Shuo Sun

Wentao Zhang, Mingxuan Zhao, Jincheng Gao et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a surge of financial benchmarks, evolving from static knowledge evaluation toward interactive trading simulations. However, existing frameworks for evaluating real-time trading largely overlook a critical failure mode: the severe behavioral instability of LLMs in sequential decision-making under financial uncertainty. Through extensive experiments, we show that when deployed as trading agents, LLMs exhibit extreme run-to-run variance, generate inconsistent action sequences even under deterministic decoding, and frequently produce irrational action flipping across adjacent time steps. We attribute these behaviors to the stateless autoregressive nature of LLMs, which lack persistent memory of prior actions, together with their sensitivity to continuous-to-discrete action mappings in portfolio allocation tasks. These deficiencies fundamentally undermine the reliability and reproducibility of many existing online and offline trading benchmarks. To address these limitations, we propose AlphaForgeBench, a principled evaluation framework that redefines LLMs as quantitative researchers rather than stochastic trading agents. Instead of producing discrete trading actions, AlphaForgeBench requires models to generate executable alpha factors and compose factor-based trading strategies grounded in financial knowledge. This paradigm decouples reasoning from execution mechanics, enabling deterministic and reproducible evaluation while remaining aligned with real-world quantitative research workflows. Extensive experiments across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate that AlphaForgeBench eliminates execution-induced instability and provides a rigorous benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning, strategy formulation, and alpha discovery. Webpage at https://finbrain-lab-hkustgz.github.io/AlphaForgeBench

Wanqi Xue, Qingpeng Cai, Zhenghai Xue et al.

Current advances in recommender systems have been remarkably successful in optimizing immediate engagement. However, long-term user engagement, a more desirable performance metric, remains difficult to improve. Meanwhile, recent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have shown their effectiveness in a variety of long-term goal optimization tasks. For this reason, RL is widely considered as a promising framework for optimizing long-term user engagement in recommendation. Though promising, the application of RL heavily relies on well-designed rewards, but designing rewards related to long-term user engagement is quite difficult. To mitigate the problem, we propose a novel paradigm, recommender systems with human preferences (or Preference-based Recommender systems), which allows RL recommender systems to learn from preferences about users historical behaviors rather than explicitly defined rewards. Such preferences are easily accessible through techniques such as crowdsourcing, as they do not require any expert knowledge. With PrefRec, we can fully exploit the advantages of RL in optimizing long-term goals, while avoiding complex reward engineering. PrefRec uses the preferences to automatically train a reward function in an end-to-end manner. The reward function is then used to generate learning signals to train the recommendation policy. Furthermore, we design an effective optimization method for PrefRec, which uses an additional value function, expectile regression and reward model pre-training to improve the performance. We conduct experiments on a variety of long-term user engagement optimization tasks. The results show that PrefRec significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in all the tasks.

Haochong Xia, Shuo Sun, Xinrun Wang et al.

Financial simulators play an important role in enhancing forecasting accuracy, managing risks, and fostering strategic financial decision-making. Despite the development of financial market simulation methodologies, existing frameworks often struggle with adapting to specialized simulation context. We pinpoint the challenges as i) current financial datasets do not contain context labels; ii) current techniques are not designed to generate financial data with context as control, which demands greater precision compared to other modalities; iii) the inherent difficulties in generating context-aligned, high-fidelity data given the non-stationary, noisy nature of financial data. To address these challenges, our contributions are: i) we proposed the Contextual Market Dataset with market dynamics, stock ticker, and history state as context, leveraging a market dynamics modeling method that combines linear regression and Dynamic Time Warping clustering to extract market dynamics; ii) we present Market-GAN, a novel architecture incorporating a Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) for the controllable generation with context, an autoencoder for learning low-dimension features, and supervisors for knowledge transfer; iii) we introduce a two-stage training scheme to ensure that Market-GAN captures the intrinsic market distribution with multiple objectives. In the pertaining stage, with the use of the autoencoder and supervisors, we prepare the generator with a better initialization for the adversarial training stage. We propose a set of holistic evaluation metrics that consider alignment, fidelity, data usability on downstream tasks, and market facts. We evaluate Market-GAN with the Dow Jones Industrial Average data from 2000 to 2023 and showcase superior performance in comparison to 4 state-of-the-art time-series generative models.

Shuo Sun, Yuchen Zhang, Jiahuan Yan et al.

The success of ChatGPT has ignited an AI race, with researchers striving to develop new large language models (LLMs) that can match or surpass the language understanding and generation abilities of commercial ones. In recent times, a number of models have emerged, claiming performance near that of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through various instruction-tuning methods. As practitioners of Text-to-SQL parsing, we are grateful for their valuable contributions to open-source research. However, it is important to approach these claims with a sense of scrutiny and ascertain the actual effectiveness of these models. Therefore, we pit six popular large language models against each other, systematically evaluating their Text-to-SQL parsing capability on nine benchmark datasets with five different prompting strategies, covering both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Regrettably, the open-sourced models fell significantly short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5, highlighting the need for further work to bridge the performance gap between these models.

Shuo Sun, Molei Qin, Xinrun Wang et al.

The financial markets, which involve more than $90 trillion market capitals, attract the attention of innumerable investors around the world. Recently, reinforcement learning in financial markets (FinRL) has emerged as a promising direction to train agents for making profitable investment decisions. However, the evaluation of most FinRL methods only focuses on profit-related measures and ignores many critical axes, which are far from satisfactory for financial practitioners to deploy these methods into real-world financial markets. Therefore, we introduce PRUDEX-Compass, which has 6 axes, i.e., Profitability, Risk-control, Universality, Diversity, rEliability, and eXplainability, with a total of 17 measures for a systematic evaluation. Specifically, i) we propose AlphaMix+ as a strong FinRL baseline, which leverages mixture-of-experts (MoE) and risk-sensitive approaches to make diversified risk-aware investment decisions, ii) we evaluate 8 FinRL methods in 4 long-term real-world datasets of influential financial markets to demonstrate the usage of our PRUDEX-Compass, iii) PRUDEX-Compass together with 4 real-world datasets, standard implementation of 8 FinRL methods and a portfolio management environment is released as public resources to facilitate the design and comparison of new FinRL methods. We hope that PRUDEX-Compass can not only shed light on future FinRL research to prevent untrustworthy results from stagnating FinRL into successful industry deployment but also provide a new challenging algorithm evaluation scenario for the reinforcement learning (RL) community.

