Alireza S. Ziabari

Jackson Trager, Alireza S. Ziabari, Elnaz Rahmati et al.

Moral framing and sentiment can affect a variety of online and offline behaviors, including donation, environmental action, political engagement, and protest. Various computational methods in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been used to detect moral sentiment from textual data, but achieving strong performance in such subjective tasks requires large, hand-annotated datasets. Previous corpora annotated for moral sentiment have proven valuable, and have generated new insights both within NLP and across the social sciences, but have been limited to Twitter. To facilitate improving our understanding of the role of moral rhetoric, we present the Moral Foundations Reddit Corpus, a collection of 16,123 English Reddit comments that have been curated from 12 distinct subreddits, hand-annotated by at least three trained annotators for 8 categories of moral sentiment (i.e., Care, Proportionality, Equality, Purity, Authority, Loyalty, Thin Morality, Implicit/Explicit Morality) based on the updated Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) framework. We evaluate baselines using large language models (Llama3-8B, Ministral-8B) in zero-shot, few-shot, and PEFT settings, comparing their performance to fine-tuned encoder-only models like BERT. The results show that LLMs continue to lag behind fine-tuned encoders on this subjective task, underscoring the ongoing need for human-annotated moral corpora for AI alignment evaluation. Keywords: moral sentiment annotation, moral values, moral foundations theory, multi-label text classification, large language models, benchmark dataset, evaluation and alignment resource

Ali Omrani, Alireza S. Ziabari, Preni Golazizian et al.

Detecting problematic content, such as hate speech, is a multifaceted and ever-changing task, influenced by social dynamics, user populations, diversity of sources, and evolving language. There has been significant efforts, both in academia and in industry, to develop annotated resources that capture various aspects of problematic content. Due to researchers' diverse objectives, the annotations are inconsistent and hence, reports of progress on detection of problematic content are fragmented. This pattern is expected to persist unless we consolidate resources considering the dynamic nature of the problem. We propose integrating the available resources, and leveraging their dynamic nature to break this pattern. In this paper, we introduce a continual learning benchmark and framework for problematic content detection comprising over 84 related tasks encompassing 15 annotation schemas from 8 sources. Our benchmark creates a novel measure of progress: prioritizing the adaptability of classifiers to evolving tasks over excelling in specific tasks. To ensure the continuous relevance of our framework, we designed it so that new tasks can easily be integrated into the benchmark. Our baseline results demonstrate the potential of continual learning in capturing the evolving content and adapting to novel manifestations of problematic content.

Parsa Hejabi, Elnaz Rahmati, Alireza S. Ziabari et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in complex tasks and interactive environments, yet their creativity remains underexplored. This paper introduces a simulation framework utilizing the game Balderdash to evaluate both the creativity and logical reasoning of LLMs. In Balderdash, players generate fictitious definitions for obscure terms to deceive others while identifying correct definitions. Our framework enables multiple LLM agents to participate in this game, assessing their ability to produce plausible definitions and strategize based on game rules and history. We implemented a centralized game engine featuring various LLMs as participants and a judge LLM to evaluate semantic equivalence. Through a series of experiments, we analyzed the performance of different LLMs, examining metrics such as True Definition Ratio, Deception Ratio, and Correct Guess Ratio. The results provide insights into the creative and deceptive capabilities of LLMs, highlighting their strengths and areas for improvement. Specifically, the study reveals that infrequent vocabulary in LLMs' input leads to poor reasoning on game rules and historical context (https://github.com/ParsaHejabi/Simulation-Framework-for-Multi-Agent-Balderdash).

Parsa Hejabi, Elnaz Rahmati, Alireza S. Ziabari et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce inconsistent answers when faced with different phrasings of the same prompt. In this paper, we propose Flip-Flop Consistency ($F^2C$), an unsupervised training method that improves robustness to such perturbations. $F^2C$ is composed of two key components. The first, Consensus Cross-Entropy (CCE), uses a majority vote across prompt variations to create a hard pseudo-label. The second is a representation alignment loss that pulls lower-confidence and non-majority predictors toward the consensus established by high-confidence, majority-voting variations. We evaluate our method on 11 datasets spanning four NLP tasks, with 4-15 prompt variations per dataset. On average, $F^2C$ raises observed agreement by 11.62%, improves mean $F_1$ by 8.94%, and reduces performance variance across formats by 3.29%. In out-of-domain evaluations, $F^2C$ generalizes effectively, increasing $\overline{F_1}$ and agreement while decreasing variance across most source-target pairs. Finally, when trained on only a subset of prompt perturbations and evaluated on held-out formats, $F^2C$ consistently improves both performance and agreement while reducing variance. These findings highlight $F^2C$ as an effective unsupervised method for enhancing LLM consistency, performance, and generalization under prompt perturbations. Code is available at https://github.com/ParsaHejabi/Flip-Flop-Consistency-Unsupervised-Training-for-Robustness-to-Prompt-Perturbations-in-LLMs.

