Hussein Al Osman

Hamideh Ghanadian, Isar Nejadgholi, Hussein Al Osman

This paper presents a novel framework for quantitatively evaluating the interactive ChatGPT model in the context of suicidality assessment from social media posts, utilizing the University of Maryland Reddit suicidality dataset. We conduct a technical evaluation of ChatGPT's performance on this task using Zero-Shot and Few-Shot experiments and compare its results with those of two fine-tuned transformer-based models. Additionally, we investigate the impact of different temperature parameters on ChatGPT's response generation and discuss the optimal temperature based on the inconclusiveness rate of ChatGPT. Our results indicate that while ChatGPT attains considerable accuracy in this task, transformer-based models fine-tuned on human-annotated datasets exhibit superior performance. Moreover, our analysis sheds light on how adjusting the ChatGPT's hyperparameters can improve its ability to assist mental health professionals in this critical task.

Rongqi Pan, Mahboubeh Dadkhah, Jean Baptiste Minani et al.

Technical documents contain rich domain knowledge for automating downstream tasks such as system testing. While this paper focuses on Ethernet switch configuration manuals (ESCMs), we propose a general framework that can be adapted to different industrial contexts. ESCMs provide valuable domain knowledge for Ethernet switch testing, but their semi-structured format, implicit step attributes, and complex section dependencies make them difficult to directly leverage for test automation. To address this, we generate knowledge graphs (KGs) that capture configuration knowledge from ESCM in a structured form. We propose a multi-agent LLM-based framework that extracts, evaluates, and improves KGs from ESCMs using a fine-grained KG schema and an iterative Extract-Evaluate-Improve (EEI) loop. Our evaluation on 50 real-world ESCMs shows that our framework achieves high extraction correctness using the original prompts, with average correctness scores ranging from 0.97 to 0.99 across three extraction tasks. For challenging ESCMs, the EEI loop further improves correctness through manual-specific prompt refinement. Moreover, the LLM judgments and human evaluations show substantial agreement, with Cohen's kappa of at least 0.72 across all extraction tasks. Finally, feedback from industry testers indicates that the generated KGs can support the generation of useful and correct test case specifications (TCSs) for downstream testing.

Mohammad Al Ridhawi, Mahtab Haj Ali, Hussein Al Osman

Agentic stock prediction systems make sequences of interdependent decisions (regime detection, pathway routing, reinforcement learning control) whose individual quality is hidden by aggregate metrics such as mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) or directional accuracy. We present a behavioral evaluation framework that addresses this gap. Behavioral traces logged at every autonomous decision point are grouped into five-day episodes and scored along six domain-specific dimensions (regime detection, routing, adaptation, risk calibration, strategy coherence, error recovery) by an ensemble of three large language model (LLM) judges (GPT 5.4, Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro). Perturbation-based validation on 420 episodes yields targeted score drops of $-1.6$ to $-2.4$ on intended dimensions versus an average of $-0.32$ on the remaining five, with cross-model agreement up to Krippendorff's $α= 0.85$. The composite behavioral score, used here only for cross-episode reporting, correlates at $ρ= 0.72$ with realized 20-day Sharpe ratio from offline backtesting. Closing the loop, the framework converts deficient per-dimension scores into a credit-assigned penalty term added to the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) reward. Three short fine-tuning cycles, all confined to the validation period, produce on the held-out 2017-2025 test period a one-day MAPE reduction from 0.61% to 0.54% (an 11.5% relative reduction; $p<0.001$, Cohen's $d=0.31$), a directional accuracy increase from 71% to 74%, and an 18% Sharpe ratio improvement (95% bootstrap CI [8.2%, 27.4%]), with gains concentrated in high-volatility episodes where the original system was most behaviorally deficient. Results are from offline backtesting and do not address effects specific to live deployment.

