As semiconductor devices become miniaturized and their structures become more complex, there is a growing need for large-scale atomic-level simulations as a less costly alternative to the trial-and-error approach during development.Although machine learning force fields (MLFFs) can meet the accuracy and scale requirements for such simulations, there are no open-access benchmarks for semiconductor materials.Hence, this study presents a comprehensive benchmark suite that consists of two semiconductor material datasets and ten MLFF models with six evaluation metrics.

With the adoption of multiple digital devices in everyday life, the cyber-attack surface has increased. Adversaries are continuously exploring new avenues to exploit them and deploy malware. On the other hand, detection approaches typically employ hashing-based algorithms such as SSDeep, TLSH, and IMPHash to capture structural and behavioural similarities among binaries. This work focuses on the analysis and evaluation of these techniques for clustering malware samples using the K-means algorithm. More specifically, we experimented with established malware families and traits and found that TLSH and IMPHash produce more distinct, semantically meaningful clusters, whereas SSDeep is more efficient for broader classification tasks. The findings of this work can guide the development of more robust threat-detection mechanisms and adaptive security mechanisms.

This paper presents a comprehensive study on enhancing kiosk systems through a low-code architecture, with a focus on AI-based implementations. Modern kiosk systems are confronted with significant challenges, including a lack of integration, structural rigidity, performance bottlenecks, and the absence of collaborative frameworks. To overcome these limitations, we propose a DIZEST-based approach methodology, a specialized low-code platform that enables intuitive workflow design and seamless AI integration. Through a comparative analysis with existing platforms, including Jupyter Notebook, ComfyUI, and Orange3, we demonstrate that DIZEST delivers superior performance across key evaluation criteria. Our photo kiosk case study further validates the effectiveness of this approach in improving interoperability, enhancing user experience, and increasing deployment flexibility.

Dense retrieval models have become a standard for state-of-the-art information retrieval. However, their high-dimensional, high-precision (float32) vector embeddings create significant storage and memory challenges for real-world deployment. To address this, we conduct a rigorous empirical study on the BEIR SciFact benchmark, evaluating the trade-offs between two primary compression strategies: (1) Dimensionality Reduction via deep Autoencoders (AE), reducing original 384-dim vectors to latent spaces from 384 down to 12, and (2) Precision Reduction via Quantization (float16, int8, and binary). We systematically compare each method by measuring the "performance loss" (or gain) relative to a float32 baseline across a full suite of retrieval metrics (NDCG, MAP, MRR, Recall, Precision) at various k cutoffs. Our results show that int8 scalar quantization provides the most effective "sweet spot," achieving a 4x compression with a negligible [~1-2%] drop in nDCG@10. In contrast, Autoencoders show a graceful degradation but suffer a more significant performance loss at equivalent 4x compression ratios (AE-96). binary quantization was found to be unsuitable for this task due to catastrophic performance drops. This work provides a practical guide for deploying efficient, high-performance retrieval systems.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable promise in clinical natural language processing, yet few domain-specific datasets exist to rigorously evaluate their performance on radiology tasks. In this work, we introduce an annotated corpus of 6,393 radiology reports from 586 patients, each labeled for follow-up imaging status, to support the development and benchmarking of follow-up adherence detection systems. Using this corpus, we systematically compared traditional machine-learning classifiers, including logistic regression (LR), support vector machines (SVM), Longformer, and a fully fine-tuned Llama3-8B-Instruct, with recent generative LLMs. To evaluate generative LLMs, we tested GPT-4o and the open-source GPT-OSS-20B under two configurations: a baseline (Base) and a task-optimized (Advanced) setting that focused inputs on metadata, recommendation sentences, and their surrounding context. A refined prompt for GPT-OSS-20B further improved reasoning accuracy. Performance was assessed using precision, recall, and F1 scores with 95% confidence intervals estimated via non-parametric bootstrapping. Inter-annotator agreement was high (F1 = 0.846). GPT-4o (Advanced) achieved the best performance (F1 = 0.832), followed closely by GPT-OSS-20B (Advanced; F1 = 0.828). LR and SVM also performed strongly (F1 = 0.776 and 0.775), underscoring that while LLMs approach human-level agreement through prompt optimization, interpretable and resource-efficient models remain valuable baselines.

