Early detection of suicide risk from social media text is crucial for timely intervention. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities in this domain, challenges remain in terms of interpretability and computational efficiency. This paper introduces Evidence-Driven LLM (ED-LLM), a novel approach for clinical marker extraction and suicide risk classification. ED-LLM employs a multi-task learning framework, jointly training a Mistral-7B based model to identify clinical marker spans and classify suicide risk levels. This evidence-driven strategy enhances interpretability by explicitly highlighting textual evidence supporting risk assessments. Evaluated on the CLPsych datasets, ED-LLM demonstrates competitive performance in risk classification and superior capability in clinical marker span identification compared to baselines including fine-tuned LLMs, traditional machine learning, and prompt-based methods. The results highlight the effectiveness of multi-task learning for interpretable and efficient LLM-based suicide risk assessment, paving the way for clinically relevant applications.

Social surveys in computational social science are well-designed by elaborate domain theories that can effectively reflect the interviewee's deep thoughts without concealing their true feelings. The candidate questionnaire options highly depend on the interviewee's previous answer, which results in the complexity of social survey analysis, the time, and the expertise required. The ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning is well-enhanced by prompting learning such as Chain-of-thought (CoT) but still confined to left-to-right decision-making processes or limited paths during inference. This means they can fall short in problems that require exploration and uncertainty searching. In response, a novel large language model prompting method, called Random Forest of Thoughts (RFoT), is proposed for generating uncertainty reasoning to fit the area of computational social science. The RFoT allows LLMs to perform deliberate decision-making by generating diverse thought space and randomly selecting the sub-thoughts to build the forest of thoughts. It can extend the exploration and prediction of overall performance, benefiting from the extensive research space of response. The method is applied to optimize computational social science analysis on two datasets covering a spectrum of social survey analysis problems. Our experiments show that RFoT significantly enhances language models' abilities on two novel social survey analysis problems requiring non-trivial reasoning.

Using a sample of 25,000 Bing Copilot conversations, we study how the agent responds to users of varying levels of domain expertise and the resulting impact on user experience along multiple dimensions. Our findings show that across a variety of topical domains, the agent largely responds at proficient or expert levels of expertise (77% of conversations) which correlates with positive user experience regardless of the user's level of expertise. Misalignment, such that the agent responds at a level of expertise below that of the user, has a negative impact on overall user experience, with the impact more profound for more complex tasks. We also show that users engage more, as measured by the number of words in the conversation, when the agent responds at a level of expertise commensurate with that of the user. Our findings underscore the importance of alignment between user and AI when designing human-centered AI systems, to ensure satisfactory and productive interactions.

Knowledge components (KCs) mapped to problems help model student learning, tracking their mastery levels on fine-grained skills thereby facilitating personalized learning and feedback in online learning platforms. However, crafting and tagging KCs to problems, traditionally performed by human domain experts, is highly labor-intensive. We present a fully automated, LLM-based pipeline for KC generation and tagging for open-ended programming problems. We also develop an LLM-based knowledge tracing (KT) framework to leverage these LLM-generated KCs, which we refer to as KCGen-KT. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations validating the effectiveness of KCGen-KT. On a real-world dataset of student code submissions to open-ended programming problems, KCGen-KT outperforms existing KT methods. We investigate the learning curves of generated KCs and show that LLM-generated KCs have a comparable level-of-fit to human-written KCs under the performance factor analysis (PFA) model. We also conduct a human evaluation to show that the KC tagging accuracy of our pipeline is reasonably accurate when compared to that by human domain experts.

The culture of the Post-Soviet states is complex, shaped by a turbulent history that continues to influence current events. In this study, we investigate the Post-Soviet cultural food knowledge of foundation models by constructing BORSch, a multimodal dataset encompassing 1147 and 823 dishes in the Russian and Ukrainian languages, centered around the Post-Soviet region. We demonstrate that leading models struggle to correctly identify the origins of dishes from Post-Soviet nations in both text-only and multimodal Question Answering (QA), instead over-predicting countries linked to the language the question is asked in. Through analysis of pretraining data, we show that these results can be explained by misleading dish-origin co-occurrences, along with linguistic phenomena such as Russian-Ukrainian code mixing. Finally, to move beyond QA-based assessments, we test models' abilities to produce accurate visual descriptions of dishes. The weak correlation between this task and QA suggests that QA alone may be insufficient as an evaluation of cultural understanding. To foster further research, we will make BORSch publicly available at https://github.com/alavrouk/BORSch.

