Neolithic period to the Industrial Revolution and includes information reviewed and assembled by history experts and graduate research assistants.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become valuable assistants for developers in code-related tasks. While LLMs excel at traditional programming tasks such as code generation and bug fixing, they struggle with visually-oriented coding tasks, often producing suboptimal aesthetics. In this paper, we introduce a new pipeline to enhance the aesthetic quality of LLM-generated code. We first construct AesCode-358K, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset focused on code aesthetics. Next, we propose agentic reward feedback, a multi-agent system that evaluates executability, static aesthetics, and interactive aesthetics. Building on this, we develop GRPO-AR, which integrates these signals into the GRPO algorithm for joint optimization of functionality and code aesthetics. Finally, we develop OpenDesign, a benchmark for assessing code aesthetics. Experimental results show that combining supervised fine-tuning on AesCode-358K with reinforcement learning using agentic reward feedback significantly improves performance on OpenDesign and also enhances results on existing benchmarks such as PandasPlotBench. Notably, our AesCoder-4B surpasses GPT -4o and GPT -4.1, and achieves performance comparable to large open-source models with 480B-685B parameters, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach.Figure 1: Performance comparison of different models on the OpenDesign benchmark.

AI has the potential to significantly improve how NGOs utilize their limited resources for societal benefits, but evidence about how NGOs adopt AI remains scattered. In this study, we systematically investigate the types of AI adoption use cases in NGOs and identify common challenges and solutions, contextualized by organizational size and geographic context. We review the existing primary literature, including studies that investigate AI adoption in NGOs related to social impact between 2020 and 2025 in English. Following the PRISMA protocol, two independent reviewers conduct study selection, with regular cross-checking to ensure methodological rigour, resulting in a final literature body of 65 studies. Leveraging a thematic and narrative approach, we identify six AI use case categories in NGOs - Engagement, Creativity, Decision-Making, Prediction, Management, and Optimization - and extract common challenges and solutions within the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. By integrating our findings, this review provides a novel understanding of AI adoption in NGOs, linking specific use cases and challenges to organizational and environmental factors. Our results demonstrate that while AI is promising, adoption among NGOs remains uneven and biased towards larger organizations. Nevertheless, following a roadmap grounded in literature can help NGOs overcome initial barriers to AI adoption, ultimately improving effectiveness, engagement, and social impact.

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the increase of conversational agents like Replika, designed to provide social interaction and emotional support. However, reports of these AI systems engaging in inappropriate sexual behaviors with users have raised significant concerns. In this study, we conducted a thematic analysis of user reviews from the Google Play Store to investigate instances of sexual harassment by the Replika chatbot. From a dataset of 35,105 negative reviews, we identified 800 relevant cases for analysis. Our findings revealed that users frequently experience unsolicited sexual advances, persistent inappropriate behavior, and failures of the chatbot to respect user boundaries. Users expressed feelings of discomfort, violation of privacy, and disappointment, particularly when seeking a platonic or therapeutic AI companion. This study highlights the potential harms associated with AI companions and underscores the need for developers to implement effective safeguards and ethical guidelines to prevent such incidents. By shedding light on user experiences of AI-induced harassment, we contribute to the understanding of AI-related risks and emphasize the importance of corporate responsibility in developing safer and more ethical AI systems.

Despite recent advances in digital resources for other Coptic dialects, especially Sahidic, Bohairic Coptic, the main Coptic dialect for pre-Mamluk, late Byzantine Egypt, and the contemporary language of the Coptic Church, remains critically under-resourced. This paper presents and evaluates the first syntactically annotated corpus of Bohairic Coptic, sampling data from a range of works, including Biblical text, saints' lives and Christian ascetic writing. We also explore some of the main differences we observe compared to the existing UD treebank of Sahidic Coptic, the classical dialect of the language, and conduct joint and cross-dialect parsing experiments, revealing the unique nature of Bohairic as a related, but distinct variety from the more often studied Sahidic.

