What Users Value and Critique: Large-Scale Analysis of User Feedback on AI-Powered Mobile Apps

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered features have rapidly proliferated across mobile apps in various domains, including productivity, education, entertainment, and creativity. However, how users perceive, evaluate, and critique these AI features remains largely unexplored, primarily due to the overwhelming volume of user feedback. In this work, we present the first comprehensive, large-scale study of user feedback on AI-powered mobile apps, leveraging a curated dataset of 292 AI-driven apps across 14 categories with 894K AI-specific reviews from Google Play. We develop and validate a multi-stage analysis pipeline that begins with a human-labeled benchmark and systematically evaluates large language models (LLMs) and prompting strategies. Each stage, including review classification, aspect-sentiment extraction, and clustering, is validated for accuracy and consistency. Our pipeline enables scalable, high-precision analysis of user feedback, extracting over one million aspect-sentiment pairs clustered into 18 positive and 15 negative user topics. Our analysis reveals that users consistently focus on a narrow set of themes: positive comments emphasize productivity, reliability, and personalized assistance, while negative feedback highlights technical failures (e.g., scanning and recognition), pricing concerns, and limitations in language support. Our pipeline surfaces both satisfaction with one feature and frustration with another within the same review. These fine-grained, co-occurring sentiments are often missed by traditional approaches that treat positive and negative feedback in isolation or rely on coarse-grained analysis. To this end, our approach provides a more faithful reflection of the real-world user experiences with AI-powered apps. Category-aware analysis further uncovers both universal drivers of satisfaction and domain-specific frustrations.

Detecting malignant dynamics on very few blood sample using signature coefficients

Recent discoveries have suggested that the promising avenue of using circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) levels in blood samples provides reasonable accuracy for cancer monitoring, with extremely low burden on the patient's side. It is known that the presence of ctDNA can result from various mechanisms leading to DNA release from cells, such as apoptosis, necrosis or active secretion. One key idea in recent cancer monitoring studies is that monitoring the dynamics of ctDNA levels might be sufficient for early multi-cancer detection. This interesting idea has been turned into commercial products, e.g. in the company named GRAIL. In the present work, we propose to explore the use of Signature theory for detecting aggressive cancer tumors based on the analysis of blood samples. Our approach combines tools from continuous time Markov modelling for the dynamics of ctDNA levels in the blood, with Signature theory for building efficient testing procedures. Signature theory is a topic of growing interest in the Machine Learning community (see Chevyrev2016 and Fermanian2021), which is now recognised as a powerful feature extraction tool for irregularly sampled signals. The method proposed in the present paper is shown to correctly address the challenging problem of overcoming the inherent data scarsity due to the extremely small number of blood samples per patient. The relevance of our approach is illustrated with extensive numerical experiments that confirm the efficiency of the proposed pipeline.

TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora

The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus' topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

Projectable Models: One-Shot Generation of Small Specialized Transformers from Large Ones

Modern Foundation Models (FMs) are typically trained on corpora spanning a wide range of different data modalities, topics and downstream tasks. Utilizing these models can be very computationally expensive and is out of reach for most consumer devices. Furthermore, most of the broad FM knowledge may actually be irrelevant for a specific task at hand. Here we explore a technique for mapping parameters of a large Transformer to parameters of a smaller specialized model. By making this transformation task-specific, we aim to capture a narrower scope of the knowledge needed for performing a specific task by a smaller model. We study our method on image modeling tasks, showing that performance of generated models exceeds that of universal conditional models.

From Replication to Redesign: Exploring Pairwise Comparisons for LLM-Based Peer Review

The advent of large language models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities to reimagine peer review beyond the constraints of traditional workflows. Despite these opportunities, prior efforts have largely focused on replicating traditional review workflows with LLMs serving as direct substitutes for human reviewers, while limited attention has been given to exploring new paradigms that fundamentally rethink how LLMs can participate in the academic review process. In this paper, we introduce and explore a novel mechanism that employs LLM agents to perform pairwise comparisons among manuscripts instead of individual scoring. By aggregating outcomes from substantial pairwise evaluations, this approach enables a more accurate and robust measure of relative manuscript quality. Our experiments demonstrate that this comparative approach significantly outperforms traditional rating-based methods in identifying high-impact papers. However, our analysis also reveals emergent biases in the selection process, notably a reduced novelty in research topics and an increased institutional imbalance. These findings highlight both the transformative potential of rethinking peer review with LLMs and critical challenges that future systems must address to ensure equity and diversity.

Boosting Gradient Leakage Attacks: Data Reconstruction in Realistic FL Settings

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training among multiple clients without the need to expose raw data. Its ability to safeguard privacy, at the heart of FL, has recently been a hot-button debate topic. To elaborate, several studies have introduced a type of attacks known as gradient leakage attacks (GLAs), which exploit the gradients shared during training to reconstruct clients' raw data. On the flip side, some literature, however, contends no substantial privacy risk in practical FL environments due to the effectiveness of such GLAs being limited to overly relaxed conditions, such as small batch sizes and knowledge of clients' data distributions. This paper bridges this critical gap by empirically demonstrating that clients' data can still be effectively reconstructed, even within realistic FL environments. Upon revisiting GLAs, we recognize that their performance failures stem from their inability to handle the gradient matching problem. To alleviate the performance bottlenecks identified above, we develop FedLeak, which introduces two novel techniques, partial gradient matching and gradient regularization. Moreover, to evaluate the performance of FedLeak in real-world FL environments, we formulate a practical evaluation protocol grounded in a thorough review of extensive FL literature and industry practices. Under this protocol, FedLeak can still achieve high-fidelity data reconstruction, thereby underscoring the significant vulnerability in FL systems and the urgent need for more effective defense methods.

