Text Analysis and Detection
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Different attack methods follow different search trajectories, they succeed on different subsets of samples, whereas existing hard-label black-box text attacks mainly focus on improving individual attackers or manually combining them. We present OASIS, a method for optimizing attacker sequences in hard-label black-box text attacks. OASIS first performs a one-time bi-objective attack chain search over candidate sequences to balance attack success rate and perturbation, and then reuses the selected fixed global chain during attack chain execution. Experiments across multiple datasets, victim models, and large language models show that OASIS consistently outperforms strong standalone baselines and simple manually constructed chains. These results suggest that attacker composition is not merely an implementation choice, but a practical optimization target for improving hard-label black-box text attacks.
Effective Graph and Rank-based Contextual Embeddings for Textual and Multimedia Data
In a data-driven world, efficiently organizing and mapping relationships between objects is crucial. Graphs are powerful tools for modeling these connections, being widely used in social networks, telecommunications, and biology. However, graph-based methods often face high computational costs, particularly in memory and space usage. To address this, graph embedding techniques, also referred to as Network Representation Learning, encode graph information into lower-dimensional representations while preserving structural aspects. Traditional methods, however, lack interpretable dimensions. RaDE (Rank Diffusion Embedding) introduces a new approach using rank-based information, with a key step being the selection of a representative subset of nodes to provide interpretability for its dimensions and improve retrieval tasks. Despite its potential, RaDE's original proposal did not fully explore the effectiveness of representative subset selection across different classes or evaluate embeddings in tasks like classification and clustering. Inspired by RaDE, this work introduces GRaCE (Graph and Rank-based Contextual Embeddings), a fully unsupervised framework that generates interpretable embeddings by leveraging robust rank-based measures for representative subset selection and node embedding. GRaCE surpasses RaDE and Original Features across diverse datasets, including textual and image collections, excelling in retrieval, classification, and clustering tasks, considering state-of-the-art Transformer models as feature descriptors and Graph Convolutional Networks models in classification tasks.
Counting Documents Is Not Counting Text: Unit Bias in Web-PDF Corpus Statistics
PDF corpora advertise their size in tokens, but every rate they publish (coverage, OCR routing, re-fetch recovery, language mix) is computed per document, and none decomposes its token total. Because PDF length is extremely skewed, the two units can describe the same corpus very differently. We ask how the headline statistics of a web-PDF corpus change when each document is weighted by the text it contributes rather than counted once. We used CC-MAIN-2021-31-PDF-UNTRUNCATED (7.9M Common Crawl PDFs, 32.6B tokens), the one public corpus that pairs the fragments Common Crawl stored with the re-fetched originals. Text mass is highly concentrated: 3.02% of text-bearing documents hold half the tokens (Gini 0.807). The clearest consequence is Common Crawl's payload cap, which truncated 23.06% of these documents but 63.08% of their text. Reconstructing the truncated fragments and extracting both versions, two widely used text-layer parsers recover only 1.4% and 11.4% of that exposed text, so roughly 55-62% of the corpus's text is unrecoverable from the crawl by such pipelines; under the 5MiB cap adopted in March 2025, 30.19% of tokens would still be exposed. We recommend that corpus statistics be reported in both units, documents and tokens.
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.
Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues
Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia. No existing instrument measures this influence per clause, predicts it before delivery, or repairs it under matched budgets. \sysname{} closes the three gaps through the model API alone: a contract ledger pairs every constraint with an executable checker, records revocations as tombstones, and compiles the net constraint state ahead of time into a single specification; a sequential ablation probe measures per-clause adherence and incremental behavioral effect; a repair ladder operates under token- and attempt-matched budgets. On \dataname{} (\NTasks{} HumanEval tasks, \NClauses{} verified checkers), relapse at an 8B operating point climbs from \ScaleDelayedMTwo{} to \ScaleDelayedMEight{} as constraint load grows, while stronger models sit at floor. Under matched checkers, model, and budget, ahead-of-time compilation significantly reduces relapse against a no-ledger verifier-retry baseline (\RestoreDiff{}, 95% CI \RestoreDiffCI{}, \RestoreDiffP{}); adaptive ladder interventions stacked on top add no detectable gain (95% confidence excludes gains \LadderExcludedGain{}). The probe predicts relapse before delivery (AUROC \AurocPrimary{}); a one-sentence tombstone note recovers about a third of the compilation effect and survives a placebo control. At \CostDeliveryFactor{} delivery overhead and \CostTotalHedged{} of API compute for every result, revocation failure becomes a measurable, predictable, and repairable property of dialogue state rather than an invisible one.
Embedding Rotation Invariance for Provable Multi-Oriented Scene Text Recognition
Multi-oriented text is ubiquitous in real-world scenes and remains a major challenge for scene text recognition (STR). Existing rotation-aware methods explicitly estimate text orientation. However, due to the lack of theoretical guarantees, they are prone to error accumulation, increased computational cost, and strong reliance on data. In this work, we incorporate rotation invariance into the STR framework to address these limitations. Specifically, we adopt an encoder-decoder architecture, embedding rotation equivariance in the encoder and rotation invariance in the decoder to construct a fully rotation-invariant network. On the decoder side, we first identify and prove the rotation-invariant property of the cross-attention mechanism and use it to formulate a rotation-invariant text decoder that maps visual features to output text in a rotation-invariant manner. On the encoder side, we propose a rotation-equivariant local-global extraction network that integrates deep equivariant convolutions with self-attention, enabling rotation-equivariant feature extraction while modeling inter-character dependencies and preserving fine-grained visual details. By integrating the encoder and decoder, we obtain an end-to-end Rotation-Invariant Scene Text Recognition network (RISTER). RISTER provides rotation invariance with theoretical guarantees, enhancing robustness on multi-oriented samples without introducing additional inference computation or relying on data-driven orientation correction. Experiments show that RISTER achieves state-of-the-art performance on both standard and multi-oriented benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.0 percent in accuracy on the general multi-oriented dataset.
Decomposition-Induced Context-Memory Conflict: When Fact-Checking Pipelines Contradict Their Own Source Text
Decompose-then-verify pipelines, including FActScore-style fact-checkers and long-form factuality evaluators, first split a passage into atomic claims before checking each one. Decomposition itself is treated as a neutral preprocessing step. We show it is not: a decomposer can be induced to substitute its own parametric belief for what the source passage says, producing a claim that contradicts the text it was supposed to summarize faithfully. We call this Decomposition-Induced Context-Memory Conflict (DI-CC) and show it is mechanistically the same phenomenon as classical context-memory conflict, occurring inside a different pipeline stage than prior work has examined. A linear probe trained only on classical context-memory conflict data (NQ-Swap), never exposed to any decomposition output, significantly separates decomposition positions that produce DI-CC from faithful decompositions (AUC = 0.86-0.88, permutation p < 0.0005). An existing reference-free baseline, SelfCheckGPT-style self-consistency sampling, fails to detect DI-CC at all (AUC 0.51, chance-level), because DI-CC content is stably recoverable and recurs across resamples, unlike the variability self-consistency methods rely on. Context-aware decoding, a training-free mitigation from the classical setting, transfers to decomposition and suppresses DI-CC, but at a severe cost: many decompositions under coreference-heavy conditions fail to parse, often because the decomposer fabricates a different identity. We do not consider this mitigation deployment-ready. We further characterize the mechanism's boundaries: its natural occurrence rate is too sparss not manifest on naturally-occurring hallucinatedtext, and it requires a minimum model scale to detecablish DI-CC as a real, mechanistically grounded, andpartially treatable failure mode, with a scope we chhan overstate.
When Vision Becomes Text: Visual Token Pruning via Cross-Modal Residual Guidance in VLMs
Abundant visual information strengthens vision-language model (VLM) perception, yet massive visual tokens raise inference costs. Existing visual token pruning methods rely on similarity-based guidance, which exploits pairwise text-vision and vision-vision token correlations for compression. However, such methods only capture local layer-level signals and overlook the whole inference process in VLM. In this paper, we revisit VLM inference and present a new efficient guidance scheme that complements similarity-based guidance. In particular, we identify a key observation: as LLM layers deepen, text tokens continuously aggregate visual information via self-attention and progressively absorb partial visual content into textual representations. To quantify this phenomenon, we propose Cross Modal Absorption (CMA) from a geometric representation perspective to measure how much visual information is absorbed by text, revealing that more visual tokens in deeper layers can be approximately explained by the text subspace. We accordingly propose Cross Modal Residual (CMR). It projects visual tokens onto the text subspace via Tikhonov regularized least squares and exploits reconstruction residuals to quantify visual information that cannot be explained by text. Finally, based on CMR, we present SIEVE, a training-free visual token compression method that combines CMR, text-attention relevance, and residual-space diversity to retain task-relevant and complementary tokens. Experiments on diverse VLM architectures verify the effectiveness of SIEVE. For instance, on LLaVA-NeXT-7B, SIEVE keeps only of visual tokens while preserving of the original average performance, achieving prefill speedup, end-to-end speedup, and a KV-cache reduction.
