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Mixture-of-Translators: Translating KV Caches Across Heterogeneous Large Language Models
2026-07-31 03:07:31Jin-woo Lee, Minkyung Song, Junghyun Oh, Seunghoon Han, Soyoung Park, Gwangseon Jang, Sungsu LimAbstract
Heterogeneous Large Language Model (LLM) systems increasingly rely on shared contexts, retrieved evidence, and multi-agent dialogue histories, yet their internal key-value (KV) caches remain model-specific and cannot be reused across architectures. Consequently, each model must repeatedly prefill or store caches for the same context, limiting the scalability of multi-model reasoning and long-context generation. We propose Mixture-of-Translators(MoT), a cache translation framework that maps context KV caches from a source LLM into the cache space of a target LLM. Unlike prior approaches that depend on a single projection path or global shared latent space, MoT uses multiple translator modules to capture diverse source--target mappings. To further reduce residual translation error, we introduce a Context Correction Loss that aligns the replayed target trajectory with the native target trajectory. We reveal two competing failure modes in cache translation: propagated translation shift from early injection and last-state shift from late injection. MoT addresses them through translator mixtures and target-side correction. Across homogeneous and heterogeneous translations among Qwen2.5, GPT-2, and OPT models, MoT preserves downstream QA performance, including Qwen2.5-7B-scale translation with 51.0% average closed-set QA accuracy and 0.43 average extractive QA F1. In practical case studies, MoT enables quality-preserving memory reuse for multi-agent reasoning and retains 96.3% of direct-context quality in long-context cache-augmented generation, demonstrating scalable KV cache reuse across heterogeneous LLMs.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28979
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Generative AI and linguistic diversity in academic writing and publishing: Perspectives from World Englishes
2026-07-30 16:46:29Kingsley Ugwuanyi, Christian Mair, Sender Dovchin, Iker Erdocia, Maria Kuteeva, Esther AiremionkhaleAbstract
The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in academic writing and publishing (AWP) raises questions about linguistic inclusivity and the legitimacy of diverse Englishes in global scholarly communication. This article responds to these questions through a structured scholarly dialogue involving five sociolinguists from World Englishes and adjacent fields. Organised around five guiding questions, the dialogue interrogates how GenAI tools influence writing practices, reinforce or disrupt dominant language norms, and raise ethical challenges. Contributors reflect on the potential of GenAI to democratise writing processes while also raising concerns about GenAI's tendency to marginalise minoritised varieties and flatten nuance in scholarly writing. Across the dialogue, themes of linguistic (in)justice, researcher agency, and institutional responsibility emerge, with contributors calling for equity-informed policies, critical AI literacy, and inclusive co-design in GenAI development. The article shows the value of dialogic reflection in understanding GenAI's role in AWP. It concludes that while GenAI may reinforce existing hierarchies, it can also serve as a site of resistance, depending on how it is designed, governed and used within scholarly communities committed to linguistic diversity.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28505
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Understanding Is Done Early: A Depth Division of Labor in Large Language Models and Its Use for Unbounded-Context Memory
2026-07-30 14:19:11Hanzuo Liu, Xuan Qi, Chunyu Liu, Haotian Zhong, Yulong Wang, Rayying, Key, Alex Lamb, Mingyu GaoAbstract
Transformer depth is not used uniformly: lower and middle layers build semantic representations, while upper layers increasingly specialize them for prediction. We turn this division of labor into CoMem (Comprehension Memory), which writes each context chunk only through an intermediate layer, retrieves a fixed number of cached residual states, and recomputes the query-conditioned upper layers over the resulting pack. For a fixed retrieval budget, model-side read compute and memory are independent of stored-context length. We evaluate a continued-trained Qwen3-8B base LM under a unified chat-template-free protocol. The backbone is frozen; the flagship trains only a rank-32 self-distillation LoRA on plain PG19, and we report an adapter-free arm separately. CoMem reaches 97.05 on RULER and 38.27 on LoCoMo versus 34.59 for full-context KV-Direct; the dialogue-memory advantage survives conversation-cluster resampling and an independent judge. Results on additional long-context and long-document tasks expose both the benefits of bounded retrieval and its in-window compression tax. Controlled depth sweeps show that deeper caching lowers per-query recomputation but incurs a fidelity loss that self-distillation substantially repairs. In a separate adapter-free efficiency control on an NVIDIA H20 at 128k, CoMem uses 18.26 GB rather than 89.36 GB and achieves a 7.83x prefill speedup. These results show that long-context memory can be organized along the layer axis, not only the token axis.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28263
