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natural language processing

2,783 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Memory-First Fact-Checking: A Knowledge-Graph-Grounded Multi-Agent System for Misinformation Detection

A hybrid fact-checking framework that integrates Knowledge Graph-based semantic memory with adversarial multi-agent reasoning for explainable misinformation detection and a graph-aware confidence mechanism combines semantic similarity, NLI confidence, and structural graph evidence to determine whether internal knowledge is sufficient, thereby reducing unnecessary web retrieval.

Amelia Petrenciuc, Alexandru Lecu, Adrian Groza · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Sep 2026

JPO: Juris Policy Optimization for Structured Legal Reasoning in Criminal Judgment Prediction

Criminal judgment prediction requires models to infer statutory articles, charges, and sentencing outcomes from case facts. Unlike standard classification tasks, it involves a structured reasoning process in which statutes should be matched with facts, charges should be justified by statutes, and sentencing outcomes should remain consistent with charges. Existing approaches optimize final labels, and while some have attempted to evaluate reasoning quality, their evaluations are indirect, often relying on LLM-generated rubrics that reflect model-internal preferences rather than the inherent logical structure of legal adjudication. We propose Juris Policy Optimization (JPO), a post-training framework for structured legal reasoning in Chinese criminal judgment prediction. JPO first uses teacher-generated rationales to supervise a standardized four-step reasoning process, and then applies reinforcement learning with a composite reward over legal prediction quality, reasoning structure completeness, and cross-step consistency. JPO further introduces token-level advantage reweighting and adaptive clipping for legally salient reasoning segments. Experiments on multiple open-source language models and three Chinese legal benchmarks show that JPO consistently improves both judgment prediction and reasoning quality over supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning baselines.

Zhaolu Kang, Yantao Liu, Tailong Luo et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond Surface Alignment: Grounding the Dynamics of Situational Understanding and Generative Control in LLMs

The current alignment tuning paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs) prioritizes surface-level behaviors -- fluency, safety, and tonal consistency. While effective for casual chat, this thesis argues that such surface alignment masks a lack of grounding, creating models that are stylistically confident but situationally brittle. We propose a framework of Grounded Alignment, analyzing how models process context (Input) and structure generation (Output), then aligning these grounded behaviors to human needs. First, we evaluate failures in Situational Grounding. SitTest shows that despite large context windows, state-of-the-art models struggle to maintain a consistent"mental model"of a changing environment. ReCode further shows that models rely on surface heuristics rather than deep syntactic dependencies: they"read"extensive histories without truly"understanding"the evolving situation. Second, we evaluate Generative Grounding. We introduce the Branching Factor (BF) to map LLM generation, finding that standard alignment tuning constricts this landscape into premature stylistic collapse. Hindsight further shows that models often fail to understand their own generations. Finally, we propose Dynamic Control for grounded interaction. AI Realtor demonstrates context engineering to compensate for poor situational grounding. Base-Aligned Model Collaboration decouples exploration from stylistic constraints. We also present Annealed Sampling for verifiable reinforcement learning and apply these ideas to Addiction Support, where model-generated rationalization offers a communication interface for high-stakes domains. Collectively, this work moves beyond surface alignment toward agents anchored in both context and generation.

Chenghao Yang · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Agent Zero Memory: Provenance-Aware Long-Term Memory for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents need durable, faithful memory of everything a user or organization has said and stored, yet most memory systems commit to a single organizing structure (a fact store, a vector index, or a knowledge graph) and inherit its blind spots. We present Agent Zero Memory, a provenance-aware long-term memory system that distils a user's conversations, files, and connected sources into three parallel memory systems, each capturing a different facet of the same history: an episodic Memory Events timeline that makes when and what changed first-class, an associative entity-event knowledge graph that links people and projects across sessions, and a semantic, curated, citation-locked Hierarchical Documentary Memory (HDM) of durable facts. A retrieval turn runs an intent gate (so self-contained turns add no latency), a source router, and three concurrent agentic searches, one per system, each a tool-using loop over hybrid (embedding + lexical) search under agent-controlled filters; their grounded, cited answers are integrated into one answer with a single confidence. We formalize the reading discipline: every learned item is a provenanced item carrying its origin, timestamp, and evidence pointer, and every answer is read under a citation lock, so it may cite only evidence its reader actually opened; fabrication is structurally excluded and the system abstains rather than guesses. On two public benchmarks the system sets a new state of the art: 95.60% on LongMemEval and 93.60% on LoCoMo, improving over the strongest prior systems by +0.73 and +1.10 points. A controlled study across eight backbone LLMs characterizes the accuracy-cost-latency frontier: accuracy varies by only 3.4 points while per-query cost varies by ~30x, with near-state-of-the-art quality at up to 20x lower cost per query, the signature of memory-driven, rather than model-driven, quality.

Ming Wu, Peng-Yuan Zhu · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Hindsight Memory-PRM: Supervising Memory Management with Auditable Hindsight Credit

Memory operations of long-horizon LLM agents are hard to supervise: an operation's value is unobservable when it is taken. But they are special -- they leave machine-readable evidence in the trajectory: retrieval hits and answer-time citations. Hindsight Memory-PRM exploits this audit trail twice: offline to train an operation-conditioned memory-utility critic, and online, where retrievals, citations, and one controlled deletion-and-reanswer per probe settle an intervention-calibrated entry-level presence credit, propagated along version chains as an action-level proxy reward -- no per-operation human labels, no Monte-Carlo replay of continuations. On held-out LoCoMo a local 8B policy reaches 77.5% under a fixed shared reader, surpassing its API teacher (65.1%) and all reproduced external systems, at one eighth the context of Mem0's official operating point; on LongMemEval, 79.0%. Ablations attribute the gain to causal calibration rather than signal density, and the policy converges to a multi-version memory organization whose gains no tested open-loop baseline reproduces.