MD-ProTector: Positioning Multiple Data-Driven Prototypes for LLM-Generated Text Detection
As LLM-generated content becomes more sophisticated, detection systems for distinguishing those texts from human-written text must operate at scale while handling diverse writing styles, domains, languages, and generator models. Input-only encoder detectors are suitable for practical deployment setting, but standard binary classification supplies only the class label and does not explicitly organize the substantial variation within either class. We propose MD-ProTector, which represents each class with multiple trainable reference vectors in the encoder embedding space, referred to as prototypes. These prototypes provide separate decision boundaries for different groups of texts within the same class. However, adding multiple prototypes alone does not determine which variation each prototype should represent. MD-ProTector addresses this problem with Prototype Positioning loss, which separates class-level structure from the within-class variation that differentiates individual prototypes. Evaluated across five settings from three large-scale benchmarks covering domain, generator, language, and adversarial variation, MD-ProTector achieves the highest AvgRec on MAGE CDCM and RAID and the highest AUROC and lowest FPR95 on RAID among the compared encoder-based methods.
MAD-HOI: Masked Autoregressive Diffusion for Generating Articulated Hand Object Interactions from Text
Methods for text-based generation of hand-object interaction (HOI) sequences primarily focus on producing smooth, physically plausible trajectories. A truly utilitarian method should additionally support variable-length generation, composite motion sequences, motion completion and infilling, and reliable termination without compromising physical plausibility. Standard diffusion models for HOI generation are typically trained only for text-to-motion generation on atomic motions and require the motion length to be specified a-priori. Autoregressive (AR) methods provide greater sequence-level flexibility, but commonly depend on discrete motion codes, which can lose contact-sensitive motion detail. To address these key limitations, we present a model performing Masked Autoregression with Diffusion for HOI generation (MAD-HOI). Our method starts by encoding hand and object motions in a continuous latent space while keeping them disentangled to maintain stream-wise control. This is followed by a masked autoregressive transformer to predict context features that condition a flow-matching head. MAD-HOI is capable of motion generation for atomic and composite articulated sequences, conditioned motion completion and infilling, as well as EOM (End of Motion) prediction from a single training objective. We provide comprehensive evaluations for these capabilities and benchmark our method on the ARCTIC and GRAB datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that our method generates more diverse and physically plausible interactions compared to other open-sourced baseline methods.
UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers
Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs. Existing approaches either require manual specification of the feature vocabulary or automate discovery only partially, leaving the gap between dataset-level correlation and model-level exploitation unaddressed. We present U N M ASK, a fully automated pipeline that discovers, causally verifies, and mitigates spurious correlations in text classifiers without additional human annotation. Given unlabeled training examples, U N M ASK generates candidate surface patterns as executable boolean expressions, filters them through a statistical validation protocol with independent replication, and establishes causal model dependence via verified counterfactual interventions. Causally confirmed features then serve as annotation-free group definitions for Deep Feature Reweighting, eliminating the group labels that standard DFR requires. Applied to BERT and RoBERTa trained on MNLI, our pipeline independently rediscovers established lexical-overlap and negation biases, verifying 9 of 10 features on BERT and 6 on RoBERTa, and improving HANS accuracy by up to 12.58 pp. On CivilComments-WILDS, programmatic groups match the 70.1% worst- group accuracy of hand-labeled DFR (Kirichenko et al., 2023) without demographic annotation. We further demonstrate that the discovery and validation stages generalize to reward model preference data, surfacing interpretable spurious correlations in RewardBench2.
Learning Deep Modality-Shared Self-Expressiveness for Image Clustering with Textual Information
Leveraging textual information for image clustering has emerged as a promising direction, largely owing to the powerful representations learned by Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Existing approaches typically retrieve a textual counterpart for each image and then refine multimodal representations by directly enforcing cross-modal agreement, e.g., maximizing image-text similarity inherited from pretrained VLMs. However, such a strategy aligns heterogeneous representations across modalities without explicitly modeling the intrinsic structure within each modality and thus might yield unreliable alignment or distort modality-specific structures that are crucial for clustering. In this paper, we propose a simple but principled approach, termed deep modality-shared self-expressive model (DeepMORSE), which discovers cross-modal structures via a modality-shared self-expressive model and simultaneously learns structured representations that conform to a union of modality-specific subspaces. Moreover, we theoretically justify that the modality-shared self-expressive coefficients suppress inter-class noise towards a subspace-preserving solution, and show that mini-batch optimization procedure introduces an implicit regularization onto the self-expressive model. We evaluate our DeepMORSE on six widely used image clustering benchmarks and observe performance improvements exceeding 3% on the UCF-101, DTD-47, and ImageNet-Dogs datasets. In addition, we demonstrate the strong transferability of the learned representations by achieving state-of-the-art performance on downstream tasks such as image retrieval and zero-shot classification---without requiring any task-specific losses or post-processing. The code is available at: https://github.com/mengxianghan123/DeepMORSE.
Measuring Concept Content in Text from LLM Activations: ESG Evidence from Concept Vectors and Linear Probes
Existing measures of how much a text is about a concept read the surface of the text: dictionary word shares, topic proportions, embedding similarities. They score the words a text uses, not the judgment a reader forms about it. Recent work has shown that a gap exists in what Large Language Models (LLMs) know internally versus what they express in their response. This paper asks whether that internal knowledge, read by monitoring the activations of frozen, out-of-the-box LLMs, can stand in for task-specific fine-tuning when measuring concept content, and which extraction method reads it best. We extract such measures via the Recursive Feature Machine (RFM) algorithm and via linear probing, and compare these against an embedding baseline, surface baselines, and the same model's own answer to the question. We demonstrate the approach on financial text, a domain studied extensively and served by established annotated resources, using a human-annotated Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) dataset. The best linear probe comes within 0.6 percentage points of a fine-tuned domain classifier's accuracy without any task-specific fine-tuning, and outscores the same model's own answer to the question in eleven of twelve comparisons, so the activations carry concept content the response does not report. The simple probe consistently beats the RFM concept vectors, which in turn provide what classification alone does not: a continuous score intended to reflect how strongly a concept is present in a text, whose validation awaits graded labels.
Beyond Text Matching: Towards Reference-Free Evaluation for Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering
Human-Oriented Binary Reverse Engineering (HOBRE) aims to transform decompiled pseudocode into a more human-friendly representation, thereby reducing the cognitive burden of reverse analysis and improving efficiency. However, reliably evaluating HOBRE outputs remains a fundamental challenge: human evaluation is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale, while existing automated metrics either require executable test cases and runtime environments that are often unavailable for real-world binaries, or rely on high-quality source code references that are typically inaccessible and fail to capture semantically equivalent but lexically diverse outputs. Although LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm is naturally well-suited to HOBRE evaluation, its effectiveness remains underexplored. This paper presents the first systematic investigation of the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm for HOBRE across three representative tasks: function name recovery, binary code summarization, and decompilation optimization. We introduce BinJudgeBench, the first expert-annotated, reference-free evaluation benchmark based on multi-dimensional human judgment, where LLM-as-a-Judge achieves an average correlation of 63.20% with human judgment, outperforming traditional automated metrics at 35.04%. By analyzing judge configurations across backbone LLMs, prompting strategies, and decoding temperatures, we find that no ``one-size-fits-all'' configuration exists, as the optimal setup varies across tasks and individual samples. To address this, we propose BinJudge, which employs a lightweight routing mechanism to adaptively select the optimal judge configuration for each task and sample. BinJudge improves correlation with human experts by 4.5%-24.7% and reduces API cost to 0.06-0.84 of that of static best configurations, providing a scalable, cost-effective, and high-fidelity automated evaluation scheme for HOBRE.
Debias in Text, Believe Your Eyes: Text-Anchored Cross-Modal Transfer for Visual Counter-Commonsense Reasoning
The visual reasoning ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is crucial for downstream applications, particularly counter-commonsense reasoning, which requires models to reason beyond common assumptions. Recent studies mainly improve visual counter-commonsense reasoning by enhancing visual inputs, following the assumption that failures originate from insufficient visual grounding. However, our empirical analysis reveals that the bottleneck is not visual perception. MLLMs already capture the relevant visual evidence, and the correct answer exists in their decoding space. Instead, the shared language decoder resolves prior--evidence conflicts by favoring dominant language priors, especially for low-frequency factual scenarios. Motivated by this, we first propose a text-anchored data construction pipeline, whose core component, Fact-Frequency Distillation (FFD), estimates the prior strength of commonsense facts and distills verified counter-commonsense scenarios into a high-quality text corpus. Building upon this corpus, we introduce TACT, a text-anchored post-training framework that debiases the shared language decoder without requiring any visual training data. TACT routes evidence-following and prior-driven reasoning trajectories into different optimization stages, enabling the decoder to resolve prior--evidence conflicts. Across counter-commonsense visual benchmarks, TACT substantially improves visual reasoning while preserving general capabilities, demonstrating effective text-to-vision cross-modal transfer.
