arXiv subjects

Zarreen Reza

Publications and source records attributed to Zarreen Reza.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Differentially Private Multimodal In-Context Learning

Vision-language models are increasingly applied to sensitive domains such as medical imaging and personal photographs, yet existing differentially private methods for in-context learning are limited to few-shot, text-only settings because privacy cost scales with the number of tokens processed. We present Differentially Private Multimodal Task Vectors (DP-MTV), the first framework enabling many-shot multimodal in-context learning with formal $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differential privacy by aggregating hundreds of demonstrations into compact task vectors in activation space. DP-MTV partitions private data into disjoint chunks, applies per-layer clipping to bound sensitivity, and adds calibrated noise to the aggregate, requiring only a single noise addition that enables unlimited inference queries. We evaluate on eight benchmarks across three VLM architectures, supporting deployment with or without auxiliary data. At $\varepsilon=1.0$, DP-MTV achieves 50% on VizWiz compared to 55% non-private and 35% zero-shot, preserving most of the gain from in-context learning under meaningful privacy constraints.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Chopping Trees: Semantic Similarity Based Dynamic Pruning for Tree-of-Thought Reasoning

Tree-of-Thought (ToT) reasoning boosts the problem-solving abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) but is computationally expensive due to semantic redundancy, where distinct branches explore equivalent reasoning paths. We introduce Semantic Similarity-Based Dynamic Pruning (SSDP), a lightweight method that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first framework to integrate online semantic merging into parallelized tree search, enabling the clustering and pruning of redundant steps in real time. Across reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K and MATH500, SSDP achieves up to a 2.3x speedup over state-of-the-art tree-search baselines while maintaining competitive accuracy (typically within 5% of the strongest baseline) and reducing the number of explored nodes by 85-90%, demonstrating a practical approach to efficient, scalable LLM reasoning. The implementation of SSDP is publicly available at https://github.com/kimjoonghokim/SSDP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The Social Laboratory: A Psychometric Framework for Multi-Agent LLM Evaluation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition from static tools to autonomous agents, traditional evaluation benchmarks that measure performance on downstream tasks are becoming insufficient. These methods fail to capture the emergent social and cognitive dynamics that arise when agents communicate, persuade, and collaborate in interactive environments. To address this gap, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that uses multi-agent debate as a controlled "social laboratory" to discover and quantify these behaviors. In our framework, LLM-based agents, instantiated with distinct personas and incentives, deliberate on a wide range of challenging topics under the supervision of an LLM moderator. Our analysis, enabled by a new suite of psychometric and semantic metrics, reveals several key findings. Across hundreds of debates, we uncover a powerful and robust emergent tendency for agents to seek consensus, consistently reaching high semantic agreement ({\mu} > 0.88) even without explicit instruction and across sensitive topics. We show that assigned personas induce stable, measurable psychometric profiles, particularly in cognitive effort, and that the moderators persona can significantly alter debate outcomes by structuring the environment, a key finding for external AI alignment. This work provides a blueprint for a new class of dynamic, psychometrically grounded evaluation protocols designed for the agentic setting, offering a crucial methodology for understanding and shaping the social behaviors of the next generation of AI agents. We have released the code and results at https://github.com/znreza/multi-agent-LLM-eval-for-debate.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Small Models, Big Support: A Local LLM Framework for Educator-Centric Content Creation and Assessment with RAG and CAG

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in student-facing educational tools, their potential to directly support educators through locally deployable and customizable solutions remains underexplored. Many existing approaches rely on proprietary, cloud-based systems that raise significant cost, privacy, and control concerns for educational institutions. To address these barriers, we introduce an end-to-end, open-source framework that empowers educators using small (3B-7B parameter), locally deployable LLMs. Our system is designed for comprehensive teacher support, including customized teaching material generation and AI-assisted assessment. The framework synergistically combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Context-Augmented Generation (CAG) to produce factually accurate, pedagogically-styled content. A core feature is an interactive refinement loop, a teacher-in-the-loop mechanism that ensures educator agency and precise alignment of the final output. To enhance reliability and safety, an auxiliary verifier LLM inspects all generated content. We validate our framework through a rigorous evaluation of its content generation capabilities and report on a successful technical deployment in a college physics course, which confirms its feasibility on standard institutional hardware. Our findings demonstrate that carefully engineered, self-hosted systems built on small LLMs can provide robust, affordable, and private support for educators, achieving practical utility comparable to much larger models for targeted instructional tasks. This work presents a practical blueprint for the development of sovereign AI tools tailored to the real-world needs of educational institutions.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Low-rank finetuning for LLMs: A fairness perspective

Low-rank approximation techniques have become the de facto standard for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their reduced computational and memory requirements. This paper investigates the effectiveness of these methods in capturing the shift of fine-tuning datasets from the initial pre-trained data distribution. Our findings reveal that there are cases in which low-rank fine-tuning falls short in learning such shifts. This, in turn, produces non-negligible side effects, especially when fine-tuning is adopted for toxicity mitigation in pre-trained models, or in scenarios where it is important to provide fair models. Through comprehensive empirical evidence on several models, datasets, and tasks, we show that low-rank fine-tuning inadvertently preserves undesirable biases and toxic behaviors. We also show that this extends to sequential decision-making tasks, emphasizing the need for careful evaluation to promote responsible LLMs development.

cs.LG↗