Large Language Model
Evaluating the AI-Lab Intervention: Impact on Student Perception and Use of Generative AI in Early Undergraduate Computer Science Courses
Dickey, Ethan, Bejarano, Andres, Kuperus, Rhianna, Fagundes, Bárbara
Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly entering computer science education, yet its effects on student learning, skill development, and perceptions remain underexplored. Concerns about overreliance coexist with a gap in research on structured scaffolding to guide tool use in formal courses. This study examines the impact of a dedicated "AI-Lab" intervention -- emphasizing guided scaffolding and mindful engagement -- on undergraduate students in Data Structures and Algorithms, Competitive Programming, and first-year engineering courses at Purdue University. Over three semesters, we integrated AI-Lab modules into four mandatory and elective courses, yielding 831 matched pre- and post-intervention survey responses, alongside focus group discussions. Employing a mixed-methods approach, we analyzed quantitative shifts in usage patterns and attitudes as well as qualitative narratives of student experiences. While the overall frequency of GenAI usage for homework or programming projects remained largely stable, we observed large effect sizes in comfort and openness across conceptual, debugging, and homework problems. Notably, usage patterns for debugging also shifted statistically significantly, reflecting students' more mindful and deliberate approach. Focus group discussions corroborated these results, suggesting that the intervention "bridged the gap" between naive GenAI usage and more nuanced, reflective integration of AI tools into coursework, ultimately heightening students' awareness of their own skill development. These findings suggest that structured, scaffolded interventions can enable students to harness GenAI's benefits without undermining essential competencies. We offer evidence-based recommendations for educators seeking to integrate GenAI responsibly into computing curricula and identify avenues for future research on GenAI-supported pedagogy.
ConSens: Assessing context grounding in open-book question answering
Vankov, Ivan, Ivanov, Matyo, Correia, Adriana, Botev, Victor
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable success in open-book question answering (QA), where the task requires generating answers grounded in a provided external context. A critical challenge in open-book QA is to ensure that model responses are based on the provided context rather than its parametric knowledge, which can be outdated, incomplete, or incorrect. Existing evaluation methods, primarily based on the LLM-as-a-judge approach, face significant limitations, including biases, scalability issues, and dependence on costly external systems. To address these challenges, we propose a novel metric that contrasts the perplexity of the model response under two conditions: when the context is provided and when it is not. The resulting score quantifies the extent to which the model's answer relies on the provided context. The validity of this metric is demonstrated through a series of experiments that show its effectiveness in identifying whether a given answer is grounded in the provided context. Unlike existing approaches, this metric is computationally efficient, interpretable, and adaptable to various use cases, offering a scalable and practical solution to assess context utilization in open-book QA systems.
Enhancing Security and Strengthening Defenses in Automated Short-Answer Grading Systems
Yarmohammadtoosky, Sahar, Zhou, Yiyun, Yaneva, Victoria, Baldwin, Peter, Rezayi, Saed, Clauser, Brian, Harikeo, Polina
This study examines vulnerabilities in transformer-based automated short-answer grading systems used in medical education, with a focus on how these systems can be manipulated through adversarial gaming strategies. Our research identifies three main types of gaming strategies that exploit the system's weaknesses, potentially leading to false positives. To counteract these vulnerabilities, we implement several adversarial training methods designed to enhance the systems' robustness. Our results indicate that these methods significantly reduce the susceptibility of grading systems to such manipulations, especially when combined with ensemble techniques like majority voting and ridge regression, which further improve the system's defense against sophisticated adversarial inputs. Additionally, employing large language models such as GPT-4 with varied prompting techniques has shown promise in recognizing and scoring gaming strategies effectively. The findings underscore the importance of continuous improvements in AI-driven educational tools to ensure their reliability and fairness in high-stakes settings.
