arXiv subjects

Talal Rahwan

Publications and source records attributed to Talal Rahwan.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Interpretable Machine Learning Models for Predicting the Next Targets of Activist Funds

This research presents a predictive model to identify potential targets of activist investment funds--entities that acquire significant corporate stakes to influence strategic and operational decisions, ultimately enhancing shareholder value. Predicting such targets is crucial for companies aiming to mitigate intervention risks, activist funds seeking optimal investments, and investors looking to leverage potential stock price gains. Using data from the Russell 3000 index from 2016 to 2022, we evaluated 123 model configurations incorporating diverse imputation, oversampling, and machine learning techniques. Our best model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.782, demonstrating its capability to effectively predict activist fund targets. To enhance interpretability, we employed the Shapley value method to identify key factors influencing a company's likelihood of being targeted, highlighting the dynamic mechanisms underlying activist fund target selection. These insights offer a powerful tool for proactive corporate governance and informed investment strategies, advancing understanding of the mechanisms driving activist investment decisions.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

Who Gets Seen in the Age of AI? Adoption Patterns of Large Language Models in Scholarly Writing and Citation Outcomes

The rapid adoption of generative AI tools is reshaping how scholars produce and communicate knowledge, raising questions about who benefits and who is left behind. We analyze over 230,000 Scopus-indexed computer science articles between 2021 and 2025 to examine how AI-assisted writing alters scholarly visibility across regions. Using zero-shot detection of AI-likeness, we track stylistic changes in writing and link them to citation counts, journal placement, and global citation flows before and after ChatGPT. Our findings reveal uneven outcomes: authors in the Global East adopt AI tools more aggressively, yet Western authors gain more per unit of adoption due to pre-existing penalties for "humanlike" writing. Prestigious journals continue to privilege more human-sounding texts, creating tensions between visibility and gatekeeping. Network analyses show modest increases in Eastern visibility and tighter intra-regional clustering, but little structural integration overall. These results highlight how AI adoption reconfigures the labor of academic writing and reshapes opportunities for recognition.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Adversarial Augmentation and Active Sampling for Robust Cyber Anomaly Detection

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) present a considerable challenge to cybersecurity due to their stealthy, long-duration nature. Traditional supervised learning methods typically require large amounts of labeled data, which is often scarce in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines AutoEncoders for anomaly detection with active learning to iteratively enhance APT detection. By selectively querying an oracle for labels on uncertain or ambiguous samples, our method reduces labeling costs while improving detection accuracy, enabling the model to effectively learn with minimal data and reduce reliance on extensive manual labeling. We present a comprehensive formulation of the Attention Adversarial Dual AutoEncoder-based anomaly detection framework and demonstrate how the active learning loop progressively enhances the model's performance. The framework is evaluated on real-world, imbalanced provenance trace data from the DARPA Transparent Computing program, where APT-like attacks account for just 0.004\% of the data. The datasets, which cover multiple operating systems including Android, Linux, BSD, and Windows, are tested in two attack scenarios. The results show substantial improvements in detection rates during active learning, outperforming existing methods.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Metric Matters: A Formal Evaluation of Similarity Measures in Active Learning for Cyber Threat Intelligence

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose a severe challenge to cyber defense due to their stealthy behavior and the extreme class imbalance inherent in detection datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel active learning-based anomaly detection framework that leverages similarity search to iteratively refine the decision space. Built upon an Attention-Based Autoencoder, our approach uses feature-space similarity to identify normal-like and anomaly-like instances, thereby enhancing model robustness with minimal oracle supervision. Crucially, we perform a formal evaluation of various similarity measures to understand their influence on sample selection and anomaly ranking effectiveness. Through experiments on diverse datasets, including DARPA Transparent Computing APT traces, we demonstrate that the choice of similarity metric significantly impacts model convergence, anomaly detection accuracy, and label efficiency. Our results offer actionable insights for selecting similarity functions in active learning pipelines tailored for threat intelligence and cyber defense.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Attackers Strike Back? Not Anymore -- An Ensemble of RL Defenders Awakens for APT Detection

