The extensive use of pesticides and synthetic dyes poses critical threats to food safety, human health, and environmental sustainability, necessitating rapid and reliable detection methods. Raman spectroscopy offers molecularly specific fingerprints but suffers from spectral noise, fluorescence background, and band overlap, limiting its real-world applicability. Here, we propose a deep learning framework based on ResNet-18 feature extraction, combined with advanced classifiers, including XGBoost, SVM, and their hybrid integration, to detect pesticides and dyes from Raman spectroscopy, called MLRaman. The MLRaman with the CNN-XGBoost model achieved a predictive accuracy of 97.4% and a perfect AUC of 1.0, while it with the CNN-SVM model provided competitive results with robust class-wise discrimination. Dimensionality reduction analyses (PCA, t-SNE, UMAP) confirmed the separability of Raman embeddings across 10 analytes, including 7 pesticides and 3 dyes. Finally, we developed a user-friendly Streamlit application for real-time prediction, which successfully identified unseen Raman spectra from our independent experiments and also literature sources, underscoring strong generalization capacity. This study establishes a scalable, practical MLRaman model for multi-residue contaminant monitoring, with significant potential for deployment in food safety and environmental surveillance.

Hash center-based deep hashing methods improve upon pairwise or triplet-based approaches by assigning fixed hash centers to each class as learning targets, thereby avoiding the inefficiency of local similarity optimization. However, random center initialization often disregards inter-class semantic relationships. While existing two-stage methods mitigate this by first refining hash centers with semantics and then training the hash function, they introduce additional complexity, computational overhead, and suboptimal performance due to stage-wise discrepancies. To address these limitations, we propose $\textbf{Center-Reassigned Hashing (CRH)}$, an end-to-end framework that $\textbf{dynamically reassigns hash centers}$ from a preset codebook while jointly optimizing the hash function. Unlike previous methods, CRH adapts hash centers to the data distribution $\textbf{without explicit center optimization phases}$, enabling seamless integration of semantic relationships into the learning process. Furthermore, $\textbf{a multi-head mechanism}$ enhances the representational capacity of hash centers, capturing richer semantic structures. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that CRH learns semantically meaningful hash centers and outperforms state-of-the-art deep hashing methods in retrieval tasks.

Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) with search engines enables large language models to iteratively retrieve up-to-date external knowledge, enhancing adaptability and generalization in complex question-answering tasks. However, existing search agent pipelines typically depend on reinforcement learning based optimization, which often suffers from sparse outcome rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and unstable training. We introduce CriticSearch, a fine-grained credit-assignment framework that supplies dense, turn-level feedback via a retrospective critic mechanism. During training, a frozen, asymmetric critique LLM retrospectively evaluates each turn using privileged information from the full trajectory and gold answers, converting these assessments into stable, dense rewards that guide policy improvement. Experimental results across diverse multi-hop reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that CriticSearch consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving faster convergence, improved training stability, and higher performance.

Many bioacoustics, neuroscience, and linguistics research utilize birdsongs as proxy models to acquire knowledge in diverse areas. Developing models generally requires precisely annotated data at the level of syllables. Hence, automated and data-efficient methods that reduce annotation costs are in demand. This work presents a lightweight, yet performant neural network architecture for birdsong annotation called Residual-MLP-RNN. Then, it presents a robust three-stage training pipeline for developing reliable deep birdsong syllable detectors with minimal expert labor. The first stage is self-supervised learning from unlabeled data. Two of the most successful pretraining paradigms are explored, namely, masked prediction and online clustering. The second stage is supervised training with effective data augmentations to create a robust model for frame-level syllable detection. The third stage is semi-supervised post-training, which leverages the unlabeled data again. However, unlike the initial phase, this time it is aligned with the downstream task. The performance of this data-efficient approach is demonstrated for the complex song of the Canary in extreme label-scarcity scenarios. Canary has one of the most difficult songs to annotate, which implicitly validates the method for other birds. Finally, the potential of self-supervised embeddings is assessed for linear probing and unsupervised birdsong analysis.

