Event understanding and reasoning play critical roles in thoroughly evaluating the capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs); however, existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets predominantly focus on entity-centric questions, while event- or action-related questions are limited in scale and suffer from significant shortcut issues. We introduce MEUR, the first Multimodal Event Understanding and Reasoning dataset consisting of 1,200 images and 4,217 questions, necessitating VLMs with a diverse range of multimodal understanding and reasoning capabilities to answer, ranging from basic event recognition to more complex tasks such as counting and comparison. To streamline the annotation process, we propose a novel semi-automated pipeline that combines advanced VLMs with human annotators, achieving high quality and efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on state-of-the-art non-thinking and thinking VLMs to demonstrate their capabilities and limitations in multimodal event understanding and reasoning. Furthermore, we provide a detailed error analysis that points out promising directions for future research.

The proliferation of multimedia content necessitates the development of effective Multimedia Event Extraction (M²E²) systems. Though Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong cross-modal capabilities, their utility in the M²E² task remains underexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of representative LVLMs, including DeepSeek-VL2 and the Qwen-VL series, on the M²E² dataset. Our evaluations cover text-only, image-only, and cross-media subtasks, assessed under both few-shot prompting and fine-tuning settings. Our key findings highlight the following valuable insights: (1) Few-shot LVLMs perform notably better on visual tasks but struggle significantly with textual tasks; (2) Fine-tuning LVLMs with LoRA substantially enhances model performance; and (3) LVLMs exhibit strong synergy when combining modalities, achieving superior performance in cross-modal settings. We further provide a detailed error analysis to reveal persistent challenges in areas such as semantic precision, localization, and cross-modal grounding, which remain critical obstacles for advancing M²E² capabilities.

Emotion detection from text is a crucial task in understanding natural language with wide-ranging applications. Existing approaches for multilingual emotion detection from text face challenges with data scarcity across many languages and a lack of interpretability. We propose a novel method that leverages both monolingual and multilingual pre-trained language models to improve performance and interpretability. Our approach involves 1) training a high-performing English monolingual model in parallel with a multilingual model and 2) using knowledge distillation to transfer the emotion detection capabilities from the monolingual teacher to the multilingual student model. Experiments on a multilingual dataset demonstrate significant performance gains for refined multilingual models like XLM-RoBERTa and E5 after distillation. Furthermore, our approach enhances interpretability by enabling better identification of emotion-trigger words. Our work presents a promising direction for building accurate, robust and explainable multilingual emotion detection systems.

Multi-hop question answering (QA) involves finding multiple relevant passages and step-by-step reasoning to answer complex questions, indicating a retrieve-and-read paradigm. However, previous retrievers were customized for two-hop questions, and most of them were trained separately across different hops, resulting in a lack of supervision over the entire multi-hop retrieval process and leading to poor performance in complicated scenarios beyond two hops. In this work, we introduce Beam Retrieval, an end-to-end beam retrieval framework for multi-hop QA. This approach models the multi-hop retrieval process in an end-to-end manner by jointly optimizing an encoder and two classification heads across all hops. Moreover, Beam Retrieval maintains multiple partial hypotheses of relevant passages at each step, expanding the search space and reducing the risk of missing relevant passages. To establish a complete QA system, we incorporate a supervised reader or a large language model (LLM). Experimental results demonstrate that Beam Retrieval achieves a nearly 50% improvement compared with baselines on challenging MuSiQue-Ans, and it also surpasses all previous retrievers on HotpotQA and achieves 99.9% precision on 2WikiMultiHopQA. Providing high-quality context, Beam Retrieval helps our supervised reader achieve new state-of-the-art performance and substantially improves the few-shot QA performance of LLMs.

The Document Set Expansion (DSE) task involves identifying relevant documents from large collections based on a limited set of example documents. Previous research has highlighted Positive and Unlabeled (PU) learning as a promising approach for this task. However, most PU methods rely on the unrealistic assumption of knowing the class prior for positive samples in the collection. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a novel PU learning framework that utilizes intractable density estimation models. Experiments conducted on PubMed and Covid datasets in a transductive setting showcase the effectiveness of the proposed method for DSE. Code is available from https://github.com/Beautifuldog01/Document-set-expansion-puDE.

We introduce MTSwitch, a web-based system for the bidirectional translation between molecules and texts, leveraging various large language models (LLMs). It supports two crucial tasks, including molecule captioning (explaining the properties of a molecule) and molecule generation (designing a molecule based on specific properties). To the best of our knowledge, MTSwitch is currently the first accessible system that allows users to translate between molecular representations and descriptive text contents. The system and a screencast can be found in https://github.com/hanninaa/MTSwitch.

Accurate prediction of stock prices is considered as a significant practical challenge and has been a longstanding topic of debate within the economic domain. In recent years, sentiment analysis on social media comments has been considered an important data source for stock prediction. However, most of these works focus on exploring stocks with high market values or from specific industries. The extent to which sentiments affect a broader range of stocks and their overall performance remains uncertain. In this paper, we study the influence of sentiment analysis on stock price prediction with respect to (1) different market value groups and (2) different Book-to-Market ratio groups in the Chinese stock market. To this end, we create a new dataset that consists of 24 stocks across different market value groups and Book-to-Market ratio categories, along with 12,000 associated comments that have been collected and manually annotated. We then utilized this dataset to train a variety of sentiment classifiers, which were subsequently integrated into sequential neural-based models for stock price prediction. Experimental findings indicate that while sentiment integration generally improve the predictive performance for price prediction, it may not consistently lead to better results for individual stocks. Moreover, these outcomes are notably influenced by varying market values and Book-to-Market ratios, with stocks of higher market values and B/M ratios often exhibiting more accurate predictions. Among all the models tested, the Bi-LSTM model incorporated with the sentiment analysis, achieves the best prediction performance.

“Commonsense reasoning and moral understanding are crucial tasks in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). However, existing research often falls short in terms of faithfulness and informativeness during the reasoning process. We propose a novel framework for performing commonsense reasoning and moral understanding using large language models (LLMs), involving constructing guided prompts by incorporating relevant knowledge for commonsense reasoning and extracting facts from stories for moral understanding. We conduct extensive experiments on the Commonsense Reasoning and Moral Understanding in Children’s Stories (CRMUS) dataset with widely recognised LLMs under both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method. Furthermore, we analyse the adaptability of different LLMs in extracting facts for moral understanding performance.”

It has been shown that word embeddings can exhibit gender bias, and various methods have been proposed to quantify this. However, the extent to which the methods are capturing social stereotypes inherited from the data has been debated. Bias is a complex concept and there exist multiple ways to define it. Previous work has leveraged gender word pairs to measure bias and extract biased analogies. We show that the reliance on these gendered pairs has strong limitations: bias measures based off of them are not robust and cannot identify common types of real-world bias, whilst analogies utilising them are unsuitable indicators of bias. In particular, the well-known analogy “man is to computer-programmer as woman is to homemaker” is due to word similarity rather than bias. This has important implications for work on measuring bias in embeddings and related work debiasing embeddings.