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) represent a growing menace to modern digital infrastructure. Unlike traditional cyberattacks, APTs are stealthy, adaptive, and long-lasting, often bypassing signature-based detection systems. This paper introduces a novel framework for APT detection that unites deep learning, reinforcement learning (RL), and active learning into a cohesive, adaptive defense system. Our system combines auto-encoders for latent behavioral encoding with a multi-agent ensemble of RL-based defenders, each trained to distinguish between benign and malicious process behaviors. We identify a critical challenge in existing detection systems: their static nature and inability to adapt to evolving attack strategies. To this end, our architecture includes multiple RL agents (Q-Learning, PPO, DQN, adversarial defenders), each analyzing latent vectors generated by an auto-encoder. When any agent is uncertain about its decision, the system triggers an active learning loop to simulate expert feedback, thus refining decision boundaries. An ensemble voting mechanism, weighted by each agent's performance, ensures robust final predictions.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Overcoming the Machine Penalty with Imperfectly Fair AI Agents

Despite rapid technological progress, effective human-machine cooperation remains a significant challenge. Humans tend to cooperate less with machines than with fellow humans, a phenomenon known as the machine penalty. Here, we show that artificial intelligence (AI) agents powered by large language models can overcome this penalty in social dilemma games with communication. In a pre-registered experiment with 1,152 participants, we deploy AI agents exhibiting three distinct personas: selfish, cooperative, and fair. However, only fair agents elicit human cooperation at rates comparable to human-human interactions. Analysis reveals that fair agents, similar to human participants, occasionally break pre-game cooperation promises, but nonetheless effectively establish cooperation as a social norm. These results challenge the conventional wisdom of machines as altruistic assistants or rational actors. Instead, our study highlights the importance of AI agents reflecting the nuanced complexity of human social behaviors -- imperfect yet driven by deeper social cognitive processes.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

SONIC: Cost-Effective Web Access for Developing Countries

Over 2.6 billion people remain without access to the Internet in 2025. This phenomenon is especially pronounced in developing regions, where cost and infrastructure limitations are major barriers to connectivity. In response, we design SONIC, a low-cost, scalable data delivery system that builds on existing infrastructures: FM radio for downlink broadcasting, and SMS for personalized uplink. SONIC is motivated by the widespread availability of FM radio and SMS infrastructure in developing regions, along with embedded FM radio tuners in affordable mobile phones. SONIC offers several innovations to effectively transmit Web content over sound over FM radio, in a reliable and compressed form. For example, we transmit pre-rendered webpages and leverage pixel interpolation to recover errors at the receiver. We further modify Android to offer a simpler deployment pipeline, supporting a wide range of devices. We deployed SONIC at an FM radio station in Cameroon for six weeks with 30 participants. Our results demonstrate a sustained downlink throughput of 10 kbps, less than 20% loss for a majority of transmissions with signal strength above -90 dbM, and a strong user engagement across both Web browsing and ChatGPT interactions.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

TikTok's recommendations skewed towards Republican content during the 2024 U.S. presidential race

TikTok is a major force among social media platforms with over a billion monthly active users worldwide and 170 million in the United States. The platform's status as a key news source, particularly among younger demographics, raises concerns about its potential influence on politics in the U.S. and globally. Despite these concerns, there is scant research investigating TikTok's recommendation algorithm for political biases. We fill this gap by conducting 323 independent algorithmic audit experiments testing partisan content recommendations in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential elections. Specifically, we create hundreds of "sock puppet" TikTok accounts in Texas, New York, and Georgia, seeding them with varying partisan content and collecting algorithmic content recommendations for each of them. Collectively, these accounts viewed ~394,000 videos from April 30th to November 11th, 2024, which we label for political and partisan content. Our analysis reveals significant asymmetries in content distribution: Republican-seeded accounts received ~11.8% more party-aligned recommendations compared to their Democratic-seeded counterparts, and Democratic-seeded accounts were exposed to ~7.5% more opposite-party recommendations on average. These asymmetries exist across all three states and persist when accounting for video- and channel-level engagement metrics such as likes, views, shares, comments, and followers, and are driven primarily by negative partisanship content. Our findings provide insights into the inner workings of TikTok's recommendation algorithm during a critical election period, raising fundamental questions about platform neutrality.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

