Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in the social sciences to simulate human behavior, based on the assumption that they can generate realistic, human-like text. Yet this assumption remains largely untested. Existing validation efforts rely heavily on human-judgment-based evaluations -- testing whether humans can distinguish AI from human output -- despite evidence that such judgments are blunt and unreliable. As a result, the field lacks robust tools for assessing the realism of LLM-generated text or for calibrating models to real-world data. This paper makes two contributions. First, we introduce a computational Turing test: a validation framework that integrates aggregate metrics (BERT-based detectability and semantic similarity) with interpretable linguistic features (stylistic markers and topical patterns) to assess how closely LLMs approximate human language within a given dataset. Second, we systematically compare nine open-weight LLMs across five calibration strategies -- including fine-tuning, stylistic prompting, and context retrieval -- benchmarking their ability to reproduce user interactions on X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, and Reddit. Our findings challenge core assumptions in the literature. Even after calibration, LLM outputs remain clearly distinguishable from human text, particularly in affective tone and emotional expression. Instruction-tuned models underperform their base counterparts, and scaling up model size does not enhance human-likeness. Crucially, we identify a trade-off: optimizing for human-likeness often comes at the cost of semantic fidelity, and vice versa. These results provide a much-needed scalable framework for validation and calibration in LLM simulations -- and offer a cautionary note about their current limitations in capturing human communication.

Large-scale disaster Search And Rescue (SAR) operations are persistently challenged by complex terrain and disrupted communications. While Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms offer a promising solution for tasks like wide-area search and supply delivery, yet their effective coordination places a significant cognitive burden on human operators. The core human-machine collaboration bottleneck lies in the ``intention-to-action gap'', which is an error-prone process of translating a high-level rescue objective into a low-level swarm command under high intensity and pressure. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a novel LLM-CRF system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to model and augment human-swarm teaming cognition. The proposed framework initially captures the operator's intention through natural and multi-modal interactions with the device via voice or graphical annotations. It then employs the LLM as a cognitive engine to perform intention comprehension, hierarchical task decomposition, and mission planning for the UAV swarm. This closed-loop framework enables the swarm to act as a proactive partner, providing active feedback in real-time while reducing the need for manual monitoring and control, which considerably advances the efficacy of the SAR task. We evaluate the proposed framework in a simulated SAR scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to traditional order and command-based interfaces, the proposed LLM-driven approach reduced task completion time by approximately $64.2\%$ and improved task success rate by $7\%$. It also leads to a considerable reduction in subjective cognitive workload, with NASA-TLX scores dropping by $42.9\%$. This work establishes the potential of LLMs to create more intuitive and effective human-swarm collaborations in high-stakes scenarios.

We introduce AraFinNews, the largest publicly available Arabic financial news dataset to date, comprising 212,500 article-headline pairs spanning a decade of reporting from 2015 to 2025. Designed as an Arabic counterpart to major English summarisation corpora such as CNN/DailyMail, AraFinNews provides a realistic benchmark for evaluating domain-specific language understanding and generation in financial contexts. Using this resource, we investigate the impact of domain specificity on abstractive summarisation of Arabic financial texts with large language models (LLMs). In particular, we evaluate transformer-based models: mT5, AraT5, and the domain-adapted FinAraT5 to examine how financial-domain pretraining influences accuracy, numerical reliability, and stylistic alignment with professional reporting. Experimental results show that domain-adapted models generate more coherent summaries, especially in their handling of quantitative and entity-centric information. These findings highlight the importance of domain-specific adaptation for improving narrative fluency in Arabic financial summarisation. The dataset is freely available for non-commercial research at https://github.com/ArabicNLP-uk/AraFinNews.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich yet complex information, and their automated analysis is critical for clinical decision-making. Despite recent advances of large language models (LLMs) in clinical workflows, their ability to analyze EHRs remains limited due to narrow task coverage and lack of EHR-oriented reasoning capabilities. This paper aims to bridge the gap, specifically, we present EHR-Ins, a large-scale, comprehensive EHR reasoning instruction dataset, comprising 300k high-quality reasoning cases and 4M non-reasoning cases across 42 distinct EHR tasks. Its core innovation is a thinking-graph-driven framework that enables to generate high-quality reasoning data at scale. Based on it, we develop EHR-R1, a series of reasoning-enhanced LLMs with up to 72B parameters tailored for EHR analysis. Through a multi-stage training paradigm, including domain adaptation, reasoning enhancement, and reinforcement learning, EHR-R1 systematically acquires domain knowledge and diverse reasoning capabilities, enabling accurate and robust EHR analysis. Lastly, we introduce EHR-Bench, a new benchmark curated from MIMIC-IV, spanning 42 tasks, to comprehensively assess reasoning and prediction across EHR scenarios. In experiments, we show that the resulting EHR-R1 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art commercial and open-source LLMs (including DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o), surpassing GPT-4o by over 30 points on MIMIC-Bench and achieving a 10\% higher zero-shot AUROC on EHRSHOT. Collectively, EHR-Ins, EHR-R1, and EHR-Bench have significantly advanced the development for more reliable and clinically relevant EHR analysis.

