Large language model driven multi-agent social simulation frameworks enable realistic modeling of complex societal dynamics but incur substantial computational overhead due to dense agent participation and extensive interaction costs. To address this limitation, we propose SocialDropout, a reinforcement learning–based agent selection strategy within the AgentSociety framework, inspired by the AgentDropout paradigm, which dynamically identifies and samples informative agent subsets for each simulation round. Each agent is assigned an adaptive importance weight optimized to jointly minimize agent sparsity and computational cost measured by LLM calls, token consumption, and execution time—while preserving social interaction intensity within the environment. Extensive performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method significantly improves simulation efficiency and scalability. Moreover, ablation studies verify that high-level behavioral realism and outcome consistency are largely maintained despite substantial agent reduction. Our approach offers a practical and general optimization mechanism for large-scale LLM-based multi-agent social simulations under constrained computational budgets.

Contextual meme understanding decodes implicit meaning from ambiguous visual metaphors and social context, which is crucial for online communication analysis. However, existing linear reasoning paradigms reductively cast this process as deterministic decoding, overlooking the fundamental reality that meme interpretation necessitates the dynamic alignment of multimodal cues. Lacking mechanisms to measure and correct misalignment, these static models inevitably allow initial perceptual failures to cascade into irreversible hallucinations. To address this, we propose Semantic Energy Entropy Descent (SEED), a framework that reformulates contextual meme understanding as an energy minimization problem within a discrete semantic space. Specifically, SEED constructs a Convergent Heterogeneous Thought Tree (CHTT) as the optimization workspace, where an Evaluator Agent quantifies the semantic inconsistency of hypotheses via a Semantic Energy Mechanism. By calculating a Discrete Semantic Gradient as structured feedback, the framework activates a Supplier Agent to retrieve knowledge and context evidence and a Reasoner Agent to refine explanations, thereby orchestrating Semantic Descent Dynamics that iteratively drive the reasoning trajectory to converge on a stable, low-entropy interpretation. Experimental results show that SEED consistently outperforms strong baselines on both classification and generation, reducing logical hallucinations and improving cultural grounding.

Despite increasing research attention to text ranking, most studies focus on monolingual scenarios, with a particular emphasis on English-language contexts. This narrow focus limits the applicability of ranking models in cross-lingual contexts, such as ranking Chinese documents based on English queries. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly reduced inter-language barriers through pre-training on extensive multilingual corpora, thus facilitating the study of multilingual text ranking (MTR). In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs in MTR tasks. Specifically, we first introduce an MTR benchmark encompassing both monolingual and cross-lingual scenarios. Then, we propose a two-stage training pipeline to alleviate the misalignment between LLMs and text ranking. Lastly, we adapt this training pipeline to multilingual scenarios from the perspective of training data and methods. Our experiments on the MTR benchmark demonstrate that the proposed multilingual two-stage training pipeline significantly improves LLM ranking performance in both monolingual and cross-lingual scenarios, particularly in out-domain settings. We complement these findings with a thorough analysis to deepen the understanding of our approach.

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) has emerged as a cheap and convenient alternative to traditional human annotation methods, enabling the automatic generation of training data by aligning text with external resources. Despite the many efforts in noise measurement methods, few works focus on the latent noise distribution between different distant annotation methods. In this work, we explore the effectiveness and robustness of DS-NER by two aspects: (1) distant annotation techniques, which encompasses both traditional rule-based methods and the innovative large language model supervision approach, and (2) noise assessment, for which we introduce a novel framework. This framework addresses the challenges by distinctly categorizing them into theunlabeled-entity problem (UEP)and thenoisy-entity problem (NEP), subsequently providing specialized solutions for each. Our proposed method achieves significant improvements on eight real-world distant supervision datasets originating from three different data sources and involving four distinct annotation techniques, confirming its superiority over current state-of-the-art methods.

