Audio-based lyrics matching can be an appealing alternative to other content-based retrieval approaches, but existing methods often suffer from limited reproducibility and inconsistent baselines. In this work, we introduce WEALY, a fully reproducible pipeline that leverages Whisper decoder embeddings for lyrics matching tasks. WEALY establishes robust and transparent baselines, while also exploring multimodal extensions that integrate textual and acoustic features. Through extensive experiments on standard datasets, we demonstrate that WEALY achieves a performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods that lack reproducibility. In addition, we provide ablation studies and analyses on language robustness, loss functions, and embedding strategies. This work contributes a reliable benchmark for future research, and underscores the potential of speech technologies for music information retrieval tasks.

Instruction-following navigation is a key step toward embodied intelligence. Prior benchmarks mainly focus on semantic understanding but overlook systematically evaluating navigation agents' spatial perception and reasoning capabilities. In this work, we introduce the NavSpace benchmark, which contains six task categories and 1,228 trajectory-instruction pairs designed to probe the spatial intelligence of navigation agents. On this benchmark, we comprehensively evaluate 22 navigation agents, including state-of-the-art navigation models and multimodal large language models. The evaluation results lift the veil on spatial intelligence in embodied navigation. Furthermore, we propose SNav, a new spatially intelligent navigation model. SNav outperforms existing navigation agents on NavSpace and real robot tests, establishing a strong baseline for future work.

Person identification plays a vital role in enabling intelligent, personalized, and secure human-computer interaction. Recent research has demonstrated the feasibility of leveraging Wi-Fi signals for passive person identification using a person's unique gait pattern. Although most existing work focuses on sub-6 GHz frequencies, the emergence of mmWave offers new opportunities through its finer spatial resolution, though its comparative advantages for person identification remain unexplored. This work presents the first comparative study between sub-6 GHz and mmWave Wi-Fi signals for person identification with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi, using a novel dataset of synchronized measurements from the two frequency bands in an indoor environment. To ensure a fair comparison, we apply identical training pipelines and model configurations across both frequency bands. Leveraging end-to-end deep learning, we show that even at low sampling rates (10 Hz), mmWave Wi-Fi signals can achieve high identification accuracy (91.2% on 20 individuals) when combined with effective background subtraction.

We introduce quantum agents trained by episodic, reward-based reinforcement learning to autonomously rediscover several seminal quantum algorithms and protocols. In particular, our agents learn: efficient logarithmic-depth quantum circuits for the Quantum Fourier Transform; Grover's search algorithm; optimal cheating strategies for strong coin flipping; and optimal winning strategies for the CHSH and other nonlocal games. The agents achieve these results directly through interaction, without prior access to known optimal solutions. This demonstrates the potential of quantum intelligence as a tool for algorithmic discovery, opening the way for the automated design of novel quantum algorithms and protocols.

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their adoption in real-world industrial scenarios for various natural language processing tasks. However, the high inference cost of large-scale LLMs makes their deployment impractical, necessitating the use of smaller models. Despite their efficiency, smaller LLMs lack robust zero-shot instruction-following capabilities across diverse domains, limiting their adaptability to dynamic user requirements. Traditional fine-tuning approaches exacerbate this issue by inducing catastrophic forgetting, reducing the model's generalization ability for unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose Domain Adaptive Continual Instruction Pre-Training via Reading Comprehension (DACIP-RC), a continual pre-training technique that enhances smaller LLMs' domain adaptability for business conversational tasks. Unlike conventional pre-training approaches that rely on next-token prediction, DACIP-RC generates diverse task instructions and responses via reading comprehension on conversation transcripts, enabling better instruction generalization. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that DACIP-RC significantly improves zero-shot generalization across a wide range of business conversational tasks, including meeting summarization, action item generation, and call purpose identification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply instruction pre-training on business conversational data, providing insights into how industries can leverage proprietary datasets for domain adaptation.

The utilization of conversational AI systems by leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to solve customer problems has been on the rise with the rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the absence of a company-specific dedicated knowledge base is a major barrier to the integration of conversational AI systems in contact centers. To this end, we introduce AI Knowledge Assist, a system that extracts knowledge in the form of question-answer (QA) pairs from historical customer-agent conversations to automatically build a knowledge base. Fine-tuning a lightweight LLM on internal data demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, outperforming larger closed-source LLMs. More specifically, empirical evaluation on 20 companies demonstrates that the proposed AI Knowledge Assist system that leverages the LLaMA-3.1-8B model eliminates the cold-start gap in contact centers by achieving above 90% accuracy in answering information-seeking questions. This enables immediate deployment of RAG-powered chatbots.

