Reihaneh Rabbany

2026-02-10

ArXiv (preprint)

Large Language Model Applications in the Algebra Domain: A Systematic Review

Yajie Song

Yimei Zhang

Doina Precup

Maria Cutumisu

2025-12-05

Technology, Knowledge and Learning (published)

Deepfakes in the 2025 Canadian Election: Prevalence, Partisanship, and Platform Dynamics

Victor Livernoche

Andreea Musulan

Zachary Yang

Jean-François Godbout

Concerns about AI-generated political content are growing, yet there is limited empirical evidence on how deepfakes actually appear and circ… (see more)ulate across social platforms during major events in democratic countries. In this study, we present one of the first in-depth analyses of how these realistic synthetic media shape the political landscape online, focusing specifically on the 2025 Canadian federal election. By analyzing 187,778 posts from X, Bluesky, and Reddit with a high-accuracy detection framework trained on a diverse set of modern generative models, we find that 5.86% of election-related images were deepfakes. Right-leaning accounts shared them more frequently, with 8.66% of their posted images flagged compared to 4.42% for left-leaning users, often with defamatory or conspiratorial intent. Yet, most detected deepfakes were benign or non-political, and harmful ones drew little attention, accounting for only 0.12% of all views on X. Overall, deepfakes were present in the election conversation, but their reach was modest, and realistic fabricated images, although less common, drew higher engagement, highlighting growing concerns about their potential misuse.

2025-11-30

arXiv (published)

Higher Order Transformers: Efficient Attention Mechanism for Tensor Structured Data

Soroush Omranpour

Transformers are now ubiquitous for sequence modeling tasks, but their extension to multi-dimensional data remains a challenge due to the qu… (see more)adratic cost of the attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose Higher-Order Transformers (HOT), a novel architecture designed to efficiently process data with more than two axes, i.e. higher-order tensors. To address the computational challenges associated with high-order tensor attention, we introduce a novel Kronecker factorized attention mechanism that reduces the attention cost to quadratic in each axis' dimension, rather than quadratic in the total size of the input tensor. To further enhance efficiency, HOT leverages kernelized attention, reducing the complexity to linear. This strategy maintains the model's expressiveness while enabling scalable attention computation. We validate the effectiveness of HOT on two high-dimensional tasks, including multivariate time series forecasting, and 3D medical image classification. Experimental results demonstrate that HOT achieves competitive performance while significantly improving computational efficiency, showcasing its potential for tackling a wide range of complex, multi-dimensional data.

2025-11-15

TMLR (accepted)

openreview.net

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

Aarash Feizi

Shravan Nayak

Xiangru Jian

Kevin Qinghong Lin

Kaixin Li

Rabiul Awal

Xing Han Lu

Johan Obando-Ceron

Juan A. Rodriguez

Nicolas Chapados

David Vázquez

Adriana Romero-Soriano

Sai Rajeswar

Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen eleme… (see more)nts. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.

2025-11-09

ArXiv (preprint)

Reframing AI-for-Good: Radical Questioning in AI for Human Trafficking Interventions

Gabriel Lefebvre

This paper introduces Radical Questioning (RQ), a structured, pre-design ethics framework developed to assess whether artificial intelligenc… (see more)e (AI) should be applied to complex social problems rather than merely how. While much of responsible AI development focuses on aligning systems with principles such as fairness, transparency, and accountability, it often begins after the decision to build has already been made, implicitly treating the deployment of AI as a given rather than a question in itself. In domains such as human trafficking, marked by contested definitions, systemic injustice, and deep stakeholder asymmetries, such assumptions can obscure foundational ethical concerns. RQ offers an upstream, deliberative process for surfacing these concerns before design begins. Drawing from critical theory, participatory ethics, and relational responsibility, RQ formalizes a five-step framework to interrogate problem framings, confront techno-solutionist tendencies, and reflect on the moral legitimacy of intervention. Developed through interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement with survivor-led organizations, RQ was piloted in the domain of human trafficking (HT) which is a particularly high-stakes and ethically entangled application area. Its use led to a fundamental design shift: away from automated detection tools and toward survivor-controlled, empowerment-based technologies. We argue that RQ's novelty lies in both its temporal position, i.e, prior to technical design, and its orientation toward domains where harm is structural and ethical clarity cannot be achieved through one-size-fits-all solutions. RQ thus addresses a critical gap between abstract principles of responsible AI and the lived ethical demands of real-world deployment.

