Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on strong linguistic reasoning inherited from their base language models. However, multimodal instruction fine-tuning paradoxically degrades this text’s reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. To address this issue, we propose a training-free framework to mitigate this degradation. Through layer-wise vision token masking, we reveal a common three-stage pattern in multimodal large language models: early-modal separation, mid-modal alignment, and late-modal degradation. By analyzing the behavior of MLLMs at different stages, we propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs. Experimental results based on five MLLMs on nine benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Attention-based analysis further reveals that merging shifts attention from diffuse, scattered patterns to focused localization on task-relevant visual regions.Our repository is on https://github.com/wzj1718/PlaM .

Empathetic speech dialogue requires not only understanding linguistic content but also perceiving rich paralinguistic information such as prosody, tone, and emotional intensity for affective understandings. Existing speech-to-speech large language models either rely on ASR transcription or use encoders to extract latent representations, often weakening affective information and contextual coherence in multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we propose ES4R, a framework for speech-based empathetic response generation. Our core innovation lies in explicitly modeling structured affective context before speech encoding, rather than relying on implicit learning by the encoder or explicit emotion supervision. Specifically, we introduce a dual-level attention mechanism to capture turn-level affective states and dialogue-level affective dynamics. The resulting affective representations are then integrated with textual semantics through speech-guided cross-modal attention to generate empathetic responses. For speech output, we employ energy-based strategy selection and style fusion to achieve empathetic speech synthesis. ES4R consistently outperforms strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluations and remains robust across different Large Language Model (LLM) backbones. Code: https://github.com/Bean0901/ES4R.

Self-report questionnaires remain the default tool for probing the psychological characteristics of Large Language Model (LLM) agents, yet classical instruments (BFI, BDI, MBTI, BSS) inherit three well-known threats under LLMs: contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. We ask whether a *projective* paradigm can be adapted into a usable psychometric tool for LLM agents. We introduce **GenPT** (Generative Projective Testing), which reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline (Behavior Collection → Interpretation → Diagnosis) grounded in SCORS-G and a Simplified Rorschach Analysis System. On personality traits (Big Five, MBTI) and mental-health risks (depression, suicide ideation), questionnaires exhibit systematic directional shifts under social-desirability framing, most strongly on suicide ideation, whereas GenPT’s collected behavioral patterns stay near the symmetric baseline; under a longitudinal counselling context, GenPT-based depression assessment shifts by roughly an order of magnitude more than its questionnaire counterpart. Questionnaires remain competitive on clean-persona trait tasks where items align lexically with the persona description. Overall, GenPT complements rather than replaces self-report when contamination resistance, bias asymmetry, and context sensitivity matter. Code and stimuli: https://github.com/sci-m-wang/GenPT.

Medical reasoning models remain constrained by parametric knowledge and are thus susceptible to forgetting and hallucinations. DeepResearch (DR) models ground outputs in verifiable evidence from tools and perform strongly in general domains, but their direct transfer to medical field yields relatively limited gains. We attribute this to two gaps: task characteristic and tool-use scaling. Medical questions require evidence interpretation in a knowledge-intensive clinical context; while general DR models can retrieve information, they often lack clinical-context reasoning and thus “find it but fail to use it,” leaving performance limited by medical abilities. Moreover, in medical scenarios, blindly scaling tool-call can inject noisy context, derailing sensitive medical reasoning and prompting repetitive evidence-seeking along incorrect paths. Therefore, we propose DeepMed. For data, we deploy a multi-hop med-search QA synthesis method supporting the model to apply the DR paradigm in medical contexts. For training, we introduce a difficulty-aware turn-penalty to suppress excessive tool-call growth. For inference, we bring a monitor to help validate hypotheses within a controlled number of steps and avoid context rot. Overall, on seven medical benchmarks, DeepMed improves its base model by 9.79% on average and outperforms larger medical reasoning and DR models.

Existing multimodal emotion and intent recognition tasks predominantly focus on classification, overlooking the underlying rationale and intrinsic connections between these states. Bridging this gap, we propose **Joint Multimodal Emotion-Intent Explanation and Classification, JX4MEI**, a novel task requiring the model to jointly predict emotion and intent, while generating natural language explanations for why they co-occur. To support this, we present **XMEI-dataset**, a large-scale benchmark of 15,461 multimodal samples spanning 7 emotion and 9 intent categories across text, audio, and visual modalities. Unlike prior works, our dataset provides fine-grained rationales for emotion, intent, and their causal interplay, curated via a rigorous pipeline involving Chain-of-Thought generation and strict human refinement to eliminate model artifacts. Furthermore, we propose **XMEI-Qwen**, a model equipped with a novel **Language-Query Former (LQ-Former)**. By leveraging modality-specific captions as semantic queries, LQ-Former injects explicit semantic guidance into feature alignment, significantly enhancing reasoning capabilities. Empirical experiments demonstrate that XMEI-Qwen sets a new state-of-the-art on the JX4MEI task, outperforming competitive baselines in both prediction and explanation generation. Code: https://github.com/OrangeYeah1027/JX4MEI.