Mohammad Al Ridhawi, Mahtab Haj Ali, Hussein Al Osman

Stock market prediction presents considerable challenges for investors, financial institutions, and policymakers operating in complex market environments characterized by noise, non-stationarity, and behavioral dynamics. Traditional forecasting methods often fail to capture the intricate patterns and cross-sectional dependencies inherent in financial markets. This paper presents an integrated framework combining a node transformer architecture with BERT-based sentiment analysis for stock price forecasting. The proposed model represents the stock market as a graph structure where individual stocks form nodes and edges capture relationships including sectoral affiliations, correlated price movements, and supply chain connections. A fine-tuned BERT model extracts sentiment from social media posts and combines it with quantitative market features through attention-based fusion. The node transformer processes historical market data while capturing both temporal evolution and cross-sectional dependencies among stocks. Experiments on 20 S&P 500 stocks spanning January 1982 to March 2025 demonstrate that the integrated model achieves a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 0.80% for one-day-ahead predictions, compared to 1.20% for ARIMA and 1.00% for LSTM. Sentiment analysis reduces prediction error by 10% overall and 25% during earnings announcements, while graph-based modeling contributes an additional 15% improvement by capturing inter-stock dependencies. Directional accuracy reaches 65% for one-day forecasts. Statistical validation through paired t-tests confirms these improvements (p < 0.05 for all comparisons). The model maintains MAPE below 1.5% during high-volatility periods where baseline models exceed 2%.

Mohammad Al Ridhawi, Mahtab Haj Ali, Hussein Al Osman

Stock markets exhibit regime-dependent behavior where prediction models optimized for stable conditions often fail during volatile periods. Existing approaches typically treat all market states uniformly or require manual regime labeling, which is expensive and quickly becomes stale as market dynamics evolve. This paper introduces an adaptive prediction framework that adaptively identifies deviations from normal market conditions and routes data through specialized prediction pathways. The architecture consists of three components: (1) an autoencoder trained on normal market conditions that identifies anomalous regimes through reconstruction error, (2) dual node transformer networks specialized for stable and event-driven market conditions respectively, and (3) a Soft Actor-Critic reinforcement learning controller that adaptively tunes the regime detection threshold and pathway blending weights based on prediction performance feedback. The reinforcement learning component enables the system to learn adaptive regime boundaries, defining anomalies as market states where standard prediction approaches fail. Experiments on 20 S&P 500 stocks spanning 1982 to 2025 demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves 0.68% MAPE for one-day predictions without the reinforcement controller and 0.59% MAPE with the full adaptive system, compared to 0.80% for the baseline integrated node transformer. Directional accuracy reaches 72% with the complete framework. The system maintains robust performance during high-volatility periods, with MAPE below 0.85% when baseline models exceed 1.5%. Ablation studies confirm that each component contributes meaningfully: autoencoder routing accounts for 36% relative MAPE degradation upon removal, followed by the SAC controller at 15% and the dual-path architecture at 7%.

Karim Alghoul, Faisal Mohd, Fedwa Laamarti et al.

With the growing integration of human-computer interaction into everyday life, advances in machine learning have enabled systems to better perceive and respond to users' emotional states. Most existing affect recognition datasets focus on static environments, limiting their applicability to immersive multimedia contexts such as Virtual Reality (VR). In this paper, we introduce WARM-VR, a novel publicly available multimodal dataset designed to support affect recognition in immersive, multisensory environments using wearable sensing instrumentation. Data were collected from 31 participants aged 19-37 using wearable sensors: a wristband measuring Blood Volume Pulse (BVP), EDA, skin Temperature, three-axis Acceleration, and a chest strap recording ECG signals. Participants engaged in immersive VR experiences designed to elicit relaxation through a calming beach environment following stress induction via an arithmetic task. These sessions incorporated synchronized multimedia stimuli: visual, auditory, and olfactory. Affective states were assessed subjectively through validated self-report questionnaires and objectively through the analysis of physiological measurements. Statistical analysis of the questionnaires confirmed that VR relaxation significantly reduced negative affect, particularly with olfactory enhancement. Furthermore, we established a benchmark on the dataset using widely recognized machine learning algorithms. The best performance for binary classification from BVP data of valence, was obtained with a CNN and a CNN-Bi-GRU model, both achieving an average F1-score of 0.63 and an AUC of 0.69. For arousal, a lightweight Transformer architecture provided the most balanced results (F1-0 0.54 and F1-1 0.63), outperforming recurrent hybrids. In the relaxation task, a CNN-Bi-GRU model reached the highest overall performance (average F1-score 0.64, AUC 0.69).

