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Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use

Awadallah, Ahmed, Lara, Yash, Magazine, Raghav, Mozannar, Hussein, Nambi, Akshay, Pandya, Yash, Rajeswaran, Aravind, Rosset, Corby, Taymanov, Alexey, Vineet, Vibhav, Whitehead, Spencer, Zhao, Andrew

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Progress in computer use agents (CUAs) has been constrained by the absence of large and high-quality datasets that capture how humans interact with a computer. While LLMs have thrived on abundant textual data, no comparable corpus exists for CUA trajectories. To address these gaps, we introduce FaraGen, a novel synthetic data generation system for multi-step web tasks. FaraGen can propose diverse tasks from frequently used websites, generate multiple solution attempts, and filter successful trajectories using multiple verifiers. It achieves high throughput, yield, and diversity for multi-step web tasks, producing verified trajectories at approximately $1 each. We use this data to train Fara-7B, a native CUA model that perceives the computer using only screenshots, executes actions via predicted coordinates, and is small enough to run on-device. We find that Fara-7B outperforms other CUA models of comparable size on benchmarks like WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and WebTailBench -- our novel benchmark that better captures under-represented web tasks in pre-existing benchmarks. Furthermore, Fara-7B is competitive with much larger frontier models, illustrating key benefits of scalable data generation systems in advancing small efficient agentic models. We are making Fara-7B open-weight on Microsoft Foundry and HuggingFace, and we are releasing WebTailBench.


Content and Engagement Trends in COVID-19 YouTube Videos: Evidence from the Late Pandemic

Thakur, Nirmalya, Hartel, Madeline D, Boden, Lane Michael, Enriquez, Dallas, Ricks, Boston Joyner

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work investigated about 10,000 COVID-19-related YouTube videos published between January 2023 and October 2024 to evaluate how temporal, lexical, linguistic, and structural factors influenced engagement during the late pandemic period. Publishing activity showed consistent weekday effects: in the first window, average views peaked on Mondays at 92,658; in the second, on Wednesdays at 115,479; and in the third, on Fridays at 84,874, reflecting a shift in audience attention toward mid- and late week. Lexical analysis of video titles revealed recurring high-frequency keywords related to COVID-19 and YouTube features, including COVID, coronavirus, shorts, and live. Frequency analysis revealed sharp spikes, with COVID appearing in 799 video titles in August 2024, while engagement analysis showed that videos titled with shorts attracted very high views, peaking at 2.16 million average views per video in June 2023. Analysis of sentiment of video descriptions in English showed weak correlation with views in the raw data (Pearson r = 0.0154, p = 0.2987), but stronger correlations emerged once outliers were addressed, with Spearman r = 0.110 (p < 0.001) and Pearson r = 0.0925 (p < 0.001). Category-level analysis of video durations revealed contrasting outcomes: long videos focusing on people and blogs averaged 209,114 views, short entertainment videos averaged 288,675 views, and medium-to-long news and politics videos averaged 51,309 and 59,226 views, respectively. These results demonstrate that engagement patterns of COVID-19-related videos on YouTube during the late pandemic followed distinct characteristics driven by publishing schedules, title vocabulary, topics, and genre-specific duration effects.


Extracting Patient History from Clinical Text: A Comparative Study of Clinical Large Language Models

Nghiem, Hieu, Le, Tuan-Dung, Chen, Suhao, Thieu, Thanh, Gin, Andrew, Nguyen, Ellie Phuong, Delen, Dursun, Thomas, Johnson, Lamichhane, Jivan, Miao, Zhuqi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Extracting medical history entities (MHEs) related to a patient's chief complaint (CC), history of present illness (HPI), and past, family, and social history (PFSH) helps structure free-text clinical notes into standardized EHRs, streamlining downstream tasks like continuity of care, medical coding, and quality metrics. Fine-tuned clinical large language models (cLLMs) can assist in this process while ensuring the protection of sensitive data via on-premises deployment. This study evaluates the performance of cLLMs in recognizing CC/HPI/PFSH-related MHEs and examines how note characteristics impact model accuracy. We annotated 1,449 MHEs across 61 outpatient-related clinical notes from the MTSamples repository. To recognize these entities, we fine-tuned seven state-of-the-art cLLMs. Additionally, we assessed the models' performance when enhanced by integrating, problems, tests, treatments, and other basic medical entities (BMEs). We compared the performance of these models against GPT-4o in a zero-shot setting. To further understand the textual characteristics affecting model accuracy, we conducted an error analysis focused on note length, entity length, and segmentation. The cLLMs showed potential in reducing the time required for extracting MHEs by over 20%. However, detecting many types of MHEs remained challenging due to their polysemous nature and the frequent involvement of non-medical vocabulary. Fine-tuned GatorTron and GatorTronS, two of the most extensively trained cLLMs, demonstrated the highest performance. Integrating pre-identified BME information improved model performance for certain entities. Regarding the impact of textual characteristics on model performance, we found that longer entities were harder to identify, note length did not correlate with a higher error rate, and well-organized segments with headings are beneficial for the extraction.


