In-Browser Agents for Search Assistance

A fundamental tension exists between the demand for sophisticated AI assistance in web search and the need for user data privacy. Current centralized models require users to transmit sensitive browsing data to external services, which limits user control. In this paper, we present a browser extension that provides a viable in-browser alternative. We introduce a hybrid architecture that functions entirely on the client side, combining two components: (1) an adaptive probabilistic model that learns a user's behavioral policy from direct feedback, and (2) a Small Language Model (SLM), running in the browser, which is grounded by the probabilistic model to generate context-aware suggestions. To evaluate this approach, we conducted a three-week longitudinal user study with 18 participants. Our results show that this privacy-preserving approach is highly effective at adapting to individual user behavior, leading to measurably improved search efficiency. This work demonstrates that sophisticated AI assistance is achievable without compromising user privacy or data control.

From SERPs to Agents: A Platform for Comparative Studies of Information Interaction

The diversification of information access systems, from RAG to autonomous agents, creates a critical need for comparative user studies. However, the technical overhead to deploy and manage these distinct systems is a major barrier. We present UXLab, an open-source system for web-based user studies that addresses this challenge. Its core is a web-based dashboard enabling the complete, no-code configuration of complex experimental designs. Researchers can visually manage the full study, from recruitment to comparing backends like traditional search, vector databases, and LLMs. We demonstrate UXLab's value via a micro case study comparing user behavior with RAG versus an autonomous agent. UXLab allows researchers to focus on experimental design and analysis, supporting future multi-modal interaction research.

Benevolent Dictators? On LLM Agent Behavior in Dictator Games

In behavioral sciences, experiments such as the ultimatum game are conducted to assess preferences for fairness or self-interest of study participants. In the dictator game, a simplified version of the ultimatum game where only one of two players makes a single decision, the dictator unilaterally decides how to split a fixed sum of money between themselves and the other player. Although recent studies have explored behavioral patterns of AI agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) instructed to adopt different personas, we question the robustness of these results. In particular, many of these studies overlook the role of the system prompt - the underlying instructions that shape the model's behavior - and do not account for how sensitive results can be to slight changes in prompts. However, a robust baseline is essential when studying highly complex behavioral aspects of LLMs. To overcome previous limitations, we propose the LLM agent behavior study (LLM-ABS) framework to (i) explore how different system prompts influence model behavior, (ii) get more reliable insights into agent preferences by using neutral prompt variations, and (iii) analyze linguistic features in responses to open-ended instructions by LLM agents to better understand the reasoning behind their behavior. We found that agents often exhibit a strong preference for fairness, as well as a significant impact of the system prompt on their behavior. From a linguistic perspective, we identify that models express their responses differently. Although prompt sensitivity remains a persistent challenge, our proposed framework demonstrates a robust foundation for LLM agent behavior studies. Our code artifacts are available at https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/LLM-ABS.

Compressed Concatenation of Small Embedding Models

Embedding models are central to dense retrieval, semantic search, and recommendation systems, but their size often makes them impractical to deploy in resource-constrained environments such as browsers or edge devices. While smaller embedding models offer practical advantages, they typically underperform compared to their larger counterparts. To bridge this gap, we demonstrate that concatenating the raw embedding vectors of multiple small models can outperform a single larger baseline on standard retrieval benchmarks. To overcome the resulting high dimensionality of naive concatenation, we introduce a lightweight unified decoder trained with a Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) loss. This decoder maps the high-dimensional joint representation to a low-dimensional space, preserving most of the original performance without fine-tuning the base models. We also show that while concatenating more base models yields diminishing gains, the robustness of the decoder's representation under compression and quantization improves. Our experiments show that, on a subset of MTEB retrieval tasks, our concat-encode-quantize pipeline recovers 89\% of the original performance with a 48x compression factor when the pipeline is applied to a concatenation of four small embedding models.

Bridging the Semantic Gap in Virtual Machine Introspection and Forensic Memory Analysis

Forensic Memory Analysis (FMA) and Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) are critical tools for security in a virtualization-based approach. VMI and FMA involves using digital forensic methods to extract information from the system to identify and explain security incidents. A key challenge in both FMA and VMI is the "Semantic Gap", which is the difficulty of interpreting raw memory data without specialized tools and expertise. In this work, we investigate how a priori knowledge, metadata and engineered features can aid VMI and FMA, leveraging machine learning to automate information extraction and reduce the workload of forensic investigators. We choose OpenSSH as our use case to test different methods to extract high level structures. We also test our method on complete physical memory dumps to showcase the effectiveness of the engineered features. Our features range from basic statistical features to advanced graph-based representations using malloc headers and pointer translations. The training and testing are carried out on public datasets that we compare against already recognized baseline methods. We show that using metadata, we can improve the performance of the algorithm when there is very little training data and also quantify how having more data results in better generalization performance. The final contribution is an open dataset of physical memory dumps, totalling more than 1 TB of different memory state, software environments, main memory capacities and operating system versions. Our methods show that having more metadata boosts performance with all methods obtaining an F1-Score of over 80%. Our research underscores the possibility of using feature engineering and machine learning techniques to bridge the semantic gap.

