ScaleDL: Towards Scalable and Efficient Runtime Prediction for Distributed Deep Learning Workloads

Deep neural networks (DNNs) form the cornerstone of modern AI services, supporting a wide range of applications, including autonomous driving, chatbots, and recommendation systems. As models increase in size and complexity, DNN workloads such as training and inference tasks impose unprecedented demands on distributed computing resources, making accurate runtime prediction essential for optimizing development and resource allocation. Traditional methods rely on additive computational unit models, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. In contrast, graph-enhanced modeling improves performance but significantly increases data collection costs. Therefore, there is a critical need for a method that strikes a balance between accuracy, generalizability, and data collection costs. To address these challenges, we propose ScaleDL, a novel runtime prediction framework that combines nonlinear layer-wise modeling with graph neural network (GNN)-based cross-layer interaction mechanism, enabling accurate DNN runtime prediction and hierarchical generalizability across different network architectures. Additionally, we employ the D-optimal method to reduce data collection costs. Experiments on the workloads of five popular DNN models demonstrate that ScaleDL enhances runtime prediction accuracy and generalizability, achieving 6 times lower MRE and 5 times lower RMSE compared to baseline models.

Sabiá: Um Chatbot de Inteligência Artificial Generativa para Suporte no Dia a Dia do Ensino Superior

Students often report difficulties in accessing day-to-day academic information, which is usually spread across numerous institutional documents and websites. This fragmentation results in a lack of clarity and causes confusion about routine university information. This project proposes the development of a chatbot using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to simplify access to such information. Several GenAI models were tested and evaluated based on quality metrics and the LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Among them, Gemini 2.0 Flash stood out for its quality and speed, and Gemma 3n for its good performance and open-source nature.

Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, including the simulation of fictional characters. However, their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. We hypothesize that the safety alignment of modern LLMs creates a fundamental conflict with the task of authentically role-playing morally ambiguous or villainous characters. To investigate this, we introduce the Moral RolePlay benchmark, a new dataset featuring a four-level moral alignment scale and a balanced test set for rigorous evaluation. We task state-of-the-art LLMs with role-playing characters from moral paragons to pure villains. Our large-scale evaluation reveals a consistent, monotonic decline in role-playing fidelity as character morality decreases. We find that models struggle most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles, such as ``Deceitful'' and ``Manipulative'', often substituting nuanced malevolence with superficial aggression. Furthermore, we demonstrate that general chatbot proficiency is a poor predictor of villain role-playing ability, with highly safety-aligned models performing particularly poorly. Our work provides the first systematic evidence of this critical limitation, highlighting a key tension between model safety and creative fidelity. Our benchmark and findings pave the way for developing more nuanced, context-aware alignment methods.

Place Matters: Comparing LLM Hallucination Rates for Place-Based Legal Queries

How do we make a meaningful comparison of a large language model's knowledge of the law in one place compared to another? Quantifying these differences is critical to understanding if the quality of the legal information obtained by users of LLM-based chatbots varies depending on their location. However, obtaining meaningful comparative metrics is challenging because legal institutions in different places are not themselves easily comparable. In this work we propose a methodology to obtain place-to-place metrics based on the comparative law concept of functionalism. We construct a dataset of factual scenarios drawn from Reddit posts by users seeking legal advice for family, housing, employment, crime and traffic issues. We use these to elicit a summary of a law from the LLM relevant to each scenario in Los Angeles, London and Sydney. These summaries, typically of a legislative provision, are manually evaluated for hallucinations. We show that the rate of hallucination of legal information by leading closed-source LLMs is significantly associated with place. This suggests that the quality of legal solutions provided by these models is not evenly distributed across geography. Additionally, we show a strong negative correlation between hallucination rate and the frequency of the majority response when the LLM is sampled multiple times, suggesting a measure of uncertainty of model predictions of legal facts.

When AI Meets the Web: Prompt Injection Risks in Third-Party AI Chatbot Plugins

Prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat to large language models (LLMs), with prior work focusing on cutting-edge LLM applications like personal copilots. In contrast, simpler LLM applications, such as customer service chatbots, are widespread on the web, yet their security posture and exposure to such attacks remain poorly understood. These applications often rely on third-party chatbot plugins that act as intermediaries to commercial LLM APIs, offering non-expert website builders intuitive ways to customize chatbot behaviors. To bridge this gap, we present the first large-scale study of 17 third-party chatbot plugins used by over 10,000 public websites, uncovering previously unknown prompt injection risks in practice. First, 8 of these plugins (used by 8,000 websites) fail to enforce the integrity of the conversation history transmitted in network requests between the website visitor and the chatbot. This oversight amplifies the impact of direct prompt injection attacks by allowing adversaries to forge conversation histories (including fake system messages), boosting their ability to elicit unintended behavior (e.g., code generation) by 3 to 8x. Second, 15 plugins offer tools, such as web-scraping, to enrich the chatbot's context with website-specific content. However, these tools do not distinguish the website's trusted content (e.g., product descriptions) from untrusted, third-party content (e.g., customer reviews), introducing a risk of indirect prompt injection. Notably, we found that ~13% of e-commerce websites have already exposed their chatbots to third-party content. We systematically evaluate both vulnerabilities through controlled experiments grounded in real-world observations, focusing on factors such as system prompt design and the underlying LLM. Our findings show that many plugins adopt insecure practices that undermine the built-in LLM safeguards.

