Yu Ning

Jiacheng Huang, Ning Yu, Xiaoyin Yi

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world communication settings, yet their ability to resolve context-dependent ambiguity remains underexplored. In this work, we present EMODIS, a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capacity to interpret ambiguous emoji expressions under minimal but contrastive textual contexts. Each instance in EMODIS comprises an ambiguous sentence containing an emoji, two distinct disambiguating contexts that lead to divergent interpretations, and a specific question that requires contextual reasoning. We evaluate both open-source and API-based LLMs, and find that even the strongest models frequently fail to distinguish meanings when only subtle contextual cues are present. Further analysis reveals systematic biases toward dominant interpretations and limited sensitivity to pragmatic contrast. EMODIS provides a rigorous testbed for assessing contextual disambiguation, and highlights the gap in semantic reasoning between humans and LLMs.

Chih-Yu Lai, Yu-Chien Ning, Duane S. Boning

Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting (PTSF) plays a critical role in domains requiring accurate and uncertainty-aware predictions for decision-making. However, existing methods offer suboptimal distribution modeling and suffer from a mismatch between training and evaluation metrics. Surprisingly, we found that augmenting a strong point estimator with a zero-mean Gaussian, whose standard deviation matches its training error, can yield state-of-the-art performance in PTSF. In this work, we propose RDIT, a plug-and-play framework that combines point estimation and residual-based conditional diffusion with a bidirectional Mamba network. We theoretically prove that the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS) can be minimized by adjusting to an optimal standard deviation and then derive algorithms to achieve distribution matching. Evaluations on eight multivariate datasets across varied forecasting horizons demonstrate that RDIT achieves lower CRPS, rapid inference, and improved coverage compared to strong baselines.

Shiyu Wang, Yihao Feng, Tian Lan et al.

Natural language serves as a common and straightforward signal for humans to interact seamlessly with machines. Recognizing the importance of this interface, the machine learning community is investing considerable effort in generating data that is semantically coherent with textual instructions. While strides have been made in text-to-data generation spanning image editing, audio synthesis, video creation, and beyond, low-resource areas characterized by expensive annotations or complex data structures, such as molecules, motion dynamics, and time series, often lack textual labels. This deficiency impedes supervised learning, thereby constraining the application of advanced generative models for text-to-data tasks. In response to these challenges in the low-resource scenario, we propose Text2Data, a novel approach that utilizes unlabeled data to understand the underlying data distribution through an unsupervised diffusion model. Subsequently, it undergoes controllable finetuning via a novel constraint optimization-based learning objective that ensures controllability and effectively counteracts catastrophic forgetting. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Text2Data is able to achieve enhanced performance regarding controllability across various modalities, including molecules, motions and time series, when compared to existing baselines.