Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced video understanding capabilities, opening new possibilities for practical applications. Yet current video benchmarks focus largely on indoor scenes or short-range outdoor activities, leaving the challenges associated with long-distance travel largely unexplored. Mastering extended geospatial-temporal trajectories is critical for next-generation MLLMs, underpinning real-world tasks such as embodied-AI planning and navigation. To bridge this gap, we present VIR-Bench, a novel benchmark consisting of 200 travel videos that frames itinerary reconstruction as a challenging task designed to evaluate and push forward MLLMs' geospatial-temporal intelligence. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art MLLMs, including proprietary ones, struggle to achieve high scores, underscoring the difficulty of handling videos that span extended spatial and temporal scales. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth case study in which we develop a prototype travel-planning agent that leverages the insights gained from VIR-Bench. The agent's markedly improved itinerary recommendations verify that our evaluation protocol not only benchmarks models effectively but also translates into concrete performance gains in user-facing applications.

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in medical applications requires fact-checking capabilities to ensure patient safety and regulatory compliance. We introduce MedFact, a challenging Chinese medical fact-checking benchmark with 2,116 expert-annotated instances from diverse real-world texts, spanning 13 specialties, 8 error types, 4 writing styles, and 5 difficulty levels. Construction uses a hybrid AI-human framework where iterative expert feedback refines AI-driven, multi-criteria filtering to ensure high quality and difficulty. We evaluate 20 leading LLMs on veracity classification and error localization, and results show models often determine if text contains errors but struggle to localize them precisely, with top performers falling short of human performance. Our analysis reveals the "over-criticism" phenomenon, a tendency for models to misidentify correct information as erroneous, which can be exacerbated by advanced reasoning techniques such as multi-agent collaboration and inference-time scaling. MedFact highlights the challenges of deploying medical LLMs and provides resources to develop factually reliable medical AI systems.

This project addresses a critical pedagogical need: offering students continuous, on-demand academic assistance beyond conventional reception hours. I present a domain-specific Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system powered by a quantized Mistral-7B Instruct model and deployed as a Telegram bot. The assistant enhances learning by delivering real-time, personalized responses aligned with the "Introduction to Parallel Processing" course materials. GPU acceleration significantly improves inference latency, enabling practical deployment on consumer hardware. This approach demonstrates how consumer GPUs can enable affordable, private, and effective AI tutoring for HPC education.

Text generating capabilities have undergone a substantial transformation with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). Electroencephalography (EEG)-based text production is still difficult, though, because it requires a lot of data and processing power. This paper introduces a new method that combines the use of the Gemma 2B LLM with a classifier-LLM architecture to incorporate a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder. Our approach drastically lowers the amount of data and compute power needed while achieving performance close to that of cutting-edge methods. Notably, compared to current methodologies, our methodology delivers an overall performance improvement of 10%. The suggested architecture demonstrates the possibility of effective transfer learning for EEG-based text production, remaining strong and functional even in the face of data limits. This work highlights the potential of integrating LLMs with EEG decoding to improve assistive technologies and improve independence and communication for those with severe motor limitations. Our method pushes the limits of present capabilities and opens new paths for research and application in brain-computer interfaces by efficiently using the strengths of pre-trained language models. This makes EEG-based text production more accessible and efficient.

Significant progress in reward modeling over recent years has been driven by a paradigm shift from task-specific designs towards generalist reward models. Despite this trend, developing effective reward models remains a fundamental challenge: the heavy reliance on large-scale labeled preference data. Pre-training on abundant unlabeled data offers a promising direction, but existing approaches fall short of instilling explicit reasoning into reward models. To bridge this gap, we propose a self-training approach that leverages unlabeled data to elicit reward reasoning in reward models. Based on this approach, we develop GRAM-R$^2$, a generative reward model trained to produce not only preference labels but also accompanying reward rationales. GRAM-R$^2$ can serve as a foundation model for reward reasoning and can be applied to a wide range of tasks with minimal or no additional fine-tuning. It can support downstream applications such as response ranking and task-specific reward tuning. Experiments on response ranking, task adaptation, and reinforcement learning from human feedback demonstrate that GRAM-R$^2$ consistently delivers strong performance, outperforming several strong discriminative and generative baselines.