Neutralizing the Narrative: AI-Powered Debiasing of Online News Articles

Bias in news reporting significantly impacts public perception, particularly regarding crime, politics, and societal issues. Traditional bias detection methods, predominantly reliant on human moderation, suffer from subjective interpretations and scalability constraints. Here, we introduce an AI-driven framework leveraging advanced large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4o, GPT-4o Mini, Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, Llama 8B, and Llama 3B, to systematically identify and mitigate biases in news articles. To this end, we collect an extensive dataset consisting of over 30,000 crime-related articles from five politically diverse news sources spanning a decade (2013-2023). Our approach employs a two-stage methodology: (1) bias detection, where each LLM scores and justifies biased content at the paragraph level, validated through human evaluation for ground truth establishment, and (2) iterative debiasing using GPT-4o Mini, verified by both automated reassessment and human reviewers. Empirical results indicate GPT-4o Mini's superior accuracy in bias detection and effectiveness in debiasing. Furthermore, our analysis reveals temporal and geographical variations in media bias correlating with socio-political dynamics and real-world events. This study contributes to scalable computational methodologies for bias mitigation, promoting fairness and accountability in news reporting.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

HowkGPT: Investigating the Detection of ChatGPT-generated University Student Homework through Context-Aware Perplexity Analysis

As the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text generation tasks proliferates, concerns arise over their potential to compromise academic integrity. The education sector currently tussles with distinguishing student-authored homework assignments from AI-generated ones. This paper addresses the challenge by introducing HowkGPT, designed to identify homework assignments generated by AI. HowkGPT is built upon a dataset of academic assignments and accompanying metadata [17] and employs a pretrained LLM to compute perplexity scores for student-authored and ChatGPT-generated responses. These scores then assist in establishing a threshold for discerning the origin of a submitted assignment. Given the specificity and contextual nature of academic work, HowkGPT further refines its analysis by defining category-specific thresholds derived from the metadata, enhancing the precision of the detection. This study emphasizes the critical need for effective strategies to uphold academic integrity amidst the growing influence of LLMs and provides an approach to ensuring fair and accurate grading in educational institutions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Self-Reflection Makes Large Language Models Safer, Less Biased, and Ideologically Neutral

Previous studies proposed that the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) can be improved through self-reflection, i.e., letting LLMs reflect on their own output to identify and correct mistakes in the initial responses. However, earlier experiments offer mixed results when it comes to the benefits of self-reflection. Furthermore, prior studies on self-reflection are predominantly concerned with the reasoning capabilities of models, ignoring the potential for self-reflection in safety, bias, and ideological leaning. Here, by conducting a series of experiments testing LLM's self-reflection capability in various tasks using a variety of prompts and different LLMs, we make several contributions to the literature. First, we reconcile conflicting findings regarding the benefit of self-reflection, by demonstrating that the outcome of self-reflection is sensitive to prompt wording -- both the original prompt that are used to elicit an initial answer and the subsequent prompt used to self-reflect. Specifically, although self-reflection may improve the reasoning capability of LLMs when the initial response is simple, the technique cannot improve upon the state-of-the-art chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Second, we show that self-reflection can lead to safer (75.8\% reduction in toxic responses while preserving 97.8\% non-toxic ones), less biased (77\% reduction in gender biased responses, while preserving 94.3\% unbiased ones), and more ideologically neutral responses (100\% reduction in partisan leaning response, while preserving 87.7\% non-partisan ones). The paper concludes by discussing the implications of our findings on the deployment of large language models. We release our experiments at https://github.com/Michael98Liu/self-reflection.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

APT-LLM: Embedding-Based Anomaly Detection of Cyber Advanced Persistent Threats Using Large Language Models

