arXiv subjects

Preetika Verma

Publications and source records attributed to Preetika Verma.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

FLAIRR-TS -- Forecasting LLM-Agents with Iterative Refinement and Retrieval for Time Series

Time series Forecasting with large languagemodels (LLMs) requires bridging numericalpatterns and natural language. Effective fore-casting on LLM often relies on extensive pre-processing and fine-tuning.Recent studiesshow that a frozen LLM can rival specializedforecasters when supplied with a carefully en-gineered natural-language prompt, but craft-ing such a prompt for each task is itself oner-ous and ad-hoc. We introduce FLAIRR-TS, atest-time prompt optimization framework thatutilizes an agentic system: a Forecaster-agentgenerates forecasts using an initial prompt,which is then refined by a refiner agent, in-formed by past outputs and retrieved analogs.This adaptive prompting generalizes across do-mains using creative prompt templates andgenerates high-quality forecasts without inter-mediate code generation.Experiments onbenchmark datasets show improved accuracyover static prompting and retrieval-augmentedbaselines, approaching the performance ofspecialized prompts.FLAIRR-TS providesa practical alternative to tuning, achievingstrong performance via its agentic approach toadaptive prompt refinement and retrieval.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

"Reasoning" with Rhetoric: On the Style-Evidence Tradeoff in LLM-Generated Counter-Arguments

Large language models (LLMs) play a key role in generating evidence-based and stylistic counter-arguments, yet their effectiveness in real-world applications has been underexplored. Previous research often neglects the balance between evidentiality and style, which are crucial for persuasive arguments. To address this, we evaluated the effectiveness of stylized evidence-based counter-argument generation in Counterfire, a new dataset of 38,000 counter-arguments generated by revising counter-arguments to Reddit's ChangeMyView community to follow different discursive styles. We evaluated generic and stylized counter-arguments from basic and fine-tuned models such as GPT-3.5, PaLM-2, and Koala-13B, as well as newer models (GPT-4o, Claude Haiku, LLaMA-3.1) focusing on rhetorical quality and persuasiveness. Our findings reveals that humans prefer stylized counter-arguments over the original outputs, with GPT-3.5 Turbo performing well, though still not reaching human standards of rhetorical quality nor persuasiveness indicating a persisting style-evidence tradeoff in counter-argument generation by LLMs. We conclude with an examination of ethical considerations in LLM persuasion research, addressing potential risks of deceptive practices and the need for transparent deployment methodologies to safeguard against misuse in public discourse. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Preetika764/Style_control/.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

The MediaSpin Dataset: Post-Publication News Headline Edits Annotated for Media Bias

We present MediaSpin, a large-scale language resource capturing how major news outlets modify headlines after publication, and MediaSpin-in-the-Wild, a complementary dataset linking these revised headlines to their downstream engagement on social media. The increasing editability of online news headlines offers new opportunities to study linguistic framing and bias through the lens of editorial revisions. The dataset contains 78,910 headline pairs annotated for 13 types of media bias, grounded in established media-bias taxonomies, covering both subjective (e.g., sensationalism, spin) and objective (e.g., omission, slant) forms, with annotation conducted through a human-supervised large-language-model pipeline with expert validation and quality control. We describe the annotation schema and demonstrate three downstream applications: (1) cross-national analysis of how country references are added or removed during editing, (2) transformer-based bias classification at both binary and fine-grained levels, and (3) behavioral analysis of biased headlines on X (Twitter) using 180,786 news-related tweets from 819 consenting users. The results reveal regional asymmetries in representational framing, measurable linguistic markers, and consistently higher engagement with biased content. MediaSpin and MediaSpin-in-the-Wild together provide a reproducible benchmark for bias detection and the study of editorial and behavioral dynamics in contemporary media ecosystems.

cs.CL↗