arXiv subjects

Usman Naseem

Publications and source records attributed to Usman Naseem.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

ExtremeAIGC: Benchmarking LMM Vulnerability to AI-Generated Extremist Content

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly vulnerable to AI-generated extremist content, including photorealistic images and text, which can be used to bypass safety mechanisms and generate harmful outputs. However, existing datasets for evaluating LMM robustness offer limited exploration of extremist content, often lacking AI-generated images, diverse image generation models, and comprehensive coverage of historical events, which hinders a complete assessment of model vulnerabilities. To fill this gap, we introduce ExtremeAIGC, a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework designed to assess LMM vulnerabilities against such content. ExtremeAIGC simulates real-world events and malicious use cases by curating diverse text- and image-based examples crafted using state-of-the-art image generation techniques. Our study reveals alarming weaknesses in LMMs, demonstrating that even cutting-edge safety measures fail to prevent the generation of extremist material. We systematically quantify the success rates of various attack strategies, exposing critical gaps in current defenses and emphasizing the need for more robust mitigation strategies.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

VaxGuard: A Multi-Generator, Multi-Type, and Multi-Role Dataset for Detecting LLM-Generated Vaccine Misinformation

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved text generation capabilities. However, they also present challenges, particularly in generating vaccine-related misinformation, which poses risks to public health. Despite research on human-authored misinformation, a notable gap remains in understanding how LLMs contribute to vaccine misinformation and how best to detect it. Existing benchmarks often overlook vaccine-specific misinformation and the diverse roles of misinformation spreaders. This paper introduces VaxGuard, a novel dataset designed to address these challenges. VaxGuard includes vaccine-related misinformation generated by multiple LLMs and provides a comprehensive framework for detecting misinformation across various roles. Our findings show that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o consistently outperform other LLMs in detecting misinformation, especially when dealing with subtle or emotionally charged narratives. On the other hand, PHI3 and Mistral show lower performance, struggling with precision and recall in fear-driven contexts. Additionally, detection performance tends to decline as input text length increases, indicating the need for improved methods to handle larger content. These results highlight the importance of role-specific detection strategies and suggest that VaxGuard can serve as a key resource for improving the detection of LLM-generated vaccine misinformation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Simulating Influence Dynamics with LLM Agents

This paper introduces a simulator designed for opinion dynamics researchers to model competing influences within social networks in the presence of LLM-based agents. By integrating established opinion dynamics principles with state-of-the-art LLMs, this tool enables the study of influence propagation and counter-misinformation strategies. The simulator is particularly valuable for researchers in social science, psychology, and operations research, allowing them to analyse societal phenomena without requiring extensive coding expertise. Additionally, the simulator will be openly available on GitHub, ensuring accessibility and adaptability for those who wish to extend its capabilities for their own research.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2025

MoCFL: Mobile Cluster Federated Learning Framework for Highly Dynamic Network

Frequent fluctuations of client nodes in highly dynamic mobile clusters can lead to significant changes in feature space distribution and data drift, posing substantial challenges to the robustness of existing federated learning (FL) strategies. To address these issues, we proposed a mobile cluster federated learning framework (MoCFL). MoCFL enhances feature aggregation by introducing an affinity matrix that quantifies the similarity between local feature extractors from different clients, addressing dynamic data distribution changes caused by frequent client churn and topology changes. Additionally, MoCFL integrates historical and current feature information when training the global classifier, effectively mitigating the catastrophic forgetting problem frequently encountered in mobile scenarios. This synergistic combination ensures that MoCFL maintains high performance and stability in dynamically changing mobile environments. Experimental results on the UNSW-NB15 dataset show that MoCFL excels in dynamic environments, demonstrating superior robustness and accuracy while maintaining reasonable training costs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Can LLM Agents Maintain a Persona in Discourse?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as conversational agents, exploiting their capabilities in various sectors such as education, law, medicine, and more. However, LLMs are often subjected to context-shifting behaviour, resulting in a lack of consistent and interpretable personality-aligned interactions. Adherence to psychological traits lacks comprehensive analysis, especially in the case of dyadic (pairwise) conversations. We examine this challenge from two viewpoints, initially using two conversation agents to generate a discourse on a certain topic with an assigned personality from the OCEAN framework (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) as High/Low for each trait. This is followed by using multiple judge agents to infer the original traits assigned to explore prediction consistency, inter-model agreement, and alignment with the assigned personality. Our findings indicate that while LLMs can be guided toward personality-driven dialogue, their ability to maintain personality traits varies significantly depending on the combination of models and discourse settings. These inconsistencies emphasise the challenges in achieving stable and interpretable personality-aligned interactions in LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating Personality Traits in Large Language Models: Insights from Psychological Questionnaires

