Our contribution to the SemEval 2025 shared task 10, subtask 1 on entity framing, tackles the challenge of providing the necessary segments from longer documents as context for classification with a masked language model. We show that a simple entity-oriented heuristics for context selection can enable text classification using models with limited context window. Our context selection approach and the XLM-RoBERTa language model is on par with, or outperforms, Supervised Fine-Tuning with larger generative language models.

Mathematics is often perceived as a complex subject by students, leading to high failure rates in exams. To improve Mathematics skills, it is important to provide sample questions for students to practice problem-solving. Manually creating Math Word Problems (MWPs) is time consuming for tutors, because they have to type in natural language while adhering to grammar and spelling rules of the language. Existing Deep Learning techniques for MWP generation either require a tutor to provide the initial portion of the MWP, and/or additional information such as an equation. In this paper, we present an MWP generation system based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that overcome the need for additional input - the only input to our system is the number of MWPs needed, the grade and the type of question (e.g. addition, subtraction). Unlike the existing LLM-based solutions for MWP generation, we carried out an extensive set of experiments involving different LLMs, prompting strategies, techniques to improve the diversity of questions, as well as techniques that employ human feedback to improve LLM performance. Human and automated evaluations confirmed that the generated MWPs are high in quality, with minimal spelling and grammar issues. However, LLMs still struggle to generate questions that adhere to the specified grade and question type requirements.

In emotional support conversations, unclear intentions can lead supporters to employ inappropriate strategies, inadvertently imposing their expectations or solutions on the seeker. Clearly defined intentions are essential for guiding both the supporter's motivations and the overall emotional support process. In this paper, we propose the Intention-centered Emotional Support Conversation (IntentionESC) framework, which defines the possible intentions of supporters in emotional support conversations, identifies key emotional state aspects for inferring these intentions, and maps them to appropriate support strategies. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in text generating, they fundamentally operate as probabilistic models trained on extensive datasets, lacking a true understanding of human thought processes and intentions. To address this limitation, we introduce the Intention Centric Chain-of-Thought (ICECoT) mechanism. ICECoT enables LLMs to mimic human reasoning by analyzing emotional states, inferring intentions, and selecting suitable support strategies, thereby generating more effective emotional support responses. To train the model with ICECoT and integrate expert knowledge, we design an automated annotation pipeline that produces high-quality training data. Furthermore, we develop a comprehensive evaluation scheme to assess emotional support efficacy and conduct extensive experiments to validate our framework. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/43zxj/IntentionESC_ICECoT.

Modern large language models (LLMs) often struggle to dynamically adapt their reasoning depth to varying task complexities, leading to suboptimal performance or inefficient resource utilization. To address this, we introduce DynamicMind, a novel tri-mode thinking system. DynamicMind empowers LLMs to autonomously select between Fast, Normal, and Slow thinking modes for zero-shot question answering (ZSQA) tasks through cognitive-inspired prompt engineering. Our framework's core innovations include: (1) expanding the established dual-process framework of fast and slow thinking into a tri-mode thinking system involving a normal thinking mode to preserve the intrinsic capabilities of LLM; (2) proposing the Thinking Density metric, which aligns computational resource allocation with problem complexity; and (3) developing the Thinking Mode Capacity (TMC) dataset and a lightweight Mind Router to predict the optimal thinking mode. Extensive experiments across diverse mathematical, commonsense, and scientific QA benchmarks demonstrate that DynamicMind achieves superior ZSQA capabilities while establishing an effective trade-off between performance and computational efficiency.

Fake news and misinformation poses a significant threat to society, making efficient mitigation essential. However, manual fact-checking is costly and lacks scalability. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise in automating counter-response generation to mitigate misinformation, but a critical challenge lies in their tendency to hallucinate non-factual information. Existing models mainly rely on LLM self-feedback to reduce hallucination, but this approach is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose MisMitiFact, Misinformation Mitigation grounded in Facts, an efficient framework for generating fact-grounded counter-responses at scale. MisMitiFact generates simple critique feedback to refine LLM outputs, ensuring responses are grounded in evidence. We develop lightweight, fine-grained critique models trained on data sourced from readily available fact-checking sites to identify and correct errors in key elements such as numerals, entities, and topics in LLM generations. Experiments show that MisMitiFact generates counter-responses of comparable quality to LLMs' self-feedback while using significantly smaller critique models. Importantly, it achieves ~5x increase in feedback generation throughput, making it highly suitable for cost-effective, large-scale misinformation mitigation. Code and LLM prompt templates are at https://github.com/xxfwin/MisMitiFact.

