Estimating the confidence of large language model (LLM) outputs is essential for real-world applications requiring high user trust. Black-box uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods, relying solely on model API access, have gained popularity due to their practical benefits. In this paper, we examine the implicit assumption behind several UQ methods, which use generation consistency as a proxy for confidence, an idea we formalize as the consistency hypothesis. We introduce three mathematical statements with corresponding statistical tests to capture variations of this hypothesis and metrics to evaluate LLM output conformity across tasks. Our empirical investigation, spanning 8 benchmark datasets and 3 tasks (question answering, text summarization, and text-to-SQL), highlights the prevalence of the hypothesis under different settings. Among the statements, we highlight the `Sim-Any' hypothesis as the most actionable, and demonstrate how it can be leveraged by proposing data-free black-box UQ methods that aggregate similarities between generations for confidence estimation. These approaches can outperform the closest baselines, showcasing the practical value of the empirically observed consistency hypothesis.

This paper presents 3Description, an experimental human-AI collaborative approach for intuitive 3D modeling. 3Description aims to address accessibility and usability challenges in traditional 3D modeling by enabling non-professional individuals to co-create 3D models using verbal and gesture descriptions. Through a combination of qualitative research, product analysis, and user testing, 3Description integrates AI technologies such as Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, powered by OpenAI and MediaPipe. Recognizing the web has wide cross-platform capabilities, 3Description is web-based, allowing users to describe the desired model and subsequently adjust its components using verbal and gestural inputs. In the era of AI and emerging media, 3Description not only contributes to a more inclusive and user-friendly design process, empowering more people to participate in the construction of the future 3D world, but also strives to increase human engagement in co-creation with AI, thereby avoiding undue surrender to technology and preserving human creativity.

The rise and growing popularity of accessible large language models have raised questions about their impact on various aspects of life, including how scientists write and publish their research. The primary objective of this paper is to analyze a dataset consisting of all abstracts posted on arXiv.org between 2010 and June 7th, 2024, to assess the evolution of their readability and determine whether significant shifts occurred following the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 . Four standard readability for mulas are used to calculate individual readability scores for each paper, classifying their level of readability. These scores are then aggregated by year and across the eight primary categories covered by the platform. The results show a steady annual decrease in readability, suggesting that abstracts are likely becoming increasingly complex. Additionally, following the release of ChatGPT, a significant change in readability is observed for 2023 and the analyzed months of 2024. Similar trends are found acr oss categories, with most experiencing a notable change in readability during 2023 and 2024. These findings offer insights into the broader changes in readability and point to the likely influence of AI on scientific writing.

Scientific English has undergone rapid and unprecedented changes in recent years, with words such as "delve," "intricate," and "crucial" showing significant spikes in frequency since around 2022. These changes are widely attributed to the growing influence of Large Language Models like ChatGPT in the discourse surrounding bias and misalignment. However, apart from changes in frequency, the exact structure of these linguistic shifts has remained unclear. The present study addresses this and investigates whether these changes involve the replacement of synonyms by suddenly 'spiking words,' for example, "crucial" replacing "essential" and "key," or whether they reflect broader semantic and pragmatic qualifications. To further investigate structural changes, we include part of speech tagging in our analysis to quantify linguistic shifts over grammatical categories and differentiate between word forms, like "potential" as a noun vs. as an adjective. We systematically analyze synonym groups for widely discussed 'spiking words' based on frequency trends in scientific abstracts from PubMed. We find that entire semantic clusters often shift together, with most or all words in a group increasing in usage. This pattern suggests that changes induced by Large Language Models are primarily semantic and pragmatic rather than purely lexical. Notably, the adjective "important" shows a significant decline, which prompted us to systematically analyze decreasing lexical items. Our analysis of "collapsing" words reveals a more complex picture, which is consistent with organic language change and contrasts with the patterns of the abrupt spikes. These insights into the structure of language change contribute to our understanding of how language technology continues to shape human language.

