Abstract:As Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of effortlessly generating high-quality text, traditional quality-focused writing assessment is losing its significance. If the essential goal of education is to foster critical thinking and original perspectives, assessment must also shift its paradigm from quality to originality. This study proposes Argument Rarity-based Originality Assessment (AROA), a framework for automatically evaluating argumentative originality in student essays. AROA defines originality as rarity within a reference corpus and evaluates it through four complementary components: structural rarity, claim rarity, evidence rarity, and cognitive depth. The framework quantifies the rarity of each component using density estimation and integrates them with a quality adjustment mechanism, thereby treating quality and originality as independent evaluation axes. Experiments using human essays and AI-generated essays revealed a strong negative correlation between quality and claim rarity, demonstrating a quality-originality trade-off where higher-quality texts tend to rely on typical claim patterns. Furthermore, while AI essays achieved comparable levels of structural complexity to human essays, their claim rarity was substantially lower than that of humans, indicating that LLMs can reproduce the form of argumentation but have limitations in the originality of content.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive world knowledge, yet methods for effectively eliciting this knowledge remain underexplored. Nationality and region prediction tasks require understanding of not only linguistic features but also cultural and historical background, making LLM world knowledge particularly valuable. However, conventional LLM prompting methods rely on direct reasoning approaches, which have limitations in applying abstract linguistic rules. We propose LLM Associative Memory Agents (LAMA), a novel framework that leverages LLM world knowledge as associative memory. Rather than directly inferring nationality from names, LAMA recalls famous individuals with the same name and aggregates their nationalities through indirect reasoning. A dual-agent architecture comprising a Person Agent and a Media Agent, specialized in different knowledge domains, recalls famous individuals in parallel, generating Top-1 predictions through voting and Top-K predictions through conditional completion. On a 99-country nationality prediction task, LAMA achieved 0.817 accuracy, substantially outperforming conventional LLM prompting methods and neural models. Our experiments reveal that LLMs exhibit higher reliability in recalling concrete examples than in abstract reasoning, that recall-based approaches are robust to low-frequency nationalities independent of data frequency distributions, and that the dual-agent architecture functions complementarily to produce synergistic effects. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of a new multi-agent system that retrieves and aggregates LLM knowledge rather than prompting reasoning.
Abstract:Predicting nationality from personal names has practical value in marketing, demographic research, and genealogical studies. Conventional neural models learn statistical correspondences between names and nationalities from task-specific training data, posing challenges in generalizing to low-frequency nationalities and distinguishing similar nationalities within the same region. Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to address these challenges by leveraging world knowledge acquired during pre-training. In this study, we comprehensively compare neural models and LLMs on nationality prediction, evaluating six neural models and six LLM prompting strategies across three granularity levels (nationality, region, and continent), with frequency-based stratified analysis and error analysis. Results show that LLMs outperform neural models at all granularity levels, with the gap narrowing as granularity becomes coarser. Simple machine learning methods exhibit the highest frequency robustness, while pre-trained models and LLMs show degradation for low-frequency nationalities. Error analysis reveals that LLMs tend to make ``near-miss'' errors, predicting the correct region even when nationality is incorrect, whereas neural models exhibit more cross-regional errors and bias toward high-frequency classes. These findings indicate that LLM superiority stems from world knowledge, model selection should consider required granularity, and evaluation should account for error quality beyond accuracy.
Abstract:The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly transformed natural language processing (NLP), enabling more generalized models to perform various tasks with minimal training. However, traditional sentiment analysis methods, which focus on individual tasks such as sentiment classification or aspect-based analysis, are not practical for real-world applications that usually require handling multiple tasks. While offering flexibility, LLMs in sentiment-specific tasks often fall short of the required accuracy. Techniques like fine-tuning and evolutionary model merging help integrate models into a unified framework, which can improve the learning performance while reducing computational costs. The use of task meta-data and curriculum learning to optimize learning processes remains underexplored, while sentiment analysis is a critical task in NLP that requires high accuracy and scalability across multiple subtasks. In this study, we propose a hybrid learning model called Multi-stage Evolutionary Model Merging with Meta data driven Curriculum Learning (MEM-MCL), to enhance the sentiment analysis in large language modeling. In particular, expert models are created through instruction tuning for specific sentiment tasks and then merged using evolutionary algorithms to form a unified model. The merging process is optimized with weak data to enhance performance across tasks. The curriculum learning is incorporated to provide a learning sequence based on task difficulty, improving knowledge extraction from LLMs. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed MEM-MCL model outperforms conventional LLMs in a majority of sentiment analysis tasks, achieving superior results across various subtasks.
