arXiv subjects

Christina Lioma

Publications and source records attributed to Christina Lioma.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

How Context Shapes Truth: Geometric Transformations of Statement-level Truth Representations in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) often encode whether a statement is true as a vector in their residual stream activations. These vectors, also known as truth vectors, have been studied in prior work, however how they change when context is introduced remains unexplored. We study this question by measuring (1) the directional change ($θ$) between the truth vectors with and without context and (2) the relative magnitude of the truth vectors upon adding context. Across four LLMs and four datasets, we find that (1) truth vectors are roughly orthogonal in early layers, converge in middle layers, and may stabilize or continue increasing in later layers; (2) adding context generally increases the truth vector magnitude, i.e., the separation between true and false representations in the activation space is amplified; (3) larger models distinguish relevant from irrelevant context mainly through directional change ($θ$), while smaller models show this distinction through magnitude differences. We also find that context conflicting with parametric knowledge produces larger geometric changes than parametrically aligned context. Collectively, these findings provide a geometric characterization of how context transforms the truth vector in the activation space of LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Don't Go Breaking My LLM: The Impact of Pruning Attention Layers on Explanation Faithfulness and Confidence Calibration

Pruning Large Language Models (LLMs) reduces memory and inference costs by removing parts of the network, producing smaller models that retain most of their accuracy. As attention layers are the most resource-intensive parts of LLMs, pruning them is a promising compression strategy. Prior work shows that up to 33% of attention layers can be pruned with minimal accuracy loss. Nevertheless, the impact of attention pruning on model interpretability, specifically faithfulness and confidence calibration, remains unstudied. To address this gap, we study how pruning attention layers affects explanation faithfulness and confidence calibration across five LLMs and eight datasets. While the pruned models often maintain high accuracy, we find that their faithfulness and calibration often degrade. Notably, faithfulness and calibration can fluctuate significantly, even when accuracy remains stable, highlighting a misalignment between model confidence, interpretability, and accuracy. Our findings suggest that layer pruning can affect LLMs' interpretability and reliability in ways not captured by accuracy and efficiency measures alone. We recommend including explainability and calibration metrics when evaluating pruned models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Post-Training Denoising of User Profiles with LLMs in Collaborative Filtering Recommendation

Implicit feedback -- the main data source for training Recommender Systems (RSs) -- is inherently noisy and has been shown to negatively affect recommendation effectiveness. Denoising has been proposed as a method for removing noisy implicit feedback and improving recommendations. Prior work has focused on in-training denoising, however this requires additional data, changes to the model architecture and training procedure or fine-tuning, all of which can be costly and data hungry. In this work, we focus on post-training denoising. Different from in-training denoising, post-training denoising does not involve changing the architecture of the model nor its training procedure, and does not require additional data. Specifically, we present a method for post-training denoising user profiles using Large Language Models (LLMs) for Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommendations. Our approach prompts LLMs with (i) a user profile (user interactions), (ii) a candidate item, and (iii) its rank as given by the CF recommender, and asks the LLM to remove items from the user profile to improve the rank of the candidate item. Experiments with a state-of-the-art CF recommender and 4 open and closed source LLMs in 3 datasets show that our denoising yields improvements up to 13% in effectiveness over the original user profiles. Our code is available at https://github.com/edervishaj/denoising-user-profiles-LLM.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Measuring Individual User Fairness with User Similarity and Effectiveness Disparity

Individual user fairness is commonly understood as treating similar users similarly. In Recommender Systems (RSs), several evaluation measures exist for quantifying individual user fairness. These measures evaluate fairness via either: (i) the disparity in RS effectiveness scores regardless of user similarity, or (ii) the disparity in items recommended to similar users regardless of item relevance. Both disparity in recommendation effectiveness and user similarity are very important in fairness, yet no existing individual user fairness measure simultaneously accounts for both. In brief, current user fairness evaluation measures implement a largely incomplete definition of fairness. To fill this gap, we present Pairwise User unFairness (PUF), a novel evaluation measure of individual user fairness that considers both effectiveness disparity and user similarity. PUF is the only measure that can express this important distinction. We empirically validate that PUF does this consistently across 4 datasets and 7 rankers, and robustly when varying user similarity or effectiveness. In contrast, all other measures are either almost insensitive to effectiveness disparity or completely insensitive to user similarity. We contribute the first RS evaluation measure to reliably capture both user similarity and effectiveness in individual user fairness. Our code: https://github.com/theresiavr/PUF-individual-user-fairness-recsys.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