Fact-Consistency Evaluation of Text-to-SQL Generation for Business Intelligence Using Exaone 3.5
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in enabling natural language interfaces for structured data querying through text-to-SQL generation. However, their application in real-world Business Intelligence (BI) contexts remains limited due to semantic hallucinations, structural errors, and a lack of domain-specific evaluation frameworks. In this study, we propose a Fact-Consistency Evaluation Framework for assessing the semantic accuracy of LLM-generated SQL outputs using Exaone 3.5--an instruction-tuned, bilingual LLM optimized for enterprise tasks. We construct a domain-specific benchmark comprising 219 natural language business questions across five SQL complexity levels, derived from actual sales data in LG Electronics' internal BigQuery environment. Each question is paired with a gold-standard SQL query and a validated ground-truth answer. We evaluate model performance using answer accuracy, execution success rate, semantic error rate, and non-response rate. Experimental results show that while Exaone 3.5 performs well on simple aggregation tasks (93% accuracy in L1), it exhibits substantial degradation in arithmetic reasoning (4% accuracy in H1) and grouped ranking tasks (31% in H4), with semantic errors and non-responses concentrated in complex cases. Qualitative error analysis further identifies common failure types such as misapplied arithmetic logic, incomplete filtering, and incorrect grouping operations. Our findings highlight the current limitations of LLMs in business-critical environments and underscore the need for fact-consistency validation layers and hybrid reasoning approaches. This work contributes a reproducible benchmark and evaluation methodology for advancing reliable natural language interfaces to structured enterprise data systems.
A Report on the llms evaluating the high school questions
This report aims to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) in solving high school science questions and to explore their potential applications in the educational field. With the rapid development of LLMs in the field of natural language processing, their application in education has attracted widespread attention. This study selected mathematics exam questions from the college entrance examinations (2019-2023) as evaluation data and utilized at least eight LLM APIs to provide answers. A comprehensive assessment was conducted based on metrics such as accuracy, response time, logical reasoning, and creativity. Through an in-depth analysis of the evaluation results, this report reveals the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs in handling high school science questions and discusses their implications for educational practice. The findings indicate that although LLMs perform excellently in certain aspects, there is still room for improvement in logical reasoning and creative problem-solving. This report provides an empirical foundation for further research and application of LLMs in the educational field and offers suggestions for improvement.
Humanizing LLMs: A Survey of Psychological Measurements with Tools, Datasets, and Human-Agent Applications
Dong, Wenhan, Zhao, Yuemeng, Sun, Zhen, Liu, Yule, Peng, Zifan, Zheng, Jingyi, Zhang, Zongmin, Zhang, Ziyi, Wu, Jun, Wang, Ruiming, Xu, Shengmin, Huang, Xinyi, He, Xinlei
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in human-centered tasks, assessing their psychological traits is crucial for understanding their social impact and ensuring trustworthy AI alignment. While existing reviews have covered some aspects of related research, several important areas have not been systematically discussed, including detailed discussions of diverse psychological tests, LLM-specific psychological datasets, and the applications of LLMs with psychological traits. To address this gap, we systematically review six key dimensions of applying psychological theories to LLMs: (1) assessment tools; (2) LLM-specific datasets; (3) evaluation metrics (consistency and stability); (4) empirical findings; (5) personality simulation methods; and (6) LLM-based behavior simulation. Our analysis highlights both the strengths and limitations of current methods. While some LLMs exhibit reproducible personality patterns under specific prompting schemes, significant variability remains across tasks and settings. Recognizing methodological challenges such as mismatches between psychological tools and LLMs' capabilities, as well as inconsistencies in evaluation practices, this study aims to propose future directions for developing more interpretable, robust, and generalizable psychological assessment frameworks for LLMs.
A Framework to Assess the Persuasion Risks Large Language Model Chatbots Pose to Democratic Societies
Chen, Zhongren, Kalla, Joshua, Le, Quan, Nakamura-Sakai, Shinpei, Sekhon, Jasjeet, Wang, Ruixiao
In recent years, significant concern has emerged regarding the potential threat that Large Language Models (LLMs) pose to democratic societies through their persuasive capabilities. We expand upon existing research by conducting two survey experiments and a real-world simulation exercise to determine whether it is more cost effective to persuade a large number of voters using LLM chatbots compared to standard political campaign practice, taking into account both the "receive" and "accept" steps in the persuasion process (Zaller 1992). These experiments improve upon previous work by assessing extended interactions between humans and LLMs (instead of using single-shot interactions) and by assessing both short-and long-run persuasive effects (rather than simply asking users to rate the persuasiveness of LLM-produced content). In two survey experiments (N = 10,417) across three distinct political domains, we find that while LLMs are about as persuasive as actual campaign ads once voters are exposed to them, political persuasion in the real-world depends on both exposure to a persuasive message and its impact conditional on exposure. Through simulations based on real-world parameters, we estimate that LLM-based persuasion costs between $48-$74 per persuaded voter compared to $100 for traditional campaign methods, when accounting for the costs of exposure. However, it is currently much easier to scale traditional campaign persuasion methods than LLM-based persuasion. While LLMs do not currently appear to have substantially greater potential for large-scale political persuasion than existing non-LLM methods, this may change as LLM capabilities continue to improve and it becomes easier to scalably encourage exposure to persuasive LLMs. This research was deemed exempt by the Y ale University Human Subjects Committee.