How Far Do Simple Transformations Translate Across Text Embedding Models?
We investigate whether simple transformations can translate representations across heterogeneous text embedding models. Understanding how independently trained models organize semantic information is an enabler for AI-to-AI latent communication without decoding into human-readable text. Focusing on lightweight translators such as linear mappings, we test the literature hypothesis of latent universality in a realistic text setting beyond simplified benchmarks. Across nine embedding models differing in architecture, pooling strategy, and training objective, we evaluate compatibility using CKA, downstream transfer, fidelity, and retrieval. Simple translators recover meaningful shared structure and support transfer for some compatible pairs, but fail sharply for others. Compatibility depends jointly on architecture, training objective, pooling, and data distribution. Overall, the results show that heterogeneous embedding spaces are not universally related by simple mappings as often suggested in some literature.
Once a Response, Always a Response: Detecting LLM-generated Text via Latent Prompt Restoration
Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent and convincing text at scale, creating growing risks for misinformation dissemination, educational misuse, and platform governance. These concerns make robust detection of machine-generated text increasingly necessary. Recent zero-shot detectors mainly exploit probability-based statistical discrepancies, but they do not explicitly account for the training process of LLMs, which leaves a distinct generation mechanism insufficiently modeled and limits detection robustness. To address this issue, we propose EchoPrompt, a training-free detector based on latent prompt restoration. Our key intuition is that machine-generated text is typically produced conditioned on an upstream prompt, and this hidden dependency can be partially reactivated by prepending a unified generic prefix. Specifically, EchoPrompt restores a generic assistant-response context, measures the induced likelihood gain with an instruction-tuned model, calibrates it against the corresponding base model, and aggregates the resulting differences into a score that quantifies latent prompt dependency. Extensive experiments show that EchoPrompt achieves state-of-the-art performance among zero-shot detectors while maintaining strong robustness across challenging evaluation settings.
Example-Guided Prompting for Document-Level Text Simplification
Document-level text simplification requires large language models (LLMs) to rewrite complex documents while preserving meaning, readability, and discourse coherence. Although prompt-based LLMs have shown promising performance, they often produce inconsistent simplifications because textual instructions alone provide limited guidance for complex document-level transformations. We investigate whether retrieved document-simplification examples can improve document-level generation by augmenting prompts with examples selected from a parallel simplification corpus. This example-guided prompting approach enables LLMs to exploit relevant simplification patterns without task-specific fine-tuning. Experiments on the OneStopEnglish corpus using multiple state-of-the-art LLMs show that incorporating retrieved examples consistently improves simplification quality over prompt-only generation and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with representative supervised (T5) and planning-based (PlanSimp) document simplification systems. Furthermore, we find that the benefits of example-guided prompting vary across LLMs, suggesting that effective use of retrieved examples depends on a model's ability to integrate contextual information during generation.
Robust Context-Aware Detection of Malicious Instructions in Text
The remarkable instruction-following ability of modern LLMs has enabled their practical use as the minds of agents that can autonomously complete increasingly complex tasks. Therein, however, also lies their vulnerability to attacks which embed malicious instructions in text, common variants of which are known as indirect prompt injection (IPI). A fundamental task in addressing this vulnerability is successful segmentation of a given text into benign and malicious sentences (if any). While a number of approaches for this task have been proposed, no detector combines query-relative detection at the segment level, and none are hardened against adaptive evasion attacks realizable in agentic executions. We address the former limitation by developing an approach for malicious sentence classification that is both context- and query-aware. Next, to harden the resulting classifier against evasion, we present two adversarial training methods. The first is directly adapted feature-space adversarial training (AT) in which evasions are approximated using projected-gradient-based optimization in the embedding space. The second simulates realizable evasion attacks in the AT loop through LLM-based paraphrasing. Crucially, we parametrize both AT variants to facilitate a smooth tradeoff between utility and attack robustness. In extensive experiments using indirect prompt injection benchmarks we show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art IPI defense baselines under static attacks, while in the case of adaptive attacks, our AT variants provide significantly higher utility, lower attack success rate, and often both. Finally, we show that the best AT parameters can depend intimately on the particular application domain. Consequently, domain-dependent tuning of malicious text detectors is likely necessary in practice. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/tavia-liu/CAD.
Coupled Continuous-Discrete Generation for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution
Scene text image super-resolution (STISR) aims to recover visually plausible appearance while preserving character semantics from degraded inputs. Existing STISR systems often rely on externally generated priors or separate image and text models, resulting in error propagation and costly multi-stage inference. We present DualTSR, a unified framework that formulates STISR as coupled continuous-discrete generation. Conditional flow matching restores continuous image latents, while absorbing-state discrete diffusion reconstructs text tokens. Both processes share a multimodal transformer backbone, allowing the evolving image and text states to interact throughout generation without an external OCR prior at inference. On CTR-TSR, DualTSR achieves the best FID, LPIPS, ACC, and NED among the compared methods at both X2 and X4. On an aligned RealCE subset, it obtains the best FID, ACC, and NED with competitive LPIPS. Compared with DiffTSR at X4, DualTSR improves ACC by 12.78 percentage points while reducing the parameter count from 1.23B to 203M and end-to-end latency from 13.3s to 132ms. These results establish DualTSR as an accurate and efficient method for STISR.
Consensus Measures for Unstructured Biomedical Text Annotations
Biomedical literature is increasingly mined for knowledge beyond the questions it was written to answer. Because the target concepts are not known in advance, annotators prefer open-ended labels, whose agreement is hard to quantify. We study soft inter-rater reliability for annotators providing unstructured texts for biomedical annotation tasks. Synthetic experiments show that soft reliability can be quantified using a variety of semantic equivalence measures, and that the choice of measure affects failure modes of the estimation. Embeddings are scalable, but limited when differentiating similar but distinct concepts. Large language models are promising, but limited by scalability for estimating agreement by chance. Finally, we suggest measures based on natural language inference as a sensible compromise.
Spike-HTR: Spiking Neural Transformer for Handwritten Text Recognition
Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) is computationally imbalanced in two ways: most image pixels are background, and many width-axis sequence positions are blank-dominated. This creates a mismatch for Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs): handwriting is observed as a static image, whereas spiking computation unfolds over timesteps. We propose Spike-HTR, a hybrid spiking recognizer that controls both the number of spiking steps and the number of width positions processed by the deep sequence mixer. To make a static image suitable for short-horizon spiking inference, InkCoder converts it into a coarse-to-fine input stream, where early steps cover broad stroke regions and later steps emphasize sharper stroke details. To reduce sequence computation, a CTC-guided length reducer keeps likely character or uncertain positions and compresses long blank-dominated stretches before deep mixing. With , Spike-HTR trains only on target data, decodes without language models or lexicons, and reaches validation/test CERs of 3.5/5.4, 2.3/2.5, and 4.2/3.9 on IAM, LAM, and READ2016. Codes are available at https://github.com/QomolangmaH/SpikeHTR.
Scoring Rules! Statistical and Strategic Alignment for Text Evaluation Metrics
Reference-based text evaluation metrics, which are widely used to assess natural language generation systems, score a candidate response by comparing it with a reference response. The reliability of an evaluation metric is usually judged by its statistical correlation with human ratings. However, as these metrics are increasingly used as optimization objectives, correlation alone is no longer sufficient: agents may strategically game the evaluation metric. We study this issue through two complementary notions of alignment. A metric is statistically aligned if it correlates with human ratings and strategically aligned if it resists perturbations that do not add task-relevant information. We make two contributions. First, we propose test principles for reference-based metrics consisting of human-rating correlation, degradation sensitivity, and manipulation robustness. These principles evaluate whether a metric agrees with human judgments, penalizes low-effort information loss, and resists strategic score inflation. Second, we develop a unified design framework for mutual-information-based metrics that decomposes existing and new metrics into four choices: information measure, estimation method, text representation, and prediction mechanism. Across peer review, summarization, and question answering, we find that strong human-rating correlation does not imply strategic alignment: LLM-as-a-Judge achieves high correlation but is susceptible to manipulation. In contrast, mutual-information-based metrics substantially improve manipulation robustness. Our framework also uncovers a new metric that achieves the strongest overall robustness in our experiments while remaining competitive on human-rating correlation.
