Golnaz Moallem

Vignesh Ram Nithin Kappagantula, Shayan Hassantabar, Samuel Simpson et al.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate broad reasoning abilities but struggle with accuracy and reliability in specialized domains such as travel, where reasoning depends on precise definitions, rules, and expert-defined conceptual frameworks, and where confident but unfounded outputs arise from a reasoning failure in which the model has not internalized the underlying domain graph rather than from missing domain knowledge alone. We propose a modular pipeline for building a travel-domain reasoning LLM grounded in an expert-designed knowledge graph (KG). Our pipeline integrates a travel KG that encodes domain entities and their relationships, a bottom-up construction procedure that walks the KG to produce multi-hop question answer (QA) pairs, a supervised fine-tuning stage that embeds the domain knowledge into a reasoning-capable LLM using the generated QA pairs as auditable reasoning traces, and a travel-domain benchmark dataset that measures the fine-tuned model's accuracy and calibration. We evaluate our approach using Qwen3-4B with LoRA adaptation. Our reasoning model achieves an $82.4\%$ exact match on the benchmark. This performance significantly outperforms the pretrained Qwen3-4B baseline at $22.4\%$. A calibration analysis decomposes the residual $17.57\%$ of errors into two distinct failure modes: an over-confident multi-label decoder that predicts both correct answers plus one spurious option on most dual-answer mistakes, and a smaller reasoning failure on single-answer questions where the supporting facts are present in the KG but the model fails to reconstruct the correct multi-hop path. This split confirms that explicit KG-grounded reasoning substantially improves the accuracy and uncertainty interpretation of LLMs in specialized domains, and isolates per-option calibration and trace-length-aware decoding as the next axes of improvement.

Golnaz Moallem, Don D. Pathirage, Joel Reznick et al.

This paper introduces an automated vision system for animal detection in trail-camera images taken from a field under the administration of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. As traditional wildlife counting techniques are intrusive and labor intensive to conduct, trail-camera imaging is a comparatively non-intrusive method for capturing wildlife activity. However, given the large volume of images produced from trail-cameras, manual analysis of the images remains time-consuming and inefficient. We implemented a two-stage deep convolutional neural network pipeline to find animal-containing images in the first stage and then process these images to detect birds in the second stage. The animal classification system classifies animal images with overall 93% sensitivity and 96% specificity. The bird detection system achieves better than 93% sensitivity, 92% specificity, and 68% average Intersection-over-Union rate. The entire pipeline processes an image in less than 0.5 seconds as opposed to an average 30 seconds for a human labeler. We also addressed post-deployment issues related to data drift for the animal classification system as image features vary with seasonal changes. This system utilizes an automatic retraining algorithm to detect data drift and update the system. We introduce a novel technique for detecting drifted images and triggering the retraining procedure. Two statistical experiments are also presented to explain the prediction behavior of the animal classification system. These experiments investigate the cues that steers the system towards a particular decision. Statistical hypothesis testing demonstrates that the presence of an animal in the input image significantly contributes to the system's decisions.