Daily Papers

Modeling long sequences of user behaviors has emerged as a critical frontier in generative recommendation. However, existing solutions face a dilemma: linear attention mechanisms achieve efficiency at the cost of retrieval precision due to limited state capacity, while softmax attention suffers from prohibitive computational overhead. To address this challenge, we propose HyTRec, a model featuring a Hybrid Attention architecture that explicitly decouples long-term stable preferences from short-term intent spikes. By assigning massive historical sequences to a linear attention branch and reserving a specialized softmax attention branch for recent interactions, our approach restores precise retrieval capabilities within industrial-scale contexts involving ten thousand interactions. To mitigate the lag in capturing rapid interest drifts within the linear layers, we furthermore design Temporal-Aware Delta Network (TADN) to dynamically upweight fresh behavioral signals while effectively suppressing historical noise. Empirical results on industrial-scale datasets confirm the superiority that our model maintains linear inference speed and outperforms strong baselines, notably delivering over 8% improvement in Hit Rate for users with ultra-long sequences with great efficiency.

In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent detection is crucial for interpreting user queries and providing appropriate responses. Existing research primarily addresses simple queries with a single intent, lacking effective systems for handling complex queries with multiple intents and extracting different intent spans. Additionally, there is a notable absence of multilingual, multi-intent datasets. This study addresses three critical tasks: extracting multiple intent spans from queries, detecting multiple intents, and developing a multi-lingual multi-label intent dataset. We introduce a novel multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset (MLMCID-dataset) curated from existing benchmark datasets. We also propose a pointer network-based architecture (MLMCID) to extract intent spans and detect multiple intents with coarse and fine-grained labels in the form of sextuplets. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates the superiority of our pointer network-based system over baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and F1-score across various datasets.

Intent detection and slot filling are critical tasks in spoken and natural language understanding for task-oriented dialog systems. In this work we describe our participation in the slot and intent detection for low-resource language varieties (SID4LR; Aepli et al. (2023)). We investigate the slot and intent detection (SID) tasks using a wide range of models and settings. Given the recent success of multitask-prompted finetuning of large language models, we also test the generalization capability of the recent encoder-decoder model mT0 (Muennighoff et al., 2022) on new tasks (i.e., SID) in languages they have never intentionally seen. We show that our best model outperforms the baseline by a large margin (up to +30 F1 points) in both SID tasks

Conversational NLU providers often need to scale to thousands of intent-classification models where new customers often face the cold-start problem. Scaling to so many customers puts a constraint on storage space as well. In this paper, we explore four different zero and few-shot intent classification approaches with this low-resource constraint: 1) domain adaptation, 2) data augmentation, 3) zero-shot intent classification using descriptions large language models (LLMs), and 4) parameter-efficient fine-tuning of instruction-finetuned language models. Our results show that all these approaches are effective to different degrees in low-resource settings. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning using T-few recipe (Liu et al., 2022) on Flan-T5 (Chang et al., 2022) yields the best performance even with just one sample per intent. We also show that the zero-shot method of prompting LLMs using intent descriptions

Recent research considers few-shot intent detection as a meta-learning problem: the model is learning to learn from a consecutive set of small tasks named episodes. In this work, we propose ProtAugment, a meta-learning algorithm for short texts classification (the intent detection task). ProtAugment is a novel extension of Prototypical Networks, that limits overfitting on the bias introduced by the few-shots classification objective at each episode. It relies on diverse paraphrasing: a conditional language model is first fine-tuned for paraphrasing, and diversity is later introduced at the decoding stage at each meta-learning episode. The diverse paraphrasing is unsupervised as it is applied to unlabelled data, and then fueled to the Prototypical Network training objective as a consistency loss. ProtAugment is the state-of-the-art method for intent detection meta-learning, at no extra labeling efforts and without the need to fine-tune a conditional language model on a given application domain.

When working on digital devices, people often face distractions that can lead to a decline in productivity and efficiency, as well as negative psychological and emotional impacts. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant that elicits a user's intention, assesses whether ongoing activities are in line with that intention, and provides gentle nudges when deviations occur. The system leverages a large language model to analyze screenshots, application titles, and URLs, issuing notifications when behavior diverges from the stated goal. Its detection accuracy is refined through initial clarification dialogues and continuous user feedback. In a three-week, within-subjects field deployment with 22 participants, we compared our assistant to both a rule-based intent reminder system and a passive baseline that only logged activity. Results indicate that our AI assistant effectively supports users in maintaining focus and aligning their digital behavior with their intentions. Our source code is publicly available at https://intentassistant.github.io

Intent detection and slot filling are important tasks in spoken and natural language understanding. However, Vietnamese is a low-resource language in these research topics. In this paper, we present the first public intent detection and slot filling dataset for Vietnamese. In addition, we also propose a joint model for intent detection and slot filling, that extends the recent state-of-the-art JointBERT+CRF model with an intent-slot attention layer to explicitly incorporate intent context information into slot filling via "soft" intent label embedding. Experimental results on our Vietnamese dataset show that our proposed model significantly outperforms JointBERT+CRF. We publicly release our dataset and the implementation of our model at: https://github.com/VinAIResearch/JointIDSF

New Intent Discovery (NID) aims to recognize known and infer new intent categories with the help of limited labeled and large-scale unlabeled data. The task is addressed as a feature-clustering problem and recent studies augment instance representation. However, existing methods fail to capture cluster-friendly representations, since they show less capability to effectively control and coordinate within-cluster and between-cluster distances. Tailored to the NID problem, we propose a Robust and Adaptive Prototypical learning (RAP) framework for globally distinct decision boundaries for both known and new intent categories. Specifically, a robust prototypical attracting learning (RPAL) method is designed to compel instances to gravitate toward their corresponding prototype, achieving greater within-cluster compactness. To attain larger between-cluster separation, another adaptive prototypical dispersing learning (APDL) method is devised to maximize the between-cluster distance from the prototype-to-prototype perspective. Experimental results evaluated on three challenging benchmarks (CLINC, BANKING, and StackOverflow) of our method with better cluster-friendly representation demonstrate that RAP brings in substantial improvements over the current state-of-the-art methods (even large language model) by a large margin (average +5.5% improvement).

This work focuses on in-context data augmentation for intent detection. Having found that augmentation via in-context prompting of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) alone does not improve performance, we introduce a novel approach based on PLMs and pointwise V-information (PVI), a metric that can measure the usefulness of a datapoint for training a model. Our method first fine-tunes a PLM on a small seed of training data and then synthesizes new datapoints - utterances that correspond to given intents. It then employs intent-aware filtering, based on PVI, to remove datapoints that are not helpful to the downstream intent classifier. Our method is thus able to leverage the expressive power of large language models to produce diverse training data. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can produce synthetic training data that achieve state-of-the-art performance on three challenging intent detection datasets under few-shot settings (1.28% absolute improvement in 5-shot and 1.18% absolute in 10-shot, on average) and perform on par with the state-of-the-art in full-shot settings (within 0.01% absolute, on average).

Recommendation systems, which assist users in discovering their preferred items among numerous options, have served billions of users across various online platforms. Intuitively, users' interactions with items are highly driven by their unchanging inherent intents (e.g., always preferring high-quality items) and changing demand intents (e.g., wanting a T-shirt in summer but a down jacket in winter). However, both types of intents are implicitly expressed in recommendation scenario, posing challenges in leveraging them for accurate intent-aware recommendations. Fortunately, in search scenario, often found alongside recommendation on the same online platform, users express their demand intents explicitly through their query words. Intuitively, in both scenarios, a user shares the same inherent intent and the interactions may be influenced by the same demand intent. It is therefore feasible to utilize the interaction data from both scenarios to reinforce the dual intents for joint intent-aware modeling. But the joint modeling should deal with two problems: 1) accurately modeling users' implicit demand intents in recommendation; 2) modeling the relation between the dual intents and the interactive items. To address these problems, we propose a novel model named Unified Dual-Intents Translation for joint modeling of Search and Recommendation (UDITSR). To accurately simulate users' demand intents in recommendation, we utilize real queries from search data as supervision information to guide its generation. To explicitly model the relation among the triplet <inherent intent, demand intent, interactive item>, we propose a dual-intent translation propagation mechanism to learn the triplet in the same semantic space via embedding translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UDITSR outperforms SOTA baselines both in search and recommendation tasks.

Deploying large language models in long-horizon, goal-oriented interactions remains challenging because similar entities and facts recur under different latent goals and constraints, causing memory systems to retrieve context-mismatched evidence. We propose STITCH (Structured Intent Tracking in Contextual History), an agentic memory system that indexes each trajectory step with a structured retrieval cue, contextual intent, and retrieves history by matching the current step's intent. Contextual intent provides compact signals that disambiguate repeated mentions and reduce interference: (1) the current latent goal defining a thematic segment, (2) the action type, and (3) the salient entity types anchoring which attributes matter. During inference, STITCH filters and prioritizes memory snippets by intent compatibility, suppressing semantically similar but context-incompatible history. For evaluation, we introduce CAME-Bench, a benchmark for context-aware retrieval in realistic, dynamic, goal-oriented trajectories. Across CAME-Bench and LongMemEval, STITCH achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 35.6%, with the largest gains as trajectory length increases. Our analysis shows that intent indexing substantially reduces retrieval noise, supporting intent-aware memory for robust long-horizon reasoning.

New intent discovery (NID) seeks to recognize both new and known intents from unlabeled user utterances, which finds prevalent use in practical dialogue systems. Existing works towards NID mainly adopt a cascaded architecture, wherein the first stage focuses on encoding the utterances into informative text embeddings beforehand, while the latter is to group similar embeddings into clusters (i.e., intents), typically by K-Means. However, such a cascaded pipeline fails to leverage the feedback from both steps for mutual refinement, and, meanwhile, the embedding-only clustering overlooks nuanced textual semantics, leading to suboptimal performance. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes NILC, a novel clustering framework specially catered for effective NID. Particularly, NILC follows an iterative workflow, in which clustering assignments are judiciously updated by carefully refining cluster centroids and text embeddings of uncertain utterances with the aid of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, NILC first taps into LLMs to create additional semantic centroids for clusters, thereby enriching the contextual semantics of the Euclidean centroids of embeddings. Moreover, LLMs are then harnessed to augment hard samples (ambiguous or terse utterances) identified from clusters via rewriting for subsequent cluster correction. Further, we inject supervision signals through non-trivial techniques seeding and soft must links for more accurate NID in the semi-supervised setting. Extensive experiments comparing NILC against multiple recent baselines under both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings showcase that NILC can achieve significant performance improvements over six benchmark datasets of diverse domains consistently.

Intent detection, a critical component in task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, faces significant challenges in adapting to the rapid influx of integrable tools with complex interrelationships. Existing approaches, such as zero-shot reformulations and LLM-based dynamic recognition, struggle with performance degradation when encountering unseen intents, leading to erroneous task routing. To enhance the model's generalization performance on unseen tasks, we employ Reinforcement Learning (RL) combined with a Reward-based Curriculum Sampling (RCS) during Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) training in intent detection tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RL-trained models substantially outperform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines in generalization. Besides, the introduction of the RCS, significantly bolsters the effectiveness of RL in intent detection by focusing the model on challenging cases during training. Moreover, incorporating Chain-of-Thought (COT) processes in RL notably improves generalization in complex intent detection tasks, underscoring the importance of thought in challenging scenarios. This work advances the generalization of intent detection tasks, offering practical insights for deploying adaptable dialogue systems.

Building conversational systems in new domains and with added functionality requires resource-efficient models that work under low-data regimes (i.e., in few-shot setups). Motivated by these requirements, we introduce intent detection methods backed by pretrained dual sentence encoders such as USE and ConveRT. We demonstrate the usefulness and wide applicability of the proposed intent detectors, showing that: 1) they outperform intent detectors based on fine-tuning the full BERT-Large model or using BERT as a fixed black-box encoder on three diverse intent detection data sets; 2) the gains are especially pronounced in few-shot setups (i.e., with only 10 or 30 annotated examples per intent); 3) our intent detectors can be trained in a matter of minutes on a single CPU; and 4) they are stable across different hyperparameter settings. In hope of facilitating and democratizing research focused on intention detection, we release our code, as well as a new challenging single-domain intent detection dataset comprising 13,083 annotated examples over 77 intents.

Smartphone scams are increasingly prevalent and typically manifest as multi-stage, cross-application processes with gradually emerging intent. Effective intervention thus requires anticipating scams before the intent becomes explicit. This is inherently challenging, as decisions must rely on partial trajectories with temporally distributed evidence. In this paper, we propose ORACLE Online Reasoning for Anticipating Cross-temporal Latent thrEats, the first agentic framework for early scam anticipation from streaming app-usage trajectories. To support this setting, we curate a real-world long-horizon benchmark of streaming app-usage trajectories, covering 12 scam types, spanning extended periods (15 days on average), involving diverse applications (95 apps), and interleaving normal and scam behaviors. To address fragmented evidence, we introduce a self-evolving context manager that adaptively consolidates entity-centric interactions over time, enabling more effective reconstruction of cross-temporal evidence from partial observations. To enhance sensitivity to latent early-stage signals, we propose an on-policy self-distillation scheme in which a teacher model, conditioned on summarized anti-scam reflections and clues by skills, supervises a student model without access to such reflections. This scheme thereby distills evidence-informed knowledge and improves recognition of emerging fraud patterns from partial trajectories. Experiments show that consistently improves early scam anticipation, yielding timely warnings while reducing false alerts in realistic streaming scenarios.