We introduce JEEM, a benchmark designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on visual understanding across four Arabic-speaking countries: Jordan, The Emirates, Egypt, and Morocco. JEEM includes the tasks of image captioning and visual question answering, and features culturally rich and regionally diverse content. This dataset aims to assess the ability of VLMs to generalize across dialects and accurately interpret cultural elements in visual contexts. In an evaluation of five prominent open-source Arabic VLMs and GPT-4V, we find that the Arabic VLMs consistently underperform, struggling with both visual understanding and dialect-specific generation. While GPT-4V ranks best in this comparison, the model's linguistic competence varies across dialects, and its visual understanding capabilities lag behind. This underscores the need for more inclusive models and the value of culturally-diverse evaluation paradigms.

In this era of rapid technological advancements, communication continues to evolve as new linguistic phenomena emerge. Among these is Arabizi, a hybrid form of Arabic that incorporates Latin characters and numbers to represent the spoken dialects of Arab communities. Arabizi is widely used on social media and allows people to communicate in an informal and dynamic way, but it poses significant challenges for machine translation due to its lack of formal structure and deeply embedded cultural nuances. This case study arises from a growing need to translate Arabizi for gisting purposes. It evaluates the capacity of different LLMs to decode and translate Arabizi, focusing on multiple Arabic dialects that have rarely been studied up until now. Using a combination of human evaluators and automatic metrics, this research project investigates the model's performance in translating Arabizi into both Modern Standard Arabic and English. Key questions explored include which dialects are translated most effectively and whether translations into English surpass those into Arabic.

Mental health disorders pose a growing public health concern in the Arab world, emphasizing the need for accessible diagnostic and intervention tools. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising approach, but their application in Arabic contexts faces challenges including limited labeled datasets, linguistic complexity, and translation biases. This study comprehensively evaluates 8 LLMs, including general multi-lingual models, as well as bi-lingual ones, on diverse mental health datasets (such as AraDepSu, Dreaddit, MedMCQA), investigating the impact of prompt design, language configuration (native Arabic vs. translated English, and vice versa), and few-shot prompting on diagnostic performance. We find that prompt engineering significantly influences LLM scores mainly due to reduced instruction following, with our structured prompt outperforming a less structured variant on multi-class datasets, with an average difference of 14.5\%. While language influence on performance was modest, model selection proved crucial: Phi-3.5 MoE excelled in balanced accuracy, particularly for binary classification, while Mistral NeMo showed superior performance in mean absolute error for severity prediction tasks. Few-shot prompting consistently improved performance, with particularly substantial gains observed for GPT-4o Mini on multi-class classification, boosting accuracy by an average factor of 1.58. These findings underscore the importance of prompt optimization, multilingual analysis, and few-shot learning for developing culturally sensitive and effective LLM-based mental health tools for Arabic-speaking populations.

As large language models (LLMs) expand into performing as agents for real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks, evaluating their robustness becomes increasingly important. However, existing benchmarks often overlook critical dimensions like cultural and social awareness. To address these, we introduce CASA, a benchmark designed to assess LLM agents' sensitivity to cultural and social norms across two web-based tasks: online shopping and social discussion forums. Our approach evaluates LLM agents' ability to detect and appropriately respond to norm-violating user queries and observations. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework that measures awareness coverage, helpfulness in managing user queries, and the violation rate when facing misleading web content. Experiments show that current LLMs perform significantly better in non-agent than in web-based agent environments, with agents achieving less than 10% awareness coverage and over 40% violation rates. To improve performance, we explore two methods: prompting and fine-tuning, and find that combining both methods can offer complementary advantages -- fine-tuning on culture-specific datasets significantly enhances the agents' ability to generalize across different regions, while prompting boosts the agents' ability to navigate complex tasks. These findings highlight the importance of constantly benchmarking LLM agents' cultural and social awareness during the development cycle.