The widespread use of text-based communication on social media-through chats, comments, and microblogs-has improved user interaction but has also led to an increase in offensive content, including hate speech, racism, and other forms of abuse. Due to the enormous volume of user-generated content, manual moderation is impractical, which creates a need for automated systems that can detect offensive language. Deep learning models, particularly those using transfer learning, have demonstrated significant success in understanding natural language through large-scale pretraining. In this study, we propose an automatic offensive language detection model based on XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method, and compare its performance with BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), which is a widely used baseline in natural language processing (NLP). Both models are evaluated using the Offensive Language Identification Dataset (OLID), a benchmark Twitter dataset that includes hierarchical annotations. Our experimental results show that XLNet outperforms BERT in detecting offensive content and in categorizing the types of offenses, while BERT performs slightly better in identifying the targets of the offenses. Additionally, we find that oversampling and undersampling strategies are effective in addressing class imbalance and improving classification performance. These findings highlight the potential of transfer learning and XLNet-based architectures to create robust systems for detecting offensive language on social media platforms.

Developing a general robot manipulation system capable of performing a wide range of tasks in complex, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments has long been a challenging task. It is widely recognized that achieving human-like efficiency and robustness manipulation requires the robotic brain to integrate a comprehensive set of functions, such as task planning, policy generation, anomaly monitoring and handling, and long-term memory, achieving high-efficiency operation across all functions. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), pretrained on massive multimodal data, have acquired rich world knowledge, exhibiting exceptional scene understanding and multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, existing methods typically focus on realizing only a single function or a subset of functions within the robotic brain, without integrating them into a unified cognitive architecture. Inspired by a divide-and-conquer strategy and the architecture of the human brain, we propose FrankenBot, a VLM-driven, brain-morphic robotic manipulation framework that achieves both comprehensive functionality and high operational efficiency. Our framework includes a suite of components, decoupling a part of key functions from frequent VLM calls, striking an optimal balance between functional completeness and system efficiency. Specifically, we map task planning, policy generation, memory management, and low-level interfacing to the cortex, cerebellum, temporal lobe-hippocampus complex, and brainstem, respectively, and design efficient coordination mechanisms for the modules. We conducted comprehensive experiments in both simulation and real-world robotic environments, demonstrating that our method offers significant advantages in anomaly detection and handling, long-term memory, operational efficiency, and stability -- all without requiring any fine-tuning or retraining.

--Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for natural language generation, with applications spanning from content creation to social simulations. Their ability to mimic human interactions raises both opportunities and concerns, particularly in the context of politically relevant online discussions. In this study, we evaluate the performance of LLMs in replicating user-generated content within a real-world, divisive scenario: Reddit conversations during the 2016 US Presidential election. In particular, we conduct three different experiments, asking GPT -4 to generate comments by impersonating either real or artificial partisan users. We analyze the generated comments in terms of political alignment, sentiment, and linguistic features, comparing them against real user contributions and benchmarking against a null model. We find that GPT -4 is able to produce realistic comments, both in favor of or against the candidate supported by the community, yet tending to create consensus more easily than dissent. In addition we show that real and artificial comments are well separated in a semantically embedded space, although they are indistinguishable by manual inspection. Our findings provide insights on the potential use of LLMs to sneak into online discussions, influence political debate and shape political narratives, bearing broader implications of AI-driven discourse manipulation. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the cornerstone of scientific inquiry and technological advancement for several decades, driving innovation in multiple scientific fields [1]. Despite its long-standing presence, AI has captured unprecedented public and academic attention in recent years, largely due to breakthroughs in generative models [2]. Among these, Large Language Models (LLMs) [3] stand out as a transforma-tive innovation, redefining how we approach problems in natural language processing, decision-making, and simulations. In the past two years, the release of powerful models capable of generating coherent and contextually relevant responses (such as GPT -3.5 and GPT -4 [4], Llama [5], Mistral [6] and Gemini [7]) not only captivated the public imagination, but also opened new avenues for research in complex systems [8]-[10]. In particular, LLMs have sparked a lot of interest in complex networks studies and Agent-Based models (ABM). For example, a population of interacting LLMs agents was shown to exhibit preferential attachment [11] and thus creating scale-free networks [12], a characteristic found in many real-world systems [13].

