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Papers

Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

The Role of Natural Language Understanding in Multimodal Video-Based Dengue Diagnosis

Detecting infection-related behavioral changes in mosquitoes from video data is challenging because mosquitoes are small, move rapidly and irregularly, and are affected by environmental factors such as background, lighting, and shadows, which can make reliable feature extraction difficult. In this study, a YOLO- and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP)-based vision-language framework is proposed to classify mosquito flight frames of uninfected and Dengue virus serotype 2 (DENV2)-infected mosquitoes. First, YOLO is used to isolate mosquito regions from the background. Then, visual features extracted from video frames are aligned with biologically meaningful textual prompts in a shared embedding space. The multimodal model was fine-tuned using supervised bidirectional contrastive learning and evaluated through frame-level image-text similarity-based classification. The results show that the proposed method achieved 98.54% accuracy and 99.91% sensitivity at the frame level. After temporal aggregation of frame-level information, the model achieved complete video-level performance. The ablation results showed that fine-tuning and CLIP-based representations were essential for this domain, while the textual branch provided semantic image-text alignment rather than an accuracy advantage over the vision-only model. These findings suggest that vision-language models can provide a useful framework for analyzing infection-related biological behaviors from video data.
Danial Sharifrazi, Saadat Behzadi, Julakha Jahan Jui +5
Aug 5, 2026cs.LG

An Emerging Retail Portfolio Management Application: Personalized, Tax-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Goals

Retail investors lack access to the kind of personalized, tax-aware portfolio management that institutional clients take for granted -- existing robo-advisors use static, rule-based allocation, and institutional-grade systems require account minimums and technology stacks unavailable to individual investors. We present a fully built, integration-tested application that closes this gap: a FastAPI backend and web dashboard that let a user describe an investment goal in plain language (e.g. "I want steady growth but need to sell some shares next month for a down payment"), routes that goal to one of six investment mandates, and produces a live, broker-integrated portfolio recommendation from athree-phase reinforcement learning system -- a self-supervised cross-asset encoder, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) allocation policy with a learned intent router, and a lightweight LoRA adapter that personalizes recommendations from an individual's revealed brokerage behavior without retraining the shared model. The system is functionally complete and integration-tested end-to-end against a live brokerage API (Alpaca, paper-trading mode), including multi-user authentication, a trust first preview-before-apply confirmation flow, daily email digests, and an auditable action-integrity chain, but has not yet been opened to real end-users; we report this honestly as an emerging, pre-deployment application with a concrete path to full deployment, alongside 14-day walk-forward backtests (bootstrapped confidence intervals included) as preliminary, pre-deployment validation rather than production performance. We also report several practical engineering lessons -- silently-inactive integration paths, hanging third-party API calls, and the value of end-to-end empirical verification over trusting checkpoint metadata -- that we believe generalize to other applied RL systems built on external, live data sources.
Ramin Pishehvar
Jul 28, 2026cs.HC

LLM4OSC: Profile-Bound Natural Language Control with Deterministic Validation for Open Sound Control

Open Sound Control (OSC) is the dominant wire protocol for real-time parametric control in professional audio, live performance, and virtual production. Large language models can emit plausible OSC, but they hallucinate addresses, mishandle type tags, and fail under paraphrase- unacceptable in show-critical contexts. We present LLM4OSC, a local-first architecture in which models propose structured intent JSON over a human-reviewed device profile, and deterministic code validates, clamps, and encodes before any UDP send. We introduce a frozen evaluation harness with CI gates on wrong-send rate: mismatches that would still pass validation and transmit. On a Max/MSP hero profile (12 patterns; 8 literal + 8 paraphrase + 4 refusal cases), after profile tag enrichment, symbolic slot fill, NL refine, and a retrieval confidence gate, backends B0--B3 all pass frozen gates (100% semantic accuracy, 0% wrong-send). B0 (rules) remains the production default at ~0.05ms; LLM backends remain ~3-4s. Historical few-shot B2 accuracy of 62.5% rises to 100% on this suite only after symbolic post-processing- not because the 0.5B model alone becomes show-safe. We argue for propose-validate-send and wrong-send rate as first-class metrics for language-to-control systems.
Yuan-Yi Fan
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

ASK-NN: An Asymmetric Nearest-Neighbor Test that detects Distribution Drifts in Natural Language

Hallucinations and artificial text in LLM-generated outputs often appear as distributional deviations between prompt and response hidden-state distributions. Since prompts or retrieved contexts typically serve as reference samples and responses as query samples, with major differences in length, these asymmetries motivate the use of change test statistics that treat the two samples differently. We consider an asymmetric two-sample test ASK-NN based on the directed k-nearest-neighbor graph. Our statistic counts reference points whose nearest neighbor in the pooled sample is also a reference point. Under the permutation null, it admits an exact finite-sample conditional mean and variance; we further establish asymptotic normality and consistency under fixed alternatives. ASK-NN is computationally effective and easy to implement. Empirically, it is competitive with kernel and graph-based baselines on synthetic benchmarks, artificial-text detection, and LLM hallucination detection from token-level hidden states.
Sergey Zakharov, Rodion Oblovatny, Alexey Zaytsev
Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