Shuo Sun, Rundong Wang, Bo An

Quantitative investment is a fundamental financial task that highly relies on accurate stock prediction and profitable investment decision making. Despite recent advances in deep learning (DL) have shown stellar performance on capturing trading opportunities in the stochastic stock market, we observe that the performance of existing DL methods is sensitive to random seeds and network initialization. To design more profitable DL methods, we analyze this phenomenon and find two major limitations of existing works. First, there is a noticeable gap between accurate financial predictions and profitable investment strategies. Second, investment decisions are made based on only one individual predictor without consideration of model uncertainty, which is inconsistent with the workflow in real-world trading firms. To tackle these two limitations, we first reformulate quantitative investment as a multi-task learning problem. Later on, we propose AlphaMix, a novel two-stage mixture-of-experts (MoE) framework for quantitative investment to mimic the efficient bottom-up trading strategy design workflow of successful trading firms. In Stage one, multiple independent trading experts are jointly optimized with an individual uncertainty-aware loss function. In Stage two, we train neural routers (corresponding to the role of a portfolio manager) to dynamically deploy these experts on an as-needed basis. AlphaMix is also a universal framework that is applicable to various backbone network architectures with consistent performance gains. Through extensive experiments on long-term real-world data spanning over five years on two of the most influential financial markets (US and China), we demonstrate that AlphaMix significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art baselines in terms of four financial criteria.

Vsevolod Skorokhodov, Chenghao Xu, Shuo Sun et al.

Foundational feed-forward visual geometry models enable accurate and efficient camera pose estimation and scene reconstruction by learning strong scene priors from massive RGB datasets. However, their effectiveness drops when applied to mixed sensing modalities, such as RGB-thermal (RGB-T) images. We observe that while a visual geometry grounded transformer pretrained on RGB data generalizes well to thermal-only reconstruction, it struggles to align RGB and thermal modalities when processed jointly. To address this, we propose SEAR, a simple yet efficient fine-tuning strategy that adapts a pretrained geometry transformer to multimodal RGB-T inputs. Despite being trained on a relatively small RGB-T dataset, our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for 3D reconstruction and camera pose estimation, achieving significant improvements over all metrics (e.g., over 29\% in AUC@30) and delivering higher detail and consistency between modalities with negligible overhead in inference time compared to the original pretrained model. Notably, SEAR enables reliable multimodal pose estimation and reconstruction even under challenging conditions, such as low lighting and dense smoke. We validate our architecture through extensive ablation studies, demonstrating how the model aligns both modalities. Additionally, we introduce a new dataset featuring RGB and thermal sequences captured at different times, viewpoints, and illumination conditions, providing a robust benchmark for future work in multimodal 3D scene reconstruction. Code and models are publicly available at https://www.github.com/Schindler-EPFL-Lab/SEAR.

Trung Nguyen Quang, Yiming Gao, Fanyi Pu et al.

When an omnimodal large language model accepts a question whose textual premise contradicts what it actually sees or hears, does the failure lie in perception or in action? Recent omnimodal models are positioned as perception-grounded agents that jointly process video, audio, and text, yet a basic form of grounding remains untested: catching a textual claim that conflicts with the model's own sensory input. We introduce IMAVB, a curated 500-clip benchmark of long-form movies with a 2x2 design crossing target modality (vision, audio) and premise condition (standard, misleading), which lets us measure conflict detection separately from ordinary multimodal comprehension. Across eight open-source omnimodal LLMs and Gemini 3.1 Pro, we document a Representation-Action Gap: hidden states reliably encode premise-perception mismatches even when the same models almost never reject the false claim in their outputs. Behaviorally, models fall into two failure modes: under-rejection, in which they answer misleading questions as if the false premise were true; and over-rejection, in which they reject more often but also reject standard questions, sacrificing ordinary comprehension accuracy. The gap is modality-asymmetric (audio grounding underperforms vision) and prompt-resistant across seven variants. As an initial diagnostic intervention, a probe-guided logit adjustment (PGLA) re-injects the encoded mismatch signal into decoding and consistently improves rejection behavior. Together, these results suggest the bottleneck for omnimodal grounding lies in translation, not perception.

Wentao Zhang, Yilei Zhao, Shuo Sun et al.

Portfolio management (PM) is a fundamental financial trading task, which explores the optimal periodical reallocation of capitals into different stocks to pursue long-term profits. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently shown its potential to train profitable agents for PM through interacting with financial markets. However, existing work mostly focuses on fixed stock pools, which is inconsistent with investors' practical demand. Specifically, the target stock pool of different investors varies dramatically due to their discrepancy on market states and individual investors may temporally adjust stocks they desire to trade (e.g., adding one popular stocks), which lead to customizable stock pools (CSPs). Existing RL methods require to retrain RL agents even with a tiny change of the stock pool, which leads to high computational cost and unstable performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose EarnMore, a rEinforcement leARNing framework with Maskable stOck REpresentation to handle PM with CSPs through one-shot training in a global stock pool (GSP). Specifically, we first introduce a mechanism to mask out the representation of the stocks outside the target pool. Second, we learn meaningful stock representations through a self-supervised masking and reconstruction process. Third, a re-weighting mechanism is designed to make the portfolio concentrate on favorable stocks and neglect the stocks outside the target pool. Through extensive experiments on 8 subset stock pools of the US stock market, we demonstrate that EarnMore significantly outperforms 14 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of 6 popular financial metrics with over 40% improvement on profit.

Shuo Sun, Zekai Gu, Tianchen Sun et al.

Realistic and diverse traffic scenarios in large quantities are crucial for the development and validation of autonomous driving systems. However, owing to numerous difficulties in the data collection process and the reliance on intensive annotations, real-world datasets lack sufficient quantity and diversity to support the increasing demand for data. This work introduces DriveSceneGen, a data-driven driving scenario generation method that learns from the real-world driving dataset and generates entire dynamic driving scenarios from scratch. DriveSceneGen is able to generate novel driving scenarios that align with real-world data distributions with high fidelity and diversity. Experimental results on 5k generated scenarios highlight the generation quality, diversity, and scalability compared to real-world datasets. To the best of our knowledge, DriveSceneGen is the first method that generates novel driving scenarios involving both static map elements and dynamic traffic participants from scratch.