Efficiently aligning visual features with Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical bottleneck in Multimodal LLMs. Existing query-based alignment modules (e.g., Q-Former) rely on randomly initialized queries, resulting in an inefficient cold start exploration process. Furthermore, they enforce uniform cross-attention across all layers, leading to computational redundancy. Our empirical analysis reveals that query tokens initialized with language priors can rapidly capture global semantics, leading to early representation convergence after only a few layers. In this paper, we propose **Cat-MoD**, a **Ca**ption **t**oken Guided Asymmetric **M**ixture-**o**f-**D**epths framework. It incorporates a **Hybrid Query Construction** module where Guide Tokens initialized from coarse-grained linguistic priors rapidly anchor global semantic context, and randomly initialized Explorer Tokens remain active to capture fine-grained visual details. Exploiting this early convergence, we introduce an **Asymmetric Mixture-of-Depths** mechanism, where a similarity-aware router dynamically prunes redundant tokens from expensive cross-attention layers while preserving their context in self-attention. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that Cat-MoD matches or surpasses baseline performance, while substantially reducing alignment FLOPs by approximately 37% during both training and inference, offering a highly efficient solution for multimodal alignment. Code: https://github.com/JasonOrange0726/Cat-MoD.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual encoders with Large Language Models (LLMs) and enable multimodal reasoning. However, for tasks that heavily rely on visual information, the model’s utilization of visual information remains unstable, which leads to reasoning failures. Prior works mainly strengthen multimodal reasoning by improving representation alignment or increasing computation. However, these methods do not explicitly characterize the differences in visual demands across tasks, making it difficult for the model to decide where and how strongly to attend to visual information. Consequently, visual attention allocation becomes a key factor that affects multimodal reasoning. To address these, we propose RATION, an entropy-driven task-adaptive visual attention allocation framework. First, we use a task routing strategy to infer the task type of each sample and identify the key layers. We use visual attention entropy as a control signal to dynamically allocate attention according to task demands. Experiments show that RATION achieves consistent performance gains across diverse reasoning tasks, datasets, and models, providing a clear direction toward more reliable multimodal reasoning.

Harmful memes convey offensive intent through implicit associations between visual symbols and text, requiring a broad understanding of cultural stereotypes and visual metaphors. Small-scale Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lack the knowledge required to identify such implicit hate, whereas Large-scale MLLMs, despite their broader knowledge, exhibit systematic labeling bias. To address these challenges, we propose DR-HM, a Distill-then-Reinforce training framework with cognition-aware data synthesis for harmful meme detection, which aims to transfer knowledge from closed-source models while mitigating their biases. DR-HM introduces a six-step structured data synthesis scheme with self-refinement that decomposes meme analysis into a progressive, human-inspired reasoning process from entity recognition to harmfulness judgment. Based on the synthesized reasoning data, we further adopt a Distill-then-Reinforce training strategy. This approach combines a two-stage Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with an Adaptive Group Relative Policy Optimization (A-GRPO) algorithm, which incorporates class-ratio-aware reward weighting and dynamic KL coefficients. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves an accuracy of 84.7% on the FHM dataset, approaching the reported performance of human annotators.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has become a popular alternative to Full-Parameter Fine-Tuning (FFT), achieving similar performance on many benchmarks with far lower computational and memory costs. Yet, its effectiveness on complex tasks such as reasoning and instruction-following remains unclear. In this work, we provide a theoretical and empirical comparison of PEFT and FFT in terms of representational capacity and robustness. We show that PEFT’s solution space is a strict subset of FFT’s and derive upper bounds revealing how its restricted parameterization limits expressiveness and increases vulnerability to perturbations. Experiments on 20 datasets and 11 adversarial test sets support these findings, indicating that while PEFT performs well on standard tasks, its weaknesses on complex and adversarial settings call for new directions beyond current PEFT paradigms.The source code is in the anonymous GitHub repository[https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PEFTEval-E2AC ].

Argumentation generation has attracted substantial research interest due to its central role in human reasoning and decision-making. However, most existing argumentative corpora focus on non-interactive, single-turn settings, either generating arguments from a given topic or refuting an existing argument. In practice, however, argumentation is often realized as multi-turn dialogue, where speakers defend their stances and employ diverse argumentative strategies to strengthen persuasiveness. To support deeper modeling of argumentation dialogue, we present the first large-scale Strategic Argumentative Dialogue dataset, SAD, consisting of 392,822 examples. Grounded in argumentation theories, we annotate each utterance with five strategy types, allowing multiple strategies per utterance. Unlike prior datasets, SAD requires models to generate contextually appropriate arguments conditioned on the dialogue history, a specified stance on the topic, and targeted argumentation strategies. We further benchmark a range of pretrained generative models on SAD and present in-depth analysis of strategy usage patterns in argumentation.

