Collaborative Evaluation of Deepfake Text with Deliberation-Enhancing Dialogue Systems

The proliferation of generative models has presented significant challenges in distinguishing authentic human-authored content from deepfake content. Collaborative human efforts, augmented by AI tools, present a promising solution. In this study, we explore the potential of DeepFakeDeLiBot, a deliberation-enhancing chatbot, to support groups in detecting deepfake text. Our findings reveal that group-based problem-solving significantly improves the accuracy of identifying machine-generated paragraphs compared to individual efforts. While engagement with DeepFakeDeLiBot does not yield substantial performance gains overall, it enhances group dynamics by fostering greater participant engagement, consensus building, and the frequency and diversity of reasoning-based utterances. Additionally, participants with higher perceived effectiveness of group collaboration exhibited performance benefits from DeepFakeDeLiBot. These findings underscore the potential of deliberative chatbots in fostering interactive and productive group dynamics while ensuring accuracy in collaborative deepfake text detection. \textit{Dataset and source code used in this study will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the manuscript.

The Future Outcome Reasoning and Confidence Assessment Benchmark

Forecasting is an important task in many domains, such as technology and economics. However existing forecasting benchmarks largely lack comprehensive confidence assessment, focus on limited question types, and often consist of artificial questions that do not align with real-world human forecasting needs. To address these gaps, we introduce FOReCAst (Future Outcome Reasoning and Confidence Assessment), a benchmark that evaluates models' ability to make predictions and their confidence in them. FOReCAst spans diverse forecasting scenarios involving Boolean questions, timeframe prediction, and quantity estimation, enabling a comprehensive evaluation of both prediction accuracy and confidence calibration for real-world applications.

Next Token Prediction Towards Multimodal Intelligence: A Comprehensive Survey

Building on the foundations of language modeling in natural language processing, Next Token Prediction (NTP) has evolved into a versatile training objective for machine learning tasks across various modalities, achieving considerable success. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced to unify understanding and generation tasks within the textual modality, recent research has shown that tasks from different modalities can also be effectively encapsulated within the NTP framework, transforming the multimodal information into tokens and predict the next one given the context. This survey introduces a comprehensive taxonomy that unifies both understanding and generation within multimodal learning through the lens of NTP. The proposed taxonomy covers five key aspects: Multimodal tokenization, MMNTP model architectures, unified task representation, datasets \& evaluation, and open challenges. This new taxonomy aims to aid researchers in their exploration of multimodal intelligence. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at https://github.com/LMM101/Awesome-Multimodal-Next-Token-Prediction

Segment-Level Diffusion: A Framework for Controllable Long-Form Generation with Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion models have shown promise in text generation but often struggle with generating long, coherent, and contextually accurate text. Token-level diffusion overlooks word-order dependencies and enforces short output windows, while passage-level diffusion struggles with learning robust representation for long-form text. To address these challenges, we propose Segment-Level Diffusion (SLD), a framework that enhances diffusion-based text generation through text segmentation, robust representation training with adversarial and contrastive learning, and improved latent-space guidance. By segmenting long-form outputs into separate latent representations and decoding them with an autoregressive decoder, SLD simplifies diffusion predictions and improves scalability. Experiments on XSum, ROCStories, DialogSum, and DeliData demonstrate that SLD achieves competitive or superior performance in fluency, coherence, and contextual compatibility across automatic and human evaluation metrics comparing with other diffusion and autoregressive baselines. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our segmentation and representation learning strategies.

Decompose and Leverage Preferences from Expert Models for Improving Trustworthiness of MLLMs

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can enhance trustworthiness by aligning with human preferences. As human preference labeling is laborious, recent works employ evaluation models for assessing MLLMs' responses, using the model-based assessments to automate preference dataset construction. This approach, however, faces challenges with MLLMs' lengthy and compositional responses, which often require diverse reasoning skills that a single evaluation model may not fully possess. Additionally, most existing methods rely on closed-source models as evaluators. To address limitations, we propose DecompGen, a decomposable framework that uses an ensemble of open-sourced expert models. DecompGen breaks down each response into atomic verification tasks, assigning each task to an appropriate expert model to generate fine-grained assessments. The DecompGen feedback is used to automatically construct our preference dataset, DGPref. MLLMs aligned with DGPref via preference learning show improvements in trustworthiness, demonstrating the effectiveness of DecompGen.