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FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval
2026-07-30 10:06:11Bohan Hou, Haoqiang Lin, Xuemeng Song, Haokun Wen, Meng Liu, Yupeng Hu, Xiangyu ZhaoAbstract
Due to their strong generalizable multimodal processing and reasoning capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as universal image retrievers, effectively addressing diverse real-world image retrieval tasks. Nevertheless, pioneering studies, while promising, overlook the potential of fine-grained context modeling and disentangled fine-tuning objectives in enhancing MLLMs' retrieval performance, particularly for complex tasks such as long-text-to-image retrieval, visual dialog retrieval, and composed image retrieval (CIR). Therefore, in this work, we propose an automated fine-grained multimodal quintuple dataset construction pipeline and a novel two-stage fine-grained multimodal fine-tuning strategy. The dataset generation pipeline produces a comprehensive CIR dataset with fine-grained image captions and modification text, facilitating fine-grained context modeling. Beyond the previously entangled fine-tuning paradigm, our approach separates the fine-tuning process into two distinct stages: (1) fine-grained context reasoning-oriented fine-tuning and (2) fine-grained retrieval-oriented fine-tuning. These stages aim to sequentially enhance the model's context understanding and query-target alignment capabilities, thereby improving retrieval performance. Extensive experiments across five datasets encompassing diverse and complex image retrieval tasks demonstrate the remarkable superiority of our method over existing approaches in zero-shot retrieval settings, even with a more lightweight MLLM backbone compared to those methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27959
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Beyond Feeling Better: Capability-Sustaining Emotional Dialogue as a Longitudinal Research Paradigm
2026-07-30 08:30:52Ming Wang, Jiaqi Wu Young, Wenfang Wu, Daling Wang, Shi FengAbstract
Emotional dialogue research includes two influential strategy traditions. Empathetic dialogue prioritizes understanding a speaker's emotional experience. Emotional support conversation selects and sequences support for the seeker's current needs. Sustained use introduces a further goal. Effective support should sustain users' capacities for emotion regulation, coping, self-endorsed decisions, and social connection across the interaction lifecycle. We propose capability-sustaining emotional dialogue (CSED) as a longitudinal research paradigm that aligns supportive strategy with this goal and organizes data, models, system design, evaluation, and governance around repeated use, non-use, transition, and termination. A targeted literature-and-corpus audit motivates this position. In a PRISMA-ScR-guided sample, 95% of 60 system-building papers pursue relief-oriented goals. None evaluates capability or longitudinal outcomes, and only 1 considers dependency, autonomy, or termination risk. In 300 ESConv supporter turns, capability-relevant functions appear in 43.0%, while generic suggestions account for 22.0%, compared with 4.0% reappraisal, 6.7% self-efficacy support, and 0.3% boundary behavior. We release a protocol for extending the audit to model behavior. An illustrative process model connects latent user capability to six design commitments, four evaluation timescales, and lifecycle constraints. The resulting agenda makes CSED testable across data, policy design, training, evaluation, and governance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27851
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Beyond Borrowed Histories: Person-Aligned User Simulation for Interactive Role-Playing Evaluation
2026-07-30 07:55:35Yuhang Zhu (University of Science and Technology of China), Mingxuan Du (University of Science and Technology of China), Benfeng Xu (University of Science and Technology of China, MetaStone Technology, Beijing, China), Jie Gao (MetaStone Technology, Beijing, China), Lingyun Yu (University of Science and Technology of China), Hongtao Xie (University of Science and Technology of China)Abstract
