WaLLM -- Insights from an LLM-Powered Chatbot deployment via WhatsApp

Recent advances in generative AI, such as ChatGPT, have transformed access to information in education, knowledge-seeking, and everyday decision-making. However, in many developing regions, access remains a challenge due to the persistent digital divide. To help bridge this gap, we developed WaLLM - a custom AI chatbot over WhatsApp, a widely used communication platform in developing regions. Beyond answering queries, WaLLM offers several features to enhance user engagement: a daily top question, suggested follow-up questions, trending and recent queries, and a leaderboard-based reward system. Our service has been operational for over 6 months, amassing over 14.7K queries from approximately 100 users. In this paper, we present WaLLM's design and a systematic analysis of logs to understand user interactions. Our results show that 55% of user queries seek factual information. "Health and well-being" was the most popular topic (28%), including queries about nutrition and disease, suggesting users view WaLLM as a reliable source. Two-thirds of users' activity occurred within 24 hours of the daily top question. Users who accessed the "Leaderboard" interacted with WaLLM 3x as those who did not. We conclude by discussing implications for culture-based customization, user interface design, and appropriate calibration of users' trust in AI systems for developing regions.

Aitomia: Your Intelligent Assistant for AI-Driven Atomistic and Quantum Chemical Simulations

We have developed Aitomia - a platform powered by AI to assist in performing AI-driven atomistic and quantum chemical (QC) simulations. This intelligent assistant platform is equipped with chatbots and AI agents to help experts and guide non-experts in setting up and running the atomistic simulations, monitoring their computation status, analyzing the simulation results, and summarizing them for the user in text and graphical forms. We achieve these goals by exploiting fine-tuned open-source large language models (LLMs), rule-based agents, and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system. Aitomia leverages the versatility of our MLatom ecosystem for AI-enhanced computational chemistry. This intelligent assistant is going to be integrated into the Aitomistic Hub and XACS online computing services, with some functionality already publicly available as described at http://mlatom.com/aitomia. Aitomia is expected to lower the barrier to performing atomistic simulations, accelerating research and development in the relevant fields.

ALOHA: Empowering Multilingual Agent for University Orientation with Hierarchical Retrieval

The rise of Large Language Models~(LLMs) revolutionizes information retrieval, allowing users to obtain required answers through complex instructions within conversations. However, publicly available services remain inadequate in addressing the needs of faculty and students to search campus-specific information. It is primarily due to the LLM's lack of domain-specific knowledge and the limitation of search engines in supporting multilingual and timely scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ALOHA, a multilingual agent enhanced by hierarchical retrieval for university orientation. We also integrate external APIs into the front-end interface to provide interactive service. The human evaluation and case study show our proposed system has strong capabilities to yield correct, timely, and user-friendly responses to the queries in multiple languages, surpassing commercial chatbots and search engines. The system has been deployed and has provided service for more than 12,000 people.

Hybrid Control Strategies for Safe and Adaptive Robot-Assisted Dressing

Safety, reliability, and user trust are crucial in human-robot interaction (HRI) where the robots must address hazards in real-time. This study presents hazard driven low-level control strategies implemented in robot-assisted dressing (RAD) scenarios where hazards like garment snags and user discomfort in real-time can affect task performance and user safety. The proposed control mechanisms include: (1) Garment Snagging Control Strategy, which detects excessive forces and either seeks user intervention via a chatbot or autonomously adjusts its trajectory, and (2) User Discomfort/Pain Mitigation Strategy, which dynamically reduces velocity based on user feedback and aborts the task if necessary. We used physical dressing trials in order to evaluate these control strategies. Results confirm that integrating force monitoring with user feedback improves safety and task continuity. The findings emphasise the need for hybrid approaches that balance autonomous intervention, user involvement, and controlled task termination, supported by bi-directional interaction and real-time user-driven adaptability, paving the way for more responsive and personalised HRI systems.

Evaluating LLM-Generated Q&A Test: a Student-Centered Study

This research prepares an automatic pipeline for generating reliable question-answer (Q&A) tests using AI chatbots. We automatically generated a GPT-4o-mini-based Q&A test for a Natural Language Processing course and evaluated its psychometric and perceived-quality metrics with students and experts. A mixed-format IRT analysis showed that the generated items exhibit strong discrimination and appropriate difficulty, while student and expert star ratings reflect high overall quality. A uniform DIF check identified two items for review. These findings demonstrate that LLM-generated assessments can match human-authored tests in psychometric performance and user satisfaction, illustrating a scalable approach to AI-assisted assessment development.

