arXiv subjects

Aleksandra Sawczuk

Publications and source records attributed to Aleksandra Sawczuk.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RAILS: Retrieval-Augmented Incremental LLM Clustering at Scale

Using a Large Language Model (LLM) as the clusterer at production scale is hard: prompts cannot hold the entire label space, and per-document serial processing does not deliver the throughput real workloads require. We present RAILS, a retrieval-augmented incremental LLM clusterer that turns clustering into a simple loop over a growing label pool and scales through document batching with bounded concurrency. On six public benchmarks RAILS exceeds the strongest prior LLM-clustering method on average, lifting accuracy from 51.2% to 59.3%, NMI from 67.2% to 74.8%, and ARI from 45.4% to 54.7%. We further report production-deployment evidence from a SaaS ticket-topic-discovery pipeline, where RAILS has replaced a traditional HDBSCAN stage with higher clustering quality, transparent prompt-driven control, and stateful incremental operation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

How Annotation Trains Annotators: Competence Development in Social Influence Recognition

Human data annotation, especially when involving experts, is often treated as an objective reference. However, many annotation tasks are inherently subjective, and annotators' judgments may evolve over time. This study investigates changes in the quality of annotators' work from a competence perspective during a process of social influence recognition. The study involved 25 annotators from five different groups, including both experts and non-experts, who annotated a dataset of 1,021 dialogues with 20 social influence techniques, along with intentions, reactions, and consequences. An initial subset of 150 texts was annotated twice - before and after the main annotation process - to enable comparison. To measure competence shifts, we combined qualitative and quantitative analyses of the annotated data, semi-structured interviews with annotators, self-assessment surveys, and Large Language Model training and evaluation on the comparison dataset. The results indicate a significant increase in annotators' self-perceived competence and confidence. Moreover, observed changes in data quality suggest that the annotation process may enhance annotator competence and that this effect is more pronounced in expert groups. The observed shifts in annotator competence have a visible impact on the performance of LLMs trained on their annotated data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Sociodemographic Biases in Educational Counselling by Large Language Models

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into educational settings, understanding their potential biases is critical. This study examines sociodemographic biases in LLM-based educational counselling. We evaluate responses from six LLMs answering questions about 900 vignettes describing students in diverse circumstances. Each vignette is systematically tested across 14 sociodemographic identifiers - spanning race and gender, socioeconomic status, and immigrant background - along with a control condition, yielding 243,000 model responses. Our findings indicate that (1) all models exhibit measurable biases, (2) bias patterns partially align with documented human biases but diverge in notable ways, (3) the magnitude of these biases is strongly influenced by the precision of the student descriptions, where vague or minimal information amplifies disparities nearly threefold, while concrete, individualised metrics substantially reduce them, and (4) bias profiles vary substantially across models. These results demonstrate the importance of context-rich and personalised educational representations, suggesting that AI-driven educational decisions benefit from detailed student-specific information to promote fairness and equity.

cs.CY↗