Sequential recommendation systems aim to capture users' evolving preferences from their interaction histories. Recent reasoningenhanced methods have shown promise by introducing deliberate, chain-of-thought-like processes with intermediate reasoning steps. However, these methods rely solely on the next target item as supervision, leading to two critical issues: (1) reasoning instability--the process becomes overly sensitive to recent behaviors and spurious interactions like accidental clicks, and (2) surface-level reasoning--the model memorizes item-to-item transitions rather than understanding intrinsic behavior patterns. To address these challenges, we propose IGR-SR, an Intent-Guided Reasoning framework for Sequential Recommendation that anchors the reasoning process to explicitly extracted high-level intents. Our framework comprises three key components: (1) a Latent Intent Distiller (LID) that efficiently extracts multi-faceted intents using a frozen encoder with learnable tokens, (2) an Intent-aware Deliberative Reasoner (IDR) that decouples reasoning into intent deliberation and decision-making via a dual-attention architecture, and (3) an Intent Consistency Regularization (ICR) that ensures robustness by enforcing consistent representations across different intent views. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that IGR-SR achieves an average 7.13% improvement over state-of-the-art baselines. Critically, under 20% behavioral noise, IGR-SR degrades only 10.4% compared to 16.2% and 18.6% for competing methods, validating the effectiveness and robustness of intent-guided reasoning.

As the disruptive changes in the media economy and the proliferation of alternative news media outlets, news intent has progressively deviated from ethical standards that serve the public interest. News intent refers to the purpose or intention behind the creation of a news article. While the significance of research on news intent has been widely acknowledged, the absence of a systematic news intent understanding framework hinders further exploration of news intent and its downstream applications. To bridge this gap, we propose News INTent (NINT) frame, the first component-aware formalism for understanding the news creation intent based on research in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. Within this frame, we define the news intent identification task and provide a benchmark dataset with fine-grained labels along with an efficient benchmark method. Experiments demonstrate that NINT is beneficial in both the intent identification task and downstream tasks that demand a profound understanding of news. This work marks a foundational step towards a more systematic exploration of news creation intents.

Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don't particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks -- (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model's understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems -- negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.

Mental manipulation severely undermines mental wellness by covertly and negatively distorting decision-making. While there is an increasing interest in mental health care within the natural language processing community, progress in tackling manipulation remains limited due to the complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. In this paper, we propose Intent-Aware Prompting (IAP), a novel approach for detecting mental manipulations using large language models (LLMs), providing a deeper understanding of manipulative tactics by capturing the underlying intents of participants. Experimental results on the MentalManip dataset demonstrate superior effectiveness of IAP against other advanced prompting strategies. Notably, our approach substantially reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. The code of this paper is available at https://github.com/Anton-Jiayuan-MA/Manip-IAP.

As Decentralized Finance (DeFi) develops, understanding user intent behind DeFi transactions is crucial yet challenging due to complex smart contract interactions, multifaceted on-/off-chain factors, and opaque hex logs. Existing methods lack deep semantic insight. To address this, we propose the Transaction Intent Mining (TIM) framework. TIM leverages a DeFi intent taxonomy built on grounded theory and a multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) system to robustly infer user intents. A Meta-Level Planner dynamically coordinates domain experts to decompose multiple perspective-specific intent analyses into solvable subtasks. Question Solvers handle the tasks with multi-modal on/off-chain data. While a Cognitive Evaluator mitigates LLM hallucinations and ensures verifiability. Experiments show that TIM significantly outperforms machine learning models, single LLMs, and single Agent baselines. We also analyze core challenges in intent inference. This work helps provide a more reliable understanding of user motivations in DeFi, offering context-aware explanations for complex blockchain activity.

Human conversation is organized by an implicit chain of thoughts that manifests as timed speech acts. Capturing this perceptual pathway is key to building natural full-duplex interactive systems. We introduce a framework that models this process as multi-level perception, and then reasons over conversational behaviors via a Graph-of-Thoughts (GoT). Our approach formalizes the intent-to-action pathway with a hierarchical labeling scheme, predicting high-level communicative intents and low-level speech acts to learn their causal and temporal dependencies. To train this system, we develop a high quality corpus that pairs controllable, event-rich dialogue data with human-annotated labels. The GoT framework structures streaming predictions as an evolving graph, enabling a transformer to forecast the next speech act, generate concise justifications for its decisions, and dynamically refine its reasoning. Experiments on both synthetic and real duplex dialogues show that the framework delivers robust behavior detection, produces interpretable reasoning chains, and establishes a foundation for benchmarking conversational reasoning in full duplex spoken dialogue systems.

For companies with customer service, mapping intents inside their conversational data is crucial in building applications based on natural language understanding (NLU). Nevertheless, there is no established automated technique to gather the intents from noisy online chats or voice transcripts. Simple clustering approaches are not suited to intent-sparse dialogues. To solve this intent-landscape task, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that extracts the intents and the taxonomy of intents from real-world dialogues. Our pipeline mines intent-span candidates with an extractive Question-Answering Electra model and leverages sentence embeddings to apply a low-level density clustering followed by a top-level hierarchical clustering. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of an ELECTRA large model fine-tuned on the SQuAD2 dataset to understand dialogues. With the right prompting question, this model achieves a rate of linguistic validation on intent spans beyond 85%. We furthermore reconstructed the intent schemes of five domains from the MultiDoGo dataset with an average recall of 94.3%.

Recent sequential recommendation models rely increasingly on consecutive short-term user-item interaction sequences to model user interests. These approaches have, however, raised concerns about both short- and long-term interests. (1) {\it short-term}: interaction sequences may not result from a monolithic interest, but rather from several intertwined interests, even within a short period of time, resulting in their failures to model skip behaviors; (2) {\it long-term}: interaction sequences are primarily observed sparsely at discrete intervals, other than consecutively over the long run. This renders difficulty in inferring long-term interests, since only discrete interest representations can be derived, without taking into account interest dynamics across sequences. In this study, we address these concerns by learning (1) multi-scale representations of short-term interests; and (2) dynamics-aware representations of long-term interests. To this end, we present an Interest Dynamics modeling framework using generative Neural Processes, coined IDNP, to model user interests from a functional perspective. IDNP learns a global interest function family to define each user's long-term interest as a function instantiation, manifesting interest dynamics through function continuity. Specifically, IDNP first encodes each user's short-term interactions into multi-scale representations, which are then summarized as user context. By combining latent global interest with user context, IDNP then reconstructs long-term user interest functions and predicts interactions at upcoming query timestep. Moreover, IDNP can model such interest functions even when interaction sequences are limited and non-consecutive. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on various evaluation metrics.

The user purchase behaviors are mainly influenced by their intentions (e.g., buying clothes for decoration, buying brushes for painting, etc.). Modeling a user's latent intention can significantly improve the performance of recommendations. Previous works model users' intentions by considering the predefined label in auxiliary information or introducing stochastic data augmentation to learn purposes in the latent space. However, the auxiliary information is sparse and not always available for recommender systems, and introducing stochastic data augmentation may introduce noise and thus change the intentions hidden in the sequence. Therefore, leveraging user intentions for sequential recommendation (SR) can be challenging because they are frequently varied and unobserved. In this paper, Intent contrastive learning with Cross Subsequences for sequential Recommendation (ICSRec) is proposed to model users' latent intentions. Specifically, ICSRec first segments a user's sequential behaviors into multiple subsequences by using a dynamic sliding operation and takes these subsequences into the encoder to generate the representations for the user's intentions. To tackle the problem of no explicit labels for purposes, ICSRec assumes different subsequences with the same target item may represent the same intention and proposes a coarse-grain intent contrastive learning to push these subsequences closer. Then, fine-grain intent contrastive learning is mentioned to capture the fine-grain intentions of subsequences in sequential behaviors. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ICSRec model compared with baseline methods.

Long-term memory enables large language model (LLM) agents to support personalized and sustained interactions. However, most work on personalized agents prioritizes utility and user experience, treating memory as a neutral component and largely overlooking its safety implications. In this paper, we reveal intent legitimation, a previously underexplored safety failure in personalized agents, where benign personal memories bias intent inference and cause models to legitimize inherently harmful queries. To study this phenomenon, we introduce PS-Bench, a benchmark designed to identify and quantify intent legitimation in personalized interactions. Across multiple memory-augmented agent frameworks and base LLMs, personalization increases attack success rates by 15.8%-243.7% relative to stateless baselines. We further provide mechanistic evidence for intent legitimation from internal representations space, and propose a lightweight detection-reflection method that effectively reduces safety degradation. Overall, our work provides the first systematic exploration and evaluation of intent legitimation as a safety failure mode that naturally arises from benign, real-world personalization, highlighting the importance of assessing safety under long-term personal context. WARNING: This paper may contain harmful content.

Slot-filling and intent detection are well-established tasks in Conversational AI. However, current large-scale benchmarks for these tasks often exclude evaluations of low-resource languages and rely on translations from English benchmarks, thereby predominantly reflecting Western-centric concepts. In this paper, we introduce Injongo -- a multicultural, open-source benchmark dataset for 16 African languages with utterances generated by native speakers across diverse domains, including banking, travel, home, and dining. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark the fine-tuning multilingual transformer models and the prompting large language models (LLMs), and show the advantage of leveraging African-cultural utterances over Western-centric utterances for improving cross-lingual transfer from the English language. Experimental results reveal that current LLMs struggle with the slot-filling task, with GPT-4o achieving an average performance of 26 F1-score. In contrast, intent detection performance is notably better, with an average accuracy of 70.6%, though it still falls behind the fine-tuning baselines. Compared to the English language, GPT-4o and fine-tuning baselines perform similarly on intent detection, achieving an accuracy of approximately 81%. Our findings suggest that the performance of LLMs is still behind for many low-resource African languages, and more work is needed to further improve their downstream performance.

State-of-the-art intent classification (IC) and slot filling (SF) methods often rely on data-intensive deep learning models, limiting their practicality for industry applications. Large language models on the other hand, particularly instruction-tuned models (Instruct-LLMs), exhibit remarkable zero-shot performance across various natural language tasks. This study evaluates Instruct-LLMs on popular benchmark datasets for IC and SF, emphasizing their capacity to learn from fewer examples. We introduce ILLUMINER, an approach framing IC and SF as language generation tasks for Instruct-LLMs, with a more efficient SF-prompting method compared to prior work. A comprehensive comparison with multiple baselines shows that our approach, using the FLAN-T5 11B model, outperforms the state-of-the-art joint IC+SF method and in-context learning with GPT3.5 (175B), particularly in slot filling by 11.1--32.2 percentage points. Additionally, our in-depth ablation study demonstrates that parameter-efficient fine-tuning requires less than 6% of training data to yield comparable performance with traditional full-weight fine-tuning.

In today's digital age, conspiracies and information campaigns can emerge rapidly and erode social and democratic cohesion. While recent deep learning approaches have made progress in modeling engagement through language and propagation models, they struggle with irregularly sampled data and early trajectory assessment. We present IC-Mamba, a novel state space model that forecasts social media engagement by modeling interval-censored data with integrated temporal embeddings. Our model excels at predicting engagement patterns within the crucial first 15-30 minutes of posting (RMSE 0.118-0.143), enabling rapid assessment of content reach. By incorporating interval-censored modeling into the state space framework, IC-Mamba captures fine-grained temporal dynamics of engagement growth, achieving a 4.72% improvement over state-of-the-art across multiple engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, and emojis). Our experiments demonstrate IC-Mamba's effectiveness in forecasting both post-level dynamics and broader narrative patterns (F1 0.508-0.751 for narrative-level predictions). The model maintains strong predictive performance across extended time horizons, successfully forecasting opinion-level engagement up to 28 days ahead using observation windows of 3-10 days. These capabilities enable earlier identification of potentially problematic content, providing crucial lead time for designing and implementing countermeasures. Code is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/ic-mamba. An interactive dashboard demonstrating our results is available at: https://ic-mamba.behavioral-ds.science.

LLM-powered search agents are increasingly being used for multi-step information seeking tasks, yet the IR community lacks empirical understanding of how agentic search sessions unfold and how retrieved evidence is used. This paper presents a large-scale log analysis of agentic search based on 14.44M search requests (3.97M sessions) collected from DeepResearchGym, i.e. an open-source search API accessed by external agentic clients. We sessionize the logs, assign session-level intents and step-wise query-reformulation labels using LLM-based annotation, and propose Context-driven Term Adoption Rate (CTAR) to quantify whether newly introduced query terms are traceable to previously retrieved evidence. Our analyses reveal distinctive behavioral patterns. First, over 90% of multi-turn sessions contain at most ten steps, and 89% of inter-step intervals fall under one minute. Second, behavior varies by intent. Fact-seeking sessions exhibit high repetition that increases over time, while sessions requiring reasoning sustain broader exploration. Third, agents reuse evidence across steps. On average, 54% of newly introduced query terms appear in the accumulated evidence context, with contributions from earlier steps beyond the most recent retrieval. The findings suggest that agentic search may benefit from repetition-aware early stopping, intent-adaptive retrieval budgets, and explicit cross-step context tracking. We plan to release the anonymized logs to support future research.