Alice Cai, Iman YeckehZaare, Shuo Sun et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to profoundly reshape how work is executed and organized, but we do not yet have deep frameworks for understanding where AI can be used. Here we provide a comprehensive ontology of work activities that can help systematically analyze and predict uses of AI. To do this, we disaggregate and then substantially reorganize the approximately 20K activities in the US Department of Labor's widely used O*NET occupational database. Next, we use this framework to classify descriptions of 13,275 AI software applications and a worldwide tally of 20.8 million robotic systems. Finally, we use the data about both these kinds of AI to generate graphical displays of how the estimated units and market values of all worldwide AI systems used today are distributed across the work activities that these systems help perform. We find a highly uneven distribution of AI market value across activities, with the top 1.6% of activities accounting for over 60% of AI market value. Most of the market value is used in information-based activities (72%), especially creating information (36%), and only 12% is used in physical activities. Interactive activities include both information-based and physical activities and account for 48% of AI market value, much of which (26%) involves transferring information. These results can be viewed as rough predictions of the AI applicability for all the different work activities down to very low levels of detail. Thus, we believe this systematic framework can help predict at a detailed level where today's AI systems can and cannot be used and how future AI capabilities may change this.

Molei Qin, Xinyu Cai, Yewen Li et al.

Futures are contracts obligating the exchange of an asset at a predetermined date and price, notable for their high leverage and liquidity and, therefore, thrive in the Crypto market. RL has been widely applied in various quantitative tasks. However, most methods focus on the spot and could not be directly applied to the futures market with high leverage because of 2 challenges. First, high leverage amplifies reward fluctuations, making training stochastic and difficult to converge. Second, prior works lacked self-awareness of capability boundaries, exposing them to the risk of significant loss when encountering new market state (e.g.,a black swan event like COVID-19). To tackle these challenges, we propose the Efficient and Risk-Aware Ensemble Reinforcement Learning for Futures Trading (FineFT), a novel three-stage ensemble RL framework with stable training and proper risk management. In stage I, ensemble Q learners are selectively updated by ensemble TD errors to improve convergence. In stage II, we filter the Q-learners based on their profitabilities and train VAEs on market states to identify the capability boundaries of the learners. In stage III, we choose from the filtered ensemble and a conservative policy, guided by trained VAEs, to maintain profitability and mitigate risk with new market states. Through extensive experiments on crypto futures in a high-frequency trading environment with high fidelity and 5x leverage, we demonstrate that FineFT outperforms 12 SOTA baselines in 6 financial metrics, reducing risk by more than 40% while achieving superior profitability compared to the runner-up. Visualization of the selective update mechanism shows that different agents specialize in distinct market dynamics, and ablation studies certify routing with VAEs reduces maximum drawdown effectively, and selective update improves convergence and performance.

Dongen Li, Yi Liu, Junqi Liu et al.

Achieving real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) based on 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) in large-scale real-world environments remains challenging, as existing methods still struggle to jointly achieve low-latency pose estimation, continuous 3D Gaussian reconstruction, and long-term global consistency. In this paper, we present a tightly coupled LiDAR-Inertial-Visual 3DGS-based SLAM framework for real-time pose estimation and photorealistic mapping in large-scale real-world scenes. The system executes state estimation and 3D Gaussian primitive initialization in parallel with global Gaussian optimization, enabling continuous dense mapping. To improve Gaussian initialization quality and accelerate optimization convergence, we introduce a cascaded strategy that combines feed-forward predictions with geometric priors derived from voxel-based principal component analysis. To enhance global consistency, we perform loop closure directly on the optimized global Gaussian map by estimating loop constraints through Gaussian-based Generalized Iterative Closest Point registration, followed by pose-graph optimization. We also collect challenging large-scale looped outdoor sequences with hardware-synchronized LiDAR-camera-IMU and ground-truth trajectories for realistic evaluation. Extensive experiments on both public datasets and our dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a state of the art among real-time efficiency, localization accuracy, and rendering quality across diverse real-world scenes.

Wenyu Zhang, Shuo Sun, Bin Wang et al.

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced natural language processing capabilities, facilitating the development of AudioLLMs that process and understand speech and audio inputs alongside text. Existing AudioLLMs typically combine a pre-trained audio encoder with a pre-trained LLM, which are subsequently finetuned on specific audio tasks. However, the pre-trained audio encoder has constrained capacity to capture features for new tasks and datasets. To address this, we propose to incorporate mixtures of `weak' encoders (MoWE) into the AudioLLM framework. MoWE supplements a base encoder with a pool of relatively light weight encoders, selectively activated based on the audio input to enhance feature extraction without significantly increasing model size. Our empirical results demonstrate that MoWE effectively improves multi-task performance, broadening the applicability of AudioLLMs to more diverse audio tasks.

Kun Peng, Lei Jiang, Qian Li et al.

Cross-domain Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment elements from target domain sentences by leveraging the knowledge acquired from the source domain. Due to the absence of labeled data in the target domain, recent studies tend to rely on pre-trained language models to generate large amounts of synthetic data for training purposes. However, these approaches entail additional computational costs associated with the generation process. Different from them, we discover a striking resemblance between table-filling methods in ASTE and two-stage Object Detection (OD) in computer vision, which inspires us to revisit the cross-domain ASTE task and approach it from an OD standpoint. This allows the model to benefit from the OD extraction paradigm and region-level alignment. Building upon this premise, we propose a novel method named \textbf{T}able-\textbf{F}illing via \textbf{M}ean \textbf{T}eacher (TFMT). Specifically, the table-filling methods encode the sentence into a 2D table to detect word relations, while TFMT treats the table as a feature map and utilizes a region consistency to enhance the quality of those generated pseudo labels. Additionally, considering the existence of the domain gap, a cross-domain consistency based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy is designed to alleviate domain shift problems. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal parameters and computational costs, making it a strong baseline for cross-domain ASTE.

Huaiyu Jia, Jiehshun You, Yizhi Luo et al.