BrainLLM: Generative Language Decoding from Brain Recordings

Generating human language through non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has the potential to unlock many applications, such as serving disabled patients and improving communication. Currently, however, generating language via BCIs has been previously successful only within a classification setup for selecting pre-generated sentence continuation candidates with the most likely cortical semantic representation. Inspired by recent research that revealed associations between the brain and the large computational language models, we propose a generative language BCI that utilizes the capacity of a large language model (LLM) jointly with a semantic brain decoder to directly generate language from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) input. The proposed model can generate coherent language sequences aligned with the semantic content of visual or auditory language stimuli perceived, without prior knowledge of any pre-generated candidates. We compare the language generated from the presented model with a random control, pre-generated language selection approach, and a standard LLM, which generates common coherent text solely based on the next word likelihood according to statistical language training data. The proposed model is found to generate language that is more aligned with semantic stimulus in response to which brain input is sampled. Our findings demonstrate the potential and feasibility of employing BCIs in direct language generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The Quest for Reliable Metrics of Responsible AI

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including AI in Science (AIS), should be done following the principles of responsible AI. Progress in responsible AI is often quantified through evaluation metrics, yet there has been less work on assessing the robustness and reliability of the metrics themselves. We reflect on prior work that examines the robustness of fairness metrics for recommender systems as a type of AI application and summarise their key takeaways into a set of non-exhaustive guidelines for developing reliable metrics of responsible AI. Our guidelines apply to a broad spectrum of AI applications, including AIS.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Stairway to Fairness: Connecting Group and Individual Fairness

Fairness in recommender systems (RSs) is commonly categorised into group fairness and individual fairness. However, there is no established scientific understanding of the relationship between the two fairness types, as prior work on both types has used different evaluation measures or evaluation objectives for each fairness type, thereby not allowing for a proper comparison of the two. As a result, it is currently not known how increasing one type of fairness may affect the other. To fill this gap, we study the relationship of group and individual fairness through a comprehensive comparison of evaluation measures that can be used for both fairness types. Our experiments with 8 runs across 3 datasets show that recommendations that are highly fair for groups can be very unfair for individuals. Our finding is novel and useful for RS practitioners aiming to improve the fairness of their systems. Our code is available at: https://github.com/theresiavr/stairway-to-fairness.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

A Reality Check on Context Utilisation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps address the limitations of parametric knowledge embedded within a language model (LM). In real world settings, retrieved information can vary in complexity, yet most investigations of LM utilisation of context has been limited to synthetic text. We introduce DRUID (Dataset of Retrieved Unreliable, Insufficient and Difficult-to-understand contexts) with real-world queries and contexts manually annotated for stance. The dataset is based on the prototypical task of automated claim verification, for which automated retrieval of real-world evidence is crucial. We compare DRUID to synthetic datasets (CounterFact, ConflictQA) and find that artificial datasets often fail to represent the complexity and diversity of realistically retrieved context. We show that synthetic datasets exaggerate context characteristics rare in real retrieved data, which leads to inflated context utilisation results, as measured by our novel ACU score. Moreover, while previous work has mainly focused on singleton context characteristics to explain context utilisation, correlations between singleton context properties and ACU on DRUID are surprisingly small compared to other properties related to context source. Overall, our work underscores the need for real-world aligned context utilisation studies to represent and improve performance in real-world RAG settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

As easy as PIE: understanding when pruning causes language models to disagree

Language Model (LM) pruning compresses the model by removing weights, nodes, or other parts of its architecture. Typically, pruning focuses on the resulting efficiency gains at the cost of effectiveness. However, when looking at how individual data points are affected by pruning, it turns out that a particular subset of data points always bears most of the brunt (in terms of reduced accuracy) when pruning, but this effect goes unnoticed when reporting the mean accuracy of all data points. These data points are called PIEs and have been studied in image processing, but not in NLP. In a study of various NLP datasets, pruning methods, and levels of compression, we find that PIEs impact inference quality considerably, regardless of class frequency, and that BERT is more prone to this than BiLSTM. We also find that PIEs contain a high amount of data points that have the largest influence on how well the model generalises to unseen data. This means that when pruning, with seemingly moderate loss to accuracy across all data points, we in fact hurt tremendously those data points that matter the most. We trace what makes PIEs both hard and impactful to inference to their overall longer and more semantically complex text. These findings are novel and contribute to understanding how LMs are affected by pruning. The code is available at: https://github.com/pietrotrope/AsEasyAsPIE

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Joint Evaluation of Fairness and Relevance in Recommender Systems with Pareto Frontier

