Event prediction plays a critical role in high-stakes applications such as military operations, public safety, and healthcare. Current methods learn temporal knowledge graphs to predict events at future timestamps, and the predictions directly influence decision-making and resource allocation. However, these methods lack rigorous uncertainty quantification, which limits their reliability for decision-making, especially in high-stakes scenarios where the cost of errors is high. In this paper, we propose CFEP, a conformal prediction framework tailored for event prediction to address this challenge. This is achieved through end-to-end optimization that ensures coverage while improving efficiency. Specifically, we first introduce non-conformity score diffusion, which captures both topological and temporal uncertainty in temporal knowledge graphs. Additionally, we propose an efficiency-aware optimization algorithm to reduce the coverage gap and improve computational efficiency. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently guarantees statistical coverage while improving efficiency. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/hucheng-IIE/CFEP.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions, but outcome-level rewards often leave reasoning traces weakly grounded and difficult to audit. Under noisy retrieval, models may exhibit right-answer-wrong-reason failures, where the final answer is correct but the supporting rationale exploits shortcuts or unsupported evidence. We therefore ask whether faithfulness-guided alignment hurts answer accuracy in post-retrieval reasoning. To study this question, we propose CRAFT (Calibrated Reasoning with Answer-Faithful Traces), a reinforcement learning framework for the response-generation stage of retrieval-augmented multi-hop question answering. CRAFT trains models to produce structured reasoning traces with configurable auditability, while combining deterministic rewards for format compliance, answer correctness, and citation validity with a judge-based reward for semantic faithfulness. Experiments across model scales and benchmarks show that CRAFT unlocks task-specific reasoning capacity from 1.5B upward, improving both answer accuracy and Faithfulness; at 0.5B, performance remains sharply template-dependent. At 7B, CRAFT improves Faithfulness over the Base model in all evaluated settings and remains competitive with strong closed-source models. Code is available at https://github.com/Ameame1/CRAFT.

Zero-shot fine-grained emotion recognition (FER) is pivotal for empathetic AI but remains constrained by two inherent limitations in retrieval-augmented in-context learning (ICL): 1) subtle emotional distinctions inject semantic noise that blurs decision boundaries, and 2) naive similarity-based retrieval often surfaces counterproductive or antonymous demonstrations. To address these, we propose EmoDap, a dual-agent prompt retrieval framework for zero-shot FER. EmoDap first constructs a high-quality demonstration pool via self-consistency pseudo-labeling and derives explicit emotion prototypes through contrastive learning. Subsequently, a demonstration retriever and an emotion predictor are jointly optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO): the retriever learns to select examples that maximize the predictor’s accuracy, while the predictor leverages prototype guidance to dynamically filter candidate emotions. Extensive experiments across four benchmarks demonstrate that EmoDap consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a robust paradigm for zero-shot FER driven by open-source LLM backbones.

Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (MSU) comprises multiple subtasks, demanding both incongruity perception and intent reasoning. However, this progress is impeded by two bottlenecks. First, the lack of a unified benchmark for holistic satirical cognition hinders comprehensive evaluation of MSU. Second, jointly modeling these heterogeneous subtasks often leads to feature entanglement. Specifically, while subtasks share a dependence on incongruity, they diverge in granular focus, causing specific execution patterns to erode the fundamental perception capability. To address these challenges, we make two contributions. First, we introduce DocMSU-PLUS, a comprehensive benchmark covering five cognitive dimensions of MSU. All tasks are reformulated into multiple-choice questions (MCQs), enabling a unified accuracy-based evaluation. Second, we propose the Dual Orthogonal Stream Experts (DOSE) framework. DOSE structurally decouples experts into orthogonal shared perception and private execution streams to physically block gradient interference between tasks. Experiments demonstrate that DOSE achieves superior performance on DocMSU-PLUS, effectively balancing general perception with task-specific adaptation.

Current Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) research follows a closed-domain assumption. However, there is no clear consensus on emotion classification in psychology, which presents a challenge for models when it comes to recognizing previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (UERC) task for the first time and propose ProEmoTrans, a solid prototype-based emotion transfer framework. This prototype-based approach shows promise but still faces key challenges: First, implicit expressions complicate emotion definition, which we address by proposing an LLM-enhanced description approach. Second, utterance encoding in long conversations is difficult, which we tackle with a proposed parameter-free mechanism for efficient encoding and overfitting prevention. Finally, the Markovian flow nature of emotions is hard to transfer, which we address with an improved Attention Viterbi Decoding (AVD) method to transfer seen emotion transitions to unseen emotions. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our method serves as a strong baseline for preliminary exploration in this new area.

Multimodal sarcasm detection (MSD) is essential for various downstream tasks. Existing MSD methods tend to rely on spurious correlations. These methods often mistakenly prioritize non-essential features yet still make correct predictions, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments. Regarding this phenomenon, this paper undertakes several initiatives. Firstly, we identify two primary causes that lead to the reliance of spurious correlations. Secondly, we address these challenges by proposing a novel method that integrate Multimodal Incongruities via Contrastive Learning (MICL) for multimodal sarcasm detection. Specifically, we first leverage incongruity to drive multi-view learning from three views: token-patch, entity-object, and sentiment. Then, we introduce extensive data augmentation to mitigate the biased learning of the textual modality. Additionally, we construct a test set, SPMSD, which consists potential spurious correlations to evaluate the the model’s generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MICL on benchmark datasets, along with the analyses showcasing MICL’s advancement in mitigating the effect of spurious correlation.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) aims to answer questions about the visual content of a video. Current methods mainly focus on improving joint representations of video and text. However, these methods pay little attention to the fine-grained semantic interaction between video and text. In this paper, we propose Mulan: a Multi-Level Alignment Model for Video Question Answering, which establishes alignment between visual and textual modalities at the object-level, frame-level, and video-level. Specifically, for object-level alignment, we propose a mask-guided visual feature encoding method and a visual-guided text description method to learn fine-grained spatial information. For frame-level alignment, we introduce the use of visual features from individual frames, combined with a caption generator, to learn overall spatial information within the scene. For video-level alignment, we propose an expandable ordinal prompt for textual descriptions, combined with visual features, to learn temporal information. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, even when utilizing the smallest amount of extra visual-language pre-training data and a reduced number of trainable parameters.

Sentence-level extractive text summarization is substantially a node classification task of network mining, adhering to the informative components and concise representations. There are lots of redundant phrases between extracted sentences, but it is difficult to model them exactly by the general supervised methods. Previous sentence encoders, especially BERT, specialize in modeling the relationship between source sentences. While, they have no ability to consider the overlaps of the target selected summary, and there are inherent dependencies among target labels of sentences. In this paper, we propose HAHSum (as shorthand for Hierarchical Attentive Heterogeneous Graph for Text Summarization), which well models different levels of information, including words and sentences, and spotlights redundancy dependencies between sentences. Our approach iteratively refines the sentence representations with redundancy-aware graph and delivers the label dependencies by message passing. Experiments on large scale benchmark corpus (CNN/DM, NYT, and NEWSROOM) demonstrate that HAHSum yields ground-breaking performance and outperforms previous extractive summarizers.