arXiv subjects

Keane Ong

Publications and source records attributed to Keane Ong.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

OmniClimate-TC: Physics-Aware Visual Abstractions for Multimedia Reasoning over Tropical Cyclones

Meteorological reanalysis encodes extreme weather through continuous, physically constrained fields, posing a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs) whose perceptual assumptions are shaped by natural images. Tropical cyclones exemplify this mismatch: critical properties such as intensity extrema, asymmetry, spatial extent, and physical impacts arise from field-level organization rather than object-centric visual cues. Existing approaches address this gap through text alignment or annotation, treating the problem as multimodal supervision rather than representation design. We introduce Physics-Aware Visual Abstraction (PAVA), a plug-and-play physics-aware representation and annotation interface that maps physical reanalysis fields to visually identifiable and semantically grounded perceptual abstractions for supervision and evaluation in vision-language reasoning. Building on PAVA, we construct OmniClimate-TC, a benchmark for tropical cyclone analysis spanning five classes of reasoning and nine tasks, with 243,890 physically grounded instruction-tuning pairs. Using PAVA-aligned supervision, we adapt VLMs and provide evidence that this representation design improves reasoning over tropical cyclone hazard fields. Our results position OmniClimate-TC as a benchmark for multimedia reasoning over structured geophysical fields, and highlight representation design as a key ingredient for physically grounded reasoning in scientific media.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2026

SHALA-LLM: Smartly Handling Ambiguous Labels in Aligning LLMs

Many human-centered tasks, including natural language inference (NLI) and emotion recognition (ER), have multiple plausible interpretations, leading to label ambiguity and challenging disagreements across human annotators. As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, faithfully modeling such ambiguity is essential to identify contested inputs, preserve variability in ambiguous cases, and capture the full distribution of human judgments. Yet, existing LLM alignment approaches have predominantly assumed a single correct label, excluding annotator disagreement during optimization. Instead of treating this ambiguity as noise, we show how to treat it as information that improves model behavior through a new algorithm called SMARTLY HANDLING AMBIGUOUS LABELS IN ALIGNING LLMS (SHALA-LLM). This reinforcement learning framework provides a new way for LLMs to learn directly from annotator distributions while dynamically prioritizing highly ambiguous samples during optimization. Experiments on ambiguity-sensitive NLI and ER benchmarks, including ChaosNLI, GoEmotions, and MSP-Podcast, demonstrate that SHALA-LLM improves agreement with annotator label distributions, e.g. on ChaosNLI, it reduces Jensen-Shannon Distance by up to 62.1%. At the same time, SHALA-LLM improves F1 by up to 16.7%, showing that modeling annotator disagreement can also strengthen classification performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Correlation: Refutation-Validated Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Explainable Energy Market Returns

This paper proposes a refutation-validated framework for aspect-based sentiment analysis in financial markets, addressing the limitations of correlational studies that cannot distinguish genuine associations from spurious ones. Using X data for the energy sector, we test whether aspect-level sentiment signals show robust, refutation-validated relationships with equity returns. Our pipeline combines net-ratio scoring with z-normalization, OLS with Newey West HAC errors, and refutation tests including placebo, random common cause, subset stability, and bootstrap. Across six energy tickers, only a few associations survive all checks, while renewables show aspect and horizon specific responses. While not establishing causality, the framework provides statistically robust, directionally interpretable signals, with limited sample size (six stocks, one quarter) constraining generalizability and framing this work as a methodological proof of concept.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Human Behavior Atlas: Benchmarking Unified Psychological and Social Behavior Understanding

Using intelligent systems to perceive psychological and social behaviors, that is, the underlying affective, cognitive, and pathological states that are manifested through observable behaviors and social interactions, remains a challenge due to their complex, multifaceted, and personalized nature. Existing work tackling these dimensions through specialized datasets and single-task systems often miss opportunities for scalability, cross-task transfer, and broader generalization. To address this gap, we curate Human Behavior Atlas, a unified benchmark of diverse behavioral tasks designed to support the development of foundation models for understanding psychological and social behaviors. Human Behavior Atlas comprises over 100,000 samples spanning text, audio, and visual modalities, covering tasks on affective states, cognitive states, pathologies, and social processes. Our unification efforts can reduce redundancy and cost, enable training to scale efficiently across tasks, and enhance generalization of behavioral features across domains. On Human Behavior Atlas, we train three models: Omnisapiens-7B SFT, Omnisapiens-7B BAM, and Omnisapiens-7B RL. We show that training on Human Behavior Atlas enables models to consistently outperform existing multimodal LLMs across diverse behavioral tasks. Pretraining on Human Behavior Atlas also improves transfer to novel behavioral datasets; with the targeted use of behavioral descriptors yielding meaningful performance gains. The benchmark, models, and codes can be found at: https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Enhancing Language Models for Robust Greenwashing Detection

