Automated radiology report generation for multi-sequence brain MRI holds strong promise for alleviating radiologists' workload, yet it remains a demanding problem: brain MRI studies are inherently volumetric, each pulse sequence carries complementary diagnostic information, and annotated data are critically scarce for low-resource clinical languages. Existing brain MRI-report resources are still dominated by English reports, translated clinical text, or datasets adapted from task-specific imaging benchmarks, leaving routine low-resource clinical reporting and heterogeneous multi-sequence MRI protocols insufficiently represented. To bridge this gap, we introduce ViBMR, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale multi-sequence brain MRI dataset paired with routine Vietnamese clinical reports, comprising 3,649 patients and 11,875 MRI series across T1, T2, FLAIR, and contrast-enhanced T1 sequences. Building on ViBMR, we establish a comprehensive evaluation setup for brain MRI report generation, covering representative medical vision-language models, multi-sequence inputs, and feature aggregation strategies. The results provide key insights into dataset characteristics and model behavior, while demonstrating the necessity of native low-resource clinical datasets for reliable Vietnamese-origin brain MRI report generation. Our dataset and baseline models will be released for non-commercial research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29905
Existing social bias benchmarks evaluate large language models mostly on fluent, well-formed English, reflecting native speaker usage and leaving non-native writers unrepresented. To address this gap, we investigate how grammatical errors by non-native writers affect social bias. We develop a controlled framework that injects common learner errors into prompts and apply it to three bias benchmarks covering stereotype alignment and demographic preference across gender, race, and religion. We find that grammatical errors increase bias, and the effect grows with the error rate. Among the four common error types we consider, preposition errors produce the largest and most consistent increase in stereotype alignment. Our analysis suggests that errors increase bias when they are more likely to interfere with comprehension. Finally, fine-tuning on erroneous texts reduces the bias increase caused by grammatical errors. Our findings show that bias evaluations based exclusively on well-formed prompts may underestimate the bias experienced by users whose English contains grammatical errors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29896
Over the past decade, substantial efforts have been devoted to developing machine learning (ML) methods for extracting materials data and, where possible, materials knowledge directly from the scientific literature. This review traces the evolution of these methods from heuristic, rule-based pipelines through natural language processing (NLP) models and transformer-based encoders to, lastly, large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems capable of extracting materials information across multiple modalities, including text, tables, and figures. Beside construction of large, queryable materials databases and knowledge graphs that support downstream materials discovery, we discuss how these advances have enabled new capabilities, such as, generic question answering across materials science, AI co-scientists and chatbots for research assistance, and closed-loop optimization and discovery when integrated with autonomous laboratories. We critically assess the datasets generated using these approaches, their extraction accuracy and computational costs, and the respective strengths and limitations of different methodologies, and even provide practical guidelines for developing more reliable and scalable materials data extraction pipelines. Finally, we identify key open challenges, including the extraction of full materials structure-property-processing-performance tetrahedron at the sample level, the scarcity of reliable benchmark datasets for systematic evaluation, and the resolution of non-standard materials terminology across different document modalities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29895
Text processing is crucial for low-resource languages as it enables the development of tools and technologies that bridge the digital divide and provide equitable access to information and services. By empowering low-resource languages with robust text processing, we can preserve linguistic diversity, enhance education, improve communi- cation, and foster inclusivity in a rapidly digitizing world. Due to the lack of sufficient annotated datasets and lin- guistic resources, it is challenging to develop accurate and reliable language technologies for these low-resource languages. Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted sig- nificant attention with their performance and the value they produce. However, with the ever-evolving language, adapting LLMs for a specific task is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Thus, Retrieval-Augmented Genera- tion (RAG) has overcome this limitation by augmenting LLMs with external knowledge, thereby improving their efficiency and extensive task-specific adaptation. Most applications of the RAG technique have been limited to English and has seen limited application in In- dic languages. This paper introduces the RAG-powered AI-Tutor application, Acharya 2.0, designed to produce academic assistance to Hindi-speaking students. The client-server-based web application integrates many fea- tures to support students in accessing and interacting with educational content.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25192
