Understanding the complexities of judicial deliberation is crucial for assessing the efficacy and fairness of a justice system. However, empirical studies of judicial panels are constrained by significant ethical and practical barriers. This paper introduces SAMVAD, an innovative Multi-Agent System (MAS) designed to simulate the deliberation process within the framework of the Indian justice system. Our system comprises agents representing key judicial roles: a Judge, a Prosecution Counsel, a Defense Counsel, and multiple Adjudicators (simulating a judicial bench), all powered by large language models (LLMs). A primary contribution of this work is the integration of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), grounded in a domain-specific knowledge base of landmark Indian legal documents, including the Indian Penal Code and the Constitution of India. This RAG functionality enables the Judge and Counsel agents to generate legally sound instructions and arguments, complete with source citations, thereby enhancing both the fidelity and transparency of the simulation. The Adjudicator agents engage in iterative deliberation rounds, processing case facts, legal instructions, and arguments to reach a consensus-based verdict. We detail the system architecture, agent communication protocols, the RAG pipeline, the simulation workflow, and a comprehensive evaluation plan designed to assess performance, deliberation quality, and outcome consistency. This work provides a configurable and explainable MAS platform for exploring legal reasoning and group decision-making dynamics in judicial simulations, specifically tailored to the Indian legal context and augmented with verifiable legal grounding via RAG.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems provide a method for factually grounding the responses of a Large Language Model (LLM) by providing retrieved evidence, or context, as support. Guided by this context, RAG systems can reduce hallucinations and expand the ability of LLMs to accurately answer questions outside the scope of their training data. Unfortunately, this design introduces a critical vulnerability: LLMs may absorb and reproduce misinformation present in retrieved evidence. This problem is magnified if retrieved evidence contains adversarial material explicitly intended to promulgate misinformation. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of RAG robustness in the health domain and examines alignment between model outputs and ground-truth answers. We focus on the health domain due to the potential for harm caused by incorrect responses, as well as the availability of evidence-based ground truth for many common health-related questions. We conduct controlled experiments using common health questions, varying both the type and composition of the retrieved documents (helpful, harmful, and adversarial) as well as the framing of the question by the user (consistent, neutral, and inconsistent). Our findings reveal that adversarial documents substantially degrade alignment, but robustness can be preserved when helpful evidence is also present in the retrieval pool. These findings offer actionable insights for designing safer RAG systems in high-stakes domains by highlighting the need for retrieval safeguards. To enable reproducibility and facilitate future research, all experimental results are publicly available in our github repository. https://github.com/shakibaam/RAG_ROBUSTNESS_EVAL

We present the novel approach for stance detection across domains and targets, Metric Learning-Based Few-Shot Learning for Cross-Target and Cross-Domain Stance Detection (MLSD). MLSD utilizes metric learning with triplet loss to capture semantic similarities and differences between stance targets, enhancing domain adaptation. By constructing a discriminative embedding space, MLSD allows a cross-target or cross-domain stance detection model to acquire useful examples from new target domains. We evaluate MLSD in multiple cross-target and cross-domain scenarios across two datasets, showing statistically significant improvement in stance detection performance across six widely used stance detection models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to critical failure modes, including \textit{intrinsic faithfulness hallucinations} (also known as confabulations), where a response deviates semantically from the provided context. Frameworks designed to detect this, such as Semantic Divergence Metrics (SDM), rely on identifying latent topics shared between prompts and responses, typically by applying geometric clustering to their sentence embeddings. This creates a disconnect, as the topics are optimized for spatial proximity, not for the downstream information-theoretic analysis. In this paper, we bridge this gap by developing a principled topic identification method grounded in the Deterministic Information Bottleneck (DIB) for geometric clustering. Our key contribution is to transform the DIB method into a practical algorithm for high-dimensional data by substituting its intractable KL divergence term with a computationally efficient upper bound. The resulting method, which we dub UDIB, can be interpreted as an entropy-regularized and robustified version of K-means that inherently favors a parsimonious number of informative clusters. By applying UDIB to the joint clustering of LLM prompt and response embeddings, we generate a shared topic representation that is not merely spatially coherent but is fundamentally structured to be maximally informative about the prompt-response relationship. This provides a superior foundation for the SDM framework and offers a novel, more sensitive tool for detecting confabulations.

Process Mining (PM), initially developed for industrial and business contexts, has recently been applied to social systems, including legal ones. However, PM's efficacy in the legal domain is limited by the accessibility and quality of datasets. We introduce ProLiFIC (Procedural Lawmaking Flow in Italian Chambers), a comprehensive event log of the Italian lawmaking process from 1987 to 2022. Created from unstructured data from the Normattiva portal and structured using large language models (LLMs), ProLiFIC aligns with recent efforts in integrating PM with LLMs. We exemplify preliminary analyses and propose ProLiFIC as a benchmark for legal PM, fostering new developments.

In the paper, we consider multilevel multitask analysis of cryptocurrency news using a fine-tuned Mistral 7B large language model with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). On the first level of analytics, the fine-tuned model generates graph and text summaries with sentiment scores as well as JSON representations of summaries. Higher levels perform hierarchical stacking that consolidates sets of graph-based and text-based summaries as well as summaries of summaries into comprehensive reports. The combination of graph and text summaries provides complementary views of cryptocurrency news. The model is fine-tuned with 4-bit quantization using the PEFT/LoRA approach. The representation of cryptocurrency news as knowledge graph can essentially eliminate problems with large language model hallucinations. The obtained results demonstrate that the use of fine-tuned Mistral 7B LLM models for multilevel cryptocurrency news analysis can conduct informative qualitative and quantitative analytics, providing important insights.

