Yiqi Nie, Fei Wang, Junjie Chen, Kun Li, Yudi Cai, Dan Guo, Chenglong Li, Meng Wang
Multimodal Emotional Reappraisal (MER) aims to shift affective interpretation by rewriting and editing a situation without altering its underlying semantic context. Despite advances in controllable editing and sentiment transfer, MER remains challenging under coupled multimodal constraints, especially in internet memes where images, embedded text, and layout jointly encode affective meaning. To bridge this gap, we present MER-Bench, a systematic benchmark for MER on image-text memes, containing over 3,000 real-world memes with fine-grained annotations for emotion transformation and structure-preserving multimodal editing. MER-Bench spans diverse visual, textual, and structural settings and is paired with a structured MLLM-as-a-Judge evaluation suite, comprising eight fine-grained metrics and three aggregated objectives for emotional alignment, content fidelity, and transformation strength. Extensive evaluation of 14 advanced multimodal models reveals that: (1) current models struggle to jointly balance affect, semantics, structure, and text; (2) strong visual editing does not imply effective MER, with poor embedded text rendering and affect-aware rewriting remaining key bottlenecks. Our results identify MER as a critical capability gap in current multimodal generation systems and highlight affective image-text reasoning as a key challenge for future work. Project Page: https://github.com/one-seven17/MER-Bench
Haozhong Wang, Zhuo Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Yibo Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, He Zhao Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, CSIRO, Hongyuan Zha The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dandan Guo
The inherent safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is prone to erosion during fine-tuning, even when using seemingly innocuous datasets. While existing defenses attempt to mitigate this via data selection, they typically rely on heuristic, instance-level assessments that neglect the global geometry of the data distribution and fail to explicitly repel harmful patterns. To address this, we introduce Safety Optimal Transport (SOT), a novel framework that reframes safe fine-tuning from an instance-level filtering challenge to a distribution-level alignment task grounded in Optimal Transport (OT). At its core is a dual-reference “push-pull” weight-learning mechanism: SOT optimizes sample importance by actively pulling the downstream distribution towards a trusted safe anchor while simultaneously pushing it away from a general harmful reference. This establishes a robust geometric safety boundary that effectively purifies the training data. Extensive experiments across diverse model families and domains demonstrate that SOT significantly enhances model safety while maintaining competitive downstream performance, achieving a superior safety-utility trade-off compared to baselines.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Chongyuan Dai, Jinpeng Hu Hefei University of Technology, Hongchang Shi, Zhuo Li The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dan Guo Hefei University of Technology, Xun Yang University of Science and Technology of China, Meng Wang Hefei University of Technology
Amidst a shortage of qualified mental health professionals, the integration of large language models (LLMs) into psychological applications offers a promising way to alleviate the growing burden of mental health disorders. Recent reasoning-augmented LLMs have achieved remarkable performance in mathematics and programming, while research in the psychological domain has predominantly emphasized emotional support and empathetic dialogue, with limited attention to reasoning mechanisms that are beneficial to generating accurate responses. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Psyche-R1, the first Chinese psychological LLM that jointly integrates empathy, psychological expertise, and reasoning, built upon a novel data curation pipeline. Specifically, we design a comprehensive data synthesis pipeline that produces over 75k high-quality psychological questions paired with detailed rationales, generated through and iterative prompt-rationale optimization procedure, along with 73k empathetic dialogues. Subsequently, we employ a hybrid training strategy wherein challenging samples are identified through a multi-LLM cross-selection strategy for group relative policy optimization (GRPO) to improve reasoning ability, while the remaining data are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance empathetic response generation and psychological domain knowledge. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of Psyche-R1 across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B Psyche-R1 achieves comparable results to 671B DeepSeek-R1.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jinhan Liu, Yibo Yang Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Ruiying Lu, Piotr Piękos King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Yimeng Chen King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Peng Wang, Dandan Guo
Detecting pre-training data in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for auditing data privacy and copyright compliance, yet it remains challenging in black-box, zero-shot settings where computational resources and training data are scarce. While existing likelihood-based methods have shown promise, they typically aggregate token-level scores using uniform weights, thereby neglecting the inherent information-theoretic dynamics of autoregressive generation. In this paper, we hypothesize and empirically validate that memorization signals are heavily skewed towards the high-entropy initial tokens, where model uncertainty is highest, and decay as context accumulates. To leverage this linguistic property, we introduce Positional Decay Reweighting (PDR), a training-free and plug-and-play framework. PDR explicitly reweights token-level scores to amplify distinct signals from early positions while suppressing noise from later ones. Extensive experiments show that PDR acts as a robust prior and can usually enhance a wide range of advanced methods across multiple benchmarks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表