Hoang D. Nguyen

Duc-Hai Nguyen, Vijayakumar Nanjappan, Barry O'Sullivan et al.

Millions of people take surveys every day, from market polls and academic studies to medical questionnaires and customer feedback forms. These datasets capture valuable insights, but their scale and structure present a unique challenge for large language models (LLMs), which otherwise excel at few-shot reasoning over open-ended text. Yet, their ability to process questionnaire data or lists of questions crossed with hundreds of respondent rows remains underexplored. Current retrieval and survey analysis tools (e.g., Qualtrics, SPSS, REDCap) are typically designed for humans in the workflow, limiting such data integration with LLM and AI-empowered automation. This gap leaves scientists, surveyors, and everyday users without evidence-based guidance on how to best represent questionnaires for LLM consumption. We address this by introducing QASU (Questionnaire Analysis and Structural Understanding), a benchmark that probes six structural skills, including answer lookup, respondent count, and multi-hop inference, across six serialization formats and multiple prompt strategies. Experiments on contemporary LLMs show that choosing an effective format and prompt combination can improve accuracy by up to 8.8% points compared to suboptimal formats. For specific tasks, carefully adding a lightweight structural hint through self-augmented prompting can yield further improvements of 3-4% points on average. By systematically isolating format and prompting effects, our open source benchmark offers a simple yet versatile foundation for advancing both research and real-world practice in LLM-based questionnaire analysis.

Khanh-Tung Tran, Barry O'Sullivan, Hoang D. Nguyen

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on high-resource languages, leaving extremely low-resource languages like Irish with limited representation. This work presents UCCIX, a pioneering effort on the development of an open-source Irish-based LLM. We propose a novel framework for continued pre-training of LLMs specifically adapted for extremely low-resource languages, requiring only a fraction of the textual data typically needed for training LLMs according to scaling laws. Our model, based on Llama 2-13B, outperforms much larger models on Irish language tasks with up to 12% performance improvement, showcasing the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. We also contribute comprehensive Irish benchmarking datasets, including IrishQA, a question-answering dataset, and Irish version of MT-bench. These datasets enable rigorous evaluation and facilitate future research in Irish LLM systems. Our work aims to preserve and promote the Irish language, knowledge, and culture of Ireland in the digital era while providing a framework for adapting LLMs to other indigenous languages.

Minh-Dung Dao, Quy Minh Le, Hoang Thanh Lam et al.

With the development of foundation model (FM), agentic AI systems are getting more attention, yet their inherent issues like hallucination and poor reasoning, coupled with the frequent ad-hoc nature of system design, lead to unreliable and brittle applications. Existing efforts to characterise agentic design patterns often lack a rigorous systems-theoretic foundation, resulting in high-level or convenience-based taxonomies that are difficult to implement. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a principled methodology for engineering robust AI agents. We propose two primary contributions: first, a novel system-theoretic framework that deconstructs an agentic AI system into five core, interacting functional subsystems: Reasoning & World Model, Perception & Grounding, Action Execution, Learning & Adaptation, and Inter-Agent Communication. Second, derived from this architecture and directly mapped to a comprehensive taxonomy of agentic challenges, we present a collection of 12 agentic design patterns. These patterns - categorised as Foundational, Cognitive & Decisional, Execution & Interaction, and Adaptive & Learning - offer reusable, structural solutions to recurring problems in agent design. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by a case study on the ReAct framework, showing how the proposed patterns can rectify systemic architectural deficiencies. This work provides a foundational language and a structured methodology to standardise agentic design communication among researchers and engineers, leading to more modular, understandable, and reliable autonomous systems.

Khanh-Tung Tran, Dung Dao, Minh-Duong Nguyen et al.

With recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI has become phenomenal in real-world applications, moving toward multiple LLM-based agents to perceive, learn, reason, and act collaboratively. These LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) enable groups of intelligent agents to coordinate and solve complex tasks collectively at scale, transitioning from isolated models to collaboration-centric approaches. This work provides an extensive survey of the collaborative aspect of MASs and introduces an extensible framework to guide future research. Our framework characterizes collaboration mechanisms based on key dimensions: actors (agents involved), types (e.g., cooperation, competition, or coopetition), structures (e.g., peer-to-peer, centralized, or distributed), strategies (e.g., role-based or model-based), and coordination protocols. Through a review of existing methodologies, our findings serve as a foundation for demystifying and advancing LLM-based MASs toward more intelligent and collaborative solutions for complex, real-world use cases. In addition, various applications of MASs across diverse domains, including 5G/6G networks, Industry 5.0, question answering, and social and cultural settings, are also investigated, demonstrating their wider adoption and broader impacts. Finally, we identify key lessons learned, open challenges, and potential research directions of MASs towards artificial collective intelligence.

Truong V. Hoang, Quang H. Nguyen, Cuong Q. Nguyen et al.

As the burden of respiratory diseases continues to fall on society worldwide, this paper proposes a high-quality and reliable dataset of human sounds for studying respiratory illnesses, including pneumonia and COVID-19. It consists of coughing, mouth breathing, and nose breathing sounds together with metadata on related clinical characteristics. We also develop a proof-of-concept system for establishing baselines and benchmarking against multiple datasets, such as Coswara and COUGHVID. Our comprehensive experiments show that the Sound-Dr dataset has richer features, better performance, and is more robust to dataset shifts in various machine learning tasks. It is promising for a wide range of real-time applications on mobile devices. The proposed dataset and system will serve as practical tools to support healthcare professionals in diagnosing respiratory disorders. The dataset and code are publicly available here: https://github.com/ReML-AI/Sound-Dr/.

Hoang D. Nguyen, Xuan-Son Vu, Quoc-Tuan Truong et al.

With the rising number of machine learning competitions, the world has witnessed an exciting race for the best algorithms. However, the involved data selection process may fundamentally suffer from evidence ambiguity and concept drift issues, thereby possibly leading to deleterious effects on the performance of various models. This paper proposes a new Reinforced Data Sampling (RDS) method to learn how to sample data adequately on the search for useful models and insights. We formulate the optimisation problem of model diversification $δ{-div}$ in data sampling to maximise learning potentials and optimum allocation by injecting model diversity. This work advocates the employment of diverse base learners as value functions such as neural networks, decision trees, or logistic regressions to reinforce the selection process of data subsets with multi-modal belief. We introduce different ensemble reward mechanisms, including soft voting and stochastic choice to approximate optimal sampling policy. The evaluation conducted on four datasets evidently highlights the benefits of using RDS method over traditional sampling approaches. Our experimental results suggest that the trainable sampling for model diversification is useful for competition organisers, researchers, or even starters to pursue full potentials of various machine learning tasks such as classification and regression. The source code is available at https://github.com/probeu/RDS.

Khanh-Tung Tran, Barry O'Sullivan, Hoang D. Nguyen

Recent advances in test-time compute scaling have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle deep reasoning tasks by generating a chain-of-thought (CoT) that includes trial and error, backtracking, and intermediate reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, these techniques have been applied predominantly to popular languages, such as English, leaving reasoning in low-resource languages underexplored and misaligned. In this work, we investigate the multilingual mechanism by which LLMs internally operate in a latent space biased toward their inherently dominant language. To leverage this phenomenon for low-resource languages, we train models to generate the CoT in English while outputting the final response in the target language, given input in the low-resource language. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach, named English-Pivoted CoT Training, outperforms other baselines, including training to generate both the CoT and the final response solely in the target language, with up to 28.33% improvement. Further analysis provides novel insights into the relationships between reasoning and multilinguality of LLMs, prompting for better approaches in developing multilingual large reasoning models

Vu Dinh Xuan, Hao Vo, David Murphy et al.

