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&quot;Is the user’s current query input exactly what they intend to search for?&quot; Our work aims to answer this question by determining, at each typing, whether the current query is complete. If so, a search is implicitly triggered in advance without waiting for user confirmation. This approach reduces response time and enhances the user search experience. Specifically, we propose QType, a client-side framework that introduces innovation in data sampling, feature selection, model design and training, and online strategy. Experiments in a leading mobile shopping application validate its effectiveness, achieving offline precision/recall/accuracy of 0.7936/0.8196/0.7742, respectively, and decreasing online response time by 640.51±93.65 milliseconds, which is of great benefit to the search system. Unlike prior work that focuses on optimizing server-side engineering pipelines or simplifying ranking models, our method leverages client-side typing behavior for real-time early prediction, utilizing on-device computation to gain response time reducing. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to identify and address this problem. This work also introduces App Intelligence, a new paradigm for enhancing mobile applications by integrating on-device AI to boost business value and user experience.

ACL 2026

Predicting Fine-Grained Typing Intent for Faster Search

### Welcome to the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia Systems and Web 
Promoted annually by the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), the Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia Systems and Web (WebMedia) is the main event on the subject in Brazil and an excellent opportunity for scientific and technical exchanges between students, researchers and professionals in the areas of Multimedia, Hypermedia and Web. This year, we will be celebrating the 27th edition of WebMedia, to be held from **November 5th to 12th, 2021**, organized by the Federal University of Minas Gerais and Federal University of São João Del Rei. For the second time in its history, the event will be held online, with interaction between the participants being done through tools and web platforms.
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The Webmedia 2021 schedule will feature:
 
* Technical sessions for the presentation of scientific articles.
* National and international lectures
* Panel with Companies
* Workshops
* Short courses
* Project meetings open to the community
 

The topics of interest for paper submission are:
 
* Web and Social Networks
* Multimedia
* Digital TV, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing
 

In addition to the main track, WebMedia 2021 will feature the Tools and Applications Workshop, the Scientific Initiation Papers Contest, the Theses and Dissertations Contest, the RNP CT-Video Workshop.
 
The organization of WebMedia 2021 is under the responsibility of the [Department of Computer Science at UFMG (DCC/UFMG)](http://dcc.ufmg.br/) and [Department of Computer Science at UFSJ (DCOMP/UFSJ)](https://dcomp.ufsj.edu.br/)
 
**#PartiuWebMedia2021 #WebMedia2021**

WebMedia 2021

The Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia Systems and Web (WebMedia) is the main event on the subject in Brazil and an excellent opportunity for scientific and technical exchanges between students, researchers and professionals in the areas of Multimedia, Hypermedia and Web.

"Is the user’s current query input exactly what they intend to search for?" Our work aims to answer this question by determining, at each typing, whether the current query is complete. If so, a search is implicitly triggered in advance without waiting for user confirmation. This approach reduces response time and enhances the user search experience. Specifically, we propose QType, a client-side framework that introduces innovation in data sampling, feature selection, model design and training, and online strategy. Experiments in a leading mobile shopping application validate its effectiveness, achieving offline precision/recall/accuracy of 0.7936/0.8196/0.7742, respectively, and decreasing online response time by 640.51±93.65 milliseconds, which is of great benefit to the search system. Unlike prior work that focuses on optimizing server-side engineering pipelines or simplifying ranking models, our method leverages client-side typing behavior for real-time early prediction, utilizing on-device computation to gain response time reducing. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to identify and address this problem. This work also introduces App Intelligence, a new paradigm for enhancing mobile applications by integrating on-device AI to boost business value and user experience.

technical paper

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The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pruning have shown state-of-the-art (SotA) compression results in post-training and retraining-free settings while maintaining high predictive performance. However, previous research mainly considered calibrating based on English text, despite the multilingual nature of modern LLMs and their frequent use in non-English languages. This analysis paper conducts an in-depth investigation of the performance and internal representation changes associated with pruning multilingual language models for monolingual applications. We present the first comprehensive empirical study, comparing different calibration languages for pruning multilingual models across diverse languages, tasks, models, and SotA pruning techniques. We further analyze the latent subspaces, pruning masks, and individual neurons within pruned models. Our results reveal that while calibration on the target language effectively retains perplexity and yields high signal-to-noise ratios, it does not consistently improve downstream task performance. Further analysis of internal representations at three different levels highlights broader limitations of current pruning approaches: While they effectively preserve dominant information like language-specific features, this is insufficient to counteract the loss of nuanced, language-agnostic features that are crucial for knowledge retention and reasoning.

