Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad, Ahmed Heakl, Dani Bouch, Momina Ahsan, Muhra AlMahri, Marwa Elsaid Khalil, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Sophia Ananiadou, Veselin Stoyanov, Jimin Huang, Xueqing Peng, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Ahmed Heakl, Gustavo Bertolo Stahl, Sarim Hashmi, Seung Hun Eddie Han, Mukul Ranjan, Arina Kharlamova, Salman Khan, Abdulrahman Mahmoud. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Robust routing under uncertainty is central to real-world logistics, yet most benchmarks assume static, idealized settings. We present \texttt{SVRPBench}, the first open benchmark to capture high-fidelity stochastic dynamics in vehicle routing at urban scale. Spanning more than 500 instances with up to 1000 customers, it simulates realistic delivery conditions: time-dependent congestion, log-normal delays, probabilistic accidents, and empirically grounded time windows for residential and commercial clients. Our pipeline generates diverse, constraint-rich scenarios, including multi-depot and multi-vehicle setups. Benchmarking reveals that state-of-the-art RL solvers like POMO and AM degrade by over 20\% under distributional shift, while classical and metaheuristic methods remain robust. To enable reproducible research, we release the dataset (Huggingface) and evaluation suite (Github). SVRPBench challenges the community to design solvers that generalize beyond synthetic assumptions and adapt to real-world uncertainty.

Due to the increased demand for music streaming/recommender services and the recent developments of music information retrieval frameworks, Music Genre Classification (MGC) has attracted the community's attention. However, convolutional-based approaches are known to lack the ability to efficiently encode and localize temporal features. In this paper, we study the broadcast-based neural networks aiming to improve the localization and generalizability under a small set of parameters (about 180k) and investigate twelve variants of broadcast networks discussing the effect of block configuration, pooling method, activation function, normalization mechanism, label smoothing, channel interdependency, LSTM block inclusion, and variants of inception schemes. Our computational experiments using relevant datasets such as GTZAN, Extended Ballroom, HOMBURG, and Free Music Archive (FMA) show the state-of-the-art classification accuracies in MGC. Our approach offers insights and the potential to enable compact and generalizable broadcast networks for music classification.