WebFAQ: A Multilingual Collection of Natural Q&A Datasets for Dense Retrieval

We present WebFAQ, a large-scale collection of open-domain question answering datasets derived from FAQ-style schema.org annotations. In total, the data collection consists of 96 million natural question-answer (QA) pairs across 75 languages, including 47 million (49%) non-English samples. WebFAQ further serves as the foundation for 20 monolingual retrieval benchmarks with a total size of 11.2 million QA pairs (5.9 million non-English). These datasets are carefully curated through refined filtering and near-duplicate detection, yielding high-quality resources for training and evaluating multilingual dense retrieval models. To empirically confirm WebFAQ's efficacy, we use the collected QAs to fine-tune an in-domain pretrained XLM-RoBERTa model. Through this process of dataset-specific fine-tuning, the model achieves significant retrieval performance gains, which generalize - beyond WebFAQ - to other multilingual retrieval benchmarks evaluated in zero-shot setting. Last but not least, we utilize WebFAQ to construct a set of QA-aligned bilingual corpora spanning over 1000 language pairs using state-of-the-art bitext mining and automated LLM-assessed translation evaluation. Due to our advanced, automated method of bitext dataset generation, the resulting bilingual corpora demonstrate higher translation quality compared to similar datasets. WebFAQ and all associated resources are publicly available on GitHub and HuggingFace.

Malware Detection based on API calls

Malware attacks pose a significant threat in today's interconnected digital landscape, causing billions of dollars in damages. Detecting and identifying families as early as possible provides an edge in protecting against such malware. We explore a lightweight, order-invariant approach to detecting and mitigating malware threats: analyzing API calls without regard to their sequence. We publish a public dataset of over three hundred thousand samples and their function call parameters for this task, annotated with labels indicating benign or malicious activity. The complete dataset is above 550GB uncompressed in size. We leverage machine learning algorithms, such as random forests, and conduct behavioral analysis by examining patterns and anomalies in API call sequences. By investigating how the function calls occur regardless of their order, we can identify discriminating features that can help us identify malware early on. The models we've developed are not only effective but also efficient. They are lightweight and can run on any machine with minimal performance overhead, while still achieving an impressive F1-Score of over 85\%. We also empirically show that we only need a subset of the function call sequence, specifically calls to the ntdll.dll library, to identify malware. Our research demonstrates the efficacy of this approach through empirical evaluations, underscoring its accuracy and scalability. The code is open source and available at Github along with the dataset on Zenodo.

On the Suitability of pre-trained foundational LLMs for Analysis in German Legal Education

We show that current open-source foundational LLMs possess instruction capability and German legal background knowledge that is sufficient for some legal analysis in an educational context. However, model capability breaks down in very specific tasks, such as the classification of "Gutachtenstil" appraisal style components, or with complex contexts, such as complete legal opinions. Even with extended context and effective prompting strategies, they cannot match the Bag-of-Words baseline. To combat this, we introduce a Retrieval Augmented Generation based prompt example selection method that substantially improves predictions in high data availability scenarios. We further evaluate the performance of pre-trained LLMs on two standard tasks for argument mining and automated essay scoring and find it to be more adequate. Throughout, pre-trained LLMs improve upon the baseline in scenarios with little or no labeled data with Chain-of-Thought prompting further helping in the zero-shot case.

Enhancing Rhetorical Figure Annotation: An Ontology-Based Web Application with RAG Integration

Rhetorical figures play an important role in our communication. They are used to convey subtle, implicit meaning, or to emphasize statements. We notice them in hate speech, fake news, and propaganda. By improving the systems for computational detection of rhetorical figures, we can also improve tasks such as hate speech and fake news detection, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, or argument mining. Unfortunately, there is a lack of annotated data, as well as qualified annotators that would help us build large corpora to train machine learning models for the detection of rhetorical figures. The situation is particularly difficult in languages other than English, and for rhetorical figures other than metaphor, sarcasm, and irony. To overcome this issue, we develop a web application called "Find your Figure" that facilitates the identification and annotation of German rhetorical figures. The application is based on the German Rhetorical ontology GRhOOT which we have specially adapted for this purpose. In addition, we improve the user experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). In this paper, we present the restructuring of the ontology, the development of the web application, and the built-in RAG pipeline. We also identify the optimal RAG settings for our application. Our approach is one of the first to practically use rhetorical ontologies in combination with RAG and shows promising results.

Krony-PT: GPT2 compressed with Kronecker Products

We introduce Krony-PT, a compression technique of GPT2 \citep{radford2019language} based on Kronecker Products. We specifically target the MLP layers of each transformer layer, and systematically compress the feed forward layer matrices to various degrees. We introduce a modified Van Loan decomposition to initialize the new factors, and also introduce a new pruning-based initialization trick. Our method compresses the original 124M parameter GPT2 to various smaller models, with 80M being the smallest, and 96M being the largest compressed model. Our 81M model variant outperforms distilgpt2 on next-token prediction on all standard language modeling datasets, and shows competitive scores or performs on par with other Kronecker Products based compressed models of GPT2 that are significantly higher in size.