Large Language Model
SPUR: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Integrating Spatial Audio Understanding and Reasoning into Large Audio-Language Models
Sakshi, S, Lokegaonkar, Vaibhavi, Zhang, Neil, Duraiswami, Ramani, Ghosh, Sreyan, Manocha, Dinesh, Lu, Lie
Spatial perception is central to auditory intelligence, enabling accurate understanding of real-world acoustic scenes and advancing human-level perception of the world around us. While recent large audio-language models (LALMs) show strong reasoning over complex audios, most operate on monaural inputs and lack the ability to capture spatial cues such as direction, elevation, and distance. We introduce SPUR, a lightweight, plug-in approach that equips LALMs with spatial perception through minimal architectural changes. SPUR consists of: (i) a First-Order Ambisonics (FOA) encoder that maps (W, X, Y, Z) channels to rotation-aware, listener-centric spatial features, integrated into target LALMs via a multimodal adapter; and (ii) SPUR-Set, a spatial QA dataset combining open-source FOA recordings with controlled simulations, emphasizing relative direction, elevation, distance, and overlap for supervised spatial reasoning. Fine-tuning our model on the SPUR-Set consistently improves spatial QA and multi-speaker attribution while preserving general audio understanding. SPUR provides a simple recipe that transforms monaural LALMs into spatially aware models. Extensive ablations validate the effectiveness of our approach.
Synthetic Data-Driven Prompt Tuning for Financial QA over Tables and Documents
Yu, Yaoning, Chang, Kai-Min, Yu, Ye, Wei, Kai, Luo, Haojing, Wang, Haohan
Financial documents like earning reports or balance sheets often involve long tables and multi-page reports. Large language models have become a new tool to help numerical reasoning and understanding these documents. However, prompt quality can have a major effect on how well LLMs perform these financial reasoning tasks. Most current methods tune prompts on fixed datasets of financial text or tabular data, which limits their ability to adapt to new question types or document structures, or they involve costly and manually labeled/curated dataset to help build the prompts. We introduce a self-improving prompt framework driven by data-augmented optimization. In this closed-loop process, we generate synthetic financial tables and document excerpts, verify their correctness and robustness, and then update the prompt based on the results. Specifically, our framework combines a synthetic data generator with verifiers and a prompt optimizer, where the generator produces new examples that exposes weaknesses in the current prompt, the verifiers check the validity and robustness of the produced examples, and the optimizer incrementally refines the prompt in response. By iterating these steps in a feedback cycle, our method steadily improves prompt accuracy on financial reasoning tasks without needing external labels. Evaluation on DocMath-Eval benchmark demonstrates that our system achieves higher performance in both accuracy and robustness than standard prompt methods, underscoring the value of incorporating synthetic data generation into prompt learning for financial applications.
CSGaze: Context-aware Social Gaze Prediction
Madan, Surbhi, Ghosh, Shreya, Subramanian, Ramanathan, Dhall, Abhinav, Gedeon, Tom
A person's gaze offers valuable insights into their focus of attention, level of social engagement, and confidence. In this work, we investigate how contextual cues combined with visual scene and facial information can be effectively utilized to predict and interpret social gaze patterns during conversational interactions. We introduce CSGaze, a context aware multimodal approach that leverages facial, scene information as complementary inputs to enhance social gaze pattern prediction from multi-person images. The model also incorporates a fine-grained attention mechanism centered on the principal speaker, which helps in better modeling social gaze dynamics. Experimental results show that CSGaze performs competitively with state-of-the-art methods on GP-Static, UCO-LAEO and AVA-LAEO. Our findings highlight the role of contextual cues in improving social gaze prediction. Additionally, we provide initial explainability through generated attention scores, offering insights into the model's decision-making process. We also demonstrate our model's generalizability by testing our model on open set datasets that demonstrating its robustness across diverse scenarios.
