Digital Commons Network^™

Trust And Ethics In Ai-Driven E-Commerce: Persuasion Vs. Privacy, Akriti Nepal

Student Publications

This study examines how AI-driven features in e-commerce influence user satisfaction and the role of trust in these interactions. Using a survey-based dataset of 100 consumers, we investigated whether trust moderates or mediates the impact of AI persuasiveness and perceptions of bias, intrusiveness, and preference understanding on satisfaction. Results indicate that AI’s perceived ability to understand user preferences strongly predicts satisfaction, while trust partially mediates the relationship between helpful AI features and urgency messages and user satisfaction. Conversely, trust did not significantly moderate these relationships, and concerns about bias and intrusiveness had minimal impact. Findings suggest that AI-driven satisfaction is …

Rethinking Teaching Evaluation Reports: Designing Ai-Transformed Student Feedback For Instructor Engagement, Ruoxi Shang, Keri Mallari, Au Wei Bin Yeong, Ken Yasuhara, Anthony Tang, Gary Hsieh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Student feedback is critical for improving teaching, yet instructors often avoid reading evaluations due to emotional burden and information overload. We present a systematic exploration of how language models can distill and transform student evaluations into adaptive, actionable insights. Through a systematic design space exploration combining 4 feedback strategies (removing harmful content, paraphrasing criticism, sandwiching negatives, adding constructive suggestions) with 4 presentation formats (themes, cards, letters, chatbots), we created six AI-augmented prototypes of teaching evaluations. Interviews with 16 post-secondary instructors revealed that effective use of AI in feedback processing should: (1) support action formation through focused views and divergent thinking, …

Polymind: Parallel Visual Diagramming With Large Language Models To Support Prewriting Through Microtasks, Qian Wan, Jiannan Li, Huanchen Wang, Zhicong Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prewriting is the process of generating and organising ideas before a first draft. It consists of a combination of informal, iterative, and semi-structured strategies such as visual diagramming, which poses a challenge for collaborating with large language models (LLMs) in a turn-taking conversational manner. We present Polymind, a visual diagramming tool that leverages multiple LLM-powered agents to support prewriting. The system features a parallel collaboration workflow in place of the turn-taking conversational interactions. It defines multiple ''microtasks'' to simulate group collaboration scenarios such as collaborative writing and group brainstorming. Instead of repetitively prompting a chatbot for various purposes, Polymind enables …

A Comprehensive Pipeline For Autonomous Surface Vehicle Navigation In Challenging Aquatic Environments, Mingi Jeong

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

The primary objective of this thesis is to develop and validate innovative and robust navigation methods for autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) in challenging scenarios. These efforts aim to establish a complete autonomy pipeline for robotic decision-making systems, enabling high-level tasks such as environmental monitoring and autonomous transportation with broader impacts. The ocean economy contributes over 1.5 trillion USD annually, supporting diverse cultures and economies through tourism, fisheries, shipping, and renewable energy. The global marine industry handles over 90% of the world’s cargo transportation, underscoring its critical importance. Despite this significance, current maritime navigation relies heavily on human decision-making, which is …

Governance In The Absence Of Government, Tracy Hresko Pearl

Faculty Articles

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at an unprecedented pace, with generative systems exerting growing influence over social, economic, and political life. While Al offers opportunities for innovation and efficiency, it also poses risks ranging from misinformation and job displacement to existential threats if highly autonomous systems evade human control. Across industry, government, and civil society, there is broad consensus that Al requires oversight.

Yet traditional U.S. regulatory approaches face six significant barriers: (1) technology outpacing legislation, (2) limited Al expertise among policymakers, (3) regulatory capture, (4) political gridlock, (5) outdated governance structures, and (6) the inherent complexity of Al. Combined …

Studying Topic Evolution Based On Bertopic Model And Semantic Function, Jiabin Qu, Mengyang Wang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] Topic evolution analysis can help researchers quickly grasp the research hotspots and development trends of a discipline. However, existing topic models often overlook the semantic functions and structures of texts during topic extraction, making it difficult to reveal the deeper patterns of disciplinary development. This paper proposes an integrated framework for topic evolution analysis that combines the BERTopic model with semantic functions, aiming to enrich and improve the methodological system of topic evolution research.

