The growing adoption of large language models (LLMs) in business applications has amplified interest in Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, in which there is competing demand for high performance and efficiency. Domain- and customer-specific requirements further complicate the problem. To address this conundrum, we introduce Distill-C, a distilled customization framework tailored for NL2SQL tasks. Distill-C utilizes large teacher LLMs to produce high-quality synthetic data through a robust and scalable pipeline. Finetuning smaller and open-source LLMs on this synthesized data enables them to rival or outperform teacher models an order of magnitude larger. Evaluated on multiple challenging benchmarks, Distill-C achieves an average improvement of 36% in execution accuracy compared to the base models from three distinct LLM families. Additionally, on three internal customer benchmarks, Distill-C demonstrates a 22.6% performance improvement over the base models. Our results demonstrate that Distill-C is an effective, high-performing and generalizable approach for deploying lightweight yet powerful NL2SQL models, delivering exceptional accuracies while maintaining low computational cost.

I) Introduction Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen . At the most important level, that of the electoral process, it is noted that it is not determined by the AI, but it is greatly impacted by its multiple applications . New types of online campaigns, driven by AI applications, are replacing traditional ones. The potential for manipulating voters and indirectly influencing the electoral outcome should not be underestimated. Certainly, instances of voter manipulation are not absent from traditional political campaigns, with the only difference being that digital manipulation is often carried out without our knowledge, e.g. by monitoring our behavior on social media. Nevertheless, we should not overlook the positive impact that AI has in the upgrading of democratic institutions by providing a forum for participation in decision - making . In this context, as a first step, we look into the potential jeopardization of democratic processes posed by the use of AI tools. Secondly, we consider the possibility of strengthening democratic processes by using AI, as well as the democratization of AI itself through the possibilities it offers. And thirdly, the impact of AI on the representative system is also discussed. The paper is concluded with recommendations and conclusions. II) Risks posed for democracy Misuse of AI tools can lead to the undermining of democratic political processes or the manipulation of individuals through specific targeting, which will destabilize democracy.

We present an interactive machine translation (MT) system designed for users who are not proficient in the target language. It aims to improve trustworthiness and explainability by identifying potentially mistranslated words and allowing the user to intervene to correct mistranslations. However, confidence estimation in machine translation has traditionally focused on the target side. Whereas the conventional approach to source-side confidence estimation would have been to project target word probabilities to the source side via word alignments, we propose a direct, alignment-free approach that measures how sensitive the target word probabilities are to changes in the source embeddings. Experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional alignment-based methods at detection of mistranslations.

Factor analysis studies have shown that the primary dimensions of word meaning are Valence (V), Arousal (A), and Dominance (D) (also referred to in social cognition research as Competence (C)). These dimensions impact various aspects of our lives from social competence and emotion regulation to success in the work place and how we view the world. We present here the NRC VAD Lexicon v2, which has human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for more than 55,000 English words and phrases. Notably, it adds entries for $\sim$25k additional words to v1.0. It also now includes for the first time entries for common multi-word phrases (~10k). We show that the associations are highly reliable. The lexicon enables a wide variety of research in psychology, NLP, public health, digital humanities, and social sciences. The NRC VAD Lexicon v2 is made freely available for research through our project webpage.

ARTICLE TEMPLATE Beyond Detection: Designing AI-Resilient Assessments with Automated Feedback Tool to Foster Critical Thinking and Originality Muhammad Sajjad Akbar a a University of Sydney, Australia; ARTICLE HISTORY Compiled April 1, 2025 ABSTRACT The growing prevalence of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has raised urgent concerns about their impact on student learning, particularly their potential to erode critical thinking and creativity in academic contexts. As students increasingly use these tools to complete assessments, foundational cognitive skills are at risk of being bypassed, challenging the integrity of higher education and the authenticity of student work. Current AI-generated text detection tools are fundamentally inadequate in addressing this challenge. They produce unreliable, unverifiable outputs and are highly susceptible to false positives and false negatives, especially when students apply obfuscation techniques such as paraphrasing, translation, or structural rewording. These tools rely on shallow statistical features rather than contextual or semantic understanding, making them unsuitable as definitive indicators of AI misuse. In response, this research proposes an AI-resilient, assessment-based solution that shifts focus from reactive detection to proactive assessment design. The solution is delivered through a web-based Python tool that integrates Bloom's Taxonomy with advanced natural language processing techniques including GPT-3.5 Turbo, BERT-based semantic similarity, and TF-IDF metrics to evaluate the AI-solvability of assignment tasks. By analyzing both surface-level and semantic features, the tool helps educators assess whether a task targets lower-order thinking (e.g., recall, summarization), which is more easily completed by AI, or higher-order skills (e.g., analysis, evaluation, creation), which are more resistant to AI automation. This framework empowers educators to intentionally design cognitively demanding AI-resistant assessments that promote originality, critical thinking, and fairness. By addressing the design of root issue assessment rather than relying on flawed detection tools, this research contributes a sustainable and pedagogically sound strategy to uphold academic standards and foster authentic learning in the era of AI. KEYWORDS Generative AI; ChatGPT; AI-resilient; Bloom's Taxonomy; Automated Assessments; AI-solvability;Automated Feedback; appendices 1. Introduction Integrating AI-technology with innovative thinking skills in higher education (HE) environment has grown more challenging due to rapid digital innovation and ubiquitous data availability. In applied education, innovative thinking is essential. It is charac-CONTACT Muhammad Sajjad Akbar. It entails thinking creatively to come up with original solutions to issues, enhance workflows, or open up new possibilities.