Large language models are typically trained with next-token prediction (NTP), which rewards predicting specific tokens rather than explicitly accounting for the semantic similarities between different words or expressions. Prior work has addressed this limitation by augmenting training data with minimally varying sentences that replace a target word with conceptually related alternatives, e.g., "The tired coach ran home" $\rightarrow$ {"The tired trainer ran home", "The tired instructor ran home", ...}. Such concept augmentation improves performance, but it remains unclear whether its effectiveness depends on where in the sentence the concept is expressed. We reproduce and extend prior work $\textit{beyond nouns}$ to verbs and adjectives, asking whether the part of speech (POS) carrying the concept signal affects perplexity and downstream performance. We find different patterns across evaluation settings: concept augmentation improves perplexity most consistently on news, independent of the POS used, whereas verbs provide the most reliable downstream gains. Despite these behavioral differences, representational analyses using CKA and linear probing show that the conditions yielding the largest downstream gains are not necessarily those that most alter the model's internal representations. Together, these results suggest that the effectiveness of concept augmentation depends on where and how conceptual information is introduced during training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29843
Translating structured biomedical information into accurate, patient-friendly narratives remains a challenging biomedical data-to-text (D2T) task. While small language models (SLMs) are attractive for healthcare applications because of their lower computational cost, easier deployment, and improved data governance, the impact of post-training alignment on biomedical D2T generation has not been systematically studied. In this work, we compare four alignment methods: supervised fine-tuning (SFT), direct preference optimization (DPO), odds ratio preference optimization (ORPO), and group relative policy optimization (GRPO), using Qwen-2.5 models for medication leaflet generation. We further introduce FDALeaflets, a dataset derived from OpenFDA drug labels, to evaluate cross-regulatory generalization in a zero-shot setting. Selected aligned SLMs outperform GPT-5 on several reference-based metrics, whereas GPT-5 achieves better hallucination and adequacy scores on FDALeaflets under LLM-as-judge evaluation. Among RL-free alignment methods, ORPO achieves the best in-domain semantic performance, reaching a semantic textual similarity (STS) score of 0.9752. GRPO achieves the highest FDALeaflets STS (0.9407), exceeding GPT-5 (0.9295). These findings show that post-training alignment is a key factor in improving both semantic fidelity and generalization for biomedical D2T generation, while clinical safety and patient readability require human verification.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13430
Evaluating audio-text semantic alignment is important in various audio-language tasks. Existing methods mainly quantify audio-text semantic alignment using a single score and cannot explicitly describe how audio and text differ. In this paper, we propose audio-text difference captioning, a task that generates textual descriptions of differences between audio and text. We also construct a new dataset AT-DIFFER containing audio-text pairs with systematically simulated differences and corresponding difference captions. Using AT-DIFFER, we fine-tune an existing multimodal large language model to describe differences between audio and text. The experimental results show that the original model has limited ability to describe such differences, whereas fine-tuning on AT-DIFFER substantially improves this ability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29836
Calibrating large language models (LLMs) in open-ended generation is uniquely challenging because many distinct token sequences can express the same underlying meaning. Prior calibration techniques target either fixed-set classification confidence or the binary correctness of individual strings, making them inherently ill-suited for the dynamic, multi-string nature of open-ended semantic outcomes. To bridge this gap, we introduce S-EDL, a novel evidential method that natively optimizes LLMs for semantic calibration. By eliciting evidence from the sequence likelihoods of the model itself, S-EDL constructs a differentiable Dirichlet prior over prompt-specific semantic classes. Optimizing the evidential loss under this prior yields a calibration-aware training signal over variable semantic classes, completely bypassing the need for fixed multiple-choice options. Evaluations across four open-ended benchmarks and three models demonstrate that S-EDL substantially reduces semantic calibration error while improving accuracy. By aligning generative likelihoods with semantic correctness, this work establishes a framework for deploying trustworthy LLMs in complex, open-ended applications. Code is available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29832
Compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel combinations of previously observed objects and attributes. Prior work showed that large-scale vision-language models encode decomposable semantic structures that can be recomposed to enable generalization. The Geodesically Decomposable Embeddings (GDE) framework formalizes this by identifying directions in the tangent space at the Frechet mean of the embedding distribution, which encode primitive visual concepts. Unseen attribute-object compositions can be synthesized through vector addition of these primitives. We revisit the assumption that compositional generalization requires explicit attribute-object pair re-composition. By means of new compositional scoring functions and extensive evaluations, we show that directly using the decomposed primitives suffices for recognizing unseen compositions. In that, we gain insights on how the geometry of the embedding manifold (Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic) and dataset structure affect compositional reasoning. Across models (CLIP, DINOv2, MERU, HyCoCLIP), we show that compositional structure consistently emerges as primitive representations, enabling inference on CZSL benchmarks (MIT-States, VAW-CZSL, UT-Zappos50K, Clothing16K) and group robustness on Waterbirds and CelebA. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29811