The scarcity of data depicting dangerous situations presents a major obstacle to training AI systems for safety-critical applications, such as construction safety, where ethical and logistical barriers hinder real-world data collection. This creates an urgent need for an end-to-end framework to generate synthetic data that can bridge this gap. While existing methods can produce synthetic scenes, they often lack the semantic depth required for scene simulations, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we propose a novel multi-agent framework that employs an iterative, in-the-loop collaboration between two agents: an Evaluator Agent, acting as an LLM-based judge to enforce semantic consistency and safety-specific constraints, and an Editor Agent, which generates and refines scenes based on this guidance. Powered by LLM's capabilities to reasoning and common-sense knowledge, this collaborative design produces synthetic images tailored to safety-critical scenarios. Our experiments suggest this design can generate useful scenes based on realistic specifications that address the shortcomings of prior approaches, balancing safety requirements with visual semantics. This iterative process holds promise for delivering robust, aesthetically sound simulations, offering a potential solution to the data scarcity challenge in multimedia safety applications.

Josh McGiff, Khanh-Tung Tran, William Mulcahy et al.

We present Irish-BLiMP (Irish Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs), the first dataset and framework designed for fine-grained evaluation of linguistic competence in the Irish language, an endangered language. Drawing on a variety of linguistic literature and grammar reference works, we manually constructed and reviewed 1020 minimal pairs across a taxonomy of 11 linguistic features, through a team of fluent Irish speakers. We evaluate both existing Large Language Models (LLMs) and fluent human participants on their syntactic knowledge of Irish. Our findings show that humans outperform all models across all linguistic features, achieving 16.6% higher accuracy on average. Moreover, a substantial performance gap of 18.1% persists between open- and closed-source LLMs, with even the strongest model (gpt-5) reaching only 73.5% accuracy compared to 90.1% by human. Interestingly, human participants and models struggle on different aspects of Irish grammar, thus highlighting a difference in representation learned by the models. Overall, Irish-BLiMP provides the first systematic framework for evaluating the grammatical competence of LLMs in Irish and offers a valuable benchmark for advancing research on linguistic understanding in low-resource languages.

Quy Minh Le, Minh Sao Khue Luu, Khanh-Tung Tran et al.

Effective tool use is essential for agentic AI, yet training agents to utilize tools remains challenging due to manually designed rewards, limited training data, and poor multi-tool selection, resulting in slow adaptation, wasted computational resources, and suboptimal performance. We introduce ToolBrain, a lightweight and user-friendly framework for coaching tool use in agentic models with flexible reinforcement learning (RL), easing the barriers for researchers and practitioners to adapt LLM-based agents to specific domains. It supports a wide range of training strategies, including RL algorithms such as GRPO and DPO, as well as supervised learning. ToolBrain enables custom reward callables directly on an agent's execution traces or simply utilizes an automated LLM-as-a-judge system for reward generation. It is packed with useful capabilities, including knowledge distillation from large to small models for efficient development, automatic task generation from tool descriptions, seamless tool retrieval, efficient fine-tuning pipelines with QLoRA through Unsloth, and quantized inference via bitsandbytes. We demonstrate ToolBrain through diverse use cases, such as training a CodeAct agent to autonomously execute email search tasks, showing fast, targeted improvements (up to 30.0%) in tool-use skills while keeping the codebase simple and extensible in Agentic AI. Our framework is publicly available at https://toolbrain.org.

Truong Hoang, Lam Pham, Dat Ngo et al.

This paper presents a deep learning framework for detecting COVID-19 positive subjects from their cough sounds. In particular, the proposed approach comprises two main steps. In the first step, we generate a feature representing the cough sound by combining an embedding extracted from a pre-trained model and handcrafted features extracted from draw audio recording, referred to as the front-end feature extraction. Then, the combined features are fed into different back-end classification models for detecting COVID-19 positive subjects in the second step. Our experiments on the Track-2 dataset of the Second 2021 DiCOVA Challenge achieved the second top ranking with an AUC score of 81.21 and the top F1 score of 53.21 on a Blind Test set, improving the challenge baseline by 8.43% and 23.4% respectively and showing deployability, robustness and competitiveness with the state-of-the-art systems.