Automated Market Makers (AMMs), as a core infrastructure of decentralized finance (DeFi), uniquely drive on-chain asset pricing through a deterministic reserve ratio mechanism. Unlike traditional markets, AMM price dynamics is triggered largely by on-chain events (e.g., swap) that change the reserve ratio, rather than by continuous responses to off-chain information. This makes event-level analysis crucial for understanding price formation mechanisms in AMMs. However, existing research generally neglects the micro-structural dynamics at the AMMs level, lacking both a comprehensive dataset covering multiple protocols with fine-grained event classification and an effective framework for event-aware modeling. To fill this gap, we construct a dataset containing 8.9 million on-chain event records from four representative AMMs protocols: Pendle, Uniswap v3, Aave and Morpho, with precise annotations of transaction type and block height timestamps. Furthermore, we propose an Uncertainty Weighted Mean Squared Error (UWM) loss function, which incorporates the block interval regression term into the traditional Time-Point Process (TPP) objective function by weighting the uncertainty with homoscedasticity. Extensive experiments on eight advanced TPP architectures demonstrate that this loss function reduces the time prediction error by an average of 56.41\% while maintaining the accuracy of event type prediction, establishing a robust benchmark for event-aware prediction in the AMMs ecosystem. This work provides the necessary data foundation and methodological framework for modeling the discreteness and event-driven characteristics of on-chain price discovery. All datasets and source code are publicly available. https://github.com/yosen-king/Deep-AMM-Events

Shuo Sun, Unal Artan, Malcolm Mielle et al.

We address the challenging problem of dense dynamic scene reconstruction and camera pose estimation from multiple freely moving cameras -- a setting that arises naturally when multiple observers capture a shared event. Prior approaches either handle only single-camera input or require rigidly mounted, pre-calibrated camera rigs, limiting their practical applicability. We propose a two-stage optimization framework that decouples the task into robust camera tracking and dense depth refinement. In the first stage, we extend single-camera visual SLAM to the multi-camera setting by constructing a spatiotemporal connection graph that exploits both intra-camera temporal continuity and inter-camera spatial overlap, enabling consistent scale and robust tracking. To ensure robustness under limited overlap, we introduce a wide-baseline initialization strategy using feed-forward reconstruction models. In the second stage, we refine depth and camera poses by optimizing dense inter- and intra-camera consistency using wide-baseline optical flow. Additionally, we introduce MultiCamRobolab, a new real-world dataset with ground-truth poses from a motion capture system. Finally, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art feed-forward models on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, while requiring less memory.

Xiang Huang, Hao Peng, Shuo Sun et al.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is the task aimed at predicting the sentiment polarity of aspect words within sentences. Recently, incorporating graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture additional syntactic structure information in the dependency tree derived from syntactic dependency parsing has been proven to be an effective paradigm for boosting ABSA. Despite GNNs enhancing model capability by fusing more types of information, most works only utilize a single topology view of the dependency tree or simply conflate different perspectives of information without distinction, which limits the model performance. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new multi-view attention syntactic enhanced graph convolutional network (MASGCN) that weighs different syntactic information of views using attention mechanisms. Specifically, we first construct distance mask matrices from the dependency tree to obtain multiple subgraph views for GNNs. To aggregate features from different views, we propose a multi-view attention mechanism to calculate the attention weights of views. Furthermore, to incorporate more syntactic information, we fuse the dependency type information matrix into the adjacency matrices and present a structural entropy loss to learn the dependency type adjacency matrix. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/SELGroup/MASGCN.

Trung Nguyen Quang, Cheng Yi Lewis Won, Minh Duc Pham et al.

Audio large language models (Audio LLMs) exhibit systematic failures in transcribing code-switching speech despite strong multilingual capabilities. Focusing on English-Mandarin, we identify three failure modes: language omission, translation-instead-of-transcription, and hallucination. We apply Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align models, constructing preference pairs in which chosen responses preserve mixed-language content while rejected responses mimic failure patterns. Training three Audio LLMs on 100K pairs (570 hours), we observe consistent behavioral shifts: models learn to preserve language composition rather than translating when prompted for transcription. This alignment yields MER reductions up to 89.6% (in-distribution) and 20.0% (out-of-distribution). Our findings suggest DPO can effectively elicit correct code-switching transcription behavior from multilingual Audio LLMs.

Wentao Zhang, Lingxuan Zhao, Haochong Xia et al.

Financial trading is a crucial component of the markets, informed by a multimodal information landscape encompassing news, prices, and Kline charts, and encompasses diverse tasks such as quantitative trading and high-frequency trading with various assets. While advanced AI techniques like deep learning and reinforcement learning are extensively utilized in finance, their application in financial trading tasks often faces challenges due to inadequate handling of multimodal data and limited generalizability across various tasks. To address these challenges, we present FinAgent, a multimodal foundational agent with tool augmentation for financial trading. FinAgent's market intelligence module processes a diverse range of data-numerical, textual, and visual-to accurately analyze the financial market. Its unique dual-level reflection module not only enables rapid adaptation to market dynamics but also incorporates a diversified memory retrieval system, enhancing the agent's ability to learn from historical data and improve decision-making processes. The agent's emphasis on reasoning for actions fosters trust in its financial decisions. Moreover, FinAgent integrates established trading strategies and expert insights, ensuring that its trading approaches are both data-driven and rooted in sound financial principles. With comprehensive experiments on 6 financial datasets, including stocks and Crypto, FinAgent significantly outperforms 9 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of 6 financial metrics with over 36% average improvement on profit. Specifically, a 92.27% return (a 84.39% relative improvement) is achieved on one dataset. Notably, FinAgent is the first advanced multimodal foundation agent designed for financial trading tasks.

Bin Wang, Xunlong Zou, Geyu Lin et al.

We introduce AudioBench, a universal benchmark designed to evaluate Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs). It encompasses 8 distinct tasks and 26 datasets, among which, 7 are newly proposed datasets. The evaluation targets three main aspects: speech understanding, audio scene understanding, and voice understanding (paralinguistic). Despite recent advancements, there lacks a comprehensive benchmark for AudioLLMs on instruction following capabilities conditioned on audio signals. AudioBench addresses this gap by setting up datasets as well as desired evaluation metrics. Besides, we also evaluated the capabilities of five popular models and found that no single model excels consistently across all tasks. We outline the research outlook for AudioLLMs and anticipate that our open-sourced evaluation toolkit, data, and leaderboard will offer a robust testbed for future model developments.

