Traditional topic models are effective at uncovering latent themes in large text collections. However, due to their reliance on bag-of-words representations, they struggle to capture semantically abstract features. While some neural variants use richer representations, they are similarly constrained by expressing topics as word lists, which limits their ability to articulate complex topics. We introduce Mechanistic Topic Models (MTMs), a class of topic models that operate on interpretable features learned by sparse autoencoders (SAEs). By defining topics over this semantically rich space, MTMs can reveal deeper conceptual themes with expressive feature descriptions. Moreover, uniquely among topic models, MTMs enable controllable text generation using topic-based steering vectors. To properly evaluate MTM topics against word-list-based approaches, we propose \textit{topic judge}, an LLM-based pairwise comparison evaluation framework. Across five datasets, MTMs match or exceed traditional and neural baselines on coherence metrics, are consistently preferred by topic judge, and enable effective steering of LLM outputs.

InsurTech refers to the use of state-of-the-art technology, including both emerging hardware and software, to address inefficiencies across the insurance value chain and further explore new opportunities to reshape traditional business operations. InsurTech encompasses a broad spectrum of technology-driven innovations, including, but not limited to, telematics, usage-based insurance, and the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors. In this study, we focus on a specific class of InsurTech, an Insurtech data vendor, that provides insurance companies with next-generation data solutions. We leverage new and diverse external data sources, such as social media data and online content, to enrich the internal database, thereby empowering actuarial analytics and gaining more accurate insights into risk profiles and policyholder behavior. Specifically, by integrating alternative data sources beyond traditional information, insurance companies can uncover previously unrecognized risk factors, reduce bias in existing features, and identify more accurate risk exposures based on the operational characteristics of the insured entities.

Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems (FDSDS) enable more natural human-machine interactions by allowing real-time user interruptions and backchanneling, compared to traditional SDS that rely on turn-taking. However, existing benchmarks lack metrics for FD scenes, e.g., evaluating model performance during user interruptions. In this paper, we present a comprehensive FD benchmarking pipeline utilizing LLMs, TTS, and ASR to address this gap. It assesses FDSDS's ability to handle user interruptions, manage delays, and maintain robustness in challenging scenarios with diverse novel metrics. We applied our benchmark to three open-source FDSDS (Moshi, Freeze-omni, and VIT A-1.5) using over 40 hours of generated speech, with 293 simulated conversations and 1,200 interruptions. The results show that all models continue to face challenges, such as failing to respond to user interruptions, under frequent disruptions and noisy conditions. Demonstrations, data, and code will be released.

Opinions expressed in online finance-related textual data are having an increasingly profound impact on trading decisions and market movements. This trend highlights the vital role of sentiment analysis as a tool for quantifying the nature and strength of such opinions. With the rapid development of Generative AI (GenAI), supervised fine-tuned (SFT) large language models (LLMs) have become the de facto standard for financial sentiment analysis. However, the SFT paradigm can lead to memorization of the training data and often fails to generalize to unseen samples. This is a critical limitation in financial domains, where models must adapt to previously unobserved events and the nuanced, domain-specific language of finance. To this end, we introduce FinDPO, the first finance-specific LLM framework based on post-training human preference alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). The proposed FinDPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard sentiment classification benchmarks, outperforming existing supervised fine-tuned models by 11% on the average. Uniquely, the FinDPO framework enables the integration of a fine-tuned causal LLM into realistic portfolio strategies through a novel 'logit-to-score' conversion, which transforms discrete sentiment predictions into continuous, rankable sentiment scores (probabilities). In this way, simulations demonstrate that FinDPO is the first sentiment-based approach to maintain substantial positive returns of 67% annually and strong risk-adjusted performance, as indicated by a Sharpe ratio of 2.0, even under realistic transaction costs of 5 basis points (bps).

The volatility and unpredictability of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), generate significant uncertainty, which is widely discussed on social media. This study examines anticipatory discourse surrounding technological futures by analysing 1.5 million posts from 400 key opinion leaders (KOLs) published on the X platform (from 2021 to 2023). Using advanced text mining techniques, including BERTopic modelling, sentiment, emotion, and attitude analyses, the research identifies 100 distinct topics reflecting anticipated tech-driven futures. Our findings emphasize the dual role of KOLs in framing \textit{present futures} -- optimistic visions of transformative technologies like AI and IoT -- and influencing \textit{future presents}, where these projections shape contemporary societal and geopolitical debates. Positive emotions such as Hope dominate, outweighing Anxiety, particularly in topics like ``Machine Learning, Data Science, and Deep Learning,'' while discussions around ``Climate Change'' and ``War, Ukraine, and Trump People'' elicit \textit{Anxiety}. By framing technologies as solutions to societal challenges, KOLs act as mediators of societal narratives, bridging imagined futures and current realities. These insights underscore their pivotal role in directing public attention with emerging technologies during periods of heightened uncertainty, advancing our understanding of anticipatory discourse in technology-mediated contexts.

