Memes play a central role in modern online communication, especially in contexts of political conflict where visual and textual cues combine to convey persuasive messages. We study persuasive technique detection in Ukrainian memes using vision-language models (VLMs). We introduce UkrMeme, a dataset of 200 organically produced Ukrainian wartime memes annotated for persuasion techniques, and PTM-UA, a Ukrainian translation of a subset of the Propaganda 950 benchmark that preserves original visual content while translating meme text. We evaluate VLMs in a zero-shot prompting setup across image, text, and multimodal inputs using hierarchical F1 metrics. Finally, we compare Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and model-generated token attributions and analyze the semantic categories of evidence emphasized by each explanation method.
When solving complex spatial reasoning tasks, ordinary humans naturally revisit the scenes from task-relevant viewpoints and mentally reconstruct the spatial layouts from those viewpoints. But can Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) proactively think in the same way? We term this ability Active Spatial Mentalization (ASM), an intrinsic component of visual intelligence that remains substantially underdeveloped in current LVLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce SpatialASM, a scalable framework to internalize ASM into LVLMs through training-time spatial simulation. SpatialASM employs an allocentric novel-view generator to ground hypothetical viewpoints in visual evidence and produces two complementary forms of supervision: i) explicit ASM trajectories that teach LVLMs when and how to adaptively invoke view planning and imagination during spatial reasoning, and ii) automatically-constructed perspective-taking tasks that further strengthens viewpoint-conditioned scene imagination. On seven benchmarks spanning relatively perception-oriented spatial understanding to more challenging tasks requiring multi-image, cross-view and viewpoint-transformation reasoning, SpatialASM yields performance gain on LVLMs of four LVLM backbones in spatial reasoning while retaining their original general vision capabilities. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves average accuracy across the seven spatial benchmarks. And the synthesis of ASM trajectories provides a scalable pathway to alleviate the scarcity of spatial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision for eliciting active viewpoint exploration and mental scene simulation.
语言模型越来越多地被用于辅助或自动执行信息检索，从规模过大、难以建立索引的文档集合中查找信息。当这项任务需要专业的语言学或科学知识时，就会变得困难。我们使用 Wikipedia Game，在一项类似的信息检索任务中测试语言模型。在该游戏中，玩家必须仅通过文章链接到达目标文章。我们在五种语言的 Wikipedia 和五个学术文献数据集上，对句子嵌入模型和大语言模型（LLM）进行了比较。我们构建了超大规模的 Wikipedia 页面本地图结构，并利用 OpenAlex 构建了论文引用本地图结构，同时提供了构建和导航这些图结构的代码。这使得研究者无需依赖第三方 API，即可研究语言模型的导航能力。我们将这些模型与人类和 TF-IDF 基准进行了比较。Wikipedia Game 的形式支持跨技术、语言和领域的稳健比较。没有任何模型显著优于人类，但表现最好的模型（GPT-o3 mini、GPT-4o、QwQ:32B 和 DeepSeek-R1:70B）取得了与人类相当的成功率。模型的表现和排名随语言和主题而变化，这对采用这些技术的实践者具有参考意义。
In August, I posted here about TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs completely in the browser, with no need for an account or server. (I didn't excpect it to get that much feedback, bug reports and help from here!) This is the same idea for the other half of my studies, the handwritten notes. I take them on a convertible laptop, and I've had a hard time with apps for that, taking notes from a device to another, exporting as PDF, needing an account for many of them, etc. So I've been working on the version of it that I always wanted. Open a tab, the slides of the lecture or multiple PDFs open next to the page or even become the page, write on them with my pen, and nothing ever leaves my browser. braiNOTES is a static website and has no backend. Strokes are perfect-freehand outlines which support pen pressure, the PDF files are rendered by pdf.js in a worker, and for storage it uses IndexedDB a moment after every change. No account, no analytics, and completely offline and local-first. You can export notebooks as .brainotes files, which in the background is a zip with one json per page + the PDFs and pictures you import. It keeps the original pages and puts the vectorized ink on top, this way the text stays selectable in the slides. You can try it here: https://notes.swimmingbrain.dev GitHub Repo: https://github.com/swimmingbrain/brainotes (MIT) In Study mode, the PDF opens on the side of the tab, you can read it simultaneously to the notes, snip a formula or diagrams directly into the notes with the snip tool, and then write around it. In Board mode, you have just a Whiteboard for tutoring or simply for more place for exercises, and can also highlight or draw things with the laser pointer tool while presenting. The line of the ink appears the moment the pen moves, and a one euro filter calms shaky hands while you write + a light a refit when you lift the pen. I also have a video editor and an animation tool which are still a work in progress, on the same GitHub profile. I'm also working on a MCP server for each tool, so you can use your MCP client to do further things with your notes, automatically edit videos on the video editor, etc. That feature will of course be off unless you turn it on and will only be able to talk to localhost. I've used this tool for every lecture in the last few months and a few friends use it too. Bug reports, fixes, recommendations, feedback are all welcome! Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50049132 Points: 14 # Comments: 0
Legacy modernization requires understanding how an application’s code, data and business rules fit together before rebuilding it. BotMan AI uses an AI-powered migration pipeline that maps an application’s dependencies, business logic and data models in a knowledge graph. That context helps agents interpret the system they are rebuilding, according to Alejandro D’Andrea (pictured), founder and […] The post BotMan AI uses knowledge graphs for legacy modernization appeared first on SiliconANGLE .