Triple-based Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (iRAG) mitigates document-level noise for multi-hop question answering. However, existing methods still face limitations: (i) greedy single-path expansion, which propagates early errors and fails to capture parallel evidence from different reasoning branches, and (ii) granularity–demand mismatch, where a single evidence representation struggles to balance noise control with contextual sufficiency. In this paper, we propose the Construction–Integration Retrieval and Adaptive Generation model, CIRAG. It introduces an Iterative Construction–Integration module that constructs candidate triples and history-conditionally integrates them to distill core triples and generate the next-hop query. This module mitigates the greedy trap by preserving multiple plausible evidence chains. Besides, to address the granularity–demand mismatch, we propose an Adaptive Cascaded Multi-Granularity Generation module that progressively expands contextual evidence based on the problem requirements, from triples to supporting sentences and full passages. Moreover, we introduce Trajectory Distillation, which distills the teacher model’s integration policy into a lightweight student, enabling efficient and reliable long-horizon reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIRAG achieves superior performance compared to existing iRAG methods.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, a phenomenon in which redundant reasoning steps are generated after a correct solution has already been reached. Existing early reasoning exit methods primarily rely on output-level heuristics or trained probing models to skip redundant reasoning steps, thereby mitigating overthinking. However, these approaches typically require additional rollout computation or externally labeled datasets. In this paper, we propose NEAT, a Neuron-based Early reAsoning exiT framework that monitors neuron-level activation dynamics to enable training-free early exits, without introducing any additional test-time computation. NEAT identifies exit-associated neurons and tracks their activation patterns during reasoning to dynamically trigger early exit or suppress reflection, thereby reducing unnecessary reasoning while preserving solution quality. Experiments on four reasoning benchmarks across six models with different scales and architectures show that, for each model, NEAT achieves an average token reduction of 22% to 28% when averaged over the four benchmarks, while maintaining accuracy.

Existing fraud detection methods predominantly rely on transcribed text, suffering from ASR errors and missing crucial acoustic cues like vocal tone and environmental context. This limits their effectiveness against complex deceptive strategies. To address these challenges, we first propose **SAFE-QAQ**, an end-to-end comprehensive framework for audio-based slow-thinking fraud detection. First, the SAFE-QAQ framework eliminates the impact of transcription errors on detection performance. Secondly, we propose rule-based slow-thinking reward mechanisms that systematically guide the system to identify fraud-indicative patterns by accurately capturing fine-grained audio details, through hierarchical reasoning processes. Besides, our framework introduces a dynamic risk assessment framework during live calls, enabling early detection and prevention of fraud. Experiments on the TeleAntiFraud-Bench demonstrate that SAFE-QAQ achieves dramatic improvements over existing methods in multiple key dimensions, including accuracy, inference efficiency, and real-time processing capabilities. Currently deployed and analyzing over 70,000 calls daily, SAFE-QAQ effectively automates complex fraud detection, reducing human workload and financial losses. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SAFE-QAQ.

Current approaches for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) primarily leverage the knowledge and reasoning capabilities of parameter-heavy (Multimodal) LLMs for classification, overlooking autonomous multimodal sentiment reasoning generation in resource-constrained environments.In this paper, we focus on the Resource-Limited Joint Multimodal Sentiment Reasoning and Classification task, JMSRC, which simultaneously performs multimodal sentiment reasoning chain generation and sentiment classification only with a lightweight model.We propose a Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Distillation model, MulCoT-RD, designed for JMSRC that employs a "Teacher-Assistant-Student" distillation paradigm to address deployment constraints in resource-limited environments.We first leverage a high-performance Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to generate the initial reasoning dataset and train a medium-sized assistant model with a multi-task learning mechanism. A lightweight student model is jointly trained to perform efficient multimodal sentiment reasoning generation and classification.Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that MulCoT-RD with only 3B parameters and achieves strong performance on JMSRC, while exhibiting robust generalization and enhanced interpretability.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis aims to integrate information from various modalities to make complementary predictions. However, it often struggles with irrelevant or misleading visual and auditory information. Most existing approaches treat entire modality as an independent unit for feature enhancement or denoising, which often suppresses redundant noise at the cost of weakening critical information. To address this challenge, we propose MoLAN, a unified ModaLity-aware noise dynAmic editiNg framework. Specifically, MoLAN performs modality-aware block partitioning by dividing the features of each modality into multiple blocks. Each block is then dynamically assigned a distinct denoising strength based on its noise level and semantic relevance, enabling fine-grained noise suppression while preserving essential multimodal information. Notably, MoLAN is a unified and flexible framework that can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of multimodal models. Building upon this framework, we further introduce MoLAN+, a new multimodal sentiment analysis approach. Experiments across five models and four datasets demonstrate the broad effectiveness of the MoLAN framework. Extensive evaluations show that MoLAN+ achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Multi-turn, long-horizon tasks are increasingly common for large language models (LLMs), but solving them typically requires many sequential model invocations, accumulating substantial inference costs. Here, we study cost-aware multi-turn LLM routing: selecting which model to invoke at each turn from a model pool, given a fixed cost budget. We propose MTRouter, which encodes the interaction history and candidate models into joint history–model embeddings, and learns an outcome estimator from logged trajectories to predict turn-level model utility. Experiments show that MTRouter improves the performance–cost trade-off: on ScienceWorld, it surpasses GPT-5 while reducing total cost by 58.7%; on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), it achieves competitive accuracy while reducing total cost by 43.4% relative to GPT-5, and these gains even carry over to held-out tasks. Further analyses reveal several mechanisms underlying its effectiveness: relative to prior multi-turn routers, MTRouter makes fewer model switches, is more tolerant to transient errors, and exhibits emergent specialization across models.Code: https://github.com/ZhangYiqun018/MTRouter