Holger Schwenk, Vishrav Chaudhary, Shuo Sun et al.

We present an approach based on multilingual sentence embeddings to automatically extract parallel sentences from the content of Wikipedia articles in 85 languages, including several dialects or low-resource languages. We do not limit the the extraction process to alignments with English, but systematically consider all possible language pairs. In total, we are able to extract 135M parallel sentences for 1620 different language pairs, out of which only 34M are aligned with English. This corpus of parallel sentences is freely available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER/tree/master/tasks/WikiMatrix. To get an indication on the quality of the extracted bitexts, we train neural MT baseline systems on the mined data only for 1886 languages pairs, and evaluate them on the TED corpus, achieving strong BLEU scores for many language pairs. The WikiMatrix bitexts seem to be particularly interesting to train MT systems between distant languages without the need to pivot through English.

Brian Lu, Hongyu Zhao, Shuo Sun et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, the conditions under which RLVR yields robust generalization remain poorly understood. This paper provides an empirical study of RLVR generalization in the setting of probabilistic inference over causal graphical models. This setting offers two natural axes along which to examine generalization: (i) the level of the probabilistic query -- associational, interventional, or counterfactual -- and (ii) the structural complexity of the query, measured by the size of its relevant subgraph. We construct datasets of causal graphs and queries spanning these difficulty axes and fine-tune Qwen-2.5-Instruct models using RLVR or supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We vary both the model scale (3B-32B) and the query level included in training. We find that RLVR yields stronger within-level and across-level generalization than SFT, but only for specific combinations of model size and training query level. Further analysis shows that RLVR's effectiveness depends on the model's initial reasoning competence. With sufficient initial competence, RLVR improves an LLM's marginalization strategy and reduces errors in intermediate probability calculations, producing substantial accuracy gains, particularly on more complex queries. These findings show that RLVR can improve specific causal reasoning subskills, with its benefits emerging only when the model has sufficient initial competence.

Huaiyu Jia, Luofeng Zhou, Wentao Zhang et al.

Prediction markets are markets for trading claims on future events, such as presidential elections, and their prices provide continuously updated signals of collective beliefs. In decentralized platforms such as Polymarket, the market lifecycle spans market creation, token registration, trading, oracle interaction, dispute, and final settlement, yet the corresponding data are fragmented across heterogeneous off-chain and on-chain sources. We present the first continuously maintained dataset suite for the full lifecycle of decentralized prediction markets, built on Polymarket. To address the challenges of large-scale cross-source integration, incomplete linkage, and continuous synchronization, we build a unified relational data system that integrates three canonical layers: market metadata, fill-level trading records, and oracle-resolution events, through identifier resolution, on-chain recovery, and incremental updates. The resulting dataset spans October 2020 to March 2026 and comprises more than 770 thousand market records, over 943 million fill records, and nearly 2 million oracle events. We describe the data model, collection pipeline, and consistency mechanisms that make the dataset reproducible and extensible, and we demonstrate its utility through descriptive analyses of market activity and two downstream case studies: NBA outcome calibration and CPI expectation reconstruction.

Yingxu He, Zhuohan Liu, Shuo Sun et al.

We introduce MERaLiON-AudioLLM (Multimodal Empathetic Reasoning and Learning in One Network), the first speech-text model tailored for Singapore's multilingual and multicultural landscape. Developed under the National Large Language Models Funding Initiative, Singapore, MERaLiON-AudioLLM integrates advanced speech and text processing to address the diverse linguistic nuances of local accents and dialects, enhancing accessibility and usability in complex, multilingual environments. Our results demonstrate improvements in both speech recognition and task-specific understanding, positioning MERaLiON-AudioLLM as a pioneering solution for region specific AI applications. We envision this release to set a precedent for future models designed to address localised linguistic and cultural contexts in a global framework.

Bin Wang, Xunlong Zou, Shuo Sun et al.

Singlish, a Creole language rooted in English, is a key focus in linguistic research within multilingual and multicultural contexts. However, its spoken form remains underexplored, limiting insights into its linguistic structure and applications. To address this gap, we standardize and annotate the largest spoken Singlish corpus, introducing the Multitask National Speech Corpus (MNSC). These datasets support diverse tasks, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Question Answering (SQA), Spoken Dialogue Summarization (SDS), and Paralinguistic Question Answering (PQA). We release standardized splits and a human-verified test set to facilitate further research. Additionally, we propose SingAudioLLM, a multi-task multimodal model leveraging multimodal large language models to handle these tasks concurrently. Experiments reveal our models adaptability to Singlish context, achieving state-of-the-art performance and outperforming prior models by 10-30% in comparison with other AudioLLMs and cascaded solutions.

Hang Yin, Li Qiao, Yu Ma et al.

Despite significant advancements in traditional syntactic communications based on Shannon's theory, these methods struggle to meet the requirements of 6G immersive communications, especially under challenging transmission conditions. With the development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), progress has been made in reconstructing videos using high-level semantic information. In this paper, we propose a scalable generative video semantic communication framework that extracts and transmits semantic information to achieve high-quality video reconstruction. Specifically, at the transmitter, description and other condition signals (e.g., first frame, sketches, etc.) are extracted from the source video, functioning as text and structural semantics, respectively. At the receiver, the diffusion-based GenAI large models are utilized to fuse the semantics of the multiple modalities for reconstructing the video. Simulation results demonstrate that, at an ultra-low channel bandwidth ratio (CBR), our scheme effectively captures semantic information to reconstruct videos aligned with human perception under different signal-to-noise ratios. Notably, the proposed ``First Frame+Desc." scheme consistently achieves CLIP score exceeding 0.92 at CBR = 0.0057 for SNR > 0 dB. This demonstrates its robust performance even under low SNR conditions.

Yiming Gao, Bin Wang, Chengwei Wei et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong instruction-following capabilities in text-based tasks. However, this ability often deteriorates in multimodal models after alignment with non-text modalities such as images or audio. While several recent efforts have investigated instruction-following performance in text and vision-language models, instruction-following in audio-based large language models remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce IFEval-Audio, a novel evaluation dataset designed to assess the ability to follow instructions in an audio LLM. IFEval-Audio contains 280 audio-instruction-answer triples across six diverse dimensions: Content, Capitalization, Symbol, List Structure, Length, and Format. Each example pairs an audio input with a text instruction, requiring the model to generate an output that follows a specified structure. We benchmark state-of-the-art audio LLMs on their ability to follow audio-involved instructions. The dataset is released publicly to support future research in this emerging area.