Fairness and relevance are two important aspects of recommender systems (RSs). Typically, they are evaluated either (i) separately by individual measures of fairness and relevance, or (ii) jointly using a single measure that accounts for fairness with respect to relevance. However, approach (i) often does not provide a reliable joint estimate of the goodness of the models, as it has two different best models: one for fairness and another for relevance. Approach (ii) is also problematic because these measures tend to be ad-hoc and do not relate well to traditional relevance measures, like NDCG. Motivated by this, we present a new approach for jointly evaluating fairness and relevance in RSs: Distance to Pareto Frontier (DPFR). Given some user-item interaction data, we compute their Pareto frontier for a pair of existing relevance and fairness measures, and then use the distance from the frontier as a measure of the jointly achievable fairness and relevance. Our approach is modular and intuitive as it can be computed with existing measures. Experiments with 4 RS models, 3 re-ranking strategies, and 6 datasets show that existing metrics have inconsistent associations with our Pareto-optimal solution, making DPFR a more robust and theoretically well-founded joint measure for assessing fairness and relevance. Our code: https://github.com/theresiavr/DPFR-recsys-evaluation

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Are Representation Disentanglement and Interpretability Linked in Recommendation Models? A Critical Review and Reproducibility Study

Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations has been closely tied to enhancing the representation intepretability of Recommender Systems (RSs). This has been achieved by making the representation of individual features more distinctly separated, so that it is easier to attribute the contribution of features to the model's predictions. However, such advantages in interpretability and feature attribution have mainly been explored qualitatively. Moreover, the effect of disentanglement on the model's recommendation performance has been largely overlooked. In this work, we reproduce the recommendation performance, representation disentanglement and representation interpretability of five well-known recommendation models on four RS datasets. We quantify disentanglement and investigate the link of disentanglement with recommendation effectiveness and representation interpretability. While several existing work in RSs have proposed disentangled representations as a gateway to improved effectiveness and interpretability, our findings show that disentanglement is not necessarily related to effectiveness but is closely related to representation interpretability. Our code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/edervishaj/disentanglement-interpretability-recsys.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Joint Extraction and Classification of Danish Competences for Job Matching

The matching of competences, such as skills, occupations or knowledges, is a key desiderata for candidates to be fit for jobs. Automatic extraction of competences from CVs and Jobs can greatly promote recruiters' productivity in locating relevant candidates for job vacancies. This work presents the first model that jointly extracts and classifies competence from Danish job postings. Different from existing works on skill extraction and skill classification, our model is trained on a large volume of annotated Danish corpora and is capable of extracting a wide range of Danish competences, including skills, occupations and knowledges of different categories. More importantly, as a single BERT-like architecture for joint extraction and classification, our model is lightweight and efficient at inference. On a real-scenario job matching dataset, our model beats the state-of-the-art models in the overall performance of Danish competence extraction and classification, and saves over 50% time at inference.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

DYNAMICQA: Tracing Internal Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models

Knowledge-intensive language understanding tasks require Language Models (LMs) to integrate relevant context, mitigating their inherent weaknesses, such as incomplete or outdated knowledge. However, conflicting knowledge can be present in the LM's parameters, termed intra-memory conflict, which can affect a model's propensity to accept contextual knowledge. To study the effect of intra-memory conflict on an LM's ability to accept relevant context, we utilize two knowledge conflict measures and a novel dataset containing inherently conflicting data, DynamicQA. This dataset includes facts with a temporal dynamic nature where facts can change over time and disputable dynamic facts, which can change depending on the viewpoint. DynamicQA is the first to include real-world knowledge conflicts and provide context to study the link between the different types of knowledge conflicts. We also evaluate several measures on their ability to reflect the presence of intra-memory conflict: semantic entropy and a novel coherent persuasion score. With our extensive experiments, we verify that LMs exhibit a greater degree of intra-memory conflict with dynamic facts compared to facts that have a single truth value. Furthermore, we reveal that facts with intra-memory conflict are harder to update with context, suggesting that retrieval-augmented generation will struggle with the most commonly adapted facts.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Investigating the Impact of Model Instability on Explanations and Uncertainty

Explainable AI methods facilitate the understanding of model behaviour, yet, small, imperceptible perturbations to inputs can vastly distort explanations. As these explanations are typically evaluated holistically, before model deployment, it is difficult to assess when a particular explanation is trustworthy. Some studies have tried to create confidence estimators for explanations, but none have investigated an existing link between uncertainty and explanation quality. We artificially simulate epistemic uncertainty in text input by introducing noise at inference time. In this large-scale empirical study, we insert different levels of noise perturbations and measure the effect on the output of pre-trained language models and different uncertainty metrics. Realistic perturbations have minimal effect on performance and explanations, yet masking has a drastic effect. We find that high uncertainty doesn't necessarily imply low explanation plausibility; the correlation between the two metrics can be moderately positive when noise is exposed during the training process. This suggests that noise-augmented models may be better at identifying salient tokens when uncertain. Furthermore, when predictive and epistemic uncertainty measures are over-confident, the robustness of a saliency map to perturbation can indicate model stability issues. Integrated Gradients shows the overall greatest robustness to perturbation, while still showing model-specific patterns in performance; however, this phenomenon is limited to smaller Transformer-based language models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Can We Trust Recommender System Fairness Evaluation? The Role of Fairness and Relevance

