#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
Closing the Modality Gap via Simplex-Constrained Representations
Shubham Gupta, Siva Reddy, Perouz Taslakian and 2 more
While multimodal contrastive models like CLIP and CLAP successfully learn shared representations, their embeddings typically exhibit a persistent \emph{modality gap}. We propose addressing this separation through a purely geometric approach: changing the embedding domain from the unit sphere, $S^{d-1}$, to the probability simplex, $Δ^{d-1}$. Although both manifolds share the same intrinsic dimension, the simplex acts as a structural prior; its nonnegative, unit-mass constraints serve as a cross-modal calibration that forces both modalities to ground themselves in the same coordinate system. By attaching lightweight softmax adapters and using Total Variation similarity, we reduce the centroid $\ell_2$ gap by 97--99\% across five multimodal retrieval benchmarks. This confirms that simplicial geometry induces genuine semantic alignment, matching or exceeding the retrieval performance of standard unconstrained models.
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.CL
Measure Before You Train: Typed Decision Models vs. a Classical Baseline vs. a Generative LLM for Routing a Personal Multilingual Inbox
Federico Lucca
Personal email agents decide, for every message, what it is, whether it is urgent, whether to draft a reply, create a task, or ignore it. Their error rate is rarely measured: the stored labels were written by the system itself. We present Foyer, a self-hosted personal inbox agent in daily use, and a measurement protocol (stratified sampling, frozen snapshots, thread-grouped splits, pre-registered hypotheses, human labels in the agent's review loop) that yields ground truth before any training. On 739 real Italian/English emails labelled by the owner (231 unbiased, 500 adversarially sampled), we compare nine systems under thread-grouped cross-validation: the production keyword rules, a TF-IDF + logistic-regression baseline, local typed decision models (Tev1, Nimble), a hosted decision model (Nimble v4-max), and hosted generative LLMs (Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma 4 26B/31B). Four results. The production rules score 28% on message type against a 58% majority class: the field shown most prominently carried no information. With ~200 labels, logistic regression has the highest accuracy on every field (type 0.79, urgency 0.74, needs-reply 0.83, is-noise 0.90), though it never predicts the two rarest classes and is statistically tied with Gemma 4 on type; few-shot prompting does not close the gap. The sender's relationship (client, supplier, service) is recovered from other emails of the same contact with 98.6% accuracy where the contact has been seen, and is not inferable from a single message by any model: it belongs in the contact graph, not the prompt. Finally, accuracy is not the product metric: composed into actions, the most accurate system most often ignores emails needing action (18% vs 4% for the best LLM); a cost-chosen threshold on its noise probability halves that rate and makes it the cheapest system.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
Advancing SVD-based LLM Compression via Layer-Wise Error Model Search
Moritz Thoma, Maximilian Groezinger, Maximilian Forstenhäusler and 8 more
Low-rank SVD-based compression offers a powerful strategy to reduce the computational costs of LLMs. However, existing methods face two key limitations: (i) global rank allocation, where uncalibrated error proxies fail to capture complex error propagation, and (ii) decomposition quality, where Fisher-based estimators suffer from severe rank collapse. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing Layer-wise Error Modeling Search (LEMS) and KFAC-SVD. LEMS advances rank allocation by introducing a layer-wise error surrogate that integrates local and global layer importance alongside a propagation bias, enabling effective global rank allocation via an ILP formulation. KFAC-SVD improves decomposition quality by utilizing token-wise statistics, mitigating the rank deficiency observed in prior Fisher-based SVD approaches. Across Mistral, Qwen3, and Llama 3 model families, we show that LEMS consistently outperforms existing search strategies, delivering significant zero-shot accuracy gains of up to 4.8 p.p. that generalize to model sizes of 70B parameters, while KFAC-SVD achieves an average perplexity improvement of 15%. Project page and code: https://lems-svd.github.io
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.CL
Communicating with the Entire Population: Machine Translation of Emergency Alerts and Warnings
Jen Wilson, Vipasha Bansal, William D. Lewis
It is essential that we communicate with the entirety of an affected population during a crisis, including those who do not speak a region's dominant language(s). Commercial Translation tools offer a tempting solution to broaden access and can provide a lifeline when no other resources are available. However, Emergency response managers often operate in the dark regarding the quality and adequacy of these automated outputs. In this paper, we conduct a nationwide survey of emergency managers to understand their current workflows, perspectives, and operational challenges. We then evaluate commercial translation tools against these needs, shedding light on their utility and offering practical guidance on how and when these tools can be safely used in emergency response.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CL
KrishokTech: A Bengali Agricultural Advisory System with Explicit Authorization Controls
Khan Raiyan Ibne Reza, Sanjana Aktar Maria, Shakil Ahmed and 2 more
For agricultural advisory, generating an answer is only part of the problem: the system must also control unsafe requests, work with limited connectivity, and accommodate changing guidance. KRISHOKTECH is a Bengali agricultural advisory system built around an explicit authorization boundary around generation. Before retrieval, normalization and rule-based admission checks refer policy-covered high-risk requests and ask for a crop when treatment intent is underspecified. The system then binds retrieval to a single crop and asks for confirmation when the text and image indicate different crops. After generation, a narrow verifier removes dosage claims not supported by retrieved BARI/BRRI evidence. Agricultural guidance is kept in an external evidence index that can be updated without retraining the generator, while browser-side vision and local retrieval reduce connectivity requirements. The interface makes these decisions visible as ASK, CONFIRM, REFER, and DROP, together with their evidence. On 200 farmer queries and 400 stress queries, the controls halted underspecified requests and reduced cross-crop retrieval violations from 36.5% to 0% under the tested alias filter. Mismatch detection caught 453 of 454 text-image conflicts, while the verifier caught 114 of 118 inserted dosage errors. The demonstration shows how these controls govern the path from request to delivered advice.