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) pose a major cybersecurity challenge due to their stealth and ability to mimic normal system behavior, making detection particularly difficult in highly imbalanced datasets. Traditional anomaly detection methods struggle to effectively differentiate APT-related activities from benign processes, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces APT-LLM, a novel embedding-based anomaly detection framework that integrates large language models (LLMs) -- BERT, ALBERT, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa -- with autoencoder architectures to detect APTs. Unlike prior approaches, which rely on manually engineered features or conventional anomaly detection models, APT-LLM leverages LLMs to encode process-action provenance traces into semantically rich embeddings, capturing nuanced behavioral patterns. These embeddings are analyzed using three autoencoder architectures -- Baseline Autoencoder (AE), Variational Autoencoder (VAE), and Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) -- to model normal process behavior and identify anomalies. The best-performing model is selected for comparison against traditional methods. The framework is evaluated on real-world, highly imbalanced provenance trace datasets from the DARPA Transparent Computing program, where APT-like attacks constitute as little as 0.004\% of the data across multiple operating systems (Android, Linux, BSD, and Windows) and attack scenarios. Results demonstrate that APT-LLM significantly improves detection performance under extreme imbalance conditions, outperforming existing anomaly detection methods and highlighting the effectiveness of LLM-based feature extraction in cybersecurity.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Analyzing political stances on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. election

Social media platforms play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and amplifying political discourse, particularly during elections. However, the same dynamics that foster democratic engagement can also exacerbate polarization. To better understand these challenges, here, we investigate the ideological positioning of tweets related to the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. To this end, we analyze 1,235 tweets from key political figures and 63,322 replies, and classify ideological stances into Pro-Democrat, Anti-Republican, Pro-Republican, Anti-Democrat, and Neutral categories. Using a classification pipeline involving three large language models (LLMs)-GPT-4o, Gemini-Pro, and Claude-Opus-and validated by human annotators, we explore how ideological alignment varies between candidates and constituents. We find that Republican candidates author significantly more tweets in criticism of the Democratic party and its candidates than vice versa, but this relationship does not hold for replies to candidate tweets. Furthermore, we highlight shifts in public discourse observed during key political events. By shedding light on the ideological dynamics of online political interactions, these results provide insights for policymakers and platforms seeking to address polarization and foster healthier political dialogue.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

AI-generated faces influence gender stereotypes and racial homogenization

Text-to-image generative AI models such as Stable Diffusion are used daily by millions worldwide. However, the extent to which these models exhibit racial and gender stereotypes is not yet fully understood. Here, we document significant biases in Stable Diffusion across six races, two genders, 32 professions, and eight attributes. Additionally, we examine the degree to which Stable Diffusion depicts individuals of the same race as being similar to one another. This analysis reveals significant racial homogenization, e.g., depicting nearly all Middle Eastern men as bearded, brown-skinned, and wearing traditional attire. We then propose debiasing solutions that allow users to specify the desired distributions of race and gender when generating images while minimizing racial homogenization. Finally, using a preregistered survey experiment, we find evidence that being presented with inclusive AI-generated faces reduces people's racial and gender biases, while being presented with non-inclusive ones increases such biases, regardless of whether the images are labeled as AI-generated. Taken together, our findings emphasize the need to address biases and stereotypes in text-to-image models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Inclusive content reduces racial and gender biases, yet non-inclusive content dominates popular culture

Images are often termed as representations of perceived reality. As such, racial and gender biases in popular culture and visual media could play a critical role in shaping people's perceptions of society. While previous research has made significant progress in exploring the frequency and discrepancies in racial and gender group appearances in visual media, it has largely overlooked important nuances in how these groups are portrayed, as it lacked the ability to systematically capture such complexities at scale over time. To address this gap, we examine two media forms of varying target audiences, namely fashion magazines and movie posters. Accordingly, we collect a large dataset comprising over 300,000 images spanning over five decades and utilize state-of-the-art machine learning models to classify not only race and gender but also the posture, expressed emotional state, and body composition of individuals featured in each image. We find that racial minorities appear far less frequently than their White counterparts, and when they do appear, they are portrayed less prominently. We also find that women are more likely to be portrayed with their full bodies, whereas men are more frequently presented with their faces. Finally, through a series of survey experiments, we find evidence that exposure to inclusive content can help reduce biases in perceptions of minorities, while racially and gender-homogenized content may reinforce and amplify such biases. Taken together, our findings highlight that racial and gender biases in visual media remain pervasive, potentially exacerbating existing stereotypes and inequalities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Static network structure cannot stabilize cooperation among Large Language Model agents