Relevance and fairness are two major objectives of recommender systems (RSs). Recent work proposes measures of RS fairness that are either independent from relevance (fairness-only) or conditioned on relevance (joint measures). While fairness-only measures have been studied extensively, we look into whether joint measures can be trusted. We collect all joint evaluation measures of RS relevance and fairness, and ask: How much do they agree with each other? To what extent do they agree with relevance/fairness measures? How sensitive are they to changes in rank position, or to increasingly fair and relevant recommendations? We empirically study for the first time the behaviour of these measures across 4 real-world datasets and 4 recommenders. We find that most of these measures: i) correlate weakly with one another and even contradict each other at times; ii) are less sensitive to rank position changes than relevance- and fairness-only measures, meaning that they are less granular than traditional RS measures; and iii) tend to compress scores at the low end of their range, meaning that they are not very expressive. We counter the above limitations with a set of guidelines on the appropriate usage of such measures, i.e., they should be used with caution due to their tendency to contradict each other and of having a very small empirical range.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Query Augmentation by Decoding Semantics from Brain Signals

Query augmentation is a crucial technique for refining semantically imprecise queries. Traditionally, query augmentation relies on extracting information from initially retrieved, potentially relevant documents. If the quality of the initially retrieved documents is low, then the effectiveness of query augmentation would be limited as well. We propose Brain-Aug, which enhances a query by incorporating semantic information decoded from brain signals. BrainAug generates the continuation of the original query with a prompt constructed with brain signal information and a ranking-oriented inference approach. Experimental results on fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) datasets show that Brain-Aug produces semantically more accurate queries, leading to improved document ranking performance. Such improvement brought by brain signals is particularly notable for ambiguous queries.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Recommending Target Actions Outside Sessions in the Data-poor Insurance Domain

Providing personalized recommendations for insurance products is particularly challenging due to the intrinsic and distinctive features of the insurance domain. First, unlike more traditional domains like retail, movie etc., a large amount of user feedback is not available and the item catalog is smaller. Second, due to the higher complexity of products, the majority of users still prefer to complete their purchases over the phone instead of online. We present different recommender models to address such data scarcity in the insurance domain. We use recurrent neural networks with 3 different types of loss functions and architectures (cross-entropy, censored Weibull, attention). Our models cope with data scarcity by learning from multiple sessions and different types of user actions. Moreover, differently from previous session-based models, our models learn to predict a target action that does not happen within the session. Our models outperform state-of-the-art baselines on a real-world insurance dataset, with ca. 44K users, 16 items, 54K purchases and 117K sessions. Moreover, combining our models with demographic data boosts the performance. Analysis shows that considering multiple sessions and several types of actions are both beneficial for the models, and that our models are not unfair with respect to age, gender and income.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Digital-analog hybrid matrix multiplication processor for optical neural networks

The computational demands of modern AI have spurred interest in optical neural networks (ONNs) which offer the potential benefits of increased speed and lower power consumption. However, current ONNs face various challenges,most significantly a limited calculation precision (typically around 4 bits) and the requirement for high-resolution signal format converters (digital-to-analogue conversions (DACs) and analogue-to-digital conversions (ADCs)). These challenges are inherent to their analog computing nature and pose significant obstacles in practical implementation. Here, we propose a digital-analog hybrid optical computing architecture for ONNs, which utilizes digital optical inputs in the form of binary words. By introducing the logic levels and decisions based on thresholding, the calculation precision can be significantly enhanced. The DACs for input data can be removed and the resolution of the ADCs can be greatly reduced. This can increase the operating speed at a high calculation precision and facilitate the compatibility with microelectronics. To validate our approach, we have fabricated a proof-of-concept photonic chip and built up a hybrid optical processor (HOP) system for neural network applications. We have demonstrated an unprecedented 16-bit calculation precision for high-definition image processing, with a pixel error rate (PER) as low as $1.8\times10^{-3}$ at an signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 18.2 dB. We have also implemented a convolutional neural network for handwritten digit recognition that shows the same accuracy as the one achieved by a desktop computer. The concept of the digital-analog hybrid optical computing architecture offers a methodology that could potentially be applied to various ONN implementations and may intrigue new research into efficient and accurate domain-specific optical computing architectures for neural networks.

cs.NE↗