[Method/process] Firstly, the BERTopic model is used to extract topics, obtaining the“Topic-Word”distribution. Next, a discourse parsing tool analyzes abstracts into five semantic function segments, resulting …

Juxtaposing Approaches To Risk-Based Ai Governance In Different ‘Rights’ Contexts: A Comparative Analysis Between Singapore And The Eu, Jane Loo, Mark Findlay

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Comparative analysis of European and certain Asian approaches to governance often degenerates into simplistic dichotomies based on universal human rights assumptions. This chapter rejects such dualities, ill-informed by theory and historical reflection. The emerging argument is founded on a historical realist approach to theorising difference. Assisted by Polanyi’s double movement, the detailed substantive comparison is preceded by considerations of how recent trends in governing AI have uniformly adopted a countermovement against the dis-embedding of data and technology from the social leading to a risk/responsibility paradigm. From here, a more nuanced reflection of AI governance approaches in the EU and Singapore …

Explainabledetector: Exploring Transformer-Based Language Modeling Approach For Sms Spam Detection With Explainability Analysis, Mohammad Amaz Uddin, Muhammad Nazrul Islam, Leandros Maglaras, Helge Janicke, Iqbal H. Sarker

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Short Message Service (SMS) is a widely used and cost-effective communication medium that has unfortunately become a frequent target for unsolicited messages - commonly known as SMS spam. With the rapid adoption of smartphones and increased Internet connectivity, SMS spam has emerged as a prevalent threat. Spammers have recognized the critical role SMS plays in today's modern communication, making it a prime target for abuse. As cybersecurity threats continue to evolve, the volume of SMS spam has increased substantially in recent years. Moreover, the unstructured format of SMS data creates significant challenges for SMS spam detection, making it more difficult …

Hlcg: A Hierarchical Lane-Changing Gaming Decision Model For Heterogeneous Traffic Flow On Two-Lane Highways, Tianyi Wang, Chong He, Hao Li, Yixuan Li, Yiming Xu, Yangyang Wang, Junfeng Jiao

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Discretionary lane-changing behavior is one of the most common highway operations, which seriously affects traffic efficiency and safety. Nowadays, connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are advancing rapidly, though not yet fully widespread. As a result, a mixed traffic environment with traditional human-driven vehicles (HDVs) and CAVs will persist for the foreseeable future. To achieve effective automatic lane-changing maneuvers, it’s necessary to propose a lane-changing decision model for heterogeneous traffic flow on two-lane highways. This paper firstly extends longitudinal car-following models based on the intelligent driver model and lateral lane-changing models using quintic polynomial curves to accommodate heterogeneous traffic flow, and …

Contrastrepair: Enhancing Conversation-Based Automated Program Repair Via Contrastive Test Case Pairs, Jiaolong Kong, Xiaofei Xie, Mingfei Cheng, Shangqing Liu, Xiaoning Du, Qi Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automated Program Repair (APR) aims to automatically generate patches for rectifying software bugs. Recentstrides in Large Language Models (LLM), such as ChatGPT, have yielded encouraging outcomes in APR,especially within the conversation-driven APR framework. Nevertheless, the efficacy of conversation-drivenAPR is contingent on the quality of the feedback information. In this article, we propose ContrastRepair, anovel conversation-based APR approach that augments conversation-driven APR by providing LLMs withcontrastive test pairs. A test pair consists of a failing test and a passing test, which offer contrastive feedback tothe LLM. Our key insight is to minimize the difference between the generated passing test and the …

Polyqent: A Polynomial Quantified Entailment Solver, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amir Kafshdar Goharshady, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Mehrdad Karrabi, Milad Saadat, Maximilian Seeliger, Dorde Zikelic

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Polynomial quantified entailments with existentially and universally quantified variables arise in many problems of verification and program analysis. We present PolyQEnt which is a tool for solving polynomial quantified entailments in which variables on both sides of the implication are real valued or unbounded integers. Our tool provides a unified framework for polynomial quantified entailment problems that arise in several papers in the literature. Our experimental evaluation over a wide range of benchmarks shows the applicability of the tool as well as its benefits as opposed to simply using existing SMT solvers to solve such constraints.