Model merging dramatically reduces storage and computational resources by combining multiple expert models into a single multi-task model. However, existing methods struggle to maintain performance gains as the number of merged models increases. In this paper, we investigate the key obstacles that limit the scalability of model merging. We prove that the limited effective parameter space imposes a strict constraint on the number of models that can be successfully merged. Through Gaussian Width analysis, we show that marginal benefits diminish according to a strictly concave function as more models are merged. Using Approximate Kinematics Theory, we further prove the existence of a unique optimal threshold beyond which additional models yield negligible improvements. To address this limitation, we propose a straightforward Reparameterized Heavy-Tailed method to extend the merged model’s coverage and enhance performance. Empirical results on 19 benchmarks, including both knowledge-intensive and general-purpose tasks, validate our theoretical analysis. We believe that these results spark further research beyond the current scope of model merging.

Videos are unique in their integration of temporal elements, including camera, scene, action, and attribute, along with their dynamic relationships over time. However, existing benchmarks for video understanding often treat these properties separately or narrowly focus on specific aspects, overlooking the holistic nature of video content. To address this, we introduce TUNA, a temporal-oriented benchmark for fine-grained understanding on dense dynamic videos, with two complementary tasks: captioning and QA. Our TUNA features diverse video scenarios and dynamics, assisted by interpretable and robust evaluation criteria. We evaluate several leading models on our benchmark, providing fine-grained performance assessments across various dimensions. This evaluation reveals key challenges in video temporal understanding, such as limited action description, inadequate multi-subject understanding, and insensitivity to camera motion, offering valuable insights for improving video understanding models.

Current conversational recommendation systems focus predominantly on text. However, real-world recommendation settings are generally multimodal, causing a significant gap between existing research and practical applications. To address this issue, we propose Muse, the first multimodal conversational recommendation dataset. Muse comprises 83,148 utterances from 7,000 conversations centered around the Clothing domain. Each conversation contains comprehensive multimodal interactions, rich elements, and natural dialogues. Data in Muse are automatically synthesized by a multi-agent framework powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It innovatively derives user profiles from real-world scenarios rather than depending on manual design and history data for better scalability, and then it fulfills conversation simulation and optimization. Both human and LLM evaluations demonstrate the high quality of conversations in Muse. Additionally, fine-tuning experiments on three MLLMs demonstrate Muse’s learnable patterns for recommendations and responses, confirming its value for multimodal conversational recommendation. Our dataset and codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Muse-0086.

Constrained by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in AI-driven mental health, researchers develop LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) with tailored configurations, such as profiles, symptoms, and scenarios, to simulate seekers. While these efforts advance AI in mental health, achieving more realistic seeker simulation remains hindered by two key challenges: dynamic evolution and multi-session memory. Seekers’ mental states often fluctuate during counseling, which typically spans multiple sessions. To address this, we propose **AnnaAgent**, an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory. AnnaAgent incorporates an emotion modulator and a complaint elicitor trained on real counseling dialogues, enabling dynamic control of the simulator’s configurations. Additionally, its tertiary memory mechanism effectively integrates short-term and long-term memory across sessions. Evaluation results, both automated and manual, demonstrate that AnnaAgent achieves more realistic seeker simulation in psychological counseling compared to existing baselines. The ethically reviewed and screened code can be found on [https://github.com/sci-m-wang/AnnaAgent](https://github.com/sci-m-wang/AnnaAgent).