We explore the use of GPT-4 on a humanoid robot in simulation and the real world as proof of concept of a novel large language model (LLM) driven behaviour method. LLMs have shown the ability to perform various tasks, including robotic agent behaviour. The problem involves prompting the LLM with a goal, and the LLM outputs the sub-tasks to complete to achieve that goal. Previous works focus on the executability and correctness of the LLM's generated tasks. We propose a method that successfully addresses practical concerns around safety, transitions between tasks, time horizons of tasks and state feedback. In our experiments we have found that our approach produces output for feasible requests that can be executed every time, with smooth transitions. User requests are achieved most of the time across a range of goal time horizons.

We model human and animal learning by computing with high-dimensional vectors (H = 10,000 for example). The architecture resembles traditional (von Neumann) computing with numbers, but the instructions refer to vectors and operate on them in superposition. The architecture includes a high-capacity memory for vectors, analogue of the random-access memory (RAM) for numbers. The model's ability to learn from data reminds us of deep learning, but with an architecture closer to biology. The architecture agrees with an idea from psychology that human memory and learning involve a short-term working memory and a long-term data store. Neuroscience provides us with a model of the long-term memory, namely, the cortex of the cerebellum. With roots in psychology, biology, and traditional computing, a theory of computing with vectors can help us understand how brains compute. Application to learning by robots seems inevitable, but there is likely to be more, including language. Ultimately we want to compute with no more material and energy than used by brains. To that end, we need a mathematical theory that agrees with psychology and biology, and is suitable for nanotechnology. We also need to exercise the theory in large-scale experiments. Computing with vectors is described here in terms familiar to us from traditional computing with numbers.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional versatility in natural language processing, prompting recent efforts to extend their multimodal capabilities to speech processing through the development of audio large language models (Audio LLMs). While Audio LLMs excel in tasks such as speech recognition and synthesis, it remains unclear how they perform when faced with the auditory cognitive challenges posed by real-world environments, such as audio comprehension and listening recall, particularly in the presence of background noise or overlapping speech. Unlike text-based LLMs, which have access to vast amounts of text data for pre-training, retraining Audio LLMs with diverse auditory cognitive scenes is difficult due to the limited datasets that simulate real-world auditory cognitive scenarios and the challenge of acquiring auditory cognitive labels for training. While test-time compute (TTC) methods have been shown to enhance the capabilities of text-based LLMs during inference, a key challenge lies in designing these TTC methods to improve the auditory capabilities of Audio LLMs. This study aims to address these two research gaps by: i) exploring the auditory cognitive capabilities of Audio LLMs, and ii) enhancing their capabilities using TTC approaches. We have investigated five different Audio LLMs for auditory cognition using a \textit{self-collected} database and have proposed five TTC approaches to enhance auditory cognitive capabilities during inference. Our findings reveal that Audio LLMs performance decreases in more challenging auditory cognitive tasks. The proposed TTC approaches significantly enhance cognitive auditory capabilities, advancing the development of more adaptable and resilient Audio LLMs for practical applications such as assistive listening devices, voice-based AI assistants, and communication technologies.

--The ability to discover meaningful, accurate, and concise mathematical equations that describe datasets is valuable across various domains. Most existing equation discovery methods rely on genetic programming, which iteratively searches the equation space but is often slow and prone to overfitting. By representing equations as directed acyclic graphs, we leverage the use of graph neural networks to learn the underlying semantics of equations, and generate new, previously unseen equations. Although graph generative models have been shown to be successful in discovering new types of graphs in many fields, there application in discovering equations remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose Graph-EQ, a deep graph generative model designed for efficient equation discovery. Graph-EQ uses a conditional variational autoencoder (CV AE) to learn a rich latent representation of the equation space by training it on a large corpus of equations in an unsupervised manner . Instead of directly searching the equation space, we employ Bayesian optimization to efficiently explore this learned latent space. We show that the encoder-decoder architecture of Graph-Eq is able to accurately reconstruct input equations. Moreover, we show that the learned latent representation can be sampled and decoded into valid equations, including new and previously unseen equations in the training data. Finally, we assess Graph-Eq's ability to discover equations that best fit a dataset by exploring the latent space using Bayesian optimization. Latent space exploration is done on 20 dataset with known ground-truth equations, and Graph-Eq is shown to successfully discover the grountruth equation in the majority of datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) can carry out human-like dialogue, but unlike humans, they are stateless due to the superposition property. However, during multi-turn, multi-agent interactions, LLMs begin to exhibit consistent, character-like behaviors, hinting at a form of emergent lifelong learning. Despite this, existing benchmarks often fail to capture these dynamics, primarily focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce LIFESTATE-BENCH, a benchmark designed to assess lifelong learning in LLMs. It features two episodic datasets: Hamlet and a synthetic script collection, rich in narrative structure and character interactions. Our fact checking evaluation probes models' self-awareness, episodic memory retrieval, and relationship tracking, across both parametric and non-parametric approaches. Experiments on models like Llama3.1-8B, GPT-4-turbo, and DeepSeek R1, we demonstrate that nonparametric methods significantly outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. However, all models exhibit challenges with catastrophic forgetting as interactions extend, highlighting the need for further advancements in lifelong learning.