H. Jia, Yang Liu, Yingguang Yang et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

How You Ask Shapes What You Get: A Theory-Seeded Measurement of Articulation in Advice-Seeking LLM Conversations

Users articulate the same advice-seeking request in different ways: some specify detailed constraints, others gesture at a vague need. Prior work treats this variation as noise to be averaged away; we instead treat it as a stable, measurable structure in the input distribution. We ask whether articulation (how people ask) forms latent dimensions separable from topic (what they ask about), and whether it is associated with how language models respond. We extract interpretable features from 16,447 advice-seeking prompts pooled from public chat corpora (WildChat, LMSYS, and ShareChat) and recover a small set of latent articulation factors that replicate across train/test splits and across corpora. Because this structure is largely separable from topic, the populations it defines cut across topics and stay invisible to topic- or task-based evaluation. The factors define a handful of recurring articulation styles, one of which stands out: a long-form but information-poor style, roughly one in six prompts in the largest corpus, where models return shorter, vaguer answers and do not ask for clarification even though under-specification is exactly the condition that warrants it. The contrast holds within every topic group and length quintile, and is not under-specification alone -- a second, equally under-specified style does draw clarifying questions. Two independent human annotators reproduce this contrast. We argue that benchmarks should stratify on articulation, and we offer the extracted structure as a measurement instrument for doing so.

Juneha Baek, Suhyeon Lee, Donghyuk Shin · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

SUP-MIMIC: A Multi-Task Clinical Diagnosis Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs'Robustness to Contradictory Evidence

SUP-MIMIC is proposed, a multi-task framework utilizing MIMIC-IV-v3.1 that comprises Basic Assessment, Diagnostic Divergence Task (DDT), and Diagnostic Convergence Task (DCT), designed to evaluate the model's"one-to-many"disambiguation capability among phenotypically similar cases, while DCT assesses the model's ability to identify"many-to-one" diagnostic patterns across different pathophysiological pathways

Yi Yu, Bo Wang, Chong Feng et al. · 0 citations

SemTrace: Source-Grounded Semantic Signatures for Tracing LLM Exposure to Protected Documents

Large language models are increasingly used to read documents and produce downstream text, creating a provenance problem when the document owner cannot control or inspect the model that performs the generation. We introduce SemTrace, a source-grounded semantic watermark for detecting whether a generated review was influenced by a known protected manuscript copy. Rather than biasing token probabilities or imposing surface-form patterns, SemTrace constructs a document-specific binary signature from factual propositions that are directly supported by the manuscript itself. A protected PDF invisibly carries a content contract that selects one fact from each binary pair and asks an instruction-following reviewer to express those facts in fixed review slots without changing its independent evaluation. A frozen natural language inference model then decodes the resulting semantic evidence with explicit erasures and scores the recovered bits against the codeword assigned to that copy. This design targets model-agnostic, assigned-copy exposure detection while keeping the watermark semantically tied to the source document.

Jun-Yan Zhang, Yuan Zeng, Yong-Wei Huang et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Which one is banana man? Evaluating vision-language models in multi-turn pragmatic interpretation

Flexible adaptation to context and shared pragmatic intuitions contribute to smooth human conversation. Iterated reference games---in which players repeatedly pick out novel referents using language---present a test case for agents'ability to perform context-sensitive pragmatic reasoning in multi-turn linguistic environments. We tested humans and vision--language models on their ability to identify the intended meaning of descriptions produced in iterated reference games, varying the provided context in terms of amount, order, and relevance. While humans performed well consistently, the models we evaluated could make use of prior context to interpret humans'referring expressions, but they struggled to build up the relevant context to interpret those expressions effectively. Our results suggest that the models we evaluated lack core skills needed for efficient linguistic collaboration.

A. W. M. Tan, Ben Prystawski, Veronica Boyce · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Evaluating LLMs on Conversational Text-to-SQL under Chain Ambiguity and Intent Drift

TIDE-Bench is introduced, a benchmark for conversational text-to-SQL under chain ambiguity and intent drift evaluation, targeting two recurring patterns: chain ambiguity, where an underspecified question triggers layered clarification with conditional dependencies, and intent drift, where the user retracts and replaces a previously committed request element.

Yu-Jia Liu, Jia-Yan Lin, Zijin Hong et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks

It is shown that the vector representations of a variety of neural networks can be closely approximated with symbolic structures, providing a potential way to reconcile longstanding symbolic conceptions of intelligence with the vector-based nature of modern AI.

R. Thomas McCoy, Paul Soulos, Tal Linzen et al. · 1 citation
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Argument-Aware Semantic Alignment of Normative Texts: A Toulmin-Based Neuro-Symbolic Approach

Preliminary evidence is given that argument structure is a useful intermediate representation for aligning specialized normative texts in cross-standard control mapping and a neuro-symbolic pipeline is built that combines neural text representations with Toulmin features.

William Schroeder · 0 citations

From tech blogs

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 27, 2026

Looking beyond natural sequences

A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 20, 2026

Paving the way for greener ammonia production

New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.

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