On the Limitations of Language Targeted Pruning: Investigating the Calibration Language Impact in Multilingual LLM Pruning

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important, with automatic evaluation benchmarks gaining prominence as alternatives to human evaluation. While existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model's capabilities. To fill this gap, we propose SCAN (Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation), a practical framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. SCAN incorporates four key components: (1) TaxBuilder, which extracts capability-indicating tags from extensive queries to construct a hierarchical taxonomy automatically; (2) RealMix, a query synthesis and filtering mechanism that ensures sufficient evaluation data for each capability tag; (3) a suite of visualization and analysis tools that facilitate efficient navigation and analysis of model capabilities; and (4) a PC$^{2}$-based (Pre-Comparison-derived Criteria) LLM-as-a-Judge approach that achieves significantly higher accuracy compared to classic LLM-as-a-Judge method. Using SCAN, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 21 mainstream LLMs. Our detailed analysis of the GPT-OSS family reveals substantial performance variations, even within sub-capabilities belonging to the same category of capability. This finding highlights the importance of fine-grained evaluation in accurately understanding LLM behavior. Project homepage and resources are available at https://github.com/liudan193/SCAN.

SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs

Feature engineering has long been central to recommender systems, yet effectively leveraging textual item features remains challenging. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as semantic encoders for recommendation, but their roles and behaviors in this setting are still not well understood. Prior studies often rely on general-purpose embedding benchmarks (e.g., MTEB) when selecting LLMs, overlooking the unique characteristics of recommendation tasks. To address this gap, we introduce BLaIR, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLMs as semantic encoders in recommendation scenarios. We contribute (1) a new large-scale Amazon Reviews 2023 dataset with over 570 million reviews and 48 million items, (2) a unified benchmark covering sequential recommendation, collaborative filtering, and product search, and (3) a new complex-query product search task featuring both semi-synthetic and real-world evaluation datasets. Experiments with 11 leading LLMs show that their rankings on BLaIR show little correlation with MTEB, highlighting the unique challenges of semantic encoding in recommendation.

Bridging Language and Items for Retrieval and Recommendation: Benchmarking LLMs as Semantic Encoders

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models (ORMs) that judge only final answers. Process Reward Models(PRMs) address this gap by evaluating and guiding reasoning at the step or trajectory level. This survey provides a systematic overview of PRMs through the full loop: how to generate process data, build PRMs, and use PRMs for test-time scaling and reinforcement learning. We summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents, and review emerging benchmarks. Our goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment.

A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating human-like social behaviors. Social graphs provide high-quality supervision signals that encode both local interactions and global network structure, yet they remain underutilized for LLM training. To address this gap, we propose Graphia, the first general LLM-based social graph simulation framework that leverages graph data as supervision for LLM post-training via reinforcement learning. With GNN-based structural rewards, Graphia trains specialized agents to predict whom to interact with (destination selection) and how to interact (edge generation), followed by designed graph generation pipelines. We evaluate Graphia under two settings: Transductive Dynamic Graph Generation (TDGG), a micro-level task with our proposed node-wise interaction alignment metrics; and Inductive Dynamic Graph Generation (IDGG), a macro-level task with our proposed metrics for aligning emergent network properties. On three real-world networks, Graphia improves micro-level alignment by 6.1\% in the composite destination selection score, 12\% in edge classification accuracy, and 27.9\% in edge content BERTScore over the strongest baseline. For macro-level alignment, it achieves 35.98\% higher structural similarity and 28.71\% better replication of social phenomena such as power laws and echo chambers. Our results show that social graphs can serve as high-quality supervision signals for LLM post-training, closing the gap between agent behaviors and network dynamics for LLM-based simulation. Code is available at https://github.com/Ji-Cather/Graphia.git.