Alex To, Maican Liu, Muhammad Hazeeq Bin Muhammad Hairul et al.

Digital Twin is an emerging technology at the forefront of Industry 4.0, with the ultimate goal of combining the physical space and the virtual space. To date, the Digital Twin concept has been applied in many engineering fields, providing useful insights in the areas of engineering design, manufacturing, automation, and construction industry. While the nexus of various technologies opens up new opportunities with Digital Twin, the technology requires a framework to integrate the different technologies, such as the Building Information Model used in the Building and Construction industry. In this work, an Information Fusion framework is proposed to seamlessly fuse heterogeneous components in a Digital Twin framework from the variety of technologies involved. This study aims to augment Digital Twin in buildings with the use of AI and 3D reconstruction empowered by unmanned aviation vehicles. We proposed a drone-based Digital Twin augmentation framework with reusable and customisable components. A proof of concept is also developed, and extensive evaluation is conducted for 3D reconstruction and applications of AI for defect detection.

Thuy-Trinh Nguyen, Kellie Sim, Anthony To Yiu Kuen et al.

Conversational agents (CAs) represent an emerging research field in health information systems, where there are great potentials in empowering patients with timely information and natural language interfaces. Nevertheless, there have been limited attempts in establishing prescriptive knowledge on designing CAs in the healthcare domain in general, and diabetes care specifically. In this paper, we conducted a Design Science Research project and proposed three design principles for designing health-related CAs that embark on artificial intelligence (AI) to address the limitations of existing solutions. Further, we instantiated the proposed design and developed AMANDA - an AI-based multilingual CA in diabetes care with state-of-the-art technologies for natural-sounding localised accent. We employed mean opinion scores and system usability scale to evaluate AMANDA's speech quality and usability, respectively. This paper provides practitioners with a blueprint for designing CAs in diabetes care with concrete design guidelines that can be extended into other healthcare domains.

Ethan Lim Ding Feng, Zhi-Wei Neo, Aaron William De Silva et al.

With the rapid development in artificial intelligence, social computing has evolved beyond social informatics toward the birth of social intelligence systems. This paper, therefore, takes initiatives to propose a social behaviour understanding framework with the use of deep neural networks for social and behavioural analysis. The integration of information fusion, person and object detection, social signal understanding, behaviour understanding, and context understanding plays a harmonious role to elicit social behaviours. Three systems, including depression detection, activity recognition and cognitive impairment screening, are developed to evidently demonstrate the importance of social intelligence. The study considerably contributes to the cumulative development of social computing and health informatics. It also provides a number of implications for academic bodies, healthcare practitioners, and developers of socially intelligent agents.

Minh-Duc Hoang, Linh Le, Anh-Tuan Nguyen et al.

With the rapid adoption of Internet technologies, digital footprints have become ubiquitous and versatile to revolutionise the financial industry in digital transformation. This paper takes initiatives to investigate a new paradigm of the unified credit assessment with the use of federated artificial intelligence. We conceptualised digital human representation which consists of social, contextual, financial and technological dimensions to assess the commercial creditworthiness and social reputation of both banked and unbanked individuals. A federated artificial intelligence platform is proposed with a comprehensive set of system design for efficient and effective credit scoring. The study considerably contributes to the cumulative development of financial intelligence and social computing. It also provides a number of implications for academic bodies, practitioners, and developers of financial technologies.

Duc-Trong Le, Xuan-Son Vu, Nhu-Dung To et al.

This paper reports on the ReINTEL Shared Task for Responsible Information Identification on social network sites, which is hosted at the seventh annual workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2020). Given a piece of news with respective textual, visual content and metadata, participants are required to classify whether the news is `reliable' or `unreliable'. In order to generate a fair benchmark, we introduce a novel human-annotated dataset of over 10,000 news collected from a social network in Vietnam. All models will be evaluated in terms of AUC-ROC score, a typical evaluation metric for classification. The competition was run on the Codalab platform. Within two months, the challenge has attracted over 60 participants and recorded nearly 1,000 submission entries.