papers

Publications (77)

cs.IR2014

Optimizing an Utility Function for Exploration / Exploitation Trade-off in Context-Aware Recommender System

Djallel Bouneffouf

In this paper, we develop a dynamic exploration/ exploitation (exr/exp) strategy for contextual recommender systems (CRS). Specifically, our methods can adaptively balance the two…

cs.IR2013

Towards User Profile Modelling in Recommender System

Djallel Bouneffouf

The notion of profile appeared in the 1970s decade, which was mainly due to the need to create custom applications that could be adapted to the user. In this paper, we treat the di…

cs.CL2013

Role of temporal inference in the recognition of textual inference

Djallel Bouneffouf

This project is a part of nature language processing and its aims to develop a system of recognition inference text-appointed TIMINF. This type of system can detect, given two port…

cs.CL2025

Evaluating the Prompt Steerability of Large Language Models

Erik Miehling, Michael Desmond, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy +5

Building pluralistic AI requires designing models that are able to be shaped to represent a wide range of value systems and cultures. Achieving this requires first being able to ev…

cs.CL2023

Utterance Classification with Logical Neural Network: Explainable AI for Mental Disorder Diagnosis

Yeldar Toleubay, Don Joven Agravante, Daiki Kimura +3

In response to the global challenge of mental health problems, we proposes a Logical Neural Network (LNN) based Neuro-Symbolic AI method for the diagnosis of mental disorders. Due…

cs.AI2023

Towards Healthy AI: Large Language Models Need Therapists Too

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi +1

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of powerful AI chatbots capable of engaging in natural and human-like conversations. However, these chat…

cs.CL2025

COMPASS: Computational Mapping of Patient-Therapist Alliance Strategies with Language Modeling

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Yulia Landa +3

The therapeutic working alliance is a critical predictor of psychotherapy success. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therapists…

cs.IR2014

Situation-Aware Approach to Improve Context-based Recommender System

Djallel Bouneffouf

In this paper, we introduce a novel situation aware approach to improve a context based recommender system. To build situation aware user profiles, we rely on evidence issued from…

cs.LG2017

Multi-armed Bandit Problem with Known Trend

Djallel Bouneffouf, Raphaël Feraud

We consider a variant of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call multi-armed bandit problem with known trend, where the gambler knows the shape of the reward function of each a…

cs.CL2024

Conversational Topic Recommendation in Counseling and Psychotherapy with Decision Transformer and Large Language Models

Aylin Gunal, Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf

Given the increasing demand for mental health assistance, artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), may be valuable for integration into automated cl…

cs.LG2023

Non-Stationary Bandits with Auto-Regressive Temporal Dependency

Qinyi Chen, Negin Golrezaei, Djallel Bouneffouf

Traditional multi-armed bandit (MAB) frameworks, predominantly examined under stochastic or adversarial settings, often overlook the temporal dynamics inherent in many real-world a…

cs.IR2014

Freshness-Aware Thompson Sampling

Djallel Bouneffouf

To follow the dynamicity of the user's content, researchers have recently started to model interactions between users and the Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS) as a bandit p…

cs.AI2025

Survey: Multi-Armed Bandits Meet Large Language Models

Djallel Bouneffouf, Raphael Feraud

Bandit algorithms and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in artificial intelligence, each addressing distinct yet complementary challenges in decision-maki…

q-bio.NC2022

Deep Annotation of Therapeutic Working Alliance in Psychotherapy

Baihan Lin, Guillermo Cecchi, Djallel Bouneffouf

The therapeutic working alliance is an important predictor of the outcome of the psychotherapy treatment. In practice, the working alliance is estimated from a set of scoring quest…

cs.LG2022

Predicting human decision making in psychological tasks with recurrent neural networks

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi

Unlike traditional time series, the action sequences of human decision making usually involve many cognitive processes such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and theory of mind, i.e…

stat.ML2019

Beyond Backprop: Online Alternating Minimization with Auxiliary Variables

Anna Choromanska, Benjamin Cowen, Sadhana Kumaravel +8

Despite significant recent advances in deep neural networks, training them remains a challenge due to the highly non-convex nature of the objective function. State-of-the-art metho…

cs.IR2014

Improving adaptation of ubiquitous recommander systems by using reinforcement learning and collaborative filtering

Djallel Bouneffouf

The wide development of mobile applications provides a considerable amount of data of all types (images, texts, sounds, videos, etc.). Thus, two main issues have to be considered:…

cs.IR2024

Interpolating Item and User Fairness in Multi-Sided Recommendations

Qinyi Chen, Jason Cheuk Nam Liang, Negin Golrezaei +1

Today's online platforms heavily lean on algorithmic recommendations for bolstering user engagement and driving revenue. However, these recommendations can impact multiple stakehol…

cs.AI2019

How can AI Automate End-to-End Data Science?