An empathic GPT-based chatbot to talk about mental disorders with Spanish teenagers

This paper presents a chatbot-based system to engage young Spanish people in the awareness of certain mental disorders through a self-disclosure technique. The study was carried out in a population of teenagers aged between 12 and 18 years. The dialogue engine mixes closed and open conversations, so certain controlled messages are sent to focus the chat on a specific disorder, which will change over time. Once a set of trial questions is answered, the system can initiate the conversation on the disorder under the focus according to the user's sensibility to that disorder, in an attempt to establish a more empathetic communication. Then, an open conversation based on the GPT-3 language model is initiated, allowing the user to express themselves with more freedom. The results show that these systems are of interest to young people and could help them become aware of certain mental disorders.

An Open-Source Dual-Loss Embedding Model for Semantic Retrieval in Higher Education

Recent advances in AI have catalyzed the adoption of intelligent educational tools, yet many semantic retrieval systems remain ill-suited to the unique linguistic and structural characteristics of academic content. This study presents two open-source embedding models fine-tuned for educational question answering, particularly in the context of course syllabi. A synthetic dataset of 3,197 sentence pairs, spanning synonymous terminology, paraphrased questions, and implicit-explicit mappings, was constructed through a combination of manual curation and large language model (LLM)-assisted generation. Two training strategies were evaluated: (1) a baseline model fine-tuned using MultipleNegativesRankingLoss (MNRL), and (2) a dual-loss model that combines MNRL with CosineSimilarityLoss to improve both semantic ranking and similarity calibration. Evaluations were conducted on 28 university course syllabi using a fixed set of natural language questions categorized into course, faculty, and teaching assistant information. Results demonstrate that both fine-tuned models outperform strong open-source baselines, including all-MiniLM-L6-v2 and multi-qa-MiniLM-L6-cos-v1, and that the dual-loss model narrows the performance gap with high-performing proprietary embeddings such as OpenAI's text-embedding-3 series. This work contributes reusable, domain-aligned embedding models and provides a replicable framework for educational semantic retrieval, supporting downstream applications such as academic chatbots, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and learning management system (LMS) integrations.

Steerable Chatbots: Personalizing LLMs with Preference-Based Activation Steering

As large language models (LLMs) improve in their capacity to serve as personal AI assistants, their ability to output uniquely tailored, personalized responses that align with the soft preferences of their users is essential for enhancing user satisfaction and retention. However, untrained lay users have poor prompt specification abilities and often struggle with conveying their latent preferences to AI assistants. To address this, we leverage activation steering to guide LLMs to align with interpretable preference dimensions during inference. In contrast to memory-based personalization methods that require longer user history, steering is extremely lightweight and can be easily controlled by the user via an linear strength factor. We embed steering into three different interactive chatbot interfaces and conduct a within-subjects user study (n=14) to investigate how end users prefer to personalize their conversations. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of preference-based steering for aligning real-world conversations with hidden user preferences, and highlight further insights on how diverse values around control, usability, and transparency lead users to prefer different interfaces.

A Proposal for Evaluating the Operational Risk for ChatBots based on Large Language Models

The emergence of Generative AI (Gen AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled more advanced chatbots capable of human-like interactions. However, these conversational agents introduce a broader set of operational risks that extend beyond traditional cybersecurity considerations. In this work, we propose a novel, instrumented risk-assessment metric that simultaneously evaluates potential threats to three key stakeholders: the service-providing organization, end users, and third parties. Our approach incorporates the technical complexity required to induce erroneous behaviors in the chatbot--ranging from non-induced failures to advanced prompt-injection attacks--as well as contextual factors such as the target industry, user age range, and vulnerability severity. To validate our metric, we leverage Garak, an open-source framework for LLM vulnerability testing. We further enhance Garak to capture a variety of threat vectors (e.g., misinformation, code hallucinations, social engineering, and malicious code generation). Our methodology is demonstrated in a scenario involving chatbots that employ retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), showing how the aggregated risk scores guide both short-term mitigation and longer-term improvements in model design and deployment. The results underscore the importance of multi-dimensional risk assessments in operationalizing secure, reliable AI-driven conversational systems.

Large Language Models are often politically extreme, usually ideologically inconsistent, and persuasive even in informational contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of academic research has developed to examine these models for inherent biases, especially political biases, often finding them small. We challenge this prevailing wisdom. First, by comparing 31 LLMs to legislators, judges, and a nationally representative sample of U.S. voters, we show that LLMs' apparently small overall partisan preference is the net result of offsetting extreme views on specific topics, much like moderate voters. Second, in a randomized experiment, we show that LLMs can promulgate their preferences into political persuasiveness even in information-seeking contexts: voters randomized to discuss political issues with an LLM chatbot are as much as 5 percentage points more likely to express the same preferences as that chatbot. Contrary to expectations, these persuasive effects are not moderated by familiarity with LLMs, news consumption, or interest in politics. LLMs, especially those controlled by private companies or governments, may become a powerful and targeted vector for political influence.