As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life and information ecosystems, concerns about their implicit biases continue to persist. While prior work has primarily examined socio-demographic and left--right political dimensions, little attention has been paid to how LLMs align with broader geopolitical value systems, particularly the democracy--authoritarianism spectrum. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to assess such alignment, combining (1) the F-scale, a psychometric tool for measuring authoritarian tendencies, (2) FavScore, a newly introduced metric for evaluating model favorability toward world leaders, and (3) role-model probing to assess which figures are cited as general role-models by LLMs. We find that LLMs generally favor democratic values and leaders, but exhibit increased favorability toward authoritarian figures when prompted in Mandarin. Further, models are found to often cite authoritarian figures as role models, even outside explicit political contexts. These results shed light on ways LLMs may reflect and potentially reinforce global political ideologies, highlighting the importance of evaluating bias beyond conventional socio-political axes. Our code is available at: https://github.com/irenestrauss/Democratic-Authoritarian-Bias-LLMs.

Nevertheless, the use of these techniques at a large scale can be challenging and expensive. Satellite data have been widely used as a valuable tool in estimating biomass on a global scale.

Often, multilingual language models are trained with the objective to map semantically similar content (in different languages) in the same latent space. In this paper, we show a nuance in this training objective, and find that by changing the language of the input query, we can improve the question answering ability of language models. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce the term Language Specific Knowledge (LSK) to denote queries that are best answered in an "expert language" for a given LLM, thereby enhancing its question-answering ability. We introduce the problem of language selection -- for some queries, language models can perform better when queried in languages other than English, sometimes even better in low-resource languages -- and the goal is to select the optimal language for the query. Second, we introduce simple to strong baselines to test this problem. Additionally, as a first-pass solution to this novel problem, we design LSKExtractor to benchmark the language-specific knowledge present in a language model and then exploit it during inference. To test our framework, we employ three datasets that contain knowledge about both cultural and social behavioral norms. Overall, LSKExtractor achieves up to 10% relative improvement across datasets, and is competitive against strong baselines, while being feasible in real-world settings. Broadly, our research contributes to the open-source development (https://github.com/agarwalishika/LSKExtractor/tree/main) of language models that are inclusive and more aligned with the cultural and linguistic contexts in which they are deployed.

Measuring global AI diffusion remains challenging due to a lack of population-normalized, cross-country usage data. We introduce AI User Share, a novel indicator that estimates the share of each country's working-age population actively using AI tools. Built from anonymized Microsoft telemetry and adjusted for device access and mobile scaling, this metric spans 147 economies and provides consistent, real-time insight into global AI diffusion. We find wide variation in adoption, with a strong correlation between AI User Share and GDP. High uptake is concentrated in developed economies, though usage among internet-connected populations in lower-income countries reveals substantial latent demand. We also detect sharp increases in usage following major product launches, such as DeepSeek in early 2025. While the metric's reliance solely on Microsoft telemetry introduces potential biases related to this user base, it offers an important new lens into how AI is spreading globally. AI User Share enables timely benchmarking that can inform data-driven AI policy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is diffusing globally at unprecedented speed, but adoption remains uneven. Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to perform poorly on low-resource languages due to data scarcity. We hypothesize that this performance deficit reduces the utility of AI, thereby slowing adoption in Low-Resource Language Countries (LRLCs). To test this, we use a weighted regression model to isolate the language effect from socioeconomic and demographic factors, finding that LRLCs have a share of AI users that is approximately 20% lower relative to their baseline. These results indicate that linguistic accessibility is a significant, independent barrier to equitable AI diffusion.

Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) are used to improve clinical and service outcomes, yet evidence from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is dispersed. This protocol outlines methods to quantify the impact of CDSS on patient and healthcare delivery outcomes in LMICs. We will include comparative quantitative designs (randomized trials, controlled before-after, interrupted time series, comparative cohorts) evaluating CDSS in World Bank-defined LMICs. Standalone qualitative studies are excluded; mixed-methods studies are eligible only if they report comparative quantitative outcomes, for which we will extract the quantitative component. Searches (from inception to 30 September 2024) will cover MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, CENTRAL, Web of Science, Global Health, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, LILACS, African Index Medicus, and IndMED, plus grey sources. Screening and extraction will be performed in duplicate. Risk of bias will be assessed with RoB 2 (randomized trials) and ROBINS-I (non-randomized). Random-effects meta-analysis will be performed where outcomes are conceptually or statistically comparable; otherwise, a structured narrative synthesis will be presented. Heterogeneity will be explored using relative and absolute metrics and a priori subgroups or meta-regression (condition area, care level, CDSS type, readiness proxies, study design).

