Digital Commons Network^™

Prompttutor: Effects Of An Llm-Based Chatbot On Learning Outcomes And Motivation In Flipped Classrooms, Yuhao Zhang, Eng Lieh Ouh, Chong Jee Adam Ho, Siaw Ling Lo, Kar Way Tan, Feng Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study explores the integration of a Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbot, PromptTutor, into flipped classrooms (FC) for undergraduate Computer Science (CS) education. PromptTutor is designed to provide personalized, immediate feedback to support student learning in FC by incorporating reflective learning and scaffolding strategies. The traditional FC typically lacks this immediate feedback during the pre-class learning phase, risking decreased student motivation according to existing literature. This study examines if students improve in learning outcomes and motivation after using PromptTutor. Through a controlled crossover experiment with 50 students, the study demonstrates statistically significant improvements in students' quiz performance and motivation …

Exploring The Capabilities Of Llms For Code-Change-Related Tasks, Lishui Fan, Jiakun Liu, Zhongxin Liu, David Lo, Xin Xia, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers deal with code-change-related tasks daily, e.g., reviewing code. Pre-trained code and code-change-oriented models have been adapted to help developers with such tasks. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown their effectiveness in code-related tasks. However, existing LLMs for code focus on general code syntax and semantics rather than the differences between two code versions. Thus, it is an open question how LLMs perform on code-change-related tasks.To answer this question, we conduct an empirical study using 1B parameters LLMs on three code-change-related tasks, i.e., code review generation, commit message generation, and just-in-time comment update, with in-context learning (ICL) and parameter-efficient …

Wa-Fdnet: A Unified Weight Adaptation Network For Multimodal Image Fusion And Object Detection, Yanyin Guo, Ying Luo, Junwei Li, Zhiyuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimodal image fusion and object detection are critical tasks in computer vision, particularly in scenarios requiring robust perception under low illumination conditions. Existing approaches that attempt to combine these tasks often rely on cascaded or loosely coupled designs, which can result in suboptimal performance due to gradient conflicts and task imbalance. In this paper, we propose WA-FDNet, a novel Weight Adaptation Fusion Detection Network that unifies multimodal image fusion and object detection into a single end-to-end framework. WA-FDNet adopts a shared encoder–private decoder architecture, enabling efficient feature sharing while preserving task-specific characteristics. The image fusion branch employs a spatial attention-based …

Instruct2see: Learning To Remove Any Obstructions Across Distributions, Junhang Li, Yu Guo, Chuhua Xian, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Images are often obstructed by various obstacles due to capture limitations, hindering the observation of objects of interest. Most existing methods address occlusions from specific elements like fences or raindrops, but are constrained by the wide range of real-world obstructions, making comprehensive data collection impractical. To overcome these challenges, we propose Instruct2See, a novel zero-shot framework capable of handling both seen and unseen obstacles. The core idea of our approach is to unify obstruction removal by treating it as a soft-hard mask restoration problem, where any obstruction can be represented using multi-modal prompts, such as visual semantics and textual instructions, …

Finir: The 2nd Workshop On Financial Information Retrieval In The Era Of Generative Ai, Fengbin Zhu, Yunshan Ma, Fuli Feng, Chao Wang, Huanbo Luan, Guangnan Ye, Shuo Zhang, Dhagash Mehta, Pingping Chen, Bing Xiang, Tat‑Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advancements in Generative AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have demonstrated remarkable success across various general tasks. Extensive studies have explored leveraging generative models in finance, but significant challenges persist. This half-day workshop explores potential approaches and research directions to address these challenges by equipping generative models with advanced Information Retrieval (IR) models. Specifically, this workshop seeks to provide a platform for discussing innovative ideas that facilitate the advancement of IR technology to enrich generative models in finance from four key perspectives: (i) financial IR techniques (ii) financial IR benchmarking and evaluation (iii) financial systems and agents/assistants (iv) …

Economic Consequences Of Public Pension Accounting Regulation Changes: Evidence From Housing Markets And Local Economies, Grace Haoqing Fan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

