As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to legal domain-specific tasks, evaluating their ability to perform legal work in real-world settings has become essential. However, existing legal benchmarks rely on simplified and highly standardized tasks, failing to capture the ambiguity, complexity, and reasoning demands of real legal practice. Moreover, prior evaluations often adopt coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce PLawBench, a Practical Law Benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic legal practice scenarios. Grounded in real-world legal workflows, PLawBench models the core processes of legal practitioners through three task categories: public legal consultation, practical case analysis, and legal document generation. These tasks assess a model’s ability to identify legal issues and key facts, perform structured legal reasoning, and generate legally coherent documents. PLawBench comprises 850 questions across 13 practical legal scenarios, with each question accompanied by expert-designed evaluation rubrics, resulting in approximately 12,500 rubric items for fine-grained assessment. Using an LLM-based evaluator aligned with human expert judgments, we evaluate 10 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that none achieves strong performance on PLawBench, revealing substantial limitations in the fine-grained legal reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and highlighting important directions for future evaluation and development of legal LLMs. Data is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PLawbench-B524/.

Multi-modal sarcasm detection aims to identify whether a given image-text pair is sarcastic. The pivotal factor of the task lies in accurately capturing incongruities from different modalities. Although existing studies have achieved impressive success, they primarily committed to fusing the textual and visual information to establish cross-modal correlations, overlooking the significance of original unimodal incongruity information at the text-level and image-level. Furthermore, the utilized fusion strategies of cross-modal information neglected the effect of inherent ambiguity within text and image modalities on multimodal fusion. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel Ambiguity-aware Multi-level Incongruity Fusion Network (AMIF) for multi-modal sarcasm detection. Our method involves a multi-level incongruity learning module to capture the incongruity information simultaneously at the text-level, image-level and cross-modal-level. Additionally, an ambiguity-based fusion module is developed to dynamically learn reasonable weights and interpretably aggregate incongruity features from different levels. Comprehensive experiments conducted on a publicly available dataset demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over state-of-the-art methods.

E-commerce pre-sales dialogue aims to understand and elicit user needs and preferences for the items they are seeking so as to provide appropriate recommendations. Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) learn user representation and provide accurate recommendations based on dialogue context, but rely on external knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) generate responses that mimic pre-sales dialogues after fine-tuning, but lack domain-specific knowledge for accurate recommendations. Intuitively, the strengths of LLM and CRS in E-commerce pre-sales dialogues are complementary, yet no previous work has explored this. This paper investigates the effectiveness of combining LLM and CRS in E-commerce pre-sales dialogues, proposing two collaboration methods: CRS assisting LLM and LLM assisting CRS. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset of E-commerce pre-sales dialogues. We analyze the impact of two collaborative approaches with two CRSs and two LLMs on four tasks of E-commerce pre-sales dialogue. We find that collaborations between CRS and LLM can be very effective in some cases.

Prefix-tuning, or more generally continuous prompt tuning, has become an essential paradigm of parameter-efficient transfer learning. Using a large pre-trained language model (PLM), prefix-tuning can obtain strong performance by training only a small portion of parameters. In this paper, we propose to understand and further develop prefix-tuning through the kernel lens. Specifically, we make an analogy between prefixes and inducing variables in kernel methods and hypothesize that prefixes serving as inducing variables would improve their overall mechanism. From the kernel estimator perspective, we suggest a new variant of prefix-tuning—inducer-tuning, which shares the exact mechanism as prefix-tuning while leveraging the residual form found in adapter-tuning. This mitigates the initialization issue in prefix-tuning. Through comprehensive empirical experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks, we demonstrate that inducer-tuning can close the performance gap between prefix-tuning and fine-tuning.

We present a new summarisation task, taking scientific articles and producing journal table-of-contents entries in the chemistry domain. These are one- or two-sentence author-written summaries that present the key findings of a paper. This is a first look at this summarisation task with an open access publication corpus consisting of titles and abstracts, as input texts, and short author-written advertising blurbs, as the ground truth. We introduce the dataset and evaluate it with state-of-the-art summarisation methods.