Jiahui Li, Tianle Shen, Zekai Gu et al.

Motion prediction is a challenging problem in autonomous driving as it demands the system to comprehend stochastic dynamics and the multi-modal nature of real-world agent interactions. Diffusion models have recently risen to prominence, and have proven particularly effective in pedestrian motion prediction tasks. However, the significant time consumption and sensitivity to noise have limited the real-time predictive capability of diffusion models. In response to these impediments, we propose a novel diffusion-based, acceleratable framework that adeptly predicts future trajectories of agents with enhanced resistance to noise. The core idea of our model is to learn a coarse-grained prior distribution of trajectory, which can skip a large number of denoise steps. This advancement not only boosts sampling efficiency but also maintains the fidelity of prediction accuracy. Our method meets the rigorous real-time operational standards essential for autonomous vehicles, enabling prompt trajectory generation that is vital for secure and efficient navigation. Through extensive experiments, our method speeds up the inference time to 136ms compared to standard diffusion model, and achieves significant improvement in multi-agent motion prediction on the Argoverse 1 motion forecasting dataset.

Qiongqiong Wang, Hardik Bhupendra Sailor, Tianchi Liu et al.

Recent speech-LLMs have shown impressive performance in tasks like transcription and translation, yet they remain limited in understanding the paralinguistic aspects of speech crucial for social and emotional intelligence. We propose CP-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating speech-LLMs on contextual paralinguistic reasoning the integration of verbal content with non-verbal cues like emotion and prosody. The benchmark includes two curated question answering (QA) datasets requiring both linguistic and empathetic understanding. We evaluate state-of-the-art speech-LLMs from both open and closed-source models and perform a comprehensive analysis across different question types. The top two models were further analyzed under temperature tuning to understand its effect on this task. Our benchmark reveals a key gap in existing evaluations and offers insights into building more context-aware and emotionally intelligent speech-capable LLMs.

Qiongqiong Wang, Hardik B. Sailor, Jeremy H. M. Wong et al.

Current large speech language models (Speech-LLMs) often exhibit limitations in empathetic reasoning, primarily due to the absence of training datasets that integrate both contextual content and paralinguistic cues. In this work, we propose two approaches to incorporate contextual paralinguistic information into model training: (1) an explicit method that provides paralinguistic metadata (e.g., emotion annotations) directly to the LLM, and (2) an implicit method that automatically generates novel training question-answer (QA) pairs using both categorical and dimensional emotion annotations alongside speech transcriptions. Our implicit method boosts performance (LLM-judged) by 38.41% on a human-annotated QA benchmark, reaching 46.02% when combined with the explicit approach, showing effectiveness in contextual paralinguistic understanding. We also validate the LLM judge by demonstrating its correlation with classification metrics, providing support for its reliability.

Charles Marrder, Shuo Sun, Murray J. Holland

Dynamical decoupling seeks to mitigate phase decoherence in qubits by applying a carefully designed sequence of effectively instantaneous electromagnetic pulses. Although analytic solutions exist for pulse timings that are optimal under specific noise regimes, identifying the optimal timings for a realistic noise spectrum remains challenging. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based method for designing pulse sequences on qubits. Our novel action set enables the RL agent to efficiently navigate this inherently non-convex optimization landscape. The action set, derived from Thompson's group $F$, is applicable to a broad class of sequential decision problems whose states can be represented as bounded sequences. We demonstrate that our RL agent can learn pulse sequences that minimize dephasing without requiring explicit knowledge of the underlying noise spectrum. This work opens the possibility for real-time learning of optimal dynamical decoupling sequences on qubits which are dephasing-limited. The model-free nature of our algorithm suggests that the agent may ultimately learn optimal pulse sequences even in the presence of unmodeled physical effects, such as pulse errors or non-Gaussian noise.

Shuo Sun, Meiling Zhou, Chen Zhao et al.

Clinical risk prediction models often fail to be generalized across cohorts because underlying data distributions differ by clinical site, region, demographics, and measurement protocols. This limitation is particularly pronounced in hip fracture risk prediction, where the performance of models trained on one cohort (the source cohort) can degrade substantially when deployed in other cohorts (target cohorts). We used a shared set of clinical and DXA-derived features across three large cohorts - the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and the UK Biobank (UKB), to systematically evaluate the performance of three domain adaptation methods - Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), Correlation Alignment (CORAL), and Domain - Adversarial Neural Networks (DANN) and their combinations. For a source cohort with males only and a source cohort with females only, domain-adaptation methods consistently showed improved performance than the no-adaptation baseline (source-only training), and the use of combinations of multiple domain adaptation methods delivered the largest and most stable gains. The method that combines MMD, CORAL, and DANN achieved the highest discrimination with the area under curve (AUC) of 0.88 for a source cohort with males only and 0.95 for a source cohort with females only), demonstrating that integrating multiple domain adaptation methods could produce feature representations that are less sensitive to dataset differences. Unlike existing methods that rely heavily on supervised tuning or assume known outcomes of samples in target cohorts, our outcome-free approaches enable the model selection under realistic deployment conditions and improve generalization of models in hip fracture risk prediction.

Arielle Sanford, Shuo Sun, Christian B. Mendl

Recent advances in protein structure prediction, such as AlphaFold, have demonstrated the power of deep neural architectures like the Evoformer for capturing complex spatial and evolutionary constraints on protein conformation. However, the depth of the Evoformer, comprising 48 stacked blocks, introduces high computational costs and rigid layerwise discretization. Inspired by Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs), we propose a continuous-depth formulation of the Evoformer, replacing its 48 discrete blocks with a Neural ODE parameterization that preserves its core attention-based operations. This continuous-time Evoformer achieves constant memory cost (in depth) via the adjoint method, while allowing a principled trade-off between runtime and accuracy through adaptive ODE solvers. Benchmarking on protein structure prediction tasks, we find that the Neural ODE-based Evoformer produces structurally plausible predictions and reliably captures certain secondary structure elements, such as alpha-helices, though it does not fully replicate the accuracy of the original architecture. However, our model achieves this performance using dramatically fewer resources, just 17.5 hours of training on a single GPU, highlighting the promise of continuous-depth models as a lightweight and interpretable alternative for biomolecular modeling. This work opens new directions for efficient and adaptive protein structure prediction frameworks.

