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Justice in Judgment: Unveiling (Hidden) Bias in LLM-assisted Peer Reviews

Vasu, Sai Suresh Macharla, Sheth, Ivaxi, Wang, Hui-Po, Binkyte, Ruta, Fritz, Mario

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) is transforming the peer review process, from assisting reviewers in writing more detailed evaluations to generating entire reviews automatically. While these capabilities offer exciting opportunities, they also raise critical concerns about fairness and reliability. In this paper, we investigate bias in LLM-generated peer reviews by conducting controlled experiments on sensitive metadata, including author affiliation and gender. Our analysis consistently shows affiliation bias favoring institutions highly ranked on common academic rankings. Additionally, we find some gender preferences, which, even though subtle in magnitude, have the potential to compound over time. Notably, we uncover implicit biases that become more evident with token-based soft ratings.


Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments

Apertus, Project, Hernández-Cano, Alejandro, Hägele, Alexander, Huang, Allen Hao, Romanou, Angelika, Solergibert, Antoni-Joan, Pasztor, Barna, Messmer, Bettina, Garbaya, Dhia, Ďurech, Eduard Frank, Hakimi, Ido, Giraldo, Juan García, Ismayilzada, Mete, Foroutan, Negar, Moalla, Skander, Chen, Tiancheng, Sabolčec, Vinko, Xu, Yixuan, Aerni, Michael, AlKhamissi, Badr, Mariñas, Inés Altemir, Amani, Mohammad Hossein, Ansaripour, Matin, Badanin, Ilia, Benoit, Harold, Boros, Emanuela, Browning, Nicholas, Bösch, Fabian, Böther, Maximilian, Canova, Niklas, Challier, Camille, Charmillot, Clement, Coles, Jonathan, Deriu, Jan, Devos, Arnout, Drescher, Lukas, Dzenhaliou, Daniil, Ehrmann, Maud, Fan, Dongyang, Fan, Simin, Gao, Silin, Gila, Miguel, Grandury, María, Hashemi, Diba, Hoyle, Alexander, Jiang, Jiaming, Klein, Mark, Kucharavy, Andrei, Kucherenko, Anastasiia, Lübeck, Frederike, Machacek, Roman, Manitaras, Theofilos, Marfurt, Andreas, Matoba, Kyle, Matrenok, Simon, Mendonça, Henrique, Mohamed, Fawzi Roberto, Montariol, Syrielle, Mouchel, Luca, Najem-Meyer, Sven, Ni, Jingwei, Oliva, Gennaro, Pagliardini, Matteo, Palme, Elia, Panferov, Andrei, Paoletti, Léo, Passerini, Marco, Pavlov, Ivan, Poiroux, Auguste, Ponkshe, Kaustubh, Ranchin, Nathan, Rando, Javi, Sauser, Mathieu, Saydaliev, Jakhongir, Sayfiddinov, Muhammad Ali, Schneider, Marian, Schuppli, Stefano, Scialanga, Marco, Semenov, Andrei, Shridhar, Kumar, Singhal, Raghav, Sotnikova, Anna, Sternfeld, Alexander, Tarun, Ayush Kumar, Teiletche, Paul, Vamvas, Jannis, Yao, Xiaozhe, Zhao, Hao, Ilic, Alexander, Klimovic, Ana, Krause, Andreas, Gulcehre, Caglar, Rosenthal, David, Ash, Elliott, Tramèr, Florian, VandeVondele, Joost, Veraldi, Livio, Rajman, Martin, Schulthess, Thomas, Hoefler, Torsten, Bosselut, Antoine, Jaggi, Martin, Schlag, Imanol

