Chenghao Wang

Jing Peng, Junhao Du, Chenghao Wang et al.

Speech foundation models and Speech LLMs have advanced speech understanding, yet deployment-oriented model selection is hindered by non-comparable evaluations caused by mismatched post-processing, and by training results that are hard to reproduce across data scales and pipelines. We present SURE, a unified experimentation framework that standardizes prediction formats, normalization, and scoring. SURE evaluates strong systems across paradigms, from conventional pipelines to Speech LLMs, on representative tasks under realistic acoustic and linguistic stressors. Beyond evaluation, SURE introduces an agent-assisted training conversion flow that maps paper and code into versioned, runnable training pipelines under a unified protocol on matched open-data subsets. Overall, SURE improves comparability and reproducibility for deployment-oriented evaluation.

Bryan Zhu, Nicholas Lui, Jeremy Irvin et al.

Reducing methane emissions is essential for mitigating global warming. To attribute methane emissions to their sources, a comprehensive dataset of methane source infrastructure is necessary. Recent advancements with deep learning on remotely sensed imagery have the potential to identify the locations and characteristics of methane sources, but there is a substantial lack of publicly available data to enable machine learning researchers and practitioners to build automated mapping approaches. To help fill this gap, we construct a multi-sensor dataset called METER-ML containing 86,599 georeferenced NAIP, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2 images in the U.S. labeled for the presence or absence of methane source facilities including concentrated animal feeding operations, coal mines, landfills, natural gas processing plants, oil refineries and petroleum terminals, and wastewater treatment plants. We experiment with a variety of models that leverage different spatial resolutions, spatial footprints, image products, and spectral bands. We find that our best model achieves an area under the precision recall curve of 0.915 for identifying concentrated animal feeding operations and 0.821 for oil refineries and petroleum terminals on an expert-labeled test set, suggesting the potential for large-scale mapping. We make METER-ML freely available at https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/meter-ml/ to support future work on automated methane source mapping.

Yucheng Wang, Jing Peng, Hanqi Li et al.

Audio agents extend large audio-language models (LALMs) by decomposing audio questions into tool calls, intermediate evidence, and iterative reasoning steps. However, as LALMs become stronger, the key challenge shifts from enabling tool use to determining when agentic evidence acquisition genuinely benefits audio understanding. We propose Audio-Mind, an auditable and pluggable framework for conditional evidence acquisition in audio understanding. Audio-Mind dynamically combines a strong frontend with planner-guided tool use, preserving frontend judgment when initial evidence is sufficient while acquiring bounded external evidence for questions with unresolved evidence gaps. Experiments on MMAR and MSU-Bench show that Audio-Mind outperforms prior audio-agent baselines, reaching 80.4% accuracy on MMAR and 82.8% accuracy on MSU-Bench. A matched-backbone comparison highlights why this design matters: under strong audio frontends, agentic decomposition can become an orchestration bottleneck when the workflow does not preserve the frontend's holistic audio-grounded judgment. Beyond accuracy, Audio-Mind produces higher-quality, auditable reasoning traces that expose uncertainty, tool evidence, and answer rationales, offering a potential basis for more reliable audio-QA annotation and error analysis.

Yiran Du, Jinlong Li, Huimin He et al.

This study investigates Chinese primary school students' acceptance of a social robot for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) speaking practice through a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design. Integrating the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Computers Are Social Actors (CASA) paradigm, the research explores both functional and social factors influencing learners' behavioural intention to use the robot. Quantitative data from 436 students were analysed using structural equation modelling, followed by qualitative interviews with twelve students to interpret the findings. Results show that perceived enjoyment and ease of use are the strongest predictors of acceptance, while social attributes such as warmth, anthropomorphism, and social presence significantly enhance enjoyment. Perceived intelligence affects usefulness but not ease of use. The findings suggest that emotional and social engagement are central to young learners' acceptance of educational robots, highlighting the importance of designing socially intelligent technologies that promote motivation and speaking confidence in EFL learning contexts.

Bin Zou, Yijia Yuan, Chenghao Wang et al.