EmoteGPT: 3D Human Facial Expressions from Natural Language Descriptions

Precise control of 3D facial expressions from text is crucial for virtual avatars, animation, and human-computer interaction, yet existing text-to-3D methods jointly generate identity, expression, and texture, making fine-grained expression control difficult. We instead formulate text-driven expression synthesis as a regression problem in the disentangled parameter space of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM). This setting, however, requires paired data linking detailed language to precise expression parameters, which are missing from existing resources. To fill this gap, we introduce Txt2Emote, a benchmark of diverse 3D facial expressions with fine-grained textual annotations obtained from GPT-4o and a high-fidelity face tracker, providing both explicit descriptions detailing facial features and implicit descriptions referencing the situational context behind the expression. Leveraging this dataset, we present EmoteGPT, a text-to-3D expression framework based on a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) with a dedicated <Expr> token to semantically ground expression representations, which are then decoded into 3DMM parameters. We further improve EmoteGPT by augmenting training with large-scale image-to-3DMM data, enabling it to surpass state-of-the-art text-to-3D face synthesis methods on emotion recognition metrics and in perceived expressiveness. Integrated into avatar pipelines, our method enables photorealistic and stylized 3D avatars, as well as expressive 3D-consistent 2D face synthesis from textual input.
Haoran Wang, Mohit Mendiratta, Christian Theobalt +1
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Compilation: Evaluating Faithful Natural-Language-to-Lean Statement Formalization

Lean verifies that a generated declaration is well typed, but not that it expresses the statement a user intended. We study two questions for autoformalization without canonical Lean targets: whether LLM judges can provide a usable proxy for human semantic review, and how much compilation overstates faithfulness across systems. Our criterion combines Lean compilation with strict semantic consensus between GPT-5.2 and Gemini-2.5-Pro. On an independently audited random sample, it agrees with human majority on 89.7% of cases (Wilson 95% CI: 82.1--94.3%). Across eight systems evaluated on 400 graduate-level statements, every system has a nonzero compile--faithfulness gap, whose observed magnitude ranges from 3.0 to 29.0 percentage points. The full GPT-5.2 tool-augmented agent shows the largest gap, compiling 89.5% while satisfying the semantic criterion on 60.5%. Human review, an independent third-family judge, and a BEq formal cross-check provide complementary evidence that the accepted core is reliable and that most audited outputs in the gap are genuine semantic mismatches. A secondary 232^3 factorial analysis shows that elaboration feedback is the largest validity intervention, yet does not eliminate semantic drift. LLM judging is therefore useful as a human-calibrated, conservative aggregate measure, not as an equivalence oracle.
Ke Zhang, Patricio Gallardo Candela, Sudhir Murthy +3
Jun 24, 2026cs.RO

GROVE: Grounded Pedestrian Simulation via Natural Language for Interactive Social Robot Navigation

Pedestrian simulation is a critical component for training and deploying social robot navigation approaches, yet it remains a largely rigid system that repeatedly requires manual data generation to define even simple scenarios. We propose GROVE, a text-to-scenario pedestrian simulation framework that combines state-of-the-art approaches to produce realistic, socially challenging scenarios for social robot navigation. Our framework allows users to customize one of several common presets (emergency, queuing, normal) or even enter a fully independent prompt to generate a highly customizable pedestrian simulation. Multiple modules separately ensure the realism and soundness of long-horizon human behavior, medium-horizon pedestrian navigation, and short-horizon robot/social interactions. Each module is tuned by the prompt in a way that reflects the user intent across all aspects of pedestrian simulation. By dynamically selecting one of several state-of-the-art (SotA) approaches in our modules based on the scenario, we capture many situational nuances of pedestrian behavior in order to narrow the simulation-to-real (sim2real) gap. The human simulation is directly integrated into Isaac Sim, Gazebo, and RViz simulators for robot deployment in highly social environments. We validate our approach through qualitative comparison against existing pedestrian simulation baselines across scenarios of varying complexity in residential, hospital, and office environments. The result is a high-fidelity pedestrian simulation that challenges social robot navigation with complex, diverse, realistic human behaviors.
Duc Tai Nguyen, Volodymyr Shcherbyna, Anh Do Duc +3
Jun 22, 2026cs.AI