Sustainability reports are critical for ESG assessment, yet greenwashing and vague claims often undermine their reliability. Existing NLP models lack robustness to these practices, typically relying on surface-level patterns that generalize poorly. We propose a parameter-efficient framework that structures LLM latent spaces by combining contrastive learning with an ordinal ranking objective to capture graded distinctions between concrete actions and ambiguous claims. Our approach incorporates gated feature modulation to filter disclosure noise and utilizes MetaGradNorm to stabilize multi-objective optimization. Experiments in cross-category settings demonstrate superior robustness over standard baselines while revealing a trade-off between representational rigidity and generalization.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Deriving Strategic Market Insights with Large Language Models: A Benchmark for Forward Counterfactual Generation

Counterfactual reasoning typically involves considering alternatives to actual events. While often applied to understand past events, a distinct form-forward counterfactual reasoning-focuses on anticipating plausible future developments. This type of reasoning is invaluable in dynamic financial markets, where anticipating market developments can powerfully unveil potential risks and opportunities for stakeholders, guiding their decision-making. However, performing this at scale is challenging due to the cognitive demands involved, underscoring the need for automated solutions. LLMs offer promise, but remain unexplored for this application. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark, FIN-FORCE-FINancial FORward Counterfactual Evaluation. By curating financial news headlines and providing structured evaluation, FIN-FORCE supports LLM based forward counterfactual generation. This paves the way for scalable and automated solutions for exploring and anticipating future market developments, thereby providing structured insights for decision-making. Through experiments on FIN-FORCE, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs and counterfactual generation methods, analyzing their limitations and proposing insights for future research. We release the benchmark, supplementary data and all experimental codes at the following link: https://github.com/keanepotato/fin_force

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ESGSenticNet: A Neurosymbolic Knowledge Base for Corporate Sustainability Analysis

Evaluating corporate sustainability performance is essential to drive sustainable business practices, amid the need for a more sustainable economy. However, this is hindered by the complexity and volume of corporate sustainability data (i.e. sustainability disclosures), not least by the effectiveness of the NLP tools used to analyse them. To this end, we identify three primary challenges - immateriality, complexity, and subjectivity, that exacerbate the difficulty of extracting insights from sustainability disclosures. To address these issues, we introduce ESGSenticNet, a publicly available knowledge base for sustainability analysis. ESGSenticNet is constructed from a neurosymbolic framework that integrates specialised concept parsing, GPT-4o inference, and semi-supervised label propagation, together with a hierarchical taxonomy. This approach culminates in a structured knowledge base of 44k knowledge triplets - ('halve carbon emission', supports, 'emissions control'), for effective sustainability analysis. Experiments indicate that ESGSenticNet, when deployed as a lexical method, more effectively captures relevant and actionable sustainability information from sustainability disclosures compared to state of the art baselines. Besides capturing a high number of unique ESG topic terms, ESGSenticNet outperforms baselines on the ESG relatedness and ESG action orientation of these terms by 26% and 31% respectively. These metrics describe the extent to which topic terms are related to ESG, and depict an action toward ESG. Moreover, when deployed as a lexical method, ESGSenticNet does not require any training, possessing a key advantage in its simplicity for non-technical stakeholders.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Towards Robust ESG Analysis Against Greenwashing Risks: Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization

Sustainability reports are key for evaluating companies' environmental, social and governance, ESG performance, but their content is increasingly obscured by greenwashing - sustainability claims that are misleading, exaggerated, and fabricated. Yet, existing NLP approaches for ESG analysis lack robustness against greenwashing risks, often extracting insights that reflect misleading or exaggerated sustainability claims rather than objective ESG performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce A3CG - Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization, as a novel dataset to improve the robustness of ESG analysis amid the prevalence of greenwashing. By explicitly linking sustainability aspects with their associated actions, A3CG facilitates a more fine-grained and transparent evaluation of sustainability claims, ensuring that insights are grounded in verifiable actions rather than vague or misleading rhetoric. Additionally, A3CG emphasizes cross-category generalization. This ensures robust model performance in aspect-action analysis even when companies change their reports to selectively favor certain sustainability areas. Through experiments on A3CG, we analyze state-of-the-art supervised models and LLMs, uncovering their limitations and outlining key directions for future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ClimaEmpact: Domain-Aligned Small Language Models and Datasets for Extreme Weather Analytics