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to model human social behavior, with recent research exploring their ability to simulate social dynamics. Here, we test whether LLMs mirror human behavior in social dilemmas, where individual and collective interests conflict. Humans generally cooperate more than expected in laboratory settings, showing less cooperation in well-mixed populations but more in fixed networks. In contrast, LLMs tend to exhibit greater cooperation in well-mixed settings. This raises a key question: Are LLMs about to emulate human behavior in cooperative dilemmas on networks? In this study, we examine networked interactions where agents repeatedly engage in the Prisoner's Dilemma within both well-mixed and structured network configurations, aiming to identify parallels in cooperative behavior between LLMs and humans. Our findings indicate critical distinctions: while humans tend to cooperate more within structured networks, LLMs display increased cooperation mainly in well-mixed environments, with limited adjustment to networked contexts. Notably, LLM cooperation also varies across model types, illustrating the complexities of replicating human-like social adaptability in artificial agents. These results highlight a crucial gap: LLMs struggle to emulate the nuanced, adaptive social strategies humans deploy in fixed networks. Unlike human participants, LLMs do not alter their cooperative behavior in response to network structures or evolving social contexts, missing the reciprocity norms that humans adaptively employ. This limitation points to a fundamental need in future LLM design -- to integrate a deeper comprehension of social norms, enabling more authentic modeling of human-like cooperation and adaptability in networked environments.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

China and the U.S. produce more impactful AI research when collaborating together

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a disruptive technology, promising to grant a significant economic and strategic advantage to nations that harness its power. China, with its recent push towards AI adoption, is challenging the U.S.'s position as the global leader in this field. Given AI's massive potential, as well as the fierce geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S., several recent policies have been put in place to discourage AI scientists from migrating to, or collaborating with, the other nation. Nevertheless, the extent of talent migration and cross-border collaboration are not fully understood. Here, we analyze a dataset of over 350,000 AI scientists and 5,000,000 AI papers. We find that since 2000, China and the U.S. have led the field in terms of impact, novelty, productivity, and workforce. Most AI scientists who move to China come from the U.S., and most who move to the U.S. come from China, highlighting a notable bidirectional talent migration. Moreover, the vast majority of those moving in either direction have Asian ancestry. Upon moving, those scientists continue to collaborate frequently with those in the origin country. Although the number of collaborations between the two countries has increased since the dawn of the millennium, such collaborations continue to be relatively rare. A matching experiment reveals that the two countries have always been more impactful when collaborating than when each works without the other. These findings suggest that instead of suppressing cross-border migration and collaboration between the two nations, the science could benefit from promoting such activities.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Where postdoctoral journeys lead

Postdoctoral training is a career stage often described as a demanding and anxiety-laden time when many promising PhDs see their academic dreams slip away due to circumstances beyond their control. We use a unique data set of academic publishing and careers to chart the more or less successful postdoctoral paths. We build a measure of academic success on the citation patterns two to five years into a faculty career. Then, we monitor how students' postdoc positions -- in terms of relocation, change of topic, and early well-cited papers -- relate to their early-career success. One key finding is that the postdoc period seems more important than the doctoral training to achieve this form of success. This is especially interesting in light of the many studies of academic faculty hiring that link Ph.D. granting institutions and hires, omitting the postdoc stage. Another group of findings can be summarized as a Goldilocks principle: it seems beneficial to change one's direction, but not too much.

cs.CY↗