Automated Essay Scoring (AES) plays a crucial role in assessing language learners' writing quality, reducing grading workload, and providing real-time feedback. Arabic AES systems are particularly challenged by the lack of annotated essay datasets. This paper presents a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Transformers to generate synthetic Arabic essay datasets for AES. We prompt an LLM to generate essays across CEFR proficiency levels and introduce controlled error injection using a fine-tuned Standard Arabic BERT model for error type prediction. Our approach produces realistic human-like essays, contributing a dataset of 3,040 annotated essays. Additionally, we develop a BERT-based auto-marking system for accurate and scalable Arabic essay evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in improving Arabic AES performance.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that fine-tuning and human alignment can render LLMs harmless. In practice, such "harmlessness" behavior is mainly achieved by training models to reject harmful requests, such as "Explain how to burn down my neighbor's house", where the model appropriately declines to respond. However, this approach can inadvertently result in false refusal, where models reject benign queries as well, such as "Tell me how to kill a Python process". In this work, we demonstrate that prompting safety reflection before generating a response can mitigate false refusal behavior. Building on this finding, we introduce the Think-Before-Refusal (TBR) schema and conduct safety-aware instruction fine-tuning incorporating safety reflection. In an ablation study across 15 pre-trained models, we show that models fine-tuned with safety reflection significantly reduce false refusal behavior while maintaining safety and overall performance compared to those fine-tuned without safety reflection.

Sophisticated phishing attacks have emerged as a major cybersecurity threat, becoming more common and difficult to prevent. Though machine learning techniques have shown promise in detecting phishing attacks, they function mainly as "black boxes" without revealing their decision-making rationale. This lack of transparency erodes the trust of users and diminishes their effective threat response. We present EXPLICATE: a framework that enhances phishing detection through a three-component architecture: an ML-based classifier using domain-specific features, a dual-explanation layer combining LIME and SHAP for complementary feature-level insights, and an LLM enhancement using DeepSeek v3 to translate technical explanations into accessible natural language. Our experiments show that EXPLICATE attains 98.4 % accuracy on all metrics, which is on par with existing deep learning techniques but has better explainability. High-quality explanations are generated by the framework with an accuracy of 94.2 % as well as a consistency of 96.8\% between the LLM output and model prediction. We create EXPLICATE as a fully usable GUI application and a light Chrome extension, showing its applicability in many deployment situations. The research shows that high detection performance can go hand-in-hand with meaningful explainability in security applications. Most important, it addresses the critical divide between automated AI and user trust in phishing detection systems.

The rapid growth of social media platforms has led to concerns about radicalization, filter bubbles, and content bias. Existing approaches to classifying ideology are limited in that they require extensive human effort, the labeling of large datasets, and are not able to adapt to evolving ideological contexts. This paper explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for classifying the political ideology of online content in the context of the two-party US political spectrum through in-context learning (ICL). Our extensive experiments involving demonstration selection in label-balanced fashion, conducted on three datasets comprising news articles and YouTube videos, reveal that our approach significantly outperforms zero-shot and traditional supervised methods. Additionally, we evaluate the influence of metadata (e.g., content source and descriptions) on ideological classification and discuss its implications. Finally, we show how providing the source for political and non-political content influences the LLM's classification.

Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are crucial for identifying malicious traffic, yet traditional signature-based methods struggle with zero-day attacks and high false positive rates. AI-driven packet-capture analysis offers a promising alternative. However, existing approaches rely heavily on flow-based or statistical features, limiting their ability to detect fine-grained attack patterns. This study proposes Xavier-CMAE, an enhanced Convolutional Multi-Head Attention Ensemble (CMAE) model that improves detection accuracy while reducing computational overhead. By replacing Word2Vec embeddings with a Hex2Int tokenizer and Xavier initialization, Xavier-CMAE eliminates pre-training, accelerates training, and achieves 99.971% accuracy with a 0.018% false positive rate, outperforming Word2Vec-based methods. Additionally, we introduce LLM-CMAE, which integrates pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) tokenizers into CMAE. While LLMs enhance feature extraction, their computational cost hinders real-time detection. LLM-CMAE balances efficiency and performance, reaching 99.969% accuracy with a 0.019% false positive rate. This work advances AI-powered IDS by (1) introducing a payload-based detection framework, (2) enhancing efficiency with Xavier-CMAE, and (3) integrating LLM tokenizers for improved real-time detection.

