arXiv subjects

Kazi Noshin

Publications and source records attributed to Kazi Noshin.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BenSyc: Benchmarking Conversational Sycophancy and Human Alignment in LLMs for Bengali Contexts

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly participate in emotionally sensitive social conversations, where responses may shift from balanced support toward excessive validation or escalatory alignment. Existing sycophancy research primarily focuses on factual agreement and instruction-following settings, leaving culturally grounded conversational sycophancy underexplored. We introduce BenSyc, the first benchmark for studying conversational sycophancy in Bengali social contexts. Starting from 11,840 Reddit posts and 170k comments collected from communities across Bangladesh and West Bengal, we construct a human-validated benchmark with binary labels and a fine-grained five-level taxonomy spanning Invalidation, Neutral, Support, Validation, and Escalation. We evaluate more than 15 open and proprietary LLMs on conversational alignment classification and response generation tasks. Results show that distinguishing empathetic support from reinforcement-oriented validation remains challenging even for frontier instruction-tuned models: the best system achieves only 61.8 Macro-F1 on binary detection and 61.7 Macro-F1 on five-class classification. In generation settings, several models frequently produce strongly validating or escalatory responses in emotionally charged situations. Our findings highlight substantial variation across model families and conversational behaviors, underscoring the importance of culturally grounded multilingual benchmarks for evaluating socially aligned conversational AI systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

User Detection and Response Patterns of Sycophantic Behavior in Conversational AI

Despite growing attention to LLM sycophancy from researchers and developers, users' own experiences of this behavior remain underexplored. We examine how everyday users experience AI sycophancy through Reddit discussions. Using our ODR Framework which maps user experiences through observation, detection, and response stages, we find that users identify sycophantic behavior through methods like cross-platform comparison and consistency testing. They employ various mitigation strategies, including persona-based prompting and specific language engineering techniques. Our findings suggest that sycophancy does not have a uniformly negative effect; its impact differs by context. Users facing trauma, mental health struggles, or isolation often actively seek affirmative AI responses for emotional support. Users construct both technical and informal theories to explain sycophantic outputs. Users construct both technical and informal theories to explain sycophantic outputs. These findings suggest eliminating sycophancy entirely may be misguided. We argue for context-aware AI design that balances risks against benefits of affirmative interaction, with implications for user education and system transparency.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

The Illusion of Agreement with ChatGPT: Sycophancy and Beyond

While concerns about ChatGPT-induced harms due to sycophancy and other behaviors, including gaslighting, have grown among researchers, how users themselves experience and mitigate these harms remain largely underexplored. We analyze Reddit discussions to investigate what concerns users report and how they address them. Our findings reveal five distinct user-reported concerns that manifest across multiple life domains, ranging from personal to societal: inducing delusion, digressing narratives, implicating users for models' limitations, inducing addiction, and providing unsupervised psychological support. We document three-tier user-driven suggestions spanning functional usage techniques, behavioral approaches, and private and institutional safeguards. Our findings show that AI-induced harms require coordinated interventions across users, developers, and policymakers. We discuss design implications and future directions to mitigate the harms and ensure user benefits.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Unmasking Parkinson's Disease with Smile: An AI-enabled Screening Framework

We present an efficient and accessible PD screening method by leveraging AI-driven models enabled by the largest video dataset of facial expressions from 1,059 unique participants. This dataset includes 256 individuals with PD, 165 clinically diagnosed, and 91 self-reported. Participants used webcams to record themselves mimicking three facial expressions (smile, disgust, and surprise) from diverse sources encompassing their homes across multiple countries, a US clinic, and a PD wellness center in the US. Facial landmarks are automatically tracked from the recordings to extract features related to hypomimia, a prominent PD symptom characterized by reduced facial expressions. Machine learning algorithms are trained on these features to distinguish between individuals with and without PD. The model was tested for generalizability on external (unseen during training) test videos collected from a US clinic and Bangladesh. An ensemble of machine learning models trained on smile videos achieved an accuracy of 87.9+-0.1% (95% Confidence Interval) with an AUROC of 89.3+-0.3% as evaluated on held-out data (using k-fold cross-validation). In external test settings, the ensemble model achieved 79.8+-0.6% accuracy with 81.9+-0.3% AUROC on the clinical test set and 84.9+-0.4% accuracy with 81.2+-0.6% AUROC on participants from Bangladesh. In every setting, the model was free from detectable bias across sex and ethnic subgroups, except in the cohorts from Bangladesh, where the model performed significantly better for female participants than males. Smiling videos can effectively differentiate between individuals with and without PD, offering a potentially easy, accessible, and cost-efficient way to screen for PD, especially when a clinical diagnosis is difficult to access.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Real-time Seismic Intensity Prediction using Self-supervised Contrastive GNN for Earthquake Early Warning

Seismic intensity prediction from early or initial seismic waves received by a few seismic stations can enhance Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems, particularly in ground motion-based approaches like PLUM. While many operational EEW systems currently utilize point-source-based models that estimate the warning area based on magnitude and distance measures, direct intensity prediction offers a potential improvement in accuracy and reliability. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning approach, Seismic Contrastive Graph Neural Network (SC-GNN), for highly accurate seismic intensity prediction using a small portion of initial seismic waveforms from a few seismic stations. The SC-GNN consists of two key components: (i) a graph neural network (GNN) to propagate spatiotemporal information through a graph-like structure representing seismic station distribution and wave propagation, and (ii) a self-supervised contrastive learning component to train the network with larger time windows and enable predictions using shorter initial waveforms. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated through experiments on three real-world seismic datasets, where it shows superior performance over existing techniques, including a significant reduction in mean squared error (MSE) and the lowest standard deviation of error, indicating its robustness, reliability, and strong positive relationship between predicted and actual values. Notably, the SC-GNN model maintains superior performance even with 5s input waveforms, making it especially suitable for enhancing EEW applications.

eess.SP↗