I examine whether, and through which channels, government pension accounting regulations affect local housing markets and economies. Using both a contiguous border-county approach across multiple states and a single-state study in California, I find that regions exposed to more severe state-level pension underfunding experience lower housing market growth after the introduction of Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) regulations 67 and 68, which significantly enhance the transparency of public pension underfunding. The effect is more pronounced in states heavily impacted by the new regulations and in counties more reliant on state funding. Further analyses suggest that the observed effect is driven …

Operationalising The Social Licence To Operate Along The Belt And Road: The Case For A Mediation-Focused Approach, Mark Mclaughlin

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article examines the intricate dynamics of community representation and stakeholder influence in the realm of international investment law. More specifically, it considers the most effective method by which to operationalise the concept of the ‘social licence to operate’ when attempting to resolve investor-state disputes. By utilising disputes relating to China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a case study, it is shown that the social impact of foreign investment projects is often a catalyst for arbitration claims. Community interests are insufficiently represented at the stage of procurement or admission of investment, which has led to violent clashes between investors and …

Mindfulness And Entrepreneurship: Looking Back And Moving Forward, Eva Katharina Peters

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation spans three chapters covering the topics of mindfulness and entrepreneurship. The first chapter is a literature review summarizing the existing literature on mindfulness in entrepreneurship. The review provides an organizing framework for structuring the knowledge of mindfulness in entrepreneurship, along with an integrative framework and a detailed agenda for future research. Building on the insights generated through the literature review, the following two chapters provide empirical evidence for the role of mindfulness in entrepreneurship. The second chapter is an empirical study exploring how mindfulness relates to entrepreneurial well-being via its relation to co-founding team relationship quality and team …

Socio-Economic Dynamics Of Engagement And Incentivization In Emerging Digital Platforms, Danyang Song

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The rapid advancement of digital technology—particularly mobile and blockchain technologies—has fueled the unprecedented growth of online platforms. Among these, live commerce and blockchain-based social media have emerged as two distinct business models that profoundly shape both commercial and social aspects of people’s lives. E-commerce livestreaming integrates live video streaming with e-commerce, offering consumers real-time product information and interactive shopping experiences. Different from traditional social media platforms that rely on either voluntary contributions or ad revenue sharing to incentivize user participation, blockchain-based social media platforms often use cryptocurrency or tokens to reward users for creating and curating content. This dissertation investigates …

Modeling Multiple Tasks In Recommendation Systems, Dinh Hieu Do

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Traditional research in recommendation systems has largely centered on the static offline supervised learning setting. In this paradigm, all available user-item interaction data is collected and partitioned into fixed training, validation, and test sets. Models are developed and evaluated in this controlled environment, where the underlying data distribution is assumed to remain unchanged. This approach offers clear advantages: it simplifies experimentation, enables reproducible benchmarking, and allows for straightforward comparisons between algorithms.

However, this static offline setting does not reflect the realities faced by modern recommendation systems. In real-world applications, data is dynamic and ever-evolving, where new users and items are …

Three Essays In Development Economics, Vardaan Chawla

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation explores policy-relevant questions through three empirical studies on issues related to education, human capital formation, and consumer protection in developing countries. The first two chapters focus on education policies in India and examine their intended and unintended impacts on children’s schooling and labour-market outcomes. The third chapter evaluates a new approach to tackle consumer protection issues in digital finance in Uganda and Bangladesh. Across all three, this dissertation reflects an interest and understanding in advancing evidence-based policymaking in developing countries, be it in education or consumer protection.

In the first chapter, we evaluate the impact of the midday …

From Sparse Feedback To Sequential Decision-Making: Learning Safety Constraints With Weak Supervision, Siow Meng Low

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Real-world decision-making often involves safety constraints that are implicit, non-Markovian, or difficult to specify directly. Standard reinforcement learning (RL) approaches typically assume access to fully specified cost functions and constraint budgets—assumptions that limit their applicability in domains where such structure must instead be inferred from data. This dissertation develops a sequence of methods for learning safety-relevant structure from weak supervision, such as sparse binary feedback on trajectory segments, and using these signals to guide planning and policy optimization.