Psychological assessment tools have long helped humans understand behavioural patterns. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content comparable to that of humans, we explore whether they exhibit personality traits. To this end, this work applies psychological tools to LLMs in diverse scenarios to generate personality profiles. Using established trait-based questionnaires such as the Big Five Inventory and by addressing the possibility of training data contamination, we examine the dimensional variability and dominance of LLMs across five core personality dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit unique dominant traits, varying characteristics, and distinct personality profiles even within the same family of models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing textual textbook question answering with large language models and retrieval augmented generation

Textbook question answering (TQA) is a challenging task in artificial intelligence due to the complex nature of context needed to answer complex questions. Although previous research has improved the task, there are still some limitations in textual TQA, including weak reasoning and inability to capture contextual information in the lengthy context. We propose a framework (PLRTQA) that incorporates the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technique to handle the out-of-domain scenario where concepts are spread across different lessons, and utilize transfer learning to handle the long context and enhance reasoning abilities. Our architecture outperforms the baseline, achieving an accuracy improvement of 4. 12% in the validation set and 9. 84% in the test set for textual multiple-choice questions. While this paper focuses on solving challenges in the textual TQA, It provides a foundation for future work in multimodal TQA where the visual components are integrated to address more complex educational scenarios. Code: https://github.com/hessaAlawwad/PLR-TQA

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Leveraging Taxonomy and LLMs for Improved Multimodal Hierarchical Classification

Multi-level Hierarchical Classification (MLHC) tackles the challenge of categorizing items within a complex, multi-layered class structure. However, traditional MLHC classifiers often rely on a backbone model with independent output layers, which tend to ignore the hierarchical relationships between classes. This oversight can lead to inconsistent predictions that violate the underlying taxonomy. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose a novel taxonomy-embedded transitional LLM-agnostic framework for multimodality classification. The cornerstone of this advancement is the ability of models to enforce consistency across hierarchical levels. Our evaluations on the MEP-3M dataset - a multi-modal e-commerce product dataset with various hierarchical levels - demonstrated a significant performance improvement compared to conventional LLM structures.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

COSEE: Consistency-Oriented Signal-Based Early Exiting via Calibrated Sample Weighting Mechanism

Early exiting is an effective paradigm for improving the inference efficiency of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by dynamically adjusting the number of executed layers for each sample. However, in most existing works, easy and hard samples are treated equally by each classifier during training, which neglects the test-time early exiting behavior, leading to inconsistency between training and testing. Although some methods have tackled this issue under a fixed speed-up ratio, the challenge of flexibly adjusting the speed-up ratio while maintaining consistency between training and testing is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Consistency-Oriented Signal-based Early Exiting (COSEE) framework, which leverages a calibrated sample weighting mechanism to enable each classifier to emphasize the samples that are more likely to exit at that classifier under various acceleration scenarios. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our COSEE across multiple exiting signals and backbones, yielding a better trade-off between performance and efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Wills Aligner: Multi-Subject Collaborative Brain Visual Decoding

Decoding visual information from human brain activity has seen remarkable advancements in recent research. However, the diversity in cortical parcellation and fMRI patterns across individuals has prompted the development of deep learning models tailored to each subject. The personalization limits the broader applicability of brain visual decoding in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we introduce Wills Aligner, a novel approach designed to achieve multi-subject collaborative brain visual decoding. Wills Aligner begins by aligning the fMRI data from different subjects at the anatomical level. It then employs delicate mixture-of-brain-expert adapters and a meta-learning strategy to account for individual fMRI pattern differences. Additionally, Wills Aligner leverages the semantic relation of visual stimuli to guide the learning of inter-subject commonality, enabling visual decoding for each subject to draw insights from other subjects' data. We rigorously evaluate our Wills Aligner across various visual decoding tasks, including classification, cross-modal retrieval, and image reconstruction. The experimental results demonstrate that Wills Aligner achieves promising performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Transfer or Self-Supervised? Bridging the Performance Gap in Medical Imaging

Recently, transfer learning and self-supervised learning have gained significant attention within the medical field due to their ability to mitigate the challenges posed by limited data availability, improve model generalisation, and reduce computational expenses. Transfer learning and self-supervised learning hold immense potential for advancing medical research. However, it is crucial to recognise that transfer learning and self-supervised learning architectures exhibit distinct advantages and limitations, manifesting variations in accuracy, training speed, and robustness. This paper compares the performance and robustness of transfer learning and self-supervised learning in the medical field. Specifically, we pre-trained two models using the same source domain datasets with different pre-training methods and evaluated them on small-sized medical datasets to identify the factors influencing their final performance. We tested data with several common issues in medical domains, such as data imbalance, data scarcity, and domain mismatch, through comparison experiments to understand their impact on specific pre-trained models. Finally, we provide recommendations to help users apply transfer learning and self-supervised learning methods in medical areas, and build more convenient and efficient deployment strategies.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Better to Ask in English: Evaluation of Large Language Models on English, Low-resource and Cross-Lingual Settings

