In modern dialogue systems, the ability to implicitly infer user backgrounds from conversations and leverage this information for personalized assistance is crucial. However, the scarcity of high-quality data remains a fundamental challenge to evaluating and improving this capability. Traditional dataset construction methods are labor-intensive, resource-demanding, and raise privacy concerns. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach for automatic synthetic data generation and introduce the Implicit Personalized Dialogue (IP-Dialog) benchmark along with a training dataset, covering 10 tasks and 12 user attribute types. Additionally, we develop a systematic evaluation framework with four metrics to assess both attribute awareness and reasoning capabilities. We further propose five causal graphs to elucidate models' reasoning pathways during implicit personalization. Extensive experiments yield insightful observations and prove the reliability of our dataset.

Textbooks are important for shaping children's understanding of the world. Previous studies of individual countries have suggested that gender inequality exists. There lacks a study that compares gender inequality in textbooks around the world. This study uses NLP approaches to quantify gender inequality in English textbooks in 7 cultural spheres, 22 countries, by measuring the count, firstness, and TF IDF words by gender. The study also counted the names that appeared in TF IDF word lists and sorted the names by gender, found out that LLMs can distinguish between the different TF IDF word lists, and mapped the TF IDF words to GloVe to see that some keywords are closer to one gender than the other. The study found more male count, firstness, and names. The study found that there is significant gender inequality in all the textbooks. Gender inequality is demonstrated the least in textbooks of the Latin Cultural Sphere.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence into educational applications has enhanced personalized and interactive learning experiences, and it shows strong potential to promote young learners language acquisition. However, it is still challenging to ensure consistent and robust performance across different languages and cultural contexts, and kids-friendly design requires simplified instructions, engaging interactions, and age-appropriate scaffolding to maintain motivation and optimize learning outcomes. In this work, we introduce SingaKids, a dialogic tutor designed to facilitate language learning through picture description tasks. Our system integrates dense image captioning, multilingual dialogic interaction, speech understanding, and engaging speech generation to create an immersive learning environment in four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil. We further improve the system through multilingual pre-training, task-specific tuning, and scaffolding optimization. Empirical studies with elementary school students demonstrate that SingaKids provides effective dialogic teaching, benefiting learners at different performance levels.

The synergistic mechanism based on Speculative Decoding (SD) has garnered considerable attention as a simple yet effective approach for accelerating the inference of large language models (LLMs). Nonetheless, the high rejection rates require repeated LLMs calls to validate draft tokens, undermining the overall efficiency gain of SD. In this work, we revisit existing verification mechanisms and propose a novel synergetic mechanism Consultant Decoding (CD). Unlike SD, which relies on a metric derived from importance sampling for verification, CD verifies candidate drafts using token-level likelihoods computed solely by the LLM. CD achieves up to a 2.5-fold increase in inference speed compared to the target model, while maintaining comparable generation quality (around 100% of the target model's performance). Interestingly, this is achieved by combining models whose parameter sizes differ by two orders of magnitude. In addition, CD reduces the call frequency of the large target model to below 10%, particularly in more demanding tasks. CD's performance was even found to surpass that of the large target model, which theoretically represents the upper bound for speculative decoding.

Time-series prediction or forecasting is critical across many real-world dynamic systems, and recent studies have proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task due to their strong generalization capabilities and ability to perform well without extensive pre-training. However, their effectiveness in handling complex, noisy, and multivariate time-series data remains underexplored. To address this, we propose LLMPred which enhances LLM-based time-series prediction by converting time-series sequences into text and feeding them to LLMs for zero shot prediction along with two main data pre-processing techniques. First, we apply time-series sequence decomposition to facilitate accurate prediction on complex and noisy univariate sequences. Second, we extend this univariate prediction capability to multivariate data using a lightweight prompt-processing strategy. Extensive experiments with smaller LLMs such as Llama 2 7B, Llama 3.2 3B, GPT-4o-mini, and DeepSeek 7B demonstrate that LLMPred achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, a thorough ablation study highlights the importance of the key components proposed in LLMPred.

In this paper we present AnswerCarefully, a dataset for promoting the safety and appropriateness of Japanese LLM outputs. The dataset consists of 1,800 pairs of questions and reference answers, where the questions require special attention in answering. It covers a wide range of risk categories established in prior English-language datasets, but the data samples are original in that they are manually created to reflect the socio-cultural context of LLM usage in Japan. We show that using this dataset for instruction to fine-tune a Japanese LLM led to improved output safety without compromising the utility of general responses. We also report the results of a safety evaluation of 12 Japanese LLMs using this dataset as a benchmark. Finally, we describe the latest update on the dataset which provides English translations and annotations of the questions, aimed at facilitating the derivation of similar datasets in different languages and regions.