MDD-LLM: Towards Accuracy Large Language Models for Major Depressive Disorder Diagnosis
Sha, Yuyang, Pan, Hongxin, Xu, Wei, Meng, Weiyu, Luo, Gang, Du, Xinyu, Zhai, Xiaobing, Tong, Henry H. Y., Shi, Caijuan, Li, Kefeng
Major depressive disorder (MDD) impacts more than 300 million people worldwide, highlighting a significant public health issue. However, the uneven distribution of medical resources and the complexity of diagnostic methods have resulted in inadequate attention to this disorder in numerous countries and regions. This paper introduces a high-performance MDD diagnosis tool named MDD-LLM, an AI-driven framework that utilizes fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) and extensive real-world samples to tackle challenges in MDD diagnosis. Therefore, we select 274,348 individual information from the UK Biobank cohort to train and evaluate the proposed method. Specifically, we select 274,348 individual records from the UK Biobank cohort and design a tabular data transformation method to create a large corpus for training and evaluating the proposed approach. To illustrate the advantages of MDD-LLM, we perform comprehensive experiments and provide several comparative analyses against existing model-based solutions across multiple evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that MDD-LLM (70B) achieves an accuracy of 0.8378 and an AUC of 0.8919 (95% CI: 0.8799 - 0.9040), significantly outperforming existing machine learning and deep learning frameworks for MDD diagnosis. Given the limited exploration of LLMs in MDD diagnosis, we examine numerous factors that may influence the performance of our proposed method, such as tabular data transformation techniques and different fine-tuning strategies.
CORG: Generating Answers from Complex, Interrelated Contexts
Lee, Hyunji, Dernoncourt, Franck, Bui, Trung, Yoon, Seunghyun
In a real-world corpus, knowledge frequently recurs across documents but often contains inconsistencies due to ambiguous naming, outdated information, or errors, leading to complex interrelationships between contexts. Previous research has shown that language models struggle with these complexities, typically focusing on single factors in isolation. We classify these relationships into four types: distracting, ambiguous, counterfactual, and duplicated. Our analysis reveals that no single approach effectively addresses all these interrelationships simultaneously. Therefore, we introduce Context Organizer (CORG), a framework that organizes multiple contexts into independently processed groups. This design allows the model to efficiently find all relevant answers while ensuring disambiguation. CORG consists of three key components: a graph constructor, a reranker, and an aggregator. Our results demonstrate that CORG balances performance and efficiency effectively, outperforming existing grouping methods and achieving comparable results to more computationally intensive, single-context approaches.
Ustnlp16 at SemEval-2025 Task 9: Improving Model Performance through Imbalance Handling and Focal Loss
Cai, Zhuoang, Li, Zhenghao, Liu, Yang, Guo, Liyuan, Song, Yangqiu
Classification tasks often suffer from imbal- anced data distribution, which presents chal- lenges in food hazard detection due to severe class imbalances, short and unstructured text, and overlapping semantic categories. In this paper, we present our system for SemEval- 2025 Task 9: Food Hazard Detection, which ad- dresses these issues by applying data augmenta- tion techniques to improve classification perfor- mance. We utilize transformer-based models, BERT and RoBERTa, as backbone classifiers and explore various data balancing strategies, including random oversampling, Easy Data Augmentation (EDA), and focal loss. Our ex- periments show that EDA effectively mitigates class imbalance, leading to significant improve- ments in accuracy and F1 scores. Furthermore, combining focal loss with oversampling and EDA further enhances model robustness, par- ticularly for hard-to-classify examples. These findings contribute to the development of more effective NLP-based classification models for food hazard detection.