Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly treated as universal, general-purpose solutions across NLP tasks, particularly in English. But does this assumption hold for low-resource, morphologically rich languages such as Sanskrit? We address this question by comparing instruction-tuned and in-context-prompted LLMs with smaller task-specific encoder-decoder models on the Sanskrit poetry-to-prose conversion task. This task is intrinsically challenging: Sanskrit verse exhibits free word order combined with rigid metrical constraints, and its conversion to canonical prose (anvaya) requires multi-step reasoning involving compound segmentation, dependency resolution, and syntactic linearisation. This makes it an ideal testbed to evaluate whether LLMs can surpass specialised models. For LLMs, we apply instruction fine-tuning on general-purpose models and design in-context learning templates grounded in Paninian grammar and classical commentary heuristics. For task-specific modelling, we fully fine-tune a ByT5-Sanskrit Seq2Seq model. Our experiments show that domain-specific fine-tuning of ByT5-Sanskrit significantly outperforms all instruction-driven LLM approaches. Human evaluation strongly corroborates this result, with scores exhibiting high correlation with Kendall's Tau scores. Additionally, our prompting strategies provide an alternative to fine-tuning when domain-specific verse corpora are unavailable, and the task-specific Seq2Seq model demonstrates robust generalisation on out-of-domain evaluations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in document understanding. However, recent research reveals that LLMs still exhibit performance gaps in Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) as requiring fine-grained comprehension. The commonly adopted "extract entities then predict relations" paradigm in LLM-based methods leads to these gaps due to two main reasons: (1) Numerous unrelated entity pairs introduce noise and interfere with the relation prediction for truly related entity pairs. (2) Although LLMs have identified semantic associations between entities, relation labels beyond the predefined set are still treated as prediction errors. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Relation as a Prior (RelPrior) paradigm for LLM-based DocRE. For challenge (1), RelPrior utilizes binary relation as a prior to extract and determine whether two entities are correlated, thereby filtering out irrelevant entity pairs and reducing prediction noise. For challenge (2), RelPrior utilizes predefined relation as a prior to match entities for triples extraction instead of directly predicting relation. Thus, it avoids misjudgment caused by strict predefined relation labeling. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that RelPrior achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing LLM-based methods.

Scene Text Recognition (STR) remains challenging due to real-world complexities, where decoupled visual-linguistic optimization in existing frameworks amplifies error propagation through cross-modal misalignment. Visual encoders exhibit attention bias toward background distractors, while decoders suffer from spatial misalignment when parsing geometrically deformed text-collectively degrading recognition accuracy for irregular patterns. Inspired by the hierarchical cognitive processes in human visual perception, we propose OTSNet, a novel three-stage network embodying a neurocognitive-inspired Observation-Thinking-Spelling pipeline for unified STR modeling. The architecture comprises three core components: (1) a Dual Attention Macaron Encoder (DAME) that refines visual features through differential attention maps to suppress irrelevant regions and enhance discriminative focus; (2) a Position-Aware Module (PAM) and Semantic Quantizer (SQ) that jointly integrate spatial context with glyph-level semantic abstraction via adaptive sampling; and (3) a Multi-Modal Collaborative Verifier (MMCV) that enforces self-correction through cross-modal fusion of visual, semantic, and character-level features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OTSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 83.5% average accuracy on the challenging Union14M-L benchmark and 79.1% on the heavily occluded OST dataset-establishing new records across 9 out of 14 evaluation scenarios.

Quantification has been proven to be a particularly difficult linguistic phenomenon for (Multimodal) Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, given that quantification interfaces with the logic, pragmatic, and numerical domains, the exact reasons for the poor performance are still unclear. This papers looks at three key features of human quantification shared cross-linguistically that have remained so far unexplored in the (M)LLM literature: the ordering of quantifiers into scales, the ranges of use and prototypicality, and the biases inherent in the human approximate number system. The aim is to determine how these features are encoded in the models' architecture, how they may differ from humans, and whether the results are affected by the type of model and language under investigation. We find that there are clear differences between humans and MLLMs with respect to these features across various tasks that tap into the representation of quantification in vivo vs. in silico. This work, thus, paves the way for addressing the nature of MLLMs as semantic and pragmatic agents, while the cross-linguistic lens can elucidate whether their abilities are robust and stable across different languages.

Machine learning has significant potential for optimizing various industrial processes. However, data acquisition remains a major challenge as it is both time-consuming and costly. Synthetic data offers a promising solution to augment insufficient data sets and improve the robustness of machine learning models. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of incorporating synthetic data into the training process of the injection molding process using an existing Long Short-Term Memory architecture. Our approach is to generate synthetic data by simulating production cycles and incorporating them into the training data set. Through iterative experimentation with different proportions of synthetic data, we attempt to find an optimal balance that maximizes the benefits of synthetic data while preserving the authenticity and relevance of real data. Our results suggest that the inclusion of synthetic data improves the model's ability to handle different scenarios, with potential practical industrial applications to reduce manual labor, machine use, and material waste. This approach provides a valuable alternative for situations where extensive data collection and maintenance has been impractical or costly and thus could contribute to more efficient manufacturing processes in the future.

