Teaching LLMs to Think Mathematically: A Critical Study of Decision-Making via Optimization

This paper investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in formulating and solving decision-making problems using mathematical programming. We first conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of recent literature to assess how well LLMs understand, structure, and solve optimization problems across domains. The analysis is guided by critical review questions focusing on learning approaches, dataset designs, evaluation metrics, and prompting strategies. Our systematic evidence is complemented by targeted experiments designed to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs in automatically generating optimization models for problems in computer networks. Using a newly constructed dataset, we apply three prompting strategies: Act-as-expert, chain-of-thought, and self-consistency, and evaluate the obtained outputs based on optimality gap, token-level F1 score, and compilation accuracy. Results show promising progress in LLMs' ability to parse natural language and represent symbolic formulations, but also reveal key limitations in accuracy, scalability, and interpretability. These empirical gaps motivate several future research directions, including structured datasets, domain-specific fine-tuning, hybrid neuro-symbolic approaches, modular multi-agent architectures, and dynamic retrieval via chain-of-RAGs. This paper contributes a structured roadmap for advancing LLM capabilities in mathematical programming.

Data Augmentation using Transformers and Similarity Measures for Improving Arabic Text Classification

Learning models are highly dependent on data to work effectively, and they give a better performance upon training on big datasets. Massive research exists in the literature to address the dataset adequacy issue. One promising approach for solving dataset adequacy issues is the data augmentation (DA) approach. In DA, the amount of training data instances is increased by making different transformations on the available data instances to generate new correct and representative data instances. DA increases the dataset size and its variability, which enhances the model performance and its prediction accuracy. DA also solves the class imbalance problem in the classification learning techniques. Few studies have recently considered DA in the Arabic language. These studies rely on traditional augmentation approaches, such as paraphrasing by using rules or noising-based techniques. In this paper, we propose a new Arabic DA method that employs the recent powerful modeling technique, namely the AraGPT-2, for the augmentation process. The generated sentences are evaluated in terms of context, semantics, diversity, and novelty using the Euclidean, cosine, Jaccard, and BLEU distances. Finally, the AraBERT transformer is used on sentiment classification tasks to evaluate the classification performance of the augmented Arabic dataset. The experiments were conducted on four sentiment Arabic datasets, namely AraSarcasm, ASTD, ATT, and MOVIE. The selected datasets vary in size, label number, and unbalanced classes. The results show that the proposed methodology enhanced the Arabic sentiment text classification on all datasets with an increase in F1 score by 4% in AraSarcasm, 6% in ASTD, 9% in ATT, and 13% in MOVIE.