54.0CYApr 20
First, Do No Harm (With LLMs): Mitigating Racial Bias via Agentic WorkflowsSihao Xing, Zaur Gouliev
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in clinical settings, raising concerns about racial bias in both generated medical text and clinical reasoning. Existing studies have identified bias in medical LLMs, but many focus on single models and give less attention to mitigation. This study uses the EU AI Act as a governance lens to evaluate five widely used LLMs across two tasks, namely synthetic patient-case generation and differential diagnosis ranking. Using race-stratified epidemiological distributions in the United States and expert differential diagnosis lists as benchmarks, we apply structured prompt templates and a two-part evaluation design to examine implicit and explicit racial bias. All models deviated from observed racial distributions in the synthetic case generation task, with GPT-4.1 showing the smallest overall deviation. In the differential diagnosis task, DeepSeek V3 produced the strongest overall results across the reported metrics. When embedded in an agentic workflow, DeepSeek V3 showed an improvement of 0.0348 in mean p-value, 0.1166 in median p-value, and 0.0949 in mean difference relative to the standalone model, although improvement was not uniform across every metric. These findings support multi-metric bias evaluation for AI systems used in medical settings and suggest that retrieval-based agentic workflows may reduce some forms of explicit bias in benchmarked diagnostic tasks. Detailed prompt templates, experimental datasets, and code pipelines are available on our GitHub.
CLSep 12, 2025
PolyTruth: Multilingual Disinformation Detection using Transformer-Based Language ModelsZaur Gouliev, Jennifer Waters, Chengqian Wang
Disinformation spreads rapidly across linguistic boundaries, yet most AI models are still benchmarked only on English. We address this gap with a systematic comparison of five multilingual transformer models: mBERT, XLM, XLM-RoBERTa, RemBERT, and mT5 on a common fake-vs-true machine learning classification task. While transformer-based language models have demonstrated notable success in detecting disinformation in English, their effectiveness in multilingual contexts still remains up for debate. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce PolyTruth Disinfo Corpus, a novel corpus of 60,486 statement pairs (false claim vs. factual correction) spanning over twenty five languages that collectively cover five language families and a broad topical range from politics, health, climate, finance, and conspiracy, half of which are fact-checked disinformation claims verified by an augmented MindBugs Discovery dataset. Our experiments revealed performance variations. Models such as RemBERT achieved better overall accuracy, particularly excelling in low-resource languages, whereas models like mBERT and XLM exhibit considerable limitations when training data is scarce. We provide a discussion of these performance patterns and implications for real-world deployment. The dataset is publicly available on our GitHub repository to encourage further experimentation and advancement. Our findings illuminate both the potential and the current limitations of AI systems for multilingual disinformation detection.
CLJun 2, 2025
Propaganda and Information Dissemination in the Russo-Ukrainian War: Natural Language Processing of Russian and Western Twitter NarrativesZaur Gouliev
The conflict in Ukraine has been not only characterised by military engagement but also by a significant information war, with social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter playing an important role in shaping public perception. This article provides an analysis of tweets from propaganda accounts and trusted accounts collected from the onset of the war, February 2022 until the middle of May 2022 with n=40,000 total tweets. We utilise natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to assess the sentiment and identify key themes, topics and narratives across the dataset with human-in-the-loop (HITL) analysis throughout. Our findings indicate distinct strategies in how information is created, spread, and targeted at different audiences by both sides. Propaganda accounts frequently employ emotionally charged language and disinformation to evoke fear and distrust, whereas other accounts, primarily Western tend to focus on factual reporting and humanitarian aspects of the conflict. Clustering analysis reveals groups of accounts with similar behaviours, which we suspect indicates the presence of coordinated efforts. This research attempts to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of information warfare and offers techniques for future studies on social media influence in military conflicts.