While large language models have transformed how we interact with AI systems, they have a critical weakness: they confidently state false information that sounds entirely plausible. This "hallucination" problem has become a major barrier to using these models where accuracy matters most. Existing solutions either require retraining the entire model, add significant computational costs, or miss the root causes of why these hallucinations occur in the first place. We present CausalGuard, a new approach that combines causal reasoning with symbolic logic to catch and prevent hallucinations as they happen. Unlike previous methods that only check outputs after generation, our system understands the causal chain that leads to false statements and intervenes early in the process. CausalGuard works through two complementary paths: one that traces causal relationships between what the model knows and what it generates, and another that checks logical consistency using automated reasoning. Testing across twelve different benchmarks, we found that CausalGuard correctly identifies hallucinations 89.3\% of the time while missing only 8.3\% of actual hallucinations. More importantly, it reduces false claims by nearly 80\% while keeping responses natural and helpful. The system performs especially well on complex reasoning tasks where multiple steps of logic are required. Because CausalGuard shows its reasoning process, it works well in sensitive areas like medical diagnosis or financial analysis where understanding why a decision was made matters as much as the decision itself.

Loss Given Default (LGD) modeling faces a fundamental data quality constraint: 90% of available training data consists of proxy estimates based on pre-distress balance sheets rather than actual recovery outcomes from completed bankruptcy proceedings. We demonstrate that this mixture-contaminated training structure causes systematic failure of recursive partitioning methods, with Random Forest achieving negative r-squared (-0.664, worse than predicting the mean) on held-out test data. Information-theoretic approaches based on Shannon entropy and mutual information provide superior generalization, achieving r-squared of 0.191 and RMSE of 0.284 on 1,218 corporate bankruptcies (1980-2023). Analysis reveals that leverage-based features contain 1.510 bits of mutual information while size effects contribute only 0.086 bits, contradicting regulatory assumptions about scale-dependent recovery. These results establish practical guidance for financial institutions deploying LGD models under Basel III requirements when representative outcome data is unavailable at sufficient scale. The findings generalize to medical outcomes research, climate forecasting, and technology reliability-domains where extended observation periods create unavoidable mixture structure in training data.

Technological systems increasingly mediate human information exchange, spanning interactions among humans as well as between humans and artificial agents. The unprecedented scale and reliance on information disseminated through these systems substantially expand the scope of information-based influence that can both enable and undermine sound decision-making. Consequently, understanding and protecting decision-making today faces growing challenges, as individuals and organizations must navigate evolving opportunities and information-based threats across varied domains and information environments. While these risks are widely recognized, research remains fragmented: work evaluating information-based threat phenomena has progressed largely in isolation from foundational studies of human information processing. In this review, we synthesize insights from both domains to identify shared cognitive mechanisms that mediate vulnerability to information-based threats and shape behavioral outcomes. Finally, we outline directions for future research aimed at integrating these perspectives, emphasizing the importance of such integration for mitigating human vulnerabilities and aligning human-machine representations.

Traditional fuzzy matching often fails when searching for quotes that are semantically identical but syntactically different across documents-a common issue when aligning official written records with speech-to-text transcripts. We introduce TimeStampEval, a benchmark for retrieving precise millisecond timestamps from long transcripts given non-verbatim quotes. Our simple two-stage method dramatically improves retrieval accuracy while cutting inference costs by over 90%. The motivating use case is an automated long-form podcast that assembles Congressional Record clips into AI-hosted narration. The technical challenge: given a sentence-timestamped transcript and a target quote that may differ due to transcription or editorial drift, return exact start and end boundaries. Standard algorithms handle verbatim text but break under fuzzier variants. Evaluating six modern LLMs on a 2,800-sentence (120k-token) transcript revealed four key findings. (1) Prompt design matters more than model choice: placing the query before the transcript and using compact formatting improved accuracy by 3-20 points while reducing token count by 30-40%. (2) Off-by-one errors form a distinct category, showing models understand the task but misplace boundaries. (3) A modest reasoning budget (600-850 tokens) raises accuracy from 37% to 77% for weak setups and to above 90% for strong ones. (4) Our "Assisted Fuzzy" approach-RapidFuzz pre-filtering followed by LLM verification on short snippets-improves fuzzy match accuracy by up to 50 points while halving latency and reducing cost per correct result by up to 96%. Extended tests on ten transcripts (50k-900k tokens, 1989-2025) confirm robustness to transcript length, vocabulary drift, and domain change, maintaining 95-100% rejection accuracy for absent targets.