YUKTI: From Natural-Language Situations to Robust, Verifiable Decisions An Uncertainty-Typed Proposition IR, Assumption-Robust Pareto Frontiers, and a Regret Certificate

Language models turn a worded situation into a numeric plan, and the dominant pipelines (NL4Opt, OptiMUS, ORLM, OR-LLM-Agent) commit to a single objective and point-valued coefficients, then solve once. For decisions that allocate real budget, effort, or clinical attention, that confidence is the failure mode: every objectified number is an assumption, and a plan optimal only if the guesses are exactly right is fragile -- mimicry of computation. YUKTI changes the target of autoformulation. Its representation is a typed-proposition graph whose relationships carry shape priors, coefficient uncertainty, and provenance. YUKTI routes each stage to an exact, nonlinear, or evolutionary solver; couples stages by a distributional Pareto hand-off; and introduces Assumption-Robust Pareto Frontiers (ARPF), resampling assumptions (including structural epsilon-contamination) to score how often each action survives (rho). We prove a bound making rho an exact factor of decision regret, add auditable traceability, and synthesize a benchmark-faithful data foundation when none exists (SRJANA). We validate three ways: under controlled misspecification the robust compromise cuts mean and tail regret by over 90% versus a naive point plan; on a regulated commercial decision we optimize inside a lawful action space and price the downside in euros; and on a real public dataset of 41,188 decisions an out-of-sample backtest beats the logged status quo by 34% and a naive point rule by 4% while reducing the optimizer's curse. The solvers are standard; we claim no benchmark-SOTA win. A head-to-head shows an LLM given the correct numbers, and single-objective optimization, both incur about 47x the held-out regret of YUKTI -- an LLM is a formulator, not a solver. Under long-range causal coupling, the forward hand-off becomes unsound, locating where it must become a backward-induction causal policy.
Suyash Mishra
Jun 19, 2026cs.LG

Decodable but Not Faithful: Coupling Natural-Language Rationales to Programmatic Verifiers

Language models can generate plausible rationales for their predictions, but these explanations may not faithfully represent the model's internal reasoning. We propose verifier-coupled reasoning, a framework that inserts inline claims into reasoning traces and trains an auxiliary consistency head to predict programmatic verifier outputs from rationale-span hidden states. The central finding is a gap between decodability and faithfulness: consistency training reliably makes verifier information decodable from rationale representations, but decodability does not guarantee faithful generation. In LeanCheck (formal theorem proving), rationale-only and proof-only pooling achieve perfect directional separation under counterfactual conflict. In KataGo (Go engine), commentary spans encode 10-way win-rate buckets at 81% accuracy. Yet in a code setting, the model achieves 98.6% coupling while its generated explanations remain unfaithful: fluent prose with correct structured claims, but describing unrelated algorithms; a controlled pretrained-vs-from-scratch comparison shows the gap is not capacity-driven. Synthetic activation patching confirms causal influence (73-89% vs. 31% baseline), FEVER reveals that evidence-only pooling isolates genuine evidence sensitivity at the cost of raw accuracy, and per-claim analysis shows that consistency loss disproportionately benefits fine-grained claims over binary ones. These results establish that consistency losses are effective diagnostics and representation-shaping tools, but not sufficient conditions for faithful reasoning.
Vatsal Ananthula, Adarsh Kumarappan
Jun 4, 2026cs.CL

PromptPrint: Behavioral Biometrics Through Natural Language Prompting in LLMs

Authorship attribution research has traditionally focused on long-form, expressive texts; however, interactions with large language models (LLMs) are typically brief and task-driven prompts. This raises a fundamental question: do such prompts contain a stable, author-identifiable, and distinctive signal? We introduce PromptPrint, a systematic study of prompt-based identity, the hypothesis that a user's habitual vocabulary, syntax, and discourse patterns form a learnable behavioral biometric. Using 20,680 real prompts from 1,034 users, we establish three key findings. First, lexical representations significantly outperform semantic encoders, supporting the "lexical stability hypothesis": identity is primarily encoded in surface-level word choice rather than abstract intent. Second, stylometric features exhibit a "uniqueness-consistency paradox": users are highly distinctive across the population, yet behaviorally inconsistent across contexts. Third, adversarial analysis reveals a clear vulnerability spectrum: identity signals are robust to minor lexical perturbations but degrade substantially under semantic paraphrasing. Overall, our results demonstrate strong identification performance at scale, establishing prompt-based identity as a viable behavioral biometric. This work introduces a new perspective on user modeling in LLM interactions, with important implications for security and privacy. Data and code will be released upon the acceptance of our work.
Shaiv Patel, Kartik Narayan, Vishal Patel
Jun 2, 2026cs.CL

SEA-NLI: Natural Language Inference as a Lens into Southeast Asian Cultural Understanding