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving external knowledge. Recently, some RAG methods interleave reasoning and retrieval, enabling LLMs to progressively generate sub-queries and retrieve external knowledge. However, these methods may suffer from redundant or ineffective sub-queries and insufficiently diverse query exploration. Moreover, due to the tightly interleaved nature of reasoning and retrieval, it remains unclear how the evolving reasoning process influences query intent. To characterize the evolution of query intent during reasoning, we introduce search momentum, which captures the accumulated retrieval tendency induced by historical changes in generated sub-queries along the reasoning trajectory. Through momentum-based analysis, we find that the query generation process tends to continuously evolve along existing retrieval trajectories. Based on this observation, we propose MAPS, a Macro-Adaptive Parallel Reasoning framework for regulating search momentum and mitigating query-intent drift. MAPS first retains the retrieved knowledge and a refined reasoning state, thereby reducing the influence of historical reasoning trajectories on subsequent sub-query generation. Subsequently, MAPS extends the conventional sequential reasoning process into a parallel reasoning paradigm. At each iteration, MAPS identifies complementary retrieval directions, generates corresponding sub-queries for parallel retrieval, and consolidates the retrieved evidence to update the knowledge and reasoning states. Experiments on six question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that MAPS consistently outperforms representative RAG methods across different backbone models. All code and resources are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29792
Asked what to study, which career to pursue, or what product to build, large language models (LLMs) often recommend AI-related options. We ask where this tendency comes from by comparing models before and after fine-tuning and by varying how questions are asked. First, pretrained models already include explicit AI/ML terms in the recommendations of 27% of their responses, and their released instruction-tuned versions do so in 59%. Second, fine-tuning models ourselves shows that this rise is not inevitable: general instruction tuning leaves the rate unchanged, but removing the 7% of instruction examples that concern AI cuts it by 14 percentage points, below the level of the pretrained models it starts from. Data rewarding helpfulness raise it by 9 points, while data ranked by the preferences of diverse simulated users lower it by 9. Finally, with models held fixed, asking for the "best" option or for what to do "right now" raises the rate by 8 and 18 points, whereas telling the model it is an AI advisor adds 4. Overall, the tendency starts in pretraining, and what models learn afterward, together with how a question is phrased, decides how strongly it appears.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29785
Memorization inflates the benchmark scores of large language models (LLMs), since a model can reproduce answers it saw in training. Researchers test for it with consistent identifier renaming (CIR), which gives every identifier in a task a new name, and treat a lower score on the renamed task as evidence of recall. We test this method on the Temporal Logic of Actions Plus (TLA+) language, whose model checker acts as an oracle by confirming whether a renamed task preserves the exact behaviors of the original. Across 111 TLA+-Bench tasks, renaming lowers the correctness of Claude Opus 4.8 from 28% to 18% and of GPT-5 from 9% to 7%. Most of this decrease comes from how the test grades, which requires exact names that most descriptions never state. Grading by behavior shrinks the decrease to about 3 percentage points for Opus 4.8 and to 0 for GPT-5. In two model families fine-tuned on disjoint halves of the tasks, renaming removes about half of the training gain in likelihood and costs 4.9 percentage points (Qwen) and 1.3 percentage points (Gemma) on unseen tasks. A lower score after renaming therefore mixes memorization, name-based grading, and the cost of new names.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29767
With the advent of foundation models, robots are increasingly capable of understanding and executing explicitly specified human tasks. Extending these capabilities to open-ended tasks, however, requires robots to infer appropriate actions from the observed scene. Household organization exemplifies this challenge, as robots must often act without detailed instructions, predefined object vocabularies, or known object-receptacle associations. While robots may follow instructions or learn organization preferences from demonstrations, inferring the latent organization of an occasionally changing scene and placing a novel object consistently with it remains challenging. We propose an open-world multi-attribute reasoning pipeline that grounds unknown objects across views and constructs an instance-level 3D scene graph for placement reasoning. First, a vision-language model proposes labels together with attributes such as content and packaging type, which are grounded through segmentation, depth, and multi-view association. Then, an LLM reasons over this representation to infer the latent shelf organization and rank scene-consistent object placements without explicitly user-provided preferences. The resulting placement rankings guide subsequent geometric and kinematic feasibility checks for execution. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach leads to improved instance mapping and placement coherence over single-view language-grounding and geometry-only baselines, enabling autonomous placement of previously unseen objects without predefined object-receptacle mappings or class-specific retraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29761