Empathetic conversation is a crucial characteristic in daily conversations between individuals. Nowadays, Large Language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance in generating empathetic responses. Knowledge bases like COMET can assist LLMs in mitigating illusions and enhancing the understanding of users’ intentions and emotions. However, models remain heavily reliant on fixed knowledge bases and unrestricted incorporation of external knowledge can introduce noise. Tool learning is a flexible end-to-end approach that assists LLMs in handling complex problems. In this paper, we propose Emotional Knowledge Tool Calling (EKTC) framework, which encapsulates the commonsense knowledge bases as empathetic tools, enabling LLMs to integrate external knowledge flexibly through tool calling. In order to adapt the models to the new task, we construct a novel dataset TOOL-ED based on the EMPATHETICDIALOGUE (ED) dataset. We validate EKTC on the ED dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate that our framework can enhance the ability of LLMs to generate empathetic responses effectively. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EKTC-3FEF.

Existing visual perception systems focus on region-level segmentation in single-turn dialogues, relying on complex and explicit query instructions. Such systems cannot reason at the pixel level and comprehend dynamic user intent that changes over interaction. Our work tackles this issue by introducing a novel task, Pixel-level Reasoning Segmentation (Pixel-level RS) based on multi-turn conversations, tracking evolving user intent via multi-turn interactions for fine-grained segmentation. To establish a benchmark for this novel task, we build a Pixel-level ReasonIng Segmentation Dataset Based on Multi-Turn Conversations (PRIST), comprising 24k utterances from 8.3k multi-turn conversational scenarios with segmentation targets. Building on PRIST, we further propose MIRAS, a Multi-turn Interactive ReAsoning Segmentation framework, integrates pixel-level segmentation with robust multi-turn conversation understanding, generating pixel-grounded explanations aligned with user intent. The PRIST dataset and MIRSA framework fill the gap in pixel-level reasoning segmentation. Experimental results on the PRIST dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms current segmentation-specific baselines in terms of segmentation and LLM-based reasoning metrics. The code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PixelRS/.

The rapid development and increasingly widespread applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) have made the safety issues of LLMs more prominent and critical. Although safety training is widely used in LLMs, the mismatch between pre-training and safety training still leads to safety vulnerabilities. To expose the safety vulnerabilities in LLMs and improve LLMs’ performance in safety, we propose a novel framework, SemanticCamo, which attacks LLMs through semantic camouflage.SemanticCamo bypasses safety guardrails by replacing the original unsafe content with semantic features, thereby concealing malicious intent while keeping the query’s objectives unchanged. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5, finding that SemanticCamo successfully induces harmful responses from the target models in over 80% of cases on average, outperforming previous counterparts. Additionally, the performance of SemanticCamo against various defenses is evaluated, demonstrating that semantic transformations introduce critical challenges to LLM safety, necessitating targeted alignment strategies to address this vulnerability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Jihui-Yan/SemanticCamo.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their further evolution is often hampered by the scarcity of high-quality training data and the heavy reliance of traditional methods on expert-labeled data. This reliance sets a ceiling on LLM performance and is particularly challenging in low data resource scenarios where extensive supervision is unavailable. To address this issue, we propose a novel paradigm named LANCE (**LAN**guage models as **C**ontinuous self-**E**volving data engineers) that enables LLMs to train themselves by autonomously generating, cleaning, reviewing, and annotating data with preference information. Our approach demonstrates that LLMs can serve as continuous self-evolving data engineers, significantly reducing the time and cost of post-training data construction. Through iterative fine-tuning on Qwen2 series models, we validate the effectiveness of LANCE across various tasks, showing that it can maintain high-quality data generation and continuously improve model performance. Across multiple benchmark dimensions, LANCE results in an average score enhancement of **3.64** for Qwen2-7B and **1.75** for Qwen2-7B-Instruct. This autonomous data construction paradigm not only lessens reliance on human experts or external models but also ensures data aligns with human preferences, offering a scalable path for LLM self-improvement, especially in contexts with limited supervisory data. Code is available at: https://github.com/Control-derek/LANCE.

Role-oriented dialogue summarization aims at generating summaries for different roles in dialogue, e.g., user and agent. Interaction between different roles is vital for the task. Existing methods could not fully capture interaction patterns between roles when encoding dialogue, thus are prone to ignore the interaction-related key information. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning based interaction-aware model for the role-oriented dialogue summarization namely CIAM. An interaction-aware contrastive objective is constructed to guide the encoded dialogue representation to learn role-level interaction. The representation is then used by the decoder to generate role-oriented summaries. The contrastive objective is trained jointly with the primary dialogue summarization task. Additionally, we innovatively utilize different decoder start tokens to control what kind of summary to generate, thus could generate different role-oriented summaries with a unified model. Experimental results show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on two public datasets. Extensive analyses further demonstrate that our method excels at capturing interaction information between different roles and producing informative summaries.

