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Using Text-Based Life Trajectories from Swedish Register Data to Predict Residential Mobility with Pretrained Transformers

Stark, Philipp, Sopasakis, Alexandros, Hall, Ola, Grillitsch, Markus

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We transform large-scale Swedish register data into textual life trajectories to address two long-standing challenges in data analysis: high cardinality of categorical variables and inconsistencies in coding schemes over time. Leveraging this uniquely comprehensive population register, we convert register data from 6.9 million individuals (2001-2013) into semantically rich texts and predict individuals' residential mobility in later years (2013-2017). These life trajectories combine demographic information with annual changes in residence, work, education, income, and family circumstances, allowing us to assess how effectively such sequences support longitudinal prediction. We compare multiple NLP architectures (including LSTM, DistilBERT, BERT, and Qwen) and find that sequential and transformer-based models capture temporal and semantic structure more effectively than baseline models. The results show that textualized register data preserves meaningful information about individual pathways and supports complex, scalable modeling. Because few countries maintain longitudinal microdata with comparable coverage and precision, this dataset enables analyses and methodological tests that would be difficult or impossible elsewhere, offering a rigorous testbed for developing and evaluating new sequence-modeling approaches. Overall, our findings demonstrate that combining semantically rich register data with modern language models can substantially advance longitudinal analysis in social sciences.


Bangla Hate Speech Classification with Fine-tuned Transformer Models

Jafari, Yalda Keivan, Dey, Krishno

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hate speech recognition in low-resource languages remains a difficult problem due to insufficient datasets, orthographic heterogeneity, and linguistic variety. Bangla is spoken by more than 230 million people of Bangladesh and India (West Bengal). Despite the growing need for automated moderation on social media platforms, Bangla is significantly under-represented in computational resources. In this work, we study Subtask 1A and Subtask 1B of the BLP 2025 Shared Task on hate speech detection. We reproduce the official baselines (e.g., Majority, Random, Support Vector Machine) and also produce and consider Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Decision Tree as baseline methods. We also utilized transformer-based models such as DistilBERT, BanglaBERT, m-BERT, and XLM-RoBERTa for hate speech classification. All the transformer-based models outperformed baseline methods for the subtasks, except for DistilBERT. Among the transformer-based models, BanglaBERT produces the best performance for both subtasks. Despite being smaller in size, BanglaBERT outperforms both m-BERT and XLM-RoBERTa, which suggests language-specific pre-training is very important. Our results highlight the potential and need for pre-trained language models for the low-resource Bangla language.


Classification of worldwide news articles by perceived quality, 2018-2024

McElroy, Connor, de Oliveira, Thiago E. A., Brogly, Chris

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study explored whether supervised machine learning and deep learning models can effectively distinguish perceived lower-quality news articles from perceived higher-quality news articles. 3 machine learning classifiers and 3 deep learning models were assessed using a newly created dataset of 1,412,272 English news articles from the Common Crawl over 2018-2024. Expert consensus ratings on 579 source websites were split at the median, creating perceived low and high-quality classes of about 706,000 articles each, with 194 linguistic features per website-level labelled article. Traditional machine learning classifiers such as the Random Forest demonstrated capable performance (0.7355 accuracy, 0.8131 ROC AUC). For deep learning, ModernBERT-large (256 context length) achieved the best performance (0.8744 accuracy; 0.9593 ROC-AUC; 0.8739 F1), followed by DistilBERT-base (512 context length) at 0.8685 accuracy and 0.9554 ROC-AUC. DistilBERT-base (256 context length) reached 0.8478 accuracy and 0.9407 ROC-AUC, while ModernBERT-base (256 context length) attained 0.8569 accuracy and 0.9470 ROC-AUC. These results suggest that the perceived quality of worldwide news articles can be effectively differentiated by traditional CPU-based machine learning classifiers and deep learning classifiers.


Open Banking Foundational Model: Learning Language Representations from Few Financial Transactions

Polleti, Gustavo, Santana, Marlesson, Fontes, Eduardo

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduced a multimodal foundational model for financial transactions that integrates both structured attributes and unstructured textual descriptions into a unified representation. By adapting masked language modeling to transaction sequences, we demonstrated that our approach not only outperforms classical feature engineering and discrete event sequence methods but is also particularly effective in data-scarce Open Banking scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale study across thousands of financial institutions in North America, providing evidence that multimodal representations can generalize across geographies and institutions. These results highlight the potential of self-supervised models to advance financial applications ranging from fraud prevention and credit risk to customer insights


Explainable Transformer-Based Email Phishing Classification with Adversarial Robustness