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, yet it remains unclear how their foundational capabilities translate into agentic capabilities. End-to-end scores leave unresolved whether low benchmark capability or weak deployment drives a failure, limiting actionable diagnosis. We bridge foundational and agentic capabilities through an operation-level measurement framework. We represent each model with a foundational profile derived from capability benchmarks and an operation profile derived from interaction trajectories, and define capability realization gaps as deviations of observed operation performance from predictions based on foundational capabilities. Experiments on fifteen model services in $\tau^2$-Bench show that foundational profiles only partially predict agentic operations. Models with comparable profiles can differ substantially in execution, and these gaps remain consistent across task subsets. Operation profiles add information and substantially improve task-score prediction. The framework locates execution departures at the operation level to inform model development and agent evaluation. We will release our code and analysis artifacts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29751
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate software engineering artifacts written in domain-specific languages (DSLs). Correct DSL instances usually must comply with not only the concrete syntax but also the abstract syntax defined by a metamodel augmented with semantic well-formedness constraints. Existing constrained decoding approaches typically guarantee compliance only with concrete syntax or with a limited set of semantic constraints expressed over the generated text, making metamodel-level constraint consistency difficult to enforce during generation. We present MeMoDecode: a decoding framework that enforces a DSL's concrete syntax, abstract syntax, and well-formedness constraints jointly. Specifically, whenever the LLM generates a complete metamodel concept, MeMoDecode incrementally maps the current output to a partial model and verifies whether it can still be completed into a consistent instance. We combine MeMoDecode with a simple retry mechanism that resumes decoding from the most recent completable snapshot whenever an inconsistency is detected. Under a sound backend verifier, MeMoDecode never performs worse than grammar-constrained decoding on alignment metrics satisfying natural assumptions. Across four DSLs and six open-weight LLMs ranging from 0.6B to 70B parameters, MeMoDecode achieves the highest consistency, improving consistency by 23% on average over unconstrained decoding and by 8% on average over grammar-constrained decoding. It also improves benchmark performance while incurring only modest runtime overhead. These results show that metamodel-guided decoding is an effective approach for enforcing DSL consistency during decoding across diverse DSLs and LLM scales.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29749
Large language models often answer from knowledge learned during training, even when a provided passage contradicts that knowledge. To address this problem, contrastive decoding contrasts the predictions under the full and a modified prompt at every token, but it also alters correct answers that the passage supports. We show that checking answers against the passage removes this trade-off. Based on this observation, we propose Accept-or-Repair (AoR), a training-free procedure. AoR keeps a sampled answer if the passage supports it. Otherwise, it tries up to two replacements with contrastive decoding, returning one as soon as it passes this check. It rejects replacements that repeat the answer generated without the passage when the passage favors another answer. Our experiments show that AoR raises the score over sampling by 12.5 points on counterfactual passages and 2.3 on ordinary ones, surpassing eight contrastive and prompting baselines on both, including when each receives the same rejection rule. Replacing only initial answers that the passage does not support improves the average score of every decoder. These results suggest that models can follow passages that contradict their knowledge while preserving accuracy on passages that agree with it. Code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29727
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external knowledge. Modern pipelines combine embedding, chunking, retrieval, reranking, query augmentation, context compression, and agentic verification, yet these techniques are typically evaluated one at a time. It remains unclear whether their isolated gains survive composition, whether retrieval quality and answer faithfulness favor the same design choices, and whether conclusions from small corpora hold at large scale. We pre-declare three hypotheses and introduce LASAGNA, an open-source framework for controlled RAG evaluation. We test 450 configurations across eight benchmarks and corpora ranging from 5K to 200K documents. Three findings emerge. First, individually strong techniques from different phases of a RAG pipeline do not necessarily compose: three retrieval techniques predict a +47% combined improvement but deliver only +17% when used together. Second, component gains stack differently for retrieval and faithfulness, and optimizing one can hurt the other. Third, the best composition changes as the corpus grows: the combination that wins on a small corpus may not remain best at large scale. These findings show that gains measured in isolation are not reliable predictors of realistic performance, and that new RAG techniques should be tested with the full surrounding stack. We call on researchers to do so and supply LASAGNA to simplify these experiments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29722
