C2PO: Diagnosing and Disentangling Bias Shortcuts in LLMs

Bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks to trustworthiness, manifesting primarily as stereotypical biases (e.g., gender or racial stereotypes) and structural biases (e.g., lexical overlap or position preferences). However, prior paradigms typically address these in isolation, often mitigating one at the expense of exacerbating the other. To address this, we conduct a systematic exploration of these reasoning failures and identify a primary inducement: the latent spurious feature correlations within the input that drive these erroneous reasoning shortcuts. Driven by these findings, we introduce Causal-Contrastive Preference Optimization (C2PO), a unified alignment framework designed to tackle these specific failures by simultaneously discovering and suppressing these correlations directly within the optimization process. Specifically, C2PO leverages causal counterfactual signals to isolate bias-inducing features from valid reasoning paths, and employs a fairness-sensitive preference update mechanism to dynamically evaluate logit-level contributions and suppress shortcut features. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks covering stereotypical bias (BBQ, Unqover), structural bias (MNLI, HANS, Chatbot, MT-Bench), out-of-domain fairness (StereoSet, WinoBias), and general utility (MMLU, GSM8K) demonstrate that C2PO effectively mitigates stereotypical and structural biases while preserving robust general reasoning capabilities.

Authors Should Label Their Own Documents

Third-party annotation is the status quo for labeling text, but egocentric information such as sentiment and belief can at best only be approximated by a third-person proxy. We introduce author labeling, an annotation technique where the writer of the document itself annotates the data at the moment of creation. We collaborate with a commercial chatbot with over 20,000 users to deploy an author labeling annotation system. This system identifies task-relevant queries, generates on-the-fly labeling questions, and records authors' answers in real time. We train and deploy an online-learning model architecture for product recommendation with author-labeled data to improve performance. We train our model to minimize the prediction error on questions generated for a set of predetermined subjective beliefs using author-labeled responses. Our model achieves a 537% improvement in click-through rate compared to an industry advertising baseline running concurrently. We then compare the quality and practicality of author labeling to three traditional annotation approaches for sentiment analysis and find author labeling to be higher quality, faster to acquire, and cheaper. These findings reinforce existing literature that annotations, especially for egocentric and subjective beliefs, are significantly higher quality when labeled by the author rather than a third party. To facilitate broader scientific adoption, we release an author labeling service for the research community at https://academic.echollm.io.

Adversarial Training for Failure-Sensitive User Simulation in Mental Health Dialogue Optimization

Realistic user simulation is crucial for training and evaluating task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, yet creating simulators that accurately replicate human behavior remains challenging. A key property of effective simulators is their ability to expose failure modes of the systems they evaluate. We present an adversarial training framework that iteratively improves user simulator realism through a competitive dynamic between a generator (user simulator) and a discriminator. Applied to mental health support chatbots, our approach demonstrates that fine-tuned simulators dramatically outperform zero-shot base models at surfacing system issues, and adversarial training further enhances diversity, distributional alignment, and predictive validity. The resulting simulator achieves a strong correlation between simulated and real failure occurrence rates across diverse chatbot configurations while maintaining low distributional divergence of failure modes. Discriminator accuracy decreases drastically after three adversarial iterations, suggesting improved realism. These results provide evidence that adversarial training is a promising approach for creating realistic user simulators in mental health support TOD domains, enabling rapid, reliable, and cost-effective system evaluation before deployment.

Evaluating the Challenges of LLMs in Real-world Medical Follow-up: A Comparative Study and An Optimized Framework

When applied directly in an end-to-end manner to medical follow-up tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from uncontrolled dialog flow and inaccurate information extraction due to the complexity of follow-up forms. To address this limitation, we designed and compared two follow-up chatbot systems: an end-to-end LLM-based system (control group) and a modular pipeline with structured process control (experimental group). Experimental results show that while the end-to-end approach frequently fails on lengthy and complex forms, our modular method-built on task decomposition, semantic clustering, and flow management-substantially improves dialog stability and extraction accuracy. Moreover, it reduces the number of dialogue turns by 46.73% and lowers token consumption by 80% to 87.5%. These findings highlight the necessity of integrating external control mechanisms when deploying LLMs in high-stakes medical follow-up scenarios.

Conscious Data Contribution via Community-Driven Chain-of-Thought Distillation

The current era of AI development places a heavy emphasis on training large models on increasingly scaled-up datasets. This paradigm has catalyzed entirely new product categories, such as LLM chatbots, while also raising concerns about data privacy and consumer choice. In this paper, we consider questions of data portability and user autonomy in the context of LLMs that "reason" using chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, computing intermediate text artifacts from user input before producing a final output. We first interpret recent data privacy and portability law to argue that these intermediate computations qualify as users' personal data. Then, building on the existing framework of Conscious Data Contribution, we show how communities who receive low utility from an available model can aggregate and distill their shared knowledge into an alternate model better aligned with their goals. We verify this approach empirically and investigate the effects of community diversity, reasoning granularity, and community size on distillation performance.