Pelican-VL 1.0: A Foundation Brain Model for Embodied Intelligence
Zhang, Yi, Liu, Che, Ren, Xiancong, Ni, Hanchu, Zhang, Shuai, Ding, Zeyuan, Hu, Jiayu, Shan, Hanzhe, Niu, Zhenwei, Liu, Zhaoyang, Liu, Shuang, Zhao, Yue, Qi, Junbo, Zhang, Qinfan, Li, Dengjie, Wang, Yidong, Luo, Jiachen, Dai, Yong, Xu, Zenglin, Shen, Bin, Wang, Qifan, Tang, Jian, Ju, Xiaozhu
This report presents Pelican-VL 1.0, a new family of open-source embodied brain models with parameter scales ranging from 7 billion to 72 billion. Our explicit mission is clearly stated as: To embed powerful intelligence into various embodiments. Pelican-VL 1.0 is currently the largest-scale open-source embodied multimodal brain model. Its core advantage lies in the in-depth integration of data power and intelligent adaptive learning mechanisms. Specifically, metaloop distilled a high-quality dataset from a raw dataset containing 4+ billion tokens. Pelican-VL 1.0 is trained on a large-scale cluster of 1000+ A800 GPUs, consuming over 50k+ A800 GPU-hours per checkpoint. This translates to a 20.3% performance uplift from its base model and outperforms 100B-level open-source counterparts by 10.6%, placing it on par with leading proprietary systems on well-known embodied benchmarks. We establish a novel framework, DPPO (Deliberate Practice Policy Optimization), inspired by human metacognition to train Pelican-VL 1.0. We operationalize this as a metaloop that teaches the AI to practice deliberately, which is a RL-Refine-Diagnose-SFT loop.
Large Language Model-assisted Autonomous Vehicle Recovery from Immobilization
Despite significant advancements in recent decades, autonomous vehicles (AVs) continue to face challenges in navigating certain traffic scenarios where human drivers excel. In such situations, AVs often become immobilized, disrupting overall traffic flow. Current recovery solutions, such as remote intervention (which is costly and inefficient) and manual takeover (which excludes non-drivers and limits AV accessibility), are inadequate. This paper introduces StuckSolver, a novel Large Language Model (LLM) driven recovery framework that enables AVs to resolve immobilization scenarios through self-reasoning and/or passenger-guided decision-making. StuckSolver is designed as a plug-in add-on module that operates on top of the AV's existing perception-planning-control stack, requiring no modification to its internal architecture. Instead, it interfaces with standard sensor data streams to detect immobilization states, interpret environmental context, and generate high-level recovery commands that can be executed by the AV's native planner. We evaluate StuckSolver on the Bench2Drive benchmark and in custom-designed uncertainty scenarios. Results show that StuckSolver achieves near-state-of-the-art performance through autonomous self-reasoning alone and exhibits further improvements when passenger guidance is incorporated.
FakeZero: Real-Time, Privacy-Preserving Misinformation Detection for Facebook and X
Essahli, Soufiane, Sarsar, Oussama, Bentajer, Ahmed, Motii, Anas, Fouad, Imane
Social platforms distribute information at unprecedented speed, which in turn accelerates the spread of misinformation and threatens public discourse. We present FakeZero, a fully client-side, cross-platform browser extension that flags unreliable posts on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) while the user scrolls. All computation, DOM scraping, tokenization, Transformer inference, and UI rendering run locally through the Chromium messaging API, so no personal data leaves the device. FakeZero employs a three-stage training curriculum: baseline fine-tuning and domain-adaptive training enhanced with focal loss, adversarial augmentation, and post-training quantization. Evaluated on a dataset of 239,000 posts, the DistilBERT-Quant model (67.6 MB) reaches 97.1% macro-F1, 97.4% accuracy, and an AUROC of 0.996, with a median latency of approximately 103 ms on a commodity laptop. A memory-efficient TinyBERT-Quant variant retains 95.7% macro-F1 and 96.1% accuracy while shrinking the model to 14.7 MB and lowering latency to approximately 40 ms, showing that high-quality fake-news detection is feasible under tight resource budgets with only modest performance loss. By providing inline credibility cues, the extension can serve as a valuable tool for policymakers seeking to curb the spread of misinformation across social networks. With user consent, FakeZero also opens the door for researchers to collect large-scale datasets of fake news in the wild, enabling deeper analysis and the development of more robust detection techniques.