Misspellings in search engine queries may prevent search engines from returning accurate results. For Chinese mobile search engines, due to the different input methods (e.g., hand-written and T9 input methods), more types of misspellings exist, making this problem more challenging. As an essential module of search engines, Chinese Spelling Check~(CSC) models aim to detect and correct misspelled Chinese characters from user-issued queries. Despite the great value of CSC to the search engine, there is no CSC benchmark collected from real-world search engine queries. To fill this blank, we construct and release the Alipay Search Engine Query (AlipaySEQ) spelling check dataset. To the best of our knowledge, AlipaySEQ is the first Chinese Spelling Check dataset collected from the real-world scenario of Chinese mobile search engines. It consists of 15,522 high-quality human annotated and 1,175,151 automatically generated samples. To demonstrate the unique challenges of AlipaySEQ in the era of Large Language Models~(LLMs), we conduct a thorough study to analyze the difference between AlipaySEQ and existing SIGHAN benchmarks and compare the performance of various baselines, including existing task-specific methods and LLMs. We observe that all baselines fail to perform satisfactorily due to the over-correction problem. Especially, LLMs exhibit below-par performance on AlipaySEQ, which is rather surprising. Therefore, to alleviate the over-correction problem, we introduce a model-agnostic CSC Self-Refine Framework (SRF) to construct a strong baseline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed SRF, though more effective against existing models on both the AlipaySEQ and SIGHAN15, is still far from achieving satisfactory performance on our real-world dataset. With the newly collected real-world dataset and strong baseline, we hope more progress can be achieved on such a challenging and valuable task.

Sequential recommendation methods are increasingly important in cutting-edge recommender systems. Through leveraging historical records, the systems can capture user interests and perform recommendations accordingly. State-of-the-art sequential recommendation models proposed very recently combine contrastive learning techniques for obtaining high-quality user representations. Though effective and performing well, the models based on contrastive learning require careful selection of data augmentation methods and pretext tasks, efficient negative sampling strategies, and massive hyper-parameters validation. In this paper, we propose an ultra-simple alternative for obtaining better user representations and improving sequential recommendation performance. Specifically, we present a simple yet effective Consistency T braining method for sequential Recommendation (CT4Rec) in which only two extra training objectives are utilized without any structural modifications and data augmentation. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and one large newly crawled industrial corpus demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms SOTA models by a large margin and with much less training time than these based on contrastive learning. Online evaluation on real-world content recommendation system also achieves 2.717% improvement on the click-through rate and 3.679% increase on the average click number per capita. Further exploration reveals that such a simple method has great potential for CTR prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/ct4rec/CT4Rec.git.

Medical dialogue generation is an important yet challenging task. Most previous works rely on the attention mechanism and large-scale pretrained language models. However, these methods often fail to acquire pivotal information from the long dialogue history to yield an accurate and informative response, due to the fact that the medical entities usually scatters throughout multiple utterances along with the complex relationships between them. To mitigate this problem, we propose a medical response generation model with Pivotal Information Recalling (MedPIR), which is built on two components, i.e., knowledge-aware dialogue graph encoder and recall-enhanced generator. The knowledge-aware dialogue graph encoder constructs a dialogue graph by exploiting the knowledge relationships between entities in the utterances, and encodes it with a graph attention network. Then, the recall-enhanced generator strengthens the usage of these pivotal information by generating a summary of the dialogue before producing the actual response. Experimental results on two large-scale medical dialogue datasets show that MedPIR outperforms the strong baselines in BLEU scores and medical entities F1 measure.

Existing multi-turn context-response matching methods mainly concentrate on obtaining multi-level and multi-dimension representations and better interactions between context utterances and response. However, in real-place conversation scenarios, whether a response candidate is suitable not only counts on the given dialogue context but also other backgrounds, e.g., wording habits, user-specific dialogue history content. To fill the gap between these up-to-date methods and the real-world applications, we incorporate user-specific dialogue history into the response selection and propose a personalized hybrid matching network (PHMN). Our contributions are two-fold: (1) our model extracts personalized wording behaviors from user-specific dialogue history as extra matching information; (2) we perform hybrid representation learning on context-response utterances and explicitly incorporate a customized attention mechanism to extract vital information from context-response interactions so as to improve the accuracy of matching. We evaluate our model on two large datasets with user identification, i.e., personalized Ubuntu dialogue Corpus (P-Ubuntu) and personalized Weibo dataset (P-Weibo). Experimental results confirm that our method significantly outperforms several strong models by combining personalized attention, wording behaviors, and hybrid representation learning.