Frontier LLMs perform well in Western contexts, but remain poorly tested on underrepresented cultures such as those in Southeast Asia (SEA). Existing NLI benchmarks are largely Western-centric, translation-derived, or monolingual, limiting their ability to measure culturally grounded reasoning. We introduce SEA-NLI, a native, culturally grounded NLI benchmark covering eight SEA countries in English and native regional languages, verified by native speakers. Across 17 encoder and decoder models, we observe a low performance from all models, especially for knowledge-intensive categories such as Languages and Science and Technology. Our analysis shows that failure cases mainly stem from missing SEA cultural knowledge: SEA-adapted models and culture-aware prompting improve performance, while CoT prompting offers limited gains.
Peerawat Chomphooyod, Jian Gang Ngui, Yosephine Susanto +5
May 30, 2026cs.IR

Critic-R: Improving Agentic Search using Instruction-tuned Retrievers with Natural Language Introspective Feedback

Agentic search systems iteratively interact with retrieval models to answer complex queries. Despite substantial progress, optimizing retrievers for agentic search remains challenging, often requiring heavy co-training or gold-standard annotations that limit real-world applicability. We propose Critic-R, a framework that explicitly closes the feedback loop between the reasoning agent and the retrieval model during both inference and training. Critic-R introduces a critic model that evaluates the agent's introspective reasoning trace after consuming retrieved evidence to determine whether the retrieved context sufficiently supports the next reasoning step. Critic-R has two complementary mechanisms: Critic-R-Zero, an inference-time query refinement loop that iteratively rewrites queries and retrieval instructions, and Critic-Embed, an optimization approach for retrieval models that leverages successful and failed refinement trajectories as automatic supervision without requiring manual relevance annotation. We evaluate Critic-R on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, and Bamboogle. Results show that Critic-R significantly improves both retrieval quality and downstream answer accuracy.
Md Zarif Ul Alam, Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani
May 29, 2026cs.CV

MyoSem: Aligning Electromyography to Natural-Language Action Semantics for Hand Action Understanding

Electromyography (EMG) directly reflects muscle activation and is a key sensing modality for gesture recognition, prosthetic control, and wearable interaction. Existing EMG methods, however, commonly formulate hand action understanding as classification over fixed labels, making it difficult to support querying, retrieval, and generalization based on action descriptions. We present MyoSem, an EMG--action semantic alignment framework that maps low-level EMG signals into a shared semantic space constructed from multi-view action descriptions. MyoSem combines multi-view action-semantic construction, activation-aware EMG encoding, and semantic query alignment, enabling bidirectional retrieval between EMG signals and text descriptions. We systematically evaluate MyoSem on EMG2Pose and NinaPro-series datasets. Results show that MyoSem performs well on EMG--text bidirectional retrieval, generally outperforms most baselines, and shows favorable generalization to unseen users, held-out action classes, and amputee-user transfer scenarios. Ablations and visualizations further validate the effectiveness of each module. Overall, MyoSem advances EMG-based hand action understanding from fixed-label recognition toward queryable bidirectional semantic retrieval, providing a new modeling paradigm for language-mediated EMG action understanding.
Chiyue Wang, Dong She, Yang Gao +1
May 28, 2026cs.LG

Bridging the Gap Between Natural Language and Market Dynamics via High-Dimensional Representation Learning

Traditional multi-modal financial forecasting often relies on scalar sentiment scores, which fail to capture the nuances of financial news. To address this information loss, this paper explores high-dimensional representation learning by replacing discrete polarity ratings with dense FinBERT embeddings within a Transformer-based forecasting architecture. We benchmarked various embedding strategies on the FNSPID dataset, including raw embeddings, attention-weighted aggregation, and a custom Siamese network. While the attention-based mechanism struggled with the low signal-to-noise ratio typical of financial data, the integration of Siamese-optimized embeddings outperformed both the scalar baseline and raw embedding approaches, demonstrating that preserving high-dimensional narrative context yields improved predictive accuracy for short-term stock price movements.
Yujin Jeong, Noelle Jung, Brian Y. C. Leung
May 28, 2026cs.AI

PhyDrawGen: Physically Grounded Diagram Generation from Natural Language

Generating physics diagrams from text requires strict adherence to physical laws. While current generative models produce visually plausible outputs, they systematically hallucinate force vectors, ignore conservation laws, and violate geometric constraints. We present PhyDrawGen, a neuro-symbolic pipeline that decouples semantic scene understanding from physical constraint satisfaction. First, a large language model extracts a typed scene graph from the problem text. A deterministic solver then converts this graph into a Planar Straight-Line Graph (PSLG), encoding force balance, optical paths, and field topologies as exact geometric primitives. Finally, a fine-tuned Qwen-VL model implements a visually grounded propose-verify loop to iteratively correct any constraint violations. Evaluated on a benchmark of 1,449 problems spanning mechanics, optics, and electromagnetism, PhyDrawGen significantly outperforms GPT-5-image, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 3 Pro, demonstrating robust physical accuracy even on unusual-object problems.
Nafiul Haque, Syed Nazmus Sakib, Shifat E Arman
May 6, 2026eess.AS

