In human society, trust is an essential component of social attitude that helps build and maintain long-term, healthy relationships which creates a strong foundation for cooperation, enabling individuals to work together effectively and achieve shared goals. As many human interactions occur through electronic means such as using mobile apps, the potential arises for AI systems to assist users in understanding the social state of their relationships. In this paper we investigate the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason about trust between two individuals in an environment which requires fostering trust relationships. We also assess whether LLMs are capable of inducing trust by role-playing one party in a trust based interaction and planning actions which can instil trust.

As generative AI (Gen-AI) tools become more prevalent in education, there is a growing need to understand how educators, not just students, can actively shape their design and use. This study investigates how two instructors integrated four custom GPT tools into a Masters-level Qualitative Research Methods course for Urban Planning Policy students. Addressing two key gaps: the dominant framing of students as passive AI users, and the limited use of AI in qualitative methods education. The study explores how Gen-AI can support disciplinary learning when aligned with pedagogical intent. Drawing on the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework and action research methodology, the instructors designed GPTs to scaffold tasks such as research question formulation, interview practice, fieldnote analysis, and design thinking. Thematic analysis of student reflections, AI chat logs, and final assignments revealed that the tools enhanced student reflexivity, improved interview techniques, and supported structured analytic thinking. However, students also expressed concerns about cognitive overload, reduced immersion in data, and the formulaic nature of AI responses. The study offers three key insights: AI can be a powerful scaffold for active learning when paired with human facilitation; custom GPTs can serve as cognitive partners in iterative research practice; and educator-led design is critical to pedagogically meaningful AI integration. This research contributes to emerging scholarship on AI in higher education by demonstrating how empowering educators to design custom tools can promote more reflective, responsible, and collaborative learning with AI.

Mobile GUI agents are becoming critical tools for enhancing human-device interaction efficiency, with multimodal large language models (MLLMs) emerging as dominant paradigms in this domain. Current agents, however, are limited to following explicit human instructions, resulting in insufficient capability for proactive intent anticipation. Additionally, these agents fail to leverage the contextual information associated with users during task execution, thereby neglecting potentially vast differences in user preferences. To address these challenges, we introduce the FingerTip benchmark. It contains two new tracks: proactive task suggestions by analyzing environment observation and users' previous intents, and personalized task execution by catering to users' action preferences. We collected unique human demonstrations of multi-step Android device interactions across a variety of everyday apps. These demonstrations are not isolated but are continuously acquired from the users' long-term usage in their real lives, and encompass essential user-related contextual information. Our experiments reveal challenges of the tasks we propose. The model fine-tuned with the data we collected effectively utilized user information and achieved good results, highlighting the potential of our approach in building more user-oriented mobile GUI agents. Our code is open-source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FingerTip-57B8 for reproducibility.

Data contracts formalize agreements between data producers and consumers regarding schema, semantics, and quality expectations. As data pipelines grow in complexity, manual authoring and maintenance of contracts becomes error-prone and labor-intensive. We present an AI-driven framework for automatic data contract generation using large language models (LLMs). Our system leverages parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, including LoRA and PEFT, to adapt LLMs to structured data domains. The models take sample data or schema descriptions and output validated contract definitions in formats such as JSON Schema and Avro. We integrate this framework into modern data platforms (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake) to automate contract enforcement at scale. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the fine-tuned LLMs achieve high accuracy in generating valid contracts and reduce manual workload by over 70%. We also discuss key challenges such as hallucination, version control, and the need for continuous learning. This work demonstrates that generative AI can enable scalable, agile data governance by bridging the gap between intent and implementation in enterprise data management.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform tasks by conditioning on input-output examples in the prompt, without requiring any update in model parameters. While widely adopted, it remains unclear whether prompting with multiple examples is the most effective and efficient way to convey task information. In this work, we propose Soft Injection of task embeddings. The task embeddings are constructed only once using few-shot ICL prompts and repeatedly used during inference. Soft injection is performed by softly mixing task embeddings with attention head activations using pre-optimized mixing parameters, referred to as soft head-selection parameters. This method not only allows a desired task to be performed without in-prompt demonstrations but also significantly outperforms existing ICL approaches while reducing memory usage and compute cost at inference time. An extensive evaluation is performed across 57 tasks and 12 LLMs, spanning four model families of sizes from 4B to 70B. Averaged across 57 tasks, our method outperforms 10-shot ICL by 10.2%-14.3% across 12 LLMs. Additional analyses show that our method also serves as an insightful tool for analyzing task-relevant roles of attention heads, revealing that task-relevant head positions selected by our method transfer across similar tasks but not across dissimilar ones -- underscoring the task-specific nature of head functionality. Our soft injection method opens a new paradigm for reducing prompt length and improving task performance by shifting task conditioning from the prompt space to the activation space.

