Agogic: Performance-Timed Music Tokens for LLM-Native Text-to-Symbolic-Music Generation

Text-to-music language models begin with a choice usually made by default: how to tokenize music. Normally entangled with backbone, data, and recipe, its effect has never been measured in isolation. We fix pretrained Qwen3.5 (0.8B-27B), data, budget, and decoding, and swap only the representation across seven tokenizations, anchoring texture metrics to each representation's model-free ceiling. The ordering is clean and surprising: representation, not model size, is the binding variable for distributional fidelity. Scaling the backbone 34x barely moves Frechet Music Distance (FMD), whereas switching representation halves it. PMT, a performance-resolution stream we release (10 ms timing, per-note velocity, multi-track texture; 609 symbols), reaches FMD 159 at 0.8B against 272-286 for beat grids (1.7-1.8x lower, up to 2.8x elsewhere; non-overlapping bootstrap CIs), so a 0.8B performance-resolution model beats a 27B beat grid. It reappears on a 26M from-scratch backbone and a second performance-resolution tokenizer: a property of the class, not one lucky vocabulary. Nor is it a finer-lattice artifact: snapping PMT's onsets to the beat grids' resolution still leaves it 67-129 FMD ahead of both (n=500). The effect is distributional; whether it is audible is a separate question, left open by our probe, with a human study pre-registered. Native caption adherence is weak but separable: a lightweight decode-time constraint doubles instrument-F1 (.28 to .60) and Correct-Key (.16 to .35) at no distributional cost. We release the harness, 25+ checkpoints, two corpora (86.6k aligned across caption/MIDI/ABC/audio; 6.25M captioned, the largest for music), and an imprinting diagnostic: published text-to-MIDI systems reproduce their training distribution near-invariant to the caption (72% vs. 71% chord-time on disjoint domains). The field's next representation claim can now be measured, not asserted.

Semantic-Aligned Structural Abstraction for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to interpret complex human emotions by integrating natural language with non-verbal modalities. Non-verbal modalities share a structural isomorphism with natural language, as both can be viewed as feature sequences evolving over time. This isomorphism enables the transformation of non-verbal modalities into text-like tokens for unified semantic reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs), designed to understand and generate sequential data, can thus be utilized to interpret complex affective sequences. However, existing LLM-based methods primarily capture low-level superficial features, failing to model affective semantics arising from structural variations and contextual interactions. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{SentiLLM}, a unified framework that leverages \textit{Semantic-Aligned Structural Abstraction} to distill continuous raw signals into compact, semantically meaningful tokens. Specifically, we introduce a \textit{Dual-Stream Salience-Context Calibration Mechanism}, which disentangles non-verbal feature sequences into a focus stream and an ambient stream. The focus stream captures salient sentiment shifts (e.g., facial expressions) guided by textual priors, while the ambient stream characterizes stable background states. Through calibrating these dynamic sentiment shifts against background states, SentiLLM effectively projects non-verbal modalities into a unified semantic space, making them naturally understandable for LLMs. Serving as a plug-and-play module, SentiLLM significantly improves discriminative performance with only a small number of trainable parameters. Our method achieves superior performance on four datasets, MOSI, MOSEI, CH-SIMS, and CH-SIMS v2, demonstrating the effectiveness of the structural abstraction paradigm in MSA. Our code is available at: \href{https://github.com/especiallyW/SentiLLM}.

VIB-AVSR: Variational Information Bottleneck for Noise-Robust LLM-Based Audio-Visual Speech Recognition

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition takes two input modalities, acoustic and visual streams, where visual information from lip movements aids recognition when audio is noisy. Recently, LLM-based AVSR models have emerged as a promising paradigm by connecting pre-trained audio-visual encoders to an LLM, achieving strong results in clean conditions. However, these models are predominantly optimized for clean acoustic conditions, with limited attention to making the LLM backbone robust to noise. No explicit mechanism is employed to produce stable representations under corrupted audio, leading to performance degradation in noisy environments. To address this, we propose VIB-AVSR, which integrates Variational Information Bottleneck layers at targeted positions within the LLM backbone to regularize representations. VIB-AVSR reduces degradation under noisy conditions across multiple SNR levels and noise types, without requiring architectural modifications or additional training data.

Lexical discovery in unknown environments orchestrated by Large Language Models

Populations of autonomous agents deployed in unknown environments (e.g. planetary or deep-sea exploration) must develop shared vocabularies to refer to entities that have no name in any human language. We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Lexical Discovery (NSLD) framework, in which a population of LLM-based agents plays a referential game over out-of-distribution visual referents, autonomously self-organising a shared alien lexicon. Each agent combines a frozen CLIP vision encoder with a private FAISS vector index and a text-only LLM. Crucially, discovered alien words are anchored to natural language via semantic proximity in the embedding space, enlarging the human vocabulary with new perceptually grounded words. Consensus is reached in simulations with populations of up to twenty agents and ten visual referents. Convergence dynamics are characterised through three analytical models achieving R^2 > 0.95, representing a first step towards pre-deployment planning in autonomous exploration missions.

Segment and Select: Vision-Language Segmentation in 3D Scenarios

3D vision-language segmentation aims to segment target objects in 3D scenarios according to the linguistic instructions and visual observations. Prior art heavily relies on the coarse superpoint representation to reduce the computation complexity, which suffers from poor segmentation quality and messy object boundaries. In this paper, we propose the SEGment-And-select (SEGA3D) paradigm for 3D visionlanguage segmentation that directly operates on the fine-grained visual information and is free from the superpoint dependency. Specifically, we first leverage a mask candidate generator to provide fine-grained categorical mask candidates, substantially improving the quality of candidate masks over the superpoint counterparts. Then, a Large Language Model (LLM) is utilized to generate the semantic and spatial information based on the linguistic description and visual features. The LLM output and visual features are fed to the Semantic-Spatial Selector (SSS) to produce the top-ranking mask candidates. Eventually, the Loopback Verification Module (LVM) is designed to yield the segmentation mask from the selected candidate masks. Our SEGA3D attains competitive performance on ScanRefer, ScanNet and Matterport3D benchmarks. Notably, our SEGA3D surpasses the top-performing counterpart by 8.3 mIoU and 5.3 mIoU on ScanNet and Matterport3D, respectively. Codes will be available upon publication.

From LLM-Driven Trading Card Generation to Procedural Relatedness: A Pokémon Case Study

Since the dawn of Trading Card Games, the genre has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry engaging millions of analog and digital players worldwide. Popular TCGs rely on regular updates, balance adjustments, and rotating constraints to sustain engagement. Yet, as metagames stabilize, predictable strategies dominate and viable card options diminish, often resulting in repetitive and impaired player experiences. This paper investigates the use of Large Language Models and Image Diffusion Models for Procedural Content Generation of TCG cards, addressing these challenges by enabling a personalized infinity of card designs. Modern generative AI not only enables large-scale content creation but could even introduce procedural relatedness, fostering unique connections between players and their cards. We present a pipeline combining player-centric co-creation, fine-tuned embeddings, local LLMs, and Diffusion Models to generate dynamic, personalized cards while potentially expanding creative range. We evaluated the pipeline in a user study with 49 participants who generated 196 Pokémon card samples. Participants rated aesthetics and representativeness of visuals and mechanics, and provided qualitative feedback. Results show high satisfaction and indicate that most participants successfully realized their own ideas through prompt adjustments. These findings lay groundwork for future content generation systems and alternatives to conventional metagame evolution through procedural relatedness.