Malnutrition among pregnant women is a major public health challenge in Ethiopia, increasing the risk of adverse maternal and neonatal outcomes. Traditional statistical approaches often fail to capture the complex and multidimensional determinants of nutritional status. This study develops a predictive model using ensemble machine learning techniques, leveraging data from the Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (2005-2020), comprising 18,108 records with 30 socio-demographic and health attributes. Data preprocessing included handling missing values, normalization, and balancing with SMOTE, followed by feature selection to identify key predictors. Several supervised ensemble algorithms including XGBoost, Random Forest, CatBoost, and AdaBoost were applied to classify nutritional status. Among them, the Random Forest model achieved the best performance, classifying women into four categories (normal, moderate malnutrition, severe malnutrition, and overnutrition) with 97.87% accuracy, 97.88% precision, 97.87% recall, 97.87% F1-score, and 99.86% ROC AUC. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of ensemble learning in capturing hidden patterns from complex datasets and provide timely insights for early detection of nutritional risks. The results offer practical implications for healthcare providers, policymakers, and researchers, supporting data-driven strategies to improve maternal nutrition and health outcomes in Ethiopia.

Abstract--Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods that incorporate deep neural networks (DNN), though powerful, often lack transparency. Their black-box characteristic hinders inter-pretability and reduces trustworthiness, particularly in critical domains. T o address this challenge in RL tasks, we propose a solution based on Self-Explaining Neural Networks (SENNs) along with explanation extraction methods to enhance inter-pretability while maintaining predictive accuracy. Our approach targets low-dimensionality problems to generate robust local and global explanations of the model's behaviour . We evaluate the proposed method on the resource allocation problem in mobile networks, demonstrating that SENNs can constitute interpretable solutions with competitive performance. This work highlights the potential of SENNs to improve transparency and trust in AIdriven decision-making for low-dimensional tasks. Interest in Explainable Artificial Intelligance (XAI) has been rapidly growing, facilitated by the need for transparency. Although powerful, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) models often operate as black boxes, making it difficult to interpret their decisions, leading to a lack of trust among stakeholders and consequently hindering their applicability.

This work aims to reproduce the results of Faithful Vision Transformers (FViTs) proposed by Hu et al. (2024) alongside interpretability methods for Vision Transformers from Chefer et al. (2021) and Xu et al. (2022). We investigate claims made by Hu et al. (2024), namely that the usage of Diffusion Denoised Smoothing (DDS) improves interpretability robustness to (1) attacks in a segmentation task and (2) perturbation and attacks in a classification task. We also extend the original study by investigating the authors' claims that adding DDS to any interpretability method can improve its robustness under attack. This is tested on baseline methods and the recently proposed Attribution Rollout method.

Data-driven decision support in high-stakes domains like healthcare and finance faces significant barriers to data sharing due to regulatory, institutional, and privacy concerns. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in open-domain tasks, their adoption in sensitive environments remains limited by unpredictable behaviors and insufficient privacy-preserving datasets for benchmarking. Existing anonymization methods are often inadequate, especially for unstructured text, as redaction and masking can still allow re-identification. Differential Privacy (DP) offers a principled alternative, enabling the generation of synthetic data with formal privacy assurances. In this work, we address these challenges through three key contributions. First, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation framework with standardized utility and fidelity metrics, encompassing nine curated datasets that capture domain-specific complexities such as technical jargon, long-context dependencies, and specialized document structures. Second, we conduct a large-scale empirical study benchmarking state-of-the-art DP text generation methods and LLMs of varying sizes and different fine-tuning strategies, revealing that high-quality domain-specific synthetic data generation under DP constraints remains an unsolved challenge, with performance degrading as domain complexity increases. Third, we develop a membership inference attack (MIA) methodology tailored for synthetic text, providing first empirical evidence that the use of public datasets - potentially present in pre-training corpora - can invalidate claimed privacy guarantees. Our findings underscore the urgent need for rigorous privacy auditing and highlight persistent gaps between open-domain and specialist evaluations, informing responsible deployment of generative AI in privacy-sensitive, high-stakes settings.

Psychological measurement is critical to many disciplines. Despite advances in measurement, building nomological networks, theoretical maps of how concepts and measures relate to establish validity, remains a challenge 70 years after Cronbach and Meehl proposed them as fundamental to validation. This limitation has practical consequences: clinical trials may fail to detect treatment effects, and public policy may target the wrong outcomes. We introduce Analysis of Latent Indicators to Generate Nomological Structures (ALIGNS), a large language model-based system trained with validated questionnaire measures. ALIGNS provides three comprehensive nomological networks containing over 550,000 indicators across psychology, medicine, social policy, and other fields. This represents the first application of large language models to solve a foundational problem in measurement validation. We report classification accuracy tests used to develop the model, as well as three evaluations. In the first evaluation, the widely used NIH PROMIS anxiety and depression instruments are shown to converge into a single dimension of emotional distress. The second evaluation examines child temperament measures and identifies four potential dimensions not captured by current frameworks, and questions one existing dimension. The third evaluation, an applicability check, engages expert psychometricians who assess the system's importance, accessibility, and suitability. ALIGNS is freely available at nomologicalnetwork.org, complementing traditional validation methods with large-scale nomological analysis.