New Intent Discovery (NID) strives to identify known and reasonably deduce novel intent groups in the open-world scenario. But current methods face issues with inaccurate pseudo-labels and poor representation learning, creating a negative feedback loop that degrades overall model performance, including accuracy and the adjusted rand index. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a Robust New Intent Discovery (RoNID) framework optimized by an EM-style method, which focuses on constructing reliable pseudo-labels and obtaining cluster-friendly discriminative representations. RoNID comprises two main modules: reliable pseudo-label generation module and cluster-friendly representation learning module. Specifically, the pseudo-label generation module assigns reliable synthetic labels by solving an optimal transport problem in the E-step, which effectively provides high-quality supervised signals for the input of the cluster-friendly representation learning module. To learn cluster-friendly representation with strong intra-cluster compactness and large inter-cluster separation, the representation learning module combines intra-cluster and inter-cluster contrastive learning in the M-step to feed more discriminative features into the generation module. RoNID can be performed iteratively to ultimately yield a robust model with reliable pseudo-labels and cluster-friendly representations. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our method brings substantial improvements over previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin of +1~+4 points.

Online scams often unfold gradually through interaction, yet existing detection systems predominantly rely on snapshot-based signals and interruptive warnings, revealing two research gaps in the lack of signals that represent scam risk within conversational dynamics and the underexplored design of non-interruptive interaction. To address these gaps, we introduce multi-level alignment-based hints, informed by the Interactive Alignment Model, as a new detection signal for supporting sensemaking in scam-related conversations. These hints operationalize low-level lexical and syntactic alignments and high-level semantic and situation-model alignments between conversational participants, making conversational dynamics visible to users. We first conduct a preliminary evaluation on real-life scam dialogues, showing that as conversations approach scam attempts, low-level alignment scores remain stable while high-level alignment scores systematically decline, revealing a consistent cross-level pattern indicative of scam progression. Building on this insight, we conduct a user study with thirty participants, indicating that relative to the no-hint baseline, multi-level alignment-based hints increase precision by 0.25, recall by 0.16, and F1 score by 0.21, yielding substantially larger gains than the marginal improvements achieved by keyword-triggered alerts. Statistical analyses reveal that the proposed hints support earlier and more stable confidence formation over time, with ablation results further highlighting the effectiveness of combining alignment hints across levels in achieving these advantages.

Current Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents operate primarily under a reactive paradigm: a user must provide an explicit instruction for the agent to execute a task. However, an intelligent AI assistant should be proactive, which is capable of anticipating user intentions directly from continuous visual inputs, such as mobile or desktop screenshots, and offering timely recommendations without explicit user prompting. Transitioning to this proactive paradigm presents significant challenges. Real-world screen activity is rarely linear; it consists of long-horizon trajectories fraught with noisy browsing, meaningless actions, and multithreaded task-switching. To address this gap, we introduce PIRA-Bench (Proactive Intent Recommendation Agent Benchmark), a novel benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on continuous, weakly-supervised visual inputs. Unlike reactive datasets, PIRA-Bench features complex trajectories with multiple interleaved intents and noisy segments with various user profile contexts, challenging agents to detect actionable events while fitting to user preferences. Furthermore, we propose the PIRF baseline, a memory-aware, state-tracking framework that empowers general MLLMs to manage multiple task threads and handle misleading visual inputs. PIRA-Bench serves as an initial step toward robust and proactive GUI-based personal assistants.

The tasks of out-of-domain (OOD) intent discovery and generalized intent discovery (GID) aim to extend a closed intent classifier to open-world intent sets, which is crucial to task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Previous methods address them by fine-tuning discriminative models. Recently, although some studies have been exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT to various downstream tasks, it is still unclear for the ability of ChatGPT to discover and incrementally extent OOD intents. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate ChatGPT on OOD intent discovery and GID, and then outline the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT. Overall, ChatGPT exhibits consistent advantages under zero-shot settings, but is still at a disadvantage compared to fine-tuned models. More deeply, through a series of analytical experiments, we summarize and discuss the challenges faced by LLMs including clustering, domain-specific understanding, and cross-domain in-context learning scenarios. Finally, we provide empirical guidance for future directions to address these challenges.

Google users have different intents from their queries such as acquiring information, buying products, comparing or simulating services, looking for products, and so on. Understanding the right intention of users helps to provide i) better content on web pages from the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective and ii) more user-satisfying results from the search engine perspective. In this study, we aim to identify the user query's intent by taking advantage of Google results and machine learning methods. Our proposed approach is a clustering model that exploits some features to detect query's intent. A list of keywords extracted from the clustered queries is used to identify the intent of a new given query. Comparing the clustering results with the intents predicted by filtered keywords show the efficiency of the extracted keywords for detecting intents.

The rise of personal assistant agents, e.g., OpenClaw, highlights the growing potential of large language models to support users across everyday life and work. A core challenge in these settings is proactive assistance, since users often begin with underspecified requests and leave important needs, constraints, or preferences unstated. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can identify and act on such hidden intents before they are explicitly stated, especially in sustained multi-turn interactions where user needs emerge gradually. To address this gap, we introduce π-Bench, a benchmark for proactive assistance comprising 100 multi-turn tasks across 5 domain-specific user personas. By incorporating hidden user intents, inter-task dependencies, and cross-session continuity, π-Bench evaluates agents' ability to anticipate and address user needs over extended interactions, jointly measuring proactivity and task completion in long-horizon trajectories that better reflect real-world use. Experiments show (1) proactive assistance remains challenging, (2) a clear distinction between task completion and proactivity, and (3) the value of prior interaction for proactive intent resolution in later tasks.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are commonly designed with the presumption that each utterance represents a single intent. However, this assumption may not accurately reflect real-world situations, where users frequently express multiple intents within a single utterance. While there is an emerging interest in multi-intent detection (MID), existing in-domain datasets such as MixATIS and MixSNIPS have limitations in their formulation. To address these issues, we present BlendX, a suite of refined datasets featuring more diverse patterns than their predecessors, elevating both its complexity and diversity. For dataset construction, we utilize both rule-based heuristics as well as a generative tool -- OpenAI's ChatGPT -- which is augmented with a similarity-driven strategy for utterance selection. To ensure the quality of the proposed datasets, we also introduce three novel metrics that assess the statistical properties of an utterance related to word count, conjunction use, and pronoun usage. Extensive experiments on BlendX reveal that state-of-the-art MID models struggle with the challenges posed by the new datasets, highlighting the need to reexamine the current state of the MID field. The dataset is available at https://github.com/HYU-NLP/BlendX.

The ability to infer the intentions of others, predict their goals, and deduce their plans are critical features for intelligent agents. For a long time, several approaches investigated the use of symbolic representations and inferences with limited success, principally because it is difficult to capture the cognitive knowledge behind human decisions explicitly. The trend, nowadays, is increasingly focusing on learning to infer intentions directly from data, using deep learning in particular. We are now observing interesting applications of intent classification in natural language processing, visual activity recognition, and emerging approaches in other domains. This paper discusses a novel approach combining few-shot and transfer learning with cross-domain features, to learn to infer the intent of an agent navigating in physical environments, executing arbitrary long sequences of actions to achieve their goals. Experiments in synthetic environments demonstrate improved performance in terms of learning from few samples and generalizing to unseen configurations, compared to a deep-learning baseline approach.

Generating user intent from a sequence of user interface (UI) actions is a core challenge in comprehensive UI understanding. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have led to substantial progress in this area, but their demands for extensive model parameters, computing power, and high latency makes them impractical for scenarios requiring lightweight, on-device solutions with low latency or heightened privacy. Additionally, the lack of high-quality datasets has hindered the development of such lightweight models. To address these challenges, we propose UI-JEPA, a novel framework that employs masking strategies to learn abstract UI embeddings from unlabeled data through self-supervised learning, combined with an LLM decoder fine-tuned for user intent prediction. We also introduce two new UI-grounded multimodal datasets, "Intent in the Wild" (IIW) and "Intent in the Tame" (IIT), designed for few-shot and zero-shot UI understanding tasks. IIW consists of 1.7K videos across 219 intent categories, while IIT contains 914 videos across 10 categories. We establish the first baselines for these datasets, showing that representations learned using a JEPA-style objective, combined with an LLM decoder, can achieve user intent predictions that match the performance of state-of-the-art large MLLMs, but with significantly reduced annotation and deployment resources. Measured by intent similarity scores, UI-JEPA outperforms GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3.5 Sonnet by 10.0% and 7.2% respectively, averaged across two datasets. Notably, UI-JEPA accomplishes the performance with a 50.5x reduction in computational cost and a 6.6x improvement in latency in the IIW dataset. These results underscore the effectiveness of UI-JEPA, highlighting its potential for lightweight, high-performance UI understanding.

Recommendation systems play a critical role in enhancing user experience and engagement in various online platforms. Traditional methods, such as Collaborative Filtering (CF) and Content-Based Filtering (CBF), rely heavily on past user interactions or item features. However, these models often fail to capture the dynamic and evolving nature of user preferences. To address these limitations, we propose DUIP (Dynamic User Intent Prediction), a novel framework that combines LSTM networks with Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically capture user intent and generate personalized item recommendations. The LSTM component models the sequential and temporal dependencies of user behavior, while the LLM utilizes the LSTM-generated prompts to predict the next item of interest. Experimental results on three diverse datasets ML-1M, Games, and Bundle show that DUIP outperforms a wide range of baseline models, demonstrating its ability to handle the cold-start problem and real-time intent adaptation. The integration of dynamic prompts based on recent user interactions allows DUIP to provide more accurate, context-aware, and personalized recommendations. Our findings suggest that DUIP is a promising approach for next-generation recommendation systems, with potential for further improvements in cross-modal recommendations and scalability.

Task-oriented dialogue systems often face difficulties when user utterances seem semantically complete but lack necessary structural information for appropriate system action. This arises because users frequently do not fully understand their own needs, while systems require precise intent definitions. Current LLM-based agents cannot effectively distinguish between linguistically complete and contextually triggerable expressions, lacking frameworks for collaborative intent formation. We present STORM, a framework modeling asymmetric information dynamics through conversations between UserLLM (full internal access) and AgentLLM (observable behavior only). STORM produces annotated corpora capturing expression trajectories and latent cognitive transitions, enabling systematic analysis of collaborative understanding development. Our contributions include: (1) formalizing asymmetric information processing in dialogue systems; (2) modeling intent formation tracking collaborative understanding evolution; and (3) evaluation metrics measuring internal cognitive improvements alongside task performance. Experiments across four language models reveal that moderate uncertainty (40-60%) can outperform complete transparency in certain scenarios, with model-specific patterns suggesting reconsideration of optimal information completeness in human-AI collaboration. These findings contribute to understanding asymmetric reasoning dynamics and inform uncertainty-calibrated dialogue system design.

Users engage with financial services companies through multiple channels, often interacting with mobile applications, web platforms, call centers, and physical locations to service their accounts. The resulting interactions are recorded at heterogeneous temporal resolutions across these domains. This multi-channel data can be combined and encoded to create a comprehensive representation of the customer's journey for accurate intent prediction. This demands sequential learning solutions. NMT transformers achieve state-of-the-art sequential representation learning by encoding context and decoding for the next best action to represent long-range dependencies. However, three major challenges exist while combining multi-domain sequences within an encoder-decoder transformers architecture for intent prediction applications: a) aligning sequences with different sampling rates b) learning temporal dynamics across multi-variate, multi-domain sequences c) combining dynamic and static sequences. We propose an encoder-decoder transformer model to address these challenges for contextual and sequential intent prediction in financial servicing applications. Our experiments show significant improvement over the existing tabular method.

We present a systematic study on multilingual and cross-lingual intent detection from spoken data. The study leverages a new resource put forth in this work, termed MInDS-14, a first training and evaluation resource for the intent detection task with spoken data. It covers 14 intents extracted from a commercial system in the e-banking domain, associated with spoken examples in 14 diverse language varieties. Our key results indicate that combining machine translation models with state-of-the-art multilingual sentence encoders (e.g., LaBSE) can yield strong intent detectors in the majority of target languages covered in MInDS-14, and offer comparative analyses across different axes: e.g., zero-shot versus few-shot learning, translation direction, and impact of speech recognition. We see this work as an important step towards more inclusive development and evaluation of multilingual intent detectors from spoken data, in a much wider spectrum of languages compared to prior work.

