Social media platforms have become central to modern communication, yet they also harbor offensive content that challenges platform safety and inclusivity. While prior research has primarily focused on textual indicators of offense, the role of emojis, ubiquitous visual elements in online discourse, remains underexplored. Emojis, despite being rarely offensive in isolation, can acquire harmful meanings through symbolic associations, sarcasm, and contextual misuse. In this work, we systematically examine emoji contributions to offensive Twitter messages, analyzing their distribution across offense categories and how users exploit emoji ambiguity. To address this, we propose an LLM-powered, multi-step moderation pipeline that selectively replaces harmful emojis while preserving the tweet’s semantic intent. Human evaluations demonstrate that our approach effectively reduces offensiveness while preserving semantic integrity. Our analysis also reveals heterogeneous effects across offense types, offering nuanced insights for online communication and emoji moderation.

The frequent introduction of new emojis in each Unicode release creates a dynamic shift in social media content, providing a unique opportunity to explore the evolution of digital language. Analyzing a large dataset of sampled English tweets, we examine how newly released emojis gain popularity and evolve in meaning. We find that the community size of early adopters and emoji semantics are positively correlated with their popularity. Certain emojis experienced notable shifts in the meanings and sentiment associations during the diffusion process. Additionally, we propose a novel framework utilizing language models to extract words and pre-existing emojis with semantically similar contexts, which enhances the interpretation of new emojis. The framework demonstrates its effectiveness in improving downstream text classification performance by substituting unknown new emojis with familiar ones. This study offers a new perspective in understanding how new language units are adopted, adapted, and integrated into the fabric of online communication.

“大语言模型正逐渐被用于各种垂直领域,利用其广泛的知识储备来赋能领域中的多种场景。然而,各领域拥有多种待学习的特定任务,且多源异构的领域数据容易引发模型进行任务迁移时的冲突。基于此,本研究提出自适应语义空间学习框架,利用对语义空间内数据的自适应重分布,提升多专家模型的性能及选择效果,并基于此框架训练了一个金融多任务大模型“银瞳”。研究结果表明,我们的框架只需利用10%的数据就能达到接近全数据训练的效果,并拥有较强的泛化表现。”

Language models (LMs) have achieved notable success in numerous NLP tasks, employing both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) methods. While language models demonstrate exceptional performance, they face robustness challenges due to spurious correlations arising from imbalanced label distributions in training data or ICL exemplars. Previous research has primarily concentrated on word, phrase, and syntax features, neglecting the concept level, often due to the absence of concept labels and difficulty in identifying conceptual content in input texts. This paper introduces two main contributions. First, we employ ChatGPT to assign concept labels to texts, assessing concept bias in models during fine-tuning or ICL on test data. We find that LMs, when encountering spurious correlations between a concept and a label in training or prompts, resort to shortcuts for predictions. Second, we introduce a data rebalancing technique that incorporates ChatGPT-generated counterfactual data, thereby balancing label distribution and mitigating spurious correlations. Our method’s efficacy, surpassing traditional token removal approaches, is validated through extensive testing.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling a variety of visual-language tasks. However, current MLLM benchmarks are predominantly designed to evaluate reasoning based on static information about a single image, and the ability of modern MLLMs to extrapolate from image sequences, which is essential for understanding our ever-changing world, has been less investigated. To address this challenge, this paper introduces Mementos, a new benchmark designed to assess MLLMs’ sequential image reasoning abilities. Mementos features 4,761 diverse image sequences with varying lengths. We also employ a GPT-4 assisted method to evaluate MLLM reasoning performance. Through a careful evaluation of nine recent MLLMs on Mementos, including GPT-4V and Gemini, we find that they struggle to accurately describe dynamic information about given image sequences, often leading to hallucinations/misrepresentations of objects and their corresponding behaviors. Our quantitative analysis and case studies identify three key factors impacting MLLMs’ sequential image reasoning: the correlation between object and behavioral hallucinations, the influence of co-occurring behaviors, and the compounding impact of behavioral hallucinations.

Prompt-based learning methods in semi-supervised learning (SSL) settings have been shown to be effective on multiple natural language understanding (NLU) datasets and tasks in the literature. However, manually designing multiple prompts and verbalizers requires domain knowledge and human effort, making it difficult and expensive to scale across different datasets. In this paper, we propose two methods to automatically design multiple prompts and integrate automatic verbalizer in SSL settings without sacrificing performance. The first method uses various demonstration examples with learnable continuous prompt tokens to create diverse prompt models. The second method uses a varying number of soft prompt tokens to encourage language models to learn different prompts. For the verbalizer, we use the prototypical verbalizer to replace the manual one. In summary, we obtained the best average accuracy of 71.5% (a relative improvement of 0.99% over even the previous state-of-the-art SSL method with manual prompts and verbalizers) in different few-shot learning settings.