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present Apertus, a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address two systemic shortcomings in today's open model ecosystem: data compliance and multilingual representation. Unlike many prior models that release weights without reproducible data pipelines or regard for content-owner rights, Apertus models are pretrained exclusively on openly available data, retroactively respecting `robots.txt` exclusions and filtering for non-permissive, toxic, and personally identifiable content. To mitigate risks of memorization, we adopt the Goldfish objective during pretraining, strongly suppressing verbatim recall of data while retaining downstream task performance. The Apertus models also expand multilingual coverage, training on 15T tokens from over 1800 languages, with ~40% of pretraining data allocated to non-English content. Released at 8B and 70B scales, Apertus approaches state-of-the-art results among fully open models on multilingual benchmarks, rivalling or surpassing open-weight counterparts. Beyond model weights, we release all scientific artifacts from our development cycle with a permissive license, including data preparation scripts, checkpoints, evaluation suites, and training code, enabling transparent audit and extension.



JobSphere: An AI-Powered Multilingual Career Copilot for Government Employment Platforms

R, Srihari, B, Adarsha V, Hussain, Mohammed Usman, Singh, Shweta

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Users of government employment websites commonly face engagement and accessibility challenges linked to navigational complexity, a dearth of language options, and a lack of personalized support. This paper introduces JobSphere, an AI-powered career assistant that is redefining the employment platform in Punjab called PGRKAM. JobSphere employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, and it is multilingual, available in English, Hindi and Punjabi. JobSphere technique uses 4-bit quantization, allowing the platform to deploy on consumer-grade GPUs (i.e., NVIDIA RTX 3050 4GB), making the implementation 89% cheaper than that of cloud-based systems. Key innovations include voice-enabled interaction with the assistant, automated mock tests, resume parsing with skills recognition, and embed-based job recommendation that achieves a precision@10 score of 68%. An evaluation of JobSphere's implementation reveals 94% factual accuracy, a median response time of 1.8 seconds, and a System Usability Scale score of 78.5/100, a 50% improvement compared to the baseline PGRKAM platform context. In conclusion, JobSphere effectively fills significant accessibility gaps for Punjab/Hindi-speaking users in rural locations, while also affirming the users access to trusted job content provided by government agencies.



SLYKLatent: A Learning Framework for Gaze Estimation Using Deep Facial Feature Learning

Adebayo, Samuel, Dessing, Joost C., McLoone, Seán

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this research, we present SLYKLatent, a novel approach for enhancing gaze estimation by addressing appearance instability challenges in datasets due to aleatoric uncertainties, covariant shifts, and test domain generalization. SLYKLatent utilizes Self-Supervised Learning for initial training with facial expression datasets, followed by refinement with a patch-based tri-branch network and an inverse explained variance-weighted training loss function. Our evaluation on benchmark datasets achieves a 10.9% improvement on Gaze360, supersedes top MPIIFaceGaze results with 3.8%, and leads on a subset of ETH-XGaze by 11.6%, surpassing existing methods by significant margins. Adaptability tests on RAF-DB and Affectnet show 86.4% and 60.9% accuracies, respectively. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of SLYKLatent's novel components.


Sparse Feature Coactivation Reveals Causal Semantic Modules in Large Language Models

Deng, Ruixuan, Hu, Xiaoyang, Gilberti, Miles, Storks, Shane, Taxali, Aman, Angstadt, Mike, Sripada, Chandra, Chai, Joyce

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We identify semantically coherent, context-consistent network components in large language models (LLMs) using coactivation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features collected from just a handful of prompts. Focusing on concept-relation prediction tasks, we show that ablating these components for concepts (e.g., countries and words) and relations (e.g., capital city and translation language) changes model outputs in predictable ways, while amplifying these components induces counterfactual responses. Notably, composing relation and concept components yields compound counterfactual outputs. Further analysis reveals that while most concept components emerge from the very first layer, more abstract relation components are concentrated in later layers. Lastly, we show that extracted components more comprehensively capture concepts and relations than individual features while maintaining specificity. Overall, our findings suggest a modular organization of knowledge accessed through compositional operations, and advance methods for efficient, targeted LLM manipulation.