Large language models exhibit systematic vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks despite extensive safety alignment. We provide a mechanistic analysis revealing that position-dependent gradient weakening during autoregressive training creates signal decay, leading to incomplete safety learning where safety training fails to transform model preferences in later response regions fully. We introduce base-favored tokens -- vocabulary elements where base models assign higher probability than aligned models -- as computational indicators of incomplete safety learning and develop a targeted completion method that addresses undertrained regions through adaptive penalties and hybrid teacher distillation. Experimental evaluation across Llama and Qwen model families demonstrates dramatic improvements in adversarial robustness, with 48--98% reductions in attack success rates while preserving general capabilities. These results establish both a mechanistic understanding and practical solutions for fundamental limitations in safety alignment methodologies.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have unlocked powerful cross-modal capabilities, but still significantly suffer from hallucinations. As such, accurate detection of hallucinations in MLLMs is imperative for ensuring their reliability in practical applications. To this end, guided by the principle of "Seeing is Believing", we introduce VBackChecker, a novel reference-free hallucination detection framework that verifies the consistency of MLLMgenerated responses with visual inputs, by leveraging a pixellevel Grounding LLM equipped with reasoning and referring segmentation capabilities. This reference-free framework not only effectively handles rich-context scenarios, but also offers interpretability. To facilitate this, an innovative pipeline is accordingly designed for generating instruction-tuning data (R-Instruct), featuring rich-context descriptions, grounding masks, and hard negative samples. We further establish R^2 -HalBench, a new hallucination benchmark for MLLMs, which, unlike previous benchmarks, encompasses real-world, rich-context descriptions from 18 MLLMs with high-quality annotations, spanning diverse object-, attribute, and relationship-level details. VBackChecker outperforms prior complex frameworks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on R^2 -HalBench, even rivaling GPT-4o's capabilities in hallucination detection. It also surpasses prior methods in the pixel-level grounding task, achieving over a 10% improvement. All codes, data, and models are available at https://github.com/PinxueGuo/VBackChecker.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is an advanced load monitoring technique that uses data-driven algorithms to disaggregate the total power consumption of a household into the consumption of individual appliances. However, real-world NILM deployment still faces major challenges, including overfitting, low model generalization, and disaggregating a large number of appliances operating at the same time. To address these challenges, this work proposes an end-to-end framework for the NILM classification task, which consists of high-frequency labeled data, a feature extraction method, and a lightweight neural network. Within this framework, we introduce a novel feature extraction method that fuses Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) features. Moreover, we propose a lightweight architecture for multi-label NILM classification (Fusion-ResNet). The proposed feature-based model achieves a higher $F1$ score on average and across different appliances compared to state-of-the-art NILM classifiers while minimizing the training and inference time. Finally, we assessed the performance of our model against baselines with a varying number of simultaneously active devices. Results demonstrate that Fusion-ResNet is relatively robust to stress conditions with up to 15 concurrently active appliances.

Goal-driven persuasive dialogue, exemplified by applications like telemarketing, requires sophisticated multi-turn planning and strict factual faithfulness, which remains a significant challenge for even state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). A lack of task-specific data often limits previous works, and direct LLM application suffers from strategic brittleness and factual hallucination. In this paper, we first construct and release TeleSalesCorpus, the first real-world-grounded dialogue dataset for this domain. We then propose AI-Salesman, a novel framework featuring a dual-stage architecture. For the training stage, we design a Bayesian-supervised reinforcement learning algorithm that learns robust sales strategies from noisy dialogues. For the inference stage, we introduce the Dynamic Outline-Guided Agent (DOGA), which leverages a pre-built script library to provide dynamic, turn-by-turn strategic guidance. Moreover, we design a comprehensive evaluation framework that combines fine-grained metrics for key sales skills with the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed AI-Salesman significantly outperforms baseline models in both automatic metrics and comprehensive human evaluations, showcasing its effectiveness in complex persuasive scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a crucial tool in Visual Question Answering (VQA) for handling knowledge-intensive questions in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios. However, their reliance on massive training datasets often causes them to inherit language biases during the acquisition of knowledge. This limitation imposes two key constraints on existing methods: (1) LLM predictions become less reliable due to bias exploitation, and (2) despite strong knowledge reasoning capabilities, LLMs still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. To address these issues, we propose Object Attribute Description Promoter (OAD-Promoter), a novel approach for enhancing LLM-based VQA by mitigating language bias and improving domain-shift robustness. OAD-Promoter comprises three components: the Object-concentrated Example Generation (OEG) module, the Memory Knowledge Assistance (MKA) module, and the OAD Prompt. The OEG module generates global captions and object-concentrated samples, jointly enhancing visual information input to the LLM and mitigating bias through complementary global and regional visual cues. The MKA module assists the LLM in handling OOD samples by retrieving relevant knowledge from stored examples to support questions from unseen domains. Finally, the OAD Prompt integrates the outputs of the preceding modules to optimize LLM inference. Experiments demonstrate that OAD-Promoter significantly improves the performance of LLM-based VQA methods in few-shot or zero-shot settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results.

The rapid proliferation of multimodal social media content has driven research in Multimodal Conversational Stance Detection (MCSD), which aims to interpret users' attitudes toward specific targets within complex discussions. However, existing studies remain limited by: 1) pseudo-multimodality, where visual cues appear only in source posts while comments are treated as text-only, misaligning with real-world multimodal interactions; and 2) user homogeneity, where diverse users are treated uniformly, neglecting personal traits that shape stance expression. T o address these issues, we introduce U-MStance, the first user-centric MCSD dataset, containing over 40k annotated comments across six real-world targets. W e further propose PRISM, a Persona-Reasoned multImodal Stance Model for MCSD. PRISM first derives longitudinal user personas from historical posts and comments to capture individual traits, then aligns textual and visual cues within conversational context via Chain-of-Thought to bridge semantic and pragmatic gaps across modalities. Finally, a mutual task reinforcement mechanism is employed to jointly optimize stance detection and stance-aware response generation for bidirectional knowledge transfer . Experiments on U-MStance demonstrate that PRISM yields significant gains over strong baselines, underscoring the effectiveness of user-centric and context-grounded multimodal reasoning for realistic stance understanding.