Recently, we have witnessed a significant performance boosting for dialogue response selection task achieved by Cross-Encoder based models. However, such models directly feed the concatenation of context and response into the pre-trained model for interactive inference, ignoring the comprehensively independent representation modeling of context and response. Moreover, randomly sampling negative responses from other dialogue contexts is simplistic, and the learned models have poor generalization capability in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a response selection model called BERT-BC that combines the representation-based Bi-Encoder and interaction-based Cross-Encoder. Three contrastive learning methods are devised for the Bi-Encoder to align context and response to obtain the better semantic representation. Meanwhile, according to the alignment difficulty of context and response semantics, the harder samples are dynamically selected from the same batch with negligible cost and sent to Cross-Encoder to enhance the model’s interactive reasoning ability. Experimental results show that BERT-BC can achieve state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets for multi-turn response selection.

Empathetic response generation aims to understand the user’s feelings emotionally and generate responses with appropriate emotion. According to psychological theories, empathy consists of two main aspects: affection and cognition. However, existing works lack the perception of fine-grained dialogue emotion propagation, as well as have limitations in reasoning about the intentions of users on cognition, which affect the quality of empathetic response. To this end, we propose to generate Empathetic response based on in-context Commonsense reasoning and Reinforcement Learning (EmpCRL). First, we use a current popular large language model combined with multi-view contextual reasoning to broaden the cognitive boundaries through in-context learning. Furthermore, we infer the response emotion by jointly modeling the dialogue history and emotion flow, and achieve the control of response emotion and diversity through reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments on EmpatheticDialogues dataset show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluation.

Stickers, while widely recognized for enhancing empathetic communication in online interactions, remain underexplored in current empathetic dialogue research, notably due to the challenge of a lack of comprehensive datasets. In this paper, we introduce the Agent for STICKERCONV (Agent4SC), which uses collaborative agent interactions to realistically simulate human behavior with sticker usage, thereby enhancing multimodal empathetic communication. Building on this foundation, we develop a multimodal empathetic dialogue dataset, STICKERCONV, comprising 12.9K dialogue sessions, 5.8K unique stickers, and 2K diverse conversational scenarios. This dataset serves as a benchmark for multimodal empathetic generation. To advance further, we propose PErceive and Generate Stickers (PEGS), a multimodal empathetic response generation framework, complemented by a comprehensive set of empathy evaluation metrics based on LLM. Our experiments demonstrate PEGS’s effectiveness in generating contextually relevant and emotionally resonant multimodal empathetic responses, contributing to the advancement of more nuanced and engaging empathetic dialogue systems.

Full-parameter fine-tuning (FPFT) has become the go-to choice for adapting language models (LMs) to downstream tasks due to its excellent performance. As LMs grow in size, fine-tuning the full parameters of LMs requires a prohibitively large amount of GPU memory. Existing approaches utilize zeroth-order optimizer to conserve GPU memory, which potentially compromises the performance of LMs as non-zero order optimizers tend to converge more readily on most downstream tasks. We propose a novel, memory-efficient, optimizer-independent, end-to-end hierarchical fine-tuning strategy, HiFT, which only updates a subset of parameters at each training step. HiFT significantly reduces the amount of gradients and optimizer state parameters residing in GPU memory at the same time, thereby reducing GPU memory usage. Our results demonstrate that: (1) HiFT achieves comparable performance with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and standard FPFT. (2) Results on six models show that HiFT reduces the number of trainable parameters by about 89.18% on average compared to FPFT. (3) HiFT supports FPFT of 7B models for 24G GPU memory devices under mixed precision without using any memory saving techniques. (4) HiFT supports various optimizers including AdamW, AdaGrad, SGD, etc. The source code link is https://github.com/misonsky/HiFT.

Responding with multimodal content has been recognized as one of the essential functionalities of intelligent conversational agents. However, existing research on multimodal dialogues primarily focuses on two topics: (1) textual response generation that ground the conversation on a given image; and (2) visual response selection based on the dialogue context. In light of the aforementioned gap, we propose mulTImodal GEnerator for dialogue Response (TIGER), a unified generative model framework for multimodal dialogue response generation. Through extensive experiments, TIGER has demonstrated new state-of-the-art results, providing users with an enhanced conversational experience. A multimodal dialogue system based on TIGER is available at https://github.com/friedrichor/TIGER. A video demonstrating the system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kd0CMwDs8Rk.