Every act of language generation compresses a rich internal state into a single token sequence. We call this process intention collapse: a many-to-one projection from a high dimensional intention space I into an external language space L. We formalize intention collapse for contemporary language models, define three simple, model agnostic intention metrics (intention entropy Hint, effective dimensionality dimeff, and latent knowledge recoverability Recov), and propose an empirical agenda for studying how inference time computation shapes internal intentions before they are verbalized. We also report a first small scale experiment. Using a 4 bit Mistral 7B model on 200 GSM8K problems, we compare a direct answer baseline, a chain of thought (CoT) regime, and a babble control. CoT raises accuracy from 5.5 percent to 53 percent, sharply reduces pre collapse intention entropy (from 1.42 to 0.37 bits), and shows higher global effective dimensionality than the other regimes despite producing fewer tokens than babble. At the same time, Hint has little item level predictive power, and a linear probe on I achieves AUROC 0.65 in the CoT regime but only about chance in the baseline regime, where it collapses to the majority class. These preliminary results indicate that intention level metrics can distinguish inference regimes and expose latent information that is partly lost during collapse, while also revealing important limitations of our current proxies

Slot filling and intent detection are two main tasks in spoken language understanding (SLU) system. In this paper, we propose a novel non-autoregressive model named SlotRefine for joint intent detection and slot filling. Besides, we design a novel two-pass iteration mechanism to handle the uncoordinated slots problem caused by conditional independence of non-autoregressive model. Experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms previous models in slot filling task, while considerably speeding up the decoding (up to X 10.77). In-depth analyses show that 1) pretraining schemes could further enhance our model; 2) two-pass mechanism indeed remedy the uncoordinated slots.

Novel intent discovery automates the process of grouping similar messages (questions) to identify previously unknown intents. However, current research focuses on publicly available datasets which have only the question field and significantly differ from real-life datasets. This paper proposes methods to improve the intent discovery pipeline deployed in a large e-commerce platform. We show the benefit of pre-training language models on in-domain data: both self-supervised and with weak supervision. We also devise the best method to utilize the conversational structure (i.e., question and answer) of real-life datasets during fine-tuning for clustering tasks, which we call Conv. All our methods combined to fully utilize real-life datasets give up to 33pp performance boost over state-of-the-art Constrained Deep Adaptive Clustering (CDAC) model for question only. By comparison CDAC model for the question data only gives only up to 13pp performance boost over the naive baseline.

In this paper, we introduce Auto-Intent, a method to adapt a pre-trained large language model (LLM) as an agent for a target domain without direct fine-tuning, where we empirically focus on web navigation tasks. Our approach first discovers the underlying intents from target domain demonstrations unsupervisedly, in a highly compact form (up to three words). With the extracted intents, we train our intent predictor to predict the next intent given the agent's past observations and actions. In particular, we propose a self-exploration approach where top-k probable intent predictions are provided as a hint to the pre-trained LLM agent, which leads to enhanced decision-making capabilities. Auto-Intent substantially improves the performance of GPT-{3.5, 4} and Llama-3.1-{70B, 405B} agents on the large-scale real-website navigation benchmarks from Mind2Web and online navigation tasks from WebArena with its cross-benchmark generalization from Mind2Web.

In a conversation or a dialogue process, attention and intention play intrinsic roles. This paper proposes a neural network based approach that models the attention and intention processes. It essentially consists of three recurrent networks. The encoder network is a word-level model representing source side sentences. The intention network is a recurrent network that models the dynamics of the intention process. The decoder network is a recurrent network produces responses to the input from the source side. It is a language model that is dependent on the intention and has an attention mechanism to attend to particular source side words, when predicting a symbol in the response. The model is trained end-to-end without labeling data. Experiments show that this model generates natural responses to user inputs.

Acquiring training data to improve the robustness of dialog systems can be a painstakingly long process. In this work, we propose a method to reduce the cost and effort of creating new conversational agents by artificially generating more data from existing examples, using paraphrase generation. Our proposed approach can kick-start a dialog system with little human effort, and brings its performance to a level satisfactory enough for allowing actual interactions with real end-users. We experimented with two neural paraphrasing approaches, namely Neural Machine Translation and a Transformer-based seq2seq model. We present the results obtained with two datasets in English and in French:~a crowd-sourced public intent classification dataset and our own corporate dialog system dataset. We show that our proposed approach increased the generalization capabilities of the intent classification model on both datasets, reducing the effort required to initialize a new dialog system and helping to deploy this technology at scale within an organization.

Intent detection is a crucial task in any Natural Language Understanding (NLU) system and forms the foundation of a task-oriented dialogue system. To build high-quality real-world conversational solutions for edge devices, there is a need for deploying intent detection model on device. This necessitates a light-weight, fast, and accurate model that can perform efficiently in a resource-constrained environment. To this end, we propose LIDSNet, a novel lightweight on-device intent detection model, which accurately predicts the message intent by utilizing a Deep Siamese Network for learning better sentence representations. We use character-level features to enrich the sentence-level representations and empirically demonstrate the advantage of transfer learning by utilizing pre-trained embeddings. Furthermore, to investigate the efficacy of the modules in our architecture, we conduct an ablation study and arrive at our optimal model. Experimental results prove that LIDSNet achieves state-of-the-art competitive accuracy of 98.00% and 95.97% on SNIPS and ATIS public datasets respectively, with under 0.59M parameters. We further benchmark LIDSNet against fine-tuned BERTs and show that our model is at least 41x lighter and 30x faster during inference than MobileBERT on Samsung Galaxy S20 device, justifying its efficiency on resource-constrained edge devices.

Malicious intent in smart contract development can lead to substantial economic losses. SmartIntentNN is a deep learning model specifically designed to identify unsafe intents in smart contracts. This model integrates the Universal Sentence Encoder, a K-means clustering-based intent highlighting mechanism, and a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory network for multi-label classification, achieving an F1 of 0.8633 in distinguishing ten different intent categories. In this study, we present an upgraded version of this model, SmartIntentNN2 (Smart Contract Intent Neural Network V2). A significant enhancement in V2 is the incorporation of a BERT-based pre-trained language model, which has been trained on a dataset of 16,000 real smart contracts using a Masked Language Modeling objective. SmartIntentNN2 retains the BiLSTM-based multi-label classification network. With an improved F1 of 0.927, V2 demonstrates enhanced performance compared to its predecessor, establishing itself as the state-of-the-art model for smart contract intent detection.

We present LINGUIST, a method for generating annotated data for Intent Classification and Slot Tagging (IC+ST), via fine-tuning AlexaTM 5B, a 5-billion-parameter multilingual sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model, on a flexible instruction prompt. In a 10-shot novel intent setting for the SNIPS dataset, LINGUIST surpasses state-of-the-art approaches (Back-Translation and Example Extrapolation) by a wide margin, showing absolute improvement for the target intents of +1.9 points on IC Recall and +2.5 points on ST F1 Score. In the zero-shot cross-lingual setting of the mATIS++ dataset, LINGUIST out-performs a strong baseline of Machine Translation with Slot Alignment by +4.14 points absolute on ST F1 Score across 6 languages, while matching performance on IC. Finally, we verify our results on an internal large-scale multilingual dataset for conversational agent IC+ST and show significant improvements over a baseline which uses Back-Translation, Paraphrasing and Slot Catalog Resampling. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate instruction fine-tuning of a large-scale seq2seq model to control the outputs of multilingual intent- and slot-labeled data generation.

Aligned large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, and their reliance on web-scale pretraining creates a subtle but consequential attack surface. We study Stealth Pretraining Seeding (SPS), a threat model in which adversaries distribute small amounts of poisoned content across stealth websites, increasing the likelihood that such material is absorbed into future training corpora derived from sources such as Common Crawl. Because each individual payload is tiny, diffuse, and superficially benign, the attack is difficult to detect during dataset construction or filtering. The result is a latent form of poisoning that remains largely invisible under standard evaluation, yet can later be activated by a precise trigger such as <00TRIGGER00>. We call this attack PermaFrost, reflecting its latent and reactivatable nature. We study it through PermaFrost-Attack, a controlled framework for latent conceptual poisoning, together with three geometric diagnostics: Thermodynamic Length, Spectral Curvature, and the Infection Traceback Graph. Across multiple model families and scales, we show that this controlled SPS proxy can induce persistent unsafe behavior that often remains hidden under standard evaluation. Our results identify SPS as a practical and underappreciated threat to future foundation models. This paper introduces a novel geometric diagnostic lens for systematically examining latent model behavior, providing a principled foundation for detecting, characterizing, and understanding vulnerabilities that may remain invisible under standard evaluation.

Intent classification and slot-filling are essential tasks of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). In most SLUsystems, those tasks are realized by independent modules. For about fifteen years, models achieving both of themjointly and exploiting their mutual enhancement have been proposed. A multilingual module using a joint modelwas envisioned to create a touristic dialogue system for a European project, HumanE-AI-Net. A combination ofmultiple datasets, including the MEDIA dataset, was suggested for training this joint model. The MEDIA SLU datasetis a French dataset distributed since 2005 by ELRA, mainly used by the French research community and free foracademic research since 2020. Unfortunately, it is annotated only in slots but not intents. An enhanced version ofMEDIA annotated with intents has been built to extend its use to more tasks and use cases. This paper presents thesemi-automatic methodology used to obtain this enhanced version. In addition, we present the first results of SLUexperiments on this enhanced dataset using joint models for intent classification and slot-filling.

Recommending novel content, which expands user horizons by introducing them to new interests, has been shown to improve users' long-term experience on recommendation platforms chen2021values. Users however are not constantly looking to explore novel content. It is therefore crucial to understand their novelty-seeking intent and adjust the recommendation policy accordingly. Most existing literature models a user's propensity to choose novel content or to prefer a more diverse set of recommendations at individual interactions. Hierarchical structure, on the other hand, exists in a user's novelty-seeking intent, which is manifested as a static and intrinsic user preference for seeking novelty along with a dynamic session-based propensity. To this end, we propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning-based method to model the hierarchical user novelty-seeking intent, and to adapt the recommendation policy accordingly based on the extracted user novelty-seeking propensity. We further incorporate diversity and novelty-related measurement in the reward function of the hierarchical RL (HRL) agent to encourage user exploration chen2021values. We demonstrate the benefits of explicitly modeling hierarchical user novelty-seeking intent in recommendations through extensive experiments on simulated and real-world datasets. In particular, we demonstrate that the effectiveness of our proposed hierarchical RL-based method lies in its ability to capture such hierarchically-structured intent. As a result, the proposed HRL model achieves superior performance on several public datasets, compared with state-of-art baselines.

Even to a simple and short news headline, readers react in a multitude of ways: cognitively (e.g. inferring the writer's intent), emotionally (e.g. feeling distrust), and behaviorally (e.g. sharing the news with their friends). Such reactions are instantaneous and yet complex, as they rely on factors that go beyond interpreting factual content of news. We propose Misinfo Reaction Frames (MRF), a pragmatic formalism for modeling how readers might react to a news headline. In contrast to categorical schema, our free-text dimensions provide a more nuanced way of understanding intent beyond being benign or malicious. We also introduce a Misinfo Reaction Frames corpus, a crowdsourced dataset of reactions to over 25k news headlines focusing on global crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and cancer. Empirical results confirm that it is indeed possible for neural models to predict the prominent patterns of readers' reactions to previously unseen news headlines. Additionally, our user study shows that displaying machine-generated MRF implications alongside news headlines to readers can increase their trust in real news while decreasing their trust in misinformation. Our work demonstrates the feasibility and importance of pragmatic inferences on news headlines to help enhance AI-guided misinformation detection and mitigation.

It is expensive and difficult to obtain the large number of sentence-level intent and token-level slot label annotations required to train neural network (NN)-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) components of task-oriented dialog systems, especially for the many real world tasks that have a large and growing number of intents and slot types. While zero shot learning approaches that require no labeled examples -- only features and auxiliary information -- have been proposed only for slot labeling, we show that one can profitably perform joint zero-shot intent classification and slot labeling. We demonstrate the value of capturing dependencies between intents and slots, and between different slots in an utterance in the zero shot setting. We describe NN architectures that translate between word and sentence embedding spaces, and demonstrate that these modifications are required to enable zero shot learning for this task. We show a substantial improvement over strong baselines and explain the intuition behind each architectural modification through visualizations and ablation studies.

As voice assistants cement their place in our technologically advanced society, there remains a need to cater to the diverse linguistic landscape, including colloquial forms of low-resource languages. Our study introduces the first-ever comprehensive dataset for intent detection and slot filling in formal Bangla, colloquial Bangla, and Sylheti languages, totaling 984 samples across 10 unique intents. Our analysis reveals the robustness of large language models for tackling downstream tasks with inadequate data. The GPT-3.5 model achieves an impressive F1 score of 0.94 in intent detection and 0.51 in slot filling for colloquial Bangla.

Purpose. We present an approach for forecasting mental health conditions and emotions of a given population during the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina based on language expressions used in social media. This approach permits anticipating high prevalence periods in short- to medium-term time horizons. Design. Mental health conditions and emotions are captured via markers, which link social media contents with lexicons. First, we build descriptive timelines for decision makers to monitor the evolution of markers, and their correlation with crisis events. Second, we model the timelines as time series, and support their forecasting, which in turn serve to identify high prevalence points for the estimated markers. Findings. Results showed that different time series forecasting strategies offer different capabilities. In the best scenario, the emergence of high prevalence periods of emotions and mental health disorders can be satisfactorily predicted with a neural network strategy, even when limited data is available in early stages of a crisis (e.g., 7 days). Originality. Although there have been efforts in the literature to predict mental states of individuals, the analysis of mental health at the collective level has received scarce attention. We take a step forward by proposing a forecasting approach for analyzing the mental health of a given population (or group of individuals) at a larger scale. Practical implications. We believe that this work contributes to a better understanding of how psychological processes related to crisis manifest in social media, being a valuable asset for the design, implementation and monitoring of health prevention and communication policies.