Systematic Classification of Studies Investigating Social Media Conversations about Long COVID Using a Novel Zero-Shot Transformer Framework

Thakur, Nirmalya, Fernandes, Niven Francis Da Guia, Tchona, Madje Tobi Marc'Avent

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Long COVID continues to challenge public health by affecting a considerable number of individuals who have recovered from acute SARS-CoV-2 infection yet endure prolonged and often debilitating symptoms. Social media has emerged as a vital resource for those seeking real-time information, peer support, and validating their health concerns related to Long COVID. This paper examines recent works focusing on mining, analyzing, and interpreting user-generated content on social media platforms to capture the broader discourse on persistent post-COVID conditions. A novel transformer-based zero-shot learning approach serves as the foundation for classifying research papers in this area into four primary categories: Clinical or Symptom Characterization, Advanced NLP or Computational Methods, Policy Advocacy or Public Health Communication, and Online Communities and Social Support. This methodology achieved an average confidence of 0.7788, with the minimum and maximum confidence being 0.1566 and 0.9928, respectively. This model showcases the ability of advanced language models to categorize research papers without any training data or predefined classification labels, thus enabling a more rapid and scalable assessment of existing literature. This paper also highlights the multifaceted nature of Long COVID research by demonstrating how advanced computational techniques applied to social media conversations can reveal deeper insights into the experiences, symptoms, and narratives of individuals affected by Long COVID.


WavePulse: Real-time Content Analytics of Radio Livestreams

Mittal, Govind, Gupta, Sarthak, Wagle, Shruti, Chopra, Chirag, DeMattee, Anthony J, Memon, Nasir, Ahamad, Mustaque, Hegde, Chinmay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.


COVID-19 on YouTube: A Data-Driven Analysis of Sentiment, Toxicity, and Content Recommendations

Su, Vanessa, Thakur, Nirmalya

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study presents a data-driven analysis of COVID-19 discourse on YouTube, examining the sentiment, toxicity, and thematic patterns of video content published between January 2023 and October 2024. The analysis involved applying advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques: sentiment analysis with VADER, toxicity detection with Detoxify, and topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). The sentiment analysis revealed that 49.32% of video descriptions were positive, 36.63% were neutral, and 14.05% were negative, indicating a generally informative and supportive tone in pandemic-related content. Toxicity analysis identified only 0.91% of content as toxic, suggesting minimal exposure to toxic content. Topic modeling revealed two main themes, with 66.74% of the videos covering general health information and pandemic-related impacts and 33.26% focused on news and real-time updates, highlighting the dual informational role of YouTube. A recommendation system was also developed using TF-IDF vectorization and cosine similarity, refined by sentiment, toxicity, and topic filters to ensure relevant and context-aligned video recommendations. This system achieved 69% aggregate coverage, with monthly coverage rates consistently above 85%, demonstrating robust performance and adaptability over time. Evaluation across recommendation sizes showed coverage reaching 69% for five video recommendations and 79% for ten video recommendations per video. In summary, this work presents a framework for understanding COVID-19 discourse on YouTube and a recommendation system that supports user engagement while promoting responsible and relevant content related to COVID-19.


Quantifying Public Response to COVID-19 Events: Introducing the Community Sentiment and Engagement Index

Thakur, Nirmalya, Patel, Kesha A., Poon, Audrey, Cui, Shuqi, Azizi, Nazif, Shah, Rishika, Shah, Riyan

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study introduces the Community Sentiment and Engagement Index (CSEI), developed to capture nuanced public sentiment and engagement variations on social media, particularly in response to major events related to COVID-19. Constructed with diverse sentiment indicators, CSEI integrates features like engagement, daily post count, compound sentiment, fine-grain sentiments (fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and neutral), readability, offensiveness, and domain diversity. Each component is systematically weighted through a multi-step Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-based framework, prioritizing features according to their variance contributions across temporal sentiment shifts. This approach dynamically adjusts component importance, enabling CSEI to precisely capture high-sensitivity shifts in public sentiment. The development of CSEI showed statistically significant correlations with its constituent features, underscoring internal consistency and sensitivity to specific sentiment dimensions. CSEI's responsiveness was validated using a dataset of 4,510,178 Reddit posts about COVID-19. The analysis focused on 15 major events, including the WHO's declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic, the first reported cases of COVID-19 across different countries, national lockdowns, vaccine developments, and crucial public health measures. Cumulative changes in CSEI revealed prominent peaks and valleys aligned with these events, indicating significant patterns in public sentiment across different phases of the pandemic. Pearson correlation analysis further confirmed a statistically significant relationship between CSEI daily fluctuations and these events (p = 0.0428), highlighting the capacity of CSEI to infer and interpret shifts in public sentiment and engagement in response to major events related to COVID-19.