Shuo Sun, Meiling Zhou, Chen Zhao et al.

Hip fractures are a major cause of disability, mortality, and healthcare burden in older adults, underscoring the need for early risk assessment. However, commonly used tools such as the DXA T-score and FRAX often lack sensitivity and miss individuals at high risk, particularly those without prior fractures or with osteopenia. To address this limitation, we propose a sequential two-stage model that integrates clinical and imaging information to improve prediction accuracy. Using data from the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), and the UK Biobank, Stage 1 (Screening) employs clinical, demographic, and functional variables to estimate baseline risk, while Stage 2 (Imaging) incorporates DXA-derived features for refinement. The model was rigorously validated through internal and external testing, showing consistent performance and adaptability across cohorts. Compared to T-score and FRAX, the two-stage framework achieved higher sensitivity and reduced missed cases, offering a cost-effective and personalized approach for early hip fracture risk assessment. Keywords: Hip Fracture, Two-Stage Model, Risk Prediction, Sensitivity, DXA, FRAX

Shuo Sun, Yimin Zhao, Christina Dao Wen Lee et al.

As the field progresses toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), there is a pressing need for more comprehensive and insightful evaluation frameworks that go beyond aggregate performance metrics. This paper introduces a unified rating system that jointly models the difficulty of individual test cases and the competency of AI models (or humans) across vision, language, and action domains. Unlike existing metrics that focus solely on models, our approach allows for fine-grained, difficulty-aware evaluations through competitive interactions between models and tasks, capturing both the long-tail distribution of real-world challenges and the competency gap between current models and full task mastery. We validate the generalizability and robustness of our system through extensive experiments on multiple established datasets and models across distinct AGI domains. The resulting rating distributions offer novel perspectives and interpretable insights into task difficulty, model progression, and the outstanding challenges that remain on the path to achieving full AGI task mastery.

Hao Peng, Xiang Huang, Shuo Sun et al.

DBSCAN, a well-known density-based clustering algorithm, has gained widespread popularity and usage due to its effectiveness in identifying clusters of arbitrary shapes and handling noisy data. However, it encounters challenges in producing satisfactory cluster results when confronted with datasets of varying density scales, a common scenario in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive and Robust DBSCAN with Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning cluster framework, namely AR-DBSCAN. First, we model the initial dataset as a two-level encoding tree and categorize the data vertices into distinct density partitions according to the information uncertainty determined in the encoding tree. Each partition is then assigned to an agent to find the best clustering parameters without manual assistance. The allocation is density-adaptive, enabling AR-DBSCAN to effectively handle diverse density distributions within the dataset by utilizing distinct agents for different partitions. Second, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning guided automatic parameter searching process is designed. The process of adjusting the parameter search direction by perceiving the clustering environment is modeled as a Markov decision process. Using a weakly-supervised reward training policy network, each agent adaptively learns the optimal clustering parameters by interacting with the clusters. Third, a recursive search mechanism adaptable to the data's scale is presented, enabling efficient and controlled exploration of large parameter spaces. Extensive experiments are conducted on nine artificial datasets and a real-world dataset. The results of offline and online tasks show that AR-DBSCAN not only improves clustering accuracy by up to 144.1% and 175.3% in the NMI and ARI metrics, respectively, but also is capable of robustly finding dominant parameters.

Shuo Sun, Torsten Sattler, Malcolm Mielle et al.

Accurate and robust 3D scene reconstruction from casual, in-the-wild videos can significantly simplify robot deployment to new environments. However, reliable camera pose estimation and scene reconstruction from such unconstrained videos remains an open challenge. Existing visual-only SLAM methods perform well on benchmark datasets but struggle with real-world footage which often exhibits uncontrolled motion including rapid rotations and pure forward movements, textureless regions, and dynamic objects. We analyze the limitations of current methods and introduce a robust pipeline designed to improve 3D reconstruction from casual videos. We build upon recent deep visual odometry methods but increase robustness in several ways. Camera intrinsics are automatically recovered from the first few frames using structure-from-motion. Dynamic objects and less-constrained areas are masked with a predictive model. Additionally, we leverage monocular depth estimates to regularize bundle adjustment, mitigating errors in low-parallax situations. Finally, we integrate place recognition and loop closure to reduce long-term drift and refine both intrinsics and pose estimates through global bundle adjustment. We demonstrate large-scale contiguous 3D models from several online videos in various environments. In contrast, baseline methods typically produce locally inconsistent results at several points, producing separate segments or distorted maps. In lieu of ground-truth pose data, we evaluate map consistency, execution time and visual accuracy of re-rendered NeRF models. Our proposed system establishes a new baseline for visual reconstruction from casual uncontrolled videos found online, demonstrating more consistent reconstructions over longer sequences of in-the-wild videos than previously achieved.

Shuo Sun, Meng Qi, Zuo-Jun Max Shen

In this work, we consider an online robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) where we have the information of finitely many prototypes of the underlying transition kernel. We consider an adaptively updated ambiguity set of the prototypes and propose an algorithm that efficiently identifies the true underlying transition kernel while guaranteeing the performance of the corresponding robust policy. To be more specific, we provide a sublinear regret of the subsequent optimal robust policy. We also provide an early stopping mechanism and a worst-case performance bound of the value function. In numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, particularly in the early stage with limited data. This work contributes to robust MDPs by considering possible prior information about the underlying transition probability and online learning, offering both theoretical insights and practical algorithms for improved decision-making under uncertainty.

Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Maulana Akbar et al.

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

Shuo Sun, Malcolm Mielle, Achim J. Lilienthal et al.

We propose a dense RGBD SLAM system based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that provides metrically accurate pose tracking and visually realistic reconstruction. To this end, we first propose a Gaussian densification strategy based on the rendering loss to map unobserved areas and refine reobserved areas. Second, we introduce extra regularization parameters to alleviate the forgetting problem in the continuous mapping problem, where parameters tend to overfit the latest frame and result in decreasing rendering quality for previous frames. Both mapping and tracking are performed with Gaussian parameters by minimizing re-rendering loss in a differentiable way. Compared to recent neural and concurrently developed gaussian splatting RGBD SLAM baselines, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the synthetic dataset Replica and competitive results on the real-world dataset TUM.