2025-10-15

Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (published)

Reframing AI-for-Good: Radical Questioning in AI for Human Trafficking Interventions

Gabriel Lefebvre

2025-10-15

Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (published)

Reframing AI-for-Good: Radical Questioning in AI for Human Trafficking Interventions

Gabriel Lefebvre

2025-10-15

Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (published)

TGM: a Modular and Efficient Library for Machine Learning on Temporal Graphs

Tran Gia Bao Ngo

Jure Leskovec

Michael M. Bronstein

Matthias Fey

Well-designed open-source software drives progress in Machine Learning (ML) research. While static graph ML enjoys mature frameworks like Py… (see more)Torch Geometric and DGL, ML for temporal graphs (TG), networks that evolve over time, lacks comparable infrastructure. Existing TG libraries are often tailored to specific architectures, hindering support for diverse models in this rapidly evolving field. Additionally, the divide between continuous- and discrete-time dynamic graph methods (CTDG and DTDG) limits direct comparisons and idea transfer. To address these gaps, we introduce Temporal Graph Modelling (TGM), a research-oriented library for ML on temporal graphs, the first to unify CTDG and DTDG approaches. TGM offers first-class support for dynamic node features, time-granularity conversions, and native handling of link-, node-, and graph-level tasks. Empirically, TGM achieves an average 7.8x speedup across multiple models, datasets, and tasks compared to the widely used DyGLib, and an average 175x speedup on graph discretization relative to available implementations. Beyond efficiency, we show in our experiments how TGM unlocks entirely new research possibilities by enabling dynamic graph property prediction and time-driven training paradigms, opening the door to questions previously impractical to study. TGM is available at https://github.com/tgm-team/tgm

2025-10-08

ArXiv (preprint)

TGM: a Modular and Efficient Library for Machine Learning on Temporal Graphs

Tran Gia Bao Ngo

Jure Leskovec

Michael M. Bronstein

Matthias Fey

Well-designed open-source software drives progress in Machine Learning (ML) research. While static graph ML enjoys mature frameworks like Py… (see more)Torch Geometric and DGL, ML for temporal graphs (TG), networks that evolve over time, lacks comparable infrastructure. Existing TG libraries are often tailored to specific architectures, hindering support for diverse models in this rapidly evolving field. Additionally, the divide between continuous- and discrete-time dynamic graph methods (CTDG and DTDG) limits direct comparisons and idea transfer. To address these gaps, we introduce Temporal Graph Modelling (TGM), a research-oriented library for ML on temporal graphs, the first to unify CTDG and DTDG approaches. TGM offers first-class support for dynamic node features, time-granularity conversions, and native handling of link-, node-, and graph-level tasks. Empirically, TGM achieves an average 7.8x speedup across multiple models, datasets, and tasks compared to the widely used DyGLib, and an average 175x speedup on graph discretization relative to available implementations. Beyond efficiency, we show in our experiments how TGM unlocks entirely new research possibilities by enabling dynamic graph property prediction and time-driven training paradigms, opening the door to questions previously impractical to study. TGM is available at https://github.com/tgm-team/tgm

2025-10-08

ArXiv (preprint)

TGM: a Modular and Efficient Library for Machine Learning on Temporal Graphs

Tran Gia Bao Ngo

Jure Leskovec

Michael M. Bronstein

Matthias Fey

Well-designed open-source software drives progress in Machine Learning (ML) research. While static graph ML enjoys mature frameworks like Py… (see more)Torch Geometric and DGL, ML for temporal graphs (TG), networks that evolve over time, lacks comparable infrastructure. Existing TG libraries are often tailored to specific architectures, hindering support for diverse models in this rapidly evolving field. Additionally, the divide between continuous- and discrete-time dynamic graph methods (CTDG and DTDG) limits direct comparisons and idea transfer. To address these gaps, we introduce Temporal Graph Modelling (TGM), a research-oriented library for ML on temporal graphs, the first to unify CTDG and DTDG approaches. TGM offers first-class support for dynamic node features, time-granularity conversions, and native handling of link-, node-, and graph-level tasks. Empirically, TGM achieves an average 7.8x speedup across multiple models, datasets, and tasks compared to the widely used DyGLib, and an average 175x speedup on graph discretization relative to available implementations. Beyond efficiency, we show in our experiments how TGM unlocks entirely new research possibilities by enabling dynamic graph property prediction and time-driven training paradigms, opening the door to questions previously impractical to study. TGM is available at https://github.com/tgm-team/tgm

2025-10-08

ArXiv (preprint)

CrediBench: Building Web-Scale Network Datasets for Information Integrity

James Zhou

Jean-François Godbout

Michael M. Bronstein

Shenyang Huang

Online misinformation poses an escalating threat, amplified by the Internet's open nature and increasingly capable LLMs that generate persua… (see more)sive yet deceptive content. Existing misinformation detection methods typically focus on either textual content or network structure in isolation, failing to leverage the rich, dynamic interplay between website content and hyperlink relationships that characterizes real-world misinformation ecosystems. We introduce CrediBench: a large-scale data processing pipeline for constructing temporal web graphs that jointly model textual content and hyperlink structure for misinformation detection. Unlike prior work, our approach captures the dynamic evolution of general misinformation domains, including changes in both content and inter-site references over time. Our processed one-month snapshot extracted from the Common Crawl archive in December 2024 contains 45 million nodes and 1 billion edges, representing the largest web graph dataset made publicly available for misinformation research to date. From our experiments on this graph snapshot, we demonstrate the strength of both structural and webpage content signals for learning credibility scores, which measure source reliability. The pipeline and experimentation code are all available here, and the dataset is in this folder.

2025-09-27

ArXiv (preprint)