Social agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can simulate human social behaviors but fall short in handling complex social dialogues. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various agent tasks. However, standard DPO focuses solely on individual turns, which limits its effectiveness in multi-turn social interactions. Several DPO-based multi-turn alignment methods with session-level data have shown potential in addressing this problem. While these methods consider multiple turns across entire sessions, they are often overly coarse-grained, introducing training noise, and lack robust theoretical support. To resolve these limitations, we propose Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO), which dynamically select key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. SDPO minimizes training noise and is grounded in a rigorous theoretical framework. Evaluations on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SDPO-tuned agents consistently outperform both existing DPO-based methods and proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o, underscoring SDPO’s potential to advance the social intelligence of LLM-based agents. We release our code and data at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SDPO-CE8F.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT. However, developing robust ASR models for young children’s speech remains challenging due to differences in pronunciation, tone, and pace compared to adult speech. In this paper, we introduce a new Mandarin speech dataset focused on children aged 3 to 5, addressing the scarcity of resources in this area. The dataset comprises 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. We provide a comprehensive analysis of speaker demographics, speech duration distribution and geographic coverage. Additionally, we evaluate ASR performance on models trained from scratch, such as Conformer, as well as fine-tuned pre-trained models like HuBERT and Whisper, where fine-tuning demonstrates significant performance improvements. Furthermore, we assess speaker verification (SV) on our dataset, showing that, despite the challenges posed by the unique vocal characteristics of young children, the dataset effectively supports both ASR and SV tasks. This dataset is a valuable contribution to Mandarin child speech research and holds potential for applications in educational technology and child-computer interaction. It will be open-source and freely available for all academic purposes.

Modern large language models (LLMs) exhibit a remarkable capacity for role-playing, enabling them to embody not only human characters but also non-human entities. This versatility allows them to simulate complex human-like interactions and behaviors within various contexts, as well as to emulate specific objects or systems. While these capabilities have enhanced user engagement and introduced novel modes of interaction, the influence of role-playing on LLMs’ reasoning abilities remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a strategically designed role-play prompting methodology and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting across twelve diverse reasoning benchmarks. Our empirical results illustrate that role-play prompting consistently surpasses the standard zero-shot approach across most datasets. Notably, in experiments conducted using ChatGPT, accuracy on AQuA rises from 53.5% to 63.8%, and on Last Letter from 23.8% to 84.2%. Upon further comparison with the Zero-Shot-CoT technique, which prompts the model to “think step by step”, our study demonstrates that role-play prompting acts as a more effective trigger for the CoT process.This highlights its potential to augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We release our code at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/Role-Play-Prompting.

The keyphrase extraction task refers to the automatic selection of phrases from a given document to summarize its core content. State-of-the-art (SOTA) performance has recently been achieved by embedding-based algorithms, which rank candidates according to how similar their embeddings are to document embeddings. However, such solutions either struggle with the document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model (PLM) without further fine-tuning. To this end, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised approach, PromptRank, based on the PLM with an encoder-decoder architecture. Specifically, PromptRank feeds the document into the encoder and calculates the probability of generating the candidate with a designed prompt by the decoder. We extensively evaluate the proposed PromptRank on six widely used benchmarks. PromptRank outperforms the SOTA approach MDERank, improving the F1 score relatively by 34.18%, 24.87%, and 17.57% for 5, 10, and 15 returned results, respectively. This demonstrates the great potential of using prompt for unsupervised keyphrase extraction. We release our code at https://github.com/HLT-NLP/PromptRank.