Recent advances in conversational AI have been substantial, but developing real-time systems for perceptual task guidance remains challenging. These systems must provide interactive, proactive assistance based on streaming visual inputs, yet their development is constrained by the costly and labor-intensive process of data collection and system evaluation. To address these limitations, we present a comprehensive framework with three key contributions. First, we introduce a novel data curation pipeline that synthesizes dialogues from annotated egocentric videos, resulting in \dataset, a large-scale synthetic dialogue dataset spanning multiple domains. Second, we develop a suite of automatic evaluation metrics, validated through extensive human studies. Third, we propose an end-to-end model that processes streaming video inputs to generate contextually appropriate responses, incorporating novel techniques for handling data imbalance and long-duration videos. This work lays the foundation for developing real-time, proactive AI assistants capable of guiding users through diverse tasks. Project page: https://pro-assist.github.io/

The zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in unknown open-ended environments coupled with semantically novel target often suffers from the significant decline in performance due to the neglect of high-dimensional implicit scene information and the long-range target searching task. To address this, we proposed an active object navigation framework with Environmental Attributes Map (EAM) and MLLM Hierarchical Reasoning module (MHR) to improve its success rate and efficiency. EAM is constructed by reasoning observed environments with SBERT and predicting unobserved ones with Diffusion, utilizing human space regularities that underlie object-room correlations and area adjacencies. MHR is inspired by EAM to perform frontier exploration decision-making, avoiding the circuitous trajectories in long-range scenarios to improve path efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the EAM module achieves 64.5\% scene mapping accuracy on MP3D dataset, while the navigation task attains SPLs of 28.4\% and 26.3\% on HM3D and MP3D benchmarks respectively - representing absolute improvements of 21.4\% and 46.0\% over baseline methods.

We present HaoMo Vision-Language Model (HMVLM), an end-to-end driving framework that implements the slow branch of a cognitively inspired fast-slow architecture. A fast controller outputs low-level steering, throttle, and brake commands, while a slow planner-a large vision-language model-generates high-level intents such as "yield to pedestrian" or "merge after the truck" without compromising latency. HMVLM introduces three upgrades: (1) selective five-view prompting with an embedded 4s history of ego kinematics, (2) multi-stage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting that enforces a Scene Understanding -> Driving Decision -> Trajectory Inference reasoning flow, and (3) spline-based trajectory post-processing that removes late-stage jitter and sharp turns. Trained on the Waymo Open Dataset, these upgrades enable HMVLM to achieve a Rater Feedback Score (RFS) of 7.7367, securing 2nd place in the 2025 Waymo Vision-based End-to-End (E2E) Driving Challenge and surpassing the public baseline by 2.77%.

With the rapid growth of fintech, personalized financial product recommendations have become increasingly important. Traditional methods like collaborative filtering or content-based models often fail to capture users' latent preferences and complex relationships. We propose a hybrid framework integrating large language models (LLMs) and graph neural networks (GNNs). A pre-trained LLM encodes text data (e.g., user reviews) into rich feature vectors, while a heterogeneous user-product graph models interactions and social ties. Through a tailored message-passing mechanism, text and graph information are fused within the GNN to jointly optimize embeddings. Experiments on public and real-world financial datasets show our model outperforms standalone LLM or GNN in accuracy, recall, and NDCG, with strong interpretability. This work offers new insights for personalized financial recommendations and cross-modal fusion in broader recommendation tasks.

Serving large language models (LLMs) to millions of users requires efficient resource allocation and parallelism strategies. It is a labor intensive trial-and-error process to find such a strategy. We present BestServe, a novel framework for ranking serving strategies by estimating goodput under various operating scenarios. Supporting both collocated and disaggregated architectures, BestServe leverages an inference simulator built on an adapted roofline model and CPU-GPU dispatch dynamics. Our framework determines the optimal strategy in minutes on a single standard CPU, eliminating the need for costly benchmarking, while achieving predictions within a $20\%$ error margin. It appeals to be practical for rapid deployment planning because of its lightweight design and strong extensibility.