The increasing digitalization of education presents unprecedented opportunities for data-driven personalization, but it also introduces significant challenges to student data privacy. Conventional recommender systems rely on centralized data, a paradigm often incompatible with modern data protection regulations. A novel privacy-preserving recommender system is proposed and evaluated to address this critical issue using Federated Learning (FL). The approach utilizes a Deep Neural Network (DNN) with rich, engineered features from the large-scale ASSISTments educational dataset. A rigorous comparative analysis of federated aggregation strategies was conducted, identifying FedProx as a significantly more stable and effective method for handling heterogeneous student data than the standard FedAvg baseline. The optimized federated model achieves a high-performance F1-Score of 76.28%, corresponding to 92% of the performance of a powerful, centralized XGBoost model. These findings validate that a federated approach can provide highly effective content recommendations without centralizing sensitive student data. Consequently, our work presents a viable and robust solution to the personalization-privacy dilemma in modern educational platforms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly leverage Federated Learning (FL) to utilize private, task-specific datasets for fine-tuning while preserving data privacy. However, while federated LLM frameworks effectively enable collaborative training without raw data sharing, they critically lack built-in mechanisms for regulatory compliance like GDPR's right to be forgotten. Integrating private data heightens concerns over data quality and long-term governance, yet existing distributed training frameworks offer no principled way to selectively remove specific client contributions post-training. Due to distributed data silos, stringent privacy constraints, and the intricacies of interdependent model aggregation, federated LLM unlearning is significantly more complex than centralized LLM unlearning. T o address this gap, we introduce Oblivionis, a lightweight learning and unlearning framework that enables clients to selectively remove specific private data during federated LLM training, enhancing trustworthiness and regulatory compliance. By unifying FL and unlearning as a dual optimization objective, we incorporate 6 FL and 5 unlearning algorithms for comprehensive evaluation and comparative analysis, establishing a robust pipeline for federated LLM unlearning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Oblivionis outperforms local training, achieving a robust balance between forgetting efficacy and model utility, with cross-algorithm comparisons providing clear directions for future LLM development.

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) often need to be tailored for specific applications, requiring the integration of new knowledge or the acquisition of new skills. While full fine-tuning is a powerful adaptation method, it is computationally expensive and can lead to a degradation of general reasoning abilities, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. A range of alternative techniques exists, each with its own trade-offs. In-Context Learning (ICL) is fast but limited by context length, while Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offer a middle ground by minimizing parameter changes. However, the challenge of catastrophic forgetting persists, raising questions about the best adaptation strategy for a given task. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Supervised Finetuning (SFT), LoRA, and ICL in data-scarce scenarios. We find that LoRA provides the most effective balance, successfully instilling new skills with minimal impact on the base model's general knowledge. In contrast, while SFT excels at skill acquisition, it is highly susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. ICL is effective for incorporating factual knowledge but struggles with complex skills. Our findings offer a practical framework for selecting an LLM adaptation strategy. We highlight the critical distinction between skill acquisition and knowledge integration, clarify the trade-offs between task-specific performance and the preservation of general capabilities.

Big Language Models (LLMs) are changing the way businesses use software, the way people live their lives and the way industries work. Companies like Google, High-Flyer, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta are making better LLMs. So, it's crucial to look at how each model is different in terms of performance, moral behaviour and usability, as these differences are based on the different ideas that built them. This study compares five top LLMs: Google's Gemini, High-Flyer's DeepSeek, Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's GPT models and Meta's LLaMA. It performs this by analysing three important factors: Performance and Accuracy, Ethics and Bias Mitigation and Usability and Integration. It was found that Claude has good moral reasoning, Gemini is better at multimodal capabilities and has strong ethical frameworks. DeepSeek is great at reasoning based on facts, LLaMA is good for open applications and ChatGPT delivers balanced performance with a focus on usage. It was concluded that these models are different in terms of how well they work, how easy they are to use and how they treat people ethically, making it a point that each model should be utilised by the user in a way that makes the most of its strengths.

This study positions large language models (LLMs) as "subjective literary critics" to explore aesthetic preferences and evaluation patterns in literary assessment. Ten Japanese science fiction short stories were translated into English and evaluated by six state-of-the-art LLMs across seven independent sessions. Principal component analysis and clustering techniques revealed significant variations in evaluation consistency (α ranging from 1.00 to 0.35) and five distinct evaluation patterns. Additionally, evaluation variance across stories differed by up to 4.5-fold, with TF-IDF analysis confirming distinctive evaluation vocabularies for each model. Our seven-session within-day protocol using an original Science Fiction corpus strategically minimizes external biases, allowing us to observe implicit value systems shaped by RLHF and their influence on literary judgment. These findings suggest that LLMs may possess individual evaluation characteristics similar to human critical schools, rather than functioning as neutral benchmarkers.