StyleSculptor: Zero-Shot Style-Controllable 3D Asset Generation with Texture-Geometry Dual Guidance

Creating 3D assets that follow the texture and geometry style of existing ones is often desirable or even inevitable in practical applications like video gaming and virtual reality. While impressive progress has been made in generating 3D objects from text or images, creating style-controllable 3D assets remains a complex and challenging problem. In this work, we propose StyleSculptor, a novel training-free approach for generating style-guided 3D assets from a content image and one or more style images. Unlike previous works, StyleSculptor achieves style-guided 3D generation in a zero-shot manner, enabling fine-grained 3D style control that captures the texture, geometry, or both styles of user-provided style images. At the core of StyleSculptor is a novel Style Disentangled Attention (SD-Attn) module, which establishes a dynamic interaction between the input content image and style image for style-guided 3D asset generation via a cross-3D attention mechanism, enabling stable feature fusion and effective style-guided generation. To alleviate semantic content leakage, we also introduce a style-disentangled feature selection strategy within the SD-Attn module, which leverages the variance of 3D feature patches to disentangle style- and content-significant channels, allowing selective feature injection within the attention framework. With SD-Attn, the network can dynamically compute texture-, geometry-, or both-guided features to steer the 3D generation process. Built upon this, we further propose the Style Guided Control (SGC) mechanism, which enables exclusive geometry- or texture-only stylization, as well as adjustable style intensity control. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StyleSculptor outperforms existing baseline methods in producing high-fidelity 3D assets.

ChartGaze: Enhancing Chart Understanding in LVLMs with Eye-Tracking Guided Attention Refinement

Charts are a crucial visual medium for communicating and representing information. While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made progress on chart question answering (CQA), the task remains challenging, particularly when models attend to irrelevant regions of the chart. In this work, we present ChartGaze, a new eye-tracking dataset that captures human gaze patterns during chart reasoning tasks. Through a systematic comparison of human and model attention, we find that LVLMs often diverge from human gaze, leading to reduced interpretability and accuracy. To address this, we propose a gaze-guided attention refinement that aligns image-text attention with human fixations. Our approach improves both answer accuracy and attention alignment, yielding gains of up to 2.56 percentage points across multiple models. These results demonstrate the promise of incorporating human gaze to enhance both the reasoning quality and interpretability of chart-focused LVLMs.

LLMs for energy and macronutrients estimation using only text data from 24-hour dietary recalls: a parameter-efficient fine-tuning experiment using a 10-shot prompt

BACKGROUND: Most artificial intelligence tools used to estimate nutritional content rely on image input. However, whether large language models (LLMs) can accurately predict nutritional values based solely on text descriptions of foods consumed remains unknown. If effective, this approach could enable simpler dietary monitoring without the need for photographs. METHODS: We used 24-hour dietary recalls from adolescents aged 12-19 years in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). An open-source quantized LLM was prompted using a 10-shot, chain-of-thought approach to estimate energy and five macronutrients based solely on text strings listing foods and their quantities. We then applied parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to evaluate whether predictive accuracy improved. NHANES-calculated values served as the ground truth for energy, proteins, carbohydrates, total sugar, dietary fiber and total fat. RESULTS: In a pooled dataset of 11,281 adolescents (49.9% male, mean age 15.4 years), the vanilla LLM yielded poor predictions. The mean absolute error (MAE) was 652.08 for energy and the Lin's CCC <0.46 across endpoints. In contrast, the fine-tuned model performed substantially better, with energy MAEs ranging from 171.34 to 190.90 across subsets, and Lin's CCC exceeding 0.89 for all outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: When prompted using a chain-of-thought approach and fine-tuned with PEFT, open-source LLMs exposed solely to text input can accurately predict energy and macronutrient values from 24-hour dietary recalls. This approach holds promise for low-burden, text-based dietary monitoring tools.

Evaluating LLM Alignment on Personality Inference from Real-World Interview Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in roles requiring nuanced psychological understanding, such as emotional support agents, counselors, and decision-making assistants. However, their ability to interpret human personality traits, a critical aspect of such applications, remains unexplored, particularly in ecologically valid conversational settings. While prior work has simulated LLM "personas" using discrete Big Five labels on social media data, the alignment of LLMs with continuous, ground-truth personality assessments derived from natural interactions is largely unexamined. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark comprising semi-structured interview transcripts paired with validated continuous Big Five trait scores. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate LLM performance across three paradigms: (1) zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-4.1 Mini, (2) LoRA-based fine-tuning applied to both RoBERTa and Meta-LLaMA architectures, and (3) regression using static embeddings from pretrained BERT and OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small. Our results reveal that all Pearson correlations between model predictions and ground-truth personality traits remain below 0.26, highlighting the limited alignment of current LLMs with validated psychological constructs. Chain-of-thought prompting offers minimal gains over zero-shot, suggesting that personality inference relies more on latent semantic representation than explicit reasoning. These findings underscore the challenges of aligning LLMs with complex human attributes and motivate future work on trait-specific prompting, context-aware modeling, and alignment-oriented fine-tuning.

Podcasts as a Medium for Participation in Collective Action: A Case Study of Black Lives Matter

We study how participation in collective action is articulated in podcast discussions, using the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as a case study. While research on collective action discourse has primarily focused on text-based content, this study takes a first step toward analyzing audio formats by using podcast transcripts. Using the Structured Podcast Research Corpus (SPoRC), we investigated spoken language expressions of participation in collective action, categorized as problem-solution, call-to-action, intention, and execution. We identified podcast episodes discussing racial justice after important BLM-related events in May and June of 2020, and extracted participatory statements using a layered framework adapted from prior work on social media. We examined the emotional dimensions of these statements, detecting eight key emotions and their association with varying stages of activism. We found that emotional profiles vary by stage, with different positive emotions standing out during calls-to-action, intention, and execution. We detected negative associations between collective action and negative emotions, contrary to theoretical expectations. Our work contributes to a better understanding of how activism is expressed in spoken digital discourse and how emotional framing may depend on the format of the discussion.

Textarium: Entangling Annotation, Abstraction and Argument

We present a web-based environment that connects annotation, abstraction, and argumentation during the interpretation of text. As a visual interface for scholarly reading and writing, Textarium combines human analysis with lightweight computational processing to bridge close and distant reading practices. Readers can highlight text, group keywords into concepts, and embed these observations as anchors in essays. The interface renders these interpretive actions as parameterized visualization states. Through a speculative design process of co-creative and iterative prototyping, we developed a reading-writing approach that makes interpretive processes transparent and shareable within digital narratives.

TexTAR : Textual Attribute Recognition in Multi-domain and Multi-lingual Document Images

Recognizing textual attributes such as bold, italic, underline and strikeout is essential for understanding text semantics, structure, and visual presentation. These attributes highlight key information, making them crucial for document analysis. Existing methods struggle with computational efficiency or adaptability in noisy, multilingual settings. To address this, we introduce TexTAR, a multi-task, context-aware Transformer for Textual Attribute Recognition (TAR). Our novel data selection pipeline enhances context awareness, and our architecture employs a 2D RoPE (Rotary Positional Embedding)-style mechanism to incorporate input context for more accurate attribute predictions. We also introduce MMTAD, a diverse, multilingual, multi-domain dataset annotated with text attributes across real-world documents such as legal records, notices, and textbooks. Extensive evaluations show TexTAR outperforms existing methods, demonstrating that contextual awareness contributes to state-of-the-art TAR performance.

Shaping Explanations: Semantic Reward Modeling with Encoder-Only Transformers for GRPO

While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating human-like text, aligning their outputs with complex, qualitative goals like pedagogical soundness remains a significant challenge. Standard reinforcement learning techniques often rely on slow and expensive LLM-as-a-judge evaluations or on brittle, keyword-based metrics like ROUGE, which fail to capture the semantic essence of a high-quality explanation. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to reward shaping within the Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO) framework. Our central contribution is the use of a small, efficient encoder-only transformer as a semantic reward model. This model provides a dense, semantically rich reward signal based on the cosine similarity between a generated explanation and a ground-truth reference, guiding the policy towards explanations that are not just factually correct but also structurally and conceptually aligned with expert reasoning. We apply this method to the task of training a model for the Italian medical-school entrance examinations, following standard domain-adaptive continued pre-training (CPT) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our results demonstrate that GRPO with our proposed semantic reward significantly improves explanation faithfulness and clarity over a strong SFT baseline, showcasing the power of using lightweight encoder models for nuanced reward shaping in complex generation tasks

TFANet: Three-Stage Image-Text Feature Alignment Network for Robust Referring Image Segmentation

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) is a task that segments image regions based on language expressions, requiring fine-grained alignment between two modalities. However, existing methods often struggle with multimodal misalignment and language semantic loss, especially in complex scenes containing multiple visually similar objects, where uniquely described targets are frequently mislocalized or incompletely segmented. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes TFANet, a Three-stage Image-Text Feature Alignment Network that systematically enhances multimodal alignment through a hierarchical framework comprising three stages: Knowledge Plus Stage (KPS), Knowledge Fusion Stage (KFS), and Knowledge Intensification Stage (KIS). In the first stage, we design the Multiscale Linear Cross-Attention Module (MLAM), which facilitates bidirectional semantic exchange between visual features and textual representations across multiple scales. This establishes rich and efficient alignment between image regions and different granularities of linguistic descriptions. Subsequently, the KFS further strengthens feature alignment through the Cross-modal Feature Scanning Module (CFSM), which applies multimodal selective scanning to capture long-range dependencies and construct a unified multimodal representation. This is essential for modeling long-range cross-modal dependencies and enhancing alignment accuracy in complex scenes. Finally, in the KIS, we propose the Word-level Linguistic Feature-guided Semantic Deepening Module (WFDM) to compensate for semantic degradation introduced in earlier stages.

MSR-Codec: A Low-Bitrate Multi-Stream Residual Codec for High-Fidelity Speech Generation with Information Disentanglement

Audio codecs are a critical component of modern speech generation systems. This paper introduces a low-bitrate, multi-scale residual codec that encodes speech into four distinct streams: semantic, timbre, prosody, and residual. This architecture achieves high-fidelity speech reconstruction at competitive low bitrates while demonstrating an inherent ability for information disentanglement. We construct a two-stage language model for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis using this codec, which, despite its lightweight design and minimal data requirements, achieves a state-of-the-art Word Error Rate (WER) and superior speaker similarity compared to several larger models. Furthermore, the codec's design proves highly effective for voice conversion, enabling independent manipulation of speaker timbre and prosody.