Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs), have transformed natural language processing by improving generative capabilities. However, detecting biases embedded within these models remains a challenge. Subtle biases can propagate misinformation, influence decision-making, and reinforce stereotypes, raising ethical concerns. This study presents a detection framework to identify nuanced biases in LLMs. The approach integrates contextual analysis, interpretability via attention mechanisms, and counterfactual data augmentation to capture hidden biases across linguistic contexts. The methodology employs contrastive prompts and synthetic datasets to analyze model behaviour across cultural, ideological, and demographic scenarios. Quantitative analysis using benchmark datasets and qualitative assessments through expert reviews validate the effectiveness of the framework. Results show improvements in detecting subtle biases compared to conventional methods, which often fail to highlight disparities in model responses to race, gender, and socio-political contexts. The framework also identifies biases arising from imbalances in training data and model architectures. Continuous user feedback ensures adaptability and refinement. This research underscores the importance of proactive bias mitigation strategies and calls for collaboration between policymakers, AI developers, and regulators. The proposed detection mechanisms enhance model transparency and support responsible LLM deployment in sensitive applications such as education, legal systems, and healthcare. Future work will focus on real-time bias monitoring and cross-linguistic generalization to improve fairness and inclusivity in AI-driven communication tools.

Construction grammar posits that constructions (form-meaning pairings) are acquired through experience with language (the distributional learning hypothesis). But how much information about constructions does this distribution actually contain? Corpus-based analyses provide some answers, but text alone cannot answer counterfactual questions about what caused a particular word to occur. For that, we need computable models of the distribution over strings -- namely, pretrained language models (PLMs). Here we treat a RoBERTa model as a proxy for this distribution and hypothesize that constructions will be revealed within it as patterns of statistical affinity. We support this hypothesis experimentally: many constructions are robustly distinguished, including (i) hard cases where semantically distinct constructions are superficially similar, as well as (ii) schematic constructions, whose "slots" can be filled by abstract word classes. Despite this success, we also provide qualitative evidence that statistical affinity alone may be insufficient to identify all constructions from text. Thus, statistical affinity is likely an important, but partial, signal available to learners.

Longitudinal data in electronic health records (EHRs) represent an individual`s clinical history through a sequence of codified concepts, including diagnoses, procedures, medications, and laboratory tests. Foundational models, such as generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), can leverage this data to predict future events. While fine-tuning of these models enhances task-specific performance, it is costly, complex, and unsustainable for every target. We show that a foundation model trained on EHRs can perform predictive tasks in a zero-shot manner, eliminating the need for fine-tuning. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of zero-shot forecasting with GPT-based foundational models in EHRs, introducing a novel pipeline that formulates medical concept prediction as a generative modeling task. Unlike supervised approaches requiring extensive labeled data, our method enables the model to forecast a next medical event purely from a pretraining knowledge. We evaluate performance across multiple time horizons and clinical categories, demonstrating model`s ability to capture latent temporal dependencies and complex patient trajectories without task supervision. Model performance for predicting the next medical concept was evaluated using precision and recall metrics, achieving an average top1 precision of 0.614 and recall of 0.524. For 12 major diagnostic conditions, the model demonstrated strong zero-shot performance, achieving high true positive rates while maintaining low false positives. We demonstrate the power of a foundational EHR GPT model in capturing diverse phenotypes and enabling robust, zero-shot forecasting of clinical outcomes. This capability enhances the versatility of predictive healthcare models and reduces the need for task-specific training, enabling more scalable applications in clinical settings.

Pre-trained foundation models can be adapted for specific tasks using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). However, the fairness properties of these adapted classifiers remain underexplored. Existing fairness-aware fine-tuning methods rely on direct access to sensitive attributes or their predictors, but in practice, these sensitive attributes are often held under strict consumer privacy controls, and neither the attributes nor their predictors are available to model developers, hampering the development of fair models. To address this issue, we introduce a set of LoRA-based fine-tuning methods that can be trained in a distributed fashion, where model developers and fairness auditors collaborate without sharing sensitive attributes or predictors. In this paper, we evaluate three such methods - sensitive unlearning, adversarial training, and orthogonality loss - against a fairness-unaware baseline, using experiments on the CelebA and UTK-Face datasets with an ImageNet pre-trained ViT-Base model. We find that orthogonality loss consistently reduces bias while maintaining or improving utility, whereas adversarial training improves False Positive Rate Parity and Demographic Parity in some cases, and sensitive unlearning provides no clear benefit. In tasks where significant biases are present, distributed fairness-aware fine-tuning methods can effectively eliminate bias without compromising consumer privacy and, in most cases, improve model utility.

The increasing prevalence of online misinformation has heightened the demand for automated fact-checking solutions. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential tools for assisting in this task, but their effectiveness remains uncertain. This study evaluates the fact-checking capabilities of various open-source LLMs, focusing on their ability to assess claims with different levels of contextual information. We conduct three key experiments: (1) evaluating whether LLMs can identify the semantic relationship between a claim and a fact-checking article, (2) assessing models' accuracy in verifying claims when given a related fact-checking article, and (3) testing LLMs' fact-checking abilities when leveraging data from external knowledge sources such as Google and Wikipedia. Our results indicate that LLMs perform well in identifying claim-article connections and verifying fact-checked stories but struggle with confirming factual news, where they are outperformed by traditional fine-tuned models such as RoBERTa. Additionally, the introduction of external knowledge does not significantly enhance LLMs' performance, calling for more tailored approaches. Our findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs in automated fact-checking, emphasizing the need for further refinements before they can reliably replace human fact-checkers.

