Sarcasm is a specific type of irony which involves discerning what is said from what is meant. Detecting sarcasm depends not only on the literal content of an utterance but also on non-verbal cues such as speaker’s tonality, facial expressions and conversational context. However, current multimodal models struggle with complex tasks like sarcasm detection, which require identifying relevant cues across modalities and pragmatically reasoning over them to infer the speaker’s intention. To explore these limitations in VideoLMs, we introduce MUStReason, a diagnostic benchmark enriched with annotations of modality-specific relevant cues and underlying reasoning steps to identify sarcastic intent. In addition to benchmarking sarcasm classification performance in VideoLMs, using MUStReason we quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the generated reasoning by disentangling the problem into perception and reasoning and aim to pinpoint the current gaps in these VideoLMs. Furthermore, to facilitate structured pragmatic reasoning, we propose PragCoT, a framework that steers VideoLMs to focus on implied intentions over literal meaning, a property core to detecting sarcasm. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/anisha0325/MUStReason

Question answering (QA) is a core challenge in AI, particularly for complex queries requiring multi-hop reasoning across documents, or symbolic operations like aggregation or exhaustive listing. Retrieval-augmented generation has become the dominant approach to QA, with recent graph-based variants addressing part of these issues by organizing knowledge to better support compositional questions. However, most textual graph-based RAG methods still lack the structure needed for symbolic operations useful to answer complex questions reliably. This motivates symbolic graph-based approaches, which extract knowledge graphs (KGs) whose relations are logic predicates that enable SQL-like querying. Yet these pipelines typically use LLMs for KG extraction, which can introduce consistency issues, where extracted facts may violate commonsense ontology constraints. We propose a neuro-symbolic framework for ontology-grounded KG construction combining open-domain extraction, embedding-based canonicalization of types and predicates, and targeted LLM-based correction of ontology violations. By deferring corrections to a post-extraction stage, our method avoids repeated LLM calls, substantially reducing token usage while improving KG consistency and preserving downstream QA quality. Finally, we show that the extracted KGs are well suited for symbolic querying by measuring the occurrence of SPARQL graph patterns.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for question answering typically retrieve evidence by semantic similarity between the query and document chunks. While effective for unstructured text, this approach is less reliable on semi-structured corpora where answering may require exact filtering, aggregation, or exhaustive retrieval over structured attributes across multiple documents. Symbolic approaches support such operations, but they are often brittle on noisy natural-language corpora. We address this gap with DualGraph, a RAG framework that represents documents through two complementary views: a Textual Knowledge Graph for semantic retrieval and a Symbolic Knowledge Graph for symbolic querying over typed subject–predicate–object triples. Building on these two components, we provide multiple strategies for selecting or combining semantic and symbolic evidence. We also introduce SpecsQA, a benchmark from a commercial shopping website with semi-structured product documents and manually curated questions spanning open-ended and specification-oriented retrieval. Experiments show that DualGraph consistently outperforms state-of-the-art dense-retrieval, GraphRAG, symbolic, and table-oriented baselines across question types. Code and data are available at https://github.com/corneliocristina/DualGraphRAG.

Personalized alignment from preference data has focused primarily on improving personal reward model (RM) accuracy, with the implicit assumption that better preference ranking translates to better personalized behavior. However, in deployment, computational constraints necessitate inference-time adaptation such as reward-guided decoding (RGD) rather than per-user policy fine-tuning. This creates a critical but overlooked requirement: reward models must not only rank preferences accurately but also effectively guide generation. We demonstrate that standard RM accuracy fails catastrophically as a selection criterion for deployment-ready personalized rewards. We introduce policy accuracy—a metric quantifying whether RGD-adapted LLMs correctly discriminate between preferred and dispreferred responses—and show that upstream RM accuracy correlates only weakly with downstream policy accuracy (Kendall’s tau = 0.08–0.31). More critically, we introduce Pref-LaMP the first personalized alignment benchmark with ground-truth user completions, enabling direct behavioural evaluation. On Pref-LaMP, we expose a complete decoupling between discriminative ranking and generation metrics: methods with 20-point RM accuracy differences produce almost identical output quality, and methods with high ranking accuracy can fail to generate behaviorally aligned responses. These findings reveal that the field has been optimizing for proxy metrics that do not predict deployment performance, and that current personalized alignment methods fail to operationalize preferences into behavioral adaptation under realistic deployment constraints. In contrast, we find simple in-context learning (ICL) to be highly effective - dominating all reward-guided methods for models ≥3B parameters, achieving ~3 point ROUGE-1 gains over the best reward method at 7B scale.

Current vision-language models (VLMs) in medicine are primarily designed for categorical question answering (e.g., “Is this normal or abnormal?”) or qualitative descriptive tasks. However, clinical decision-making often relies on quantitative assessments, such as measuring the size of a tumor or the angle of a joint, from which clinicians draw their own diagnostic conclusions. This quantitative reasoning capability remains underexplored and poorly supported in existing VLMs. In this work, we introduce MedVision, a large-scale dataset and benchmark specifically designed to evaluate and improve VLMs on quantitative medical image analysis. MedVision spans 22 public datasets covering diverse anatomies and modalities, with 29.0K 3D images, 11.2M annotated 2D slices, and 24.3M single-instance annotations. We focus on three representative quantitative tasks: (1) detection of anatomical structures and abnormalities, (2) tumor/lesion (T/L) size estimation, and (3) angle/distance (A/D) measurement. We show that current off-the-shelf VLMs perform poorly on these tasks. However, supervised and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) on MedVision significantly enhances performance across detection, T/L size estimation, and A/D measurement, yielding MedVision-V0 as a strong open baseline. In the RFT stage, we design and evaluate the efficacy of process rewards, multiplicative reward composition, and multi-task RFT with curriculum learning. MedVision provides a foundation for developing VLMs with robust quantitative reasoning capabilities in medical imaging.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20%-50% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.

Knowledge graphs are structured representations of real world facts. However, they typically contain only a small subset of all possible facts. Link prediction is a task of inferring missing facts based on existing ones. We propose TuckER, a relatively straightforward but powerful linear model based on Tucker decomposition of the binary tensor representation of knowledge graph triples. TuckER outperforms previous state-of-the-art models across standard link prediction datasets, acting as a strong baseline for more elaborate models. We show that TuckER is a fully expressive model, derive sufficient bounds on its embedding dimensionalities and demonstrate that several previously introduced linear models can be viewed as special cases of TuckER.

Word translation, or bilingual dictionary induction, is an important capability that impacts many multilingual language processing tasks. Recent research has shown that word translation can be achieved in an unsupervised manner, without parallel seed dictionaries or aligned corpora. However, state of the art methods unsupervised bilingual dictionary induction are based on generative adversarial models, and as such suffer from their well known problems of instability and hyper-parameter sensitivity. We present a statistical dependency-based approach to bilingual dictionary induction that is unsupervised – no seed dictionary or parallel corpora required; and introduces no adversary – therefore being much easier to train. Our method performs comparably to adversarial alternatives and outperforms prior non-adversarial methods.