Five Years of COVID-19 Discourse on Instagram: A Labeled Instagram Dataset of Over Half a Million Posts for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Thakur, Nirmalya

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The work presented in this paper makes three scientific contributions with a specific focus on mining and analysis of COVID-19-related posts on Instagram. First, it presents a multilingual dataset of 500,153 Instagram posts about COVID-19 published between January 2020 and September 2024. This dataset, available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/d46p-v480, contains Instagram posts in 161 different languages as well as 535,021 distinct hashtags. After the development of this dataset, multilingual sentiment analysis was performed, which involved classifying each post as positive, negative, or neutral. The results of sentiment analysis are presented as a separate attribute in this dataset. Second, it presents the results of performing sentiment analysis per year from 2020 to 2024. The findings revealed the trends in sentiment related to COVID-19 on Instagram since the beginning of the pandemic. For instance, between 2020 and 2024, the sentiment trends show a notable shift, with positive sentiment decreasing from 38.35% to 28.69%, while neutral sentiment rising from 44.19% to 58.34%. Finally, the paper also presents findings of language-specific sentiment analysis. This analysis highlighted similar and contrasting trends of sentiment across posts published in different languages on Instagram. For instance, out of all English posts, 49.68% were positive, 14.84% were negative, and 35.48% were neutral. In contrast, among Hindi posts, 4.40% were positive, 57.04% were negative, and 38.56% were neutral, reflecting distinct differences in the sentiment distribution between these two languages.


Mpox Narrative on Instagram: A Labeled Multilingual Dataset of Instagram Posts on Mpox for Sentiment, Hate Speech, and Anxiety Analysis

Thakur, Nirmalya

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The world is currently experiencing an outbreak of mpox, which has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by WHO. No prior work related to social media mining has focused on the development of a dataset of Instagram posts about the mpox outbreak. The work presented in this paper aims to address this research gap and makes two scientific contributions to this field. First, it presents a multilingual dataset of 60,127 Instagram posts about mpox, published between July 23, 2022, and September 5, 2024. The dataset, available at https://dx.doi.org/10.21227/7fvc-y093, contains Instagram posts about mpox in 52 languages. For each of these posts, the Post ID, Post Description, Date of publication, language, and translated version of the post (translation to English was performed using the Google Translate API) are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. After developing this dataset, sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and anxiety or stress detection were performed. This process included classifying each post into (i) one of the sentiment classes, i.e., fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, or neutral, (ii) hate or not hate, and (iii) anxiety/stress detected or no anxiety/stress detected. These results are presented as separate attributes in the dataset. Second, this paper presents the results of performing sentiment analysis, hate speech analysis, and anxiety or stress analysis. The variation of the sentiment classes - fear, surprise, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and neutral were observed to be 27.95%, 2.57%, 8.69%, 5.94%, 2.69%, 1.53%, and 50.64%, respectively. In terms of hate speech detection, 95.75% of the posts did not contain hate and the remaining 4.25% of the posts contained hate. Finally, 72.05% of the posts did not indicate any anxiety/stress, and the remaining 27.95% of the posts represented some form of anxiety/stress.


Leveraging Multi-AI Agents for Cross-Domain Knowledge Discovery

Aryal, Shiva, Do, Tuyen, Heyojoo, Bisesh, Chataut, Sandeep, Gurung, Bichar Dip Shrestha, Gadhamshetty, Venkataramana, Gnimpieba, Etienne

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, the ability to harness and integrate knowledge across various domains stands as a paramount challenge and opportunity. This study introduces a novel approach to cross-domain knowledge discovery through the deployment of multi-AI agents, each specialized in distinct knowledge domains. These AI agents, designed to function as domain-specific experts, collaborate in a unified framework to synthesize and provide comprehensive insights that transcend the limitations of single-domain expertise. By facilitating seamless interaction among these agents, our platform aims to leverage the unique strengths and perspectives of each, thereby enhancing the process of knowledge discovery and decision-making. We present a comparative analysis of the different multi-agent workflow scenarios evaluating their performance in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and the breadth of knowledge integration. Through a series of experiments involving complex, interdisciplinary queries, our findings demonstrate the superior capability of domain specific multi-AI agent system in identifying and bridging knowledge gaps. This research not only underscores the significance of collaborative AI in driving innovation but also sets the stage for future advancements in AI-driven, cross-disciplinary research and application. Our methods were evaluated on a small pilot data and it showed a trend we expected, if we increase the amount of data we custom train the agents, the trend is expected to be more smooth.