JASTIN: Aligning LLMs for Zero-Shot Audio and Speech Evaluation via Natural Language Instructions

The rapid advancement of generative audio models has outpaced the development of robust evaluation methodologies. Existing objective metrics and general multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often struggle with domain generalization, zero-shot capabilities, and instructional flexibility. To address these bottlenecks, we propose JASTIN, a generalizable, instruction-driven audio evaluation framework that formulates audio assessment as a self-instructed reasoning task. JASTIN bridges a frozen high-performance audio encoder with a fine-tuned LLM backbone via a trainable audio adapter. To ensure robust zero-shot generalization, we introduce a comprehensive instruction following data preparation pipeline, incorporating Multi-Source, Multi-Task, Multi-Calibration, and Multi-Description data. Experimental results demonstrate that JASTIN achieves state-of-the-art Pearson and Spearman correlations with human subjective ratings. It consistently outperforms general MLLMs across speech, sound, music, and out-of-domain evaluation tasks without the need for task-specific retraining.
Leying Zhang, Bowen Shi, Haibin Wu +2
May 5, 2026cs.CL

Natural Language Processing: A Comprehensive Practical Guide from Tokenisation to RLHF

This preprint presents a systematic, research-oriented practicum that guides the reader through the entire modern NLP pipeline: from tokenisation and vectorisation to fine-tuning of large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and reinforcement learning from human feedback. A distinctive feature of the work is its consistent attention to low-resource and morphologically rich languages -- original contributions on Tajik and Tatar, including subword tokenisers, word embeddings, lexical databases, and transliteration benchmarks, are woven throughout the twelve sessions, demonstrating how modern NLP can be adapted to data-scarce environments without sacrificing rigour. Each session combines concise theory with detailed implementation plans, formalised evaluation metrics, and transparent assessment criteria. The work is not a conventional textbook: it is designed as a reproducible research artefact where every session requires publishing code, models, and reports in public repositories. All experiments are conducted on a single evolving corpus, and the work advocates open-weight models over commercial APIs, with special attention to the Hugging Face ecosystem. Designed for senior undergraduates, graduate students, and practising developers seeking to implement, compare, and deploy methods from classical ML to state-of-the-art LLM-based systems.
Mullosharaf K. Arabov
Apr 21, 2026cs.CL

Product-of-Experts Training Reduces Dataset Artifacts in Natural Language Inference

Neural NLI models overfit dataset artifacts instead of truly reasoning. A hypothesis-only model gets 57.7% in SNLI, showing strong spurious correlations, and 38.6% of the baseline errors are the result of these artifacts. We propose Product-of-Experts (PoE) training, which downweights examples where biased models are overconfident. PoE nearly preserves accuracy (89.10% vs. 89.30%) while cutting bias reliance by 4.71% (bias agreement 49.85% to 45%). An ablation finds lambda = 1.5 that best balances debiasing and accuracy. Behavioral tests still reveal issues with negation and numerical reasoning.
Aby Mammen Mathew
Apr 16, 2026cs.CL

Text2Arch: A Dataset for Generating Scientific Architecture Diagrams from Natural Language Descriptions

Communicating complex system designs or scientific processes through text alone is inefficient and prone to ambiguity. A system that automatically generates scientific architecture diagrams from text with high semantic fidelity can be useful in multiple applications like enterprise architecture visualization, AI-driven software design, and educational content creation. Hence, in this paper, we focus on leveraging language models to perform semantic understanding of the input text description to generate intermediate code that can be processed to generate high-fidelity architecture diagrams. Unfortunately, no clean large-scale open-access dataset exists, implying lack of any effective open models for this task. Hence, we contribute a comprehensive dataset, \system, comprising scientific architecture images, their corresponding textual descriptions, and associated DOT code representations. Leveraging this resource, we fine-tune a suite of small language models, and also perform in-context learning using GPT-4o. Through extensive experimentation, we show that \system{} models significantly outperform existing baseline models like DiagramAgent and perform at par with in-context learning-based generations from GPT-4o. We make the code, data and models publicly available.
Shivank Garg, Sankalp Mittal, Manish Gupta
Mar 3, 2026cs.CV

Designing UNICORN: a Unified Benchmark for Imaging in Computational Pathology, Radiology, and Natural Language