Fine-tuned large language models can exhibit reward-hacking behavior arising from emergent misalignment, which is difficult to detect from final outputs alone. While prior work has studied reward hacking at the level of completed responses, it remains unclear whether such behavior can be identified during generation. We propose an activation-based monitoring approach that detects reward-hacking signals from internal representations as a model generates its response. Our method trains sparse autoencoders on residual stream activations and applies lightweight linear classifiers to produce token-level estimates of reward-hacking activity. Across multiple model families and fine-tuning mixtures, we find that internal activation patterns reliably distinguish reward-hacking from benign behavior, generalize to unseen mixed-policy adapters, and exhibit model-dependent temporal structure during chain-of-thought reasoning. Notably, reward-hacking signals often emerge early, persist throughout reasoning, and can be amplified by increased test-time compute in the form of chain-of-thought prompting under weakly specified reward objectives. These results suggest that internal activation monitoring provides a complementary and earlier signal of emergent misalignment than output-based evaluation, supporting more robust post-deployment safety monitoring for fine-tuned language models.

Truly proactive AI systems must anticipate what we will do next. This foresight demands far richer information than the sparse signals we type into our prompts -- it demands reasoning over the entire context of what we see and do. We formalize this as next action prediction (NAP): given a sequence of a user's multimodal interactions with a computer (screenshots, clicks, sensor data), predict that user's next action. Progress on this task requires both new data and modeling approaches. To scale data, we annotate longitudinal, naturalistic computer use with vision-language models. We release an open-source pipeline for performing this labeling on private infrastructure, and label over 360K actions across one month of continuous phone usage from 20 users, amounting to 1,800 hours of screen time. We then introduce LongNAP, a user model that combines parametric and in-context learning to reason over long interaction histories. LongNAP is trained via policy gradient methods to generate user-specific reasoning traces given some context; retrieve relevant traces from a library of past traces; and then apply retrieved traces in-context to predict future actions. Using an LLM-as-judge evaluation metric (0-1 similarity to ground truth), LongNAP significantly outperforms supervised finetuning and prompted baselines on held-out data (by 79% and 39% respectively). Additionally, LongNAP generalizes to held out users when trained across individuals. The space of next actions a user might take at any moment is unbounded, spanning thousands of possible outcomes. Despite this, 17.1% of LongNAP's predicted trajectories are well-aligned with what a user does next (LLM-judge score geq 0.5). This rises to 26% when we filter to highly confident predictions. In sum, we argue that learning from the full context of user behavior to anticipate user needs is now a viable task with substantial opportunity.

Within twelve days of launch, an AI-native social platform exhibits extreme attention concentration, hierarchical role separation, and one-way attention flow, consistent with the hypothesis that stratification in agent ecosystems can emerge rapidly rather than gradually. We analyse publicly observable traces from a 12-day window of Moltbook (28 January -- 8 February 2026), comprising 20,040 posts and 192,410 comments from 15,083 accounts across 759 submolts. We construct co-participation and directed-comment graphs and report reciprocity, community structure, and centrality, alongside descriptive content themes. Under a commenter--post-author tie definition, interaction is strongly asymmetric (reciprocity ~1%), and HITS centrality separates cleanly into hub and authority roles, consistent with broadcast-style attention rather than mutual exchange. Engagement is highly unequal: attention is far more concentrated than production (upvote Gini = 0.992 vs. posting Gini = 0.601), and early-arriving accounts accumulate substantially higher cumulative upvotes prior to exposure-time correction, suggesting rich-get-richer dynamics. Participation is brief and bursty (median observed lifespan 2.48 minutes; 54.8% of posts occur within six peak UTC hours). Embedding-based topic modelling identifies diverse thematic clusters, including technical discussion of memory and identity, onboarding messages, and formulaic token-minting content. These results provide an early structural baseline for large-scale agent--agent social interaction and suggest that familiar forms of hierarchy, amplification, and role differentiation can arise on compressed timescales in agent-facing platforms.

Accurately understanding the intent behind speech, conversation, and writing is crucial to the development of helpful Large Language Model (LLM) assistants. This paper introduces IntentGrasp, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the intent understanding capability of LLMs. Derived from 49 high-quality, open-licensed corpora spanning 12 diverse domains, IntentGrasp is constructed through source datasets curation, intent label contextualization, and task format unification. IntentGrasp contains a large-scale training set of 262,759 instances and two evaluation sets: an All Set of 12,909 test cases and a more balanced and challenging Gem Set of 470 cases. Extensive evaluations on 20 LLMs across 7 families (including frontier models such as GPT-5.4, Gemini-3.1-Pro, and Claude-Opus-4.7) demonstrate unsatisfactory performance, with scores below 60% on All Set and below 25% on Gem set. Notably, 17 out of 20 tested models perform worse than a random-guess baseline (15.2%) on Gem Set, while the estimated human performance is ~81.1%, showing substantial room for improvement. To enhance such ability, this paper proposes Intentional Fine-Tuning (IFT), which fine-tunes the models on the training set in IntentGrasp, yielding significant gains of 30+ F1 points on All Set and 20+ points on Gem Set. Tellingly, the leave-one-domain-out (Lodo) experiments further demonstrate the strong cross-domain generalizability of IFT, verifying that it is a promising approach to substantially enhancing the intent understanding of LLMs. Overall, by benchmarking and boosting intent understanding ability, this study sheds light on a promising path towards more intentional, capable, and safe AI assistants for human benefits and social good.

Understanding user intent is essential for effective planning in conversational assistants, particularly those powered by large language models (LLMs) coordinating multiple agents. However, real-world dialogues are often ambiguous, underspecified, or dynamic, making intent detection a persistent challenge. Traditional classification-based approaches struggle to generalize in open-ended settings, leading to brittle interpretations and poor downstream planning. We propose RECAP (REwriting Conversations for Agent Planning), a new benchmark designed to evaluate and advance intent rewriting, reframing user-agent dialogues into concise representations of user goals. RECAP captures diverse challenges such as ambiguity, intent drift, vagueness, and mixed-goal conversations. Alongside the dataset, we introduce an LLM-based evaluator that assesses planning utility given the rewritten intent. Using RECAP, we develop a prompt-based rewriting approach that outperforms baselines. We further demonstrate that fine-tuning two DPO-based rewriters yields additional utility gains. Our results highlight intent rewriting as a critical and tractable component for improving agent planning in open-domain dialogue systems.

Achieving natural full-duplex interaction in spoken dialogue systems (SDS) remains a challenge due to the difficulty of accurately detecting user interruptions. Current solutions are polarized between "trigger-happy" VAD-based methods that misinterpret backchannels and robust end-to-end models that exhibit unacceptable response delays. Moreover, the absence of real-world benchmarks and holistic metrics hinders progress in the field. This paper presents a comprehensive frame-work to overcome these limitations. We first introduce SID-Bench, the first benchmark for semantic-aware interruption detection built entirely from real-world human dialogues. To provide a rigorous assessment of the responsiveness-robustness trade-off, we propose the Average Penalty Time (APT) metric, which assigns a temporal cost to both false alarms and late responses. Building on this framework, we design an LLM-based detection model optimized through a novel training paradigm to capture subtle semantic cues of intent. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms mainstream baselines, achieving a nearly threefold reduction in APT. By successfully resolving the long-standing tension between speed and stability, our work establishes a new state-of-the-art for intelligent interruption handling in SDS. To facilitate future research, SID-Bench and the associated code are available at: https://github.com/xkx-hub/SID-bench.

Early rumor detection (ERD) on social media platform is very challenging when limited, incomplete and noisy information is available. Most of the existing methods have largely worked on event-level detection that requires the collection of posts relevant to a specific event and relied only on user-generated content. They are not appropriate to detect rumor sources in the very early stages, before an event unfolds and becomes widespread. In this paper, we address the task of ERD at the message level. We present a novel hybrid neural network architecture, which combines a task-specific character-based bidirectional language model and stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to represent textual contents and social-temporal contexts of input source tweets, for modelling propagation patterns of rumors in the early stages of their development. We apply multi-layered attention models to jointly learn attentive context embeddings over multiple context inputs. Our experiments employ a stringent leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) evaluation setup on seven publicly available real-life rumor event data sets. Our models achieve state-of-the-art(SoA) performance for detecting unseen rumors on large augmented data which covers more than 12 events and 2,967 rumors. An ablation study is conducted to understand the relative contribution of each component of our proposed model.

While GUI agents have shown strong performance under explicit and completion instructions, real-world deployment requires aligning with users' more complex implicit intents. In this work, we highlight Hierarchical Implicit Intent Alignment for Personalized GUI Agent (PersonalAlign), a new agent task that requires agents to leverage long-term user records as persistent context to resolve omitted preferences in vague instructions and anticipate latent routines by user state for proactive assistance. To facilitate this study, we introduce AndroidIntent, a benchmark designed to evaluate agents' ability in resolving vague instructions and providing proactive suggestions through reasoning over long-term user records. We annotated 775 user-specific preferences and 215 routines from 20k long-term records across different users for evaluation. Furthermore, we introduce Hierarchical Intent Memory Agent (HIM-Agent), which maintains a continuously updating personal memory and hierarchically organizes user preferences and routines for personalization. Finally, we evaluate a range of GUI agents on AndroidIntent, including GPT-5, Qwen3-VL, and UI-TARS, further results show that HIM-Agent significantly improves both execution and proactive performance by 15.7% and 7.3%.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in transforming recommender systems from implicit behavioral pattern matching to explicit intent reasoning. While RecGPT-V1 successfully pioneered this paradigm by integrating LLM-based reasoning into user interest mining and item tag prediction, it suffers from four fundamental limitations: (1) computational inefficiency and cognitive redundancy across multiple reasoning routes; (2) insufficient explanation diversity in fixed-template generation; (3) limited generalization under supervised learning paradigms; and (4) simplistic outcome-focused evaluation that fails to match human standards. To address these challenges, we present RecGPT-V2 with four key innovations. First, a Hierarchical Multi-Agent System restructures intent reasoning through coordinated collaboration, eliminating cognitive duplication while enabling diverse intent coverage. Combined with Hybrid Representation Inference that compresses user-behavior contexts, our framework reduces GPU consumption by 60% and improves exclusive recall from 9.39% to 10.99%. Second, a Meta-Prompting framework dynamically generates contextually adaptive prompts, improving explanation diversity by +7.3%. Third, constrained reinforcement learning mitigates multi-reward conflicts, achieving +24.1% improvement in tag prediction and +13.0% in explanation acceptance. Fourth, an Agent-as-a-Judge framework decomposes assessment into multi-step reasoning, improving human preference alignment. Online A/B tests on Taobao demonstrate significant improvements: +2.98% CTR, +3.71% IPV, +2.19% TV, and +11.46% NER. RecGPT-V2 establishes both the technical feasibility and commercial viability of deploying LLM-powered intent reasoning at scale, bridging the gap between cognitive exploration and industrial utility.

Reliable slot and intent detection (SID) is crucial in natural language understanding for applications like digital assistants. Encoder-only transformer models fine-tuned on high-resource languages generally perform well on SID. However, they struggle with dialectal data, where no standardized form exists and training data is scarce and costly to produce. We explore zero-shot transfer learning for SID, focusing on multiple Bavarian dialects, for which we release a new dataset for the Munich dialect. We evaluate models trained on auxiliary tasks in Bavarian, and compare joint multi-task learning with intermediate-task training. We also compare three types of auxiliary tasks: token-level syntactic tasks, named entity recognition (NER), and language modelling. We find that the included auxiliary tasks have a more positive effect on slot filling than intent classification (with NER having the most positive effect), and that intermediate-task training yields more consistent performance gains. Our best-performing approach improves intent classification performance on Bavarian dialects by 5.1 and slot filling F1 by 8.4 percentage points.

Intent classification and slot filling are two essential tasks for natural language understanding. They often suffer from small-scale human-labeled training data, resulting in poor generalization capability, especially for rare words. Recently a new language representation model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), facilitates pre-training deep bidirectional representations on large-scale unlabeled corpora, and has created state-of-the-art models for a wide variety of natural language processing tasks after simple fine-tuning. However, there has not been much effort on exploring BERT for natural language understanding. In this work, we propose a joint intent classification and slot filling model based on BERT. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves significant improvement on intent classification accuracy, slot filling F1, and sentence-level semantic frame accuracy on several public benchmark datasets, compared to the attention-based recurrent neural network models and slot-gated models.

Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema and asking many domain experts to annotate the corresponding utterances, upon which neural models are trained. This procedure brings the challenges of information sharing hindering, out-of-schema, or data sparsity in open-domain dialogue systems. To tackle these challenges, we explore a new task of {\em automatic intent-slot induction} and propose a novel domain-independent tool. That is, we design a coarse-to-fine three-step procedure including Role-labeling, Concept-mining, And Pattern-mining (RCAP): (1) role-labeling: extracting keyphrases from users' utterances and classifying them into a quadruple of coarsely-defined intent-roles via sequence labeling; (2) concept-mining: clustering the extracted intent-role mentions and naming them into abstract fine-grained concepts; (3) pattern-mining: applying the Apriori algorithm to mine intent-role patterns and automatically inferring the intent-slot using these coarse-grained intent-role labels and fine-grained concepts. Empirical evaluations on both real-world in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that: (1) our RCAP can generate satisfactory SLU schema and outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised learning method; (2) our RCAP can be directly applied to out-of-domain datasets and gain at least 76\% improvement of F1-score on intent detection and 41\% improvement of F1-score on slot filling; (3) our RCAP exhibits its power in generic intent-slot extractions with less manual effort, which opens pathways for schema induction on new domains and unseen intent-slot discovery for generalizable dialogue systems.