The first part of the dissertation introduces a sample-efficient method for planning in continuous Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using deep reactive policies. …

Language Brokering Conditions The Indirect Association Between Mexican‐Origin Adolescents' Academic Discrimination And Educational Expectations, Su Yeong Kim, Yayu Du, Chantal Alvarado, Wei Xiang Sim, Wen Wen, Tianlu Zhang, Jingyi Shen

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Mexican-origin adolescents, a significant portion of the US Latino population, often experience a decline in educational expectations from early to late adolescence. Contextual factors such as academic discrimination and language brokering for parents may contribute to this decline. This study investigates the indirect effect of academic discrimination experienced in middle school on educational expectations in young adulthood through high school grades and engagement, and the moderating role of language brokering experiences in these relations. Data were collected from 604 Mexican-origin adolescents across four waves from 2012 to 2023. Academic discrimination experiences in middle school were negatively associated with school grades …

Mitigating Regression Faults Induced By Feature Evolution In Deep Learning Systems, Hanmo Yu, Zan Wang, Xuyang Chen, Junjie Chen, Jun Sun, Shuang Liu, Zishuo Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning (DL) systems have been widely utilized across various domains. However, the evolution of DL systems can result in regression faults. In addition to the evolution of DL systems through the incorporation of new data, feature evolution, such as the addition of new features, is also common and can introduce regression faults. In this work, we first investigate the underlying factors that are correlated with regression faults in feature evolution scenarios, i.e., redundancy and contribution shift. Based on our investigation, we propose a novel mitigation approach called FeaProtect, which aims to minimize the impact of these two factors. To …

Crow: Eliminating Backdoors From Large Language Models Via Internal Consistency Regularization, Nay Myat Min, Long H. Pham, Yige Li, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks that manipulate outputs via hidden triggers. Existing defense methods—designed for vision/text classification tasks—fail for text generation. We propose Internal Consistency Regularization (CROW), a defense leveraging the observation that backdoored models exhibit unstable layer-wise hidden representations when triggered, while clean models show smooth transitions. CROW enforces consistency across layers via adversarial perturbations and regularization during finetuning, neutralizing backdoors without requiring clean reference models or trigger knowledge—only a small clean dataset. Experiments across Llama-2 (7B, 13B), CodeLlama (7B, 13B), and Mistral-7B demonstrate CROW’s effectiveness: it achieves significant reductions in attack success rates across …

Llmscan: Causal Scan For Llm Misbehavior Detection, Mengdi Zhang, Kai Kiat Goh, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun, Lin Xin Rose, Hongyu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various fields, their potential to generate untruthful and harmful responses poses significant risks, particularly in critical applications. This highlights the urgent need for systematic methods to detect and prevent such misbehavior. While existing approaches target specific issues such as harmful responses, this work introduces LLMSCAN, an innovative LLM monitoring technique based on causality analysis, offering a comprehensive solution. LLMSCAN systematically monitors the inner workings of an LLM through the lens of causal inference, operating on the premise that the LLM’s ‘brain’ behaves differently when generating harmful or untruthful responses. By analyzing …

Efficient Prompt Tuning For Hierarchical Ingredient Recognition, Yinxuan Gui, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fine-grained ingredient recognition presents a significant challenge due to the diverse appearances of ingredients, resulting from different cutting and cooking methods. While existing approaches have shown promising results, they still require extensive training costs and focus solely on fine-grained ingredient recognition. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing an efficient prompt-tuning framework that adapts pretrained visual-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to the ingredient recognition task without requiring full model finetuning. Additionally, we introduce three-level ingredient hierarchies to enhance both training performance and evaluation robustness. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical ingredient recognition task, designed to evaluate model performance …

Dual-Target Disjointed Cross-Domain Recommendation Mediated Via Latent User Preferences, Dinh Hieu Do, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Users often navigate multiple platforms online, each characterized by its own set of scarce data. Recommender systems face a significant challenge in such fragmented environments. This paper proposes a novel approach to enhance recommendation systems by leveraging connections across distinct yet conceptually similar datasets from multiple platforms. We introduce a unique scenario of dual-target overlapping-free cross-platform recommendation, presenting a bridging mechanism to mutually improve across platforms and learn latent user preferences. Our approach addresses the data sparsity prevalent in each platform and enhances recommendation quality by harnessing redundant, rich, and similar domain data. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, …