Responsible for approximately two million new cases and over six hundred thousand deaths in 2022 alone (Sung et al., 2021), breast cancer remains a prominent global health concern, and is expected to account nearly one-third of all newly diagnosed cancers among women in the United States (DeSantis et al., 2016). According to the most recent report from International Agency for Research on Cancer (Bray et al., 2024), it is one of the most widespread cancers diagnosed worldwide, both in the number of cases and associated deaths. Consequently, medical imaging techniques are indispensable for screening, diagnosis, and further research into the disease. Historically, the most common imaging technique for breast cancer screening is digital mammography (DM), in which a 2D x-ray projection of a compressed breast is taken. Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), a pseudo-3D imaging technique, has been increasingly adopted, demonstrating improved screening performance (Asbeutah et al., 2019; Sprague et al., 2023).

Multilingual toxicity detection remains a significant challenge due to the scarcity of training data and resources for many languages. While prior work has leveraged the translate-test paradigm to support cross-lingual transfer across a range of classification tasks, the utility of translation in supporting toxicity detection at scale remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive comparison of translation-based and language-specific/multilingual classification pipelines. We find that translation-based pipelines consistently outperform out-of-distribution classifiers in 81.3% of cases (13 of 16 languages), with translation benefits strongly correlated with both the resource level of the target language and the quality of the machine translation (MT) system. Our analysis reveals that traditional classifiers outperform large language model (LLM) judges, with this advantage being particularly pronounced for low-resource languages, where translate-classify methods dominate translate-judge approaches in 6 out of 7 cases. We additionally show that MT-specific fine-tuning on LLMs yields lower refusal rates compared to standard instruction-tuned models, but it can negatively impact toxicity detection accuracy for low-resource languages. These findings offer actionable guidance for practitioners developing scalable multilingual content moderation systems.

Many black-box techniques for quantifying the uncertainty of large language models (LLMs) rely on repeated LLM sampling, which can be computationally expensive. Therefore, practical applicability demands reliable estimation from few samples. Semantic entropy (SE) is a popular sample-based uncertainty estimator with a discrete formulation attractive for the black-box setting. Recent extensions of semantic entropy exhibit improved LLM hallucination detection, but do so with less interpretable methods that admit additional hyperparameters. For this reason, we revisit the canonical discrete semantic entropy estimator, finding that it underestimates the "true" semantic entropy, as expected from theory. We propose a modified semantic alphabet size estimator, and illustrate that using it to adjust discrete semantic entropy for sample coverage results in more accurate semantic entropy estimation in our setting of interest. Furthermore, our proposed alphabet size estimator flags incorrect LLM responses as well or better than recent top-performing approaches, with the added benefit of remaining highly interpretable.

De-identification in the healthcare setting is an application of NLP where automated algorithms are used to remove personally identifying information of patients (and, sometimes, providers). With the recent rise of generative large language models (LLMs), there has been a corresponding rise in the number of papers that apply LLMs to de-identification. Although these approaches often report near-perfect results, significant challenges concerning reproducibility and utility of the research papers persist. This paper identifies three key limitations in the current literature: inconsistent reporting metrics hindering direct comparisons, the inadequacy of traditional classification metrics in capturing errors which LLMs may be more prone to (i.e., altering clinically relevant information), and lack of manual validation of automated metrics which aim to quantify these errors. To address these issues, we first present a survey of LLM-based de-identification research, highlighting the heterogeneity in reporting standards. Second, we evaluated a diverse set of models to quantify the extent of inappropriate removal of clinical information. Next, we conduct a manual validation of an existing evaluation metric to measure the removal of clinical information, employing clinical experts to assess their efficacy. We highlight poor performance and describe the inherent limitations of such metrics in identifying clinically significant changes. Lastly, we propose a novel methodology for the detection of clinically relevant information removal.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has drawn urgent attention to the task of machine-generated text detection (MGTD). However, existing approaches struggle in complex real-world scenarios: zero-shot detectors rely heavily on scoring model's output distribution while training-based detectors are often constrained by overfitting to the training data, limiting generalization. We found that the performance bottleneck of training-based detectors stems from the misalignment between training objective and task needs. To address this, we propose Direct Discrepancy Learning (DDL), a novel optimization strategy that directly optimizes the detector with task-oriented knowledge. DDL enables the detector to better capture the core semantics of the detection task, thereby enhancing both robustness and generalization. Built upon this, we introduce DetectAnyLLM, a unified detection framework that achieves state-of-the-art MGTD performance across diverse LLMs. To ensure a reliable evaluation, we construct MIRAGE, the most diverse multi-task MGTD benchmark. MIRAGE samples human-written texts from 10 corpora across 5 text-domains, which are then re-generated or revised using 17 cutting-edge LLMs, covering a wide spectrum of proprietary models and textual styles. Extensive experiments on MIRAGE reveal the limitations of existing methods in complex environment. In contrast, DetectAnyLLM consistently outperforms them, achieving over a 70% performance improvement under the same training data and base scoring model, underscoring the effectiveness of our DDL. Project page: {https://fjc2005.github.io/detectanyllm}.