The homogeneity and heterogeneity across modalities are critical factors that influence multimodal fusion. In Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), the inherent textual information within the audio modality induces cross-modality homogeneity with the text modality. Conversely, the mutual independence between text and vision modalities results in their cross-modal heterogeneity. Although existing disentangle-based methods achieve notable performance gains by separating modality features into distinct subspaces, they overlook the characteristics of cross-modality heterogeneity and homogeneity among different modalities. To this end, we propose a novel Modality-aware Disentangle and Fusion (MDF) framework to investigate the role of core modality features. Specifically, we first use text as the anchor to disentangle the audio modality and extract its unique modality-specific features, thereby establishing cross-modal heterogeneity among text, audio, and vision. We then introduce a Cross-Modality Heterogeneity Enhancement (CHE) module to refine these features, further reinforcing their heterogeneous characteristics. Finally, a Modality Adaptive Weighting (MAW) module is employed to dynamically assign weights to the text, sound, and vision modalities based on their potential contributions to sentiment prediction, achieving a more effective multimodal representation for MSA. Experimental evaluations on different benchmarks demonstrate MDF's superiority, with extensive ablation studies confirming its effectiveness.

Recent research reveals that a minority of high-entropy tokens significantly influence the reasoning quality of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by this, we propose Prototype Entropy Alignment (PEA), a reinforcement learning framework that models effective reasoning not as a single path but as a collection of learnable "entropy signatures." PEA identifies these signatures by clustering expert trajectories' uncertainty patterns into a diverse and continuously updated set of prototypes. The model is then rewarded for aligning its own reasoning process with these evolving targets, creating a self-improvement loop. Instead of replacing traditional outcome-based rewards, PEA provides a complementary, process-oriented signal. Our experiments show that this synergy is crucial: PEA substantially boosts performance on creative and general reasoning tasks and, when combined with outcome rewards, achieves SOTA results on structured tasks such as mathematics. By rewarding alignment with diverse and evolving reasoning structures, PEA offers a robust, verifier-free pathway to enhance reasoning's adaptability.

Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) is the most complex subtask of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), aiming to predict all sentiment quadruples within the given sentence. Due to the complexity of sentence syntaxes and the diversity of sentiment expressions, generative methods gradually become the mainstream approach in ASQP. However, existing generative models are constrained in the effectiveness of demonstrations. Semantically similar demonstrations help in judging sentiment categories and polarities but may confuse the model in recognizing aspect and opinion terms, which are more related to sentence syntaxes. To this end, we first develop Syn2Vec, a method for calculating syntactic vectors to support the retrieval of syntactically similar demonstrations. Then, we propose Syntactic and Semantic Similarity Retrieval Prompting (SimRP) to construct effective prompts by retrieving the most related demonstrations that are syntactically and semantically similar. With these related demonstrations, pre-trained generative models, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), can fully release their potential to recognize sentiment quadruples. Extensive experiments in Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and In-context Learning (ICL) paradigms demonstrate the effectiveness of SimRP. Furthermore, we find that LLMs' capabilities in ASQP are severely underestimated by biased data annotations and the exact matching metric. We propose a novel constituent subtree-based fuzzy metric for more accurate and rational quadruple recognition.

This research proposes the METORIE dataset1, a novel resource designed to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), such as LLaMA3 and GLM4, in information extraction (IE) tasks. The METORIE dataset is derived from brain teasers that incorporate complex logical and metaphorical elements and is designed to train LLMs to navigate intricate reasoning paths and interpret layered expressions. Our findings demonstrate that the METORIE dataset markedly enhances LLMs’ performance across both general and specialized IE tasks. The results of fine-tuning with the METORIE dataset, mixed with a small number of IE datasets, are close to, if not exceeding, those of LLMs of the same parametric size on IE tasks using much larger datasets. Through controlled experiments, we establish that metaphors of medium complexity optimize IE performance, while higher complexities tend to overstretch LLMs’ inference limits. METORIE-fine-tuned LLMs also demonstrate exceptional performance in legal and medical domains, suggesting that enhanced metaphor understanding and logical deduction are key to improving LLMs’ adaptability and efficiency in vertical domains.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) face substantial challenges in Long-Tail Visual Recognition (LTVR) due to the inherent class imbalances in real-world data distributions. The Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework has emerged as a promising approach to addressing these issues. However, in MoE systems, experts are typically trained to optimize a collective objective, often neglecting the individual optimality of each expert. This individual optimality usually contributes to the overall performance, as the goals of different experts are not mutually exclusive. We propose the Independent and Collaborative Learning (ICL) framework to optimize each expert independently while ensuring global optimality. First, Diverse Optimization Learning (DOL) is introduced to enhance expert diversity and individual performance. Then, we conceptualize experts as parallel circuit branches and introduce Competition and Collaboration Learning (CoL). Competition Learning amplifies the gradients of better-performing experts to preserve individual optimality, and Collaboration Learning encourages collaboration through mutual distillation to enhance optimal knowledge sharing. ICL achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in experiments on CIFAR-100/10-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist 2018, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/PolarisLight/ICL.