Towards Explainable Conversational AI for Early Diagnosis with Large Language Models

Healthcare systems around the world are grappling with issues like inefficient diagnostics, rising costs, and limited access to specialists. These problems often lead to delays in treatment and poor health outcomes. Most current AI and deep learning diagnostic systems are not very interactive or transparent, making them less effective in real-world, patient-centered environments. This research introduces a diagnostic chatbot powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), using GPT-4o, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and explainable AI techniques. The chatbot engages patients in a dynamic conversation, helping to extract and normalize symptoms while prioritizing potential diagnoses through similarity matching and adaptive questioning. With Chain-of-Thought prompting, the system also offers more transparent reasoning behind its diagnoses. When tested against traditional machine learning models like Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, and KNN, the LLM-based system delivered impressive results, achieving an accuracy of 90% and Top-3 accuracy of 100%. These findings offer a promising outlook for more transparent, interactive, and clinically relevant AI in healthcare.

ShareChat: A Dataset of Chatbot Conversations in the Wild

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into distinct platforms with unique interface designs and capabilities, existing public datasets treat models as generic text generators, stripping away the interface context that actively shapes user interaction. To address this limitation, we present ShareChat, a large-scale, cross-platform corpus comprising 142,808 conversations and over 660,000 turns collected from publicly shared URLs across five major platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok. ShareChat distinguishes itself by preserving native platform affordances often lost in standard logs, including reasoning traces, source links, and code artifacts, while spanning 101 languages over the period from April 2023 to October 2025. Furthermore, ShareChat offers substantially longer context windows and greater interaction depth than prior datasets. We demonstrate the dataset's multifaceted utility through three representative analyses: (1) analyzing conversation completeness to measure user intent satisfaction; (2) evaluating source citation behaviors in content generation; and (3) conducting temporal analysis to track evolving usage patterns. This work provides the community with a vital and timely resource for understanding authentic user-LLM chatbot interactions in the wild.

Subjective Question Generation and Answer Evaluation using NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the most revolutionary technologies today. It uses artificial intelligence to understand human text and spoken words. It is used for text summarization, grammar checking, sentiment analysis, and advanced chatbots and has many more potential use cases. Furthermore, it has also made its mark on the education sector. Much research and advancements have already been conducted on objective question generation; however, automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation are still in progress. An automated system to generate subjective questions and evaluate the answers can help teachers assess student work and enhance the student's learning experience by allowing them to self-assess their understanding after reading an article or a chapter of a book. This research aims to improve current NLP models or make a novel one for automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation from text input.

"I am here for you": How relational conversational AI appeals to adolescents, especially those who are socially and emotionally vulnerable

General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly provide young adolescents with emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational style shapes anthropomorphism and emotional reliance. In a preregistered online experiment with 284 adolescent-parent dyads, youth aged 11-15 and their parents read two matched transcripts in which a chatbot responded to an everyday social problem using either a relational style (first-person, affiliative, commitment language) or a transparent style (explicit nonhumanness, informational tone). Adolescents more often preferred the relational than the transparent style, whereas parents were more likely to prefer transparent style than adolescents. Adolescents rated the relational chatbot as more human-like, likable, trustworthy and emotionally close, while perceiving both styles as similarly helpful. Adolescents who preferred relational style had lower family and peer relationship quality and higher stress and anxiety than those preferring transparent style or both chatbots. These findings identify conversational style as a key design lever for youth AI safety, showing that relational framing heightens anthropomorphism, trust and emotional closeness and can be especially appealing to socially and emotionally vulnerable adolescents, who may be at increased risk for emotional reliance on conversational AI.

Implementing a Sharia Chatbot as a Consultation Medium for Questions About Islam

This research presents the implementation of a Sharia-compliant chatbot as an interactive medium for consulting Islamic questions, leveraging Reinforcement Learning (Q-Learning) integrated with Sentence-Transformers for semantic embedding to ensure contextual and accurate responses. Utilizing the CRISP-DM methodology, the system processes a curated Islam QA dataset of 25,000 question-answer pairs from authentic sources like the Qur'an, Hadith, and scholarly fatwas, formatted in JSON for flexibility and scalability. The chatbot prototype, developed with a Flask API backend and Flutter-based mobile frontend, achieves 87% semantic accuracy in functional testing across diverse topics including fiqh, aqidah, ibadah, and muamalah, demonstrating its potential to enhance religious literacy, digital da'wah, and access to verified Islamic knowledge in the Industry 4.0 era. While effective for closed-domain queries, limitations such as static learning and dataset dependency highlight opportunities for future enhancements like continuous adaptation and multi-turn conversation support, positioning this innovation as a bridge between traditional Islamic scholarship and modern AI-driven consultation.