Using the vertex model approach for braid representations, we compute polynomials for spin-1 placed on hyperbolic knots up to 15 crossings. These polynomials are referred to as 3-colored Jones polynomials or adjoint Jones polynomials. Training a subset of the data using a fully connected feedforward neural network, we predict the volume of the knot complement of hyperbolic knots from the adjoint Jones polynomial or its evaluations with 99.34% accuracy. A function of the adjoint Jones polynomial evaluated at the phase $q=e^{ 8 \pi i / 15 }$ predicts the volume with nearly the same accuracy as the neural network. From an analysis of 2-colored and 3-colored Jones polynomials, we conjecture the best phase for $n$-colored Jones polynomials, and use this hypothesis to motivate an improved statement of the volume conjecture. This is tested for knots for which closed form expressions for the $n$-colored Jones polynomial are known, and we show improved convergence to the volume.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated vast capabilities on generative tasks in recent years, yet they struggle with guaranteeing the factual correctness of the generated content. This makes these models unreliable in realistic situations where factually accurate responses are expected. In this paper, we propose FactReasoner, a new factuality assessor that relies on probabilistic reasoning to assess the factuality of a long-form generated response. Specifically, FactReasoner decomposes the response into atomic units, retrieves relevant contexts for them from an external knowledge source, and constructs a joint probability distribution over the atoms and contexts using probabilistic encodings of the logical relationships (entailment, contradiction) between the textual utterances corresponding to the atoms and contexts. FactReasoner then computes the posterior probability of whether atomic units in the response are supported by the retrieved contexts. Our experiments on labeled and unlabeled benchmark datasets demonstrate clearly that FactReasoner improves considerably over state-of-the-art prompt-based approaches in terms of both factual precision and recall.

Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology uses satellite radar to detect surface deformation patterns and monitor earthquake impacts on buildings. While vital for emergency response planning, extracting multi-class building damage classifications from InSAR data faces challenges: overlapping damage signatures with environmental noise, computational complexity in multi-class scenarios, and the need for rapid regional-scale processing. Our novel multi-class variational causal Bayesian inference framework with quadratic variational bounds provides rigorous approximations while ensuring efficiency. By integrating InSAR observations with USGS ground failure models and building fragility functions, our approach separates building damage signals while maintaining computational efficiency through strategic pruning. Evaluation across five major earthquakes (Haiti 2021, Puerto Rico 2020, Zagreb 2020, Italy 2016, Ridgecrest 2019) shows improved damage classification accuracy (AUC: 0.94-0.96), achieving up to 35.7% improvement over existing methods. Our approach maintains high accuracy (AUC > 0.93) across all damage categories while reducing computational overhead by over 40% without requiring extensive ground truth data.

As machine learning technologies advance rapidly across various domains, concerns over data privacy and model security have grown significantly. These challenges are particularly pronounced when models are trained and deployed on cloud platforms or third-party servers due to the computational resource limitations of users' end devices. In response, zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology has emerged as a promising solution, enabling effective validation of model performance and authenticity in both training and inference processes without disclosing sensitive data. Thus, ZKP ensures the verifiability and security of machine learning models, making it a valuable tool for privacy-preserving AI. Although some research has explored the verifiable machine learning solutions that exploit ZKP, a comprehensive survey and summary of these efforts remain absent. This survey paper aims to bridge this gap by reviewing and analyzing all the existing Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (ZKML) research from June 2017 to December 2024. We begin by introducing the concept of ZKML and outlining its ZKP algorithmic setups under three key categories: verifiable training, verifiable inference, and verifiable testing. Next, we provide a comprehensive categorization of existing ZKML research within these categories and analyze the works in detail. Furthermore, we explore the implementation challenges faced in this field and discuss the improvement works to address these obstacles. Additionally, we highlight several commercial applications of ZKML technology. Finally, we propose promising directions for future advancements in this domain.

Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions that are suboptimal due to poor planning or execution to behaviors which are intended to communicate goals rather than achieve them. We propose that supervised learning offers a unified framework to infer reward functions from any class of behavior, and show that such an approach is asymptotically Bayes-optimal under mild assumptions. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation tasks show that our method can efficiently infer rewards from a wide variety of arbitrarily suboptimal demonstrations.