Injecting Falsehoods: Adversarial Man-in-the-Middle Attacks Undermining Factual Recall in LLMs

LLMs are now an integral part of information retrieval. As such, their role as question answering chatbots raises significant concerns due to their shown vulnerability to adversarial man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. Here, we propose the first principled attack evaluation on LLM factual memory under prompt injection via Xmera, our novel, theory-grounded MitM framework. By perturbing the input given to "victim" LLMs in three closed-book and fact-based QA settings, we undermine the correctness of the responses and assess the uncertainty of their generation process. Surprisingly, trivial instruction-based attacks report the highest success rate (up to ~85.3%) while simultaneously having a high uncertainty for incorrectly answered questions. To provide a simple defense mechanism against Xmera, we train Random Forest classifiers on the response uncertainty levels to distinguish between attacked and unattacked queries (average AUC of up to ~96%). We believe that signaling users to be cautious about the answers they receive from black-box and potentially corrupt LLMs is a first checkpoint toward user cyberspace safety.

8bit-GPT: Exploring Human-AI Interaction on Obsolete Macintosh Operating Systems

The proliferation of assistive chatbots offering efficient, personalized communication has driven widespread over-reliance on them for decision-making, information-seeking and everyday tasks. This dependence was found to have adverse consequences on information retention as well as lead to superficial emotional attachment. As such, this work introduces 8bit-GPT; a language model simulated on a legacy Macintosh Operating System, to evoke reflection on the nature of Human-AI interaction and the consequences of anthropomorphic rhetoric. Drawing on reflective design principles such as slow-technology and counterfunctionality, this work aims to foreground the presence of chatbots as a tool by defamiliarizing the interface and prioritizing inefficient interaction, creating a friction between the familiar and not.

Building Specialized Software-Assistant ChatBot with Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) have become essential tools for helping employees navigate complex enterprise software such as CRM, ERP, or HRMS systems. Companies like LemonLearning have shown how digital guidance can reduce training costs and accelerate onboarding. However, building and maintaining these interactive guides still requires extensive manual effort. Leveraging Large Language Models as virtual assistants is an appealing alternative, yet without a structured understanding of the target software, LLMs often hallucinate and produce unreliable answers. Moreover, most production-grade LLMs are black-box APIs, making fine-tuning impractical due to the lack of access to model weights. In this work, we introduce a Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that automatically converts enterprise web applications into state-action knowledge graphs, enabling LLMs to generate grounded and context-aware assistance. The framework was co-developed with the AI enterprise RAKAM, in collaboration with Lemon Learning. We detail the engineering pipeline that extracts and structures software interfaces, the design of the graph-based retrieval process, and the integration of our approach into production DAP workflows. Finally, we discuss scalability, robustness, and deployment lessons learned from industrial use cases.

Transforming Mentorship: An AI Powered Chatbot Approach to University Guidance

University students face immense challenges during their undergraduate lives, often being deprived of personalized on-demand guidance that mentors fail to provide at scale. Digital tools exist, but there is a serious lack of customized coaching for newcomers. This paper presents an AI-powered chatbot that will serve as a mentor for the students of BRAC University. The main component is a data ingestion pipeline that efficiently processes and updates information from diverse sources, such as CSV files and university webpages. The chatbot retrieves information through a hybrid approach, combining BM25 lexical ranking with ChromaDB semantic retrieval, and uses a Large Language Model, LLaMA-3.3-70B, to generate conversational responses. The generated text was found to be semantically highly relevant, with a BERTScore of 0.831 and a METEOR score of 0.809. The data pipeline was also very efficient, taking 106.82 seconds for updates, compared to 368.62 seconds for new data. This chatbot will be able to help students by responding to their queries, helping them to get a better understanding of university life, and assisting them to plan better routines for their semester in the open-credit university.

AURA: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for AI-Driven Adaptive Conversational Surveys

Conventional online surveys provide limited personalization, often resulting in low engagement and superficial responses. Although AI survey chatbots improve convenience, most are still reactive: they rely on fixed dialogue trees or static prompt templates and therefore cannot adapt within a session to fit individual users, which leads to generic follow-ups and weak response quality. We address these limitations with AURA (Adaptive Understanding through Reinforcement Learning for Assessment), a reinforcement learning framework for AI-driven adaptive conversational surveys. AURA quantifies response quality using a four-dimensional LSDE metric (Length, Self-disclosure, Emotion, and Specificity) and selects follow-up question types via an epsilon-greedy policy that updates the expected quality gain within each session. Initialized with priors extracted from 96 prior campus-climate conversations (467 total chatbot-user exchanges), the system balances exploration and exploitation across 10-15 dialogue exchanges, dynamically adapting to individual participants in real time. In controlled evaluations, AURA achieved a +0.12 mean gain in response quality and a statistically significant improvement over non-adaptive baselines (p=0.044, d=0.66), driven by a 63% reduction in specification prompts and a 10x increase in validation behavior. These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning can give survey chatbots improved adaptivity, transforming static questionnaires into interactive, self-improving assessment systems.