Charu Aggarwal, Djallel Bouneffouf, Horst Samulowitz +9

Data science is labor-intensive and human experts are scarce but heavily involved in every aspect of it. This makes data science time consuming and restricted to experts with the r…

cs.IR2014

The Impact of Situation Clustering in Contextual-Bandit Algorithm for Context-Aware Recommender Systems

Djallel Bouneffouf

Most existing approaches in Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CRS) focus on recommending relevant items to users taking into account contextual information, such as time, location…

cs.CL2023

TherapyView: Visualizing Therapy Sessions with Temporal Topic Modeling and AI-Generated Arts

Baihan Lin, Stefan Zecevic, Djallel Bouneffouf +1

We present the TherapyView, a demonstration system to help therapists visualize the dynamic contents of past treatment sessions, enabled by the state-of-the-art neural topic modeli…

cs.LG2019

Optimal Exploitation of Clustering and History Information in Multi-Armed Bandit

Djallel Bouneffouf, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Horst Samulowitz +1

We consider the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem and the contextual bandit problem with historical observations and pre-clustered arms. The historical observations can contain…

cs.AI2020

Contextual Bandit with Adaptive Feature Extraction

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi +1

We consider an online decision making setting known as contextual bandit problem, and propose an approach for improving contextual bandit performance by using an adaptive feature e…

cs.LG2019

Split Q Learning: Reinforcement Learning with Two-Stream Rewards

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a general parametric framework for a reinforcement learning problem, which extends the stan…

cs.LG2024

Detectors for Safe and Reliable LLMs: Implementations, Uses, and Limitations

Swapnaja Achintalwar, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Ateret Anaby-Tavor +35

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a variety of risks, from non-faithful output to biased and toxic generations. Due to several limiting factors surrounding LLMs (trai…

cs.LG2014

Exponentiated Gradient Exploration for Active Learning

Djallel Bouneffouf

Active learning strategies respond to the costly labelling task in a supervised classification by selecting the most useful unlabelled examples in training a predictive model. Many…

cs.CL2022

Neural Topic Modeling of Psychotherapy Sessions

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi +1

In this work, we compare different neural topic modeling methods in learning the topical propensities of different psychiatric conditions from the psychotherapy session transcripts…

cs.IR2014

R-UCB: a Contextual Bandit Algorithm for Risk-Aware Recommender Systems

Djallel Bouneffouf

Mobile Context-Aware Recommender Systems can be naturally modelled as an exploration/exploitation trade-off (exr/exp) problem, where the system has to choose between maximizing its…

cs.LG2025

The Effectiveness of Approximate Regularized Replay for Efficient Supervised Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Matthew Riemer, Erik Miehling, Miao Liu +2

Although parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as LoRA, only modify a small subset of parameters, they can have a significant impact on the model. Our instruction-tuning ex…

cs.LG2022

Learning to Generate Image Source-Agnostic Universal Adversarial Perturbations

Pu Zhao, Parikshit Ram, Songtao Lu +4

Adversarial perturbations are critical for certifying the robustness of deep learning models. A universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) can simultaneously attack multiple images,…

cs.LG2020

Double-Linear Thompson Sampling for Context-Attentive Bandits

Djallel Bouneffouf, Raphaël Féraud, Sohini Upadhyay +2

In this paper, we analyze and extend an online learning framework known as Context-Attentive Bandit, motivated by various practical applications, from medical diagnosis to dialog s…

cs.LG2020

Contextual Bandit with Missing Rewards

Djallel Bouneffouf, Sohini Upadhyay, Yasaman Khazaeni

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the reward associ…

cs.OH2013

Proposition d'une technique de gestion de projet dans les startups

Djallel Bouneffouf

This project is part of the development of mobile CRM. It aims to develop a management application client named NOMALYS. This application allows the commercial and business leaders…

cs.AI2023

A Survey on Compositional Generalization in Applications

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Irina Rish

The field of compositional generalization is currently experiencing a renaissance in AI, as novel problem settings and algorithms motivated by various practical applications are be…

cs.LG2014

Hybrid Q-Learning Applied to Ubiquitous recommender system

Djallel Bouneffouf

Ubiquitous information access becomes more and more important nowadays and research is aimed at making it adapted to users. Our work consists in applying machine learning technique…

cs.CY2024

Assessing AI Utility: The Random Guesser Test for Sequential Decision-Making Systems

