Jianghan Zhu, Cong Zhang, Ni Zhang, Yifan Yang, Yew Soon Ong, Zhiguang Cao
Automatic operator design (AOD) has increasingly adopted large language models (LLMs) to generate problem-specific search and variation operators for multi-objective combinatorial optimization (MOCO). Yet most methods evolve the operators while leaving the process that discovers them fixed. This limits adaptation as new Pareto trade-offs and operator interactions change where and how the search should proceed. We introduce HEMO, which makes the AOD harness itself a self-evolving optimization target. HEMO maintains a persistent harness state and updates one module at a time, revising the logic that determines which experience to retrieve, which operators to improve, which parents to select, and how to formulate the orchestration of search steps. Downstream solution quality and runtime guide these updates, while a discounted UCB scheduler directs adaptation toward promising modules as their utility changes. A persistent memory filesystem preserves candidate outcomes and diagnostic feedback across harness states, enabling successive states to build on accumulated optimization experience. Experiments across eight MOCO tasks and two structurally distinct evolutionary backbones demonstrate strong performance against conventional evolutionary, neural, and LLM-based AOD baselines, together with effective transfer to related tasks. HEMO extends automatic operator design beyond evolving individual operators to improving the search process that discovers them.
Controllable world simulation requires more than visually plausible frames: scenes must retain persistent state, coordinated actions, and editable temporal structure. Generative world models offer flexible visual synthesis, but their outputs do not always expose the objects and transitions needed for precise revision. Graphics engines provide executable state and direct control, yet translating language into valid operations requires specialized knowledge of assets, geometry, and interdependent APIs. We present CineU (Cinematize from Unreal), an agentic system for language-driven world orchestration and cinematic choreography within Unreal Engine. From a code-based world modeling perspective, an Unreal project serves as a persistent, inspectable world representation, while agent-generated code specifies operations whose effects can be executed and verified. CineU combines hierarchical orchestration, cascaded asset retrieval and geometry-constrained placement, capability-aligned code synthesis, and multi-stage verification with localized repair. Shared scene and timeline context coordinates entities, actions, camera trajectories, and shot boundaries while supporting dependency-aware revisions. Experiments on scene construction, selective editing, multi-shot cinematography, and component ablations show how specialized execution knowledge and engine feedback improve task completion and targeted recovery. CineU illustrates how executable world state can complement learned visual generation to support controllable and revisable simulated worlds.
Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) are increasingly expected to assist users while observing continuous audiovisual streams. However, existing evaluations provide limited insight into how reliably these models connect stream evidence and user needs to timely, sustained interventions. We introduce \textbf{Omni-InteractScope}, a benchmark of 1,479 human-annotated, cross-reviewed interactions with 1,790 temporal targets across eight task groups. It links input modalities, event triggers, intervention types, and user needs, covering event-timed tool invocation and query-free assistance alongside notifications, warnings, state tracking, and continuous responses. Our experimental results on the proposed benchmark reveal three critical limitations of current Omni-LLMs: (1) \textbf{Timely tool invocation remains unreliable}: all 12 evaluated models produce an on-time first response for at most 40\% of tool-invocation targets, and joint timing-and-tool accuracy reaches at most 32.0\%. (2) \textbf{Query-free reminders remain poorly covered}: all evaluated models achieve lower timely reference-target recall on query-free reminders than on explicit questions, measured on their respective target sets. Reminder recall never exceeds 23.0\%. (3) \textbf{End-to-end guidance coverage remains limited}: nine models cover none of the 26 guidance sequences in full, and the remaining three cover only one to three sequences each. Targeted controls further show that tool-invocation scores alone do not establish event grounding and that reminder coverage depends on response history and frequency. These findings motivate developing and evaluating streaming assistants for timely action, initiative under general user needs, and coverage of entire response sequences.
Yifei Gao, Junhong Ye Beijing Jiaotong University, Yifan Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Yi Zhang Ant Group, Zhang Ruichen, Jitao Sang Beijing Jiaotong University
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly capable web agents, yet training such agents still relies on high-quality interaction trajectories that are difficult to obtain at scale. We identify two key challenges: (1) Infrastructure Overhead, where network instability and website access restrictions limit data collection scalability; and (2) Constrained Exploration, where irreversible state transitions preclude tree-based search and thus limit trajectory diversity. To address these challenges, we introduce WebSynthesis, a framework for scalable trajectory synthesis. WebSynthesis employs an LLM-based World Model to simulate state transitions without network dependencies, and integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search to enable reversible exploration over the simulated state space. Experiments on WebArena, WebVoyager, and Mind2Web-Online demonstrate that agents trained exclusively on synthesized trajectories outperform those trained on real-world data, providing a viable alternative to costly real-world data collection.
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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
Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Wei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Long Zhou Tencent, Zengrui Jin Tsinghua University, Guanrou Yang 等 11 位作者
Modeling fine-grained speaking styles remains challenging for language-speech representation pre-training, as existing speech-text models are typically trained with coarse captions or task-specific supervision, and scalable fine-grained style annotations are unavailable. We present FCaps, a large-scale dataset with fine-grained free-text style descriptions, encompassing 47k hours of speech and 19M fine-grained captions annotated via a novel end-to-end pipeline that directly grounds detailed captions in audio, thereby avoiding the error propagation caused by LLM-based rewriting in existing cascaded pipelines. Evaluations using LLM-as-a-judge demonstrate that our annotations surpass existing cascaded annotations in terms of correctness, coverage, and naturalness. Building on FCaps, we propose CLSP, a contrastive language-speech pre-trained model that integrates global and fine-grained supervision, enabling unified representations across multiple granularities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CLSP learns fine-grained and multi-granular speech-text representations that perform reliably across global and fine-grained speech-text retrieval, zero-shot paralinguistic classification, and speech style similarity scoring, with strong alignment to human judgments. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/yfyeung/CLSP.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Generative speech technologies are progressing rapidly, but evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech remains a core challenge. Existing methods typically rely on scalar scores or binary decisions, which lack interpretability and generalization across tasks and languages. We present SpeechLLM-as-Judges, a new paradigm for enabling large language models (LLMs) to conduct structured and explanation-based speech quality evaluation. To support this direction, we introduce SpeechEval, a large-scale dataset containing 32,207 multilingual speech clips and 128,754 annotations spanning four tasks: quality assessment, pairwise comparison, improvement suggestion, and deepfake detection. Based on this resource, we develop SQ-LLM, a speech-quality-aware LLM trained with chain-of-thought reasoning and reward optimization to improve capability. Experimental results show that SQ-LLM delivers strong performance across tasks and languages, revealing the potential of this paradigm for advancing speech quality evaluation. The relevant code, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/SpeechLLM-as-Judges.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Evaluating expressive speech remains challenging, as existing methods mainly assess emotional intensity and overlook whether a speech sample is expressively appropriate for its contextual setting. This limitation hinders reliable evaluation of speech systems used in narrative-driven and interactive applications, such as audiobooks and conversational agents. We introduce CEAEval, a Context-rich framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech, which assesses whether a speech sample expressively aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. To support this task, we construct CEAEval-D, the first context-rich speech dataset with real human performances in Mandarin conversational speech, providing narrative descriptions together with fifteen dimensions of human annotations covering expressive attributes and expressive appropriateness. We further develop CEAEval-M, a model that integrates knowledge distillation, planner-based multi-model collaboration, adaptive audio attention bias, and reinforcement learning to perform context-rich expressive appropriateness evaluation. Experiments on a human-annotated test set demonstrate that CEAEval-M substantially outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems.
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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