This research examines the potential of datasets generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) to support Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, aiming to overcome challenges related to data acquisition and privacy concerns associated with real-world data. Focusing on negative valence text, a critical component of sentiment analysis, we explore the use of LLM-generated synthetic news headlines as an alternative to real-world data. A specialized corpus of negative news headlines was created using tailored prompts to capture diverse negative sentiments across various societal domains. The synthetic headlines were validated by expert review and further analyzed in embedding space to assess their alignment with real-world negative news in terms of content, tone, length, and style. Key metrics such as correlation with real headlines, perplexity, coherence, and realism were evaluated. The synthetic dataset was benchmarked against two sets of real news headlines using evaluations including the Comparative Perplexity Test, Comparative Readability Test, Comparative POS Profiling, BERTScore, and Comparative Semantic Similarity. Results show the generated headlines match real headlines with the only marked divergence being in the proper noun score of the POS profile test.

Large language models (LLMs) show promise for personalized financial recommendations but are hampered by context limits, hallucinations, and a lack of behavioral grounding. Our prior work, FLARKO, embedded structured knowledge graphs (KGs) in LLM prompts to align advice with user behavior and market data. This paper introduces RAG-FLARKO, a retrieval-augmented extension to FLARKO, that overcomes scalability and relevance challenges using multi-stage and parallel KG retrieval processes. Our method first retrieves behaviorally relevant entities from a user's transaction KG and then uses this context to filter temporally consistent signals from a market KG, constructing a compact, grounded subgraph for the LLM. This pipeline reduces context overhead and sharpens the model's focus on relevant information. Empirical evaluation on a real-world financial transaction dataset demonstrates that RAG-FLARKO significantly enhances recommendation quality. Notably, our framework enables smaller, more efficient models to achieve high performance in both profitability and behavioral alignment, presenting a viable path for deploying grounded financial AI in resource-constrained environments.

A long-standing goal in both industry and academia is to develop an LLM inference platform that is portable across hardware architectures, eliminates the need for low-level hand-tuning, and still delivers best-in-class efficiency. In this work, we demonstrate that portable, efficient cross-platform LLM inference is indeed possible and share our experience. We develop a state-of-the-art paged attention kernel, the core performance-critical component of many LLM deployments, that builds exclusively on the domain-specific just-in-time compiled language Triton to achieve state-of-the-art performance on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. We describe our high-level approach, the key algorithmic and system-level improvements, the parameter auto-tuning required to unlock efficiency, and the integrations into a popular inference server that are necessary to bring the performance of a generic Triton attention kernel from 19.7% of the state-of-the-art to 105.9%. Our results highlight how open-source domain-specific languages can be leveraged to unlock model portability across different GPU vendors.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have accelerated research on automated optimization modeling. While real-world decision-making is inherently uncertain, most existing work has focused on deterministic optimization with known parameters, leaving the application of LLMs in uncertain settings largely unexplored. To that end, we propose the DAOpt framework including a new dataset OptU, a multi-agent decision-making module, and a simulation environment for evaluating LLMs with a focus on out-of-sample feasibility and robustness. Additionally, we enhance LLMs' modeling capabilities by incorporating few-shot learning with domain knowledge from stochastic and robust optimization.

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly deployed in critical domains such as finance, healthcare, and criminal justice [1]. The increasing popularity of algorithmic decision-making has stimulated interest in algorithmic fairness within the academic community. Researchers have introduced various fairness definitions that quantify disparities between privileged and protected groups, use causal inference to determine the impact of race on model predictions, and that test calibration of probability predictions from the model. Existing literature does not provide a way in which to assess whether observed disparities between groups are statistically significant or merely due to chance. This paper introduces a rigorous framework for testing the statistical significance of fairness violations by leveraging k-fold cross-validation [2] to generate sampling distributions of fairness metrics. This paper introduces statistical tests that can be used to identify statistically significant violations of fairness metrics based on disparities between predicted and actual outcomes, model calibration, and causal inference techniques [1]. We demonstrate this approach by testing recidivism forecasting algorithms trained on data from the National Institute of Justice. Our findings reveal that machine learning algorithms used for recidivism forecasting exhibit statistically significant bias against Black individuals under several fairness definitions, while also exhibiting no bias or bias against White individuals under other definitions. The results from this paper underscore the importance of rigorous and robust statistical testing while evaluating algorithmic decision-making systems.

The current standard architecture of Large Language Models (LLMs) with QKV self-attention is briefly summarized, including the architecture of a typical Transformer. Scaling laws for compute (flops) and memory (parameters plus data) are given, along with their present (2025) rough cost estimates for the parameters of present LLMs of various scales, including discussion of whether DeepSeek should be viewed as a special case. Nothing here is new, but this material seems not otherwise readily available in summary form.