Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) assigns scores to student essays, reducing the grading workload for instructors. Developing a scoring system capable of handling essays across diverse prompts is challenging due to the flexibility and diverse nature of the writing task. Existing methods typically fall into two categories: supervised feature-based approaches and large language model (LLM)-based methods. Supervised feature-based approaches often achieve higher performance but require resource-intensive training. In contrast, LLM-based methods are computationally efficient during inference but tend to suffer from lower performance. This paper combines these approaches by incorporating linguistic features into LLM-based scoring. Experimental results show that this hybrid method outperforms baseline models for both in-domain and out-of-domain writing prompts.

The rapid advent of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) has catalyzed major transformations in chemistry, yet the application of these methods to spectroscopic and spectrometric data, referred to as Spectroscopy Machine Learning (SpectraML), remains relatively underexplored. Modern spectroscopic techniques (MS, NMR, IR, Raman, UV-Vis) generate an ever-growing volume of high-dimensional data, creating a pressing need for automated and intelligent analysis beyond traditional expert-based workflows. In this survey, we provide a unified review of SpectraML, systematically examining state-of-the-art approaches for both forward tasks (molecule-to-spectrum prediction) and inverse tasks (spectrum-to-molecule inference). We trace the historical evolution of ML in spectroscopy, from early pattern recognition to the latest foundation models capable of advanced reasoning, and offer a taxonomy of representative neural architectures, including graph-based and transformer-based methods. Addressing key challenges such as data quality, multimodal integration, and computational scalability, we highlight emerging directions such as synthetic data generation, large-scale pretraining, and few- or zero-shot learning. To foster reproducible research, we also release an open-source repository containing recent papers and their corresponding curated datasets (https://github.com/MINE-Lab-ND/SpectrumML_Survey_Papers). Our survey serves as a roadmap for researchers, guiding progress at the intersection of spectroscopy and AI.

LLM cascades are based on the idea that processing all queries with the largest and most expensive LLMs is inefficient. Instead, cascades deploy small LLMs to answer the majority of queries, limiting the use of large and expensive LLMs to only the most difficult queries. This approach can significantly reduce costs without impacting performance. However, risk-sensitive domains such as finance or medicine place an additional premium on avoiding model errors. Recognizing that even the most expensive models may make mistakes, applications in these domains benefit from allowing LLM systems to completely abstain from answering a query when the chance of making a mistake is significant. However, giving a cascade the ability to abstain poses an immediate design question for LLM cascades: should abstention only be allowed at the final model or also at earlier models? Since the error patterns of small and large models are correlated, the latter strategy may further reduce inference costs by letting inexpensive models anticipate abstention decisions by expensive models, thereby obviating the need to run the expensive models. We investigate the benefits of "early abstention" in LLM cascades and find that it reduces the overall test loss by 2.2% on average across six benchmarks (GSM8K, MedMCQA, MMLU, TriviaQA, TruthfulQA, and XSum). These gains result from a more effective use of abstention, which trades a 4.1% average increase in the overall abstention rate for a 13.0% reduction in cost and a 5.0% reduction in error rate. Our findings demonstrate that it is possible to leverage correlations between the error patterns of different language models to drive performance improvements for LLM systems with abstention.

In this study, we tackle industry challenges in video content classification by exploring and optimizing GPT-based models for zero-shot classification across seven critical categories of video quality. We contribute a novel approach to improving GPT's performance through prompt optimization and policy refinement, demonstrating that simplifying complex policies significantly reduces false negatives. Additionally, we introduce a new decomposition-aggregation-based prompt engineering technique, which outperforms traditional single-prompt methods. These experiments, conducted on real industry problems, show that thoughtful prompt design can substantially enhance GPT's performance without additional finetuning, offering an effective and scalable solution for improving video classification systems across various domains in industry.

In this paper, we reexamine prompt engineering for large language models through the lens of automata theory. We argue that language models function as automata and, like all automata, should be programmed in the languages they accept, a unified collection of all natural and formal languages. Therefore, traditional software engineering practices--conditioned on the clear separation of programming languages and natural languages--must be rethought. We introduce the Ann Arbor Architecture, a conceptual framework for agent-oriented programming of language models, as a higher-level abstraction over raw token generation, and provide a new perspective on in-context learning. Based on this framework, we present the design of our agent platform Postline, and report on our initial experiments in agent training.