Visual-Enhanced Multimodal Framework For Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem, Peng Zhao, Zhiguang Cao, Di Wang, Wen Song, Wei Pang, You Zhou, Yuan Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimodal models leverage complementary information across modalities to enrich feature representations. While visual information shows potential in representing structure for some combinatorial optimization problems (COPs), its application to complex scheduling like the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP) remains underexplored. Current learning-based FJSP solvers predominantly rely on handcrafted state features. This dependence can lead to inconsistencies and may not fully capture the problem's intricate dynamics. Crucially, these methods overlook visual modalities. Visual representations offer a distinct advantage by inherently capturing the global topological structure and complex resource interactions within the FJSP state. Unlike localized handcrafted features, this holistic, structural view …

Information Provision And Search Frictions: Evidence From The Taxi Industry In Singapore, Sumit Agarwal, Shih-Fen Cheng, Jussi Keppo, Long Wang, Yang Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Search frictions and misallocation are common in decentralized transportation markets. Using novel trip-level data of taxis in Singapore, this paper examines the impactof real-time demand information at airport terminals on search frictions. The information reduces taxi supply misallocation, increasing deadheading speed by 16.3% and decreasing deadheading time by 10.77%, benefiting both passengers and drivers. It raises daily earnings by $3.70 USD and adds 6.2 minutes of operational time per airport-trip taxi. Spatial spillovers are primarily observed among drivers in adjacentdistricts. Taxis from the Budget Terminal and drivers with fewer prior airport pickups benefit more from this information.

Filterfl: Knowledge Filtering-Based Data-Free Backdoor Defense For Federated Learning, Yanxin Yang, Ming Hu, Xiaofei Xie, Yue Cao, Pengyu Zhang, Yihao Huang, Mingsong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a distributed machine learning paradigm, Federated Learning (FL) enables large-scale clients to collaboratively train a model without sharing their raw data. However, due to the lack of data auditing for untrusted clients, FL is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, especially backdoor attacks. By using poisoned data for local training or directly changing the model parameters, attackers can easily inject backdoors into the model, which can trigger the model to make misclassification of targeted patterns in images. To address these issues, we propose a novel data-free trigger-generation-based defense approach based on the two characteristics of backdoor attacks: i) triggers are learned …

Seeing 3d Through 2d Lenses: 3d Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning Via Cross-Modal Geometric Rectification, Tuo Xiang, Xuemiao Xu, Bangzhen Liu, Jinyi Li, Yong Li, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid growth of 3D digital content necessitates expandable recognition systems for open-world scenarios. However, existing 3D class-incremental learning methods struggle under extreme data scarcity due to geometric misalignment and texture bias. While recent approaches integrate 3D data with 2D foundation models (e.g., CLIP), they suffer from semantic blurring caused by texture-biased projections and indiscriminate fusion of geometric-textural cues, leading to unstable decision prototypes and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose Cross-Modal Geometric Rectification (CMGR), a framework that enhances 3D geometric fidelity by leveraging CLIP’s hierarchical spatial semantics. Specifically, we introduce a Structure-Aware Geometric Rectification module that hierarchically …

Omnivton: Training-Free Universal Virtual Try-On, Zhaotong Yang, Yuhui Li, Shengfeng He, Xinzhe Li, Yangyang Xu, Junyu Dong, Yong Du

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Image-based Virtual Try-On (VTON) techniques rely on either supervised in-shop approaches, which ensure high fidelity but struggle with cross-domain generalization, or unsupervised in-the-wild methods, which improve adaptability but remain constrained by data biases and limited universality. A unified, training-free solution that works across both scenarios remains an open challenge. We propose OmniVTON, the first training-free universal VTON framework that decouples garment and pose conditioning to achieve both texture fidelity and pose consistency across diverse settings. To preserve garment details, we introduce a garment prior generation mechanism that aligns clothing with the body, followed by continuous boundary stitching technique to achieve …

Fcad: Feature-Coupled Anisotropic Diffusion For Continuous Graph Learning, Amitoz Azad, Zhiyuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we propose a novel continuous graph neural network called FCAD (Feature-Coupled Anisotropic Diffusion) for the task of node classification on graphs. Our approach is motivated by the success of feature-coupled anisotropic diffusion PDEs in multivalued image restoration. Our method introduces a total variation regularization-inspired anisotropic term to control diffusion between nodes and incorporates a learnable parameterization for feature coupling during the diffusion process. Our model performs competitively against several GNN baselines for both heterophilous and homophilous graphs, demonstrating notable benefits for heterophilous graphs due to the learnable feature coupling.