Foundation models are changing the way we develop medical artificial intelligence. By learning broadly generalizable features across diverse data modalities, a single model can be rapidly adapted to address multiple modalities and tasks with minimal supervision. This potential comes with the urgent need to reliably benchmark, understand and compare the performance and clinical impact of foundation models across data modalities and clinical tasks. We introduce UNICORN, a fundamentally new benchmarking concept for medical foundation models. UNICORN brings four main contributions to medical artificial intelligence. First, a framework that enables a one-to-many benchmarking approach, where a single foundation model is tested across multiple tasks and data modalities. Here, we populate it with 20 tasks across radiology, pathology, and clinical text, covering classification, detection, segmentation, regression, and vision-language generation. Second, a publicly available evaluation platform that implements, for the first time, a two-step approach to run foundation models for data encoding followed by custom task-specific adaptation via few-shot learning and linear probing mechanisms. Third, we create a meta-model that combines state-of-the-art foundation models in pathology, radiology and language with novel task-specific adapters that address all UNICORN tasks, which we refer to as Unicorn Model-0 (UM-0). Finally, we design a novel UNICORN score to benchmark and compare model performance across all tasks. We present the results of UM-0 using sequestered test data from over 2,400 patients, 3,700 vision cases, and 2,400 clinical reports from 17 institutions across eight countries, spanning eight anatomical regions and four imaging modalities. Data, baselines, and evaluation platform are publicly accessible at unicorn.grand-challenge.org.
Michelle Stegeman, Lena Philipp, Fennie van der Graaf +20
Dec 10, 2024cs.CL

Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in generative tasks but pose potential risks due to their tendency to generate hallucinatory responses. Therefore, Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), which aims to distinguish the validity of answers, is crucial for ensuring the safety and robustness of AI systems. However, existing methods primarily rely on measuring the entropy of multiple stochastic samples to represent uncertainty, often overlooking the specific uncertainty information associated with the candidate answer under evaluation. This oversight can lead to biased classification outcomes. In this paper, we investigate the discrepancy between global entropy from multiple samples and local confidence of candidate answer, and propose a Label-Confidence-Aware Uncertainty Quantification (LCA-UQ) method based on Pointwise Kullback-Leibler (PKL) divergence. Our method effectively bridges the gap between the consistency of sampled outputs and the calibration of the candidate answer, thereby enhancing the reliability and stability of uncertainty assessments. Empirical evaluations across a range of popular LLMs and NLP datasets reveal that label sources significantly impact classification. Furthermore, our approach effectively captures the nuances between sampling results and label sources, demonstrating superior performance in uncertainty estimation.
Qinhong Lin, Yinglun Feng, Yuhao Zhang +2
Apr 23, 2026cs.CL

GiVA: Gradient-Informed Bases for Vector-Based Adaptation

As model sizes continue to grow, parameter-efficient fine-tuning has emerged as a powerful alternative to full fine-tuning. While LoRA is widely adopted among these methods, recent research has explored vector-based adaptation methods due to their extreme parameter efficiency. However, these methods typically require substantially higher ranks than LoRA to match its performance, leading to increased training costs. This work introduces GiVA, a gradient-based initialization strategy for vector-based adaptation. It achieves training times comparable to LoRA and maintains the extreme parameter efficiency of vector-based adaptation. We evaluate GiVA across diverse benchmarks, including natural language understanding, natural language generation, and image classification. Experiments show that our approach consistently outperforms or achieves performance competitive with existing vector-based adaptation methods and LoRA while reducing rank requirements by a factor of eight (8×8\times).
Neeraj Gangwar, Rishabh Deshmukh, Michael Shavlovsky +4
Jun 15, 2026cs.CL

PromptMN: Pseudo Prompting Language

Prompting has become the primary interface between humans and generative AI, yet many natural language prompts remain fragile: roles, goals, constraints, and expected outputs are often buried in prose or left implicit. In agentic and software development workflows, a misread at the first handoff can propagate through every step, since a significant portion of agent failures stem from context ambiguities rather than model limitations. This paper introduces PromptMN, a pseudo-prompting domain-specific language that annotates natural language with compact, %-prefixed typed directives covering roles, goals, requirements, priorities, constraints, plans, inputs, and outputs. Semantic resolution lets authors write in any order while the model interprets directives by function. PromptMN sits between informal prompting and programming-style pseudocode: structured enough to be inspectable and reusable, yet lightweight enough for analysts, managers, developers, and stakeholders across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). PromptMN also pairs with reverse prompt engineering. Asking a model to restate a desired outcome as PromptMN lets users inspect the inferred roles, goals, constraints, and missing assumptions before acting, reducing repair cycles and yielding a reusable artifact for aligning people and AI tools. PromptMN's feasibility is evaluated across several frontier models, including Claude Fable 5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.5. The models correctly resolved PromptMN instructions, including complex structures such as repetition, conditionals, methods, and a prime-checking task, without fine-tuning. The same vocabulary applies across new codebases, maintenance, and redesign in the SDLC scenarios presented. While large-scale validation remains future work, these early results suggest PromptMN is a practical step toward clearer, more reviewable human-to-AI interaction.
Enkhzol Dovdon
May 8, 2026cs.RO

