Recent advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) alignment have sought to mitigate the cost of human annotations by leveraging pretrained models to generate preference data. However, existing methods often compare responses from models with substantially different capabilities, yielding superficial distinctions that fail to provide meaningful guidance on what constitutes a superior response. To address this limitation, we propose Kinship-Aware pReference MApping (KARMA), a novel framework that systematically pairs responses from models with comparable competencies. By constraining preference comparisons to outputs of similar complexity and quality, KARMA enhances the informativeness of preference data and improves the granularity of alignment signals. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our kinship-aware approach leads to more consistent and interpretable alignment outcomes, ultimately facilitating a more principled and reliable pathway for aligning LLM behavior with human preferences.

Despite Generative AI (GenAI) systems' potential for enhancing content creation, users often struggle to effectively integrate GenAI into their creative workflows. Core challenges include misalignment of AI-generated content with user intentions (intent elicitation and alignment), user uncertainty around how to best communicate their intents to the AI system (prompt formulation), and insufficient flexibility of AI systems to support diverse creative workflows (workflow flexibility). Motivated by these challenges, we created IntentTagger: a system for slide creation based on the notion of Intent Tags - small, atomic conceptual units that encapsulate user intent - for exploring granular and non-linear micro-prompting interactions for Human-GenAI co-creation workflows. Our user study with 12 participants provides insights into the value of flexibly expressing intent across varying levels of ambiguity, meta-intent elicitation, and the benefits and challenges of intent tag-driven workflows. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our findings and design considerations for GenAI-supported content creation workflows.

Social surveys in computational social science are well-designed by elaborate domain theories that can effectively reflect the interviewee's deep thoughts without concealing their true feelings. The candidate questionnaire options highly depend on the interviewee's previous answer, which results in the complexity of social survey analysis, the time, and the expertise required. The ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform complex reasoning is well-enhanced by prompting learning such as Chain-of-thought (CoT) but still confined to left-to-right decision-making processes or limited paths during inference. This means they can fall short in problems that require exploration and uncertainty searching. In response, a novel large language model prompting method, called Random Forest of Thoughts (RFoT), is proposed for generating uncertainty reasoning to fit the area of computational social science. The RFoT allows LLMs to perform deliberate decision-making by generating diverse thought space and randomly selecting the sub-thoughts to build the forest of thoughts. It can extend the exploration and prediction of overall performance, benefiting from the extensive research space of response. The method is applied to optimize computational social science analysis on two datasets covering a spectrum of social survey analysis problems. Our experiments show that RFoT significantly enhances language models' abilities on two novel social survey analysis problems requiring non-trivial reasoning.

Deep learning (DL) has revolutionized areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, and more. However, developing DL systems is challenging due to the complexity of DL workflows. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT, Claude, Llama, Mistral, etc., have emerged as promising tools to assist in DL code generation, offering potential solutions to these challenges. Despite this, existing benchmarks such as DS-1000 are limited, as they primarily focus on small DL code snippets related to pre/post-processing tasks and lack a comprehensive coverage of the full DL pipeline, including different DL phases and input data types. To address this, we introduce DeepBench, a novel benchmark dataset designed for function-level DL code generation. DeepBench categorizes DL problems based on three key aspects: phases such as pre-processing, model construction, and training; tasks, including classification, regression, and recommendation; and input data types such as tabular, image, and text. GPT-4o -- the state-of-the-art LLM -- achieved 31% accuracy on DeepBench, significantly lower than its 60% on DS-1000. We observed similar difficulty for other LLMs (e.g., 28% vs. 54% for Claude, 21% vs. 41% for LLaMA, and 15% vs. 20% for Mistral). This result underscores DeepBench's greater complexity. We also construct a taxonomy of issues and bugs found in LLM-generated DL code, which highlights the distinct challenges that LLMs face when generating DL code compared to general code. Furthermore, our analysis also reveals substantial performance variations across categories, with differences of up to 7% among phases and 37% among tasks. These disparities suggest that DeepBench offers valuable insights into the LLMs' performance and areas for potential improvement in the DL domain.

Traditional psychological experiments utilizing naturalistic stimuli face challenges in manual annotation and ecological validity. To address this, we introduce a novel paradigm leveraging multimodal large language models (LLMs) as proxies to extract rich semantic information from naturalistic images through a Visual Question Answering (VQA) strategy for analyzing human visual semantic representation. LLM-derived repres entations successfully predict esta blished neural activity patterns measured by fMRI (e.g., faces, buildings), validatin g its feasibility and revealing hierarchical semantic organization across cortical regions. A brain semantic network constructed from LLM-derived representations identifies meaningful clusters refl ecting functional and contextual associations. This innovative methodology offers a powerful solution fo r investigating brain semantic organization with naturalistic stimuli, overcoming limitations of traditional annotation methods and paving the way for more ecologically valid explorations of human cognition.

