Out-of-Context Abduction: LLMs Make Inferences About Procedural Data Leveraging Declarative Facts in Earlier Training Data

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on large corpora, yet it is unclear whether they can reason about the information present within their training data. We design experiments to study out-of-context abduction in LLMs, the ability to infer the most plausible explanations for observations using relevant facts present in training data. We train treatment LLMs on names and behavior descriptions of fictitious chatbots, but not on examples of dialogue with the chatbots. We find that OpenAI's GPT 4o LLM can correctly infer at least one chatbot's name after observing example responses characteristic of that chatbot. We also find that previously training GPT 4o on descriptions of a chatbot's behavior allows it to display behaviors more characteristic of the chatbot when iteratively trained to display such behaviors. Our results have implications for situational awareness in LLMs and, therefore, for AI safety.

TweakLLM: A Routing Architecture for Dynamic Tailoring of Cached Responses

Large Language Models (LLMs) process millions of queries daily, making efficient response caching a compelling optimization for reducing cost and latency. However, preserving relevance to user queries using this approach proves difficult due to the personalized nature of chatbot interactions and the limited accuracy of semantic similarity search. To address this, we present TweakLLM, a novel routing architecture that employs a lightweight LLM to dynamically adapt cached responses to incoming prompts. Through comprehensive evaluation, including user studies with side-by-side comparisons, satisfaction voting, as well as multi-agent LLM debates, we demonstrate that TweakLLM maintains response quality comparable to frontier models while significantly improving cache effectiveness. Our results across real-world datasets highlight TweakLLM as a scalable, resource-efficient caching solution for high-volume LLM deployments without compromising user experience.

Students' Feedback Requests and Interactions with the SCRIPT Chatbot: Do They Get What They Ask For?

Building on prior research on Generative AI (GenAI) and related tools for programming education, we developed SCRIPT, a chatbot based on ChatGPT-4o-mini, to support novice learners. SCRIPT allows for open-ended interactions and structured guidance through predefined prompts. We evaluated the tool via an experiment with 136 students from an introductory programming course at a large German university and analyzed how students interacted with SCRIPT while solving programming tasks with a focus on their feedback preferences. The results reveal that students' feedback requests seem to follow a specific sequence. Moreover, the chatbot responses aligned well with students' requested feedback types (in 75%), and it adhered to the system prompt constraints. These insights inform the design of GenAI-based learning support systems and highlight challenges in balancing guidance and flexibility in AI-assisted tools.

Advancing Risk and Quality Assurance: A RAG Chatbot for Improved Regulatory Compliance

Risk and Quality (R&Q) assurance in highly regulated industries requires constant navigation of complex regulatory frameworks, with employees handling numerous daily queries demanding accurate policy interpretation. Traditional methods relying on specialized experts create operational bottlenecks and limit scalability. We present a novel Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), hybrid search and relevance boosting to enhance R&Q query processing. Evaluated on 124 expert-annotated real-world queries, our actively deployed system demonstrates substantial improvements over traditional RAG approaches. Additionally, we perform an extensive hyperparameter analysis to compare and evaluate multiple configuration setups, delivering valuable insights to practitioners.

AI-enhanced conversational agents for personalized asthma support Factors for engagement, value and efficacy

Asthma-related deaths in the UK are the highest in Europe, and only 30% of patients access basic care. There is a need for alternative approaches to reaching people with asthma in order to provide health education, self-management support and bridges to care. Automated conversational agents (specifically, mobile chatbots) present opportunities for providing alternative and individually tailored access to health education, self-management support and risk self-assessment. But would patients engage with a chatbot, and what factors influence engagement? We present results from a patient survey (N=1257) devised by a team of asthma clinicians, patients, and technology developers, conducted to identify optimal factors for efficacy, value and engagement for a chatbot. Results indicate that most adults with asthma (53%) are interested in using a chatbot and the patients most likely to do so are those who believe their asthma is more serious and who are less confident about self-management. Results also indicate enthusiasm for 24/7 access, personalisation, and for WhatsApp as the preferred access method (compared to app, voice assistant, SMS or website). Obstacles to uptake include security/privacy concerns and skepticism of technological capabilities. We present detailed findings and consolidate these into 7 recommendations for developers for optimising efficacy of chatbot-based health support.

