Simona-Vasilica Oprea

Gabriela Dobrita, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bara

Existing learning-based detectors for Solidity smart-contracts reduce vulnerability detection to syntactic pattern matching within single functions, yet many of the most consequential exploits (The DAO, Cream Finance) exist not in any individual function but in the relationship between functions and in the combination of conditions that made the attack feasible. Thus, we propose AttackPathGNN, a graph neural network (GNN) that reframes detection as reasoning over explicit attack paths. Two architectural choices distinguish it from prior GNN-based detectors: (1)a State Interference Graph that links every pair of functions sharing mutable storage through typed, weighted edges and through directed reentrancy-path edges defined by an explicit five-condition predicate; (2)conjunction pooling, a differentiable AND-aggregator over eight named exploit preconditions whose log-sigmoid form causes the per-function exploit score to collapse whenever any single mitigation (a reentrancy guard, an access-control modifier or SafeMath) is in place. Across five independent training runs, AttackPathGNN attains 92.3+/-0.2% F1 on the SmartBugs Wild held-out test partition (4.3+/-0.3% false-negative rate, 90.8+/-2.5% detection rate on the independently human-labelled SmartBugs Curated benchmark), recovering 6/10 DASP10 categories at 100% on every seed and Reentrancy at 98.7+/-1.8%. Each prediction is emitted with a structured remediation report, turning each verdict into an actionable, function-level audit finding.

Alin-Gabriel Văduva, Anca-Ioana Andreescu, Simona-Vasilica Oprea et al.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based code analysis tools are adopted to automate software documentation tasks. However, the scalability of these approaches to real codebases, where Intermediate Representations (IR) exceed LLM context limits, remains underexplored. This paper introduces an agentic architecture with context engineering for automated UML diagram generation from source code repositories. It employs a hierarchy of five specialized agents: PlannerAgent, AnalyzerAgent, DiagramAgent, CorrectorAgent and DependencyAnalyzerAgent, built on the Claude Agent SDK, each addressing a distinct cognitive subtask. A deterministic, importance-weighted IR compaction layer transforms full project IRs into diagram-specific views guaranteed to fit within token constraints, requiring no LLM calls and completing in milliseconds. Thus, we evaluate the system across 12 open-source repositories in 4 programming languages (Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python) and 7 UML diagram types, producing 84 observations assessed on 5 automated metrics. Results demonstrate high syntactic validity (mean: 91.5%, with component and deployment diagrams reaching 100%), strong relationship precision (mean: 0.858) and consistent structural quality (mean: 81.7/100, with cross-language variance of 3.1 points). Entity recall averaged 0.313, reflecting deliberate architectural prioritization over exhaustive coverage. A sensitivity analysis (31 to 4,578 IR entities) confirms that quality scores remain stable regardless of scale.

Adela Bara, Simona-Vasilica Oprea

Our paper introduces a generative, multiagent AI framework designed to overcome the rigidity, limited flexibility and technical barriers of current bibliometric tools. The objective is to enable researchers to perform fully dynamic, code-based scientometric analysis using natural language NL instructions, eliminating the need for specialized programming skills while expanding analytical depth. Methodologically, the system integrates four coordinated AI agents: a custom analytics generator, a full-paper retriever, including a Retrieval Augmented Generation RAG based researcher assistant and an automated report generator. User queries are translated into executable Python scripts, run within a sandbox ensuring safety, reproducibility and auditability. The framework supports automated data cleaning, construction of co-authorship and citation networks, temporal analyses, topic modeling, embedding based clustering and synthesis of research gaps. Each analytical session produces an exportable, end to end report. The novelty lies in unifying NL to code scientometrics, multimodal full paper retrieval, agentic exploration and dynamic metric creation in a single adaptive environment, capabilities absent in existing platforms: VOSviewer, Bibliometrix, SciMAT. Unlike static GUI based workflows, the proposed framework supports iterative what if analysis, hybrid indicators and user driven pipeline modification. Results demonstrate that the framework generates valid analysis scripts, retrieves and synthesizes full papers, identifies frontier themes and produces reproducible scientometric outputs. It establishes a new paradigm for accessible, interactive and extensible bibliometric knowledge.