Health misinformation spreading online poses a significant threat to public health. Researchers have explored methods for automatically generating counterspeech to health misinformation as a mitigation strategy. Existing approaches often produce uniform responses, ignoring that the health literacy level of the audience could affect the accessibility and effectiveness of counterspeech. We propose a Controlled-Literacy framework using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with reinforcement learning (RL) to generate tailored counterspeech adapted to different health literacy levels. In particular, we retrieve knowledge aligned with specific health literacy levels, enabling accessible and factual information to support generation. We design a reward function incorporating subjective user preferences and objective readability-based rewards to optimize counterspeech to the target health literacy level. Experiment results show that Controlled-Literacy outperforms baselines by generating more accessible and user-preferred counterspeech. This research contributes to more equitable and impactful public health communication by improving the accessibility and comprehension of counterspeech to health misinformation

In response to the urgent need for effective communication with crisis-affected populations, automated responses driven by language models have been proposed to assist in crisis communications. A critical yet often overlooked factor is the consistency of response style, which could affect the trust of affected individuals in responders. Despite its importance, few studies have explored methods for maintaining stylistic consistency across generated responses. To address this gap, we propose a novel metric for evaluating style consistency and introduce a fusion-based generation approach grounded in this metric. Our method employs a two-stage process: it first assesses the style of candidate responses and then optimizes and integrates them at the instance level through a fusion process. This enables the generation of high-quality responses while significantly reducing stylistic variation between instances. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baselines in both response quality and stylistic uniformity.

The broad capabilities and substantial resources required to train Large Language Models (LLMs) make them valuable intellectual property, yet they remain vulnerable to copyright infringement, such as unauthorized use and model theft. LLM fingerprinting, a non-intrusive technique that compares the distinctive features (i.e., fingerprint) of LLMs to identify whether an LLM is derived from another, offers a promising solution to copyright auditing. However, its reliability remains uncertain due to the prevalence of diverse model modifications and the lack of standardized evaluation. In this SoK, we present the first comprehensive study of the emerging LLM fingerprinting. We introduce a unified framework and taxonomy that structures the field: white-box methods are classified based on their feature source as static, forward-pass, or backward-pass fingerprinting, while black-box methods are distinguished by their query strategy as either untargeted or targeted. Furthermore, we propose LeaFBench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating LLM fingerprinting under realistic deployment scenarios. Built upon 7 mainstream foundation models and comprising 149 distinct model instances, LeaFBench integrates 13 representative post-development techniques, spanning both parameter-altering methods (e.g., fine-tuning, quantization) and parameter-independent techniques (e.g., system prompts, RAG). Extensive experiments on LeaFBench reveal the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods, thereby outlining future research directions and critical open problems in this emerging field. The code is available at https://github.com/shaoshuo-ss/LeaFBench.

Recent generative models have significantly advanced speech restoration tasks, yet their training objectives often misalign with human perceptual preferences, resulting in suboptimal quality. While post-training alignment has proven effective in other generative domains like text and image generation, its application to generative speech restoration remains largely under-explored. This work investigates the challenges of applying preference-based post-training to this task, focusing on how to define a robust preference signal and curate high-quality data to avoid reward hacking. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-metric preference alignment strategy. We construct a new dataset, GenSR-Pref, comprising 80K preference pairs, where each chosen sample is unanimously favored by a complementary suite of metrics covering perceptual quality, signal fidelity, content consistency, and timbre preservation. This principled approach ensures a holistic preference signal. Applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with our dataset, we observe consistent and significant performance gains across three diverse generative paradigms: autoregressive models (AR), masked generative models (MGM), and flow-matching models (FM) on various restoration benchmarks, in both objective and subjective evaluations. Ablation studies confirm the superiority of our multi-metric strategy over single-metric approaches in mitigating reward hacking. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our aligned models can serve as powerful ''data annotators'', generating high-quality pseudo-labels to serve as a supervision signal for traditional discriminative models in data-scarce scenarios like singing voice restoration. Demo Page:https://gensr-pref.github.io

Clinical ML workflows are often fragmented and inefficient: triage, task selection, and model deployment are handled by a patchwork of task-specific networks. These pipelines are rarely aligned with data-science practice, reducing efficiency and increasing operational cost. They also lack data-driven model identification (from imaging/tabular inputs) and standardized delivery of model outputs. We present a framework that employs a single vision-language model (VLM) in two complementary, modular roles. First (Solution 1): the VLM acts as an aware model-card matcher that routes an incoming image to the appropriate specialist model via a three-stage workflow (modality -> primary abnormality -> model-card ID). Reliability is improved by (i) stage-wise prompts enabling early termination via "None"/"Other" and (ii) a calibrated top-2 answer selector with a stage-wise cutoff. This raises routing accuracy by +9 and +11 percentage points on the training and held-out splits, respectively, compared with a baseline router, and improves held-out calibration (lower Expected Calibration Error, ECE). Second (Solution 2): we fine-tune the same VLM on specialty-specific datasets so that one model per specialty covers multiple downstream tasks, simplifying deployment while maintaining performance. Across gastroenterology, hematology, ophthalmology, pathology, and radiology, this single-model deployment matches or approaches specialized baselines. Together, these solutions reduce data-science effort through more accurate selection, simplify monitoring and maintenance by consolidating task-specific models, and increase transparency via per-stage justifications and calibrated thresholds. Each solution stands alone, and in combination they offer a practical, modular path from triage to deployment.