Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring innovative methodologies in machine translation and language model training. The papers highlight advancements in structuring speech through paragraph segmentation, improving reasoning in audio-language models, and introducing novel training paradigms for domain-specific large language models.

HY-MT1.5 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce our latest translation models, HY-MT1.5-1.8B and HY-MT1.5-7B, a new family of machine translation models developed through a holistic training framework tailored for high-performance translation. Our methodology orchestrates a multi-stage pipeline that integrates general and MT-oriented pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, on-policy distillation, and reinforcement learning. HY-MT1.5-1.8B, the 1.8B-parameter model demonstrates remarkable parameter efficiency, comprehensively outperforming significantly larger open-source baselines (e.g., Tower-Plus-72B, Qwen3-32B) and mainstream commercial APIs (e.g., Microsoft Translator, Doubao Translator) in standard Chinese-foreign and English-foreign tasks. It achieves approximately 90% of the performance of ultra-large proprietary models such as Gemini-3.0-Pro, while marginally trailing Gemini-3.0-Pro on WMT25 and Mandarin-minority language benchmarks, it maintains a substantial lead over other competing models. Furthermore, HY-MT1.5-7B establishes a new state-of-the-art for its size class, achieving 95% of Gemini-3.0-Pro's performance on Flores-200 and surpassing it on the challenging WMT25 and Mandarin-minority language test sets. Beyond standard translation, the HY-MT1.5 series supports advanced constraints, including terminology intervention, context-aware translation, and format preservation. Extensive empirical evaluations confirm that both models offer highly competitive, robust solutions for general and specialized translation tasks within their respective parameter scales.

Paragraph Segmentation Revisited: Towards a Standard Task for Structuring Speech

Automatic speech transcripts are often delivered as unstructured word streams that impede readability and repurposing. We recast paragraph segmentation as the missing structuring step and fill three gaps at the intersection of speech processing and text segmentation. First, we establish TEDPara (human-annotated TED talks) and YTSegPara (YouTube videos with synthetic labels) as the first benchmarks for the paragraph segmentation task. The benchmarks focus on the underexplored speech domain, where paragraph segmentation has traditionally not been part of post-processing, while also contributing to the wider text segmentation field, which still lacks robust and naturalistic benchmarks. Second, we propose a constrained-decoding formulation that lets large language models insert paragraph breaks while preserving the original transcript, enabling faithful, sentence-aligned evaluation. Third, we show that a compact model (MiniSeg) attains state-of-the-art accuracy and, when extended hierarchically, jointly predicts chapters and paragraphs with minimal computational cost. Together, our resources and methods establish paragraph segmentation as a standardized, practical task in speech processing.

AHA: Aligning Large Audio-Language Models for Reasoning Hallucinations via Counterfactual Hard Negatives

Although Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) deliver state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, they frequently suffer from hallucinations, e.g. generating text not grounded in the audio input. We analyze these grounding failures and identify a distinct taxonomy: Event Omission, False Event Identity, Temporal Relation Error, and Quantitative Temporal Error. To address this, we introduce the AHA (Audio Hallucination Alignment) framework. By leveraging counterfactual hard negative mining, our pipeline constructs a high-quality preference dataset that forces models to distinguish strict acoustic evidence from linguistically plausible fabrications. Additionally, we establish AHA-Eval, a diagnostic benchmark designed to rigorously test these fine-grained temporal reasoning capabilities. We apply this data to align Qwen2.5-Omni. The resulting model, Qwen-Audio-AHA, achieves a 13.7% improvement on AHA-Eval. Crucially, this benefit generalizes beyond our diagnostic set. Our model shows substantial gains on public benchmarks, including 1.3% on MMAU-Test and 1.6% on MMAR, outperforming latest SOTA methods.

Factorized Learning for Temporally Grounded Video-Language Models

Recent video-language models have shown great potential for video understanding, but still struggle with accurate temporal grounding for event-level perception. We observe that two main factors in video understanding (i.e., temporal grounding and textual response) form a logical hierarchy: accurate temporal evidence grounding lays the foundation for reliable textual response. However, existing works typically handle these two tasks in a coupled manner without a clear logical structure, leading to sub-optimal objectives. We address this from a factorized learning perspective. We first propose D$^2$VLM, a framework that decouples the learning of these two tasks while also emphasizing their inherent dependency. We adopt a "grounding then answering with evidence referencing" paradigm and introduce evidence tokens for evidence grounding, which emphasize event-level visual semantic capture beyond the focus on timestamp representation in existing works. To further facilitate the learning of these two tasks, we introduce a novel factorized preference optimization (FPO) algorithm. Unlike standard preference optimization, FPO explicitly incorporates probabilistic temporal grounding modeling into the optimization objective, enabling preference learning for both temporal grounding and textual response. We also construct a synthetic dataset to address the lack of suitable datasets for factorized preference learning with explicit temporal grounding. Experiments on various tasks demonstrate the clear advantage of our approach. Our source code is available at https://github.com/nusnlp/d2vlm.

QianfanHuijin Technical Report: A Novel Multi-Stage Training Paradigm for Finance Industrial LLMs

Domain-specific enhancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the financial context has long been a focal point of industrial application. While previous models such as BloombergGPT and Baichuan-Finance primarily focused on knowledge enhancement, the deepening complexity of financial services has driven a growing demand for models that possess not only domain knowledge but also robust financial reasoning and agentic capabilities. In this paper, we present QianfanHuijin, a financial domain LLM, and propose a generalizable multi-stage training paradigm for industrial model enhancement. Our approach begins with Continual Pre-training (CPT) on financial corpora to consolidate the knowledge base. This is followed by a fine-grained Post-training pipeline designed with increasing specificity: starting with Financial SFT, progressing to Finance Reasoning RL and Finance Agentic RL, and culminating in General RL aligned with real-world business scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate that QianfanHuijin achieves superior performance across various authoritative financial benchmarks. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that the targeted Reasoning RL and Agentic RL stages yield significant gains in their respective capabilities. These findings validate our motivation and suggest that this fine-grained, progressive post-training methodology is poised to become a mainstream paradigm for various industrial-enhanced LLMs.