Role-playing agents (RPAs) have become one of the most important consumer applications of large language models. Users engage in multi-turn conversations with RPAs for experiences such as emotional comfort, making reliable evaluation essential for measuring capability, comparing systems, and guiding further improvement. Existing benchmarks, however, typically require an RPA to continue a fixed dialogue history and then evaluate the continuation using a fixed rubric detached from the user. We identify and empirically demonstrate two limitations of this design. First, an RPA's output is shaped by the preceding dialogue history, preventing a scientifically grounded assessment of its role-playing ability in real multi-turn settings. Second, user experience varies substantially across individuals, and conventional fixed rubrics need not align with user satisfaction. We therefore introduce PALATE (Person-Aligned LLM-Simulated-User Assessment with Tailored Evaluation), a scalable RPA benchmark built on user simulators. PALATE is accompanied by a pool of 300 character profiles. Its main evaluation trains five per-user simulators and lets them engage candidate RPAs in free-form, multi-turn conversations over a pre-frozen panel of character profiles. Alongside a general quality rubric, we construct personalized rubrics to measure user satisfaction; on held-out annotated data, the personalized rubrics show higher agreement with human judgments than the general rubric. In the main evaluation of 16 candidates, PALATE separately characterizes generic turn quality, long-horizon session capability, and per-user experience on multi-turn trajectories co-constructed by each candidate. It thereby produces interpretable evaluations of specific user-RPA pairs rather than compressing systems into a single user-independent ranking.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27816
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Cocktail-Talker: Multi-Speaker Dialog Modeling in Noisy Social Environments with Turn Action GRPO
2026-07-30 06:53:15Xilin Jiang, Riki Shimizu, Sukru Samet Dindar, Junkai Wu, Zhongweiyang Xu, Nima MesgaraniAbstract
Spoken dialog systems are typically designed for clean, dyadic interactions in which a single user and an assistant take turns speaking. Real-world social conversations, however, are often more ambiguous: multiple speakers may participate in the same conversation amid irrelevant speech and background noise. Each utterance may be directed to the assistant, addressed to another speaker, or completely irrelevant. In such settings, the assistant must decide not only what to say, but also whether to speak at all. In this paper, we introduce Cocktail-Talker, a speech LLM framework for multi-speaker spoken dialog modeling in noisy social environments. We model the assistant's behavior with three action tokens: <|respond|>, <|listen|>, and <|ignore|>, placed before a response or silence. Cocktail-Talker is trained via supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning to generate the appropriate action token and, only in <|respond|> mode, a speech response. To prepare the training data, we develop Cocktail-DialogGen, an LLM-based data pipeline that simulates realistic multi-speaker dialogs with speaker roles across diverse social settings. Together, these components take a step toward spoken dialog systems that interact more naturally and selectively in complex social environments.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27756
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Selecting Open-Weight Language Models for Zero-Shot Intent Classification: A Systematic Evaluation of 41 Models
2026-07-29 19:42:33Parishruthi Ganesh, Gerry Dozier, Cheryl SealsAbstract
Intent classification is a core component of task-oriented dialogue systems, yet practitioners have limited systematic guidance for selecting deployable open-weight language models under compute, latency, and robustness constraints. We present a systematic zero-shot evaluation of 41 open-weight language models spanning 15 families and the 135M--9B parameter range across eight English single-label intent-classification datasets. A ninth dataset, ATIS, uses five labeled demonstrations and is reported as an auxiliary five-shot result. The evaluation includes standard benchmarks, a large-scale voice-assistant corpus, and production-derived e-commerce datasets. Beyond exact-match accuracy, we analyze confidence calibration, robustness to realistic input perturbations, statistical reliability of model rankings, deployment efficiency, and benchmark saturation. Our results show that instruction-tuned 3B models can outperform several evaluated 7B base models, that differences among leading models on MASSIVE are statistically indistinguishable under pairwise McNemar tests, and that widely used benchmarks such as SNIPS have become saturated and no longer meaningfully discriminate among current open-weight models. Instruction tuning's effect on confidence calibration is inconsistent rather than uniformly harmful. These findings provide practical guidance for selecting and evaluating open-weight language models for intent classification.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27421
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Generation or Judgement? A Paradigm Perspective on LLM-Based Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversation
2026-07-29 14:28:55Weijie Feng, Hongchuang Wang, Binbin Liu, Zhiyong ChengAbstract