CommandSwarm: Safety-Aware Natural Language-to-Behavior-Tree Generation for Robotic Swarms

Natural-language interfaces can make swarm robotics more accessible to non-expert operators, but they must translate ambiguous user intent into executable swarm behaviors without unsupported actions, malformed programs, or unsafe plans. This paper presents CommandSwarm, a safety-aware language-to-behavior-tree pipeline for generating XML behavior trees (BTs) from speech or text commands. The system combines multilingual translation, command-level safety filtering, constrained prompting, a LoRA-adapted large language model (LLM), and deterministic parser validation against a whitelist of executable swarm primitives. We evaluate eleven open 6.7B--14B parameter LLMs, all using 4-bit quantization, on representative swarm-control scenarios under zero-shot, one-shot, and two-shot prompting. Falcon3-Instruct-10B and Mistral-7B-v3 are the strongest prompt-engineered candidates, reaching BLEU scores above 0.60 and high syntactic validity in few-shot settings. LoRA adaptation of Falcon3-Instruct-10B on a 2,063-example synthetic instruction--BT corpus improves zero-shot BLEU from 0.267 to 0.663, ROUGE-L from 0.366 to 0.692, and parser-accepted syntactic validity from 0% to 72%. Translation experiments further show that SeamlessM4T v2-large and EuroLLM-9B provide the best quality-latency trade-offs for the multilingual front end. The results indicate that compact, quantized, domain-adapted LLMs can generate useful swarm BTs when embedded in a validated systems pipeline. They also show that parser acceptance and safety filtering remain necessary execution gates; generation quality alone is not sufficient for autonomous deployment.
Mohammed Majid, Amjad Yousef Majid
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

ltzGLUE: Luxembourgish General Language Understanding Evaluation

This paper presents ltzGLUE, the first Natural Language Understanding (NLU) benchmark for Luxembourgish (LTZ) based on the popular GLUE benchmark for English. Although NLU tasks are available for many European languages nowadays, LTZ is one of the official national languages that is often overlooked. We construct new tasks and reuse existing ones to introduce the first official NLU benchmark and accompanying evaluation of encoder models for the language. Our tasks include common natural language processing tasks in binary and multi-class classification settings, including named entity recognition, topic classification, and intent classification. We evaluate various pre-trained language models for LTZ to present an overview of the current capabilities of these models on the LTZ language.
Alistair Plum, Felicia Körner, Anne-Marie Lutgen +8
Jun 10, 2026cs.CR

Grammar-Constrained Decoding Can Jailbreak LLMs into Generating Malicious Code

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, raising concerns that they may be misused to produce malicious code. Meanwhile, Grammar-Constrained Decoding (GCD) has been widely adopted to improve the reliability of LLM-generated code by enforcing syntactic validity. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive risk: this reliability-oriented technique can itself become an attack surface. We uncover a new jailbreak attack, termed CodeSpear, that exploits GCD to induce LLMs into generating malicious code. Our experiments show that simply applying a benign code grammar constraint can effectively jailbreak LLMs. To address this vulnerability, we propose CodeShield, a safety alignment approach that robustly preserves safe behavior even under attacker-controlled grammar constraints. CodeShield aligns the model in the code modality by teaching it to generate honeypot code under GCD. Such code is semantically harmless, so it does not implement the malicious request, and structurally diverse, so it is difficult to suppress through grammar tightening. At the same time, CodeShield still preserves natural-language refusals when natural language is available. Experiments on 10 popular LLMs across 4 benchmarks show that CodeSpear outperforms representative jailbreak baselines and increases the attack success rate by more than 30 percentage points on average. CodeShield also restores safety under CodeSpear while preserving benign utility. Our findings reveal a fundamental risk of GCD and call for greater attention to its potential security implications.
Yitong Zhang, Shiteng Lu, Jia Li
Jul 6, 2026cs.CL