Recent dimension-free communication frameworks in Federated Learning (FL), such as DeComFL, significantly reduce per-round communication by transmitting only scalars via zeroth-order stochastic gradient descent (ZO-SGD). This method is particularly advantageous for federated fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, the high variance in ZO gradient estimation typically leads to slow convergence. Although leveraging Hessian information is known to enhance optimization speed, integrating this into FL presents significant challenges. These include clients' restrictions on local data and the critical need to maintain the dimension-free communication property. To overcome this limitation, we first introduce a generalized scalar-only communication FL framework that decouples dimension-free communication from standard ZO-SGD, enabling the integration of more advanced optimization strategies. Building on this framework, we propose HiSo, a fast federated fine-tuning method via Hessian-informed zeroth-order optimization and Scalar-only communication. Specifically, it leverages global curvature information to accelerate convergence while preserving the same minimal communication cost per round. Theoretically, we establish convergence guarantees that are independent of the global Lipschitz constant, and further show that HiSo achieves faster rates when the global Hessian exhibits a low effective rank -- a common phenomenon in LLMs. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and LLM fine-tuning tasks confirm that HiSo significantly outperforms existing ZO-based FL methods in both convergence speed and communication efficiency.

Traditional approaches -- such as Win Probability Added (WPA)-based ranking or computer vision-driven event detection -- can identify scoring plays but often miss strategic depth, momentum shifts, and storyline progression. Manual curation remains the gold standard but is resource-intensive and not scalable. We introduce DIAMOND, an LLM-driven agent for context-aware baseball highlight summarization that integrates structured sports analytics with natural language reasoning. DIAMOND leverages sabermetric features -- Win Expectancy, WPA, and Leverage Index -- to quantify play importance, while an LLM module enhances selection based on contextual narrative value. This hybrid approach ensures both quantitative rigor and qualitative richness, surpassing the limitations of purely statistical or vision-based systems. Evaluated on five diverse Korean Baseball Organization League games, DIAMOND improves F1-score from 42.9% (WPA-only) to 84.8%, outperforming both commercial and statistical baselines. Though limited in scale, our results highlight the potential of modular, interpretable agent-based frameworks for event-level summarization in sports and beyond.

Misinformation detection models often rely on superficial cues (i.e., \emph{shortcuts}) that correlate with misinformation in training data but fail to generalize to the diverse and evolving nature of real-world misinformation. This issue is exacerbated by large language models (LLMs), which can easily generate convincing misinformation through simple prompts. We introduce TruthOverTricks, a unified evaluation paradigm for measuring shortcut learning in misinformation detection. TruthOverTricks categorizes shortcut behaviors into intrinsic shortcut induction and extrinsic shortcut injection, and evaluates seven representative detectors across 14 popular benchmarks, along with two new factual misinformation datasets, NQ-Misinfo and Streaming-Misinfo. Empirical results reveal that existing detectors suffer severe performance degradation when exposed to both naturally occurring and adversarially crafted shortcuts. To address this, we propose SMF, an LLM-augmented data augmentation framework that mitigates shortcut reliance through paraphrasing, factual summarization, and sentiment normalization. SMF consistently enhances robustness across 16 benchmarks, encouraging models to rely on deeper semantic understanding rather than shortcut cues. To promote the development of misinformation detectors, we have published the resources publicly at https://github.com/whr000001/TruthOverTricks.

Stories are central to human culture, serving to share ideas, preserve traditions, and foster connections. Automatic story generation, a key advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), offers new possibilities for creating personalized content, exploring creative ideas, and enhancing interactive experiences. However, existing methods struggle to maintain narrative coherence and logical consistency. This disconnect compromises the overall storytelling experience, underscoring the need for substantial improvements. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we introduce Storyteller, a novel approach that systemically improves the coherence and consistency of automatically generated stories. Storyteller introduces a plot node structure based on linguistically grounded subject verb object (SVO) triplets, which capture essential story events and ensure a consistent logical flow. Unlike previous methods, Storyteller integrates two dynamic modules, the STORYLINE and narrative entity knowledge graph (NEKG),that continuously interact with the story generation process. This integration produces structurally sound, cohesive and immersive narratives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Storyteller significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving an 84.33% average win rate through human preference evaluation. At the same time, it is also far ahead in other aspects including creativity, coherence, engagement, and relevance.