Large language models (LLMs) hold great promise for medical applications and are evolving rapidly, with new models being released at an accelerated pace. However, benchmarking on large-scale real-world data such as electronic health records (EHRs) is critical, as clinical decisions are directly informed by these sources, yet current evaluations remain limited. Most existing benchmarks rely on medical exam-style questions or PubMed-derived text, failing to capture the complexity of real-world clinical data. Others focus narrowly on specific application scenarios, limiting their generalizability across broader clinical use. To address this gap, we present BRIDGE, a comprehensive multilingual benchmark comprising 87 tasks sourced from real-world clinical data sources across nine languages. It covers eight major task types spanning the entire continuum of patient care across six clinical stages and 20 representative applications, including triage and referral, consultation, information extraction, diagnosis, prognosis, and billing coding, and involves 14 clinical specialties. We systematically evaluated 95 LLMs (including DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o, Gemini series, and Qwen3 series) under various inference strategies. Our results reveal substantial performance variation across model sizes, languages, natural language processing tasks, and clinical specialties. Notably, we demonstrate that open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to proprietary models, while medically fine-tuned LLMs based on older architectures often underperform versus updated general-purpose models. The BRIDGE and its corresponding leaderboard serve as a foundational resource and a unique reference for the development and evaluation of new LLMs in real-world clinical text understanding. The BRIDGE leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/YLab-Open/BRIDGE-Medical-Leaderboard

Protein mutations can have profound effects on biological function, making accurate prediction of property changes critical for drug discovery, protein engineering, and precision medicine. Current approaches rely on fine-tuning protein-specific transformers for individual datasets, but struggle with cross-dataset generalization due to heterogeneous experimental conditions and limited target domain data. We introduce two key innovations: (1) the first application of Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) to protein mutation property prediction, and (2) a novel mutation encoding strategy using separator tokens to directly incorporate mutations into sequence context. We build upon transformer architectures integrating them with MAML to enable rapid adaptation to new tasks through minimal gradient steps rather than learning dataset-specific patterns. Our mutation encoding addresses the critical limitation where standard transformers treat mutation positions as unknown tokens, significantly degrading performance. Evaluation across three diverse protein mutation datasets (functional fitness, thermal stability, and solubility) demonstrates significant advantages over traditional fine-tuning. In cross-task evaluation, our meta-learning approach achieves 29% better accuracy for functional fitness with 65% less training time, and 94% better accuracy for solubility with 55% faster training. The framework maintains consistent training efficiency regardless of dataset size, making it particularly valuable for industrial applications and early-stage protein design where experimental data is limited. This work establishes a systematic application of meta-learning to protein mutation analysis and introduces an effective mutation encoding strategy, offering transformative methodology for cross-domain generalization in protein engineering.

The injection molding industry faces critical challenges in preserving and transferring field knowledge, particularly as experienced workers retire and multilingual barriers hinder effective communication. This study introduces IM-Chat, a multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs), designed to facilitate knowledge transfer in injection molding. IM-Chat integrates both limited documented knowledge (e.g., troubleshooting tables, manuals) and extensive field data modeled through a data-driven process condition generator that infers optimal manufacturing settings from environmental inputs such as temperature and humidity, enabling robust and context-aware task resolution. By adopting a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategy and tool-calling agents within a modular architecture, IM-Chat ensures adaptability without the need for fine-tuning. Performance was assessed across 100 single-tool and 60 hybrid tasks for GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-3.5-turbo by domain experts using a 10-point rubric focused on relevance and correctness, and was further supplemented by automated evaluation using GPT-4o guided by a domain-adapted instruction prompt. The evaluation results indicate that more capable models tend to achieve higher accuracy, particularly in complex, tool-integrated scenarios. In addition, compared with the fine-tuned single-agent LLM, IM-Chat demonstrated superior accuracy, particularly in quantitative reasoning, and greater scalability in handling multiple information sources. Overall, these findings demonstrate the viability of multi-agent LLM systems for industrial knowledge workflows and establish IM-Chat as a scalable and generalizable approach to AI-assisted decision support in manufacturing.

Nevertheless, the use of these techniques at a large scale can be challenging and expensive. Satellite data have been widely used as a valuable tool in estimating biomass on a global scale.