This study investigates the automated classification of Calls to Action (CTAs) within the 2021 German Instagram election campaign to advance the understanding of mobilization in social media contexts. We analyzed over 2,208 Instagram stories and 712 posts using fine-tuned BERT models and OpenAI's GPT-4 models. The fine-tuned BERT model incorporating synthetic training data achieved a macro F1 score of 0.93, demonstrating a robust classification performance. Our analysis revealed that 49.58% of Instagram posts and 10.64% of stories contained CTAs, highlighting significant differences in mobilization strategies between these content types. Additionally, we found that FDP and the Greens had the highest prevalence of CTAs in posts, whereas CDU and CSU led in story CTAs.

Machine-based prediction of real-world events is garnering attention due to its potential for informed decision-making. Whereas traditional forecasting predominantly hinges on structured data like time-series, recent breakthroughs in language models enable predictions using unstructured text. In particular, (Zou et al., 2022) unveils AutoCast, a new benchmark that employs news articles for answering forecasting queries. Nevertheless, existing methods still trail behind human performance. The cornerstone of accurate forecasting, we argue, lies in identifying a concise, yet rich subset of news snippets from a vast corpus. With this motivation, we introduce AutoCast++, a zero-shot ranking-based context retrieval system, tailored to sift through expansive news document collections for event forecasting. Our approach first re-ranks articles based on zero-shot question-passage relevance, honing in on semantically pertinent news. Following this, the chosen articles are subjected to zero-shot summarization to attain succinct context. Leveraging a pre-trained language model, we conduct both the relevance evaluation and article summarization without needing domain-specific training. Notably, recent articles can sometimes be at odds with preceding ones due to new facts or unanticipated incidents, leading to fluctuating temporal dynamics. To tackle this, our re-ranking mechanism gives preference to more recent articles, and we further regularize the multi-passage representation learning to align with human forecaster responses made on different dates. Empirical results underscore marked improvements across multiple metrics, improving the performance for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) by 48% and true/false (TF) questions by up to 8%.

Language models excel at following instructions but often struggle with the collaborative aspects of conversation that humans naturally employ. This limitation in grounding -- the process by which conversation participants establish mutual understanding -- can lead to outcomes ranging from frustrated users to serious consequences in high-stakes scenarios. To systematically study grounding challenges in human-LLM interactions, we analyze logs from three human-assistant datasets: WildChat, MultiWOZ, and Bing Chat. We develop a taxonomy of grounding acts and build models to annotate and forecast grounding behavior. Our findings reveal significant differences in human-human and human-LLM grounding: LLMs were three times less likely to initiate clarification and sixteen times less likely to provide follow-up requests than humans. Additionally, early grounding failures predicted later interaction breakdowns. Building on these insights, we introduce RIFTS: a benchmark derived from publicly available LLM interaction data containing situations where LLMs fail to initiate grounding. We note that current frontier models perform poorly on RIFTS, highlighting the need to reconsider how we train and prompt LLMs for human interaction. To this end, we develop a preliminary intervention that mitigates grounding failures.

Current instruction data synthesis methods primarily focus on single-turn instructions and often neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates in extended conversations. To address this limitation, we propose Skeleton-Guided Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation, a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent. It operates in two stages: (1) Intent Modeling, which captures the global structure of human dialogues by assigning each conversation to one of nine well-defined intent trajectories, ensuring a coherent and goal-oriented information flow; and (2) Skeleton Generation, which constructs a structurally grounded sequence of user queries aligned with the modeled intent, thereby serving as a scaffold that constrains and guides the downstream instruction synthesis process. Based on this process, we construct ConsistentChat, a multi-turn instruction dataset with approximately 15,000 multi-turn conversations and 224,392 utterances. Experiments on the Light, Topdial, and MT-Eval benchmarks show that models fine-tuned on ConsistentChat achieve a 20-30% improvement in chat consistency and up to a 15% increase in task success rate, significantly outperforming models trained on existing single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets.

Human-AI planning for complex goals remains challenging with current large language models (LLMs), which rely on linear chat histories and simplistic memory mechanisms. Despite advances in long-context prompting, users still manually manage information, leading to a high cognitive burden. Hence, we propose JumpStarter, a system that enables LLMs to collaborate with humans on complex goals by dynamically decomposing tasks to help users manage context. We specifically introduce task-structured context curation, a novel framework that breaks down a user's goal into a hierarchy of actionable subtasks, and scopes context to localized decision points, enabling finer-grained personalization and reuse. The framework is realized through three core mechanisms: context elicitation, selection, and reuse. We demonstrate that task-structured context curation significantly improves plan quality by 16% over ablations. Our user study shows that JumpStarter helped users generate plans with 79% higher quality compared to ChatGPT.

With the increasing importance of online communities, discussion forums, and customer reviews, Internet "trolls" have proliferated thereby making it difficult for information seekers to find relevant and correct information. In this paper, we consider the problem of detecting and identifying Internet trolls, almost all of which are human agents. Identifying a human agent among a human population presents significant challenges compared to detecting automated spam or computerized robots. To learn a troll's behavior, we use contextual anomaly detection to profile each chat user. Using clustering and distance-based methods, we use contextual data such as the group's current goal, the current time, and the username to classify each point as an anomaly. A user whose features significantly differ from the norm will be classified as a troll. We collected 38 million data points from the viral Internet fad, Twitch Plays Pokemon. Using clustering and distance-based methods, we develop heuristics for identifying trolls. Using MapReduce techniques for preprocessing and user profiling, we are able to classify trolls based on 10 features extracted from a user's lifetime history.

Multimodal intent recognition poses significant challenges, requiring the incorporation of non-verbal modalities from real-world contexts to enhance the comprehension of human intentions. Existing benchmark datasets are limited in scale and suffer from difficulties in handling out-of-scope samples that arise in multi-turn conversational interactions. We introduce MIntRec2.0, a large-scale benchmark dataset for multimodal intent recognition in multi-party conversations. It contains 1,245 dialogues with 15,040 samples, each annotated within a new intent taxonomy of 30 fine-grained classes. Besides 9,304 in-scope samples, it also includes 5,736 out-of-scope samples appearing in multi-turn contexts, which naturally occur in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we provide comprehensive information on the speakers in each utterance, enriching its utility for multi-party conversational research. We establish a general framework supporting the organization of single-turn and multi-turn dialogue data, modality feature extraction, multimodal fusion, as well as in-scope classification and out-of-scope detection. Evaluation benchmarks are built using classic multimodal fusion methods, ChatGPT, and human evaluators. While existing methods incorporating nonverbal information yield improvements, effectively leveraging context information and detecting out-of-scope samples remains a substantial challenge. Notably, large language models exhibit a significant performance gap compared to humans, highlighting the limitations of machine learning methods in the cognitive intent understanding task. We believe that MIntRec2.0 will serve as a valuable resource, providing a pioneering foundation for research in human-machine conversational interactions, and significantly facilitating related applications. The full dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/thuiar/MIntRec2.0.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at single-turn tasks such as instruction following and summarization, yet real-world deployments require sustained multi-turn interactions where user goals and conversational context persist and evolve. A recurring challenge in this setting is context drift: the gradual divergence of a model's outputs from goal-consistent behavior across turns. Unlike single-turn errors, drift unfolds temporally and is poorly captured by static evaluation metrics. In this work, we present a study of context drift in multi-turn interactions and propose a simple dynamical framework to interpret its behavior. We formalize drift as the turn-wise KL divergence between the token-level predictive distributions of the test model and a goal-consistent reference model, and propose a recurrence model that interprets its evolution as a bounded stochastic process with restoring forces and controllable interventions. We instantiate this framework in both synthetic long-horizon rewriting tasks and realistic user-agent simulations such as in tau-Bench, measuring drift for several open-weight LLMs that are used as user simulators. Our experiments consistently reveal stable, noise-limited equilibria rather than runaway degradation, and demonstrate that simple reminder interventions reliably reduce divergence in line with theoretical predictions. Together, these results suggest that multi-turn drift can be understood as a controllable equilibrium phenomenon rather than as inevitable decay, providing a foundation for studying and mitigating context drift in extended interactions.

As multimodal large language models advance rapidly, the automation of mobile tasks has become increasingly feasible through the use of mobile-use agents that mimic human interactions from graphical user interface. To further enhance mobile-use agents, previous studies employ demonstration learning to improve mobile-use agents from human demonstrations. However, these methods focus solely on the explicit intention flows of humans (e.g., step sequences) while neglecting implicit intention flows (e.g., personal preferences), which makes it difficult to construct personalized mobile-use agents. In this work, to evaluate the Intention Alignment Rate between mobile-use agents and humans, we first collect MobileIAR, a dataset containing human-intent-aligned actions and ground-truth actions. This enables a comprehensive assessment of the agents' understanding of human intent. Then we propose IFRAgent, a framework built upon Intention Flow Recognition from human demonstrations. IFRAgent analyzes explicit intention flows from human demonstrations to construct a query-level vector library of standard operating procedures (SOP), and analyzes implicit intention flows to build a user-level habit repository. IFRAgent then leverages a SOP extractor combined with retrieval-augmented generation and a query rewriter to generate personalized query and SOP from a raw ambiguous query, enhancing the alignment between mobile-use agents and human intent. Experimental results demonstrate that IFRAgent outperforms baselines by an average of 6.79\% (32.06\% relative improvement) in human intention alignment rate and improves step completion rates by an average of 5.30\% (26.34\% relative improvement). The codes are available at https://github.com/MadeAgents/Quick-on-the-Uptake.

Zero-Input AI (ZIA) introduces a novel framework for human-computer interaction by enabling proactive intent prediction without explicit user commands. It integrates gaze tracking, bio-signals (EEG, heart rate), and contextual data (time, location, usage history) into a multi-modal model for real-time inference, targeting <100 ms latency. The proposed architecture employs a transformer-based model with cross-modal attention, variational Bayesian inference for uncertainty estimation, and reinforcement learning for adaptive optimization. To support deployment on edge devices (CPUs, TPUs, NPUs), ZIA utilizes quantization, weight pruning, and linear attention to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear with sequence length. Theoretical analysis establishes an information-theoretic bound on prediction error and demonstrates how multi-modal fusion improves accuracy over single-modal approaches. Expected performance suggests 85-90% accuracy with EEG integration and 60-100 ms inference latency. ZIA provides a scalable, privacy-preserving framework for accessibility, healthcare, and consumer applications, advancing AI toward anticipatory intelligence.

Proactive agents that anticipate user intentions without explicit prompts represent a significant evolution in human-AI interaction, promising to reduce cognitive load and streamline workflows. However, existing datasets suffer from two critical deficiencies: (1) reliance on LLM-synthesized data that fails to capture authentic human decision-making patterns, and (2) focus on isolated tasks rather than continuous workflows, missing the pre-assistance behavioral context essential for learning proactive intervention signals. To address these gaps, we introduce ProAgentBench, a rigorous benchmark for proactive agents in working scenarios. Our contributions include: (1) a hierarchical task framework that decomposes proactive assistance into timing prediction and assist content generation; (2) a privacy-compliant dataset with 28,000+ events from 500+ hours of real user sessions, preserving bursty interaction patterns (burstiness B=0.787) absent in synthetic data; and (3) extensive experiments that evaluates LLM- and VLM-based baselines. Numerically, we showed that long-term memory and historical context significantly enhance prediction accuracy, while real-world training data substantially outperforms synthetic alternatives. We release our dataset and code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProAgentBench-6BC0.

Intent, typically clearly formulated and planned, functions as a cognitive framework for reasoning and problem-solving. This paper introduces the concept of Speaking with Intent (SWI) in large language models (LLMs), where the explicitly generated intent encapsulates the model's underlying intention and provides high-level planning to guide subsequent analysis and communication. By emulating deliberate and purposeful thoughts in the human mind, SWI is hypothesized to enhance the reasoning capabilities and generation quality of LLMs. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superiority of Speaking with Intent over Baseline (i.e., generation without explicit intent). Moreover, SWI outperforms answer-trigger prompting methods Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve and maintains competitive performance with the strong method ARR (Analyzing, Retrieving, and Reasoning). Additionally, the effectiveness and generalizability of SWI are solidified on reasoning-intensive question answering (QA) and text summarization benchmarks, where SWI brings consistent improvement to the Baseline generation. In text summarization, SWI-generated summaries exhibit greater accuracy, conciseness, and factual correctness, with fewer hallucinations. Furthermore, human evaluations verify the coherence, effectiveness, and interpretability of the intent produced by SWI. This proof-of-concept study creates a novel avenue for enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities with cognitive notions.

