Humor, requiring creativity and contextual understanding, is a hallmark of human intelligence, showcasing adaptability across linguistic scenarios. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning on various benchmarks, it remains unclear whether they truly adapt to new tasks like humans (i.e., generalize) or merely replicate memorized content. To explore this, we introduce Phunny, a new humor-based question-answering benchmark designed to assess LLMs’ reasoning through carefully crafted puns. Our dataset is manually curated to ensure novelty and minimize data contamination, providing a robust evaluation of LLMs’ linguistic comprehension. Experiments on pun comprehension, resolution, and generation reveal that most LLMs struggle with generalization, even on simple tasks, consistently underperforming the human baseline. Additionally, our detailed error analysis provides valuable insights to guide future research.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong mathematical reasoning abilities, even in visual contexts, with some models surpassing human performance on existing benchmarks. However, these benchmarks lack structured age categorization, clearly defined skill requirements, and—crucially—were not designed to assess human performance in international competitions. To address these limitations, we introduce MathGames, a new benchmark of 2,183 high-quality mathematical problems (both text-only and multimodal) in an open-ended format, sourced from an international mathematical games championships. Spanning seven age groups and a skill-based taxonomy, MathGames enables a structured evaluation of LLMs’ mathematical and logical reasoning abilities. Our experiments reveal a substantial gap between state-of-the-art LLMs and human participants—even 11-year-olds consistently outperform some of the strongest models—highlighting the need for advancements. Further, our detailed error analysis offers valuable insights to guide future research. The data is publicly available at https://disi-unibo-nlp.github.io/math-games.

Computational fact-checking (FC) relies on supervised models to verify claims based on given evidence, requiring a resource-intensive process to annotate large volumes of training data. We introduce Unown, a novel framework that generates training instances for FC systems automatically using both textual and tabular content. Unown selects relevant evidence and generates supporting and refuting claims with advanced negation artifacts. Designed to be flexible, Unown accommodates various strategies for evidence selection and claim generation, offering unparalleled adaptability. We comprehensively evaluate Unown on both text-only and table+text benchmarks, including Feverous, SciFact, and MMFC, a new multi-modal FC dataset. Our results prove that Unown examples are of comparable quality to expert-labeled data, even enabling models to achieve up to 5% higher accuracy. The code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/unown

Scientific document summarization aims to condense complex and long articles in both technical and plain-language terms to facilitate the accessibility and dissemination of scientific findings. Existing datasets suffer from a deficiency in source heterogeneity, as their data predominantly stem from a single common resource, hindering effective model training and generalizability. First, we introduce SciLay, a novel dataset that includes documents from multiple natural science journals with expert-authored technical and lay summaries. Second, we propose PrunePert, a new transformer-based model that incorporates a differentiable perturbed top-k encoder layer to prune irrelevant tokens in end-to-end learning. Experimental results show that our model achieves a nearly 2x speed-up compared to a state-of-the-art linear transformer, remaining comparable in effectiveness. Additional examinations underscore the importance of employing a training dataset that includes different sources to enhance the generalizability of the models. Code is available at https://github.com/disi-unibo-nlp/sci-lay.

Although current state-of-the-art Transformer-based solutions succeeded in a wide range for single-document NLP tasks, they still struggle to address multi-input tasks such as multi-document summarization. Many solutions truncate the inputs, thus ignoring potential summary-relevant contents, which is unacceptable in the medical domain where each information can be vital. Others leverage linear model approximations to apply multi-input concatenation, worsening the results because all information is considered, even if it is conflicting or noisy with respect to a shared background. Despite the importance and social impact of medicine, there are no ad-hoc solutions for multi-document summarization. For this reason, we propose a novel discriminative marginalized probabilistic method (DAMEN) trained to discriminate critical information from a cluster of topic-related medical documents and generate a multi-document summary via token probability marginalization. Results prove we outperform the previous state-of-the-art on a biomedical dataset for multi-document summarization of systematic literature reviews. Moreover, we perform extensive ablation studies to motivate the design choices and prove the importance of each module of our method.