Parameter-Efficient Variational Autoencoder For Multimodal Multi-Interest Recommendation, Nhu Thuat Tran, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning user preferences in recommendation systems is enriched by multimodal features, such as textual and visual content, and amplified by multi-interest modeling with Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs). However, prior efforts are limited by single modality focus and cumbersome, parameter-heavy architecture designs. To address these limitations, we introduce an innovative solution that blends the semantic richness of multimodal data with the representational power of multi-representation VAEs. Drawing inspiration from Mixture of Experts (MoE), we cast each VAE as an expert tailored to a specific modality, then fuse them via a novel parameter-merging function into a lean, unified model. This approach efficiently captures …

Search Trajectory Network-Enhanced Multi-Objective Dynamic Algorithm Configuration, Robbert Reijnen, Zaharah Bukhsh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Yaoxin Wu, Yingqian Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as an effective technique for dynamic algorithm configuration, particularly in evolutionary computation, enabling adaptive parameter updates during algorithmic execution. DRL-based methods have shown broad applicability across different problem domains and are designed to configure algorithms without problem-specific information, making them highly transferable across problem variants and scalable to different problem sizes. This paper proposes a novel graph neural network-based approach that learns representations of Search Trajectory Networks (STNs) to track the convergence behavior of multiple objectives and dynamically reconfigures multiobjective evolutionary algorithms during execution. By capturing how solutions evolve and interact over time, the …

Memad: Structured Memory Of Debates For Enhanced Multi-Agent Reasoning, Shuai Ling, Lizi Liao, Dongmei Jiang, Weili Guan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable in-context learning capabilities but often struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning. Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) frameworks partially address these limitations by enabling iterative agent interactions. However, they neglect valuable historical insights by treating each new debate independently. In this paper, we propose Memory-Augmented MAD (MeMAD), a parameter-free memory-augmented MAD framework that systematically organizes and reuses past debate transcripts. MeMAD stores structured representations of successful and unsuccessful reasoning attempts enriched with self-reflections and peer feedback. It systematically retrieves them via semantic similarity at inference time to inform new reasoning tasks. Our experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning, scientific …

Mitigating Cross-Modal Representation Bias For Multicultural Image-To-Recipe Retrieval, Qing Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu Cao, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing approaches for image-to-recipe retrieval have the implicit assumption that a food image can fully capture the details textually documented in its recipe. However, a food image only reflects the visual outcome of a cooked dish and not the underlying cooking process. Consequently, learning cross-modal representations to bridge the modality gap between images and recipes tends to ignore subtle, recipe-specific details that are not visually apparent but are crucial for recipe retrieval. Specifically, the representations are biased to capture the dominant visual elements, resulting in difficulty in ranking similar recipes with subtle differences in use of ingredients and cooking methods. …

Boosting Chart-To-Code Generation In Mllm Via Dual Preference-Guided Refinement, Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Translating chart images into executable plotting scripts-referred to as the chart-to-code generation task-requires Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to perform fine-grained visual parsing, precise code synthesis, and robust cross-modal reasoning. However, this task is inherently under-constrained: multiple valid code implementations can produce the same visual chart, and evaluation must consider both code correctness and visual fidelity across diverse dimensions. This makes it difficult to learn accurate and generalizable mappings through standard supervised fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose a dual preference-guided refinement framework that combines a feedback-driven, dual-modality reward mechanism with iterative preference learning. Our approach introduces a structured …

Art4math: Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition Via Multimodal Sketch Grounding, Yang Zhou, Jin Wang, Yuxiao Zhang, Kaixiang Huang, Guodong Lu, Jingru Yang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) remains a challenging task due to the structural complexity of mathematical notation and the ambiguity of handwritten symbols-e.g., ''ρ'' vs. ''p'' or ''B'' vs. ''β''. While stroke-based models offer disambiguation via temporal cues, most existing methods are constrained by coarse modality fusion and a lack of fine-grained cross-modal alignment, further hindered by limited annotated data. We introduce Art for Math (Art4Math), a novel framework that leverages the structural richness of human sketches to enhance HMER through fine-grained, modality-aware learning. Art4Math follows a two-stage training paradigm: Art Grounding (A-Grd) and Math Decoding (M-Dec). In A-Grd, the …

Language-Driven 3d Human Pose Estimation In Multi-Person Scenarios: A New Dataset And Approach, Tingrui Shen, Bangzhen Liu, Zhirun Fan, Shiting Zhang, Weifeng Pan, Sun Fan, Dan Cao, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In an NBA game scenario, consider the challenge of locating and analyzing the 3D poses of players performing a user-specified action, such as attempting a shot. Traditional 3D human pose estimation (3DHPE) methods often fall short in such complex, multi-person scenes due to their lack of semantic integration and reliance on isolated pose data. To address these limitations, we introduce Language-Driven 3D Human Pose Estimation (L3DHPE), a novel approach that extends 3DHPE to general multi-person contexts by incorporating detailed language descriptions. We present Panoptic-L3D, the first dataset designed for L3DHPE, featuring 3,838 linguistic annotations for 1,476 individuals across 588 videos, …