This paper examines how science fiction destabilises ontological categories by measuring conceptual permeability across the terms human, animal, and machine using masked language modelling (MLM). Drawing on corpora of science fiction (Gollancz SF Masterworks) and general fiction (NovelTM), we operationalise Darko Suvin's theory of estrangement as computationally measurable deviation in token prediction, using RoBERTa to generate lexical substitutes for masked referents and classifying them via Gemini. We quantify conceptual slippage through three metrics: retention rate, replacement rate, and entropy, mapping the stability or disruption of category boundaries across genres. Our findings reveal that science fiction exhibits heightened conceptual permeability, particularly around machine referents, which show significant cross-category substitution and dispersion. Human terms, by contrast, maintain semantic coherence and often anchor substitutional hierarchies. These patterns suggest a genre-specific restructuring within anthropocentric logics. We argue that estrangement in science fiction operates as a controlled perturbation of semantic norms, detectable through probabilistic modelling, and that MLMs, when used critically, serve as interpretive instruments capable of surfacing genre-conditioned ontological assumptions. This study contributes to the methodological repertoire of computational literary studies and offers new insights into the linguistic infrastructure of science fiction.

Oscillatory Graph Neural Networks (OGNNs) are an emerging class of physics-inspired architectures designed to mitigate oversmoothing and vanishing gradient problems in deep GNNs. In this work, we introduce the Complex-Valued Stuart-Landau Graph Neural Network (SLGNN), a novel architecture grounded in Stuart-Landau oscillator dynamics. Stuart-Landau oscillators are canonical models of limit-cycle behavior near Hopf bifurcations, which are fundamental to synchronization theory and are widely used in e.g. neuroscience for mesoscopic brain modeling. Unlike harmonic oscillators and phase-only Kuramoto models, Stuart-Landau oscillators retain both amplitude and phase dynamics, enabling rich phenomena such as amplitude regulation and multistable synchronization. The proposed SLGNN generalizes existing phase-centric Kuramoto-based OGNNs by allowing node feature amplitudes to evolve dynamically according to Stuart-Landau dynamics, with explicit tunable hyperparameters (such as the Hopf-parameter and the coupling strength) providing additional control over the interplay between feature amplitudes and network structure. We conduct extensive experiments across node classification, graph classification, and graph regression tasks, demonstrating that SLGNN outperforms existing OGNNs and establishes a novel, expressive, and theoretically grounded framework for deep oscillatory architectures on graphs.

Large speech recognition models like Whisper-small achieve high accuracy but are difficult to deploy on edge devices due to their high computational demand. To this end, we present a unified, cross-library evaluation of post-training quantization (PTQ) on Whisper-small that disentangles the impact of quantization scheme, method, granularity, and bit-width. Our study is based on four libraries: PyTorch, Optimum-Quanto, HQQ, and bitsandbytes. Experiments on LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other show that dynamic int8 quantization with Quanto offers the best trade-off, reducing model size by 57% while improving on the baseline's word error rate. Static quantization performed worse, likely due to Whisper's Transformer architecture, while more aggressive formats (e.g., nf4, int3) achieved up to 71% compression at the cost of accuracy in noisy conditions. Overall, our results demonstrate that carefully chosen PTQ methods can substantially reduce model size and inference cost without retraining, enabling efficient deployment of Whisper-small on constrained hardware.

Face morphing attacks threaten the integrity of biometric identity systems by enabling multiple individuals to share a single identity. T o develop and evaluate effective morphing attack detection (MAD) systems, we need access to high-quality, realistic morphed images that reflect the challenges posed in real-world scenarios. However, existing morph generation methods often produce images that are blurry, riddled with artifacts, or poorly constructed--making them easy to detect and not representative of the most dangerous attacks. In this work, we introduce StableMorph, a novel approach that generates highly realistic, artifact-free morphed face images using modern diffusion-based image synthesis. Unlike prior methods, StableMorph produces full-head images with sharp details, avoids common visual flaws, and offers unmatched control over visual attributes. Through extensive evaluation, we show that StableMorph images not only rival or exceed the quality of genuine face images, but also maintain a strong ability to fool face recognition systems--posing a greater challenge to existing MAD solutions and setting a new standard for morph quality in research and operational testing. StableMorph improves the evaluation of biometric security by creating more realistic and effective attacks and supports the development of more robust detection systems.

This research presents a comprehensive investigation into Bangla authorship attribution, introducing a new balanced benchmark corpus BARD10 (Bangla Authorship Recognition Dataset of 10 authors) and systematically analyzing the impact of stop - word removal across classical and deep learning models to uncover the stylistic significance of Bangla stop - words. BARD10 is a curated corpus of Bangla blog and opinion prose from ten contemporary authors, alongside the methodical assessment of four representative class ifiers: SVM (Support V ector Machine), Bangla BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), XGBoost, and a MLP (Multilayer Perce p tion), utilizing uniform preprocessing on both BARD10 and the benchmark corpora BAAD16 (Bangla Authorship Attribution Dataset of 16 authors). In all datasets, the classical TF - IDF + SVM baseline outperformed, attaining a macro - F1 score of 0.997 on BAAD16 a nd 0.921 on BARD10, while Bangla BERT lagged by as much as five points. This study reveals that BARD10 authors are highly sensitive to sto p - word pruning, while BAAD16 authors remain comparatively robust highlighting genre - dependent reliance on stop - word signatures. Error analysis revealed that high frequency components transmit authorial signatures that are diminished or reduced by transformer models. Three insights are identified: Bangla stop - words serve as essential stylistic indicators; finely calibrated ML models prove effective within short - text limitations; and BARD10 connects formal literature with contemporary web dialogue, offering a reproducible benchmark for future long - context or domain - adapted transformers.