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient inference through sparse, event-driven computation, yet remain constrained on continuous, context-dependent tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR). A key bottleneck is the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron, whose membrane decay erases information across pauses and phonetic boundaries while it must both extract features and retain long-range context. Inspired by cortical separation of nonlinear filtering and somatic integration, we introduce the Spiking Ternary GRU (stGRU): a ternary-weight gated recurrent unit performs temporal filtering, while downstream Resonate-and-Fire (RF) neurons generate the binary spike stream driving the next block's event pathway. This makes binary event transmission a native training constraint rather than a separate deployment-time activation quantization step; together with ternary weights, learned projections avoid dense floating-point matrix MACs. Trained end-to-end on LibriSpeech-960, Small, Medium, and Large stGRUs reach 8.09%, 7.04%, and $6.44 \pm 0.17\%$ WER on test-clean without an external language model. To our knowledge, these are the first matrix-MAC-free spiking networks without a learned ANN sequence decoder to achieve single-digit WER on LibriSpeech. The architecture also achieves 10.88% test CER on Aishell-1 (9.28% on dev) when trained from scratch. Internally, trained networks develop a depth-graded hierarchy: shallow layers act as fast acoustic filters, while deep layers form slower semantic integrators whose latent representations segregate into part-of-speech manifolds and word-level spike events. Deep-layer firing rates follow lognormal distributions with a sparsity gradient, mirroring hierarchical processing observed in human cortex in vivo. Our biologically grounded architecture combines competitive ASR with favorable modeled compute and memory cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29720
We present SpatialDex, a framework that learns 3D-grounded bimanual dexterity from RGB-only human videos through reconstruction-augmented visuomotor pre-training. The central idea is to learn human behavior together with its spatial context. From each video, we reconstruct the scene geometry and estimate the hand motion, align them at a shared video-level scale using the hand-size prior of 3D hand estimates. We retain the reconstructed geometry as both a policy input and a prediction target. The policy grounds the token grid of a pre-trained vision-language model in this geometry through gated residual fusion, is trained to predict future scene geometry alongside wrist and finger actions, and generates finger motion conditioned on the predicted trajectories of both wrists. Pre-trained on 1M human-video clips and fine-tuned with a small number of robot demonstrations, SpatialDex outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 16.5 points on nine simulated dexterous tasks across two embodiments and by 38.3 points on six real-world bimanual dexterous tasks. Under a matched comparison, pre-training with reconstructed geometry improves success by 14.2 points over pre-training on hand motion alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29716
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising reasoning capabilities, but reliable physical interaction requires planning that accounts for when actions are executable and how they change the world. These preconditions and effects are environment-dependent and often not captured by MLLMs, making adaptation challenging. Yet existing approaches either require costly environment-specific training or rely on unstructured interaction experience that is difficult to reuse. Therefore, we introduce CausGround, a non-parametric causal interaction grounding framework that distills interaction experience into reusable action-centered causal knowledge. CausGround identifies action preconditions and effects and organizes them in a factorized world-state representation capturing object attributes and inter-object relations. At planning time, task-relevant causal dependencies are grounded in current observations to support backward reasoning over preconditions and forward reasoning over effects for action selection and multi-step planning. We evaluate CausGround on simulated high-level planning, interaction reasoning, and real-world robot manipulation. On adapted VirtualHome and RoboCasa benchmarks, CausGround improves vision-based high-level planning across MLLM backbones, increasing average task success from 24.9% to 53.3% on VirtualHome and closed-loop planning success from 43.0% to 57.0% on RoboCasa. On SWITCH, average interaction reasoning accuracy increases from 25.8% to 31.9%, indicating improved action selection, recovery, and verification. Moreover, real-world experiments show that CausGround reasons backward from MLLM-interpreted goals to derive executable high-level action sequences for sequential manipulation. These results demonstrate that reusable action preconditions and effects support long-horizon embodied planning across diverse environments without parameter updates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29702