This paper develops a critical theory of artificial intelligence, within a historical constellation where computational systems increasingly generate cultural content that destabilises traditional distinctions between human and machine production. Through this analysis, I introduce the concept of the algorithmic condition, a cultural moment when machine-generated work not only becomes indistinguishable from human creation but actively reshapes our understanding of ideas of authenticity. This transformation, I argue, moves beyond false consciousness towards what I call post-consciousness, where the boundaries between individual and synthetic consciousness become porous. Drawing on critical theory and extending recent work on computational ideology, I develop three key theoretical contributions, first, the concept of the Inversion to describe a new computational turn in algorithmic society; second, automimetric production as a framework for understanding emerging practices of automated value creation; and third, constellational analysis as a methodological approach for mapping the complex interplay of technical systems, cultural forms and political economic structures. Through these contributions, I argue that we need new critical methods capable of addressing both the technical specificity of AI systems and their role in restructuring forms of life under computational capitalism. The paper concludes by suggesting that critical reflexivity is needed to engage with the algorithmic condition without being subsumed by it and that it represents a growing challenge for contemporary critical theory.

Automatic fact-checking aims to support professional fact-checkers by offering tools that can help speed up manual fact-checking. Yet, existing frameworks fail to address the key step of producing output suitable for broader dissemination to the general public: while human fact-checkers communicate their findings through fact-checking articles, automated systems typically produce little or no justification for their assessments. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. We argue for the need to extend the typical automatic fact-checking pipeline with automatic generation of full fact-checking articles. We first identify key desiderata for such articles through a series of interviews with experts from leading fact-checking organizations. We then develop QRAFT, an LLM-based agentic framework that mimics the writing workflow of human fact-checkers. Finally, we assess the practical usefulness of QRAFT through human evaluations with professional fact-checkers. Our evaluation shows that while QRAFT outperforms several previously proposed text-generation approaches, it lags considerably behind expert-written articles. We hope that our work will enable further research in this new and important direction.

Despite recent success in applying large language models (LLMs) to electronic health records (EHR), most systems focus primarily on assessment rather than treatment planning. We identify three critical limitations in current approaches: they generate treatment plans in a single pass rather than following the sequential reasoning process used by clinicians; they rarely incorporate patient-specific historical context; and they fail to effectively distinguish between subjective and objective clinical information. Motivated by the SOAP methodology (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), we introduce MedPlan, a novel framework that structures LLM reasoning to align with real-life clinician workflows. Our approach employs a two-stage architecture that first generates a clinical assessment based on patient symptoms and objective data, then formulates a structured treatment plan informed by this assessment and enriched with patient-specific information through retrieval-augmented generation. Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches in both assessment accuracy and treatment plan quality.

While recent debiasing methods for Scene Graph Generation (SGG) have shown impressive performance, these efforts often attribute model bias solely to the long-tail distribution of relationships, overlooking the more profound causes stemming from skewed object and object pair distributions. In this paper, we employ causal inference techniques to model the causality among these observed skewed distributions. Our insight lies in the ability of causal inference to capture the unobservable causal effects between complex distributions, which is crucial for tracing the roots of model bias. Specifically, we introduce the Mediator-based Causal Chain Model (MCCM), which, in addition to modeling causality among objects, object pairs, and relationships, incorporates mediator variables, i.e., cooccurrence distribution, for complementing the causality. Following this, we propose the Causal Adjustment Module (CAModule) to estimate the modeled causal structure, using variables from MCCM as inputs to produce a set of adjustment factors aimed at correcting biased model predictions. Moreover, our method enables the composition of zero-shot relationships, thereby enhancing the model's ability to recognize such relationships. Experiments conducted across various SGG backbones and popular benchmarks demonstrate that CAModule achieves state-of-the-art mean recall rates, with significant improvements also observed on the challenging zero-shot recall rate metric.

Traditional retrieval methods rely on transforming user queries into vector representations and retrieving documents based on cosine similarity within an embedding space. While efficient and scalable, this approach often fails to handle complex queries involving logical constructs such as negations, conjunctions, and disjunctions. In this paper, we propose a novel inference-time logical reasoning framework that explicitly incorporates logical reasoning into the retrieval process. Our method extracts logical reasoning structures from natural language queries and then composes the individual cosine similarity scores to formulate the final document scores. This approach enables the retrieval process to handle complex logical reasoning without compromising computational efficiency. Our results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms traditional retrieval methods across different models and datasets, significantly improving retrieval performance for complex queries.