Recent advances have significantly improved the performance of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsers, yet determining when their outputs can be trusted remains largely unexplored. This work presents the first study of uncertainty estimation for AMR parsers in a black-box setting using top-k beam-search candidates. Uncertainty is estimated from pairwise candidate similarities and evaluated using the Prediction Rejection Ratio. This work characterises the relationship between parsing performance and uncertainty, evaluates the reliability of beam candidate distributions, analyses the effect of evaluation metrics on uncertainty assessment, and identifies parsers that provide the strongest balance between performance and reliability. Experimental results show the value of uncertainty estimation as a complementary dimension for evaluating AMR parsers.
API specifications serve as critical documentation for modern software development, directly impacting integration efficiency and client code generation. While recent advancements have leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate initial specifications from source code, existing approaches treat this process as a one-time event - overlooking the needs for continuous validation, long-term maintenance, and market-driven evolution of these artifacts. To address this issue, we present Agent4Spec, an autonomous multi-agent framework featuring two distinct pipelines: (1) a validation pipeline that detects and self-corrects OpenAPI syntax errors, and (2) a market analysis pipeline that conducts competitive research, identifies functional gaps against industry leaders, and automatically generates missing API-spec functionalities. We evaluate Agent4Spec on two curated datasets of API specifications spanning both general-purpose and industrial scenarios. Among 9 SOTA LLMs, the top-performer achieves 100% syntax error detection rates and over 95% implementation success for proposed corrections, while securing over 50% adoption rates for suggested endpoint improvements, representing a practical tool for API development.
Traditional system identification typically involves two steps: initially, training data is processed to estimate a model of the system of interest; then, the model is used to predict outputs for new input queries. In contrast, recent in-context learning approaches learn a meta model that maps directly from training data and query inputs to outputs in a zero-shot fashion, bypassing explicit model estimation. This approach leverages a meta model trained offline, on large sets of synthetically generated data, to emulate the behavior of a system identification algorithm. In this work, we advance this meta-learning framework for system identification in three directions. First, we develop a unified probabilistic meta-identification architecture that combines a Transformer-based encoder-decoder with tailored mechanisms for handling long training sequences, enabling calibrated predictions over long horizons. Second, we show how a pre-trained meta model can act as an uncertainty-aware synthetic data generator for classical system identification, providing task-specific data that regularize parametric models when real data are scarce. Third, we systematically evaluate the framework on standard nonlinear system identification benchmarks and on a challenging out-of-distribution scenario, demonstrating competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods and strong generalization, including cases where input-only adaptation is sufficient to handle significant distribution shifts.
This paper addresses the grid quantization error of deep-learning (DL)-based direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. Classification- based DOA methods discretize the continuous angular space into a grid, so that with a peak-based read-out, the accuracy and resolution are limited by the grid step and by the width of the label peak. To address this issue, we propose a sigmoid label that encodes the sources' DOAs as the sum of angle-shifted monotonic sigmoid functions. Differentiating the output of a CNN-Transformer network trained with the sigmoid label produces sharp spectral peaks at the source DOAs. Combined with a moderately refined grid step of 0.25 degrees, the CNN-Transformer with the proposed sigmoid label attains sub-degree accuracy and a 1-degree resolution, breaking the limit of the grid quantization error. Under the unified CNN-Transformer backbone, we compare the proposed Sigmoid label with the Gaussian label, the 0-1 hard label, and the binary cross-entropy (BCE) baseline. Numerical results demonstrate that the Sigmoid label attains the highest accuracy and superior resolution compared to other labels.