This work leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate human mobility, addressing challenges like high costs and privacy concerns in traditional models. Our hierarchical framework integrates persona generation, activity selection, and destination prediction, using real-world demographic and psychological data to create realistic movement patterns. Both physical models and language models are employed to explore and demonstrate different methodologies for human mobility simulation. By structuring data with summarization and weighted density metrics, the system ensures scalable memory management while retaining actionable insights. Preliminary results indicate that LLM-driven simulations align with observed real-world patterns, offering scalable, interpretable insights for social problems such as urban planning, traffic management, and public health. The framework's ability to dynamically generate personas and activities enables it to provide adaptable and realistic daily routines. This study demonstrates the transformative potential of LLMs in advancing mobility modeling for societal and urban applications. The source code and interactive demo for our framework are available at https://github.com/cju0/TrajLLM.

Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to develop entity recognition systems from unannotated text corpora. This task presents substantial challenges due to minimal human intervention. Recent work has adapted large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot NER by crafting specialized prompt templates. It advances model self-learning abilities by incorporating self-annotated demonstrations. However, two important challenges persist: (i) Correlations between contexts surrounding entities are overlooked, leading to wrong type predictions or entity omissions. (ii) The indiscriminate use of task demonstrations, retrieved through shallow similarity-based strategies, severely misleads LLMs during inference. In this paper, we introduce the cooperative multi-agent system (CMAS), a novel framework for zero-shot NER that uses the collective intelligence of multiple agents to address the challenges outlined above. CMAS has four main agents: (i) a self-annotator, (ii) a type-related feature (TRF) extractor, (iii) a demonstration discriminator, and (iv) an overall predictor. To explicitly capture correlations between contexts surrounding entities, CMAS reformulates NER into two subtasks: recognizing named entities and identifying entity type-related features within the target sentence. To enable controllable utilization of demonstrations, a demonstration discriminator is established to incorporate the self-reflection mechanism, automatically evaluating helpfulness scores for the target sentence. Experimental results show that CMAS significantly improves zero-shot NER performance across six benchmarks, including both domain-specific and general-domain scenarios. Furthermore, CMAS demonstrates its effectiveness in few-shot settings and with various LLM backbones.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise in aligning large language models (LLMs). Yet its reliance on a singular reward model often overlooks the diversity of human preferences. Recent approaches address this limitation by leveraging multi-dimensional feedback to fine-tune corresponding reward models and train LLMs using reinforcement learning. However, the process is costly and unstable, especially given the competing and heterogeneous nature of human preferences. In this paper, we propose Mixing Preference Optimization (MPO), a post-processing framework for aggregating single-objective policies as an alternative to both multi-objective RLHF (MORLHF) and MaxMin-RLHF. MPO avoids alignment from scratch. Instead, it log-linearly combines existing policies into a unified one with the weight of each policy computed via a batch stochastic mirror descent. Empirical results demonstrate that MPO achieves balanced performance across diverse preferences, outperforming or matching existing models with significantly reduced computational costs.

Content moderation plays a critical role in shaping safe and inclusive online environments, balancing platform standards, user expectations, and regulatory frameworks. Traditionally, this process involves operationalising policies into guidelines, which are then used by downstream human moderators for enforcement, or to further annotate datasets for training machine learning moderation models. However, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) are transforming this landscape. These models can now interpret policies directly as textual inputs, eliminating the need for extensive data curation. This approach offers unprecedented flexibility, as moderation can be dynamically adjusted through natural language interactions. This paradigm shift raises important questions about how policies are operationalised and the implications for content moderation practices. In this paper, we formalise the emerging policy-as-prompt framework and identify five key challenges across four domains: Technical Implementation (1. translating policy to prompts, 2. sensitivity to prompt structure and formatting), Sociotechnical (3. the risk of technological determinism in policy formation), Organisational (4. evolving roles between policy and machine learning teams), and Governance (5. model governance and accountability). Through analysing these challenges across technical, sociotechnical, organisational, and governance dimensions, we discuss potential mitigation approaches. This research provides actionable insights for practitioners and lays the groundwork for future exploration of scalable and adaptive content moderation systems in digital ecosystems.

In role-playing games (RPGs), the level of immersion is critical-especially when an in-game agent conveys tasks, hints, or ideas to the player. For an agent to accurately interpret the player's emotional state and contextual nuances, a foundational level of understanding is required, which can be achieved using a Large Language Model (LLM). Maintaining the LLM's focus across multiple context changes, however, necessitates a more robust approach, such as integrating the LLM with a dedicated task allocation model to guide its performance throughout gameplay. In response to this need, we introduce Voting-Based Task Assignment (VBTA), a framework inspired by human reasoning in task allocation and completion. VBTA assigns capability profiles to agents and task descriptions to tasks, then generates a suitability matrix that quantifies the alignment between an agent's abilities and a task's requirements. Leveraging six distinct voting methods, a pre-trained LLM, and integrating conflict-based search (CBS) for path planning, VBTA efficiently identifies and assigns the most suitable agent to each task. While existing approaches focus on generating individual aspects of gameplay, such as single quests, or combat encounters, our method shows promise when generating both unique combat encounters and narratives because of its generalizable nature.