A Critical Study of Automatic Evaluation in Sign Language Translation
Yazdani, Shakib, Hamidullah, Yasser, Espaรฑa-Bonet, Cristina, Avramidis, Eleftherios, van Genabith, Josef
Automatic evaluation metrics are crucial for advancing sign language translation (SLT). Current SLT evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, are only text-based, and it remains unclear to what extent text-based metrics can reliably capture the quality of SLT outputs. To address this gap, we investigate the limitations of text-based SLT evaluation metrics by analyzing six metrics, including BLEU, chrF, and ROUGE, as well as BLEURT on the one hand, and large language model (LLM)-based evaluators such as G-Eval and GEMBA zero-shot direct assessment on the other hand. Specifically, we assess the consistency and robustness of these metrics under three controlled conditions: paraphrasing, hallucinations in model outputs, and variations in sentence length. Our analysis highlights the limitations of lexical overlap metrics and demonstrates that while LLM-based evaluators better capture semantic equivalence often missed by conventional metrics, they can also exhibit bias toward LLM-paraphrased translations. Moreover, although all metrics are able to detect hallucinations, BLEU tends to be overly sensitive, whereas BLEURT and LLM-based evaluators are comparatively lenient toward subtle cases. This motivates the need for multimodal evaluation frameworks that extend beyond text-based metrics to enable a more holistic assessment of SLT outputs.
VoiceAgentEval: A Dual-Dimensional Benchmark for Expert-Level Intelligent Voice-Agent Evaluation of Xbench's Professional-Aligned Series
Xu, Pengyu, Li, Shijia, Sun, Ao, Zhang, Feng, Li, Yahan, Wu, Bo, Ma, Zhanyu, Li, Jiguo, Xu, Jun, Gao, Jiuchong, Hao, Jinghua, He, Renqing, Wang, Rui, Liu, Yang, Hu, Xiaobo, Yang, Fan, Zheng, Jia, Yao, Guanghua
We propose OutboundEval, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in expert-level intelligent outbound calling scenarios. Unlike existing methods that suffer from three key limitations - insufficient dataset diversity and category coverage, unrealistic user simulation, and inaccurate evaluation metrics - OutboundEval addresses these issues through a structured framework. First, we design a benchmark spanning six major business domains and 30 representative sub-scenarios, each with scenario-specific process decomposition, weighted scoring, and domain-adaptive metrics. Second, we develop a large-model-driven User Simulator that generates diverse, persona-rich virtual users with realistic behaviors, emotional variability, and communication styles, providing a controlled yet authentic testing environment. Third, we introduce a dynamic evaluation method that adapts to task variations, integrating automated and human-in-the-loop assessment to measure task execution accuracy, professional knowledge application, adaptability, and user experience quality. Experiments on 12 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal distinct trade-offs between expert-level task completion and interaction fluency, offering practical insights for building reliable, human-like outbound AI systems. OutboundEval establishes a practical, extensible, and domain-oriented standard for benchmarking LLMs in professional applications.
Res-Bench: Benchmarking the Robustness of Multimodal Large Language Models to Dynamic Resolution Input
Li, Chenxu, Wang, Zhicai, Sheng, Yuan, Zhu, Xingyu, Hao, Yanbin, Wang, Xiang
However, current evaluation paradigms primarily assess semantic performance, overlooking the critical question of resolution robustness - whether performance remains stable across varying input resolutions. To address this gap, we introduce Res-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 14,400 samples across 12 resolution levels and six core capability dimensions. We designed a novel evaluation framework that goes beyond traditional accuracy metrics to capture performance stability. This framework introduces multiple robustness metrics: Spearman's correlation for assessing resolution-performance trends, and Absolute/Relative Continuous Error (ACE/RCE) for measuring performance volatility. Using these metrics, we conducted a large-scale evaluation of leading MLLMs. Our analysis encompasses: (1) model-centric and task-centric robustness examination, (2) investigation of preprocessing strategies including padding and super-resolution, and (3) exploration of fine-tuning for stability enhancement. Our code is available at https://github.com/
ICL-Router: In-Context Learned Model Representations for LLM Routing
Wang, Chenxu, Li, Hao, Zhang, Yiqun, Chen, Linyao, Chen, Jianhao, Jian, Ping, Ye, Peng, Zhang, Qiaosheng, Hu, Shuyue
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit complementary strengths. Model routing harnesses these strengths by dynamically directing each query to the most suitable model, given a candidate model pool. However, routing performance relies on accurate model representations, and adding new models typically requires retraining, limiting scalability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel routing method using in-context vectors to represent model capabilities. The method proceeds in two stages. First, queries are embedded and projected into vectors, with a projector and LLM-based router trained to reconstruct the original queries, aligning vector representations with the router's semantic space. Second, each candidate model is profiled on a query set, and the router learns -- based on in-context vectors of query and model performance -- to predict whether each model can correctly answer new queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art routing performance in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks. Moreover, our method allows for seamless integration of new models without retraining the router. The code is available at https://github.com/lalalamdbf/ICL-Router.