DeBERTa-Sentinel: Toward Transparent and Trustworthy Detection of AI-Generated Text
The rapid spread of large language models (LLMs) across the web raises concerns about misinformation, academic integrity, automated content manipulation, and risks to vulnerable online communities. Existing transformer-based detectors, such as GPT-Sentinel, show promise but struggle to generalize to diverse model outputs and paraphrasing attacks, limiting their role in building trustworthy web ecosystems. This work introduces DeBERTa-Sentinel, a responsible AI-generated text detection framework leveraging DeBERTa-v3's disentangled attention to capture subtle structural irregularities in synthetic content. A central design principle is transparency: unlike black-box commercial detectors, DeBERTa-Sentinel exposes token-level explanations of its decisions, enabling affected stakeholders journalists, educators, and platform trust and safety teams to audit, challenge, and contextualize detection outcomes. Using the GLC-AIText dataset of 28,057 human and LLM-generated samples (GPT, LLaMA, and Claude) with a 60-20-20 split, DeBERTa-Sentinel achieves 98.21% validation accuracy and surpasses the RoBERTa-Sentinel baseline from NeurIPS 2025, achieving 97.53% test accuracy, 95.89% precision, 99.33% recall, and 99.53% ROC-AUC, and maintaining a 0.665% false negative rate. The model's interpretability reveals linguistic markers such as academic phrasing and formal transitions associated with synthetic text, directly supporting stakeholder needs for verifiable, auditable content-authenticity decisions. By advancing responsible detection methods that reduce bias and enhance explainability, DeBERTa-Sentinel promotes trustworthy, ethical, and human-centric AI systems. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Galileo-Galili/HUMAN-VS-AI-TEXT-DETECTION.
RAGOCR: Optical Compression of Retrieval-Augmented Text via Visual Representation
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become essential for knowledge-intensive question answering, yet scaling RAG pipelines remains challenging due to the prohibitive computational cost of processing lengthy retrieved contexts. Existing compression approaches face a fundamental trade-off: hard compression methods operate online in a query-aware fashion but achieve only modest compression rates and typically require fine-tuning the generative model, while soft compression methods attain higher ratios but rely on costly offline encoding that is entirely agnostic to the input query. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAGOCR, a novel framework that compresses retrieved documents into compact visual representations conditioned on the input query. To further balance compression rate and information fidelity, we introduce a query-aware dynamic resolution mechanism that adaptively allocates visual granularity based on each document's estimated relevance and complexity: highly relevant passages are rendered at higher resolution to preserve fine-grained details, while peripheral documents are aggressively compressed at lower resolution. Experiments on five QA benchmarks using the MedOmniKB retrieval corpus demonstrate that RAGOCR surpasses naive RAG by over 15% in accuracy while requiring only one-eighth the number of input tokens, and consistently outperforms both hard and soft compression baselines across varying retrieval depths.
Unleashing the Power of Text: Text-Guided Flow Matching for Image Fusion under Complex Degradations
Infrared-visible image fusion under realistic degradation scenarios is a challenging task, as degradations not only cause a loss of reliable modality-specific information in observed images but also hinder the fusion process. Recent studies indicate that text can provide prior information about degradation characteristics, complementing the limited evidence available from corrupted input images and facilitating fusion. However, existing methods typically inject fixed global text representations into visual features, making it difficult for textual guidance to adapt to spatially varying degradations, local structures, and thermal saliency. To this end, we propose TGFusion, a text-guided latent-space flow matching framework that unifies degradation suppression and cross-modal fusion. TGFusion encodes task, degradation, and generation cues into structured prompts. To fully exploit these priors, we design a Prompt-conditioned Multi-stream Joint Flow Transformer that represents text as an independent semantic stream alongside fusion, visible, and infrared streams. Joint attention enables token-level bidirectional interaction and layer-wise updating among semantic and visual representations, allowing degradation semantics to dynamically guide reliable information selection and fusion latent generation. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and complex degradation scenarios demonstrate that TGFusion achieves superior or competitive performance in perceptual quality, image naturalness, structural-detail preservation, and infrared-saliency retention, while remaining robust across diverse single and compound degradations.
Scaling Properties of Text Conditioning in Visual Generation
We study empirical scaling properties for text conditioning in visual generation. Such properties have rarely been measured because diffusion loss does not scale with the number of tokens in natural-language prompts. Surprisingly, we find that the converged diffusion loss scales with the amount of structured language in the prompt. To quantify structured language, we adapt two complementary measures: a white-box likelihood metric (GPG) and a black-box attribute metric (ED). Across controlled training runs, the converged diffusion loss decreases approximately linearly with GPG and follows a power law with ED. Guided by these scaling properties, we improve \emph{diffusability} by constructing structured prompts with semantic and geometric annotations derived from images, and improve \emph{promptability} by training a prompter through supervised fine-tuning, cold-start, and verifier-gated on-policy distillation. The resulting system outperforms all evaluated open-weight models on nearly every compositional, reasoning, and world-knowledge benchmark, while matching or surpassing the strongest closed-weight models on most evaluations.
Small Is Enough: Per-User Style Rewriting of AI-Edited Text via LoRA Adapters
InMyStyle is a privacy first, single user system that adapts small language models to rewrite AI-edited text towards an individual user's writing style without an instruction prompt at inference. Given a user's documents, it uses multiple local helper LLMs to construct paired training examples and fine tunes LoRA adapters on base models ranging from 0.5B to 7B parameters. Length aware generation budgets and automatic chunking support inputs of different lengths. On 219 evaluation pairs from a scientific-paper corpus, the automatic composite score plateaus at 0.69 [scale 0-1] across all model sizes under both greedy and sampled decoding. This observed plateau suggests that small models are sufficient for the measured rewriting task, with model size determining trade-offs rather than a stable quality ranking. As a secondary evaluation, 400 ratings from five LLM judges give InMyStyle outputs a mean perceived AI-ness score over 20% lower than their helper-AI generated inputs, while mean perceived AI-ness scores decrease with model size within InMyStyle.
Finding Change in Satellite Archives from Text: How to Combine Before-and-After Images Efficiently
Operational Earth observation increasingly calls for answering queries such as
find the image pairs where a new building appeared.'' This means searching an archive of before-and-after (bi-temporal) satellite image pairs and ranking each pair by how well it matches a natural-language description of the change. The component that performs this match, the fusion module that combines the before'' and ``after'' views, must be run at query time across many candidate pairs, so its speed largely sets the cost of every search. We present a controlled comparison of how to build that module. Using one fixed image encoder (a frozen CLIP model) and one training recipe for all variants, we evaluate eight designs drawn from three families: attention, state-space models (Mamba), and learned compression (our Temporal Bottleneck Fusion, TBF). Each design is tested on two benchmarks (LEVIR-CC and Dubai-CC) with ten random seeds, so the reported differences are statistically grounded. We outline three findings: first, a training-free two-stage search (a cheap difference model that shortlists candidates, followed by attention fusion that re-ranks them) matches or exceeds full-fusion recall on LEVIR-CC while cutting query cost -, with comparable R@1/R@5 on Dubai-CC; second, the linear-time scan of Mamba, attractive on paper, gives no speed benefit at the patch counts typical of vision transformers (): the scan is limited by memory bandwidth, whereas attention maps cleanly onto parallel hardware; and third, compressing the fused representation (TBF) reduces parameters by and latency by for a change-only BLEU-1 cost of , although more aggressive compression quietly discards change-relevant detail that aggregate metrics fail to reveal.From Textual Requirements to Microservice Architectures - A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM-Based Design Synthesis
Microservice architectures have become dominant for modernizing monolithic systems, yet identifying appropriate services remains challenging and largely manual. Existing decomposition approaches are predominantly code-centric, limiting applicability in early design stages where only textual requirements are available. Despite advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), limited empirical evidence exists on their ability to synthesize complete microservice architectures from natural-language requirements, including service definitions and inter-service interactions. This study investigates whether an LLM can bridge requirements engineering and architectural design, generating architectures solely from textual requirements and evaluating structural agreement and perceived quality of results. We conduct a mixed-method study using OpenAI o3 under zero-shot (ZS) and few-shot (FS) prompting across two systems (Bookstore, PetClinic), one execution per system/condition. Architectures are evaluated through (i) comparison with reference architectures using precision, recall, and F1-score for service identification and communication recovery, and (ii) a blinded expert assessment of correctness, completeness, modularity, and plausibility, plus open feedback synthesis. OpenAI o3 identifies services with higher agreement under FS prompting (F1 = 0.79 for ZS versus = 0.97 for FS). Communication recovery is more challenging: ZS produces dense architectures with high recall but low precision (F1 = 0.61), while FS improves agreement, reaching F1 = 0.82 and reducing unsupported dependencies. Expert evaluation corroborates these results, with FS architectures perceived as more modular, coherent, and plausible than ZS outputs. OpenAI o3 shows potential for requirements-driven synthesis when guided by exemplar prompting. Results are model- and context-specific from two small systems, not model-independent proof.
