Career exploration is uncertain, requiring decisions with limited information and unpredictable outcomes. While generative AI offers new opportunities for career guidance, most systems rely on linear chat interfaces that produce overly comprehensive and idealized suggestions, overlooking the non-linear and effortful nature of real-world trajectories. We present CareerPooler, a generative AI-powered system that employs a pool-table metaphor to simulate career development as a spatial and narrative interaction. Users strike balls representing milestones, skills, and random events, where hints, collisions, and rebounds embody decision-making under uncertainty. In a within-subjects study with 24 participants, CareerPooler significantly improved engagement, information gain, satisfaction, and career clarity compared to a chatbot baseline. Qualitative findings show that spatial-narrative interaction fosters experience-based learning, resilience through setbacks, and reduced psychological burden. Our findings contribute to the design of AI-assisted career exploration systems and more broadly suggest that visually grounded analogical interactions can make generative systems engaging and satisfying.

The emergence of decentralized social media platforms presents new opportunities and challenges for real-time analysis of public discourse. This study introduces CognitiveSky, an open-source and scalable framework designed for sentiment, emotion, and narrative analysis on Bluesky, a federated Twitter or X.com alternative. By ingesting data through Bluesky's Application Programming Interface (API), CognitiveSky applies transformer-based models to annotate large-scale user-generated content and produces structured and analyzable outputs. These summaries drive a dynamic dashboard that visualizes evolving patterns in emotion, activity, and conversation topics. Built entirely on free-tier infrastructure, CognitiveSky achieves both low operational cost and high accessibility. While demonstrated here for monitoring mental health discourse, its modular design enables applications across domains such as disinformation detection, crisis response, and civic sentiment analysis. By bridging large language models with decentralized networks, CognitiveSky offers a transparent, extensible tool for computational social science in an era of shifting digital ecosystems.

This study presents the first multi-platform sentiment analysis of public opinion on the 15-minute city concept across Twitter, Reddit, and news media. Using compressed transformer models and Llama-3-8B for annotation, we classify sentiment across heterogeneous text domains. Our pipeline handles long-form and short-form text, supports consistent annotation, and enables reproducible evaluation. We benchmark five models (DistilRoBERTa, DistilBERT, MiniLM, ELECTRA, TinyBERT) using stratified 5-fold cross-validation, reporting F1-score, AUC, and training time. DistilRoBERTa achieved the highest F1 (0.8292), TinyBERT the best efficiency, and MiniLM the best cross-platform consistency. Results show News data yields inflated performance due to class imbalance, Reddit suffers from summarization loss, and Twitter offers moderate challenge. Compressed models perform competitively, challenging assumptions that larger models are necessary. We identify platform-specific trade-offs and propose directions for scalable, real-world sentiment classification in urban planning discourse.

Developing professional, structured reasoning on par with human financial analysts and traders remains a central challenge in AI for finance, where markets demand interpretability and trust. Traditional time-series models lack explainability, while LLMs face challenges in turning natural-language analysis into disciplined, executable trades. Although reasoning LLMs have advanced in step-by-step planning and verification, their application to risk-sensitive financial decisions is underexplored. We present Trading-R1, a financially-aware model that incorporates strategic thinking and planning for comprehensive thesis composition, facts-grounded analysis, and volatility-adjusted decision making. Trading-R1 aligns reasoning with trading principles through supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with a three-stage easy-to-hard curriculum. Training uses Tauric-TR1-DB, a 100k-sample corpus spanning 18 months, 14 equities, and five heterogeneous financial data sources. Evaluated on six major equities and ETFs, Trading-R1 demonstrates improved risk-adjusted returns and lower drawdowns compared to both open-source and proprietary instruction-following models as well as reasoning models. The system generates structured, evidence-based investment theses that support disciplined and interpretable trading decisions. Trading-R1 Terminal will be released at https://github.com/TauricResearch/Trading-R1.

Multilingual language models are trained on a fixed set of languages, and to support new languages, the models need to be retrained from scratch. This is an expensive endeavor and is often infeasible, as model developers tend not to release their pre-training data. Naive approaches, such as continued pretraining, suffer from catastrophic forgetting; however, mitigation strategies like experience replay cannot be applied due to the lack of original pretraining data. In this work, we investigate the problem of continually adding new languages to a multilingual model, assuming access to pretraining data in only the target languages. We explore multiple approaches to address this problem and propose Layer-Selective LoRA (LayRA), which adds Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) to selected initial and final layers while keeping the rest of the model frozen. LayRA builds on two insights: (1) LoRA reduces forgetting, and (2) multilingual models encode inputs in the source language in the initial layers, reason in English in intermediate layers, and translate back to the source language in final layers. We experiment with adding multiple combinations of Galician, Swahili, and Urdu to pretrained language models and evaluate each method on diverse multilingual tasks. We find that LayRA provides the overall best tradeoff between preserving models' capabilities in previously supported languages, while being competitive with existing approaches such as LoRA in learning new languages. We also demonstrate that using model arithmetic, the adapted models can be equipped with strong instruction following abilities without access to any instruction tuning data in the target languages.

