pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Ideation-Execution Gap: Execution Outcomes of LLM-Generated versus Human Research Ideas
Authors: Chenglei Si, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Diyi Yang
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in accelerating the scientific research pipeline. A key capability for this process is the ability to generate novel research ideas, and prior studies have found settings in which LLM-generated research ideas were judged as more novel than human-expert ideas. However, a good idea should not simply appear to be novel, it should also result in better research after being executed. To test whether AI-generated ideas lead to better research outcomes, we conduct an execution study by recruiting 43 expert researchers to execute randomly-assigned ideas, either written by experts or generated by an LLM. Each expert spent over 100 hours implementing the idea and wrote a 4-page short paper to document the experiments. All the executed projects are then reviewed blindly by expert NLP researchers. Comparing the review scores of the same ideas before and after execution, the scores of the LLM-generated ideas decrease significantly more than expert-written ideas on all evaluation metrics (novelty, excitement, effectiveness, and overall; p < 0.05), closing the gap between LLM and human ideas observed at the ideation stage. When comparing the aggregated review scores from the execution study, we even observe that for many metrics there is a flip in rankings where human ideas score higher than LLM ideas. This ideation-execution gap highlights the limitations of current LLMs in generating truly effective research ideas and the challenge of evaluating research ideas in the absence of execution outcomes.
The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities
Authors: Yoshua Bengio, Tegan Maharaj, Luke Ong, Stuart Russell, Dawn Song, Max Tegmark, Lan Xue, Ya-Qin Zhang, Stephen Casper, Wan Sie Lee, Sören Mindermann, Vidhisha Balachandran, Fazl Barez, Michael Belinsky, Imane Bello, Malo Bourgon, Mark Brakel, Siméon Campos, Duncan Cass-Beggs, Jiahao Chen, Rumman Chowdhury, Kuan Chua Seah, Jeff Clune, Juntao Dai, Agnes Delaborde, Nouha Dziri, Francisco Eiras, Joshua Engels, Jinyu Fan, Adam Gleave, Noah Goodman, Fynn Heide, Dan Hendrycks, Cyrus Hodes, Bryan Low Kian Hsiang, Minlie Huang, Sami Jawhar, Wang Jingyu, Adam Tauman Kalai, Meindert Kamphuis, Mohan Kankanhalli, Subhash Kantamneni, Mathias Bonde Kirk, Thomas Kwa, Jeffrey Ladish, Kwok-Yan Lam, Wan Lee Sie, Taewhi Lee, Xiaojian Li, Jiajun Liu, Chaochao Lu, Yifan Mai, Richard Mallah, Julian Michael, Nick Moës, Simon Möller, Kihyuk Nam, Kwan Yee Ng, Mark Nitzberg, Besmira Nushi, Seán O hÉigeartaigh, Alejandro Ortega, Pierre Peigné, James Petrie, Benjamin Prud'homme, Reihaneh Rabbany, Nayat Sanchez-pi, Sarah Schwettmann, Buck Shlegeris, Saad Siddiqui, Aradhana Sinha, Martín Soto, Cheston Tan, Dong Ting, Robert Trager, Brian Tse, Anthony Tung K. H., Vanessa Wilfred, John Willes, Denise Wong, Wei Xu, Rongwu Xu, Yi Zeng, HongJiang Zhang, Djordje Žikelić
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00

Rapidly improving AI capabilities and autonomy hold significant promise of transformation, but are also driving vigorous debate on how to ensure that AI is safe, i.e., trustworthy, reliable, and secure. Building a trusted ecosystem is therefore essential -- it helps people embrace AI with confidence and gives maximal space for innovation while avoiding backlash. The "2025 Singapore Conference on AI (SCAI): International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety" aimed to support research in this space by bringing together AI scientists across geographies to identify and synthesise research priorities in AI safety. This resulting report builds on the International AI Safety Report chaired by Yoshua Bengio and backed by 33 governments. By adopting a defence-in-depth model, this report organises AI safety research domains into three types: challenges with creating trustworthy AI systems (Development), challenges with evaluating their risks (Assessment), and challenges with monitoring and intervening after deployment (Control).
LLM-Based Social Simulations Require a Boundary
Authors: Zengqing Wu, Run Peng, Takayuki Ito, Chuan Xiao
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

