Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers focusing on the capabilities and evaluation of large language models. The papers explore their application in diverse areas such as quantitative trading, metaphor norm generation, and language learning, highlighting their growing versatility and impact across fields.

Large language models have learned to use language

Acknowledging that large language models have learned to use language can open doors to breakthrough language science. Achieving these breakthroughs may require abandoning some long-held ideas about how language knowledge is evaluated and reckoning with the difficult fact that we have entered a post-Turing test era.

Market-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Introductory Quantitative Trading and Market Dynamics

We introduce MARKET-BENCH, a benchmark that evaluates large language models (LLMs) on introductory quantitative trading tasks by asking them to construct executable backtesters from natural-language strategy descriptions and market assumptions. Each instance specifies one of three canonical strategies -- scheduled trading on Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), pairs trading on Coca-Cola (NASDAQ: KO) and Pepsi (NASDAQ: PEP), or delta hedging on MSFT -- and models must produce code whose P\&L, drawdown, and position paths match a verifiable reference implementation. We assess twelve state-of-the-art models using a multi-round pass@k metric that separates structural reliability (whether the backtest runs) from numerical accuracy (mean absolute error of the backtest metrics). While most models reliably execute the simplest strategy (average pass@3 of 0.80), errors vary by orders of magnitude across models and tasks: Gemini 3 Pro and Claude 4.5 Sonnet combine strong reliability with low error on simpler strategies, GPT-5.1 Codex-Max achieves perfect pass@1 on the first two strategies and the lowest best-run error on the easiest task, and Qwen3 Max attains perfect pass@3 yet sometimes produces inaccurate P\&L paths. These results show that current LLMs can scaffold basic trading infrastructure but still struggle to reason robustly about prices, inventory, and risk; we release MARKET-BENCH and a public leaderboard at https://marketbench.ai.

Journey Before Destination: On the importance of Visual Faithfulness in Slow Thinking

Reasoning-augmented vision language models (VLMs) generate explicit chains of thought that promise greater capability and transparency but also introduce new failure modes: models may reach correct answers via visually unfaithful intermediate steps, or reason faithfully yet fail on the final prediction. Standard evaluations that only measure final-answer accuracy cannot distinguish these behaviors. We introduce the visual faithfulness of reasoning chains as a distinct evaluation dimension, focusing on whether the perception steps of a reasoning chain are grounded in the image. We propose a training- and reference-free framework that decomposes chains into perception versus reasoning steps and uses off-the-shelf VLM judges for step-level faithfulness, additionally verifying this approach through a human meta-evaluation. Building on this metric, we present a lightweight self-reflection procedure that detects and locally regenerates unfaithful perception steps without any training. Across multiple reasoning-trained VLMs and perception-heavy benchmarks, our method reduces Unfaithful Perception Rate while preserving final-answer accuracy, improving the reliability of multimodal reasoning.

Can GPT replace human raters? Validity and reliability of machine-generated norms for metaphors

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in scientific research, the issue of their trustworthiness becomes crucial. In psycholinguistics, LLMs have been recently employed in automatically augmenting human-rated datasets, with promising results obtained by generating ratings for single words. Yet, performance for ratings of complex items, i.e., metaphors, is still unexplored. Here, we present the first assessment of the validity and reliability of ratings of metaphors on familiarity, comprehensibility, and imageability, generated by three GPT models for a total of 687 items gathered from the Italian Figurative Archive and three English studies. We performed a thorough validation in terms of both alignment with human data and ability to predict behavioral and electrophysiological responses. We found that machine-generated ratings positively correlated with human-generated ones. Familiarity ratings reached moderate-to-strong correlations for both English and Italian metaphors, although correlations weakened for metaphors with high sensorimotor load. Imageability showed moderate correlations in English and moderate-to-strong in Italian. Comprehensibility for English metaphors exhibited the strongest correlations. Overall, larger models outperformed smaller ones and greater human-model misalignment emerged with familiarity and imageability. Machine-generated ratings significantly predicted response times and the EEG amplitude, with a strength comparable to human ratings. Moreover, GPT ratings obtained across independent sessions were highly stable. We conclude that GPT, especially larger models, can validly and reliably replace - or augment - human subjects in rating metaphor properties. Yet, LLMs align worse with humans when dealing with conventionality and multimodal aspects of metaphorical meaning, calling for careful consideration of the nature of stimuli.

F5-TTS-RO: Extending F5-TTS to Romanian TTS via Lightweight Input Adaptation

This work introduces a lightweight input-level adapter for the F5-TTS model that enables Romanian Language support. To preserve the existing capabilities of the model (voice cloning, English and Chinese support), we keep the original weights frozen, append a sub-network to the model and train it as an extension for the textual embedding matrix of the text encoder. For simplicity, we rely on ConvNeXt module implemented in F5-TTS to also model the co-dependencies between the new character-level embeddings. The module serves as a soft letter-to-sound layer, converting Romanian text into a continuous representation that the F5-TTS model uses to produce naturally sounding Romanian utterances. We evaluate the model with a pool of 20 human listeners across three tasks: (a) audio similarity between reference and generated speech, (b) pronunciation and naturalness and (c) Romanian-English code-switching. The results indicate that our approach maintains voice cloning capabilities and enables, to a certain extent, code-switching within the same utterance; however, residual English accent characteristics remain. We open-source our code and provide example audio samples at https://github.com/racai-ro/Ro-F5TTS.