Abstract:Sarcasm understanding is a challenging problem in natural language processing, as it requires capturing the discrepancy between the surface meaning of an utterance and the speaker's intentions as well as the surrounding social context. Although recent advances in deep learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially improved performance, most existing approaches still rely on black-box predictions of a single model, making it difficult to structurally explain the cognitive factors underlying sarcasm. Moreover, while sarcasm often emerges as a mismatch between semantic evaluation and normative expectations or intentions, frameworks that explicitly decompose and model these components remain limited. In this work, we reformulate sarcasm understanding as a world model inspired reasoning process and propose World Model inspired SArcasm Reasoning (WM-SAR), which decomposes literal meaning, context, normative expectation, and intention into specialized LLM-based agents. The discrepancy between literal evaluation and normative expectation is explicitly quantified as a deterministic inconsistency score, and together with an intention score, these signals are integrated by a lightweight Logistic Regression model to infer the final sarcasm probability. This design leverages the reasoning capability of LLMs while maintaining an interpretable numerical decision structure. Experiments on representative sarcasm detection benchmarks show that WM-SAR consistently outperforms existing deep learning and LLM-based methods. Ablation studies and case analyses further demonstrate that integrating semantic inconsistency and intention reasoning is essential for effective sarcasm detection, achieving both strong performance and high interpretability.




Abstract:In practical deep learning deployment, the scarcity of data and the imbalance of label distributions often lead to semantically uncovered regions within the real-world data distribution, hindering model training and causing misclassification near class boundaries as well as unstable behaviors in peripheral areas. Although recent large language models (LLMs) show promise for data augmentation, an integrated framework that simultaneously achieves directional control of generation, domain alignment, and quality control has not yet been fully established. To address these challenges, we propose a Cluster-conditioned Interpolative and Extrapolative framework for Geometry-Aware and Domain-aligned data augmentation (CIEGAD), which systematically complements both in-distribution and out-of-distribution semantically uncovered regions. CIEGAD constructs domain profiles through cluster conditioning, allocates generation with a hierarchical frequency-geometric allocation integrating class frequency and geometric indicators, and finely controls generation directions via the coexistence of interpolative and extrapolative synthesis. It further performs quality control through geometry-constrained filtering combined with an LLM-as-a-Judge mechanism. Experiments on multiple classification tasks demonstrate that CIEGAD effectively extends the periphery of real-world data distributions while maintaining high alignment between generated and real-world data as well as semantic diversity. In particular, for long-tailed and multi-class classification tasks, CIEGAD consistently improves F1 and recall, validating the triple harmony of distributional consistency, diversity, and quality. These results indicate that CIEGAD serves as a practically oriented data augmentation framework that complements underrepresented regions while preserving alignment with real-world data.
Abstract:Driver distraction behavior recognition using in-vehicle cameras demands real-time inference on edge devices. However, lightweight models often fail to capture fine-grained behavioral cues, resulting in reduced performance on unseen drivers or under varying conditions. ROI-based methods also increase computational cost, making it difficult to balance efficiency and accuracy. This work addresses the need for a lightweight architecture that overcomes these constraints. We propose Computationally efficient Dynamic region of Interest Routing and domain-invariant Adversarial learning for lightweight driver behavior recognition (C-DIRA). The framework combines saliency-driven Top-K ROI pooling and fused classification for local feature extraction and integration. Dynamic ROI routing enables selective computation by applying ROI inference only to high difficulty data samples. Moreover, pseudo-domain labeling and adversarial learning are used to learn domain-invariant features robust to driver and background variation. Experiments on the State Farm Distracted Driver Detection Dataset show that C-DIRA maintains high accuracy with significantly fewer FLOPs and lower latency than prior lightweight models. It also demonstrates robustness under visual degradation such as blur and low-light, and stable performance across unseen domains. These results confirm C-DIRA's effectiveness in achieving compactness, efficiency, and generalization.