Cognitive biases, systematic deviations from rationality in judgment, pose significant challenges in generating objective content. This paper introduces a novel approach for real-time cognitive bias detection in user-generated text using large language models (LLMs) and advanced prompt engineering techniques. The proposed system analyzes textual data to identify common cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, circular reasoning, and hidden assumption. By designing tailored prompts, the system effectively leverages LLMs' capabilities to both recognize and mitigate these biases, improving the quality of human-generated content (e.g., news, media, reports). Experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy of our approach in identifying cognitive biases, offering a valuable tool for enhancing content objectivity and reducing the risks of biased decisionmaking. Introduction Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from rational judgment, affecting decision-making processes across various domains, including media, policy-making, and legal reasoning. With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) applications, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in processing and evaluating vast amounts of textual information. However, existing research has largely focused on mitigating biases within AI-generated outputs rather than leveraging AI to detect biases in human-generated content. This gap presents a critical challenge in ensuring transparency and fairness in AI-assisted decision-making. This study explores the application of structured prompt engineering as a novel approach to improving LLM accuracy in detecting cognitive biases.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world question-answering (QA) applications. However, LLMs have been proven to generate hallucinations and nonfactual information, undermining their trustworthiness in high-stakes medical tasks. Conformal prediction (CP) is well-known to be model-agnostic and distribution-free, which creates statistically rigorous prediction sets in classification tasks. In this work, we for the first time adapt the CP framework to medical multiple-choice question-answering (MCQA) tasks, by correlating the nonconformity score with the frequency score of correct options grounded in self-consistency theory, assuming no access to internal model information. Considering that the adapted CP framework can only control the (mis)coverage rate, we employ a risk control framework, which can manage task-specific metrics by devising a monotonically decreasing loss function. We evaluate our framework on 3 popular medical MCQA datasets utilizing 4 ``off-the-shelf'' LLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that we achieve user-specified average (or marginal) error rates on the test set. Furthermore, we observe that the average prediction set size (APSS) on the test set decreases as the risk level increases, which concludes a promising evaluation metric for the uncertainty of LLMs.

The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack stands out as a highly formidable cyber threat, representing an advanced form of the denial-of-service (DoS) attack. A DDoS attack involves multiple computers working together to overwhelm a system, making it unavailable. On the other hand, a DoS attack is a one-on-one attempt to make a system or website inaccessible. Thus, it is crucial to construct an effective model for identifying various DDoS incidents. Although extensive research has focused on binary detection models for DDoS identification, they face challenges to adapt evolving threats, necessitating frequent updates. Whereas multiclass detection models offer a comprehensive defense against diverse DDoS attacks, ensuring adaptability in the ever-changing cyber threat landscape. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Model to strengthen network security by combining the featureextraction abilities of 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with the classification skills of Random Forest (RF) and Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers. Using the CIC-DDoS2019 dataset, we perform multiclass classification of various DDoS attacks and conduct a comparative analysis of evaluation metrics for RF, MLP, and our proposed Hybrid Model. After analyzing the results, we draw meaningful conclusions and confirm the superiority of our Hybrid Model by performing thorough cross-validation. Additionally, we integrate our machine learning model with Snort, which provides a robust and adaptive solution for detecting and mitigating various DDoS attacks.

Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Learning (EFCIL) aims to sequentially learn from distinct categories without retaining exemplars but easily suffers from catastrophic forgetting of learned knowledge. While existing EFCIL methods leverage knowledge distillation to alleviate forgetting, they still face two critical challenges: semantic shift and decision bias. Specifically, the embeddings of old tasks shift in the embedding space after learning new tasks, and the classifier becomes biased towards new tasks due to training solely with new data, thereby hindering the balance between old and new knowledge. To address these issues, we propose the Dual-Projection Shift Estimation and Classifier Reconstruction (DPCR) approach for EFCIL. DPCR effectively estimates semantic shift through a dual-projection, which combines a learnable transformation with a row-space projection to capture both task-wise and category-wise shifts. Furthermore, to mitigate decision bias, DPCR employs ridge regression to reformulate classifier training as a reconstruction process. This reconstruction exploits previous information encoded in covariance and prototype of each class after calibration with estimated shift, thereby reducing decision bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, across various datasets, DPCR effectively balances old and new tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art EFCIL methods.

Previous work on clinical relation extraction from free-text sentences leveraged information about semantic types from clinical knowledge bases as a part of entity representations. In this paper, we exploit additional evidence by also making use of domain-specific semantic type dependencies. We encode the relation between a span of tokens matching a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concept and other tokens in the sentence. We implement our method and compare against different named entity recognition (NER) architectures (i.e., BiLSTM-CRF and BiLSTM-GCN-CRF) using different pre-trained clinical embeddings (i.e., BERT, BioBERT, UMLSBert). Our experimental results on clinical datasets show that in some cases NER effectiveness can be significantly improved by making use of domain-specific semantic type dependencies. Our work is also the first study generating a matrix encoding to make use of more than three dependencies in one pass for the NER task.