A Bayesian Optimization Approach to Machine Translation Reranking

Reranking a list of candidates from a machine translation system with an external scoring model and returning the highest-scoring candidate remains a simple and effective method for improving the overall output quality. Translation scoring models continue to grow in size, with the best models being comparable to generation models. Thus, reranking can add substantial computational cost to the translation pipeline. In this work, we pose reranking as a Bayesian optimization (BayesOpt) problem. By strategically selecting candidates to score based on a balance of exploration and exploitation, we show that it is possible to find top-scoring candidates when scoring only a fraction of the candidate list. For instance, our method achieves the same CometKiwi score using only 70 scoring evaluations compared a baseline system using 180. We present a multi-fidelity setting for BayesOpt, where the candidates are first scored with a cheaper but noisier proxy scoring model, which further improves the cost-performance tradeoff when using smaller but well-trained distilled proxy scorers.

Ev2R: Evaluating Evidence Retrieval in Automated Fact-Checking

Current automated fact-checking (AFC) approaches commonly evaluate evidence either implicitly via the predicted verdicts or by comparing retrieved evidence with a predefined closed knowledge source, such as Wikipedia. However, these methods suffer from limitations, resulting from their reliance on evaluation metrics developed for different purposes and constraints imposed by closed knowledge sources. Recent advances in natural language generation (NLG) evaluation offer new possibilities for evidence assessment. In this work, we introduce Ev2R, an evaluation framework for AFC that comprises three types of approaches for evidence evaluation: reference-based, proxy-reference, and reference-less. We evaluate their effectiveness through agreement with human ratings and adversarial tests, and demonstrate that prompt-based scorers, particularly those leveraging LLMs and reference evidence, outperform traditional evaluation approaches.

TabVer: Tabular Fact Verification with Natural Logic

Fact verification on tabular evidence incentivises the use of symbolic reasoning models where a logical form is constructed (e.g. a LISP-style program), providing greater verifiability than fully neural approaches. However, these systems typically rely on well-formed tables, restricting their use in many scenarios. An emerging symbolic reasoning paradigm for textual evidence focuses on natural logic inference, which constructs proofs by modelling set-theoretic relations between a claim and its evidence in natural language. This approach provides flexibility and transparency but is less compatible with tabular evidence since the relations do not extend to arithmetic functions. We propose a set-theoretic interpretation of numerals and arithmetic functions in the context of natural logic, enabling the integration of arithmetic expressions in deterministic proofs. We leverage large language models to generate arithmetic expressions by generating questions about salient parts of a claim which are answered by executing appropriate functions on tables. In a few-shot setting on FEVEROUS, we achieve an accuracy of 71.4, outperforming both fully neural and symbolic reasoning models by 3.4 points. When evaluated on TabFact without any further training, our method remains competitive with an accuracy lead of 0.5 points.

The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) Shared Task

The Automated Verification of Textual Claims (AVeriTeC) shared task asks participants to retrieve evidence and predict veracity for real-world claims checked by fact-checkers. Evidence can be found either via a search engine, or via a knowledge store provided by the organisers. Submissions are evaluated using AVeriTeC score, which considers a claim to be accurately verified if and only if both the verdict is correct and retrieved evidence is considered to meet a certain quality threshold. The shared task received 21 submissions, 18 of which surpassed our baseline. The winning team was TUDA_MAI with an AVeriTeC score of 63%. In this paper we describe the shared task, present the full results, and highlight key takeaways from the shared task.

Conformity in Large Language Models

The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are increasingly used in various information-seeking and decision-making tasks as conversation partners to improve productivity. Thus, conformity to incorrect responses can compromise their effectiveness. In this paper, we adapt psychological experiments to examine the extent of conformity in state-of-the-art LLMs. Our findings reveal that all models tested exhibit varying levels of conformity toward the majority, regardless of their initial choice or correctness, across different knowledge domains. Notably, we are the first to show that LLMs are more likely to conform when they are more uncertain in their own prediction. We further explore factors that influence conformity, such as training paradigms and input characteristics, finding that instruction-tuned models are less susceptible to conformity, while increasing the naturalness of majority tones amplifies conformity. Finally, we propose two interventions--Devil's Advocate and Question Distillation--to mitigate conformity, providing insights into building more robust language models.