This position paper argues that large language model (LLM)-based social simulations should establish clear boundaries to meaningfully contribute to social science research. While LLMs offer promising capabilities for modeling human-like agents compared to traditional agent-based modeling, they face fundamental limitations that constrain their reliability for social pattern discovery. The core issue lies in LLMs' tendency towards an ``average persona'' that lacks sufficient behavioral heterogeneity, a critical requirement for simulating complex social dynamics. We examine three key boundary problems: alignment (simulated behaviors matching real-world patterns), consistency (maintaining coherent agent behavior over time), and robustness (reproducibility under varying conditions). We propose heuristic boundaries for determining when LLM-based simulations can reliably advance social science understanding. We believe that these simulations are more valuable when focusing on (1) collective patterns rather than individual trajectories, (2) agent behaviors aligning with real population averages despite limited variance, and (3) proper validation methods available for testing simulation robustness. We provide a practical checklist to guide researchers in determining the appropriate scope and claims for LLM-based social simulations.
AI-based Multimodal Biometrics for Detecting Smartphone Distractions: Application to Online Learning
Authors: Alvaro Becerra, Roberto Daza, Ruth Cobos, Aythami Morales, Mutlu Cukurova, Julian Fierrez
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

This work investigates the use of multimodal biometrics to detect distractions caused by smartphone use during tasks that require sustained attention, with a focus on computer-based online learning. Although the methods are applicable to various domains, such as autonomous driving, we concentrate on the challenges learners face in maintaining engagement amid internal (e.g., motivation), system-related (e.g., course design) and contextual (e.g., smartphone use) factors. Traditional learning platforms often lack detailed behavioral data, but Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) and biosensors provide new insights into learner attention. We propose an AI-based approach that leverages physiological signals and head pose data to detect phone use. Our results show that single biometric signals, such as brain waves or heart rate, offer limited accuracy, while head pose alone achieves 87%. A multimodal model combining all signals reaches 91% accuracy, highlighting the benefits of integration. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of deploying these models for real-time support in online learning environments.
Unlocking Insights Addressing Alcohol Inference Mismatch through Database-Narrative Alignment
Authors: Sudesh Bhagat, Raghupathi Kandiboina, Ibne Farabi Shihab, Skylar Knickerbocker, Neal Hawkins, Anuj Sharma
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Road traffic crashes are a significant global cause of fatalities, emphasizing the urgent need for accurate crash data to enhance prevention strategies and inform policy development. This study addresses the challenge of alcohol inference mismatch (AIM) by employing database narrative alignment to identify AIM in crash data. A framework was developed to improve data quality in crash management systems and reduce the percentage of AIM crashes. Utilizing the BERT model, the analysis of 371,062 crash records from Iowa (2016-2022) revealed 2,767 AIM incidents, resulting in an overall AIM percentage of 24.03%. Statistical tools, including the Probit Logit model, were used to explore the crash characteristics affecting AIM patterns. The findings indicate that alcohol-related fatal crashes and nighttime incidents have a lower percentage of the mismatch, while crashes involving unknown vehicle types and older drivers are more susceptible to mismatch. The geospatial cluster as part of this study can identify the regions which have an increased need for education and training. These insights highlight the necessity for targeted training programs and data management teams to improve the accuracy of crash reporting and support evidence-based policymaking.
Neural Total Variation Distance Estimators for Changepoint Detection in News Data
Authors: Csaba Zsolnai, Niels Lörch, Julian Arnold
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Detecting when public discourse shifts in response to major events is crucial for understanding societal dynamics. Real-world data is high-dimensional, sparse, and noisy, making changepoint detection in this domain a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we leverage neural networks for changepoint detection in news data, introducing a method based on the so-called learning-by-confusion scheme, which was originally developed for detecting phase transitions in physical systems. We train classifiers to distinguish between articles from different time periods. The resulting classification accuracy is used to estimate the total variation distance between underlying content distributions, where significant distances highlight changepoints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on both synthetic datasets and real-world data from The Guardian newspaper, successfully identifying major historical events including 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic, and presidential elections. Our approach requires minimal domain knowledge, can autonomously discover significant shifts in public discourse, and yields a quantitative measure of change in content, making it valuable for journalism, policy analysis, and crisis monitoring.
Citizenship Challenges in Artificial Intelligence Education
Authors: Margarida Romero
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00