Alireza S. Ziabari, Nona Ghazizadeh, Zhivar Sourati et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning abilities, yet their reliance on structured step-by-step processing reveals a critical limitation. In contrast, human cognition fluidly adapts between intuitive, heuristic (System 1) and analytical, deliberative (System 2) reasoning depending on the context. This difference between human cognitive flexibility and LLMs' reliance on a single reasoning style raises a critical question: while human fast heuristic reasoning evolved for its efficiency and adaptability, is a uniform reasoning approach truly optimal for LLMs, or does its inflexibility make them brittle and unreliable when faced with tasks demanding more agile, intuitive responses? To answer these questions, we explicitly align LLMs to these reasoning styles by curating a dataset with valid System 1 and System 2 answers, and evaluate their performance across reasoning benchmarks. Our results reveal an accuracy-efficiency trade-off: System 2-aligned models excel in arithmetic and symbolic reasoning, while System 1-aligned models perform better in commonsense reasoning tasks. To analyze the reasoning spectrum, we interpolated between the two extremes by varying the proportion of alignment data, which resulted in a monotonic change in accuracy. A mechanistic analysis of model responses shows that System 1 models employ more definitive outputs, whereas System 2 models demonstrate greater uncertainty. Building on these findings, we further combine System 1- and System 2-aligned models based on the entropy of their generations, without additional training, and obtain a dynamic model that outperforms across nearly all benchmarks. This work challenges the assumption that step-by-step reasoning is always optimal and highlights the need for adapting reasoning strategies based on task demands.

Zhivar Sourati, Alireza S. Ziabari, Morteza Dehghani

Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in people's lives, they risk standardizing language and reasoning. This Review synthesizes evidence across linguistics, cognitive, and computer science to show how LLMs reflect and reinforce dominant styles while marginalizing alternative voices and reasoning strategies. We examine how their design and widespread use contribute to this effect by mirroring patterns in their training data and amplifying convergence as all people increasingly rely on the same models across contexts. Unchecked, this homogenization risks flattening the cognitive landscapes that drive collective intelligence and adaptability.

Preni Golazizian, Alireza S. Ziabari, Ali Omrani et al.

In subjective NLP tasks, where a single ground truth does not exist, the inclusion of diverse annotators becomes crucial as their unique perspectives significantly influence the annotations. In realistic scenarios, the annotation budget often becomes the main determinant of the number of perspectives (i.e., annotators) included in the data and subsequent modeling. We introduce a novel framework for annotation collection and modeling in subjective tasks that aims to minimize the annotation budget while maximizing the predictive performance for each annotator. Our framework has a two-stage design: first, we rely on a small set of annotators to build a multitask model, and second, we augment the model for a new perspective by strategically annotating a few samples per annotator. To test our framework at scale, we introduce and release a unique dataset, Moral Foundations Subjective Corpus, of 2000 Reddit posts annotated by 24 annotators for moral sentiment. We demonstrate that our framework surpasses the previous SOTA in capturing the annotators' individual perspectives with as little as 25% of the original annotation budget on two datasets. Furthermore, our framework results in more equitable models, reducing the performance disparity among annotators.

Elnaz Rahmati, Alireza S. Ziabari, Morteza Dehghani

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) develop cross-lingual abilities despite being trained on limited parallel data. However, they often struggle to generate responses in the intended language, favoring high-resource languages such as English. In this work, we introduce CoCo-CoLa (Correct Concept - Correct Language), a novel metric to evaluate language adherence in multilingual LLMs. Using fine-tuning experiments on a closed-book QA task across seven languages, we analyze how training in one language affects others' performance. Our findings reveal that multilingual models share task knowledge across languages but exhibit biases in the selection of output language. We identify language-specific layers, showing that final layers play a crucial role in determining output language. Accordingly, we propose a partial training strategy that selectively fine-tunes key layers, improving language adherence while significantly reducing computational cost. Our method achieves comparable or superior performance to full fine-tuning, particularly for low-resource languages, offering a more efficient multilingual adaptation.