Large Language Models (LLMs) as automatic evaluators, commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-Judge, have also attracted growing attention. This approach plays a vital role in aligning LLMs with human judgments, providing accurate and reliable assessments. However, LLM-based judgment models often exhibit judgment preference bias during the evaluation phase, tending to favor responses generated by themselves, undermining the reliability of their judgments. This paper introduces the Group-Based Polling Optimization (Genii), an unsupervised multi-agent collaborative optimization framework that mitigates the inherent judgment preference bias of judgment models. Specifically, Genii integrates various LLM-based judgment models into a multi-agent system and simulates the interactive client-server polling mechanism to optimize each client agent unsupervisedly. Our experiments demonstrate that Genii outperforms supervised models trained on annotated judgment data, while requiring no human-labeled annotations. Genii consistently improves performance across different client agents during the polling, even when weaker models act as server agents. Further analysis reveals that Genii effectively mitigates judgment preference bias of LLM-based judgment models, demonstrating its effectiveness. All codes are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/Genii.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate self-contradictory outputs, which severely impacts their reliability and hinders their adoption in practical applications. In video-language models (Video-LLMs), this phenomenon recently draws the attention of researchers. Specifically, these models fail to provide logically consistent responses to rephrased questions based on their grounding outputs. However, the underlying causes of this phenomenon remain underexplored. In this work, we adopt an interpretability-driven approach to analyze, statistically summarize, and intervention the potential factors of the phenomenon. We find that one of the primary reasons for the inconsistency in responses lies in the inability of cross-modal attention heads to effectively distinguish video tokens across different timestamps. To address this, we propose an attention enhancement method called Temporally Conditioned Attention Sharpening (TCAS), which constructs an enhancement objective based on attention distinctions to enhance the model's temporal resolution capability, thereby improving its temporal understanding logic consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the temporal logic consistency of Video-LLMs. Further interpretability analyses reveal that our method indeed improves the temporal discriminability of attention heads, validating our conclusions. Additionally, our method achieves performance improvements in general video temporal grounding tasks, highlighting that temporal logic consistency is a bottleneck in temporal understanding. By enhancing consistency, our method drives significant progress in video temporal understanding.

Abstract--Contrast-enhanced Computed T omography (CT) is important for diagnosis and treatment planning for various medical conditions. Deep learning (DL) based segmentation models may enable automated medical image analysis for detecting and delineating tumors in CT images, thereby reducing clinicians' workload. Achieving generalization capabilities in limited data domains, such as radiology, requires modern DL models to be trained with image augmentation. However, naively applying augmentation methods developed for natural images to CT scans often disregards the nature of the CT modality, where the intensities measure Hounsfield Units (HU) and have important physical meaning. This paper challenges the use of such intensity augmentations for CT imaging and shows that they may lead to artifacts and poor generalization. T o mitigate this, we propose a CT -specific augmentation technique, called Random windowing, that exploits the available HU distribution of intensities in CT images. Random windowing encourages robustness to contrast-enhancement and significantly increases model performance on challenging images with poor contrast or timing. We perform ablations and analysis of our method on multiple datasets, and compare to, and outperform, state-of-the-art alternatives, while focusing on the challenge of liver tumor segmentation. Computed Tomography (CT) is a cornerstone in the diagnosis and treatment planning of various health conditions [1]. In liver applications, contrast-enhanced CT imaging enables precise imaging for detection and delineation of tumors, facilitating effective intervention strategies. With the rapid advancement of Deep Learning (DL), the utilization of computer vision (CV) models has become increasingly prevalent for automating tasks in radiology [2]-[5].

Responsible AI demands systems whose behavioral tendencies can be effectively measured, audited, and adjusted to prevent inadvertently nudging users toward risky decisions or embedding hidden biases in risk aversion. As language models (LMs) are increasingly incorporated into AI-driven decision support systems, understanding their risk behaviors is crucial for their responsible deployment. This study investigates the manipulability of risk aversion (MoRA) in LMs, examining their ability to replicate human risk preferences across diverse economic scenarios, with a focus on gender-specific attitudes, uncertainty, role-based decision-making, and the manipulability of risk aversion. The results indicate that while LMs such as DeepSeek Reasoner and Gemini-2.0-flash-lite exhibit some alignment with human behaviors, notable discrepancies highlight the need to refine bio-centric measures of manipulability. These findings suggest directions for refining AI design to better align human and AI risk preferences and enhance ethical decision-making. The study calls for further advancements in model design to ensure that AI systems more accurately replicate human risk preferences, thereby improving their effectiveness in risk management contexts. This approach could enhance the applicability of AI assistants in managing risk.