Building training-ready multi-hop question answering (QA) datasets that truly stress a model's retrieval and reasoning abilities remains highly challenging recently. While there have been a few recent evaluation datasets that capture the characteristics of hard-to-search but easy-to-verify problems -- requiring the integration of ambiguous, indirect, and cross-domain cues -- these data resources remain scarce and are mostly designed for evaluation, making them unsuitable for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL). Meanwhile, manually curating non-trivially retrievable questions -- where answers cannot be found through a single direct query but instead require multi-hop reasoning over oblique and loosely connected evidence -- incurs prohibitive human costs and fails to scale, creating a critical data bottleneck for training high-capability retrieval-and-reasoning agents. To address this, we present BMGQ, a bottom-up automated method for generating high-difficulty, training-ready multi-hop questions from semi-structured knowledge sources. The BMGQ system (i) grows diverse, logically labeled evidence clusters through Natural Language Inference (NLI)-based relation typing and diversity-aware expansion; (ii) applies reverse question construction to compose oblique cues so that isolated signals are underinformative but their combination uniquely identifies the target entity; and (iii) enforces quality with a two-step evaluation pipeline that combines multi-model consensus filtering with structured constraint decomposition and evidence-based matching. The result is a scalable process that yields complex, retrieval-resistant yet verifiable questions suitable for SFT/RL training as well as challenging evaluation, substantially reducing human curation effort while preserving the difficulty profile of strong evaluation benchmarks.

Group segregation or cohesion can emerge from micro-level communication, and AI-assisted messaging may shape this process. Here, we report a preregistered online experiment (N = 557 across 60 sessions) in which participants discussed controversial political topics over multiple rounds and could freely change groups. Some participants received real-time message suggestions from a large language model (LLM), either personalized to their stance ("individual assistance") or incorporating their group members' perspectives ("relational assistance"). We find that small variations in AI-mediated communication cascade into macro-level differences in group composition. Participants with individual assistance send more messages and show greater stance-based clustering, whereas those with relational assistance use more receptive language and form more heterogeneous ties. Hybrid expressive processes--jointly produced by humans and AI--can reshape collective organization. The patterns of structural division and cohesion depend on how AI incorporates users' interaction context. Understanding how micro-level communication patterns accumulate into macro-level group segregation or cohesion is a central question in social and behavioral science [1-3]. Conversations across differences are often asymmetric: people find it difficult to engage constructively with those who hold opposing views [4, 5], and stereotypes bias perceptions of outgroup members [6]. Online platforms can intensify these dynamics through lowered inhibitions [9], emotion-amplified diffusion [10], and algorithmic or behavioral clustering processes [11-13]. While the forces that produce social division are well theorized and empirically documented, far less is known about the micro-level conversational mechanisms that can instead generate cohesion in ideollogically diverse groups [14-16].