Beyond Similarity: Grounded Agentic Extraction and Expert-Adjudicated Evaluation of Intertextuality in Classical Chinese Histories
Computational approaches to intertextuality have advanced from string matching to neural retrieval, yet their outputs, similarity scores and parallel-passage lists, identify where texts reuse one another without characterizing how or why. We recast fine-grained intertextuality extraction as an agentic task in which a large language model (LLM) reads two text units in full and, through a constrained tool interface, must ground each proposed reuse in exact character spans on both sides and label it under a five-dimension typology of reuse (form, aspect, source-marking, function, stance). We validate the approach on an exhaustive comparison of the Analects with the Book of Han, where three domain experts adjudicate a pooled multi-model candidate set into a benchmark of 2,533 intertextual pairs. Against this standard we study twelve LLMs, reporting precision (56%-93%), a 51 cost spread at comparable quality, and how well their confidence is calibrated. Expert agreement traces a reliability gradient: dimensions legible on the textual surface are annotated consistently, while those requiring inference of intent are contested, delimiting the claims such annotation supports. Scaling the validated extractor to the full Twenty-Four Histories (65,380 comparisons, 5,766 pairs) recovers corpus-level structure a similarity score cannot express. The interpretive composition of citation shows no systematic change across eighteen centuries, yet the same passage is quoted less and less literally. Stability in the aggregate with drift in the individual case is what a cultural-attraction account expects. We release the extraction protocol and the expert-adjudicated benchmark.
Labeled Incidence Structures for Native Transformer Modeling of Text, Knowledge Graphs, and Hypergraphs
Current Transformer interfaces index tokens by one or more integer coordinates, which determine their addresses inside attention. In RoPE and its multi-axis or hierarchical variants, the resulting address has the form , where the exponents are integer coordinates assigned after choosing a serialized token layout. When Transformers process new or large collections of data, this addressing scheme can produce unseen offsets or coordinate combinations, push repositories toward retrieve-and-serialize pipelines, and force new entities, records, or repository items to be represented by long token strings or identifier embeddings not seen in training. We introduce labeled incidence structures (LIS), in which each participating token or value is an endpoint with content and a structural index . The index can include local position, relation role, relation instance, text unit, field, or content-derived identity. The model maps this index to a structural address , so adding new tokens, facts, text units, or repository items applies the same learned address rule to structural and content coordinates rather than requiring larger integer coordinates, unseen coordinate combinations, or new identifier embeddings. Attention scores endpoints using , where journey consistency forces . When has several coordinates, such as position, role, and instance, coordinate independence is equivalent to factoring into one address factor per coordinate. This recovers RoPE, RoPE-2D, and HiRoPE as special cases. This allows knowledge-graph (KG) roles, fact instances, and text units to enter the attention score directly. In controlled shallow diagnostics, the LIS address interface is implemented inside ordinary Transformer attention and yields promising results across text, KG, and -ary settings.
Diagnosing Fine-Grained Inconsistency Classification in Financial Disclosure Text
Financial disclosures may contain numerical, temporal, referential, factual, and policy inconsistencies that require different evidence and reasoning to diagnose. We study \emph{fine-grained inconsistency classification}: given a passage known to contain a conflict, the goal is to identify its type among 11 categories. Using a fixed snapshot of the synthetic SBID-FD benchmark, we compare frozen and fine-tuned encoders, evidence-augmented classifiers, prompted large language models, and LoRA-adapted generative models under a shared evaluation protocol. Task-specific adaptation yields large improvements over frozen representations, and a fine-tuned 300M encoder performs competitively with substantially larger prompted and adapted models. We further study whether localizing the conflicting claims improves classification through matched predicted-span, reference-span, and distractor-span conditions. The results show that automatically extracted evidence provides additional signal but recovers only part of the benefit obtained from reference spans. Per-class and confusion analyses further reveal that some inconsistency types are especially sensitive to localization quality, whereas others remain difficult even when the relevant evidence is supplied. These findings identify evidence localization and fine-grained type discrimination as distinct challenges and show that compact supervised encoders are strong baselines for this task.
The Confounder Trap: Treatment-Encoding Representations in Causal Inference with Text
Estimating causal effects of linguistic properties from observational text is difficult because the same document can contain both the treatment of interest and the non-treatment textual attributes needed for adjustment. Existing approaches often learn representations from the full text to capture latent confounding, but when treatment status is itself encoded by words in the text, these representations can directly encode treatment. This creates a confounder trap: richer representations can make treated and control documents separable, inducing overlap violations even when the underlying causal problem satisfies overlap. We study latent text treatments that are encoded through lexicons or other treatment-defining lexical information, and propose masking-based adjustment representations that remove this lexical treatment signal before representation learning. We formalize representation-induced overlap failure, prove that deletion masking preserves overlap for bag-of-words/topic-model representations, and characterize replacement masking as a natural relaxation for large language models that hides treatment-defining tokens while preserving word order and context. Across simulations, masking improves overlap diagnostics, stabilizes treatment effect estimates, and reduces bias relative to adjustment methods that learn from the unmasked text.
EchoBridge: Long-Tail-Aware ECG-Echocardiography Text Alignment for Echocardiography-Derived Cardiac Findings
Standardized echocardiography conclusions provide meaningful supervision for learning ECG representations of echocardiography-derived cardiac findings. Global ECG--text alignment may entangle modality-specific factors, while long-tailed finding distributions provide sparse positive supervision for low-prevalence conditions. We propose EchoBridge with Complementary Shared--Private Projection (CSPP) and Adaptive Prototype Boundary Calibration (APBC). CSPP maps each modality into shared and auxiliary private projections, reduces directional redundancy via within-modality orthogonality, and bidirectionally aligns normalized shared projections. APBC organizes the shared hypersphere with class-specific prototypes, training-frequency-adaptive angular margins, and spherical Riesz repulsion. We evaluate EchoBridge on EchoNext-Mini and independent PKUPH and SHTMU cohorts under four protocols: prompt-based inference without downstream classifier training, in-domain frozen linear probing, target-domain cross-center frozen linear probing, and source-only cross-center transfer, supplemented by finding-specific analyses. EchoBridge improves classifier-free AUROC, AUPRC, and F1 over the strongest baselines by 7.88, 5.61, and 4.54 points, respectively, and achieves the highest point estimates across all in-domain and target-domain probing budgets and both source-only transfer cohorts. Finding-specific analyses show gains for most conditions, including several low-prevalence valvular findings.
Choosing a Text Embedding Model: A Practical Benchmarking and Decision Framework
Choosing the right text embedding model is one of the most consequential -- and most frequently under-examined -- decisions in building a retrieval or search system, yet the model that tops a leaderboard is rarely the best choice for a given deployment. This report develops a practical, evidence-based framework for embedding model selection, built on a benchmarking study that evaluates T3EM (Text 3 Embedding Model), a commercial API-based embedding model, against a broad set of open-source alternatives on English-language retrieval tasks, and situates these findings within the wider Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) landscape spanning classification, clustering, semantic similarity, reranking, pair classification, bitext mining, and summarization. Beyond raw benchmark scores, the report traces the full path from embedding model to retrieved result -- how embeddings are produced, how they are indexed and searched at scale, and how document chunking strategy shapes retrieval quality -- so that model choice can be reasoned about as one decision within a complete retrieval pipeline rather than in isolation. The result is a consolidated set of practical recommendations for selecting an embedding model according to task, latency, cost, and deployment constraints.
Co-Evolving Graph and Text Memory for Training-Free Multi-Hop Question Answering
Multi-hop question answering requires coordinating relational and textual evidence across reasoning steps, a combination neither a text corpus nor a knowledge graph can supply alone. Prior work often emphasizes only part of this loop: graph-augmented RAG retrieves from a pre-built or query-updated graph, KGQA systems search within topic-centered subgraphs, and memory-augmented agents maintain evolving memories without continuously reconciling graph memory with textual context. We propose Co-E, a training-free system built around synchronized bidirectional graph-text working memory. A synchronization cycle consolidates textual memory, extracts relational triples into graph memory, and injects graph facts back into the generation context. Because both memories are maintained, they shape subsequent retrieval and generation. Evaluated on six multi-hop QA benchmarks, Co-E improves over comparable training-free open-backbone baselines and is competitive with larger or trained systems.