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on massive amounts of data, enabling their application across diverse domains and tasks. Despite their remarkable performance, most LLMs are developed and evaluated primarily in English. Recently, a few multi-lingual LLMs have emerged, but their performance in low-resource languages, especially the most spoken languages in South Asia, is less explored. To address this gap, in this study, we evaluate LLMs such as GPT-4, Llama 2, and Gemini to analyze their effectiveness in English compared to other low-resource languages from South Asia (e.g., Bangla, Hindi, and Urdu). Specifically, we utilized zero-shot prompting and five different prompt settings to extensively investigate the effectiveness of the LLMs in cross-lingual translated prompts. The findings of the study suggest that GPT-4 outperformed Llama 2 and Gemini in all five prompt settings and across all languages. Moreover, all three LLMs performed better for English language prompts than other low-resource language prompts. This study extensively investigates LLMs in low-resource language contexts to highlight the improvements required in LLMs and language-specific resources to develop more generally purposed NLP applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Performance Evaluation of Deep Learning and Transformer Models Using Multimodal Data for Breast Cancer Classification

Rising breast cancer (BC) occurrence and mortality are major global concerns for women. Deep learning (DL) has demonstrated superior diagnostic performance in BC classification compared to human expert readers. However, the predominant use of unimodal (digital mammography) features may limit the current performance of diagnostic models. To address this, we collected a novel multimodal dataset comprising both imaging and textual data. This study proposes a multimodal DL architecture for BC classification, utilising images (mammograms; four views) and textual data (radiological reports) from our new in-house dataset. Various augmentation techniques were applied to enhance the training data size for both imaging and textual data. We explored the performance of eleven SOTA DL architectures (VGG16, VGG19, ResNet34, ResNet50, MobileNet-v3, EffNet-b0, EffNet-b1, EffNet-b2, EffNet-b3, EffNet-b7, and Vision Transformer (ViT)) as imaging feature extractors. For textual feature extraction, we utilised either artificial neural networks (ANNs) or long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The combined imaging and textual features were then inputted into an ANN classifier for BC classification, using the late fusion technique. We evaluated different feature extractor and classifier arrangements. The VGG19 and ANN combinations achieved the highest accuracy of 0.951. For precision, the VGG19 and ANN combination again surpassed other CNN and LSTM, ANN based architectures by achieving a score of 0.95. The best sensitivity score of 0.903 was achieved by the VGG16+LSTM. The highest F1 score of 0.931 was achieved by VGG19+LSTM. Only the VGG16+LSTM achieved the best area under the curve (AUC) of 0.937, with VGG16+LSTM closely following with a 0.929 AUC score.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

Structural Representation Learning and Disentanglement for Evidential Chinese Patent Approval Prediction

Automatic Chinese patent approval prediction is an emerging and valuable task in patent analysis. However, it involves a rigorous and transparent decision-making process that includes patent comparison and examination to assess its innovation and correctness. This resultant necessity of decision evidentiality, coupled with intricate patent comprehension presents significant challenges and obstacles for the patent analysis community. Consequently, few existing studies are addressing this task. This paper presents the pioneering effort on this task using a retrieval-based classification approach. We propose a novel framework called DiSPat, which focuses on structural representation learning and disentanglement to predict the approval of Chinese patents and offer decision-making evidence. DiSPat comprises three main components: base reference retrieval to retrieve the Top-k most similar patents as a reference base; structural patent representation to exploit the inherent claim hierarchy in patents for learning a structural patent representation; disentangled representation learning to learn disentangled patent representations that enable the establishment of an evidential decision-making process. To ensure a thorough evaluation, we have meticulously constructed three datasets of Chinese patents. Extensive experiments on these datasets unequivocally demonstrate our DiSPat surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on patent approval prediction, while also exhibiting enhanced evidentiality.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

MultiHateClip: A Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Hateful Video Detection on YouTube and Bilibili