Emotion-cause pair extraction in conversation (ECPEC) identifies utterance pairs in which one utterance causes an emotion expressed in another. Recent LLM-based approaches formulate ECPEC at markedly different granularities, ranging from generating complete pair sets to judging individual candidate pairs. In this paper, we make the surprising observation that task formulation substantially affects performance, where pair-level judgement outperforms dialogue-level generation in all 18 controlled comparisons. We investigate the sources of this paradigm gap and find that many relations omitted by dialogue-level generation remain recognizable under explicit pair queries, under which the model recognizes 92.7%-98.1% of emotion-cause relations. This suggests that LLMs can recognize emotion-cause relations but struggle to discover and return complete pair sets. Pair-level judgement alleviates this burden, although its candidate rankings are more reliable than the binary decisions produced by a shared threshold. Based on this diagnosis, we introduce an auxiliary retriever that selectively re-examines ambiguous boundary cases, yielding consistent F1 improvements of 0.50-1.46 points across three datasets while maintaining an inference time of only 1.49x that of the baseline paradigm. These findings show that task decomposition and candidate scope are critical to effectively utilizing LLMs for ECPEC.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26967
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Latent-IM: Latent Interaction Management for Speech LLMs
2026-07-29 13:56:28Adar Avsian, Atahan Dokme, Tony Woo, Larry HeckAbstract
Classical spoken dialogue systems often separated dialogue management from response realization: a policy selected the next dialogue action, and a generation component expressed that action. As dialogue systems shift toward LLMs, this decomposition has largely disappeared into the model's hidden representations. We ask whether an LLM-internal analogue of state estimation and action control can be recovered for conversational moves such as acknowledging, checking, querying, explaining, and replying. We formulate move control as two coupled problems: selection, predicting the appropriate next move from the dialogue context, and realization, causally producing a chosen move at generation time. We introduce Latent-IM, an internal dialogue-management framework that provides a general interface for choosing and deploying conversational moves under different objectives. Here, we use this control to reproduce human move choices, improving average end-to-end move accuracy by 12.5 points over the unsteered backbone while performing comparably to fine-tuning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26928
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Towards Flexible, Natural, Efficient Interaction for Conversational Talking Face Generation
2026-07-29 10:27:50Baiqin Wang, Sen Chen, Jiankuo Zhao, Xiangyu Liu, Zhen Lei, Xiangyu ZhuAbstract
Conversational talking face generation has recently attracted increasing attention, aiming to synthesize interactive talking videos where characters speak, listen, and respond dynamically to each other. This task presents three core challenges: 1) Flexibility: enabling multi-round dialogues with an arbitrary number of participants; 2) Naturalness: maintaining coherent motion and appropriate non-verbal feedback throughout the interaction; and 3) Efficiency: achieving real-time generation and low computation overhead for long-term continuous online conversation. Despite recent advances, existing methods still fall short in balancing all three requirements. To bridge this gap, we introduce InterTalk, a novel and efficient framework designed for highly interactive conversational talking face generation. Built upon a motion-based architecture, InterTalk supports real-time conversation synthesis. Our method achieves strong flexibility by explicitly modeling multi-round conversational dynamics among each participant, eliminating constraints on their numbers. To enhance interactivity, we incorporate motion feedback from multiple participants and introduce an iterative generation strategy for more natural behaviors. Besides, we disentangle motion into several facial components, enabling targeted refinements for natural response such as precise lip sync and realistic eye blinking. Finally, we construct a new multi-person conversational dataset and enrich it with 3D face-based data augmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InterTalk achieves superior interaction quality while maintaining real-time performance at 30 FPS.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31088
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AtmosERC: Modeling Dialogue-Level Affective Atmosphere for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
2026-07-29 10:15:36Weijie Feng, Tongwei Zhang, Binbin Liu, Zhiyong ChengAbstract
Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) aims to predict utterance-level emotions in dialogues and has largely advanced through context-centric modeling. However, global context is a heterogeneous signal, and not all contextual information is equally relevant to emotion prediction. This paper focuses on the affect-oriented component of this signal, termed dialogue-level affective atmosphere, which captures a latent tendency commonly reflected in conversational emotion patterns. To estimate and exploit this tendency, we propose AtmosERC, a graph-based ERC framework that models each dialogue as a conversational graph over utterances and speakers. A relation-aware graph extractor filters and fuses heterogeneous graph signals to produce dialogue-level and speaker-conditioned affective priors. The resulting compact prior guides lightweight sequential emotion prediction and can also be verbalized into prompt-level cues for LLM-based ERC without modifying backbone models. Experiments on four ERC benchmarks show that AtmosERC improves lightweight ERC, enhances LLM-based ERC as a plug-in cue, and yields more stable predictions under local emotional deviations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26726
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CMT-RAG: Complementary Memory Traces for Multi-turn Multi-hop RAG
2026-07-29 04:50:41Lang Zhou, Yingjian Chen, Shuxuan Li, Kun-Yu Lin, Zhilin ZhaoAbstract
Multi-turn information-seeking conversations require both multi-hop reasoning and long-range dependency tracking across turns. However, existing RAG systems typically represent conversational memory as raw dialogue history, rewritten queries, or unstructured summaries, making it difficult to recover the specific prior reasoning steps and evidence required for follow-up queries. Our key insight is to align conversational memory with retrieval by representing dialogue context as sub-question-level reasoning traces. Building on this insight, we introduce MuMu-QA, a benchmark for multi-turn multi-hop RAG with explicit cross-turn sub-question dependency annotations, and CMT-RAG, a complementary memory framework for this setting. At each turn, CMT-RAG employs a state-space trace generator, whose recurrent state serves as runtime memory, to incorporate recent conversational context and decompose the current query into structured trace drafts containing retrieval-oriented sub-questions and dependencies on earlier traces. It then grounds these drafts with retrieved evidence and stores them as persistent memory traces in a session-level DAG, enabling future turns to efficiently recover relevant prior reasoning and evidence. Experiments on MuMu-QA and corpus-level RAG benchmarks show that CMT-RAG consistently outperforms five categories of RAG baselines in answer accuracy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26470
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From GenAI Virtual Patient Dialogue Logs to Teacher-Interpretable Process Evidence: A Learning Analytics Study in Higher Education
2026-07-29 03:05:33Xinyu Li, Zijian Li, Mengyu Xia, Luzhen Tang, Naping Chen, Changmin Lin, Danijela Gasevic, Dragan Gasevic, Yizhou FanAbstract
Medical history taking is a dialogue-based clinical reasoning task in which learners must gather, organise, and integrate patient information while the consultation unfolds. Generative AI-powered virtual patients (GenAI VPs) make repeated history taking practice scalable and preserve full turn by turn dialogue. However, these logs are educationally difficult to use directly. Complete transcripts are too detailed for routine teacher review, whereas final scores obscure whether learners followed up patient cues, checked uncertainty, or used summaries to guide later questioning. This study examined whether coded GenAI VP dialogues can provide teacher-interpretable process evidence of clinical reasoning. We analysed 1{,}030 GenAI VP dialogues from 210 second-year medical learners across five weeks chest-pain cases. Each consultation was teacher-scored using a rubric assessing the full history taking dialogue, and consultations were classified within each week as high- or low-rated using the weekly median score. To explain how rated performance was reflected in the dialogue process, we applied three analytic layers to the same coded dialogue data: behavioural prevalence, local co-occurrence using Epistemic Network Analysis, and sequential transition using Transition Network Analysis. High-rated consultations involved more history taking activity, but differences were not simply about volume. High rated consultations more often connected information gathering and symptom exploration with communication, checking, organisation, and synthesis. Summarising and organising moves more often led to verification or mechanism-oriented follow-up. These findings show how layered analysis of GenAI VP dialogue logs can reveal process patterns associated with high rated history taking and support process-focused feedback in medical education.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28619
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Contextualized Counterspeech Can Be More Persuasive Than Generic Counterspeech