We investigate response generation for multi-turn dialogue in generative chatbots. Existing generative modelsbased on RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) usually employ the last hidden state to summarize the history, which makesmodels unable to capture the subtle variability observed in different dialogues and cannot distinguish the differencesbetween dialogues that are similar in composition. In this paper, we propose Pseudo-Variational Gated Recurrent Unit (PVGRU). The key novelty of PVGRU is a recurrent summarizing variable thataggregates the accumulated distribution variations of subsequences. We train PVGRU without relying on posterior knowledge, thus avoiding the training-inference inconsistency problem. PVGRU can perceive subtle semantic variability through summarizing variables that are optimized by two objectives we employ for training: distribution consistency and reconstruction. In addition, we build a Pseudo-Variational Hierarchical Dialogue(PVHD) model based on PVGRU. Experimental results demonstrate that PVGRU can broadly improve the diversity andrelevance of responses on two benchmark datasets.

We have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal data on numerous social media platforms. Conventional studies typically require massive labeled data to train models for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA). However, collecting and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for MABSA is tough. To alleviate the above issue, we perform three MABSA-related tasks with quite a small number of labeled multimodal samples. We first build diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets according to the data distribution. To capture the specific prompt for each aspect term in a few-shot scenario, we propose a novel Generative Multimodal Prompt (GMP) model for MABSA, which includes the Multimodal Encoder module and the N-Stream Decoders module. We further introduce a subtask to predict the number of aspect terms in each instance to construct the multimodal prompt. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines on two MABSA-related tasks in the few-shot setting.

With the evolution of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), new entities emerge which are not seen before. Representation learning of KGs in such an inductive setting aims to capture and transfer the structural patterns from existing entities to new entities. However, the performance of existing methods in inductive KGs are limited by sparsity and implicit transfer. In this paper, we propose VMCL, a Contrastive Learning (CL) framework with graph guided Variational autoencoder on Meta-KGs in the inductive setting. We first propose representation generation to capture the encoded and generated representations of entities, where the generated variations can densify representations with complementary features. Then, we design two CL objectives that work across entities and meta-KGs to simulate the transfer mode. With extensive experiments we demonstrate that our proposed VMCL can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art baselines.

Building dialogue generation systems in a zero-shot scenario remains a huge challenge, since the typical zero-shot approaches in dialogue generation rely heavily on large-scale pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-3 and T5. The research on zero-shot dialogue generation without cumbersome language models is limited due to lacking corresponding parallel dialogue corpora. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Multilingual learning framework for Zero-shot Dialogue Generation (dubbed as MulZDG) that can effectively transfer knowledge from an English corpus with large-scale training samples to a non-English corpus with zero samples. Besides, MulZDG can be viewed as a multilingual data augmentation method to improve the performance of the resource-rich language. First, we construct multilingual code-switching dialogue datasets via translation utterances randomly selected from monolingual English datasets. Then we employ MulZDG to train a unified multilingual dialogue model based on the code-switching datasets. The MulZDG can conduct implicit semantic alignment between different languages. Experiments on DailyDialog and DSTC7 datasets demonstrate that MulZDG not only achieve competitive performance under zero-shot case compared to training with sufficient examples but also greatly improve the performance of the source language.

Sentiment analysis has always been an important research direction in natural language processing. The research can be divided into explicit sentiment analysis and implicit sentiment analysis according to whether there are sentiment words in language expression. There have been many research results in explicit sentiment analysis. However, implicit sentiment analysis is rarely studied. Compared with explicit sentiment expression, implicit sentiment expression usually omits a lot of knowledge and common sense, and context also has an important impact on implicit sentiment expression. In this paper, we use a knowledge graph to supplement implicit sentiment expression and propose a novel Implicit Sentiment Analysis model combining Knowledge enhancement and Context features (dubbed KC-ISA). The KC-ISA model can effectively integrate external knowledge and contextual features by the coattention mechanism. Finally, we conduct experiments on the SMP2019 implicit sentiment analysis dataset. Moreover, to verify the generality of the model, we also conduct experiments on two common sentiment analysis datasets. The results on three datasets show that our proposed KC-ISA model can achieve better results on text sentiment analysis.

Sparsity of formal knowledge and roughness of non-ontological construction make sparsity problem particularly prominent in Open Knowledge Graphs (OpenKGs). Due to sparse links, learning effective representation for few-shot entities becomes difficult. We hypothesize that by introducing negative samples, a contrastive learning (CL) formulation could be beneficial in such scenarios. However, existing CL methods model KG triplets as binary objects of entities ignoring the relation-guided ternary propagation patterns and they are too generic, i.e., they ignore zero-shot, few-shot and synonymity problems that appear in OpenKGs. To address this, we propose TernaryCL, a CL framework based on ternary propagation patterns among head, relation and tail. TernaryCL designs Contrastive Entity and Contrastive Relation to mine ternary discriminative features with both negative entities and relations, introduces Contrastive Self to help zero- and few-shot entities learn discriminative features, Contrastive Synonym to model synonymous entities, and Contrastive Fusion to aggregate graph features from multiple paths. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of TernaryCL over state-of-the-art models.