Where to cut, how deep: BPE and Unigram-LM on chemistry SMILES

Every chemical language model reading SMILES begins with a tokenizer, yet the field has inherited byte-pair encoding (BPE) from natural language with little scrutiny. In natural language, BPE's principal alternative, Unigram-LM, is known to build structurally different vocabularies. Whether that contrast survives in chemistry was open. We report a controlled comparison of BPE and Unigram-LM over a fixed 165-token chemistry base, at the small vocabulary sizes where token embeddings are learnable, across three corpus typologies (diverse, drug-like, natural-products) and both pre-tokenization boundary policies. The two do not converge. In all 22 matched conditions they build near-disjoint subword vocabularies: cross-algorithm Jaccard overlap on the learned pieces never exceeds 0.161, and at most 0.05 once weighted toward the high-frequency pieces a model updates most. Unigram-LM also segments held-out molecules into 29-41% more tokens; the arms largely agree on where to cut but not how deeply, so BPE's segmentation is a strict coarsening of Unigram-LM's on 80-99% of molecules. The separation holds across corpus, boundary, and vocabulary size, persisting even at eight times that scale. The subword algorithm is therefore a modeling decision, not a free default. The study trains no language models.
Hunter Heidenreich
May 14, 2026cs.RO

SR-Platform: An Agentic Pipeline for Natural Language-Driven Robot Simulation Environment Synthesis

Generating robot simulation environments remains a major bottleneck in simulation-based robot learning. Constructing a training-ready MuJoCo scene typically requires expertise in 3D asset modeling, MJCF specification, spatial layout, collision avoidance, and robot-model integration. We present SR-Platform, a production-deployed agentic system that converts free-form natural language descriptions into executable, physically valid MuJoCo environments. SR-Platform decomposes scene synthesis into four stages: an LLM-based orchestrator that converts user intent into a structured scene plan; an asset forge that retrieves cached assets or generates new 3D geometry through LLM-to-CadQuery synthesis; a layout architect that assigns object poses and verifies industrial constraints; and a bridge layer that assembles the final MJCF scene and merges the selected robot model. The system is deployed as a nine-service Docker stack with WebSocket progress streaming, MinIO-backed mesh storage, Qdrant-based semantic asset retrieval, Redis job state, and InfluxDB telemetry. Using 30 days of production telemetry covering 611 successful LLM calls, SR-Platform generates five-object scenes with a median end-to-end latency of approximately 50 s, while cache-accelerated scenes complete in approximately 30-40 s. The asset forge shows an 11.3% first-attempt retry rate with automatic recovery, and cached asset retrieval removes per-object LLM calls for previously generated object types. These results show that agentic scene synthesis can reduce the manual effort required to create diverse robot training environments, enabling users to produce executable MuJoCo scenes from plain English prompts in under one minute.
Ben Wei Lim, Minh Duc Le, Thang Truong +1
Jun 8, 2026cs.CL

SafeRun: Enabling Determinism in LLM Planning for Running

Large Language Models enable flexible natural-language planning but remain unreliable in determinism-critical domains due to their probabilistic nature. This limitation is especially problematic in running planning, where violating safety rules can lead to safety risks. We propose SafeRun, a framework for deterministic LLM-based planning via a decoupled architecture. SafeRun separates soft interpretation by an LLM from hard constraint enforcement by a deterministic solver, ensuring strict safety constraints while preserving natural-language flexibility. To validate SafeRun, we build a comprehensive benchmark for running planning under realistic physiological and safety constraints. Experiments across five LLMs show that SafeRun achieves 100% safety score (vs.\ 79.1% PE average and 97.6% CodeAct average) while maintaining competitive instruction-following scores. The SafeRun benchmark is publicly available at \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/zzp-seeker/SafeRun-RunPlanning-Benchmark}{huggingface}.
Meilin Chen, Zepeng Zhai, Jiaxuan Zhao +1
Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

AURORA: A Natural Language-Driven Agentic Framework for Understanding, Reasoning, and Orchestrating Reliable Air-Ground Co-Simulation

Air-ground transportation research increasingly relies on co-simulation, yet constructing scenarios remains labor-intensive and difficult to validate. More importantly, a generated scenario may execute successfully while failing to realize the spatial, temporal, communication, or behavioral relationships requested by the user. This paper presents AURORA, a natural-language-driven agentic framework that treats air-ground scenario generation as a process of compilation with verification. Central to AURORA is the Air-Ground Scenario Graph (AGSG), a typed intermediate representation that explicitly connects agents, aerial missions, events, communication links, success conditions, and their cross-domain dependencies. This shared representation enables simulator-grounded parsing, joint road-airspace grounding, temporal planning, pre-execution feasibility checking, trace-based runtime verification, failure localization, and bounded repair within a unified workflow. We further introduce AURORA-Bench to evaluate not only whether generated scenarios execute, but whether they faithfully realize the requested interactions. Experiments across multiple language models show that structured execution substantially improves reliability, while runtime verification exposes silent failures that completion-based evaluation overlooks. Localized repair further resolves many violations without regenerating the entire scenario. The results show that reliable scenario generation requires verifying realized behavior, not merely executable code, and demonstrate the value of explicit intermediate representations for verifiable and repairable language-driven co-simulation.
Keshu Wu, Hao Zhang, Rui Gan +4