This chapter addresses the citizenship challenges related to AI in education, particularly concerning students, teachers, and other educational stakeholders in the context of AI integration. We first explore how to foster AI awareness and education, along with various strategies to promote a socio-critical approach to AI training, aiming to identify relevant and ethical uses to prioritise. In the second part, we discuss critical thinking and computational thinking skills that can be mobilised within certain AI-supported educational activities, depending on the degree of creative and transformative engagement those activities require.
A Modular Taxonomy for Hate Speech Definitions and Its Impact on Zero-Shot LLM Classification Performance
Authors: Matteo Melis, Gabriella Lapesa, Dennis Assenmacher
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Detecting harmful content is a crucial task in the landscape of NLP applications for Social Good, with hate speech being one of its most dangerous forms. But what do we mean by hate speech, how can we define it, and how does prompting different definitions of hate speech affect model performance? The contribution of this work is twofold. At the theoretical level, we address the ambiguity surrounding hate speech by collecting and analyzing existing definitions from the literature. We organize these definitions into a taxonomy of 14 Conceptual Elements-building blocks that capture different aspects of hate speech definitions, such as references to the target of hate (individual or groups) or of the potential consequences of it. At the experimental level, we employ the collection of definitions in a systematic zero-shot evaluation of three LLMs, on three hate speech datasets representing different types of data (synthetic, human-in-the-loop, and real-world). We find that choosing different definitions, i.e., definitions with a different degree of specificity in terms of encoded elements, impacts model performance, but this effect is not consistent across all architectures.
Prompt Engineering Techniques for Mitigating Cultural Bias Against Arabs and Muslims in Large Language Models: A Systematic Review
Authors: Bushra Asseri, Estabrag Abdelaziz, Areej Al-Wabil
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, yet concerns about cultural bias - particularly towards Arabs and Muslims - pose significant ethical challenges by perpetuating harmful stereotypes and marginalization. Despite growing recognition of bias in LLMs, prompt engineering strategies specifically addressing Arab and Muslim representation remain understudied. This mixed-methods systematic review examines such techniques, offering evidence-based guidance for researchers and practitioners. Following PRISMA guidelines and Kitchenham's systematic review methodology, we analyzed 8 empirical studies published between 2021-2024 investigating bias mitigation strategies. Our findings reveal five primary prompt engineering approaches: cultural prompting, affective priming, self-debiasing techniques, structured multi-step pipelines, and parameter-optimized continuous prompts. Although all approaches show potential for reducing bias, effectiveness varied substantially across studies and bias types. Evidence suggests that certain bias types may be more resistant to prompt-based mitigation than others. Structured multi-step pipelines demonstrated the highest overall effectiveness, achieving up to 87.7% reduction in bias, though they require greater technical expertise. Cultural prompting offers broader accessibility with substantial effectiveness. These results underscore the accessibility of prompt engineering for mitigating cultural bias without requiring access to model parameters. The limited number of studies identified highlights a significant research gap in this critical area. Future research should focus on developing culturally adaptive prompting techniques, creating Arab and Muslim-specific evaluation resources, and integrating prompt engineering with complementary debiasing methods to address deeper stereotypes while maintaining model utility.
Can AI support student engagement in classroom activities in higher education?
Authors: Neha Rani, Sharan Majumder, Ishan Bhardwaj, Pedro Guillermo Feijoo Garcia
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00

Lucrative career prospects and creative opportunities often attract students to enroll in computer science majors and pursue advanced studies in the field. Consequently, there has been a significant surge in enrollment in computer science courses, resulting in large class sizes that can range from hundreds to even thousands of students. A common challenge in such large classrooms is the lack of engagement between students and both the instructor and the learning material. However, with advancements in technology and improvements in large language models (LLMs), there is a considerable opportunity to utilize LLM-based AI models, such as conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), to enhance student engagement with learning content in large classes. To explore the potential of CAI to support engagement, especially with learning content, we designed an activity in a software Engineering course (with a large class size) where students used CAI for an in-class activity. We conducted a within-subject investigation in a large classroom at a US university where we compared student engagement during an in-class activity that used CAI tool vs. one without CAI tool. The CAI tool we used was ChatGPT due to its widespread popularity and familiarity. Our results indicate that CAI (ChatGPT) has the potential to support engagement with learning content during in-class activities, especially in large class sizes. We further discuss the implications of our findings.
Mental Health Equity in LLMs: Leveraging Multi-Hop Question Answering to Detect Amplified and Silenced Perspectives
Authors: Batool Haider, Atmika Gorti, Aman Chadha, Manas Gaur
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-hop Question Answering, Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) in mental healthcare risk propagating biases that reinforce stigma and harm marginalized groups. While previous research identified concerning trends, systematic methods for detecting intersectional biases remain limited. This work introduces a multi-hop question answering (MHQA) framework to explore LLM response biases in mental health discourse. We analyze content from the Interpretable Mental Health Instruction (IMHI) dataset across symptom presentation, coping mechanisms, and treatment approaches. Using systematic tagging across age, race, gender, and socioeconomic status, we investigate bias patterns at demographic intersections. We evaluate four LLMs: Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Jamba 1.6, Gemma 3, and Llama 4, revealing systematic disparities across sentiment, demographics, and mental health conditions. Our MHQA approach demonstrates superior detection compared to conventional methods, identifying amplification points where biases magnify through sequential reasoning. We implement two debiasing techniques: Roleplay Simulation and Explicit Bias Reduction, achieving 66-94% bias reductions through few-shot prompting with BBQ dataset examples. These findings highlight critical areas where LLMs reproduce mental healthcare biases, providing actionable insights for equitable AI development.
The Democratic Paradox in Large Language Models' Underestimation of Press Freedom
Authors: I. Loaiza, R. Vestrelli, A. Fronzetti Colladon, R. Rigobon
Date: 2025-06-22 00:00:00