Shuo Sun, Wanqi Xue, Rundong Wang et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have shown great success in many challenging quantitative trading tasks, such as portfolio management and algorithmic trading. Especially, intraday trading is one of the most profitable and risky tasks because of the intraday behaviors of the financial market that reflect billions of rapidly fluctuating capitals. However, a vast majority of existing RL methods focus on the relatively low frequency trading scenarios (e.g., day-level) and fail to capture the fleeting intraday investment opportunities due to two major challenges: 1) how to effectively train profitable RL agents for intraday investment decision-making, which involves high-dimensional fine-grained action space; 2) how to learn meaningful multi-modality market representation to understand the intraday behaviors of the financial market at tick-level. Motivated by the efficient workflow of professional human intraday traders, we propose DeepScalper, a deep reinforcement learning framework for intraday trading to tackle the above challenges. Specifically, DeepScalper includes four components: 1) a dueling Q-network with action branching to deal with the large action space of intraday trading for efficient RL optimization; 2) a novel reward function with a hindsight bonus to encourage RL agents making trading decisions with a long-term horizon of the entire trading day; 3) an encoder-decoder architecture to learn multi-modality temporal market embedding, which incorporates both macro-level and micro-level market information; 4) a risk-aware auxiliary task to maintain a striking balance between maximizing profit and minimizing risk. Through extensive experiments on real-world market data spanning over three years on six financial futures, we demonstrate that DeepScalper significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art baselines in terms of four financial criteria.

Shuo Sun, Rundong Wang, Bo An

Quantitative trading (QT), which refers to the usage of mathematical models and data-driven techniques in analyzing the financial market, has been a popular topic in both academia and financial industry since 1970s. In the last decade, reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant interest in many domains such as robotics and video games, owing to its outstanding ability on solving complex sequential decision making problems. RL's impact is pervasive, recently demonstrating its ability to conquer many challenging QT tasks. It is a flourishing research direction to explore RL techniques' potential on QT tasks. This paper aims at providing a comprehensive survey of research efforts on RL-based methods for QT tasks. More concretely, we devise a taxonomy of RL-based QT models, along with a comprehensive summary of the state of the art. Finally, we discuss current challenges and propose future research directions in this exciting field.

Shuo Sun, Ahmed El-Kishky, Vishrav Chaudhary et al.

Sentence-level Quality estimation (QE) of machine translation is traditionally formulated as a regression task, and the performance of QE models is typically measured by Pearson correlation with human labels. Recent QE models have achieved previously-unseen levels of correlation with human judgments, but they rely on large multilingual contextualized language models that are computationally expensive and make them infeasible for real-world applications. In this work, we evaluate several model compression techniques for QE and find that, despite their popularity in other NLP tasks, they lead to poor performance in this regression setting. We observe that a full model parameterization is required to achieve SoTA results in a regression task. However, we argue that the level of expressiveness of a model in a continuous range is unnecessary given the downstream applications of QE, and show that reframing QE as a classification problem and evaluating QE models using classification metrics would better reflect their actual performance in real-world applications.

Marina Fomicheva, Shuo Sun, Erick Fonseca et al.

We present MLQE-PE, a new dataset for Machine Translation (MT) Quality Estimation (QE) and Automatic Post-Editing (APE). The dataset contains eleven language pairs, with human labels for up to 10,000 translations per language pair in the following formats: sentence-level direct assessments and post-editing effort, and word-level good/bad labels. It also contains the post-edited sentences, as well as titles of the articles where the sentences were extracted from, and the neural MT models used to translate the text.

Marina Fomicheva, Shuo Sun, Lisa Yankovskaya et al.

Quality Estimation (QE) is an important component in making Machine Translation (MT) useful in real-world applications, as it is aimed to inform the user on the quality of the MT output at test time. Existing approaches require large amounts of expert annotated data, computation and time for training. As an alternative, we devise an unsupervised approach to QE where no training or access to additional resources besides the MT system itself is required. Different from most of the current work that treats the MT system as a black box, we explore useful information that can be extracted from the MT system as a by-product of translation. By employing methods for uncertainty quantification, we achieve very good correlation with human judgments of quality, rivalling state-of-the-art supervised QE models. To evaluate our approach we collect the first dataset that enables work on both black-box and glass-box approaches to QE.

Shuo Sun, Kevin Duh

Learning to rank is an important task that has been successfully deployed in many real-world information retrieval systems. Most existing methods compute relevance judgments of documents independently, without holistically considering the entire set of competing documents. In this paper, we explore modeling documents interactions with self-attention based neural networks. Although self-attention networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in many NLP tasks, we find empirically that self-attention provides little benefit over baseline neural learning to rank architecture. To improve the learning of self-attention weights, We propose simple yet effective regularization terms designed to model interactions between documents. Evaluations on publicly available Learning to Rank (LETOR) datasets show that training self-attention network with our proposed regularization terms can significantly outperform existing learning to rank methods.

Vojtěch Kovařík, Dominik Seitz, Viliam Lisý et al.

We provide a formal definition of depth-limited games together with an accessible and rigorous explanation of the underlying concepts, both of which were previously missing in imperfect-information games. The definition works for an arbitrary extensive-form game and is not tied to any specific game-solving algorithm. Moreover, this framework unifies and significantly extends three approaches to depth-limited solving that previously existed in extensive-form games and multiagent reinforcement learning but were not known to be compatible. A key ingredient of these depth-limited games are value functions. Focusing on two-player zero-sum imperfect-information games, we show how to obtain optimal value functions and prove that public information provides both necessary and sufficient context for computing them. We provide a domain-independent encoding of the domains that allows for approximating value functions even by simple feed-forward neural networks, which are then able to generalize to unseen parts of the game. We use the resulting value network to implement a depth-limited version of counterfactual regret minimization. In three distinct domains, we show that the algorithm's exploitability is roughly linearly dependent on the value network's quality and that it is not difficult to train a value network with which depth-limited CFR's performance is as good as that of CFR with access to the full game.