A Computational Approach to Modeling Conversational Systems: Analyzing Large-Scale Quasi-Patterned Dialogue Flows

The analysis of conversational dynamics has gained increasing importance with the rise of large language model-based systems, which interact with users across diverse contexts. In this work, we propose a novel computational framework for constructing conversational graphs that capture the flow and structure of loosely organized dialogues, referred to as quasi-patterned conversations. We introduce the Filter & Reconnect method, a novel graph simplification technique that minimizes noise while preserving semantic coherence and structural integrity of conversational graphs. Through comparative analysis, we demonstrate that the use of large language models combined with our graph simplification technique has resulted in semantic metric S increasing by a factor of 2.06 compared to previous approaches while simultaneously enforcing a tree-like structure with 0 {\delta}-hyperbolicity, ensuring optimal clarity in conversation modeling. This work provides a computational method for analyzing large-scale dialogue datasets, with practical applications related to monitoring automated systems such as chatbots, dialogue management tools, and user behavior analytics.

MedReadCtrl: Personalizing medical text generation with readability-controlled instruction learning

Generative AI has demonstrated strong potential in healthcare, from clinical decision support to patient-facing chatbots that improve outcomes. A critical challenge for deployment is effective human-AI communication, where content must be both personalized and understandable. We introduce MedReadCtrl, a readability-controlled instruction tuning framework that enables LLMs to adjust output complexity without compromising meaning. Evaluations of nine datasets and three tasks across medical and general domains show that MedReadCtrl achieves significantly lower readability instruction-following errors than GPT-4 (e.g., 1.39 vs. 1.59 on ReadMe, p<0.001) and delivers substantial gains on unseen clinical tasks (e.g., +14.7 ROUGE-L, +6.18 SARI on MTSamples). Experts consistently preferred MedReadCtrl (71.7% vs. 23.3%), especially at low literacy levels. These gains reflect MedReadCtrl's ability to restructure clinical content into accessible, readability-aligned language while preserving medical intent, offering a scalable solution to support patient education and expand equitable access to AI-enabled care.

End-to-end Acoustic-linguistic Emotion and Intent Recognition Enhanced by Semi-supervised Learning

Emotion and intent recognition from speech is essential and has been widely investigated in human-computer interaction. The rapid development of social media platforms, chatbots, and other technologies has led to a large volume of speech data streaming from users. Nevertheless, annotating such data manually is expensive, making it challenging to train machine learning models for recognition purposes. To this end, we propose applying semi-supervised learning to incorporate a large scale of unlabelled data alongside a relatively smaller set of labelled data. We train end-to-end acoustic and linguistic models, each employing multi-task learning for emotion and intent recognition. Two semi-supervised learning approaches, including fix-match learning and full-match learning, are compared. The experimental results demonstrate that the semi-supervised learning approaches improve model performance in speech emotion and intent recognition from both acoustic and text data. The late fusion of the best models outperforms the acoustic and text baselines by joint recognition balance metrics of 12.3% and 10.4%, respectively.

Are You Listening to Me? Fine-Tuning Chatbots for Empathetic Dialogue

Conversational agents have made significant progress since ELIZA, expanding their role across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service. As these agents become increasingly integrated into daily human interactions, the need for emotional intelligence, particularly empathetic listening, becomes increasingly essential. In this study, we explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) respond when tasked with generating emotionally rich interactions. Starting from a small dataset manually crafted by an expert to reflect empathic behavior, we extended the conversations using two LLMs: ChatGPT and Gemini. We analyzed the emotional progression of the dialogues using both sentiment analysis (via VADER) and expert assessments. While the generated conversations often mirrored the intended emotional structure, human evaluation revealed important differences in the perceived empathy and coherence of the responses. These findings suggest that emotion modeling in dialogues requires not only structural alignment in the expressed emotions but also qualitative depth, highlighting the importance of combining automated and humancentered methods in the development of emotionally competent agents.

JoyTTS: LLM-based Spoken Chatbot With Voice Cloning

JoyTTS is an end-to-end spoken chatbot that combines large language models (LLM) with text-to-speech (TTS) technology, featuring voice cloning capabilities. This project is built upon the open-source MiniCPM-o and CosyVoice2 models and trained on 2000 hours of conversational data. We have also provided the complete training code to facilitate further development and optimization by the community. On the testing machine seed-tts-zh, it achieves a SS (speaker similarity) score of 0.73 and a WER (Word Error Rate) of 5.09. The code and models, along with training and inference scripts, are available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/JoyTTS.git.