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate global information access for millions of users worldwide, their alignment and biases have the potential to shape public understanding and trust in fundamental democratic institutions, such as press freedom. In this study, we uncover three systematic distortions in the way six popular LLMs evaluate press freedom in 180 countries compared to expert assessments of the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI). The six LLMs exhibit a negative misalignment, consistently underestimating press freedom, with individual models rating between 71% to 93% of countries as less free. We also identify a paradoxical pattern we term differential misalignment: LLMs disproportionately underestimate press freedom in countries where it is strongest. Additionally, five of the six LLMs exhibit positive home bias, rating their home countries' press freedoms more favorably than would be expected given their negative misalignment with the human benchmark. In some cases, LLMs rate their home countries between 7% to 260% more positively than expected. If LLMs are set to become the next search engines and some of the most important cultural tools of our time, they must ensure accurate representations of the state of our human and civic rights globally.
Trustworthy Chronic Disease Risk Prediction For Self-Directed Preventive Care via Medical Literature Validation
Authors: Minh Le, Khoi Ton
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Disease Prediction

Chronic diseases are long-term, manageable, yet typically incurable conditions, highlighting the need for effective preventive strategies. Machine learning has been widely used to assess individual risk for chronic diseases. However, many models rely on medical test data (e.g. blood results, glucose levels), which limits their utility for proactive self-assessment. Additionally, to gain public trust, machine learning models should be explainable and transparent. Although some research on self-assessment machine learning models includes explainability, their explanations are not validated against established medical literature, reducing confidence in their reliability. To address these issues, we develop deep learning models that predict the risk of developing 13 chronic diseases using only personal and lifestyle factors, enabling accessible, self-directed preventive care. Importantly, we use SHAP-based explainability to identify the most influential model features and validate them against established medical literature. Our results show a strong alignment between the models' most influential features and established medical literature, reinforcing the models' trustworthiness. Critically, we find that this observation holds across 13 distinct diseases, indicating that this machine learning approach can be broadly trusted for chronic disease prediction. This work lays the foundation for developing trustworthy machine learning tools for self-directed preventive care. Future research can explore other approaches for models' trustworthiness and discuss how the models can be used ethically and responsibly.
Mind the Gap: Assessing Wiktionary's Crowd-Sourced Linguistic Knowledge on Morphological Gaps in Two Related Languages
Authors: Jonathan Sakunkoo, Annabella Sakunkoo
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00

Morphological defectivity is an intriguing and understudied phenomenon in linguistics. Addressing defectivity, where expected inflectional forms are absent, is essential for improving the accuracy of NLP tools in morphologically rich languages. However, traditional linguistic resources often lack coverage of morphological gaps as such knowledge requires significant human expertise and effort to document and verify. For scarce linguistic phenomena in under-explored languages, Wikipedia and Wiktionary often serve as among the few accessible resources. Despite their extensive reach, their reliability has been a subject of controversy. This study customizes a novel neural morphological analyzer to annotate Latin and Italian corpora. Using the massive annotated data, crowd-sourced lists of defective verbs compiled from Wiktionary are validated computationally. Our results indicate that while Wiktionary provides a highly reliable account of Italian morphological gaps, 7% of Latin lemmata listed as defective show strong corpus evidence of being non-defective. This discrepancy highlights potential limitations of crowd-sourced wikis as definitive sources of linguistic knowledge, particularly for less-studied phenomena and languages, despite their value as resources for rare linguistic features. By providing scalable tools and methods for quality assurance of crowd-sourced data, this work advances computational morphology and expands linguistic knowledge of defectivity in non-English, morphologically rich languages.
Optimizing Mastery Learning by Fast-Forwarding Over-Practice Steps
Authors: Meng Xia, Robin Schmucker, Conrad Borchers, Vincent Aleven
Date: 2025-06-21 00:00:00

Mastery learning improves learning proficiency and efficiency. However, the overpractice of skills--students spending time on skills they have already mastered--remains a fundamental challenge for tutoring systems. Previous research has reduced overpractice through the development of better problem selection algorithms and the authoring of focused practice tasks. However, few efforts have concentrated on reducing overpractice through step-level adaptivity, which can avoid resource-intensive curriculum redesign. We propose and evaluate Fast-Forwarding as a technique that enhances existing problem selection algorithms. Based on simulation studies informed by learner models and problem-solving pathways derived from real student data, Fast-Forwarding can reduce overpractice by up to one-third, as it does not require students to complete problem-solving steps if all remaining pathways are fully mastered. Fast-Forwarding is a flexible method that enhances any problem selection algorithm, though its effectiveness is highest for algorithms that preferentially select difficult problems. Therefore, our findings suggest that while Fast-Forwarding may improve student practice efficiency, the size of its practical impact may also depend on students' ability to stay motivated and engaged at higher levels of difficulty.