2026-07-28 20:16:06Lorenzo Cima, Alessio Miaschi, Amaury Trujillo, Marco Avenuti, Felice Dell'Orletta, Stefano CresciAbstract
AI-generated counterspeech offers a scalable and effective strategy to mitigate online toxicity by promoting more constructive dialogue. Yet, existing approaches adopt a generic, one-size-fits-all paradigm, overlooking the conversational context and characteristics of the targeted users. Here, we propose and evaluate multiple strategies for generating contextualized counterspeech that is adapted to the moderation setting and personalized to the moderated user. In detail, we explore a range of configurations that integrate different forms of contextual information and fine-tuning techniques. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation combining quantitative indicators with a pre-registered, mixed-design crowdsourcing experiment. To ensure robustness, we implement algorithmic measures of counterspeech quality based on ROUGE, BLEU, and BERTScore, observing overall consistent results across metrics. Furthermore, we analyze which characteristics of both the generated counterspeech and the moderated toxic message most strongly influence perceived persuasiveness, yielding insights into how contextualized interventions can be made more effective. Our findings show that personalization can be effective, but not uniformly so. Lightweight strategies combining conversational context and user history improve perceived adequacy and persuasiveness, whereas several other contextualization strategies degrade human-perceived counterspeech quality. Taken together, these results provide actionable directions for developing more personalized, effective, and responsible counterspeech systems, ultimately advancing human-AI collaboration in online content moderation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26236
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DuplexGen: Adaptive Synthesis of Human-AI Turn-Taking Dialogues
2026-07-28 18:36:46Takyoung Kim, Kang-wook Kim, Sang Hoon Woo, Julia Hirschberg, Gunhee Kim, Dilek Hakkani-T\"urAbstract
Turn-taking is a central component of full-duplex interaction. Which turn-taking behaviors are appropriate varies with the scenario, yet current models apply a single norm regardless of context. This limitation originates in their training data: human-human speech corpora capture natural timing phenomena but provide little role grounding or scenario-specific norms, while heuristic or prompted synthesis methods inject turn-taking behaviors without basing them on human preferences. We introduce DuplexGen, a framework for generating dialogues with scenario-adaptive turn-taking by calibrating LLM predictions against a small set of slot-level human preference annotations. In six cooperative and competitive tasks, human turn-taking preferences differ systematically, and DuplexGen aligns substantially more closely with those preferences than uncalibrated prompting or training solely on generic human-human data; a full-duplex model trained on DuplexGen-generated data exhibits distinctive, human-preferred turn-taking behaviors. These results show that human calibration, not corpus scale or prompt design alone, is what allows turn-taking synthesis to be scenario-specific.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26178
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Instruction-Tuned Models Locally Reuse Human Syntax More Than Humans Do
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Syntactic convergence (the tendency of speakers to adapt in language towards the grammatical profiles of their interlocutors) is a well-documented feature of human dialogue widely considered to operate below conscious awareness. Whether large language models exhibit analogous syntactic convergence toward human users relative to human baselines and across a broad range of syntactic constructions remains an open question. Using substitution-paradigm data in which model generations replace one speaker's turns in pre-existing human dialogues, this study measures turn-adjacent reuse of context-free grammar (CFG) rules across sixteen open-weight Llama and Gemma models (1B-70B, pretrained and instruction-tuned) at 1,901 matched positions per model. Every model showed greater CFG-rule overlap with the preceding human turn than with a sampled unrelated human prime, and in every model this actual-versus-random difference was larger for lower-frequency rules. Each instruction-tuned model also showed greater natural-output overlap with the actual prime than the human response it replaced, and all eight matched architecture pairs exhibited greater actual-prime overlap after instruction tuning. However, relative to pretrained variants, instruction-tuned outputs overlapped more with unrelated primes, showed a smaller actual-versus-random increment, and had lower conditional rule-reuse odds once target rule-set size was held constant. In exploratory analyses, each model exhibited greater mean lexical and semantic similarity to the preceding turn than the matched human responses did. Instruction-tuned models additionally produced responses with greater mean semantic similarity than their pretrained counterparts in all eight architecture pairs, whereas the lexical similarity results were more heterogeneous.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26015