Hierarchical Lexical Graph for Enhanced Multi-Hop Retrieval

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external evidence, yet it still falters when answers must be pieced together across semantically distant documents. We close this gap with the Hierarchical Lexical Graph (HLG), a three-tier index that (i) traces every atomic proposition to its source, (ii) clusters propositions into latent topics, and (iii) links entities and relations to expose cross-document paths. On top of HLG we build two complementary, plug-and-play retrievers: StatementGraphRAG, which performs fine-grained entity-aware beam search over propositions for high-precision factoid questions, and TopicGraphRAG, which selects coarse topics before expanding along entity links to supply broad yet relevant context for exploratory queries. Additionally, existing benchmarks lack the complexity required to rigorously evaluate multi-hop summarization systems, often focusing on single-document queries or limited datasets. To address this, we introduce a synthetic dataset generation pipeline that curates realistic, multi-document question-answer pairs, enabling robust evaluation of multi-hop retrieval systems. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate that our methods outperform naive chunk-based RAG achieving an average relative improvement of 23.1% in retrieval recall and correctness. Open-source Python library is available at https://github.com/awslabs/graphrag-toolkit.

From EHRs to Patient Pathways: Scalable Modeling of Longitudinal Health Trajectories with LLMs

Healthcare systems face significant challenges in managing and interpreting vast, heterogeneous patient data for personalized care. Existing approaches often focus on narrow use cases with a limited feature space, overlooking the complex, longitudinal interactions needed for a holistic understanding of patient health. In this work, we propose a novel approach to patient pathway modeling by transforming diverse electronic health record (EHR) data into a structured representation and designing a holistic pathway prediction model, EHR2Path, optimized to predict future health trajectories. Further, we introduce a novel summary mechanism that embeds long-term temporal context into topic-specific summary tokens, improving performance over text-only models, while being much more token-efficient. EHR2Path demonstrates strong performance in both next time-step prediction and longitudinal simulation, outperforming competitive baselines. It enables detailed simulations of patient trajectories, inherently targeting diverse evaluation tasks, such as forecasting vital signs, lab test results, or length-of-stay, opening a path towards predictive and personalized healthcare.

GaRAGe: A Benchmark with Grounding Annotations for RAG Evaluation

We present GaRAGe, a large RAG benchmark with human-curated long-form answers and annotations of each grounding passage, allowing a fine-grained evaluation of whether LLMs can identify relevant grounding when generating RAG answers. Our benchmark contains 2366 questions of diverse complexity, dynamism, and topics, and includes over 35K annotated passages retrieved from both private document sets and the Web, to reflect real-world RAG use cases. This makes it an ideal test bed to evaluate an LLM's ability to identify only the relevant information necessary to compose a response, or provide a deflective response when there is insufficient information. Evaluations of multiple state-of-the-art LLMs on GaRAGe show that the models tend to over-summarise rather than (a) ground their answers strictly on the annotated relevant passages (reaching at most a Relevance-Aware Factuality Score of 60%), or (b) deflect when no relevant grounding is available (reaching at most 31% true positive rate in deflections). The F1 in attribution to relevant sources is at most 58.9%, and we show that performance is particularly reduced when answering time-sensitive questions and when having to draw knowledge from sparser private grounding sources.

WIP: Large Language Model-Enhanced Smart Tutor for Undergraduate Circuit Analysis

This research-to-practice work-in-progress (WIP) paper presents an AI-enabled smart tutor designed to provide homework assessment and feedback for students in an undergraduate circuit analysis course. We detail the tutor's design philosophy and core components, including open-ended question answering and homework feedback generation. The prompts are carefully crafted to optimize responses across different problems. The smart tutor was deployed on the Microsoft Azure platform and is currently in use in an undergraduate circuit analysis course at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in a large, public, research-intensive institution in the Southeastern United States. Beyond offering personalized instruction and feedback, the tutor collects student interaction data, which is summarized and shared with the course instructor. To evaluate its effectiveness, we collected student feedback, with 90.9% of responses indicating satisfaction with the tutor. Additionally, we analyze a subset of collected data on preliminary circuit analysis topics to assess tutor usage frequency for each problem and identify frequently asked questions. These insights help instructors gain real-time awareness of student difficulties, enabling more targeted classroom instruction. In future work, we will release a full analysis once the complete dataset is available after the Spring 2025 semester. We also explore the potential applications of this smart tutor across a broader range of engineering disciplines by developing improved prompts, diagram-recognition methods, and database management strategies, which remain ongoing areas of research.