GRAPHIA: Harnessing Social Graph Data to Enhance LLM-Based Social Simulation

Large language model (LLM) dialogue agents are increasingly used in psychological therapy, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. We address this gap with three contributions: (1) MindEval, a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents; (2) MindData, a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues (2,573 sessions; 63,348 turns); and (3) MindApt, a framework that integrates a therapeutic dialogue state tracking paradigm with a patient-aware strategic planning module. On MindEval, MindApt outperforms strong baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. To evaluate utility beyond role-play, we conducted a clinical study with real patients, demonstrating that MindApt-guided care achieves outcomes comparable to therapist-determined care, while the hybrid setting combining therapist judgment with MindApt’s recommendations yields the strongest overall outcomes.

Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning

Language models (LMs) behave more like humans when their cognitive resources are restricted, particularly in predicting sentence processing costs such as reading times. However, it remains unclear whether such constraints similarly affect sentence comprehension strategies, and existing methods do not directly target the balance between memory storage and sentence processing, which is central to human working memory. To address this issue, we propose a dual-task paradigm that combines an arithmetic computation task with a sentence comprehension task, such as "The 2 cocktail + blended 3 =...". Our experiments show that under dual-task conditions, GPT-4o, o3-mini, and o4-mini shift toward plausibility-based comprehension, mirroring humans' rational inference. Specifically, these models show a greater accuracy gap between plausible sentences (e.g., "The cocktail was blended by the bartender") and implausible sentences (e.g., "The bartender was blended by the cocktail") in the dual-task condition compared to the single-task conditions. These findings suggest that constraints on the balance between memory and processing resources promote rational inference in LMs. More broadly, they support the view that human-like sentence comprehension fundamentally arises from the allocation of limited cognitive resources.

A Dual-Task Paradigm to Investigate Sentence Comprehension Strategies in Language Models

The standard post-training recipe for large reasoning models, supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning (SFT-then-RL), may limit the benefits of the RL stage: while SFT imitates expert demonstrations, it often causes overconfidence and reduces generation diversity, leaving RL with a narrowed solution space to explore. Adding entropy regularization during SFT is not a cure-all; it tends to flatten token distributions toward uniformity, increasing entropy without improving meaningful exploration capability. In this paper, we propose CurioSFT, an entropy-preserving SFT method designed to enhance exploration capabilities through intrinsic curiosity. It consists of (a) Self-Exploratory Distillation, which distills the model toward a self-generated, temperature-scaled teacher to encourage exploration within its capability; and (b) Entropy-Guided Temperature Selection, which adaptively adjusts distillation strength to mitigate knowledge forgetting by amplifying exploration at reasoning tokens while stabilizing factual tokens. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that, in SFT stage, CurioSFT outperforms the vanilla SFT by 2.5 points on in-distribution tasks and 2.9 points on out-of-distribution tasks. We also verify that exploration capabilities preserved during SFT successfully translate into concrete gains in RL stage, yielding an average improvement of 5.0 points. Code is available at https://github.com/HaoooWang/CurioSFT.

Learning While Staying Curious: Entropy-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Adaptive Self-Distillation for Large Reasoning Models

While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing---constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover a distinct asymmetry driven by English dominance: mixing is uniformly beneficial when retrieving from non-English document indices, whereas indices containing English are best served by pure English queries. Furthermore, English acts as the strongest mixing partner for every non-English document language. Finally, when controlling for English dominance, mixing gains correlate negatively with typological distance. We conclude that language-mix sensitivity is structured and predictable, and we validate the robustness of these patterns across model families and scales.

When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

As LLM-based judges become integral to industry applications, obtaining well-calibrated uncertainty estimates efficiently has become critical for production deployment. However, existing techniques, such as verbalized confidence and multi-generation methods, are often either poorly calibrated or computationally expensive. We introduce linear probes trained with a Brier score-based loss to provide calibrated uncertainty estimates from reasoning judges' hidden states, requiring no additional model training. We evaluate our approach on both objective tasks (reasoning, mathematics, factuality, coding) and subjective human preference judgments. Our results demonstrate that probes achieve superior calibration compared to existing methods with x computational savings, generalize robustly to unseen evaluation domains, and deliver higher accuracy on high-confidence predictions. However, probes produce conservative estimates that underperform on easier datasets but may benefit safety-critical deployments prioritizing low false-positive rates. Overall, our work demonstrates that interpretability-based uncertainty estimation provides a practical and scalable plug-and-play solution for LLM judges in production.

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On the Limitations of Language Targeted Pruning: Investigating the Calibration Language Impact in Multilingual LLM Pruning

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