Foodlmm: A Versatile Food Assistant Using Large Multi-Modal Model, Yuehao Yin, Huiyan Qi, Bin Zhu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) have made impressive progress in many vision-language tasks. Nevertheless, the performance of general LMMs in specific domains is still far from satisfactory. This paper proposes FoodLMM, a versatile food assistant based on LMMs with various capabilities, including food recognition, ingredient recognition, recipe generation, nutrition estimation, food segmentation and multi-round conversation. To facilitate FoodLMM to deal with tasks beyond pure text output, we introduce a series of novel task-specific tokens and heads, enabling the model to predict food nutritional values and multiple segmentation masks. We adopt a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we utilize multiple …

Unveiling Knowledge Boundary Of Large Language Models For Trustworthy Information Access, Yang Deng, Moxin Li, Liang Pang, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for generating content and facilitating information seeking across diverse domains. While their integration into conversational systems opens new avenues for interactive information-seeking experiences, their effectiveness is constrained by their knowledge boundaries—the limits of what they know and their ability to provide reliable, truthful, and contextually appropriate information. Understanding these boundaries is essential for maximizing the utility of LLMs for real-time information seeking while ensuring their reliability and trustworthiness. In this tutorial, we will explore the taxonomy of knowledge boundary in LLMs, addressing their handling of uncertainty, response calibration, and mitigation of …

Hps: Hard Preference Sampling For Human Preference Alignment, Xiandong Zou, Wanyu Lin, Yuchen Li, Pan Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aligning Large Language Model (LLM) responses with human preferences is vital for building safe and controllable AI systems. While preference optimization methods based on PlackettLuce (PL) and Bradley-Terry (BT) models have shown promise, they face challenges such as poor handling of harmful content, inefficient use of dispreferred responses, and, specifically for PL, high computational costs. To address these issues, we propose Hard Preference Sampling (HPS), a novel framework for robust and efficient human preference alignment. HPS introduces a training loss that prioritizes the most preferred response while rejecting all dispreferred and harmful ones. It emphasizes “hard” dispreferred responses — those …

Repairing Adversarial Texts Through Perturbation, Guoliang Dong, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay, Xinyu Wang, Ting Dai, Jie Shi, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It is known that neural networks are subject to attacks through adversarial perturbations. Worse yet, such attacks are impossible to eliminate, i.e., the adversarial perturbation is still possible after applying mitigation methods such as adversarial training. Multiple approaches have been developed to detect and reject such adversarial inputs. Rejecting suspicious inputs however may not be always feasible or ideal. First, normal inputs may be rejected due to false alarms generated by the detection algorithm. Second, denial-of-service attacks may be conducted by feeding such systems with adversarial inputs. To address this, in this work, we focus on the text domain and …

Understanding The Bad Development Practices Of Android Custom Permissions In The Wild, Xiaohan Zhang, Zhiyuan Yu, Xinghua Li, Cen Zhang, Cong Sun, Ning Zhang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android system provides application developers with the ability to define custom permissions, which serve to moderate the sharing of resources and interactions with other applications. However, poor development practices of developers can render the permission mechanism ineffective, weakening the system protection. This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the problematic practices surrounding custom permissions employed by developers, referred to as Bad Practices of Custom Permissions (BPCP issues). To accomplish this, we conducted an empirical study and identified nine common BPCP issue patterns that can lead to various adverse consequences, such as installation failures, crashes, or even component hijacking. To automatically …

Runtime Anomaly Detection For Drones: An Integrated Rule-Mining And Unsupervised Learning Approach, Ivan Wei Han Tan, Wei Minn, Christopher M. Poskitt, Lwin Khin Shar, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have witnessed a remarkable surge in popularity due to their versatile applications. These cyber-physical systems depend on multiple sensor inputs, such as cameras, GPS receivers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, with faults potentially leading to physical instability and serious safety concerns. To mitigate such risks, anomaly detection has emerged as a crucial safeguarding mechanism, capable of identifying the physical manifestations of emerging issues and allowing operators to take preemptive action at runtime. Recent anomaly detection methods based on LSTM neural networks have shown promising results, but three challenges persist: the need for models …