Recently, there have been notable advancements in large language models (LLMs), demonstrating their growing abilities in complex reasoning. However, existing research largely overlooks a thorough and systematic comparison of these models' reasoning processes and outputs, particularly regarding their self-reflection pattern (also termed "Aha moment") and the interconnections across diverse domains. This paper proposes a novel framework for analyzing the reasoning characteristics of four cutting-edge large reasoning models (GPT-o1, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-k1.5, and Grok-3) using keywords statistic and LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. Our approach connects their internal thinking processes with their final outputs. A diverse dataset consists of real-world scenario-based questions covering logical deduction, causal inference, and multi-step problem-solving. Additionally, a set of metrics is put forward to assess both the coherence of reasoning and the accuracy of the outputs. The research results uncover various patterns of how these models balance exploration and exploitation, deal with problems, and reach conclusions during the reasoning process. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, disparities among these models are identified in aspects such as the depth of reasoning, the reliance on intermediate steps, and the degree of similarity between their thinking processes and output patterns and those of GPT-o1. This work offers valuable insights into the trade-off between computational efficiency and reasoning robustness and provides practical recommendations for enhancing model design and evaluation in practical applications. We publicly release our project at: https://github.com/ChangWenhan/FromThinking2Output

Human smuggling networks are increasingly adaptive and difficult to analyze. Legal case documents offer valuable insights but are unstructured, lexically dense, and filled with ambiguous or shifting references-posing challenges for automated knowledge graph (KG) construction. Existing KG methods often rely on static templates and lack coreference resolution, while recent LLM-based approaches frequently produce noisy, fragmented graphs due to hallucinations, and duplicate nodes caused by a lack of guided extraction. We propose CORE-KG, a modular framework for building interpretable KGs from legal texts. It uses a two-step pipeline: (1) type-aware coreference resolution via sequential, structured LLM prompts, and (2) entity and relationship extraction using domain-guided instructions, built on an adapted GraphRAG framework. CORE-KG reduces node duplication by 33.28%, and legal noise by 38.37% compared to a GraphRAG-based baseline-resulting in cleaner and more coherent graph structures. These improvements make CORE-KG a strong foundation for analyzing complex criminal networks.

Although the recent wave of AI models, known as Large Language Models (LLMs), are seamlessly surpassing the Turing Test, this milestone has been overshadowed by their rapid commercialization and the profound ways they are already reshaping society. The pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)--commonly defined as human-level intelligence--is touted as the next major milestone. Yet whether the continued progress within the current framework could ever lead to agency and meaning at the scale of AI itself remains an open and contested question. Critics argue that current LLMs operate through algorithmic mimicry, that is simulating intelligent behavior without embodying the principles behind it (Jaeger, 2024; Jaeger et al., 2024) . Artificial Neural Networks--the main framework behind LLMs--operate on behaviorist assumptions: a framework that focuses exclusively on observable input-output patterns while treating internal states as part of a "black box" to be optimized (Brooks, 1991; Sutton & Barto, 2015) . This does not mean LLMs do not have sophisticated engineering, but their structure is designed to optimize internal states based on input-output feedback loops. Even though the logic behind behaviorism is likely one of the key principles supporting an intelligent system, it likely is not sufficient for intelligence and is not what enables agency and intelligence in the first place (Dreyfus, 1992; Searle, 1980) . Furthermore, it would be naive to consider outward behavior of intelligence as having acquired intelligence or sentience since a good simulation can be powerful and convincing. To address such issues, alternative approaches grounded in organismal intelligence are emerging to instead explain the principles behind intelligence through intrinsic and goal-directed models of the body and its relationship to the environment (Deacon, 2012; Jacob, 2023; Jaeger et al., 2024; Levin, 2019; Roli et al., 2022; Varela et al., 1993; Watson, 2024) .