P, Sajad U

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Phishing and related cyber threats are becoming more varied and technologically advanced. Among these, email-based phishing remains the most dominant and persistent threat. These attacks exploit human vulnerabilities to disseminate malware or gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. Deep learning (DL) models, particularly transformer-based models, have significantly enhanced phishing mitigation through their contextual understanding of language. However, some recent threats, specifically Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated phishing attacks, are reducing the overall system resilience of phishing detectors. In response, adversarial training has shown promise against AI-generated phishing threats. This study presents a hybrid approach that uses DistilBERT, a smaller, faster, and lighter version of the BERT transformer model for email classification. Robustness against text-based adversarial perturbations is reinforced using Fast Gradient Method (FGM) adversarial training. Furthermore, the framework integrates the LIME Explainable AI (XAI) technique to enhance the transparency of the DistilBERT architecture. The framework also uses the Flan-T5-small language model from Hugging Face to generate plain-language security narrative explanations for end-users. This combined approach ensures precise phishing classification while providing easily understandable justifications for the model's decisions.



Figure 1 Left results of different fine tuning baselines . Right Results of utilizing back translation on baselines

Neural Information Processing Systems

We will follow the suggestions on writing and related works and revise accordingly. We agree with the reviewers' Net (AB-Net FB), the variant that trains AB-Net from scratch (AB-Net SC) and baselines trained with back-translation. English Wikipedia data, which is a subset of the training corpus of BERT. Results are shown in Figure 1. And our method is orthogonal with BT as shown by the Ro-En results in Table 3(a) of the main paper.


The Lossy Horizon: Error-Bounded Predictive Coding for Lossy Text Compression (Episode I)

Aghanya, Nnamdi, Li, Jun, Wang, Kewei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve near-optimal lossless compression by acting as powerful probability models. We investigate their use in the lossy domain, where reconstruction fidelity is traded for higher compression ratios. This paper introduces Error-Bounded Predictive Coding (EPC), a lossy text codec that leverages a Masked Language Model (MLM) as a decompressor. Instead of storing a subset of original tokens, EPC allows the model to predict masked content and stores minimal, rank-based corrections only when the model's top prediction is incorrect. This creates a residual channel that offers continuous rate-distortion control. We compare EPC to a simpler Predictive Masking (PM) baseline and a transform-based Vector Quantisation with a Residual Patch (VQ+RE) approach. Through an evaluation that includes precise bit accounting and rate-distortion analysis, we demonstrate that EPC consistently dominates PM, offering superior fidelity at a significantly lower bit rate by more efficiently utilising the model's intrinsic knowledge.


Misinformation Detection using Large Language Models with Explainability

Patel, Jainee, Bhatt, Chintan, Trivedi, Himani, Nguyen, Thanh Thi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The COVID Fake News dataset is a collection of mostly COVID-19 pandemic-specific news headlines and brief claims. The data is representative of the combination of proven factual statements and much misleading or outright false information widespread on digital platforms during the pandemic. The data set was then preprocessed and split into training (8,160 samples) and testing (2,041 samples) categories in a balanced portion so that both real and fake labels could be checked robustly. The dataset used to check whether the pipeline can be applied to other domains rather than the pandemic area is the FakeNewsNet GossipCop. This dataset lies in the domain of entertainment and celebrity news and it is one of the prominent areas where gossip, rumors, fabricated stories are prevalent. Approximately 10,000 samples were used to train, and 2,500 samples were used to test. In the present dataset, the labels distinguish the news objects as Real or Fake by fact-checking them with regards to the original GossipCop platform. The two datasets were combined, standardized, and stratified to ensure the balanced classes in the samples during training and validation. Such prudent training has the benefit of enabling these models to improve in identifying subtle signs in language that may be contained in actual and made-up claims that can be used in enhancing the pipeline to perform better in practical misinformation detection applications.


Lightweight Baselines for Medical Abstract Classification: DistilBERT with Cross-Entropy as a Strong Default

Liu, Jiaqi, Wang, Tong, Liu, Su, Hu, Xin, Tong, Ran, Wang, Lanruo, Xu, Jiexi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The research evaluates lightweight medical abstract classification methods to establish their maximum performance capabilities under financial budget restrictions. On the public medical abstracts corpus, we finetune BERT base and Distil BERT with three objectives cross entropy (CE), class weighted CE, and focal loss under identical tokenization, sequence length, optimizer, and schedule. DistilBERT with plain CE gives the strongest raw argmax trade off, while a post hoc operating point selection (validation calibrated, classwise thresholds) sub stantially improves deployed performance; under this tuned regime, focal benefits most. We report Accuracy, Macro F1, and WeightedF1, release evaluation artifacts, and include confusion analyses to clarify error structure. The practical takeaway is to start with a compact encoder and CE, then add lightweight calibration or thresholding when deployment requires higher macro balance.