Hate speech is a pressing issue in modern society, with significant effects both online and offline. Recent research in hate speech detection has primarily centered on text-based media, largely overlooking multimodal content such as videos. Existing studies on hateful video datasets have predominantly focused on English content within a Western context and have been limited to binary labels (hateful or non-hateful), lacking detailed contextual information. This study presents MultiHateClip1 , an novel multilingual dataset created through hate lexicons and human annotation. It aims to enhance the detection of hateful videos on platforms such as YouTube and Bilibili, including content in both English and Chinese languages. Comprising 2,000 videos annotated for hatefulness, offensiveness, and normalcy, this dataset provides a cross-cultural perspective on gender-based hate speech. Through a detailed examination of human annotation results, we discuss the differences between Chinese and English hateful videos and underscore the importance of different modalities in hateful and offensive video analysis. Evaluations of state-of-the-art video classification models, such as VLM, GPT-4V and Qwen-VL, on MultiHateClip highlight the existing challenges in accurately distinguishing between hateful and offensive content and the urgent need for models that are both multimodally and culturally nuanced. MultiHateClip represents a foundational advance in enhancing hateful video detection by underscoring the necessity of a multimodal and culturally sensitive approach in combating online hate speech.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2024

Do Large Language Models Speak All Languages Equally? A Comparative Study in Low-Resource Settings

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest in natural language processing (NLP), particularly their remarkable performance in various downstream tasks in resource-rich languages. Recent studies have highlighted the limitations of LLMs in low-resource languages, primarily focusing on binary classification tasks and giving minimal attention to South Asian languages. These limitations are primarily attributed to constraints such as dataset scarcity, computational costs, and research gaps specific to low-resource languages. To address this gap, we present datasets for sentiment and hate speech tasks by translating from English to Bangla, Hindi, and Urdu, facilitating research in low-resource language processing. Further, we comprehensively examine zero-shot learning using multiple LLMs in English and widely spoken South Asian languages. Our findings indicate that GPT-4 consistently outperforms Llama 2 and Gemini, with English consistently demonstrating superior performance across diverse tasks compared to low-resource languages. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that natural language inference (NLI) exhibits the highest performance among the evaluated tasks, with GPT-4 demonstrating superior capabilities.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Robust and Explainable Framework to Address Data Scarcity in Diagnostic Imaging

Deep learning has significantly advanced automatic medical diagnostics and released the occupation of human resources to reduce clinical pressure, yet the persistent challenge of data scarcity in this area hampers its further improvements and applications. To address this gap, we introduce a novel ensemble framework called `Efficient Transfer and Self-supervised Learning based Ensemble Framework' (ETSEF). ETSEF leverages features from multiple pre-trained deep learning models to efficiently learn powerful representations from a limited number of data samples. To the best of our knowledge, ETSEF is the first strategy that combines two pre-training methodologies (Transfer Learning and Self-supervised Learning) with ensemble learning approaches. Various data enhancement techniques, including data augmentation, feature fusion, feature selection, and decision fusion, have also been deployed to maximise the efficiency and robustness of the ETSEF model. Five independent medical imaging tasks, including endoscopy, breast cancer, monkeypox, brain tumour, and glaucoma detection, were tested to demonstrate ETSEF's effectiveness and robustness. Facing limited sample numbers and challenging medical tasks, ETSEF has proved its effectiveness by improving diagnostics accuracies from 10\% to 13.3\% when compared to strong ensemble baseline models and up to 14.4\% improvements compared with published state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we emphasise the robustness and trustworthiness of the ETSEF method through various vision-explainable artificial intelligence techniques, including Grad-CAM, SHAP, and t-SNE. Compared to those large-scale deep learning models, ETSEF can be deployed flexibly and maintain superior performance for challenging medical imaging tasks, showing the potential to be applied to more areas that lack training data

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MSynFD: Multi-hop Syntax aware Fake News Detection

The proliferation of social media platforms has fueled the rapid dissemination of fake news, posing threats to our real-life society. Existing methods use multimodal data or contextual information to enhance the detection of fake news by analyzing news content and/or its social context. However, these methods often overlook essential textual news content (articles) and heavily rely on sequential modeling and global attention to extract semantic information. These existing methods fail to handle the complex, subtle twists in news articles, such as syntax-semantics mismatches and prior biases, leading to lower performance and potential failure when modalities or social context are missing. To bridge these significant gaps, we propose a novel multi-hop syntax aware fake news detection (MSynFD) method, which incorporates complementary syntax information to deal with subtle twists in fake news. Specifically, we introduce a syntactical dependency graph and design a multi-hop subgraph aggregation mechanism to capture multi-hop syntax. It extends the effect of word perception, leading to effective noise filtering and adjacent relation enhancement. Subsequently, a sequential relative position-aware Transformer is designed to capture the sequential information, together with an elaborate keyword debiasing module to mitigate the prior bias. Extensive experimental results on two public benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness and superior performance of our proposed MSynFD over state-of-the-art detection models.

cs.CL↗