Karim Alghoul, Hussein Al Osman, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is increasingly used in wearable affective computing due to its low cost and ease of integration into consumer devices. Recent advances in deep learning have introduced long-range sequence models, such as Transformers, and state-space models, like Mamba, which have demonstrated strong performance on natural language and general time-series tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these architectures offer tangible benefits over widely used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) for PPG-based affect recognition, given that datasets are typically small and noisy. This work presents a measurement-driven comparison of four deep learning architectures, CNN, CNN-LSTM hybrid, Transformers, and Mamba, for classifying arousal, valence, and relaxation states from wrist-based PPG signals. All models are evaluated under a subject-independent 5-fold cross-validation protocol using identical preprocessing, segmentation, and training pipelines. Our results show that the Transformer and Mamba models achieve performance comparable to that of a CNN baseline, but do not consistently outperform it across all tasks. CNNs remain the most effective overall, providing the highest accuracy with the smallest model size, whereas Transformers have a better balance of F1 scores for Arousal and Relaxation. The study provides the first evaluation of Transformer and Mamba models for PPG-based affect recognition, offering practical guidance on model selection for wearable affective monitoring systems.

Laurent Cheret, Vincent Létourneau, Isar Nejadgholi et al.

We study a simple unsupervised regularization scheme for autoencoders called Manifold-Matching (MMAE): we align the pairwise distances in the latent space to those of the input data space by minimizing mean squared error. Because alignment occurs on pairwise distances rather than coordinates, it can also be extended to a lower-dimensional representation of the data, adding flexibility to the method. We find that this regularization outperforms similar methods on metrics based on preservation of nearest-neighbor distances and persistent homology-based measures. We also observe that MMAE provides a scalable approximation of Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS).

Karim Alghoul, Hussein Al Osman, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik

Human computer interaction has become integral to modern life, driven by advancements in machine learning technologies. Affective computing, in particular, has focused on systems that recognize, interpret, and respond to human emotions, often using wearable devices, which provide continuous data streams of physiological signals. Among various physiological signals, the photoplethysmogram (PPG) has gained prominence due to its ease of acquisition from widely available devices. However, the generalization of PPG-based emotion recognition models across individuals remains an unresolved challenge. This paper introduces a novel hybrid architecture that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs), and Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) to address this issue. The proposed model integrates the strengths of these architectures to improve robustness and generalization. Raw PPG signals are fed into the CNN for feature extraction. These features are processed separately by LSTM and TCN. The outputs from these components are concatenated to generate a final feature representation, which serves as the input for classifying valence and arousal, the primary dimensions of emotion. Experiments using the Photoplethysmogram Dataset for Emotional Analysis (PPGE) demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model achieves better model generalization than standalone CNN and LSTM architectures. Our results show that the proposed solution outperforms the state-of-the-art CNN architecture, as well as a CNN-LSTM model, in emotion recognition tasks with PPG signals. Using metrics such as Area Under the Curve (AUC) and F1 Score, we highlight the model's effectiveness in handling subject variability.

Hamideh Ghanadian, Isar Nejadgholi, Hussein Al Osman

Suicidal ideation detection is a vital research area that holds great potential for improving mental health support systems. However, the sensitivity surrounding suicide-related data poses challenges in accessing large-scale, annotated datasets necessary for training effective machine learning models. To address this limitation, we introduce an innovative strategy that leverages the capabilities of generative AI models, such as ChatGPT, Flan-T5, and Llama, to create synthetic data for suicidal ideation detection. Our data generation approach is grounded in social factors extracted from psychology literature and aims to ensure coverage of essential information related to suicidal ideation. In our study, we benchmarked against state-of-the-art NLP classification models, specifically, those centered around the BERT family structures. When trained on the real-world dataset, UMD, these conventional models tend to yield F1-scores ranging from 0.75 to 0.87. Our synthetic data-driven method, informed by social factors, offers consistent F1-scores of 0.82 for both models, suggesting that the richness of topics in synthetic data can bridge the performance gap across different model complexities. Most impressively, when we combined a mere 30% of the UMD dataset with our synthetic data, we witnessed a substantial increase in performance, achieving an F1-score of 0.88 on the UMD test set. Such results underscore the cost-effectiveness and potential of our approach in confronting major challenges in the field, such as data scarcity and the quest for diversity in data representation.