Tariff exemptions are fundamental to attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the manufacturing sector, though the associated administrative processes present areas for optimization for both investing entities and the national tax authority. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to empower tax administration by leveraging a synergistic integration of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies. The proposed system is designed to first utilize OCR for intelligent digitization, precisely extracting data from diverse application documents and key regulatory texts such as tariff orders. Subsequently, the LLM would enhance the capabilities of administrative officers by automating the critical and time-intensive task of verifying submitted HS Tariff Codes for machinery, equipment, and raw materials against official exemption lists. By enhancing the speed and precision of these initial assessments, this AI-driven approach systematically reduces potential for non-alignment and non-optimized exemption utilization, thereby streamlining the investment journey for FDI companies. For the national administration, the benefits include a significant boost in operational capacity, reduced administrative load, and a strengthened control environment, ultimately improving the ease of doing business and solidifying the nation's appeal as a premier destination for high-value manufacturing FDI.

A comprehensive understanding of traffic accidents is essential for improving city safety and informing policy decisions. In this study, we analyze traffic incidents in Munich to identify patterns and characteristics that distinguish different types of accidents. The dataset consists of both structured tabular features, such as location, time, and weather conditions, as well as unstructured free-text descriptions detailing the circumstances of each accident. Each incident is categorized into one of seven predefined classes. To assess the reliability of these labels, we apply NLP methods, including topic modeling and few-shot learning, which reveal inconsistencies in the labeling process. These findings highlight potential ambiguities in accident classification and motivate a refined predictive approach. Building on these insights, we develop a classification model that achieves high accuracy in assigning accidents to their respective categories. Our results demonstrate that textual descriptions contain the most informative features for classification, while the inclusion of tabular data provides only marginal improvements. These findings emphasize the critical role of free-text data in accident analysis and highlight the potential of transformer-based models in improving classification reliability.

This paper introduces ChatbotManip, a novel dataset for studying manipulation in Chatbots. It contains simulated generated conversations between a chatbot and a (simulated) user, where the chatbot is explicitly asked to showcase manipulation tactics, persuade the user towards some goal, or simply be helpful. We consider a diverse set of chatbot manipulation contexts, from consumer and personal advice to citizen advice and controversial proposition argumentation. Each conversation is annotated by human annotators for both general manipulation and specific manipulation tactics. Our research reveals three key findings. First, Large Language Models (LLMs) can be manipulative when explicitly instructed, with annotators identifying manipulation in approximately 84\% of such conversations. Second, even when only instructed to be ``persuasive'' without explicit manipulation prompts, LLMs frequently default to controversial manipulative strategies, particularly gaslighting and fear enhancement. Third, small fine-tuned open source models, such as BERT+BiLSTM have a performance comparable to zero-shot classification with larger models like Gemini 2.5 pro in detecting manipulation, but are not yet reliable for real-world oversight. Our work provides important insights for AI safety research and highlights the need of addressing manipulation risks as LLMs are increasingly deployed in consumer-facing applications.

Recently, Large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise across a diversity of tasks, ranging from generating images to reasoning spatially. Considering their remarkable (and growing) textual reasoning capabilities, we investigate LLMs' potency in conducting analyses of an individual's preferences in music (based on playlist metadata, personal write-ups, etc.) and producing effective prompts (based on these analyses) to be passed to Suno AI (a generative AI tool for music production). Our proposition of a novel LLM-based textual representation to music model (which we call TuneGenie) and the various methods we develop to evaluate & benchmark similar models add to the increasing (and increasingly controversial) corpus of research on the use of AI in generating art.

Understanding how complex societal behaviors emerge from individual cognition and interactions requires both high-fidelity modeling of human behavior and large-scale simulations. Traditional agent-based models (ABMs) have been employed to study these dynamics for decades, but are constrained by simplified agent behaviors that fail to capture human complexity. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities by enabling agents to exhibit sophisticated social behaviors that go beyond rule-based logic, yet face significant scaling challenges. Here we present Light Society, an agent-based simulation framework that advances both fronts, efficiently modeling human-like societies at planetary scale powered by LLMs. Light Society formalizes social processes as structured transitions of agent and environment states, governed by a set of LLM-powered simulation operations, and executed through an event queue. This modular design supports both independent and joint component optimization, supporting efficient simulation of societies with over one billion agents. Large-scale simulations of trust games and opinion propagation--spanning up to one billion agents--demonstrate Light Society's high fidelity and efficiency in modeling social trust and information diffusion, while revealing scaling laws whereby larger simulations yield more stable and realistic emergent behaviors.