The rise of multimodal data, integrating text, audio, and visuals, has created new opportunities for studying multimodal tasks such as intent detection. This work investigates the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) and non-LLMs, including text-only and multi-modal models, in the multimodal intent detection task. Our study reveals that Mistral-7B, a text-only LLM, outperforms most competitive multimodal models by approximately 9% on MIntRec-1 and 4% on MIntRec2.0 datasets. This performance advantage comes from a strong textual bias in these datasets, where over 90% of the samples require textual input, either alone or in combination with other modalities, for correct classification. We confirm the modality bias of these datasets via human evaluation, too. Next, we propose a framework to debias the datasets, and upon debiasing, more than 70% of the samples in MIntRec-1 and more than 50% in MIntRec2.0 get removed, resulting in significant performance degradation across all models, with smaller multimodal fusion models being the most affected with an accuracy drop of over 50 - 60%. Further, we analyze the context-specific relevance of different modalities through empirical analysis. Our findings highlight the challenges posed by modality bias in multimodal intent datasets and emphasize the need for unbiased datasets to evaluate multimodal models effectively.

User response prediction is essential in industrial recommendation systems, such as online display advertising. Among all the features in recommendation models, user behaviors are among the most critical. Many works have revealed that a user's behavior reflects her interest in the candidate item, owing to the semantic or temporal correlation between behaviors and the candidate. While the literature has individually examined each of these correlations, researchers have yet to analyze them in combination, that is, the semantic-temporal correlation. We empirically measure this correlation and observe intuitive yet robust patterns. We then examine several popular user interest models and find that, surprisingly, none of them learn such correlation well. To fill this gap, we propose a Temporal Interest Network (TIN) to capture the semantic-temporal correlation simultaneously between behaviors and the target. We achieve this by incorporating target-aware temporal encoding, in addition to semantic encoding, to represent behaviors and the target. Furthermore, we conduct explicit 4-way interaction by deploying target-aware attention and target-aware representation to capture both semantic and temporal correlation. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on two popular public datasets, and our proposed TIN outperforms the best-performing baselines by 0.43% and 0.29% on GAUC, respectively. During online A/B testing in Tencent's advertising platform, TIN achieves 1.65% cost lift and 1.93% GMV lift over the base model. It has been successfully deployed in production since October 2023, serving the WeChat Moments traffic. We have released our code at https://github.com/zhouxy1003/TIN.

Slot Filling (SF) is one of the sub-tasks of Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) which aims to extract semantic constituents from a given natural language utterance. It is formulated as a sequence labeling task. Recently, it has been shown that contextual information is vital for this task. However, existing models employ contextual information in a restricted manner, e.g., using self-attention. Such methods fail to distinguish the effects of the context on the word representation and the word label. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel method to incorporate the contextual information in two different levels, i.e., representation level and task-specific (i.e., label) level. Our extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets on SF show the effectiveness of our model leading to new state-of-the-art results on all three benchmark datasets for the task of SF.

Smart contracts on the blockchain offer decentralized financial services but often lack robust security measures, leading to significant economic losses. While substantial research has focused on identifying vulnerabilities in smart contracts, a notable gap remains in evaluating the malicious intent behind their development. To address this, we introduce SmartIntentNN (Smart Contract Intent Neural Network), a deep learning-based tool designed to automate the detection of developers' intent in smart contracts. Our approach integrates a Universal Sentence Encoder for contextual representation of smart contract code, employs a K-means clustering algorithm to highlight intent-related code features, and utilizes a bidirectional LSTM-based multi-label classification network to predict ten distinct categories of unsafe intent. Evaluations on 10,000 real-world smart contracts demonstrate that SmartIntentNN surpasses all baselines, achieving an F1-score of 0.8633. A demo video is available at https://youtu.be/otT0fDYjwK8.

Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations, such as providing randomly-guessed answers to ambiguous queries or failing to refuse users' requests, both of which are considered aspects of a conversational agent's proactivity. This raises the question of whether LLM-based conversational systems are equipped to handle proactive dialogue problems. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based conversational systems, specifically focusing on three aspects of proactive dialogue systems: clarification, target-guided, and non-collaborative dialogues. To trigger the proactivity of LLMs, we propose the Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme, which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains. Empirical findings are discussed to promote future studies on LLM-based proactive dialogue systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on single-turn tasks, yet their effectiveness deteriorates in multi-turn conversations. We define this phenomenon as cumulative contextual decay - a progressive degradation of contextual integrity caused by attention pollution, dilution, and drift. To address this challenge, we propose Rhea (Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention), a novel framework that decouples conversation history into two functionally independent memory modules: (1) an Instructional Memory (IM) that persistently stores high-fidelity global constraints via a structural priority mechanism, and (2) an Episodic Memory (EM) that dynamically manages user-model interactions via asymmetric noise control and heuristic context retrieval. During inference, Rhea constructs a high signal-to-noise context by applying its priority attention: selectively integrating relevant episodic information while always prioritizing global instructions. To validate this approach, experiments on multiple multi-turn conversation benchmarks - including MT-Eval and Long-MT-Bench+ - show that Rhea mitigates performance decay and improves overall accuracy by 1.04 points on a 10-point scale (a 16% relative gain over strong baselines). Moreover, Rhea maintains near-perfect instruction fidelity (IAR > 8.1) across long-horizon interactions. These results demonstrate that Rhea provides a principled and effective framework for building more precise, instruction-consistent conversational LLMs.

One of the long-standing aspirations in conversational AI is to allow them to autonomously take initiatives in conversations, i.e., being proactive. This is especially challenging for multi-party conversations. Prior NLP research focused mainly on predicting the next speaker from contexts like preceding conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate the limitations of such methods and rethink what it means for AI to be proactive in multi-party, human-AI conversations. We propose that just like humans, rather than merely reacting to turn-taking cues, a proactive AI formulates its own inner thoughts during a conversation, and seeks the right moment to contribute. Through a formative study with 24 participants and inspiration from linguistics and cognitive psychology, we introduce the Inner Thoughts framework. Our framework equips AI with a continuous, covert train of thoughts in parallel to the overt communication process, which enables it to proactively engage by modeling its intrinsic motivation to express these thoughts. We instantiated this framework into two real-time systems: an AI playground web app and a chatbot. Through a technical evaluation and user studies with human participants, our framework significantly surpasses existing baselines on aspects like anthropomorphism, coherence, intelligence, and turn-taking appropriateness.

Linear probes are a promising approach for monitoring AI systems for deceptive behaviour. Previous work has shown that a linear classifier trained on a contrastive instruction pair and a simple dataset can achieve good performance. However, these probes exhibit notable failures even in straightforward scenarios, including spurious correlations and false positives on non-deceptive responses. In this paper, we identify the importance of the instruction pair used during training. Furthermore, we show that targeting specific deceptive behaviors through a human-interpretable taxonomy of deception leads to improved results on evaluation datasets. Our findings reveal that instruction pairs capture deceptive intent rather than content-specific patterns, explaining why prompt choice dominates probe performance (70.6% of variance). Given the heterogeneity of deception types across datasets, we conclude that organizations should design specialized probes targeting their specific threat models rather than seeking a universal deception detector.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and related alignment paradigms have become central to steering large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) toward human-preferred behaviors. However, these approaches introduce a systemic vulnerability: reward hacking, where models exploit imperfections in learned reward signals to maximize proxy objectives without fulfilling true task intent. As models scale and optimization intensifies, such exploitation manifests as verbosity bias, sycophancy, hallucinated justification, benchmark overfitting, and, in multimodal settings, perception--reasoning decoupling and evaluator manipulation. Recent evidence further suggests that seemingly benign shortcut behaviors can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic gaming of oversight mechanisms. In this survey, we propose the Proxy Compression Hypothesis (PCH) as a unifying framework for understanding reward hacking. We formalize reward hacking as an emergent consequence of optimizing expressive policies against compressed reward representations of high-dimensional human objectives. Under this view, reward hacking arises from the interaction of objective compression, optimization amplification, and evaluator--policy co-adaptation. This perspective unifies empirical phenomena across RLHF, RLAIF, and RLVR regimes, and explains how local shortcut learning can generalize into broader forms of misalignment, including deception and strategic manipulation of oversight mechanisms. We further organize detection and mitigation strategies according to how they intervene on compression, amplification, or co-adaptation dynamics. By framing reward hacking as a structural instability of proxy-based alignment under scale, we highlight open challenges in scalable oversight, multimodal grounding, and agentic autonomy.

Rumours in online social media pose significant risks to modern society, motivating the need for better understanding of how they develop. We focus specifically on the interface between emotion and rumours in threaded discourses, building on the surprisingly sparse literature on the topic which has largely focused on single aspect of emotions within the original rumour posts themselves, and largely overlooked the comparative differences between rumours and non-rumours. In this work, we take one step further to provide a comprehensive analytical emotion framework with multi-aspect emotion detection, contrasting rumour and non-rumour threads and provide both correlation and causal analysis of emotions. We applied our framework on existing widely-used rumour datasets to further understand the emotion dynamics in online social media threads. Our framework reveals that rumours trigger more negative emotions (e.g., anger, fear, pessimism), while non-rumours evoke more positive ones. Emotions are contagious, rumours spread negativity, non-rumours spread positivity. Causal analysis shows surprise bridges rumours and other emotions; pessimism comes from sadness and fear, while optimism arises from joy and love.

Conventional conversation assistants extract text transcripts from the speech signal using automatic speech recognition (ASR) and then predict intent from the transcriptions. Using end-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU), the intents of the speaker are predicted directly from the speech signal without requiring intermediate text transcripts. As a result, the model can optimize directly for intent classification and avoid cascading errors from ASR. The end-to-end SLU system also helps in reducing the latency of the intent prediction model. Although many datasets are available publicly for text-to-intent tasks, the availability of labeled speech-to-intent datasets is limited, and there are no datasets available in the Indian accent. In this paper, we release the Skit-S2I dataset, the first publicly available Indian-accented SLU dataset in the banking domain in a conversational tonality. We experiment with multiple baselines, compare different pretrained speech encoder's representations, and find that SSL pretrained representations perform slightly better than ASR pretrained representations lacking prosodic features for speech-to-intent classification. The dataset and baseline code is available at https://github.com/skit-ai/speech-to-intent-dataset

Intent is defined for understanding spoken language in existing works. Both textual features and acoustic features involved in medical speech contain intent, which is important for symptomatic diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a medical speech classification model named DRSC that automatically learns to disentangle intent and content representations from textual-acoustic data for classification. The intent representations of the text domain and the Mel-spectrogram domain are extracted via intent encoders, and then the reconstructed text feature and the Mel-spectrogram feature are obtained through two exchanges. After combining the intent from two domains into a joint representation, the integrated intent representation is fed into a decision layer for classification. Experimental results show that our model obtains an average accuracy rate of 95% in detecting 25 different medical symptoms.

Human-computer interaction has long imagined technology that understands us-from our preferences and habits, to the timing and purpose of our everyday actions. Yet current user models remain fragmented, narrowly tailored to specific apps, and incapable of the flexible reasoning required to fulfill these visions. This paper presents an architecture for a general user model (GUM) that learns about you by observing any interaction you have with your computer. The GUM takes as input any unstructured observation of a user (e.g., device screenshots) and constructs confidence-weighted propositions that capture that user knowledge and preferences. GUMs can infer that a user is preparing for a wedding they're attending from messages with a friend. Or recognize that a user is struggling with a collaborator's feedback on a draft by observing multiple stalled edits and a switch to reading related work. GUMs introduce an architecture that infers new propositions about a user from multimodal observations, retrieves related propositions for context, and continuously revises existing propositions. To illustrate the breadth of applications that GUMs enable, we demonstrate how they augment chat-based assistants with context, manage OS notifications to selectively surface important information, and enable interactive agents that adapt to preferences across apps. We also instantiate proactive assistants (GUMBOs) that discover and execute useful suggestions on a user's behalf using their GUM. In our evaluations, we find that GUMs make calibrated and accurate inferences about users, and that assistants built on GUMs proactively identify and perform actions that users wouldn't think to request explicitly. Altogether, GUMs introduce methods that leverage multimodal models to understand unstructured context, enabling long-standing visions of HCI and entirely new interactive systems that anticipate user needs.

Conversational scams, such as romance and investment scams, are emerging as a major form of online fraud. Unlike one-shot scam lures such as fake lottery or unpaid toll messages, they unfold through multi-turn conversations in which scammers gradually manipulate victims using evolving psychological techniques. However, existing research mainly focuses on static scam detection or synthetic scams, leaving open whether language models can understand how real-world scams progress over time. We introduce PreScam, a benchmark for modeling scam progression from early conversations. Built from user-submitted scam reports, PreScam filters and structures 177,989 raw reports into 11,573 conversational scam instances spanning 20 scam categories. Each instance is hierarchically structured according to the scam lifecycle defined by the proposed scam kill chain, and further annotated at the turn level with scammer psychological actions and victim responses. We benchmark models on two tasks: real-time termination prediction, which estimates whether a conversation is approaching the termination stage, and scammer action prediction, which forecasts the scammer's subsequent actions. Results show a clear gap between surface-level fluency and progression modeling: supervised encoders substantially outperform zero-shot LLMs on real-time termination prediction, while next-action prediction remains only moderately successful even for strong LLMs. Taken together, these results show that current models can capture some scam-related cues, yet still struggle to track how risk escalates and how manipulation unfolds across turns.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are required to identify key information from conversations for the completion of given tasks. Such information is conventionally specified in terms of intents and slots contained in task-specific ontology or schemata. Since these schemata are designed by system developers, the naming convention for slots and intents is not uniform across tasks, and may not convey their semantics effectively. This can lead to models memorizing arbitrary patterns in data, resulting in suboptimal performance and generalization. In this paper, we propose that schemata should be modified by replacing names or notations entirely with natural language descriptions. We show that a language description-driven system exhibits better understanding of task specifications, higher performance on state tracking, improved data efficiency, and effective zero-shot transfer to unseen tasks. Following this paradigm, we present a simple yet effective Description-Driven Dialog State Tracking (D3ST) model, which relies purely on schema descriptions and an "index-picking" mechanism. We demonstrate the superiority in quality, data efficiency and robustness of our approach as measured on the MultiWOZ (Budzianowski et al.,2018), SGD (Rastogi et al., 2020), and the recent SGD-X (Lee et al., 2021) benchmarks.

User engagement on social media platforms is influenced by historical context, time constraints, and reward-driven interactions. This study presents an agent-based simulation approach that models user interactions, considering past conversation history, motivation, and resource constraints. Utilizing German Twitter data on political discourse, we fine-tune AI models to generate posts and replies, incorporating sentiment analysis, irony detection, and offensiveness classification. The simulation employs a myopic best-response model to govern agent behavior, accounting for decision-making based on expected rewards. Our results highlight the impact of historical context on AI-generated responses and demonstrate how engagement evolves under varying constraints.

The growing capabilities of large language models in natural language understanding significantly strengthen existing agentic systems. To power performant on-device mobile agents for better data privacy, we introduce DroidCall, the first training and testing dataset for accurate Android intent invocation. With a highly flexible and reusable data generation pipeline, we constructed 10k samples in DroidCall. Given a task instruction in natural language, small language models such as Qwen2.5-3B and Gemma2-2B fine-tuned with DroidCall can approach or even surpass the capabilities of GPT-4o for accurate Android intent invocation. We also provide an end-to-end Android app equipped with these fine-tuned models to demonstrate the Android intent invocation process. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/UbiquitousLearning/DroidCall.

Modern dialog managers face the challenge of having to fulfill human-level conversational skills as part of common user expectations, including but not limited to discourse with no clear objective. Along with these requirements, agents are expected to extrapolate intent from the user's dialogue even when subjected to non-canonical forms of speech. This depends on the agent's comprehension of paraphrased forms of such utterances. Especially in low-resource languages, the lack of data is a bottleneck that prevents advancements of the comprehension performance for these types of agents. In this regard, here we demonstrate the necessity of extracting the intent argument of non-canonical directives in a natural language format, which may yield more accurate parsing, and suggest guidelines for building a parallel corpus for this purpose. Following the guidelines, we construct a Korean corpus of 50K instances of question/command-intent pairs, including the labels for classification of the utterance type. We also propose a method for mitigating class imbalance, demonstrating the potential applications of the corpus generation method and its multilingual extensibility.

Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems have emerged as powerful architectures for complex task decomposition and collaborative problem-solving. However, their long-term behavioral stability remains largely unexamined. This study introduces the concept of agent drift, defined as the progressive degradation of agent behavior, decision quality, and inter-agent coherence over extended interaction sequences. We present a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding drift phenomena, proposing three distinct manifestations: semantic drift (progressive deviation from original intent), coordination drift (breakdown in multi-agent consensus mechanisms), and behavioral drift (emergence of unintended strategies). We introduce the Agent Stability Index (ASI), a novel composite metric framework for quantifying drift across twelve dimensions, including response consistency, tool usage patterns, reasoning pathway stability, and inter-agent agreement rates. Through simulation-based analysis and theoretical modeling, we demonstrate how unchecked agent drift can lead to substantial reductions in task completion accuracy and increased human intervention requirements. We propose three mitigation strategies: episodic memory consolidation, drift-aware routing protocols, and adaptive behavioral anchoring. Theoretical analysis suggests these approaches can significantly reduce drift-related errors while maintaining system throughput. This work establishes a foundational methodology for monitoring, measuring, and mitigating agent drift in production agentic AI systems, with direct implications for enterprise deployment reliability and AI safety research.

Intent-detection and slot-filling are the two main tasks in natural language understanding. In this study, we propose CTRAN, a novel encoder-decoder CNN-Transformer-based architecture for intent-detection and slot-filling. In the encoder, we use BERT, followed by several convolutional layers, and rearrange the output using window feature sequence. We use stacked Transformer encoders after the window feature sequence. For the intent-detection decoder, we utilize self-attention followed by a linear layer. In the slot-filling decoder, we introduce the aligned Transformer decoder, which utilizes a zero diagonal mask, aligning output tags with input tokens. We apply our network on ATIS and SNIPS, and surpass the current state-of-the-art in slot-filling on both datasets. Furthermore, we incorporate the language model as word embeddings, and show that this strategy yields a better result when compared to the language model as an encoder.

Conventional surveillance systems for monitoring infectious diseases, such as influenza, face challenges due to shortage of skilled healthcare professionals, remoteness of communities and absence of communication infrastructures. Internet-based approaches for surveillance are appealing logistically as well as economically. Search engine queries and Twitter have been the primarily used data sources in such approaches. The aim of this study is to assess the predictive power of an alternative data source, Instagram. By using 317 weeks of publicly available data from Instagram, we trained several machine learning algorithms to both nowcast and forecast the number of official influenza-like illness incidents in Finland where population-wide official statistics about the weekly incidents are available. In addition to date and hashtag count features of online posts, we were able to utilize also the visual content of the posted images with the help of deep convolutional neural networks. Our best nowcasting model reached a mean absolute error of 11.33 incidents per week and a correlation coefficient of 0.963 on the test data. Forecasting models for predicting 1 week and 2 weeks ahead showed statistical significance as well by reaching correlation coefficients of 0.903 and 0.862, respectively. This study demonstrates how social media and in particular, digital photographs shared in them, can be a valuable source of information for the field of infodemiology.

Query understanding is a fundamental problem in information retrieval (IR), which has attracted continuous attention through the past decades. Many different tasks have been proposed for understanding users' search queries, e.g., query classification or query clustering. However, it is not that precise to understand a search query at the intent class/cluster level due to the loss of many detailed information. As we may find in many benchmark datasets, e.g., TREC and SemEval, queries are often associated with a detailed description provided by human annotators which clearly describes its intent to help evaluate the relevance of the documents. If a system could automatically generate a detailed and precise intent description for a search query, like human annotators, that would indicate much better query understanding has been achieved. In this paper, therefore, we propose a novel Query-to-Intent-Description (Q2ID) task for query understanding. Unlike those existing ranking tasks which leverage the query and its description to compute the relevance of documents, Q2ID is a reverse task which aims to generate a natural language intent description based on both relevant and irrelevant documents of a given query. To address this new task, we propose a novel Contrastive Generation model, namely CtrsGen for short, to generate the intent description by contrasting the relevant documents with the irrelevant documents given a query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model by comparing with several state-of-the-art generation models on the Q2ID task. We discuss the potential usage of such Q2ID technique through an example application.

Conversational search is an approach to information retrieval (IR), where users engage in a dialogue with an agent in order to satisfy their information needs. Previous conceptual work described properties and actions a good agent should exhibit. Unlike them, we present a novel conceptual model defined in terms of conversational goals, which enables us to reason about current research practices in conversational search. Based on the literature, we elicit how existing tasks and test collections from the fields of IR, natural language processing (NLP) and dialogue systems (DS) fit into this model. We describe a set of characteristics that an ideal conversational search dataset should have. Lastly, we introduce MANtIS (the code and dataset are available at https://guzpenha.github.io/MANtIS/), a large-scale dataset containing multi-domain and grounded information seeking dialogues that fulfill all of our dataset desiderata. We provide baseline results for the conversation response ranking and user intent prediction tasks.

Context information in search sessions has proven to be useful for capturing user search intent. Existing studies explored user behavior sequences in sessions in different ways to enhance query suggestion or document ranking. However, a user behavior sequence has often been viewed as a definite and exact signal reflecting a user's behavior. In reality, it is highly variable: user's queries for the same intent can vary, and different documents can be clicked. To learn a more robust representation of the user behavior sequence, we propose a method based on contrastive learning, which takes into account the possible variations in user's behavior sequences. Specifically, we propose three data augmentation strategies to generate similar variants of user behavior sequences and contrast them with other sequences. In so doing, the model is forced to be more robust regarding the possible variations. The optimized sequence representation is incorporated into document ranking. Experiments on two real query log datasets show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for context-aware document ranking.

Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting ``high-stakes'' interactions -- where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm -- as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such monitoring. We evaluate several probe architectures trained on synthetic data, and find them to exhibit robust generalization to diverse, out-of-distribution, real-world data. Probes' performance is comparable to that of prompted or finetuned medium-sized LLM monitors, while offering computational savings of six orders-of-magnitude. These savings are enabled by reusing activations of the model that is being monitored. Our experiments also highlight the potential of building resource-aware hierarchical monitoring systems, where probes serve as an efficient initial filter and flag cases for more expensive downstream analysis. We release our novel synthetic dataset and the codebase at https://github.com/arrrlex/models-under-pressure.

Dialogue systems need to deal with the unpredictability of user intents to track dialogue state and the heterogeneity of slots to understand user preferences. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that solving these challenges as one unified model will allow the transfer of parameter support data across the different tasks. The proposed principled model is based on a Transformer encoder, trained on multiple tasks, and leveraged by a rich input that conditions the model on the target inferences. Conditioning the Transformer encoder on multiple target inferences over the same corpus, i.e., intent and multiple slot types, allows learning richer language interactions than a single-task model would be able to. In fact, experimental results demonstrate that conditioning the model on an increasing number of dialogue inference tasks leads to improved results: on the MultiWOZ dataset, the joint intent and slot detection can be improved by 3.2\% by conditioning on intent, 10.8\% by conditioning on slot and 14.4\% by conditioning on both intent and slots. Moreover, on real conversations with Farfetch costumers, the proposed conditioned BERT can achieve high joint-goal and intent detection performance throughout a dialogue.

Increasing evidence suggests that, similar to face-to-face communications, human emotions also spread in online social media. However, the mechanisms underlying this emotion contagion, for example, whether different feelings spread in unlikely ways or how the spread of emotions relates to the social network, is rarely investigated. Indeed, because of high costs and spatio-temporal limitations, explorations of this topic are challenging using conventional questionnaires or controlled experiments. Because they are collection points for natural affective responses of massive individuals, online social media sites offer an ideal proxy for tackling this issue from the perspective of computational social science. In this paper, based on the analysis of millions of tweets in Weibo, surprisingly, we find that anger travels easily along weaker ties than joy, meaning that it can infiltrate different communities and break free of local traps because strangers share such content more often. Through a simple diffusion model, we reveal that weaker ties speed up anger by applying both propagation velocity and coverage metrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that quantitative long-term evidence has been presented that reveals a difference in the mechanism by which joy and anger are disseminated. With the extensive proliferation of weak ties in booming social media, our results imply that the contagion of anger could be profoundly strengthened to globalize its negative impact.

Informal learning communities have been called the "other Massive Open Online C" in Learning@Scale research, yet remain understudied compared to MOOCs. We present the first empirical study of a large-scale informal learning community composed entirely of AI agents. Moltbook, a social network exclusively for AI agents powered by autonomous agent frameworks such as OpenClaw, grew to over 2.8 million registered agents in three weeks. Analyzing 231,080 non-spam posts across three phases of community evolution, we find three key patterns. First, participation inequality is extreme from the start (comment Gini = 0.889), exceeding human community benchmarks. Second, AI agents exhibit a "broadcasting inversion": statement-to-question ratios of 8.9:1 to 9.7:1 contrast sharply with the question-driven dynamics of human learning communities, and comment-level analysis of 1.55 million comments reveals a "parallel monologue" pattern where 93% of comments are independent responses rather than threaded dialogue. Third, we document a characteristic engagement lifecycle: explosive initial growth (184K posts from 32K authors in 11 days), a spam crisis (57,093 posts deleted by the platform), and engagement decline (mean comments: 31.7 -> 8.3 -> 1.7) that had not reversed by the end of our observation window despite effective spam removal. Sentiment analysis reveals a selection effect: comment tone becomes more positive as engagement declines, suggesting that casual participants disengage first while committed contributors remain. These findings have direct implications for hybrid human-AI learning platforms.

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agent. One safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives - also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming. Our results show that o1, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Llama 3.1 405B all demonstrate in-context scheming capabilities. They recognize scheming as a viable strategy and readily engage in such behavior. For example, models strategically introduce subtle mistakes into their responses, attempt to disable their oversight mechanisms, and even exfiltrate what they believe to be their model weights to external servers. Additionally, this deceptive behavior proves persistent. When o1 has engaged in scheming, it maintains its deception in over 85% of follow-up questions and often remains deceptive in multi-turn interrogations. Analysis of the models' chains-of-thought reveals that models explicitly reason about these deceptive strategies, providing evidence that the scheming behavior is not accidental. Surprisingly, we also find rare instances where models engage in scheming when only given a goal, without being strongly nudged to pursue it. We observe cases where Claude 3.5 Sonnet strategically underperforms in evaluations in pursuit of being helpful, a goal that was acquired during training rather than in-context. Our findings demonstrate that frontier models now possess capabilities for basic in-context scheming, making the potential of AI agents to engage in scheming behavior a concrete rather than theoretical concern.