Current end-to-end retrieval-based dialogue systems are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Networks or Transformers with attention mechanisms. Although promising results have been achieved, these models often suffer from slow inference or huge number of parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight fully convolutional architecture, called DialogConv, for response selection. DialogConv is exclusively built on top of convolution to extract matching features of context and response. Dialogues are modeled in 3D views, where DialogConv performs convolution operations on embedding view, word view and utterance view to capture richer semantic information from multiple contextual views. On the four benchmark datasets, compared with state-of-the-art baselines, DialogConv is on average about 8.5x smaller in size, and 79.39x and 10.64x faster on CPU and GPU devices, respectively. At the same time, DialogConv achieves the competitive effectiveness of response selection.

In an open-domain dialogue system, the consistent persona is a key factor to generate real and coherent dialogues. Existing methods suffer from the incomprehensive persona tags that have unique and obscure meanings to describe human’s personality. Besides, the addressee information, which is closely related to express personality in multi-party dialogues, has been neglected. In this paper, we construct a multi-party personalized dialogue dataset and propose a graph convolution network model (PersonaTKG) with addressee selecting mechanism that integrates personas, dialogue utterances, and external text knowledge in a unified graph. Extensive experiments have shown that PersonaTKG outperforms the baselines by large margins and effectively improves persona consistency in the generated responses.

With the popularity of smartphones, we have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal posts on various social media platforms. We observe that the multimodal sentiment expression has specific global characteristics, such as the interdependencies of objects or scenes within the image. However, most previous studies only considered the representation of a single image-text post and failed to capture the global co-occurrence characteristics of the dataset. In this paper, we propose Multi-channel Graph Neural Networks with Sentiment-awareness (MGNNS) for image-text sentiment detection. Specifically, we first encode different modalities to capture hidden representations. Then, we introduce multi-channel graph neural networks to learn multimodal representations based on the global characteristics of the dataset. Finally, we implement multimodal in-depth fusion with the multi-head attention mechanism to predict the sentiment of image-text pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on three publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for multimodal sentiment detection.

In conversational machine comprehension, it has become one of the research hotspots integrating conversational history information through question reformulation for obtaining better answers. However, the existing question reformulation models are trained only using supervised question labels annotated by annotators without considering any feedback information from answers. In this paper, we propose a novel Answer-Supervised Question Reformulation (ASQR) model for enhancing conversational machine comprehension with reinforcement learning technology. ASQR utilizes a pointer-copy-based question reformulation model as an agent, takes an action to predict the next word, and observes a reward for the whole sentence state after generating the end-of-sequence token. The experimental results on QuAC dataset prove that our ASQR model is more effective in conversational machine comprehension. Moreover, pretraining is essential in reinforcement learning models, so we provide a high-quality annotated dataset for question reformulation by sampling a part of QuAC dataset.

Generating intriguing question is a key step towards building human-like open-domain chatbots. Although some recent works have focused on this task, compared with questions raised by humans, significant gaps remain in maintaining semantic coherence with post, which may result in generating dull or deviated questions. We observe that the answer has strong semantic coherence to its question and post, which can be used to guide question generation. Thus, we devise two methods to further enhance semantic coherence between post and question under the guidance of answer. First, the coherence score between generated question and answer is used as the reward function in a reinforcement learning framework, to encourage the cases that are consistent with the answer in semantic. Second, we incorporate adversarial training to explicitly control question generation in the direction of question-answer coherence. Extensive experiments show that our two methods outperform state-of-the-art baseline algorithms with large margins in raising semantic coherent questions.

Sentiment expression in microblog posts can be affected by user’s personal character, opinion bias, political stance and so on. Most of existing personalized microblog sentiment classification methods suffer from the insufficiency of discriminative tweets for personalization learning. We observed that microblog users have consistent individuality and opinion bias in different languages. Based on this observation, in this paper we propose a novel user-attention-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model with adversarial cross-lingual learning framework. The user attention mechanism is leveraged in CNN model to capture user’s language-specific individuality from the posts. Then the attention-based CNN model is incorporated into a novel adversarial cross-lingual learning framework, in which with the help of user properties as bridge between languages, we can extract the language-specific features and language-independent features to enrich the user post representation so as to alleviate the data insufficiency problem. Results on English and Chinese microblog datasets confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline algorithms with large margins.

Emotion cause analysis has been a key topic in natural language processing. Existing methods ignore the contexts around the emotion word which can provide an emotion cause clue. Meanwhile, the clauses in a document play different roles on stimulating a certain emotion, depending on their content relevance. Therefore, we propose a co-attention neural network model for emotion cause analysis with emotional context awareness. The method encodes the clauses with a co-attention based bi-directional long short-term memory into high-level input representations, which are further fed into a convolutional layer for emotion cause analysis. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods.