3arXiv cs.CL (Computation and Language)·
BERT-based candidate-attended dialogue state tracking with zero-shot generalization
A preprint introduces a scalable multi-domain dialogue state tracking (DST) framework that uses pretrained BERT to achieve zero-shot generalization across domains without additional training. The system is evaluated on the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, showing improvement over prior baselines. The work targets scalability challenges in task-oriented dialogue systems like voice assistants.
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AnyGroundBench: Domain-adaptation benchmark for spatio-temporal video grounding in specialized fields
Researchers introduce AnyGroundBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models on Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) across five specialized domains: animal behavior, industry, sports, surgery, and public security. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on zero-shot general-domain evaluation, AnyGroundBench includes dedicated training subsets to measure domain adaptability and in-context learning. Evaluation of 15 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals significant failures in both zero-shot and ICL-based adaptation, exposing weaknesses in spatio-temporal reasoning under domain shift.
TREAD: VLM-based re-labelling framework improves robot policy generalization via dataset augmentation
TREAD (Task Robustness via Re-Labelling Vision-Action Robot Data) is a scalable framework that uses pretrained Vision-Language Models to augment existing robotics datasets without new data collection. The approach decomposes demonstrations into sub-tasks, segments videos accordingly, and generates linguistically diverse instruction labels, enriching language-action pair diversity. Evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark show improved generalization to novel tasks and goals, addressing a key limitation of current robot learning policies.
Forgotten Words: Benchmarking NeoBERT for Dementia Detection in Low-Resource Conversational Filipino and English Speech
This paper presents the first NLP-based dementia detection study for Filipino speech, constructing a parallel bilingual dataset of 4,000 DementiaBank-derived transcripts with manual Filipino translations. Five model families are evaluated across monolingual, zero-shot cross-lingual, and bilingual fine-tuning settings. English-trained BERT degrades sharply on Filipino (Macro-F1 = 0.455), but bilingual fine-tuning recovers performance to Macro-F1 = 0.969–0.973 across all transformer models. The key finding is that multilingual clinical NLP performance is driven by linguistic coverage during training rather than model scale or architecture.
DramaSR-LRM: Reasoning LLM with multimodal tool-use for speaker recognition in TV dramas
Researchers introduce DramaSR-532K, a large-scale benchmark of 532K annotated dialogue lines across 900+ characters from long-form TV dramas, targeting multimodal speaker recognition. They also propose DramaSR-LRM, a system built on a large reasoning model that uses multimodal tool-use to aggregate auditory, linguistic, and visual cues for speaker attribution. The approach significantly outperforms baselines, especially on short utterances where acoustic biometrics alone are unreliable. Data and code are to be publicly released.
Sub-billion parameter SLMs outperform zero-shot GPT-5.4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 on relation extraction benchmarks
A new arXiv paper demonstrates that small language models (360M–3B parameters) fine-tuned on task-specific data can substantially outperform zero-shot frontier LLMs on relation extraction tasks. The best sub-billion model, Qwen2.5-0.5B fine-tuned on pooled general-domain data, achieves micro-F1 of 0.83 versus 0.69 for GPT-5.4 and 0.66 for Claude Sonnet 4.6 in zero-shot settings. The authors attribute the gains to task adaptation rather than model architecture, with a discriminative RoBERTa baseline also exceeding frontier models, and show that 4-bit quantized models deployable on consumer GPUs can match or beat proprietary API-based systems for this narrow task. The work provides evidence that for well-defined NLP tasks with available training data, compact adapted models offer a practical, private, and hardware-efficient alternative to frontier APIs.
RL-based alignment improves interactivity in full-duplex spoken dialogue models
Researchers propose a post-training alignment method using reinforcement learning to improve interactivity in full-duplex spoken dialogue models, which can listen and speak simultaneously. The method addresses four canonical axes of interactivity—pause handling, turn-taking, backchanneling, and user interruption—each with axis-specific reward functions, plus an LLM-based reward to prevent semantic degradation. The approach is applied to two open-source models, Moshi and PersonaPlex, showing consistent improvements in both offline and real-time multi-turn evaluation.
Humanoid-GPT: GPT-style Transformer trained on 2B-frame motion corpus for zero-shot humanoid control
Researchers introduce Humanoid-GPT, a causal Transformer pre-trained on a 2-billion-frame retargeted motion corpus that unifies major mocap datasets with large-scale in-house recordings for whole-body humanoid control. The model achieves zero-shot generalization to unseen motions and control tasks, overcoming the agility-generalization trade-off seen in prior MLP-based trackers. Scaling analyses demonstrate a new performance frontier for dynamic motion tracking without task-specific fine-tuning.
SARDI: Self-Augmenting Retrieval for Diffusion Language Models using lookahead tokens
Researchers introduce SARDI, a training-free RAG framework for discrete diffusion language models that repurposes discarded low-confidence tokens during denoising as lookahead signals to guide retrieval before output is finalized. The method is retriever-agnostic and applicable to any reasoning-capable discrete diffusion LM. Evaluated across five multi-hop QA benchmarks, SARDI outperforms training-free diffusion and autoregressive retrieval baselines at up to 8x higher throughput.