Jailbreak attacks aim to exploit large language models (LLMs) and pose a significant threat to their proper conduct; they seek to bypass models' safeguards and often provoke transgressive behaviors. However, existing automatic jailbreak attacks require extensive computational resources and are prone to converge on suboptimal solutions. In this work, we propose \textbf{C}ompliance \textbf{R}efusal \textbf{I}nitialization (CRI), a novel, attack-agnostic framework that efficiently initializes the optimization in the proximity of the compliance subspace of harmful prompts. By narrowing the initial gap to the adversarial objective, CRI substantially improves adversarial success rates (ASR) and drastically reduces computational overhead -- often requiring just a single optimization step. We evaluate CRI on the widely-used AdvBench dataset over the standard jailbreak attacks of GCG and AutoDAN. Results show that CRI boosts ASR and decreases the median steps to success by up to \textbf{\(\times 60\)}. The project page, along with the reference implementation, is publicly available at \texttt{https://amit1221levi.github.io/CRI-Jailbreak-Init-LLMs-evaluation/}.

Web-based management systems have been widely used in risk control and industrial safety. However, effectively integrating source search capabilities into these systems, to enable decision-makers to locate and address the hazard (e.g., gas leak detection) remains a challenge. While prior efforts have explored using web crowdsourcing and AI algorithms for source search decision support, these approaches suffer from overheads in recruiting human participants and slow response times in time-sensitive situations. To address this, we introduce AutoS$^2$earch, a novel framework leveraging large models for zero-shot source search in web applications. AutoS$^2$earch operates on a simplified visual environment projected through a web-based display, utilizing a chain-of-thought prompt designed to emulate human reasoning. The multi-modal large language model (MLLMs) dynamically converts visual observations into language descriptions, enabling the LLM to perform linguistic reasoning on four directional choices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoS$^2$earch achieves performance nearly equivalent to human-AI collaborative source search while eliminating dependency on crowdsourced labor. Our work offers valuable insights in using web engineering to design such autonomous systems in other industrial applications.

Group max-min fairness (MMF) is commonly used in fairness-aware recommender systems (RS) as an optimization objective, as it aims to protect marginalized item groups and ensures a fair competition platform. However, our theoretical analysis indicates that integrating MMF constraint violates the assumption of sample independence during optimization, causing the loss function to deviate from linear additivity. Such nonlinearity property introduces the Jensen gap between the model's convergence point and the optimal point if mini-batch sampling is applied. Both theoretical and empirical studies show that as the mini-batch size decreases and the group size increases, the Jensen gap will widen accordingly. Some methods using heuristic re-weighting or debiasing strategies have the potential to bridge the Jensen gap. However, they either lack theoretical guarantees or suffer from heavy computational costs. To overcome these limitations, we first theoretically demonstrate that the MMF-constrained objective can be essentially reformulated as a group-weighted optimization objective. Then we present an efficient and effective algorithm named FairDual, which utilizes a dual optimization technique to minimize the Jensen gap. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that FairDual can achieve a sub-linear convergence rate to the globally optimal solution and the Jensen gap can be well bounded under a mini-batch sampling strategy with random shuffle. Extensive experiments conducted using six large-scale RS backbone models on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that FairDual outperforms all baselines in terms of both accuracy and fairness. Our data and codes are shared at https://github.com/XuChen0427/FairDual.

Recent advances in generative AI have precipitated a proliferation of novel writing assistants. These systems typically rely on multilingual large language models (LLMs), providing globalized workers the ability to revise or create diverse forms of content in different languages. However, there is substantial evidence indicating that the performance of multilingual LLMs varies between languages. Users who employ writing assistance for multiple languages are therefore susceptible to disparate output quality. Importantly, recent research has shown that people tend to generalize algorithmic errors across independent tasks, violating the behavioral axiom of choice independence. In this paper, we analyze whether user utilization of novel writing assistants in a charity advertisement writing task is affected by the AI's performance in a second language. Furthermore, we quantify the extent to which these patterns translate into the persuasiveness of generated charity advertisements, as well as the role of peoples' beliefs about LLM utilization in their donation choices. Our results provide evidence that writers who engage with an LLM-based writing assistant violate choice independence, as prior exposure to a Spanish LLM reduces subsequent utilization of an English LLM. While these patterns do not affect the aggregate persuasiveness of the generated advertisements, people's beliefs about the source of an advertisement (human versus AI) do. In particular, Spanish-speaking female participants who believed that they read an AI-generated advertisement strongly adjusted their donation behavior downwards. Furthermore, people are generally not able to adequately differentiate between human-generated and LLM-generated ads. Our work has important implications for the design, development, integration, and adoption of multilingual LLMs as assistive agents -- particularly in writing tasks.

With the growing influence of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is increasing interest in integrating speech representations with them to enable more seamless multi-modal processing and speech understanding. This study introduces a novel approach that leverages self-supervised speech representations in combination with instruction-tuned LLMs for speech-to-text translation. The proposed approach leverages a modality adapter to align extracted speech features with instruction-tuned LLMs using English-language data. Our experiments demonstrate that this method effectively preserves the semantic content of the input speech and serves as an effective bridge between self-supervised speech models and instruction-tuned LLMs, offering a promising solution for various speech understanding applications.