These authors contributed equally to this work. Abstract --As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into online platforms and digital communication spaces, their potential to influence public discourse--particularly in contentious domains like climate change--demands systematic investigation. This study examines how LLMs naturally moderate climate change conversations through their distinct communicative behaviors, offering insights into their role as facilitators of civil discourse. We conducted a comparative analysis of conversational patterns between LLMs and human participants in climate change discussions across social media platforms. Our investigation employed five state-of-the-art models: three open-source LLMs (Gemma, Llama 3, and Llama 3.3) and two commercial systems (GPT -4o by OpenAI and Claude 3.5 by Anthropic). Through sentiment analysis, we assessed the emotional characteristics and discourse patterns exhibited by both LLMs and human users. Our findings reveal two key mechanisms through which LLMs moderate climate change conversations: First, LLMs consistently demonstrate emotional neutrality, with their responses significantly dominated by neutral sentiment compared to human participants who exhibit more polarized emotional expressions. Second, LLMs maintain notably lower emotional intensity across all interaction contexts, creating a stabilizing effect on conversational dynamics. These results suggest that LLMs possess inherent moderating capabilities that could enhance the quality of public discourse on controversial topics. By maintaining emotional equilibrium and reducing inflammatory rhetoric, LLMs may serve as valuable tools for fostering more constructive and civil climate change conversations online. This research contributes to our understanding of AI's potential role in improving digital discourse and offers implications for the design of AI-mediated communication platforms.

Accurate alignment of dysfluent speech with intended text is crucial for automating the diagnosis of neurodegenerative speech disorders. Traditional methods often fail to model phoneme similarities effectively, limiting their performance. In this work, we propose Neural LCS, a novel approach for dysflu-ent text-text and speech-text alignment. Neural LCS addresses key challenges, including partial alignment and context-aware similarity mapping, by leveraging robust phoneme-level modeling. We evaluate our method on a large-scale simulated dataset, generated using advanced data simulation techniques, and real PP A data. Neural LCS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in both alignment accuracy and dysfluent speech segmentation. Our results demonstrate the potential of Neural LCS to enhance automated systems for diagnosing and analyzing speech disorders, offering a more accurate and linguistically grounded solution for dysfluent speech alignment.

Digital technologies are increasingly used in education to reduce the workload of teachers and students. However, creating open-ended study or examination questions and grading their answers is still a tedious task. This thesis presents the foundation for a system that generates questions grounded in class materials and automatically grades student answers. It introduces a sophisticated method for chunking documents with a visual layout, specifically targeting PDF documents. This method enhances the accuracy of downstream tasks, including Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Our thesis demonstrates that high-quality questions and reference answers can be generated from study material. Further, it introduces a new benchmark for automated grading of short answers to facilitate comparison of automated grading systems. An evaluation of various grading systems is conducted and indicates that Large Language Models (LLMs) can generalise to the task of automated grading of short answers from their pre-training tasks. As with other tasks, increasing the parameter size of the LLMs leads to greater performance. Currently, available systems still need human oversight, especially in examination scenarios.

In real-world applications, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems must handle overlapping speech from multiple speakers and recognize rare words like technical terms. Traditional methods address multi-talker ASR and contextual biasing separately, limiting performance in complex scenarios. We propose a unified framework that combines multi-talker overlapping speech recognition and contextual biasing into a single task. Our ASR method integrates pretrained speech encoders and large language models (LLMs), using optimized finetuning strategies. We also introduce a two-stage filtering algorithm to efficiently identify relevant rare words from large biasing lists and incorporate them into the LLM's prompt input, enhancing rare word recognition. Experiments show that our approach outperforms traditional contextual biasing methods, achieving a WER of 7.9% on LibriMix and 32.9% on AMI SDM when the biasing size is 1,000, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex speech scenarios.

Binary quantization represents the most extreme form of large language model (LLM) compression, reducing weights to $\pm$1 for maximal memory and computational efficiency. While recent sparsity-aware binarization methods achieve sub-1-bit compression by pruning redundant binary weights, they suffer from three critical challenges: performance deterioration, computational complexity from sparse mask management, and limited hardware compatibility. In this paper, we present BTC-LLM, a novel sub-1-bit LLM quantization framework that leverages adaptive weight transformation and binary pattern clustering to overcome these limitations, delivering both superior accuracy and efficiency. Our approach incorporates two key innovations: (1) a Learnable Transformation that optimizes invertible scaling and rotation matrices to align binarized weights with full-precision distributions, enabling incoherence processing to enhance layer-wise representation quality; (2) a Flash and Accurate Binary Codebook that identifies recurring binary vector clusters, compressing them into compact indices with tailored distance metrics and sign-based centroid updates. This eliminates the need for sparse masks, enabling efficient inference on standard hardware. Our code is available at https://github.com/Chooovy/BTC-LLM.