Adela Bâra, Simona-Vasilica Oprea

Current knowledge graph (KG) construction methods are confirmatory, focusing on recovering known relationships rather than identifying novel or context-dependent nodes. This paper proposes a phenotype-driven and evidence-governed framework that shifts the paradigm toward structured hypothesis discovery and controlled KG expansion. The approach integrates graph neural networks (GNNs) for phenotype discovery, causal inference, probabilistic reasoning and large language models (LLMs) for hypothesis generation and claim extraction within a unified pipeline. The framework prioritizes relationships that are both structurally supported by data and underexplored in the literature. KG expansion is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, where candidate claims are jointly evaluated in terms of relevance, structural validation and novelty. Pareto-optimal selection enables the identification of non-dominated claims that balance confirmation and discovery, avoiding trivial or redundant knowledge inclusion. Experiments on heterogeneous population datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework produces more interpretable phenotypes, reveals context-dependent causal structures and generates high-quality claims that align with both data and scientific evidence. Compared to rule-based and LLM-only baselines, the method achieves the best trade-off across plausibility, novelty, validation and relevance. In retrieval-augmented settings, it significantly improves performance (Recall@5=0.98) while reducing hallucination rates (0.05), highlighting its effectiveness in grounding LLM outputs.

Diana Maria Popa, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bâra

This paper examines whether students are entering the generative AI era with sufficiently strong educational foundations, focusing on the relationship between learning environments and changes in ICT related career aspirations across countries. The analysis uses country-level data from PISA 2018 and 2022, combining indicators of student autonomy, digital skills and teacher support. A mixed-method approach is applied, including descriptive statistics, regression analysis, clustering, latent representation learning (using Variational Autoencoder-VAE), discriminant analysis and probabilistic modeling to capture both observable and latent dimensions of educational readiness. Unlike prior research that treats learning loss, digital skills and career expectations separately, our analysis integrates them within a comparative longitudinal framework. It shifts the focus from short-term post-pandemic effects to the structural capacity of education systems to prepare students for digital and AI-driven labor markets. Results show a global but uneven increase in ICT career aspirations. Digital skills emerge as the strongest and most consistent predictor, while teacher support plays a complementary role. Autonomy shows weaker, context-dependent effects. Educational readiness is multidimensional, and ICT aspirations evolve relatively independently from other career domains.

Diana Maria Popa, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bâra

This paper investigates how generative-artificial intelligence AI is reshaping job requirements, skill compositions and sectoral dynamics across global labor markets. It examines the evolving frequency and framing of AI-related competencies in job postings, exploring whether generative-AI functions primarily as an augmentative or substitutive force in the workplace. A large-scale, multi-source corpus of over 150,000 English-language job postings 2018-2025 is compiled from twelve open-access datasets and one public API. The analytical framework integrates lexical skill extraction, semantic framing, topic modeling, BERTopic, LDA, KMeans, and time-series forecasting ARIMA. Skill mentions are categorized into five dimensions: AI_Data, Routine, Soft_Meta, Domain_Specific and Leadership, while cross sectoral analyses and correlation matrices quantify interdependencies between competencies. Sentence-transformer embeddings and cosine similarity are used to compute a Framing Index, distinguishing augmentation- versus automation-oriented discourse. Investigating job postings, our research contributes a replicable, data driven methodology for mapping the diffusion of AI related skills across industries and time. Results reveal a sharp post-2021 increase in AI-related skill mentions: prompt engineering, fine-tuning and model validation, accompanied by a decline in routine tasks: data entry and manual coding. Forecasts suggest sustained growth in AI_Data and Soft_Meta skills through 2025, signaling a structural convergence toward hybrid human-AI expertise as a new foundation of employability.

Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bâra

Learning human preferences in language models remains fundamentally challenging, as reward modeling relies on subtle, subjective comparisons or shades of gray rather than clear-cut labels. This study investigates the limits of current approaches and proposes a feature-augmented framework to better capture the multidimensional nature of human judgment. Using the Anthropic HHRLHF dataset, we evaluate ten diverse large language models LLMs under a standard pairwise preference setting, where baseline performance remains below 0.74 ROC AUC, highlighting the difficulty of the task. To address this, we enrich textual representations with interpretable signals: response length, refusal indicators, toxicity scores and prompt response semantic similarity, enabling models to explicitly capture key aspects of helpfulness, safety and relevance. The proposed hybrid approach yields consistent improvements across all models, achieving up to 0.84 ROC AUC and significantly higher pairwise accuracy, with DeBERTav3Large demonstrating the best performance. Beyond accuracy, we integrate SHAP and LIME to provide fine-grained interpretability, revealing that model decisions depend on contextualized safety and supportive framing rather than isolated keywords. We further analyze bias amplification, showing that while individual features have weak marginal effects, their interactions influence preference learning.

