Simplifying complex texts is essential for ensuring equitable access to information, especially for individuals with cognitive impairments. The Easy-to-Read (ETR) initiative offers a framework for making content accessible to the neurodivergent population, but the manual creation of such texts remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. In this work, we investigate the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate the generation of ETR content. To address the scarcity of aligned corpora and the specificity of ETR constraints, we propose a multi-task learning (MTL) approach that trains models jointly on text summarization, text simplification, and ETR generation. We explore two different strategies: multi-task retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for in-context learning, and MTL-LoRA for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Our experiments with Mistral-7B and LLaMA-3-8B, based on ETR-fr, a new high-quality dataset, demonstrate the benefits of multi-task setups over single-task baselines across all configurations. Moreover, results show that the RAG-based strategy enables generalization in out-of-domain settings, while MTL-LoRA outperforms all learning strategies within in-domain configurations.

As language models gain access to external tools via structured function calls, they become increasingly more capable of solving complex, multi-step tasks. However, existing benchmarks for tool-augmented language models (TaLMs) provide insufficient control over factors such as the number of functions accessible, task complexity, and input size, and remain vulnerable to data contamination. We present FuncBenchGen, a unified, contamination-free framework that evaluates TaLMs by generating synthetic multi-step tool-use tasks. The key idea is to cast tool use as traversal over a hidden function-dependency DAG where nodes are function calls and an edge between nodes represents one function consuming the output of another. Given a set of external function schemas, initial variable values, and a target variable, models must compose the correct call sequence to compute the target variable. FuncBenchGen allows users to precisely control task difficulty (e.g., graph size, dependency depth, and distractor functions) while avoiding data leakage. We apply our FuncBenchGen framework to evaluate seven LLMs on tool use tasks of varying difficulty. Reasoning-optimized models consistently outperform general-purpose models with GPT-5 significantly outperforming other models. Performance declines sharply as dependency depth increases. Furthermore, connected irrelevant functions prove especially difficult to handle. We find that strong models often make syntactically valid function calls but propagate incorrect or stale argument values across steps, revealing brittle state tracking by LLMs in multi-turn tool use. Motivated by this observation, we introduce a simple mitigation strategy that explicitly restates prior variable values to the agent at each step. Surprisingly, this lightweight change yields substantial gains across models. e.g., yielding a success rate improvement from 62.5% to 81.3% for GPT-5.

Diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) are gaining attention for their inherent capacity for parallel decoding, offering a compelling alternative to autoregressive LLMs. Among various decoding strategies, blockwise semi-autoregressive (semi-AR) approaches are widely adopted due to their natural support for KV caching and their favorable accuracy-speed trade-off. However, this paper identifies two fundamental limitations in the conventional semi-AR decoding approach that applies a fixed block size: i) late decoding overhead, where the unmasking of high-confidence tokens outside the current block is unnecessarily delayed, and ii) premature decoding error, where low-confidence tokens inside the current block are committed too early, leading to incorrect tokens. This paper presents the first systematic investigation challenging the fixed block size assumption in semi-AR decoding. Through a statistical analysis of confidence dynamics during the denoising process, we identify a volatility band (VB) region during dLLM decoding, which encodes local semantic structure and can be used to guide adaptive block sizing. Leveraging these insights, we introduce AdaBlock-dLLM, a training-free, plug-and-play scheduler that adaptively aligns block boundaries with semantic steps by adjusting block size during runtime. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that AdaBlock-dLLM achieves up to 5.3% accuracy improvement under the same throughput budget. Beyond inference-time optimization, we hope our semantics-aware adaptive scheduling approach and confidence-based analysis will inspire future training strategies for dLLMs.

The rapid rise of synthetic media has made deepfake detection a critical challenge for online safety and trust. Progress remains constrained by the scarcity of large, high-quality datasets. Although multimodal large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, their performance on deepfake detection is poor, often producing explanations that are misaligned with visual evidence or hallucinatory. To address this limitation, we introduce a reasoning-annotated dataset for deepfake detection and propose Paragraph-level Relative Policy Optimization (PRPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that aligns LLM reasoning with image content at the paragraph level. Experiments show that PRPO improves detection accuracy by a wide margin and achieves the highest reasoning score of 4.55/5.0. Ablation studies further demonstrate that PRPO significantly outperforms GRPO under test-time conditions. These results underscore the importance of grounding multimodal reasoning in visual evidence to enable more reliable and interpretable deepfake detection.

We apply definition generators based on open-weights large language models to the task of creating explanations of novel senses, taking target word usages as an input. To this end, we employ the datasets from the AXOLOTL'24 shared task on explainable semantic change modeling, which features Finnish, Russian and German languages. We fine-tune and provide publicly the open-source models performing higher than the best submissions of the aforementioned shared task, which employed closed proprietary LLMs. In addition, we find that encoder-decoder definition generators perform on par with their decoder-only counterparts.

While Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) excels at zero-shot tasks by aligning image and text embeddings, its performance in few-shot classification is hindered by a critical limitation: intra-modal misalignment. This issue, caused by a persistent modality gap and CLIP's exclusively inter-modal training objective, leaves the embedding spaces uncalibrated, making direct image-to-image comparisons unreliable. Existing methods attempt to address this by refining similarity logits or by computationally expensive per-sample optimization. To overcome these challenges, we introduce SeMoBridge, a lightweight yet powerful approach that directly addresses the misalignment. Our method maps images into the text modality, while keeping their semantic content intact through what we call a Semantic Modality Bridge. SeMoBridge is closed-form and can optionally be trained through multi-modal supervision, combining image and text-alignment losses to optimize the projection. Experiments show that the trained version, SeMoBridge-T, requires only a fraction of the training time while overall outperforming other methods, particularly in low-data scenarios (1, 2, and 4 shots). Our proposed trained SeMoBridge-T achieves better accuracy using only a fraction of the time.

Large language models (LLMs) are often modified after release through post-processing such as post-training or quantization, which makes it challenging to determine whether one model is derived from another. Existing provenance detection methods have two main limitations: (1) they embed signals into the base model before release, which is infeasible for already published models, or (2) they compare outputs across models using hand-crafted or random prompts, which are not robust to post-processing. In this work, we propose LLMPrint, a novel detection framework that constructs fingerprints by exploiting LLMs' inherent vulnerability to prompt injection. Our key insight is that by optimizing fingerprint prompts to enforce consistent token preferences, we can obtain fingerprints that are both unique to the base model and robust to post-processing. We further develop a unified verification procedure that applies to both gray-box and black-box settings, with statistical guarantees. We evaluate LLMPrint on five base models and around 700 post-trained or quantized variants. Our results show that LLMPrint achieves high true positive rates while keeping false positive rates near zero.

Fast and high-quality language generation is the holy grail that people pursue in the age of AI. In this work, we introduce Discrete Diffusion Divergence Instruct (DiDi-Instruct), a training-based method that initializes from a pre-trained (masked) discrete diffusion language model (dLLM) and distills a few-step student for fast generation. The resulting DiDi-Instruct model achieves comparable or superior performance to its dLLM teacher and the GPT-2 baseline while enabling up to 64$\times$ acceleration. The theoretical foundation of DiDi-Instruct is a novel framework based on integral KL-divergence minimization, which yields a practical training algorithm. We further introduce grouped reward normalization, intermediate-state matching, and the reward-guided ancestral sampler that significantly improve training stability, model coverage, and inference quality. On OpenWebText, DiDi-Instruct achieves perplexity from 62.2 (8 NFEs) to 18.4 (128 NFEs), which outperforms prior accelerated dLLMs and GPT-2 baseline. These gains come with a negligible entropy loss (around $1\%$) and reduce additional training wall-clock time by more than $20\times$ compared to competing dLLM distillation methods. We further validate the robustness and effectiveness of DiDi-Instruct through extensive ablation studies, model scaling, and the generation of discrete protein sequences. In conclusion, DiDi-Instruct is an efficient yet effective distillation method, enabling language generation in the blink of an eye. We will release both code and models at github.com/haoyangzheng-ai/didi-instruct.

Metaphor is a pervasive feature of discourse and a powerful lens for examining cognition, emotion, and ideology. Large-scale analysis, however, has been constrained by the need for manual annotation due to the context-sensitive nature of metaphor. This study investigates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to automate metaphor identification in full texts. We compare three methods: (i) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where the model is provided with a codebook and instructed to annotate texts based on its rules and examples; (ii) prompt engineering, where we design task-specific verbal instructions; and (iii) fine-tuning, where the model is trained on hand-coded texts to optimize performance. Within prompt engineering, we test zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought strategies. Our results show that state-of-the-art closed-source LLMs can achieve high accuracy, with fine-tuning yielding a median F1 score of 0.79. A comparison of human and LLM outputs reveals that most discrepancies are systematic, reflecting well-known grey areas and conceptual challenges in metaphor theory. We propose that LLMs can be used to at least partly automate metaphor identification and can serve as a testbed for developing and refining metaphor identification protocols and the theory that underpins them.

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) significantly advances image reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), its application to complex video reasoning remains underdeveloped. This gap stems primarily from a critical data bottleneck: existing datasets lack the challenging, multi-hop questions and high-quality, video-grounded Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data necessary to effectively bootstrap RLVR. To address this, we introduce ReWatch, a large-scale dataset built to foster advanced video reasoning. We propose a novel multi-stage synthesis pipeline to synthesize its three components: ReWatch-Caption, ReWatch-QA, and ReWatch-CoT. A core innovation is our Multi-Agent ReAct framework for CoT synthesis, which simulates a human-like "re-watching" process to generate video-grounded reasoning traces by explicitly modeling information retrieval and verification. Building on this dataset, we develop ReWatch-R1 by post-training a strong baseline LVLM with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and our RLVR framework. This framework incorporates a novel Observation \& Reasoning (O\&R) reward mechanism that evaluates both the final answer's correctness and the reasoning's alignment with video content, directly penalizing hallucination. Our experiments show that ReWatch-R1 achieves state-of-the-art average performance on five challenging video reasoning benchmarks. Project Page: https://rewatch-r1.github.io