arXiv subjects

Sana Ebrahimi

Publications and source records attributed to Sana Ebrahimi.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

From Citations to Contributions: LLM-Assisted Credit Scoring of Research Articles

Citation-based measures of scientific influence typically treat citations as uniform signals, ignoring the different roles that cited works play in a paper's contribution. We introduce contribution-based credit scoring for research articles: a structured citation analysis that decomposes a paper's credit between its own original contribution and the prior work it builds on. Motivated by a cooperative-game view of scientific credit, we propose the contribution tree, a hierarchical framework that conserves importance across the document structure and separates original from citation-derived contribution. To make this framework scalable, we use LLMs as noisy comparative estimators of local importance. We further extend the model to article collections by propagating contributions through weighted citation graphs, yielding corpus-level contributions and normalized influence scores. Our experiments suggest that our framework captures contribution signals beyond surface-level heuristics. Our code is available at https://github.com/sanaebrahimi/Importance_Scoring/

cs.DL↗

arXiv2025

An Adversary-Resistant Multi-Agent LLM System via Credibility Scoring

While multi-agent LLM systems show strong capabilities in various domains, they are highly vulnerable to adversarial and low-performing agents. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we introduce a general and adversary-resistant multi-agent LLM framework based on credibility scoring. We model the collaborative query-answering process as an iterative game, where the agents communicate and contribute to a final system output. Our system associates a credibility score that is used when aggregating the team outputs. The credibility scores are learned gradually based on the past contributions of each agent in query answering. Our experiments across multiple tasks and settings demonstrate our system's effectiveness in mitigating adversarial influence and enhancing the resilience of multi-agent cooperation, even in the adversary-majority settings.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

REQUAL-LM: Reliability and Equity through Aggregation in Large Language Models

The extensive scope of large language models (LLMs) across various domains underscores the critical importance of responsibility in their application, beyond natural language processing. In particular, the randomized nature of LLMs, coupled with inherent biases and historical stereotypes in data, raises critical concerns regarding reliability and equity. Addressing these challenges are necessary before using LLMs for applications with societal impact. Towards addressing this gap, we introduce REQUAL-LM, a novel method for finding reliable and equitable LLM outputs through aggregation. Specifically, we develop a Monte Carlo method based on repeated sampling to find a reliable output close to the mean of the underlying distribution of possible outputs. We formally define the terms such as reliability and bias, and design an equity-aware aggregation to minimize harmful bias while finding a highly reliable output. REQUAL-LM does not require specialized hardware, does not impose a significant computing load, and uses LLMs as a blackbox. This design choice enables seamless scalability alongside the rapid advancement of LLM technologies. Our system does not require retraining the LLMs, which makes it deployment ready and easy to adapt. Our comprehensive experiments using various tasks and datasets demonstrate that REQUAL- LM effectively mitigates bias and selects a more equitable response, specifically the outputs that properly represents minority groups.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

AXOLOTL: Fairness through Assisted Self-Debiasing of Large Language Model Outputs

Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing capabilities but are susceptible to biases present in their training data, leading to unfair outcomes in various applications. While numerous strategies have been proposed to mitigate bias, they often require extensive computational resources and may compromise model performance. In this work, we introduce AXOLOTL, a novel post-processing framework, which operates agnostically across tasks and models, leveraging public APIs to interact with LLMs without direct access to internal parameters. Through a three-step process resembling zero-shot learning, AXOLOTL identifies biases, proposes resolutions, and guides the model to self-debias its outputs. This approach minimizes computational costs and preserves model performance, making AXOLOTL a promising tool for debiasing LLM outputs with broad applicability and ease of use.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

[Experiments & Analysis] Evaluating the Feasibility of Sampling-Based Techniques for Training Multilayer Perceptrons

The training process of neural networks is known to be time-consuming, and having a deep architecture only aggravates the issue. This process consists mostly of matrix operations, among which matrix multiplication is the bottleneck. Several sampling-based techniques have been proposed for speeding up the training time of deep neural networks by approximating the matrix products. These techniques fall under two categories: (i) sampling a subset of nodes in every hidden layer as active at every iteration and (ii) sampling a subset of nodes from the previous layer to approximate the current layer's activations using the edges from the sampled nodes. In both cases, the matrix products are computed using only the selected samples. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of these approaches on CPU machines with limited computational resources. Making a connection between the two research directions as special cases of approximating matrix multiplications in the context of neural networks, we provide a negative theoretical analysis that shows feedforward approximation is an obstacle against scalability. We conduct comprehensive experimental evaluations that demonstrate the most pressing challenges and limitations associated with the studied approaches. We observe that the hashing-based node selection method is not scalable to a large number of layers, confirming our theoretical analysis. Finally, we identify directions for future research.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Maximizing Fair Content Spread via Edge Suggestion in Social Networks

Content spread inequity is a potential unfairness issue in online social networks, disparately impacting minority groups. In this paper, we view friendship suggestion, a common feature in social network platforms, as an opportunity to achieve an equitable spread of content. In particular, we propose to suggest a subset of potential edges (currently not existing in the network but likely to be accepted) that maximizes content spread while achieving fairness. Instead of re-engineering the existing systems, our proposal builds a fairness wrapper on top of the existing friendship suggestion components. We prove the problem is NP-hard and inapproximable in polynomial time unless P = NP. Therefore, allowing relaxation of the fairness constraint, we propose an algorithm based on LP-relaxation and randomized rounding with fixed approximation ratios on fairness and content spread. We provide multiple optimizations, further improving the performance of our algorithm in practice. Besides, we propose a scalable algorithm that dynamically adds subsets of nodes, chosen via iterative sampling, and solves smaller problems corresponding to these nodes. Besides theoretical analysis, we conduct comprehensive experiments on real and synthetic data sets. Across different settings, our algorithms found solutions with nearzero unfairness while significantly increasing the content spread. Our scalable algorithm could process a graph with half a million nodes on a single machine, reducing the unfairness to around 0.0004 while lifting content spread by 43%.

cs.SI↗