arXiv subjects

John Hawkins

Publications and source records attributed to John Hawkins.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Automated evaluation of LLMs for effective machine translation of Mandarin Chinese to English

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have exceptional performance in machine translation, only a limited systematic assessment of translation quality has been done. The challenge lies in automated frameworks, as human-expert-based evaluations can be time-consuming, given the fast-evolving LLMs and the need for a diverse set of texts to ensure fair assessments of translation quality. In this paper, we utilise an automated machine learning framework featuring semantic and sentiment analysis to assess Mandarin Chinese to English translation using Google Translate and LLMs, including GPT-4, GPT-4o, and DeepSeek. We compare original and translated texts in various classes of high-profile Chinese texts, which include novel texts that span modern and classical literature, as well as news articles. As the main evaluation measures, we utilise novel similarity metrics to compare the quality of translations produced by LLMs and further evaluate them by an expert human translator. Our results indicate that the LLMs perform well in news media translation, but show divergence in their performance when applied to literary texts. Although GPT-4o and DeepSeek demonstrated better semantic conservation in complex situations, DeepSeek demonstrated better performance in preserving cultural subtleties and grammatical rendering. Nevertheless, the subtle challenges in translation remain: maintaining cultural details, classical references and figurative expressions remain an open problem for all the models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Machine Learning for Detection and Analysis of Novel LLM Jailbreaks

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a range of vulnerabilities that allow malicious users to solicit undesirable responses through manipulation of the input text. These so-called jailbreak prompts are designed to trick the LLM into circumventing the safety guardrails put in place to keep responses acceptable to the developer's policies. In this study, we analyse the ability of different machine learning models to distinguish jailbreak prompts from genuine uses, including looking at our ability to identify jailbreaks that use previously unseen strategies. Our results indicate that using current datasets the best performance is achieved by fine tuning a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model end-to-end for identifying jailbreaks. We visualise the keywords that distinguish jailbreak from genuine prompts and conclude that explicit reflexivity in prompt structure could be a signal of jailbreak intention.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Improving AGI Evaluation: A Data Science Perspective

Evaluation of potential AGI systems and methods is difficult due to the breadth of the engineering goal. We have no methods for perfect evaluation of the end state, and instead measure performance on small tests designed to provide directional indication that we are approaching AGI. In this work we argue that AGI evaluation methods have been dominated by a design philosophy that uses our intuitions of what intelligence is to create synthetic tasks, that have performed poorly in the history of AI. Instead we argue for an alternative design philosophy focused on evaluating robust task execution that seeks to demonstrate AGI through competence. This perspective is developed from common practices in data science that are used to show that a system can be reliably deployed. We provide practical examples of what this would mean for AGI evaluation.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Enigme: Generative Text Puzzles for Evaluating Reasoning in Language Models

Transformer-decoder language models are a core innovation in text based generative artificial intelligence. These models are being deployed as general-purpose intelligence systems in many applications. Central to their utility is the capacity to understand natural language commands and exploit the reasoning embedded in human text corpora to apply some form of reasoning process to a wide variety of novel tasks. To understand the limitations of this approach to generating reasoning we argue that we need to consider the architectural constraints of these systems. Consideration of the latent variable structure of transformer-decoder models allows us to design reasoning tasks that should probe the boundary of their capacity to reason. We present enigme, an open-source library for generating text-based puzzles to be used in training and evaluating reasoning skills within transformer-decoder models and future AI architectures.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Efficient Systematic Reviews: Literature Filtering with Transformers & Transfer Learning

Identifying critical research within the growing body of academic work is an intrinsic aspect of conducting quality research. Systematic review processes used in evidence-based medicine formalise this as a procedure that must be followed in a research program. However, it comes with an increasing burden in terms of the time required to identify the important articles of research for a given topic. In this work, we develop a method for building a general-purpose filtering system that matches a research question, posed as a natural language description of the required content, against a candidate set of articles obtained via the application of broad search terms. Our results demonstrate that transformer models, pre-trained on biomedical literature, and then fine tuned for the specific task, offer a promising solution to this problem. The model can remove large volumes of irrelevant articles for most research questions. Furthermore, analysis of the specific research questions in our training data suggest natural avenues for further improvement.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2024

Enhanced Review Detection and Recognition: A Platform-Agnostic Approach with Application to Online Commerce

Online commerce relies heavily on user generated reviews to provide unbiased information about products that they have not physically seen. The importance of reviews has attracted multiple exploitative online behaviours and requires methods for monitoring and detecting reviews. We present a machine learning methodology for review detection and extraction, and demonstrate that it generalises for use across websites that were not contained in the training data. This method promises to drive applications for automatic detection and evaluation of reviews, regardless of their source. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of our method by implementing and discussing three key applications for analysing reviews: Sentiment Inconsistency Analysis, which detects and filters out unreliable reviews based on inconsistencies between ratings and comments; Multi-language support, enabling the extraction and translation of reviews from various languages without relying on HTML scraping; and Fake review detection, achieved by integrating a trained NLP model to identify and distinguish between genuine and fake reviews.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Recursive deep learning framework for forecasting the decadal world economic outlook

The gross domestic product (GDP) is the most widely used indicator in macroeconomics and the main tool for measuring a country's economic output. Due to the diversity and complexity of the world economy, a wide range of models have been used, but there are challenges in making decadal GDP forecasts given unexpected changes such as emergence of catastrophic world events including pandemics and wars. Deep learning models are well suited for modelling temporal sequences and time series forecasting. In this paper, we develop a deep learning framework to forecast the GDP growth rate of the world economy over a decade. We use the Penn World Table as the data source featuring 13 countries prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, such as Australia, China, India, and the United States. We present a recursive deep learning framework to predict the GDP growth rate in the next ten years. We test prominent deep learning models and compare their results with traditional econometric models for selected developed and developing countries. Our decadal forecasts reveal that that most of the developed countries would experience economic growth slowdown, stagnation and even recession within five years (2020-2024). Furthermore, our model forecasts show that only China, France, and India would experience stable GDP growth.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Minimum Viable Model Estimates for Machine Learning Projects

Prioritization of machine learning projects requires estimates of both the potential ROI of the business case and the technical difficulty of building a model with the required characteristics. In this work we present a technique for estimating the minimum required performance characteristics of a predictive model given a set of information about how it will be used. This technique will result in robust, objective comparisons between potential projects. The resulting estimates will allow data scientists and managers to evaluate whether a proposed machine learning project is likely to succeed before any modelling needs to be done. The technique has been implemented into the open source application MinViME (Minimum Viable Model Estimator) which can be installed via the PyPI python package management system, or downloaded directly from the GitHub repository. Available at https://github.com/john-hawkins/MinViME

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Likelihood Models for Forensic Genealogy

In the idealized Morgan model of crossover, we study the probability distributions of shared DNA (identical by descent) between individuals having a wide range of relationships (not just lineal descendants), especially cases for which previous work produces inaccurate results. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we show that a particular, complicated functional form with just one continuous fitted parameter accurately approximates the distributions in all cases tried. Analysis of that functional form shows that it is close to a normal distribution, not in shared fraction f, but in the square-root of f. We describe a multivariate normal model in this variable for use as a practical framework for several general tasks in forensic genealogy that are currently done by less-accurate and less well-founded methods.

q-bio.GN↗