Diffusionmat: Alpha Matting As Deterministic Sequential Refinement Learning, Yangyang Xu, Shengfeng He, Wenqi Shao, Yong Du, Kwan-Yee K. Wong, Yu Qiao, Jun Yu, Ping Luo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we introduce DiffusionMat, a novel image matting framework that employs a diffusion model for the transition from coarse to refined alpha mattes. Diverging from conventional methods that utilize trimaps merely as loose guidance for alpha matte prediction, our approach treats image matting as a deterministic sequential refinement learning process. This process begins with the addition of noise to trimaps and iteratively denoises them using a pre-trained diffusion model, which incrementally guides the prediction towards a clean alpha matte. The key innovation of our framework is a correction module that adjusts the output at each denoising step, ensuring …

Fine-Grained Abnormality Prompt Learning For Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection, Jiawen Zhu, Yew‑Soon Ong, Chunhua Shen, Guansong Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) methods show remarkable success in prompting large pre-trained visionlanguage models to detect anomalies in a target dataset without using any dataset-specific training or demonstration. However, these methods often focus on crafting/learning prompts that capture only coarse-grained semantics of abnormality, e.g., high-level semantics like ‘damaged’, ‘imperfect’, or ‘defective’ objects. They therefore have limited capability in recognizing diverse abnormality details that deviate from these general abnormal patterns in various ways. To address this limitation, we propose FAPrompt, a novel framework designed to learn Fine-grained Abnormality Prompts for accurate ZSAD. To this end, a novel Compound Abnormality Prompt …

Advances In Iot, Ai, And Sensor‑Based Technologies For Disease Treatment, Health Promotion, Successful Ageing, And Ageing Well, Yuzhou Qian, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) are unlocking transformative opportunities across society. One of the most critical challenges addressed by these technologies is the ageing population, which presents mounting concerns for healthcare systems and quality of life worldwide. By supporting continuous monitoring, personal care, and data-driven decision-making, IoT and AI are shifting healthcare delivery from a reactive approach to a proactive one. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of IoT-based systems with a particular focus on the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) and their integration with AI, referred to as the Artificial Intelligence of …

Website Owner Identification Through Multi-Level Contrastive Representation Learning, Cheng Tu, Yunshan Ma, Yang Li, Min Zhang, Miao Hu, Fan Shi, Xiang Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Website owner identification aims to recognize the organization or individual who owns a given website that is served on the web. It is a crucial step for cyberspace surveying and mapping, playing a significant role in cyberspace administration and governance. Existing widely employed solutions for website owner identification mainly fall into two paradigms: (1) querying the public information databases such as WHOIS, which store the Internet resource’s registered users or assignees; and (2) directly extracting the organization or individual name of the website owner from the webpage using the technique of named entity recognition. However, the former is less reliable …

Unsupervised Visual Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning Via Preference Optimization, Kesen Zhao, Beier Zhu, Qianru Sun, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning greatly improves the interpretability and problem-solving abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing ap proaches focus on text CoT, limiting their ability to lever age visual cues. Visual CoT remains underexplored, and the only work [35] is based on supervised fine-tuning that relies on extensive labeled bounding-box data and is hard to generalize to unseen cases. In this paper, we introduce Unsupervised Visual CoT (UV-CoT), a novel framework for image-level CoT reasoning via preference optimization. UV-CoTperforms preference comparisons between model generated bounding boxes (one is preferred and the other is dis-preferred), eliminating the need for …

Genwardrobe: A Fully Generative System For Travel Fashion Wardrobe Construction, Peng Jin, Yilin Wen, Mingzhe Yu, Yunshan Ma, Rong Zheng, Jin‑Tu Fan, Chong Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the increasing demand for outfit planning in real-world travel scenarios, the need for constructing a travel fashion wardrobe, a series of outfits tailored to a user's personalization and destination-specific context over a short travel period, has grown significantly. However, existing systems or works often focus on isolated factors and rely on retrieval-based methods, with insufficient utilization of generative models, limiting their adaptability to real-world travel scenarios. To address this issue, this study introduces GenWardrobe, a fully generative system for travel fashion wardrobe construction. GenWardrobe consists of three key modules: user query analysis, fashion knowledge retrieval via retrieval-augmented generation and …