Diversity Optimization For Travelling Salesman Problem Via Deep Reinforcement Learning, Qi Li, Zhiguang Cao, Yining Ma, Yaoxin Wu, Yue-Jiao Gong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing neural methods for the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) mostly aim at finding a single optimal solution. To discover diverse yet high-quality solutions for Multi-Solution TSP (MSTSP), we propose a novel deep reinforcement learning based neural solver, which is primarily featured by an encoder-decoder structured policy. Concretely, on the one hand, a Relativization Filter (RF) is designed to enhance the robustness of the encoder to affine transformations of the instances, so as to potentially improve the quality of the found solutions. On the other hand, a Multi-Attentive Adaptive Active Search (MA3S) is tailored to allow the decoders to strike a …

An Efficient Diffusion-Based Non-Autoregressive Solver For Traveling Salesman Problem, Mingzhao Wang, You Zhou, Zhiguang Cao, Yubin Xiao, Xuan Wu, Wei Pang, Yuan Jiang, Hui Yang, Peng Zhao, Yuanshu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advances in neural models have shown considerable promise in solving Traveling Salesman Problems (TSPs) without relying on much hand-crafted engineering. However, while non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches benefit from faster inference through parallelism, they typically deliver solutions of inferior quality compared to autoregressive ones. To enhance the solution quality while maintaining fast inference, we propose DEITSP, a diffusion model with efficient iterations tailored for TSP that operates in a NAR manner. Firstly, we introduce a one-step diffusion model that integrates the controlled discrete noise addition process with self-consistency enhancement, enabling optimal solution prediction through simultaneous denoising of multiple solutions. Secondly, we …

Milpbench: A Large-Scale Benchmark Test Suite For Mixed Integer Linear Programming Problems, Huigen Ye, Yaoyang Cheng, Hua Xu, Zhiguang Cao, Hanzhang Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) is a cornerstone of optimization with applications across numerous domains. However, the development and evaluation of MILP-solving algorithms are hindered by existing benchmark datasets, which are often limited in scale, lack diversity, and are poorly structured, making them inadequate for systematic testing across different solving approaches, especially for machine learning (ML)-based methods. To address these issues, we introduce MILPBench, a large-scale benchmark suite comprising 100,000 MILP instances organized into 60 well-categorized classes. Using structural properties and embedding similarity metrics, we developed a novel classification framework to ensure both intra-class homogeneity and inter-class diversity. In addition to …

Robust Relevance Feedback For Interactive Known-Item Video Search, Zhixin Ma, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Known-item search (KIS) involves only a single search target, making relevance feedback-typically a powerful technique for efficiently identifying multiple positive examples to infer user intent-inapplicable. PicHunter addresses this issue by asking users to select the top-k most similar examples to the unique search target from a displayed set. Under ideal conditions, when the user's perception aligns closely with the machine's perception of similarity, consistent and precise judgments can elevate the target to the top position within a few iterations. However, in practical scenarios, expecting users to provide consistent judgments is often unrealistic, especially when the underlying embedding features used for …

Cradle: Empowering Foundation Agents Towards General Computer Control, Weihao Tan, Et. Al.

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite their success in specific scenarios, existing foundation agents still struggle to generalize across various virtual scenarios, mainly due to the dramatically different encapsulations of environments with manually designed observation and action spaces. To handle this issue, we propose the General Computer Control (GCC) setting to restrict foundation agents to interact with software through the most unified and standardized interface, i.e., using screenshots as input and keyboard and mouse actions as output. We introduce Cradle, a modular and flexible LMM-powered framework, as a preliminary attempt towards GCC. Enhanced by six key modules, Information Gathering, Self-Reflection, Task Inference, Skill Curation, Action …

Generalization Analysis For Supervised Contrastive Representation Learning Under Non‑Iid Settings, Minh Hieu Nong, Antoine Ledent

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Contrastive Representation Learning (CRL) has achieved impressive success in various domains in recent years. Nevertheless, the theoretical understanding of the generalization behavior of CRL has remained limited. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, the current literature only analyzes generalization bounds under the assumption that the data tuples used for contrastive learning are independently and identically distributed. However, in practice, we are often limited to a fixed pool of reusable labeled data points, making it inevitable to recycle data across tuples to create sufficiently large datasets. Therefore, the tuple-wise independence condition imposed by previous works is invalidated. In this paper, …