Gabriela Dobrita, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bara

Smart-contract exploits have caused billions of USD in cumulative losses, yet audits remain expensive and slow. Automated tools have emerged to close this gap, but each class has a characteristic failure mode. Static analyzers report findings that frequently fail manual triage at high rates, while large language models (LLMs) hallucinate findings that contradict the source code. Thus, we propose Chaintrix, an end-to-end auditing framework whose central architectural commitment is that every LLM-generated claim must be discharged against a deterministic structural contract representation. We introduce a Cross-Contract Interaction Model (CCIM) that parses Solidity into a structured map of function-level reads, writes, modifiers and resolved cross-contract calls. CCIM serves as the substrate against which all 12 of Chaintrix's deterministic signal engines and the parallel LLM audit pipelines operate. A staged false-positive-reduction pipeline, terminating in a Structural Verdict Engine (SVE) that applies deterministic structural checks against parsed code, filters the merged finding set, with selected high-confidence findings further validated through symbolic execution and fuzz testing. We evaluate Chaintrix on EVMbench, the smart-contract security benchmark by OpenAI, Paradigm, OtterSec. Chaintrix detects 86 of 120 high-severity vulnerabilities (71.7% recall), with 25 audits scoring 100% recall, placing Chaintrix 26 percentage points above the strongest frontier-model baseline.

Adela Bara, Gabriela Dobrita, Simona-Vasilica Oprea

The purpose of our paper is to develop a unified multi-agent architecture that automates end-to-end machine learning (ML) pipeline generation from datasets and natural-language (NL) goals, improving efficiency, robustness and explainability. A five-agent system is proposed to handle profiling, intent parsing, microservice recommendation, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) construction and execution. It integrates code-grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for microservice understanding, an explainable hybrid recommender combining multiple criteria, a self-healing mechanism using Large Language Model (LLM)-based error interpretation and adaptive learning from execution history. The approach is evaluated on 150 ML tasks across diverse scenarios. The system achieves an 84.7% end-to-end pipeline success rate, outperforming baseline methods. It demonstrates improved robustness through self-healing and reduces workflow development time compared to manual construction. The study introduces a novel integration of code-grounded RAG, explainable recommendation, self-healing execution and adaptive learning within a single architecture, showing that tightly coupled intelligent components can outperform isolated solutions.

Alin-Gabriel Văduva, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bâra

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into peer review raises a concern beyond authorship and detection: the potential cascading automation of the entire editorial process. As reviews become partially or fully machine-generated, it becomes plausible that editorial decisions may also be delegated to algorithmic systems, leading to a fully automated evaluation pipeline. They risk reshaping the criteria by which scientific work is assessed. This paper argues that machine-driven assessment may systematically favor standardized, pattern-conforming research while penalizing unconventional and paradigm-shifting ideas that require contextual human judgment. We consider that this shift could lead to epistemic homogenization, where researchers are implicitly incentivized to optimize their work for algorithmic approval rather than genuine discovery. To address this risk, we introduce an explainable framework (RAG-XAI) for assessing review quality and detecting automated patterns using markers LLM extractor, aiming to preserve transparency, accountability and creativity in science. The proposed framework achieves near-perfect detection performance, with XGBoost, Random Forest and LightGBM reaching 99.61% accuracy, AUC-ROC above 0.999 and F1-scores of 0.9925 on the test set, while maintaining extremely low false positive rates (<0.23%) and false negative rates (~0.8%). In contrast, the logistic regression baseline performs substantially worse (89.97% accuracy, F1-score 0.8314). Feature importance and SHAP analyses identify absence of personal signals and repetition patterns as the dominant predictors. Additionally, the RAG component achieves 90.5% top-1 retrieval accuracy, with strong same-class clustering in the embedding space, further supporting the reliability of the framework's outputs.

Alin-Gabriel Vaduva, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bara

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods (SHAP, LIME) are increasingly adopted to interpret models in high-stakes businesses. However, the credibility of these explanations, their stability under realistic data perturbations, remains unquantified. This paper introduces the Credibility Index via Explanation Stability (CIES), a mathematically grounded metric that measures how robust a model's explanations are when subject to realistic business noise. CIES captures whether the reasons behind a prediction remain consistent, not just the prediction itself. The metric employs a rank-weighted distance function that penalizes instability in the most important features disproportionately, reflecting business semantics where changes in top decision drivers are more consequential than changes in marginal features. We evaluate CIES across three datasets (customer churn, credit risk, employee attrition), four tree-based classification models and two data balancing conditions. Results demonstrate that model complexity impacts explanation credibility, class imbalance treatment via SMOTE affects not only predictive performance but also explanation stability, and CIES provides statistically superior discriminative power compared to a uniform baseline metric (p < 0.01 in all 24 configurations). A sensitivity analysis across four noise levels confirms the robustness of the metric itself. These findings offer business practitioners a deployable "credibility warning system" for AI-driven decision support.