Keummin Ka

Heejeong Nam, Jinwoo Ahn, Keummin Ka et al.

Human communication often relies on visual cues to resolve ambiguity. While humans can intuitively integrate these cues, AI systems often find it challenging to engage in sophisticated multimodal reasoning. We introduce VAGUE, a benchmark evaluating multimodal AI systems' ability to integrate visual context for intent disambiguation. VAGUE consists of 1.6K ambiguous textual expressions, each paired with an image and multiple-choice interpretations, where the correct answer is only apparent with visual context. The dataset spans both staged, complex (Visual Commonsense Reasoning) and natural, personal (Ego4D) scenes, ensuring diversity. Our experiments reveal that existing multimodal AI models struggle to infer the speaker's true intent. While performance consistently improves from the introduction of more visual cues, the overall accuracy remains far below human performance, highlighting a critical gap in multimodal reasoning. Analysis of failure cases demonstrates that current models fail to distinguish true intent from superficial correlations in the visual scene, indicating that they perceive images but do not effectively reason with them. We release our code and data at https://hazel-heejeong-nam.github.io/vague/.

Shubin Kim, Yejin Son, Junyeong Park et al.

Humor holds up a mirror to social perception: what we find funny often reflects who we are and how we judge others. When language models engage with humor, their reactions expose the social assumptions they have internalized from training data. In this paper, we investigate counterfactual unfairness through humor by observing how the model's responses change when we swap who speaks and who is addressed while holding other factors constant. Our framework spans three tasks: humor generation refusal, speaker intention inference, and relational/societal impact prediction, covering both identity-agnostic humor and identity-specific disparagement humor. We introduce interpretable bias metrics that capture asymmetric patterns under identity swaps. Experiments across state-of-the-art models reveal consistent relational disparities: jokes told by privileged speakers are refused up to 67.5% more often, judged as malicious 64.7% more frequently, and rated up to 1.5 points higher in social harm on a 5-point scale. These patterns highlight how sensitivity and stereotyping coexist in generative models, complicating efforts toward fairness and cultural alignment.

Sung Jun Cheon, Jaekyung Cho, Seongho Choi et al.

We introduce A.X K1, a 519B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model trained from scratch. Our design leverages scaling laws to optimize training configurations and vocabulary size under fixed computational budgets. A.X K1 is pre-trained on a corpus of approximately 10T tokens, curated by a multi-stage data processing pipeline. Designed to bridge the gap between reasoning capability and inference efficiency, A.X K1 supports explicitly controllable reasoning to facilitate scalable deployment across diverse real-world scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective Think-Fusion training recipe, enabling user-controlled switching between thinking and non-thinking modes within a single unified model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that A.X K1 achieves performance competitive with leading open-source models, while establishing a distinctive advantage in Korean-language benchmarks.

Seo Hyun Kim, Keummin Ka, Yohan Jo et al.

For a human-like chatbot, constructing a long-term memory is crucial. However, current large language models often lack this capability, leading to instances of missing important user information or redundantly asking for the same information, thereby diminishing conversation quality. To effectively construct memory, it is crucial to seamlessly connect past and present information, while also possessing the ability to forget obstructive information. To address these challenges, we propose CREEM, a novel memory system for long-term conversation. Improving upon existing approaches that construct memory based solely on current sessions, CREEM blends past memories during memory formation. Additionally, we introduce a refining process to handle redundant or outdated information. Unlike traditional paradigms, we view responding and memory construction as inseparable tasks. The blending process, which creates new memories, also serves as a reasoning step for response generation by informing the connection between past and present. Through evaluation, we demonstrate that CREEM enhances both memory and response qualities in multi-session personalized dialogues.

Keummin Ka, Junhyeong Park, Jaehyun Jeon et al.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in perception and reasoning. However, the ability to perform causal inference -- a core aspect of human cognition -- remains underexplored, particularly in multimodal settings. In this study, we introduce InfoCausalQA, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning grounded in infographics that combine structured visual data with textual context. The benchmark comprises two tasks: Task 1 focuses on quantitative causal reasoning based on inferred numerical trends, while Task 2 targets semantic causal reasoning involving five types of causal relations: cause, effect, intervention, counterfactual, and temporal. We manually collected 494 infographic-text pairs from four public sources and used GPT-4o to generate 1,482 high-quality multiple-choice QA pairs. These questions were then carefully revised by humans to ensure they cannot be answered based on surface-level cues alone but instead require genuine visual grounding. Our experimental results reveal that current VLMs exhibit limited capability in computational reasoning and even more pronounced limitations in semantic causal reasoning. Their significantly lower performance compared to humans indicates a substantial gap in leveraging infographic-based information for causal inference. Through InfoCausalQA, we highlight the need for advancing the causal reasoning abilities of multimodal AI systems.