Inspired by recent advancements in LLM reasoning, the field of multimodal reasoning has seen remarkable progress, achieving significant performance gains on intricate tasks such as mathematical problem-solving. Despite this progress, current multimodal large reasoning models exhibit two key limitations. They tend to employ computationally expensive reasoning even for simple queries, leading to inefficiency. Furthermore, this focus on specialized reasoning often impairs their broader, more general understanding capabilities. In this paper, we propose Metis-HOME: a Hybrid Optimized Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to address this trade-off. Metis-HOME enables a ''Hybrid Thinking'' paradigm by structuring the original dense model into two distinct expert branches: a thinking branch tailored for complex, multi-step reasoning, and a non-thinking branch optimized for rapid, direct inference on tasks like general VQA and OCR. A lightweight, trainable router dynamically allocates queries to the most suitable expert. We instantiate Metis-HOME by adapting the Qwen2.5-VL-7B into an MoE architecture. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that our approach not only substantially enhances complex reasoning abilities but also improves the model's general capabilities, reversing the degradation trend observed in other reasoning-specialized models. Our work establishes a new paradigm for building powerful and versatile MLLMs, effectively resolving the prevalent reasoning-vs-generalization dilemma. Code and weights are available at https://github.com/MM-Thinking/Metis-HOME.

LLM-powered coding agents, which operate in iterative loops (turns) to solve software engineering tasks, are becoming increasingly powerful. However, their practical deployment is hindered by significant and unpredictable costs. This challenge arises from a combination of factors: quadratically growing token counts with each turn, the high price of models, the large number of turns required for real-world tasks, and the tendency of agents to take inefficient or unnecessary actions. While existing research focuses on optimizing individual turns, the strategic control of the total number of turns remains an underexplored area for managing agent performance and cost. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on SWE-bench using three state-of-the-art models and evaluate the impact of three distinct turn-control strategies: an unrestricted baseline, a fixed-turn limit with reminders, and a novel dynamic-turn strategy that grants extensions on-demand. Our findings first reveal a fundamental trade-off in the unrestricted setting, where no single model excels across performance, cost, and turn efficiency. We then show that a fixed-turn limit, specifically at the 75th percentile of the baseline, serves as a "sweet spot", substantially reducing costs (by 24%-68%) with minimal impact on solve rates. Most significantly, the dynamic-turn strategy consistently outperforms fixed-limit approaches, achieving comparable or better solve rates while further reducing costs by an additional 12%-24% by intelligently allocating resources only to tasks that need them. This work provides the first systematic analysis of turn-control strategies, offering simple yet effective guidelines for developers to balance cost and efficacy. We demonstrate that dynamic resource allocation is a superior, easy-to-implement approach for deploying powerful yet economically viable coding agents.

In quantitative investing, return prediction supports various tasks, including stock selection, portfolio optimization, and risk management. Quantitative factors, such as valuation, quality, and growth, capture various characteristics of stocks. Unstructured data, like news and transcripts, has attracted growing attention, driven by recent advances in large language models (LLMs). This paper examines effective methods for leveraging multimodal factors and newsflow in return prediction and stock selection. First, we introduce a fusion learning framework to learn a unified representation from factors and newsflow representations generated by an LLM. Within this framework, we compare three methods of different architectural complexities: representation combination, representation summation, and attentive representations. Next, building on the limitation of fusion learning observed in empirical comparison, we explore the mixture model that adaptively combines predictions made by single modalities and their fusion. To mitigate the training instability of the mixture model, we introduce a decoupled training approach with theoretical insights. Finally, our experiments on real investment universes yield several insights into effective multimodal modeling of factors and news for stock return prediction and selection.

We conduct a moderate-scale contamination-free (to some extent) evaluation of current large reasoning models (LRMs) with some preliminary findings. We also release ROME, our evaluation benchmark for vision language models intended to test reasoning from visual clues. We attach links to the benchmark, evaluation data, and other updates on this website: https://flageval-baai.github.io/LRM-Eval/