Out-of-Length Scene Text Recognition: A Two-Axis Diagnosis and a Training-Free Fix
Scene Text Recognition (STR) models are trained almost exclusively on word crops of at most 25 characters, yet real deployments (signage, product labels, dense captions) require reading much longer text. This paper diagnoses that failure and then closes it. The diagnosis separates out-of-length failure into two simultaneously extrapolating axes (the encoder's width axis and the decoder's time axis) and shows that encoder width, not decoder length, is the dominant failure mode. Representation-side fixes bring only partial relief: training-free rotary rescalings recover at most 2-4 points of character error rate (CER), and a weighted fine-tuning recipe recovers 6-8 points while improving standard-benchmark accuracy, yet word accuracy on the Long Text Benchmark (LTB) stays near zero, because the residual gap lies in the decoding mechanism rather than the representation. We then close that gap at inference time, on an unmodified word-level checkpoint: the long image is sliced into overlapping crops at the model's training width, each decoded independently and in-distribution, and the reads stitched by geometry-anchored edit-distance alignment. This procedure reaches 42.79-43.05% bucket-average word accuracy on LTB across two base checkpoints, matching the published state of the art (41.57%) and beating it by 11-12 points on the hardest bucket, at wall-clock parity with plain decoding; applied unchanged to the public PARSeq checkpoint it reaches 47.11%. Once chunking is applied fine-tuning no longer helps: the decoding-side fix alone matches purpose-built architectures. We release the diagnosis harness and implementation.
Transforming Keystroke Noise to Text: Self-Supervised Acoustic Eavesdropping Attacks on Keyboards
We present a self-supervised acoustic eavesdropping attack that reconstructs typed text solely from keystroke sounds, without requiring labeled data for the target device. The proposed attack enables stealthy eavesdropping in two real-world scenarios-physical spaces (public and semi-public) and online meetings. Our method combines unsupervised acoustic clustering with Transformer-based language model inference and iterative self-training, enabling stable character inference under highly uncertain acoustic-to-character mappings. We demonstrate that the proposed method achieves over 99% reconstruction accuracy with only 100-150 observed keystrokes under a close-proximity recording setup using a smartphone placed near the target device, significantly outperforming prior unsupervised baselines in low-data regimes. We further evaluate robustness across multiple laptop platforms and in realistic acquisition channels, including distance recording from approximately 3 meters away on the same desk, through-the-wall eavesdropping with a contact microphone, and background keyboard noise in online conferencing systems. Across these scenarios, the proposed method achieves high reconstruction accuracy (often exceeding 90%) with approximately 150-250 observed keystrokes. These results indicate that accurate text reconstruction from keystroke sounds is feasible in practice under an audio-only setting, even with limited observed keystrokes and without requiring device-specific labeled data, highlighting a realistic and previously underestimated privacy risk.
TextSLIP: Text Self-Supervised CLIP for Medical Report Generation
Automating radiology report generation is important for improving reporting consistency and clinical workflows . While Contrastive Language--Image Pretraining (CLIP) has advanced medical vision language modeling, existing CLIP-style approaches may still provide insufficient fine-grained semantic supervision for complex report generation. Standard CLIP primarily optimizes cross-modal alignment, without explicitly structuring the textual embedding space that guides visual representation learning. To address this limitation, we propose TextSLIP, a general medical vision-language pretraining framework that augments CLIP with intra-modal text contrastive learning. By improving textual embedding discriminability through self-supervised augmented text pairs, TextSLIP is designed to provide finer-grained linguistic supervision to the visual encoder. As an initial validation, we pretrain TextSLIP on a curated dataset of 7 million brain MRI image-text pairs and fine-tune the pretrained visual encoder within a report generation architecture. In controlled comparisons with CLIP-style baselines, TextSLIP shows consistent improvements on report generation metrics. Ablation studies further suggest that text-side self-supervision contributes to the observed gains. These results indicate that text-level contrastive learning is a promising direction for improving medical visual-textual alignment, while broader validation across additional medical domains remains an important next step.
Detecting LLM-Generated Tokens in Human--LLM Coauthored Text
The rise of human-AI collaborative writing has created a growing need for fine-grained detection methods that support localizing likely LLM-generated content in mixed-authorship documents. Existing methods for detecting LLM-generated text mainly focus on document-level classification and cannot identify which parts of the text are generated by LLMs. This paper introduces a new method to address this urgent need. Our method operates at the token level, the natural unit of modern language models, and builds on existing token-level detection scores. The key idea is to smooth adjacent token scores to reduce their variability, while using an adaptive Lepski-type rule to select the bandwidth according to the local authorship structure. Our method is simple to implement and does not require token-level labeled data for training. Theoretically, we characterize this trade-off and show that the proposed method achieves favorable mean square error performance in estimating the underlying signal. Empirically, we demonstrate strong performance of our method against a wide range of baselines in both synthetic datasets and a realistic dataset. We deploy a publicly accessible website that implements the methods as well.
Pixels for Programs? A Cross-Provider Case Study of Input-Token Accounting for Source Code as Text and Images
Long source-code contexts consume many text tokens, motivating the proposal to render code as images for vision-language models. Recent work asks whether models can still solve code tasks after this transformation. We examine a different systems question: how commercial APIs count the resulting requests. We present a reproducible measurement case study of provider-reported input tokens for raw source text and a compact rendered-image representation. The benchmark pairs requests across five programming languages, nine source lengths from 20 to 2,000 lines, and 15 available model aliases exposed by Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google Vertex AI. These aliases collapse to approximately five distinct accounting signatures and are not independent model replications. Across 675 complete text/image pairs, aggregate image-to-text ratios are 0.135, 0.194, and 0.242, corresponding to reported input-token reductions of 86.5%, 80.6%, and 75.8%, respectively. These totals conceal materially different break-even behavior: Anthropic and OpenAI images receive lower counts at every tested size, while Gemini images require 6.95 times as many tokens at 20 lines and cross below text only at 200 lines in the aggregate. A targeted audit also reproduces non-monotonic Gemini image accounting across a page boundary. This study measures black-box request accounting for one compact rendering pipeline. It does not measure semantic fidelity, task accuracy, latency, monetary cost, or coding-agent efficiency. We release the scripts, revision-pinned corpus specification, raw usage records, validators, and deterministic analysis needed to reproduce and extend the study.
Show, Don't Tell: Evaluating Spatial Cognition in Generative Pixels Rather Than LLM Text
Spatial intelligence is essential for agents to move from static semantic understanding toward interacting with the physical world. Many spatial tasks are grounded in continuous visual scenes, where locations, regions, and paths are more naturally expressed by pointing, marking, or drawing than by reporting precise coordinates or discrete textual symbols. Yet existing spatial reasoning benchmarks usually require coordinates, options, or text, creating an answer-interface mismatch for image-generation models. This makes it difficult to evaluate image-generation models under the same task semantics as text-output VLMs, despite their ability to externalize spatial judgments directly in pixel space. We propose ProVisE (Protocolized Visual Evaluation), a benchmark-agnostic framework that elicits protocol-constrained visual answers from image-generation models and parses them into structured predictions compatible with original metrics. ProVisE also includes an Agentic builder that constructs and validates task-specific protocols for new benchmarks. We further introduce SpatialGen-Bench, a curated diagnostic benchmark of 470 samples across 14 spatial subtasks, four capability levels, and diverse answer forms. We evaluate representative text-output VLMs and image-generation models in a unified setting and validate Agentic protocol construction on six external spatial benchmarks. Results show that image-generation models are competitive when spatial answers can be externalized directly in pixel space, while text-output VLMs retain a clear advantage in compositional spatial reasoning. These findings reveal complementary strengths of pixel-space expression and text-based reasoning and establish a metric-compatible testbed for studying spatial cognition in image-generation models.
From Agent Failures to Text Policies: What Works and What Breaks
TextGrad improves language-model systems by revising text from feedback. Its core thesis is that natural-language feedback can act as a gradient for optimizing text components without changing model weights. Applying it to agents is harder because feedback arrives only after a sequence of actions, making it difficult to identify which decision caused failure. We study this problem by separating the ability to follow a useful policy from the ability to learn that policy from experience. Our main finding is a clear gap between these two abilities. Human-written policies improve two frozen 7B agents on TextWorldExpress by 5.0 success points, showing that useful policy text exists. However, policies generated from agent trajectories do not reliably outperform fixed prompting, even with richer traces, counterfactual evidence, or iterative GEPA search. The main challenge for agent-level TextGrad is therefore not executing textual policy updates, but reliably generating and selecting them from experience.
