United States

We present a phoneme-level analysis of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for two low-resourced and phonologically complex East Caucasian languages, Archi and Rutul, based on curated and standardized speech–transcript resources totaling approximately 50 minutes and 1 hour 20 minutes of audio, respectively. Existing recordings and transcriptions are consolidated and processed into a form suitable for ASR training and evaluation. We evaluate several state-of-the-art audio and audio--language models, including wav2vec2, Whisper, and Qwen2-Audio. For wav2vec2, we introduce a language-specific phoneme vocabulary with heuristic output-layer initialization, which yields consistent improvements and achieves performance comparable to or exceeding Whisper in these extremely low-resource settings. Beyond standard word and character error rates, we conduct a detailed phoneme-level error analysis. We find that phoneme recognition accuracy strongly correlates with training frequency, exhibiting a characteristic sigmoid-shaped learning curve. For Archi, this relationship partially breaks for Whisper, pointing to model-specific generalization effects beyond what is predicted by training frequency. Overall, our results indicate that many errors attributed to phonological complexity are better explained by data scarcity. These findings demonstrate the value of phoneme-level evaluation for understanding ASR behavior in low-resource, typologically complex languages.

ACL 2026

Hard to Be Heard: Phoneme-Level ASR Analysis of Phonologically Complex, Low-Resource Endangered Languages

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ACL 2022

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Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR) aims to map different modalities (e.g., visual and textual) into a shared embedding space for multi-modal retrieval. Existing UMR methods can be broadly divided into two categories: early-fusion approaches, such as Marvel, which projects visual features into the language model (LM) space for integrating with text modality, and late-fusion approaches, such as UniVL-DR, encode visual and textual inputs using separate encoders and obtain fused embeddings through addition. Our pilot study reveals that Marvel exhibits visual modality collapse, which is characterized by the model’s tendency to disregard visual features while depending excessively on textual cues. In contrast, although UniVL-DR is less affected by this issue, it is more susceptible to semantic misalignment, where semantically related content is positioned far apart in the embedding space. To address these challenges, we propose MiMIC, which introduces two key innovations: (1) a fusion-in-decoder architecture for effective multimodal integration, and (2) robust training through single-modality mix-in and random caption dropout. Experiments on the WebQA+ and EVQA+ datasets—where image in documents or queries might lack captions—indicate that MiMIC consistently outperforms both early- and late-fusion baselines.

MiMIC: Mitigating Visual Modality Collapse in Universal Multimodal Retrieval While Avoiding Semantic Misalignment

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human behavior, yet existing agents often exhibit behavioral rigidity, a flaw frequently masked by the self-referential bias of current "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluations. By evaluating against empirical ground truth, we reveal a counter-intuitive phenomenon: increasing the intensity of prompt-driven reasoning does not enhance fidelity but rather exacerbates value polarization, collapsing population diversity. To address this, we propose the Context-Value-Action (CVA) architecture, grounded in the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model and Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values. Unlike methods relying on self-verification, CVA decouples action generation from cognitive reasoning via a novel Value Verifier trained on authentic human data to explicitly model dynamic value activation. Experiments on CVABench, which comprises over 1.1 million real-world interaction traces, demonstrate that CVA significantly outperforms baselines. Our approach effectively mitigates polarization while offering superior behavioral fidelity and interpretability.

Context-Value-Action Architecture for Value-Driven Large Language Model Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) are challenged by generating hallucinations and factually incorrect responses, particularly in complex and specialized medical question answering (QA). Integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods has emerged as a promising direction. However, existing graph-based RAG methods heuristically retrieve and refine question-relevant subgraphs, potentially introducing redundant and noisy factual information that is difficult for LLMs to process, ultimately limiting reasoning capability. To incorporate a concise yet informative evidence subgraph, we propose an iterative medical QA framework. It optimizes graph-based RAG methods by selectively retrieving focused knowledge from KGs to construct a precise evidence subgraph and progressively pruning it utilizing structured feature representations. The targeted KG integration maintains coherent and reliable inference. Experiments on three medical QA benchmark datasets demonstrate that the framework achieves state-of-the-art performance against representative baseline competitors, highlighting the importance of efficient KG integration.

Iterative Knowledge Graph Refinement and Integration for Medical Question Answering

Large-scale multitask benchmarks have driven rapid progress in language modeling, yet most emphasize high-resource languages such as English, leaving Bengali underrepresented. We present BnMMLU, a comprehensive benchmark for measuring massive multitask language understanding in Bengali. BnMMLU spans 41 domains across STEM, humanities, social sciences, and general knowledge, and contains 134,375 multiple-choice question–option pairs-the most extensive Bengali evaluation suite to date. The dataset preserves mathematical content via MathML, and includes BnMMLU-HARD, a compact subset constructed from questions most frequently missed by top systems to stress difficult cases. We benchmark 24 model variants across 11 LLM families, spanning open-weights general/multilingual, Bengali-centric open-weights, and proprietary models, covering multiple parameter scales and instruction-tuned settings. We evaluate models under standardized protocols covering two prompting styles (Direct vs. Chain-of-Thought) and two context regimes (0-shot vs. 5-shot), reporting accuracy consistently across families. Our analysis highlights persistent gaps in reasoning and application skills and indicates sublinear returns to scale across model sizes. We release the dataset and evaluation templates to support rigorous, reproducible assessment of Bengali language understanding and to catalyze progress in multilingual NLP.

BnMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Bengali

Causal and intervention-based question answering is fundamental to advancing large language models (LLMs) toward reasoning beyond surface-level correlations and understanding underlying causal mechanisms. However, existing LLM-based methods often rely on implicit language-level reasoning, resulting in opaque causal assumptions, unverifiable reasoning paths, and fragile predictions under complex interventions, particularly in context-free settings. In this paper, we propose an explicit and auditable causal reasoning framework for context-free intervention-based question answering. Our method formulates causal inference as structured reasoning over an explicit causal graph through four modular stages, rather than implicit end-to-end prediction. A key innovation is a target-aware causal graph construction strategy that treats the target variable as a core constraint during graph expansion, effectively suppressing irrelevant variables, spurious causal relations, and reasoning noise. We further introduce a path-level causal evidence aggregation mechanism that combines multiple causal paths while modeling both reinforcing and counteracting effects, enabling robust decision-making beyond single-chain reasoning. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our framework consistently outperforms existing LLM-based methods while providing interpretable and auditable causal reasoning traces.

Causal-Audit: Explicit and Auditable Graph-based Reasoning via Target-Aware Causal Chain Construction

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: \textbf{\url{https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git}}.

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Node Importance Estimation (NIE) in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) aims to quantify the significance of entities, serving as a pivotal instrument for deciphering the latent mechanisms of social dynamics. However, existing methods are often confined to supervised paradigms and rely heavily on topological aggregation, resulting in limited generalization capability. To address these challenges, we propose GenNIE, the first end-to-end generative reasoning framework for NIE. Specifically, GenNIE leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) integrated with topological information to generate precise importance scores for entities in KGs. Furthermore, GenNIE introduces a Global-Structural Graph Perception mechanism to empower the LLMs with holistic graph cognition. Extensive experiments demonstrate the performance superiority of GenNIE and its robust generalization across diverse domains. Our code is available at https://github.com/CoffeyF/GenNIE.git.

Beyond Topology: Generative Node Importance Estimation via Structure-Guided Semantic Reasoning

Psychological defenses are strategies, often automatic, that people use to manage distress. Rigid use or overuse of defenses is negatively linked to mental health and shapes what speakers disclose and how they accept or resist help. However, defenses are complex and difficult to reliably measure, particularly in clinical dialogues. We introduce PsyDefConv, a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level, and DMRS Co-Pilot, a four-stage pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. The corpus contains 200 dialogues and 4,709 utterances, including 2,336 help seeker turns, with double-blind labeling reaching Cohen’s kappa of 0.639. In a counterbalanced study, the co-pilot reduced average annotation time by 24.0%. In expert review, it averaged 4.62 for evidence supportiveness, 4.44 for clinical plausibility, and 4.40 for insight on a seven-point scale. Benchmarks with strong large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings demonstrate clear headroom, with the best macro F1-score around 30% and a tendency to overpredict mature defenses. Corpus analyses confirm that mature defenses are most common and reveal emotion-specific deviations. We release the corpus, annotations, code, and prompts to support research on defensive functioning in language.

You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations

As large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as domain-specific agents, many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate their ability to follow instructions and make decisions in real-world scenarios. However, business scenarios often involve complex standard operating procedures (SOPs), and the evaluation of LLM capabilities in such contexts has not been fully explored. To bridge this gap, we propose SOP-Maze, a benchmark constructed from real-world business data and adapted into a collection of 397 instances and 3422 subtasks from 23 complex SOP scenarios. We further categorize SOP tasks into two broad classes: Lateral Root System (LRS), representing wide-option tasks that demand precise selection; and Heart Root System (HRS), which emphasizes deep logical reasoning with complex branches. Extensive experiments reveal that nearly all state-of-the-art models struggle with SOP-Maze. We conduct a comprehensive analysis and identify three key error categories: (i) route blindness: difficulty following procedures; (ii) conversational fragility: inability to handle real dialogue nuances; and (iii) calculation errors: mistakes in time or arithmetic reasoning under complex contexts. The systematic study explores LLM performance across SOP tasks that challenge both breadth and depth, offering new insights for improving model capabilities. We have open-sourced our work on the anonymous link: https://github.com/meituan-longcat/SOP-Maze.

SOP-Maze: Evaluating Large Language Models on Complicated Business Standard Operating Procedures

The capability to precisely adhere to instructions is a cornerstone for Large Language Models (LLMs) to function as dependable agents in real-world scenarios. However, confronted with complex prompts, LLMs frequently encounter difficulties in fulfilling all specified requirements within a single response. Drawing inspiration from recent advancements in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and self-correction methodologies, we introduce Meeseeks, a fully automated iterative instruction-following benchmark equipped with an integrated feedback mechanism. Meeseeks identifies erroneous components in model responses and provides corresponding feedback accurately, thereby iteratively guiding the model toward self-correction. The dataset contains over 700 curated instances annotated by 32 distinct capability tags in Chinese and English. Extensive experimental results reveal that different state-of-the-art commercial and open-source LLMs exhibit vastly disparate performance, and even after 20 turns of iterative feedback-driven self-correction, nearly all models demonstrate suboptimal performance. We conducted comprehensive analysis and uncovered numerous common issues prevalent in current state-of-the-art models, as well as several counterintuitive phenomena. Meeseeks has been open-sourced on https://github.com/ADoublLEN/Meeseeks.

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MiMIC: Mitigating Visual Modality Collapse in Universal Multimodal Retrieval While Avoiding Semantic Misalignment

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