T ext-to-Image (T2I) generative models have revolutionized content creation but remain highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, often requiring users to repeatedly refine prompts multiple times without clear feedback. While techniques such as automatic prompt engineering, controlled text em-beddings, denoising, and multi-turn generation mitigate these issues, they offer limited controllability, or often necessitate additional training, restricting the generalization abilities. Thus, we introduce T2I-Copilot, a training-free multi-agent system that leverages collaboration between (Multimodal) Large Language Models to automate prompt phrasing, model selection, and iterative refinement. This approach significantly simplifies prompt engineering while enhancing generation quality and text-image alignment compared to direct generation. Specifically, T2I-Copilot consists of three agents: (1) Input Interpreter, which parses the input prompt, resolves ambiguities, and generates a standardized report; (2) Generation Engine, which selects the appropriate model from different types of T2I models and organizes visual and textual prompts to initiate generation; and (3) Quality Evaluator, which assesses aesthetic quality and text-image alignment, providing scores and feedback for potential regeneration. T2I-Copilot can operate fully autonomously while also supporting human-in-the-loop intervention for fine-grained control. On GenAI-Bench, using open-source generation models, T2I-Copilot achieves a VQA score comparable to commercial models RecraftV3 and Imagen 3, surpasses FLUX1.1-pro by 6.17% at only 16.59% of its cost, and outperforms FLUX.1-dev and SD 3.5 Large by 9.11% and 6.36%.

Generative AI can now synthesize strikingly realistic images from text, yet output quality remains highly sensitive to how prompts are phrased. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) offers a lightweight, off-policy alternative to RL for automatic prompt engineering, but its token-level regularization leaves semantic inconsistency unchecked as prompts that win higher preference scores can still drift away from the user's intended meaning. We introduce Sem-DPO, a variant of DPO that preserves semantic consistency yet retains its simplicity and efficiency. Sem-DPO adjusts the DPO loss using a weight based on how different the winning prompt is from the original, reducing the impact of training examples that are semantically misaligned. We provide the first analytical bound on semantic drift for preference-tuned prompt generators, showing that Sem-DPO keeps learned prompts within a provably bounded neighborhood of the original text. On three standard text-to-image prompt-optimization benchmarks and two language models, Sem-DPO achieves 8-12% higher CLIP similarity and 5-9% higher human-preference scores (HPSv2.1, PickScore) than DPO, while also outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. These findings suggest that strong flat baselines augmented with semantic weighting should become the new standard for prompt-optimization studies and lay the groundwork for broader, semantics-aware preference optimization in language models.

Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and BERT have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), yet their environmental costs remain dangerously overlooked. This article critiques the sustainability of LLMs, quantifying their carbon footprint, water usage, and contribution to e-waste through case studies of models such as GPT-4 and energy-efficient alternatives like Mistral 7B. Training a single LLM can emit carbon dioxide equivalent to hundreds of cars driven annually, while data centre cooling exacerbates water scarcity in vulnerable regions. Systemic challenges corporate greenwashing, redundant model development, and regulatory voids perpetuate harm, disproportionately burdening marginalized communities in the Global South. However, pathways exist for sustainable NLP: technical innovations (e.g., model pruning, quantum computing), policy reforms (carbon taxes, mandatory emissions reporting), and cultural shifts prioritizing necessity over novelty. By analysing industry leaders (Google, Microsoft) and laggards (Amazon), this work underscores the urgency of ethical accountability and global cooperation. Without immediate action, AIs ecological toll risks outpacing its societal benefits. The article concludes with a call to align technological progress with planetary boundaries, advocating for equitable, transparent, and regenerative AI systems that prioritize both human and environmental well-being.

Using g eneralizability t heory, the research evaluates and compares score consistency between human and AI raters across two types of AP Chinese free - response writing tasks: story narration and email response. These essays were independently scored by two trained human raters and seven AI raters. Each essay received four scores: one holistic score and three analytic scores corres ponding to the domains of task completion, delivery, and language use. Results indicate that although human raters produced more reliable scores overall, LLMs demonstrated reasonable consistency under certain conditions, particularly for story narration tasks. Composite scoring that incorporates both human and AI raters improved reliability, which supports that hybrid scoring models may offer benefits for large - scale writing assessments. Keywords: large language model; a utomated essay s coring; generalizability theory; w riting a ssessment; AI - h uman c omparison 2 Exploring LLM Autoscoring Reliability in Large - Scale Writing Assessments Using Generalizability Theory The integration of large language models (LLMs) into a utomated e ssay s coring (AES) represents a significant shift in how essay scoring is approached. While traditional AES systems have long depended on manually engineered features and statistical models (Attali & Burstein, 2006; Dikli, 2006), LLMs offer the potential to assess student writing with greater flexibility and contextual sensitivi ty by drawing on deep learning architectures trained on diverse textual corpora ( Ifenthaler, 2022; Ouyang et al., 2022). However, despite their promising capabilities, recent studies indic ate that LLMs have not yet consistently matched the scoring reliability of established AES tools or trained human raters, especially in high - stakes language assessment contexts (Mizumoto & Eguchi, 2023; Xiao et al., 2025; Y ancey et al., 2023). These concerns highlight the need for rigorous evaluation of LLM - based scoring systems, particularly with respect to their reliability and alignment with human scoring standards. This study addresses these challenges by applying generalizability theory to systematical ly examine the consistency of LLM - generated scores on standardized writing tasks in the AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam (AP Chinese Exam) . Literature Review This section reviews the literature on AES and the application of LLMs to AES. It also provides brief overviews of generalizability theory and the AP Chinese Language and Culture Exam, followed by the research questions addressed in this study.

-- Resolution of i ncidents or problem tickets is a common theme in service industries in any sector, including billing and charging systems in telecom domain. Machine learning can help to identify patterns and suggest resolutions for the problem tickets, based on patterns in the historical data of the tickets . However, this process may be complicated due to a variety of phenomena such as data drift and issues such as missing data, lack of data pertaining to resolutions of past incidents, too many similar sound ing resolutions due to free text and similar sounding text . This paper proposes a robust ML - driven solution employing clustering, supervised learning, and advanced NLP models to tackle these challenges effectively. Building on previous work, w e demonstrate clustering - based resolution identification, supervised classification with LDA, Siamese networks, and One - shot learning, Index embedding . Additionally, we present a real - time dashboard and a highly available Kubernetes - based production deployment. Our experiments with both the open - source Bitext customer - support dataset and proprietary telecom datasets demonstrate high prediction accuracy. The problem of recommend ing resolutions for problem tickets or incidents on the basis of historical data is an important problem for service users, including telecom operators. Typically, service desks have dedicated manual teams that perform triaging of the issues and root cause analysis, and recommending a solution can take several hours end to end. Using machine learning models to recommend resolutions can save significant time and manpower of the operators by recommending solutions based on historical i ncident data. However, real - world application involves addressing several practical challenges: Diverse ticketing formats across service desks.