Human communication involves more than explicit semantics, with implicit signals and contextual cues playing a critical role in shaping meaning. However, modern speech technologies, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) often fail to capture these beyond-semantic dimensions. To better characterize and benchmark the progression of speech intelligence, we introduce Spoken Interaction System Capability Levels (L1-L5), a hierarchical framework illustrated the evolution of spoken dialogue systems from basic command recognition to human-like social interaction. To support these advanced capabilities, we propose Beyond-Semantic Speech (BoSS), which refers to the set of information in speech communication that encompasses but transcends explicit semantics. It conveys emotions, contexts, and modifies or extends meanings through multidimensional features such as affective cues, contextual dynamics, and implicit semantics, thereby enhancing the understanding of communicative intentions and scenarios. We present a formalized framework for BoSS, leveraging cognitive relevance theories and machine learning models to analyze temporal and contextual speech dynamics. We evaluate BoSS-related attributes across five different dimensions, reveals that current spoken language models (SLMs) are hard to fully interpret beyond-semantic signals. These findings highlight the need for advancing BoSS research to enable richer, more context-aware human-machine communication.

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis(MABSA) seeks to identify aspect terms within paired image-text data and determine their fine grained sentiment polarities, representing a fundamental task for improving the effectiveness of applications such as product review systems and public opinion monitoring. Existing methods face challenges such as cross modal alignment noise and insufficient consistency in fine-grained representations. While global modality alignment methods often overlook the connection between aspect terms and their corresponding local visual regions, bridging the representation gap between text and images remains a challenge. To address these limitations, this paper introduces an end to end Contrastive Learning framework with Adaptive Multi-loss and Progressive Attention Fusion(CLAMP). The framework is composed of three novel modules: Progressive Attention Fusion network, Multi-task Contrastive Learning, and Adaptive Multi-loss Aggregation. The Progressive Attention Fusion network enhances fine-grained alignment between textual features and image regions via hierarchical, multi-stage cross modal interactions, effectively suppressing irrelevant visual noise. Secondly, multi-task contrastive learning combines global modal contrast and local granularity alignment to enhance cross modal representation consistency. Adaptive Multi-loss Aggregation employs a dynamic uncertainty based weighting mechanism to calibrate loss contributions according to each task's uncertainty, thereby mitigating gradient interference. Evaluation on standard public benchmarks demonstrates that CLAMP consistently outperforms the vast majority of existing state of the art methods.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task which has the objective of categorising text documents into a set of classes from a predefined structured class hierarchy. Recent HTC approaches use various techniques to incorporate the hierarchical class structure information with the natural language understanding capabilities of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to improve classification performance. Furthermore, using topic models along with PLMs to extract features from text documents has been shown to be an effective approach for multi-label text classification tasks. The rationale behind the combination of these feature extractor models is that the PLM captures the finer-grained contextual and semantic information while the topic model obtains high-level representations which consider the corpus of documents as a whole. In this paper, we use a HTC approach which uses a PLM and a topic model to extract features from text documents which are used to train a classification model. Our objective is to determine whether the combination of the features extracted from the two models is beneficial to HTC performance in general. In our approach, the extracted features are passed through separate convolutional layers whose outputs are combined and passed to a label-wise attention mechanisms which obtains label-specific document representations by weighing the most important features for each class separately. We perform comprehensive experiments on three HTC benchmark datasets and show that using the features extracted from the topic model generally decreases classification performance compared to only using the features obtained by the PLM. In contrast to previous work, this shows that the incorporation of features extracted from topic models for text classification tasks should not be assumed beneficial.

We introduce AdaptiSent, a new framework for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) that uses adaptive cross-modal attention mechanisms to improve sentiment classification and aspect term extraction from both text and images. Our model integrates dynamic modality weighting and context-adaptive attention, enhancing the extraction of sentiment and aspect-related information by focusing on how textual cues and visual context interact. We tested our approach against several baselines, including traditional text-based models and other multimodal methods. Results from standard Twitter datasets show that AdaptiSent surpasses existing models in precision, recall, and F1 score, and is particularly effective in identifying nuanced inter-modal relationships that are crucial for accurate sentiment and aspect term extraction. This effectiveness comes from the model's ability to adjust its focus dynamically based on the context's relevance, improving the depth and accuracy of sentiment analysis across various multimodal data sets. AdaptiSent sets a new standard for MABSA, significantly outperforming current methods, especially in understanding complex multimodal information.

Graph generation plays a pivotal role across numerous domains, including molecular design and knowledge graph construction. Although existing methods achieve considerable success in generating realistic graphs, their interpretability remains limited, often obscuring the rationale behind structural decisions. To address this challenge, we propose the Neural Graph Topic Model (NGTM), a novel generative framework inspired by topic modeling in natural language processing. NGTM represents graphs as mixtures of latent topics, each defining a distribution over semantically meaningful substructures, which facilitates explicit interpretability at both local and global scales. The generation process transparently integrates these topic distributions with a global structural variable, enabling clear semantic tracing of each generated graph. Experiments demonstrate that NGTM achieves competitive generation quality while uniquely enabling fine-grained control and interpretability, allowing users to tune structural features or induce biological properties through topic-level adjustments.