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.