Accurate assessments of extreme weather events are vital for research and policy, yet localized and granular data remain scarce in many parts of the world. This data gap limits our ability to analyze potential outcomes and implications of extreme weather events, hindering effective decision-making. Large Language Models (LLMs) can process vast amounts of unstructured text data, extract meaningful insights, and generate detailed assessments by synthesizing information from multiple sources. Furthermore, LLMs can seamlessly transfer their general language understanding to smaller models, enabling these models to retain key knowledge while being fine-tuned for specific tasks. In this paper, we propose Extreme Weather Reasoning-Aware Alignment (EWRA), a method that enhances small language models (SLMs) by incorporating structured reasoning paths derived from LLMs, and ExtremeWeatherNews, a large dataset of extreme weather event-related news articles. EWRA and ExtremeWeatherNews together form the overall framework, ClimaEmpact, that focuses on addressing three critical extreme-weather tasks: categorization of tangible vulnerabilities/impacts, topic labeling, and emotion analysis. By aligning SLMs with advanced reasoning strategies on ExtremeWeatherNews (and its derived dataset ExtremeAlign used specifically for SLM alignment), EWRA improves the SLMs' ability to generate well-grounded and domain-specific responses for extreme weather analytics. Our results show that the approach proposed guides SLMs to output domain-aligned responses, surpassing the performance of task-specific models and offering enhanced real-world applicability for extreme weather analytics.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging LLMS for Top-Down Sector Allocation In Automated Trading

This paper introduces a methodology leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for sector-level portfolio allocation through systematic analysis of macroeconomic conditions and market sentiment. Our framework emphasizes top-down sector allocation by processing multiple data streams simultaneously, including policy documents, economic indicators, and sentiment patterns. Empirical results demonstrate superior risk-adjusted returns compared to traditional cross momentum strategies, achieving a Sharpe ratio of 2.51 and portfolio return of 8.79% versus -0.61 and -1.39% respectively. These results suggest that LLM-based systematic macro analysis presents a viable approach for enhancing automated portfolio allocation decisions at the sector level.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2024

Explainable Natural Language Processing for Corporate Sustainability Analysis

Sustainability commonly refers to entities, such as individuals, companies, and institutions, having a non-detrimental (or even positive) impact on the environment, society, and the economy. With sustainability becoming a synonym of acceptable and legitimate behaviour, it is being increasingly demanded and regulated. Several frameworks and standards have been proposed to measure the sustainability impact of corporations, including United Nations' sustainable development goals and the recently introduced global sustainability reporting framework, amongst others. However, the concept of corporate sustainability is complex due to the diverse and intricate nature of firm operations (i.e. geography, size, business activities, interlinks with other stakeholders). As a result, corporate sustainability assessments are plagued by subjectivity both within data that reflect corporate sustainability efforts (i.e. corporate sustainability disclosures) and the analysts evaluating them. This subjectivity can be distilled into distinct challenges, such as incompleteness, ambiguity, unreliability and sophistication on the data dimension, as well as limited resources and potential bias on the analyst dimension. Put together, subjectivity hinders effective cost attribution to entities non-compliant with prevailing sustainability expectations, potentially rendering sustainability efforts and its associated regulations futile. To this end, we argue that Explainable Natural Language Processing (XNLP) can significantly enhance corporate sustainability analysis. Specifically, linguistic understanding algorithms (lexical, semantic, syntactic), integrated with XAI capabilities (interpretability, explainability, faithfulness), can bridge gaps in analyst resources and mitigate subjectivity problems within data.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

FinXABSA: Explainable Finance through Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

This paper presents a novel approach for explainability in financial analysis by deriving financially-explainable statistical relationships through aspect-based sentiment analysis, Pearson correlation, Granger causality & uncertainty coefficient. The proposed methodology involves constructing an aspect list from financial literature and applying aspect-based sentiment analysis on social media text to compute sentiment scores for each aspect. Pearson correlation is then applied to uncover financially explainable relationships between aspect sentiment scores and stock prices. Findings for derived relationships are made robust by applying Granger causality to determine the forecasting ability of each aspect sentiment score for stock prices. Finally, an added layer of interpretability is added by evaluating uncertainty coefficient scores between aspect sentiment scores and stock prices. This allows us to determine the aspects whose sentiment scores are most statistically significant for stock prices. Relative to other methods, our approach provides a more informative and accurate understanding of the relationship between sentiment analysis and stock prices. Specifically, this methodology enables an interpretation of the statistical relationship between aspect-based sentiment scores and stock prices, which offers explainability to AI-driven financial decision-making.

cs.CL↗