Accurately obtaining crop type and its spatial distribution at a global scale is critical for food security, agricultural policy-making, and sustainable development. Remote sensing offers an efficient solution for large-scale crop classification, but the limited availability of reliable ground samples in many regions constrains applicability across geographic areas. To address performance declines under geospatial shifts, this study identifies remote sensing features that are invariant to geographic variation and proposes strategies to enhance cross-regional generalization. We construct CropGlobe, a global crop type dataset with 300,000 pixel-level samples from eight countries across five continents, covering six major food and industrial crops (corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, sugarcane, cotton). With broad geographic coverage, CropGlobe enables a systematic evaluation under cross-country, cross-continent, and cross-hemisphere transfer. We compare the transferability of temporal multi-spectral features (Sentinel-2-based 1D/2D median features and harmonic coefficients) and hyperspectral features (from EMIT). To improve generalization under spectral and phenological shifts, we design CropNet, a lightweight and robust CNN tailored for pixel-level crop classification, coupled with temporal data augmentation (time shift, time scale, and magnitude warping) that simulates realistic cross-regional phenology. Experiments show that 2D median temporal features from Sentinel-2 consistently exhibit the strongest invariance across all transfer scenarios, and augmentation further improves robustness, particularly when training data diversity is limited. Overall, the work identifies more invariant feature representations that enhance geographic transferability and suggests a promising path toward scalable, low-cost crop type applications across globally diverse regions.

The global food landscape is rife with scientific, cultural, and commercial claims about what foods are, what they do, what they should not do, or should not do. These range from rigorously studied health benefits (probiotics improve gut health) and misrepresentations (soaked almonds make one smarter) to vague promises (superfoods boost immunity) and culturally rooted beliefs (cold foods cause coughs). Despite their widespread influence, the infrastructure for tracing, verifying, and contextualizing these claims remains fragmented and underdeveloped. In this paper, we propose a Food Claim-Traceability Network (FCN) as an extension of FKG[.]in, a knowledge graph of Indian food that we have been incrementally building. We also present the ontology design and the semi-automated knowledge curation workflow that we used to develop a proof of concept of FKG[.]in-FCN using Reddit data and Large Language Models. FCN integrates curated data inputs, structured schemas, and provenance-aware pipelines for food-related claim extraction and validation. While directly linked to the Indian food knowledge graph as an application, our methodology remains application-agnostic and adaptable to other geographic, culinary, or regulatory settings. By modeling food claims and their traceability in a structured, verifiable, and explainable way, we aim to contribute to more transparent and accountable food knowledge ecosystems, supporting researchers, policymakers, and most importantly, everyday consumers in navigating a world saturated with dietary assertions.

A surge of recent work explores the ethical and societal implications of large-scale AI models that make "moral" judgments. Much of this literature focuses either on alignment with human judgments through various thought experiments or on the group fairness implications of AI judgments. However, the most immediate and likely use of AI is to help or fully replace the so-called street-level bureaucrats, the individuals deciding to allocate scarce social resources or approve benefits. There is a rich history underlying how principles of local justice determine how society decides on prioritization mechanisms in such domains. In this paper, we examine how well LLM judgments align with human judgments, as well as with socially and politically determined vulnerability scoring systems currently used in the domain of homelessness resource allocation. Crucially, we use real data on those needing services (maintaining strict confidentiality by only using local large models) to perform our analyses. We find that LLM prioritizations are extremely inconsistent in several ways: internally on different runs, between different LLMs, and between LLMs and the vulnerability scoring systems. At the same time, LLMs demonstrate qualitative consistency with lay human judgments in pairwise testing.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) job scheduling involves balancing conflicting objectives such as minimizing makespan, reducing wait times, optimizing resource use, and ensuring fairness. Traditional methods, including heuristic-based, e.g., First-Come-First-Served (FJFS) and Shortest Job First (SJF), or intensive optimization techniques, often lack adaptability to dynamic workloads and, more importantly, cannot simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in HPC systems. To address this, we propose a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based scheduler using a ReAct-style framework (Reason + Act), enabling iterative, interpretable decision-making. The system incorporates a scratchpad memory to track scheduling history and refine decisions via natural language feedback, while a constraint enforcement module ensures feasibility and safety. We evaluate our approach using OpenAI's O4-Mini and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 across seven real-world HPC workload scenarios, including heterogeneous mixes, bursty patterns, and adversarial cases etc. Comparisons against FCFS, SJF, and Google OR-Tools (on 10 to 100 jobs) reveal that LLM-based scheduling effectively balances multiple objectives while offering transparent reasoning through natural language traces. The method excels in constraint satisfaction and adapts to diverse workloads without domain-specific training. However, a trade-off between reasoning quality and computational overhead challenges real-time deployment. This work presents the first comprehensive study of reasoning-capable LLMs for HPC scheduling, demonstrating their potential to handle multiobjective optimization while highlighting limitations in computational efficiency. The findings provide insights into leveraging advanced language models for complex scheduling problems in dynamic HPC environments.