This study examined whether AI-mediated speaking practice can reduce acculturative stress among Chinese international students in UK universities. Using a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design, 126 participants were randomly assigned to an experimental group, which completed a four-week intervention using EAP Talk, an AI-assisted English for Academic Purposes speaking platform offering role play, scenario-based practice, free talk, and automated feedback, or a control group, which continued usual academic and English-learning activities. Pre- and post-test questionnaires measured perceived language insufficiency, social isolation, and academic pressure, while semi-structured interviews with 20 experimental-group participants contextualised the quantitative findings. Linear mixed-effects models showed that the experimental group experienced significantly greater reductions than the control group across all three outcomes, with the strongest effect on perceived language insufficiency. Interview findings suggested that EAP Talk supported low-stakes rehearsal, communicative confidence, academic speaking preparation, and greater willingness to initiate social interaction. However, participants also noted that AI-mediated practice could not fully reproduce authentic human interaction, disciplinary feedback, or broader institutional support. The findings suggest that AI-mediated speaking practice can function as a supplementary scaffold for reducing communication-related dimensions of acculturative stress, but should be integrated with peer interaction, teacher feedback, and wider support services.

Rujing Yao, Yang Wu, Chenghao Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results across numerous domains, yet they experience notable deficiencies in legal question-answering tasks. LLMs often generate generalized responses that lack the logical specificity required for expert legal advice and are prone to hallucination, providing answers that appear correct but are unreliable. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques offer partial solutions to address this challenge, but existing approaches typically focus only on semantic similarity, neglecting the logical structure essential to legal reasoning. In this paper, we propose the Logical-Semantic Integration Model (LSIM), a novel supervised framework that bridges semantic and logical coherence. LSIM comprises three components: reinforcement learning predicts a structured fact-rule chain for each question, a trainable Deep Structured Semantic Model (DSSM) retrieves the most relevant candidate questions by integrating semantic and logical features, and in-context learning generates the final answer using the retrieved content. Our experiments on a real-world legal QA dataset-validated through both automated metrics and human evaluation-demonstrate that LSIM significantly enhances accuracy and reliability compared to existing methods.

Jing Peng, Chenghao Wang, Yi Yang et al.

Speech LLM post-training increasingly relies on efficient cross-modal alignment and robust low-resource adaptation, yet collecting large-scale audio-text pairs remains costly. Text-only alignment methods such as TASU reduce this burden by simulating CTC posteriors from transcripts, but they provide limited control over uncertainty and error rate, making curriculum design largely heuristic. We propose \textbf{TASU2}, a controllable CTC simulation framework that simulates CTC posterior distributions under a specified WER range, producing text-derived supervision that better matches the acoustic decoding interface. This enables principled post-training curricula that smoothly vary supervision difficulty without TTS. Across multiple source-to-target adaptation settings, TASU2 improves in-domain and out-of-domain recognition over TASU, and consistently outperforms strong baselines including text-only fine-tuning and TTS-based augmentation, while mitigating source-domain performance degradation.

Yang Wu, Chenghao Wang, Ece Gumusel et al.

The integration of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) into various applications, including the legal domain, has been accelerated by their expansive and versatile nature. However, when facing a legal case, users without a legal background often struggle to formulate professional queries and may inadvertently overlook critical legal factors when presenting their case narrative to LLMs. To address this issue, we propose the Diagnostic Legal Large Language Model (D3LM), which utilizes adaptive lawyer-like diagnostic questions to collect additional case information and then provides high-quality feedback. D3LM incorporates an innovative graph-based Positive-Unlabeled Reinforcement Learning (PURL) algorithm, enabling the generation of critical questions and enhancing user-LLM interactions. Moreover, an integrated LLM-based stopping criterion facilitates precise Court Views Generation (CVG). Our research also introduces a new English-language CVG dataset based on the US case law database, enriching the realm of LLM research and deployment with a vital dimension. D3LM surpasses classical LLMs by delivering outstanding performance and a remarkable user experience in the legal domain.