Text Template Tokens Are Implicit Semantic Registers in Diffusion Transformers
Modern text-to-image diffusion transformers (DiTs) generate images through joint attention, in which text and image tokens interact directly within a single sequence. In large-scale DiTs, the conditioning input contains not only the user prompt but also chat-template tokens introduced by LLM-based text encoders. Yet how these tokens participate in the denoising computation remains poorly understood. To probe this, we introduce a causal interpretability framework. Using it to separate prompt-content tokens from chat-template tokens, we find that the template tokens carry little prompt-specific information at the encoder output. Yet surprisingly, they emerge as dominant image-to-text attention sinks and causally maintain object identity inside the DiT, acting as implicit semantic registers. We show that they acquire this identity indirectly. Rather than reading the prompt tokens, they draw the identity from the image latents into which the prompt semantics have already been injected at the very first layer. We further reveal a division of labor across heads and depth in DiTs, where distinct heads route semantics or render visual structure, and identity is committed in early blocks, carried by middle blocks, and refined in late ones. As a practical payoff, this analysis yields a training-free pruning rule that removes the causally inert prompt-reading heads and cuts of joint-attention FLOPs at a -point cost in GenEval accuracy. Overall, our work not only reveals that the tokens encoding semantics at the input need not be those that maintain them during generation, but also provides a causal view of internal mechanisms in diffusion transformers.
Fusion Embedding: A Unified Embedding Space for Text, Image, Video, and Audio
A single embedding space that covers text, images, video, and audio lets one index serve every query a user can pose. Embedding models built on vision-language backbones now lead text/image/video retrieval benchmarks but lack audio entirely, while audio-text retrieval is led by specialist systems that serve no other modality. We present the Fusion Embedding family, which adds audio to a frozen vision-language embedding base whose parameters are never updated: generation 1 (fusion-embedding-1) trains only a 16.4M-parameter connector between a frozen audio tower and the frozen base, and generation 2 (fusion-embedding-2) adds modality-gated deep adapters (44.2M parameters) whose branch never executes on text, image, or video inputs: their outputs are bit-for-bit those of the released base, verified after every training run. Because the base already binds text, images, and video, aligning audio to text alone makes audio-image retrieval emerge, with zero paired audio-visual training data. Alongside the recipe we map its design space with controlled negative results (rewriting training captions with an LLM, substituting a leaderboard-stronger audio tower, and widening the connector each reduce retrieval) and with training-protocol findings that we expect to transfer to any frozen decoder-LM embedding backbone. Both generations train in hours on a single GPU. Weights, code, and the evaluation harness are openly released.
Literary Non-Style in LLM-Generated Text
Prior work on LLM-generated text has demonstrated quantitative and qualitative departures from text produced by humans. LLM-generated texts differ from human writing in style, resulting in a characteristic textual "feel," while the semantic range of LLMs is much restricted compared to that of humans. In this contribution, I note simple but consistent patterns in the statistical distribution of n-grams within LLM-generated text. Via qualitative analysis of these n-grams, I reveal deficiencies in LLM style. Because higher-order n-grams correlate to semantic content, I conclude that questions of style and semantics are not cleanly separable.
Multimodal Attention-based Deep Learning for Emergency Triage with Electronic Health Records
Accurate emergency triage decision is critical to avoid clinical deterioration, morbidity, and mortality. Machine learning-based triage system involves acquiring the main presenting complaint in text form and assessing vital signs in numerical data, enabling an automated and efficient analysis of patient information for timely and accurate prioritization of medical attention. However, modelling the intricacies of both data types requires a comprehensive understanding of the temporal structure and dependencies within the data. Thus, the aim of this study is to propose a multimodal deep learning architecture that can effectively handle both tabular and textual data. Furthermore, the proposed model exploits self-attention to to capture both local and global relationships between the features. A dataset consisting of 11,102 triage data collected from emergency department of Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia is used for model development and validation. The proposed model demonstrated an increase of 1.95% in accuracy, 2.49% in F1-score, and 1.41% in ROC AUC compared to the baseline model. The experimental results demonstrated the potential of the proposed model in predicting triage decisions.
Frontier Language Models Struggle to Copy: Text Can Be Better Viewed in 2D
While large language models (LLMs) can solve advanced reasoning problems in seconds, we show that even frontier models fail to perform a much simpler operation: exactly copying an input string that lies well within their context windows. We attribute this failure to positional encodings in Transformer architectures, whose inductive bias favors copying through a shortcut based on matching local contexts rather than carefully locating the corresponding input positions. To address this issue, we introduce 2D-RoPE, which organizes text into a 2D grid rather than a 1D sequence and assigns each token a row ID and a column ID. Under this view, copying becomes simply retrieving input tokens at a fixed column offset, which makes the task easy to learn. In synthetic copy experiments, shallow Transformers with 2D-RoPE achieve perfect copying at input lengths hundreds of times longer than those seen during training, whereas standard positional encodings fall far behind. We further show that the advantage of 2D-RoPE language models on copy tasks consistently holds in large-scale pretraining on DCLM with model sizes up to 1.4B parameters. Overall, our results suggest that viewing text in 2D can benefit language modeling, and we hope this encourages future work to further explore the potential of 2D positional encodings.
ArtChart: Faithful Artistic Chart Generation with Integrated Text Rendering
Artistic charts combine data visualization with expressive marks, textures, and typography, but they are difficult for image generators: an output is useful only when its stylization preserves chart geometry, exact in-image text, and the semantic binding between labels and marks. We introduce ArtChart, a framework for faithful artistic chart generation with integrated text rendering. Given a structured chart specification and an artistic prompt, ArtChart first renders a text-free grayscale layout that encodes the target chart geometry, then trains a chart-specific control module to preserve mathematical structure. To address the remaining text and layout errors, we further refine the generation policy through GRPO-based reinforcement learning with OCR-based text rewards, VLM-based layout rewards, and aesthetic rewards. A multi-expert distillation stage reconciles these objectives by distilling single-reward experts into one balanced generation policy. We also construct ArtChart-Bench, a bilingual 2K-prompt benchmark covering four chart types, controlled value distributions, diverse label/value formats, and 15 artistic styles, together with ArtChart-Eval, a six-axis evaluation protocol measuring mathematical logic, text accuracy, text layout, aesthetics, instruction following, and readability. Experiments on ArtChart-Bench show that ArtChart consistently outperforms prompt-only, image-editing, and generic ControlNet baselines, with the largest gains on mathematical fidelity and label-layout binding while maintaining competitive visual quality. These results suggest that artistic chart generation should be evaluated as reliable visual communication rather than as generic stylized image synthesis.
KeySI: An Interaction Framework for Tuning Text Embeddings Based on Human Feedback
In large-scale text analysis tasks, pre-trained language models are often used to embed text corpora for downstream analysis. However, such models may struggle to capture domain-specific semantics and adapting them typically requires large amounts of labeled data and technical expertise to implement training pipelines. Recent approaches have demonstrated how visual interactions in document projections can capture human feedback as training signals for model tuning. However, these methods operate on document-level feedback, which requires users to open and assess individual documents in order to provide effective feedback. In this paper, we propose KeySI, an interaction framework that enables feature-level feedback through keyword-based concept specification. Users specify feedback by organizing extracted keywords into groups representing concepts, which KeySI translates into document-level supervision for subsequent tuning. By operating on keywords as the primary interaction medium, KeySI reduces the need for manual document inspection and labeling and lowers the barrier to adapting embedding models. We present a prototype implementation that, given a corpus, curates representative keywords, visualizes keywords and document embeddings via dimensionality reduction, allows interactive specification of keyword groups, and supports iterative refinement through system feedback. We evaluate KeySI through a user study, usage scenarios, and quantitative experiments demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing user intent and improving embedding alignment.
Gold-Guided Programmatic Distillation for Financial Reasoning over Hybrid Tables and Text
Financial question answering over hybrid tabular and textual data may require multi-source reasoning and precise numerical computation. While large language models (LLMs) can generate intermediate reasoning steps, natural-language rationales remain prone to arithmetic errors, making them an unreliable supervision source for distillation. Building on programmatic distillation, we develop an approach that transfers reliable numerical reasoning from a large teacher model to a compact student using execution-verified Python programs instead of free-form textual rationales. It leverages gold derivations to guide teacher-side program synthesis and retains only programs that execute correctly and produce the gold answer, ensuring high-quality supervision. We further introduce an iterative recovery stage that revisits teacher-failed examples, enabling the student to recover and incorporate newly verified programs into training. Experiments on TAT-QA show that our framework is highly effective for hybrid financial reasoning. Our best 7B student achieves 87.00 EM / 87.18 F1 on the test set, substantially outperforming the 72B teacher (78.46 EM) as well as traditional and strong LLM-based baselines, including TAGOP and TAT-LLM. These results demonstrate that execution-verified programmatic distillation provides an effective and extensible framework for training smaller models to perform reliable numerical reasoning.