Existing AI system benchmarks such as MLPerf often struggle to keep pace with the rapidly evolving AI landscape, making it difficult to support informed deployment, optimization, and co-design decisions for AI systems. We suggest that benchmarking itself can be framed as an AI task--one in which models are continuously evaluated and optimized across diverse datasets, software, and hardware, using key metrics such as accuracy, latency, throughput, energy consumption, and cost. To support this perspective, we present FlexBench: a modular extension of the MLPerf LLM inference benchmark, integrated with Hugging Face and designed to provide relevant and actionable insights. Benchmarking results and metadata are collected into an Open MLPerf Dataset, which can be collaboratively curated, extended, and leveraged for predictive modeling and feature engineering. The broader objective is to enable practitioners to make cost-effective AI deployment decisions that reflect their available resources, requirements, and constraints.

A red team simulates adversary attacks to help defenders find effective strategies to defend their systems in a real-world operational setting. As more enterprise systems adopt AI, red-teaming will need to evolve to address the unique vulnerabilities and risks posed by AI systems. We take the position that AI systems can be more effectively red-teamed if AI red-teaming is recognized as a domain-specific evolution of cyber red-teaming. Specifically, we argue that existing Cyber Red Teams who adopt this framing will be able to better evaluate systems with AI components by recognizing that AI poses new risks, has new failure modes to exploit, and often contains unpatchable bugs that re-prioritize disclosure and mitigation strategies. Similarly, adopting a cybersecurity framing will allow existing AI Red Teams to leverage a well-tested structure to emulate realistic adversaries, promote mutual accountability with formal rules of engagement, and provide a pattern to mature the tooling necessary for repeatable, scalable engagements. In these ways, the merging of AI and Cyber Red Teams will create a robust security ecosystem and best position the community to adapt to the rapidly changing threat landscape.

In the era of large language model, relation extraction (RE) plays an important role in information extraction through the transformation of unstructured raw text into structured data (Wadhwa et al., 2023). In this paper, we systematically compare the performance of deep supervised learning approaches without transformers and those with transformers. We used a series of non-transformer architectures such as PA-LSTM(Zhang et al., 2017), C-GCN(Zhang et al., 2018), and AGGCN(attention guide GCN)(Guo et al., 2019), and a series of transformer architectures such as BERT, RoBERTa, and R-BERT(Wu and He, 2019). Our comparison included traditional metrics like micro F1, as well as evaluations in different scenarios, varying sentence lengths, and different percentages of the dataset for training. Our experiments were conducted on TACRED, TACREV, and RE-TACRED. The results show that transformer-based models outperform non-transformer models, achieving micro F1 scores of 80-90% compared to 64-67% for non-transformer models. Additionally, we briefly review the research journey in supervised relation classification and discuss the role and current status of large language models (LLMs) in relation extraction.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI-driven music generation has become a vibrant and fruitful area of research. However, the representation of musical data remains a significant challenge. To address this, a novel, machine-learning-friendly music notation system, YNote, was developed. This study leverages YNote to train an effective classification model capable of distinguishing whether a piece of music was composed by a human (Native), a rule-based algorithm (Algorithm Generated), or an LLM (LLM Generated). We frame this as a text classification problem, applying the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm to extract structural features from YNote sequences and using the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) to address data imbalance. The resulting model achieves an accuracy of 98.25%, successfully demonstrating that YNote retains sufficient stylistic information for analysis. More importantly, the model can identify the unique " technological fingerprints " left by different AI generation techniques, providing a powerful tool for tracing the origins of AI-generated content.

We present our systems for Track 2 (General Arabic Health QA, MedArabiQ) of the AraHealthQA-2025 shared task, where our methodology secured 2nd place in both Sub-Task 1 (multiple-choice question answering) and Sub-Task 2 (open-ended question answering) in Arabic clinical contexts. For Sub-Task 1, we leverage the Gemini 2.5 Flash model with few-shot prompting, dataset preprocessing, and an ensemble of three prompt configurations to improve classification accuracy on standard, biased, and fill-in-the-blank questions. For Sub-Task 2, we employ a unified prompt with the same model, incorporating role-playing as an Arabic medical expert, few-shot examples, and post-processing to generate concise responses across fill-in-the-blank, patient-doctor Q&A, GEC, and paraphrased variants.