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Seen, Said, or Forgotten? A Causal Audit of Visual KV Memory Across Dialog Turns
2026-07-28 08:59:57Hong Chen, Kang Chen, Yuxuan Fan, Bo Wang, Yubo Gao, Yuanlin Chu, Xuming HuAbstract
Stateful multimodal assistants encode an image once but may answer questions about it many turns later. Attention-guided visual-KV eviction assumes that evidence irrelevant now will remain dispensable, although future questions are unknown. We ask when a visual fact is actually safe to forget and introduce the Causal Visual Memory Audit (CVMA), a paired single-prefill framework that tests what later answers lose when a visual region, the whole image, or prior assistant text becomes unavailable. On VisDial and ConvBench, current attention can rank future-useful regions worse than random even though a diagnostic marginal-utility control shows substantial selection headroom. Aggregate scores hide this failure when later turns do not need vision; controlled and stock-generated histories reveal a second escape route, in which assistant-text KV replaces image KV for facts already stated but not reliably for unstated facts. In the tested stacks, safe forgetting is supported by low future visual dependence or fact-specific verbalization---not by low current attention.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25467
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Every Time I Hire a Linguist, Inference Costs Go Down: On Linguistic Rules as Effective Prompt Compressors
2026-07-28 06:33:27Jianfei Ma, Zhaoxin Feng, Emmanuele Chersoni, Si ChenAbstract
Prompt compression shortens LLM input to reduce inference cost, yet existing methods score token importance through LM forward passes. It remains questionable whether such nuanced, costly token selection is necessary. Compression requires identifying informative content, a problem that linguistic research has long addressed through cues that can be operationalized as deterministic rules. We therefore ask: can \textbf{linguistic rules alone} serve as effective prompt compressors, without LM-based scoring at compression time? To address this, we conduct offline evolutionary search over lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse seeds to find competitive rule combinations. The resulting linguistic compressor requires no LM forward pass at deployment and uses only CPU-side processing for compression. We evaluate it with a dual-path protocol to balance compression quality and reconstruction fidelity. Across short passages, multi-document reasoning, and dialogue-memory QA datasets, evolved compressors achieve performance similar to that of recent advanced prompt-compression strategies. Performance is strongest under light-to-moderate compression and degrades as compression becomes more aggressive, while the Direct and Reconstruction paths exhibit distinct patterns. Evolutionary analysis reveals that effective compression fuses signals across linguistic levels and, as the compression ratio increases, rules shift from token pruning to sentence extraction.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25335
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Everyone is unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems for Debt Collection
2026-07-28 02:50:43Yuhang Yang, Kai Tang, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang, Qiqi Luo, Jinguang Zheng, Zhixin ZhangAbstract
Debt collection is a critical negotiation task in the financial industry, with strong practical relevance and exceptional academic value as a behaviorally rich, high-stakes testbed for human-centered dialogue systems. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in dialogue and negotiation, effectively evaluating their performance in this complex scenarios remains a major challenge: existing benchmarks uniformly assume users to be static, rational agents with fixed preferences, failing to capture the rich behavioral heterogeneity inherent in real-world debt collection. To bridge this gap, we propose DebtBench, the first public persona-enriched debt collection benchmark, that highlights behavioral heterogeneity in negotiation. Moreover, we develop DebtGPT, a debt collection agent trained to jointly optimize financial recovery and interaction experience. Our experimental results, using 16 state-of-the-art LLMs, find that most existing models struggle in this complex but realistic scenarios, whereas DebtGPT outperforms all open-source baselines and achieves performance on par with GPT-4o. The code and data are available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25218
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