KGCQual: An Interpretable Framework for Evaluating the Knowledge Graph Construction Quality from Text
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are increasingly constructed through automated extraction pipelines; however, such systems often introduce spurious or incomplete triples, which degrade downstream performance. Existing evaluation practices rely heavily on task-specific metrics or small-scale manual verification, offering limited insight into the structural and semantic fidelity of extracted graphs. We propose a novel, interpretable metric for intrinsic KG quality assessment that measures how closely an automatically extracted graph approximates an "ideal" graph capturing the key noun phrases, predicate relations, and basic linguistic phenomena such as negation expressed in the source text. Our framework integrates two complementary components: (1) an entity-level assessment that evaluates completeness, resolution quality, and connectivity, and (2) a relation-level assessment that judges predicate preservation and multiplicity using lexical similarity, dependency-parse alignment, and light-weight negation handling to ensure semantic faithfulness. We evaluate our metric across multiple state-of-the-art triple extraction systems and datasets, including WebNLG, TinyButMighty, and BenchIE, demonstrating that it reliably identifies omissions, redundancy, and structural deviations that existing metrics overlook. Our work offers a scalable, model-agnostic, and interpretable framework for comparing automated KG construction methods and provides a foundation for standardised evaluation. We further validate the metric through an ablation study isolating noun and verb components, and a downstream evaluation showing that KGCQual scores correlate significantly with link prediction performance on the same extracted KGs. The code repository is available at https://github.com/kracr/kg-quality-metric.
FindMyText: Robust, Scalable Detection of Text Containment in Large Web-Crawled Corpora
We present FindMyText, an open-source Python package designed to efficiently assess whether a given text appears, in part or in full, within a text corpus. The tool builds on prior techniques for document fingerprinting, but extends them with a novel mechanism to explicitly capture sequences of matching fingerprints. By identifying such chains, the tool can more reliably detect near-verbatim copies of a given text rather than mere textual similarities. This makes FindMyText particularly suited for verifying the presence of copyrighted material in a corpus. Leveraging a distributed, disk-based indexing framework, the system scales to large web-crawled datasets. Using a new benchmark for evaluating text containment methods, we show that FindMyText outperforms alternative approaches across three datasets (ArXiv papers, Wikipedia, and generic web content).
From Text to Parameters: Predicting Item Parameters from Embedding Regularization with Reliability and Design Ceilings
Newly developed items must ordinarily be field tested before their psychometric properties are known, creating a cold start problem for item calibration. Predicting item parameters from features is a long standing measurement problem dating back to the Linear Logistic Test Model; modern text embeddings now automate the design matrices traditionally specified by hand. We propose an evaluation framework combining regularized regression on item text embeddings, repeated cross validated R squared reported with its resampling standard deviation, and two performance upper bounds: a reliability ceiling derived from parameter standard errors, and a design ceiling derived from simulation based power calibration. Applying this framework to a mathematics item bank (EEDI) and a medical licensure benchmark (BEA 2024), we find that item difficulty is highly predictable from text (repeated cross validated R squared = 0.53, or about 57% of its reliability ceiling), whereas discrimination and pseudo guessing appear less predictable. However, evaluating these results against our ceilings reveals that this apparent hierarchy stems from target reliability rather than text signal strength: text uniformly recovers 57 to 63% of the reliable variance across difficulty targets, whereas the 3PL pseudo guessing parameter has a reliability ceiling near zero, making it an unviable target at current precision. On BEA, embedding based regression matches leaderboard RMSE despite explaining almost no variance, highlighting the critical need for scale free metrics and explicit ceilings in benchmarking. Finally, we show that a single train and test split can inflate apparent accuracy by 0.1 to 0.15 in R squared, underscoring the necessity of repeated cross validation for calibration support applications and future benchmark construction.
Prompting Complexity: Shortest Prompts for Texts and Behaviors in LLMs
In this paper, we define the quantity of prompting complexity: for a fixed instruction-tuned language model, what is the shortest plausible prompt that makes deterministic decoding produce a target text? It is an LM-relative analogue of resource-bounded Kolmogorov complexity: the prompt is a program, the model interface is the interpreter, and information omitted from the prompt is supplied by the model's weights, training distribution, tokenizer, template, and decoding rule. Unlike classical Kolmogorov complexity, this measure is intentionally non-universal. In the finite-context setting it is computable by enumeration, but there is no model-independent invariance theorem; the same text may be cheap for one model and inaccessible or expensive for another. To keep the search space aligned with prompt engineering, we restrict programs to plausible human-readable texts rather than arbitrary token strings. We extend the exact definition to soft prompting complexity for approximate outputs, yielding a lossy notion of model-relative text compression and a formal target for prompt optimization. We also define prompting distance by comparing shortest generating prompts, and behavioral prompting complexity for reaching any output satisfying a specification. Based on these formulations, we define a research agenda for empirically studying which texts and behaviors are accessible from short plausible prompts under a fixed LM interface.
MTEB-BR: A Text Embedding Benchmark for Brazilian Portuguese
Text embeddings for Portuguese have no dedicated benchmark: evaluation rests on translated corpora such as English MS MARCO or on thin multilingual coverage, with native tasks scattered and unconsolidated. We introduce MTEB-BR, a benchmark of 22 native Brazilian-Portuguese tasks across seven categories (classification, multilabel classification, pair classification, semantic textual similarity, clustering, retrieval, and reranking), admitting only data created or found in Portuguese and excluding translations by construction. We evaluate 93 models spanning 23M to 27B parameters: 73 open-weight and 20 closed commercial APIs. Alongside the leaderboard we report a statistical layer for every headline comparison: per-task bootstrap confidence intervals, paired-bootstrap significance, a task- and instance-level discrimination analysis (how sharply each task separates models) adapted from Item Response Theory, and a cross-leaderboard correlation. Three findings stand out. The benchmark cleanly separates about a dozen tiers of models, though the top six are statistically too close to order. An openly licensed, self-hostable model reaches that leading tier, so strong Portuguese embedding quality does not require a commercial API. And a model's rank on the global multilingual leaderboard predicts its Portuguese rank only moderately (Spearman rho = 0.75 over 55 shared models; one model ranks 3rd there and 49th here), so a native benchmark measures something the multilingual boards do not. We release every task, our code, and a public leaderboard, so practitioners can choose Portuguese embedding models on native evidence.
Fidelity-Diversity Metrics for Text
As language modeling technology matures, there is an increasing research focus on the composition and curation of datasets used to train these models. For instance, practitioners commonly seek to augment high-quality datasets with additional text to enhance the performance of models trained on that data. However, informed decisions about data augmentation require more nuanced assessments about data quality. We build on work measuring the precision and recall of generative models to develop a pair of metrics that quantify (1) fidelity, capturing how closely candidate text resembles reference data, and (2) diversity, capturing how well it covers the modes of the reference dataset. Our metrics are based on optimal transport divergence functionals between discrete text summaries. In experiments on M2D2 text datasets, we show that these metrics are able to disentangle a lack of fidelity from a lack of diversity in deficient candidate text. In further experiments, our metrics detect diversity deficits in synthetic GSM8K-style math datasets, which correlate with degradations in downstream accuracy of language models finetuned on this synthetic data.
Separating Representation from Reconstruction Enables Scalable Text Encoders
While decoders have rapidly scaled, encoders have remained largely unchanged since BERT. We revisit this disparity by frozen backbone evaluation via probing. Under this lens, the representations of BERT encoders become increasingly by frozen probes, despite improved perplexity. The misalignment originates in BERT's flat design, which couples representation learning to the token reconstruction loss. We propose , a two-part architecture that separates the learning of high-quality encoded representations from the rigid grounding of token reconstruction. This design further enables high masking ratios () and gradient collection over all tokens via a , respectively increasing throughput by to and sample efficiency by . Overall, CrossBERT demonstrates monotonic scaling and superior performance on MTEB(eng, v2) and frozen GLUE benchmarks.
LLM-Guided Transportation Hub Capacity Planning with Textual Business Inputs
While traditional hub capacity planning models optimize effectively for quantitative inputs, they often fail to digest qualitative business context. We propose a novel framework where a large language model (LLM) agent iteratively proposes hub capacity decisions guided by natural-language business context descriptions. The key mechanism is a chain-of-thought reasoning protocol: the LLM constructs a structured decision table that maps each contextual item to specific capacity adjustments based on the implied direction and magnitude of changes. The new capacity decision is then validated through a feedback loop with an optimization model, which provides routing-based performance metrics to guide the agent's selection. On a real-world 13-hub freight network in the southeastern US, our framework achieves a 2.8% optimality gap relative to the hidden ground-truth, a significant improvement over the 11.0% gap produced by the traditional optimization model without textual business inputs. This demonstrates that LLMs can serve as a contextual bridge, integrating qualitative business insights into Operations Research workflows.