Shun Ide, Allison Blunt, Djallel Bouneffouf

We propose a general approach to quantitatively assessing the risk and vulnerability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems to biased decisions. The guiding principle of the propo…

cs.LG2022

Optimal Epidemic Control as a Contextual Combinatorial Bandit with Budget

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is an open challenge and critical practical problem to find a optimal way to dynamically prescribe the best policies that balance both the gov…

stat.ML2020

Computing the Dirichlet-Multinomial Log-Likelihood Function

Djallel Bouneffouf

Dirichlet-multinomial (DMN) distribution is commonly used to model over-dispersion in count data. Precise and fast numerical computation of the DMN log-likelihood function is impor…

cs.CY2025

Scopes of Alignment

Kush R. Varshney, Zahra Ashktorab, Djallel Bouneffouf +2

Much of the research focus on AI alignment seeks to align large language models and other foundation models to the context-less and generic values of helpfulness, harmlessness, and…

cs.NE2014

A Neural Networks Committee for the Contextual Bandit Problem

Robin Allesiardo, Raphael Feraud, Djallel Bouneffouf

This paper presents a new contextual bandit algorithm, NeuralBandit, which does not need hypothesis on stationarity of contexts and rewards. Several neural networks are trained to…

cs.SI2025

Targeted Advertising on Social Networks Using Online Variational Tensor Regression

Tsuyoshi Idé, Keerthiram Murugesan, Djallel Bouneffouf +1

This paper is concerned with online targeted advertising on social networks. The main technical task we address is to estimate the activation probability for user pairs, which quan…

cs.LG2023

Psychotherapy AI Companion with Reinforcement Learning Recommendations and Interpretable Policy Dynamics

Baihan Lin, Guillermo Cecchi, Djallel Bouneffouf

We introduce a Reinforcement Learning Psychotherapy AI Companion that generates topic recommendations for therapists based on patient responses. The system uses Deep Reinforcement…

cs.LG2018

Scalable Recollections for Continual Lifelong Learning

Matthew Riemer, Tim Klinger, Djallel Bouneffouf +1

Given the recent success of Deep Learning applied to a variety of single tasks, it is natural to consider more human-realistic settings. Perhaps the most difficult of these setting…

cs.GT2022

Online Learning in Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma to Mimic Human Behavior

Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi

As an important psychological and social experiment, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) treats the choice to cooperate or defect as an atomic action. We propose to study the beh…

cs.MA2026

Enhancing Value Alignment of LLMs with Multi-agent system and Combinatorial Fusion

Yuanhong Wu, Djallel Bouneffouf, D. Frank Hsu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is a central challenge for ensuring trustworthy and safe deployment. While existing methods such as Reinforcement Learning f…

cs.AI2018

Incorporating Behavioral Constraints in Online AI Systems

Avinash Balakrishnan, Djallel Bouneffouf, Nicholas Mattei +1

AI systems that learn through reward feedback about the actions they take are increasingly deployed in domains that have significant impact on our daily life. However, in many case…

cs.CL2022

Working Alliance Transformer for Psychotherapy Dialogue Classification

Baihan Lin, Guillermo Cecchi, Djallel Bouneffouf

As a predictive measure of the treatment outcome in psychotherapy, the working alliance measures the agreement of the patient and the therapist in terms of their bond, task and goa…

cs.LG2020

Spectral Clustering using Eigenspectrum Shape Based Nystrom Sampling

Djallel Bouneffouf

Spectral clustering has shown a superior performance in analyzing the cluster structure. However, its computational complexity limits its application in analyzing large-scale data.…

cs.LG2020

Solving Constrained CASH Problems with ADMM

Parikshit Ram, Sijia Liu, Deepak Vijaykeerthi +5

The CASH problem has been widely studied in the context of automated configurations of machine learning (ML) pipelines and various solvers and toolkits are available. However, CASH…

cs.AI2024

Contextual Moral Value Alignment Through Context-Based Aggregation

Pierre Dognin, Jesus Rios, Ronny Luss +7

Developing value-aligned AI agents is a complex undertaking and an ongoing challenge in the field of AI. Specifically within the domain of Large Language Models (LLMs), the capabil…

cs.AI2021

Unified Models of Human Behavioral Agents in Bandits, Contextual Bandits and RL

Baihan Lin, Guillermo Cecchi, Djallel Bouneffouf +2

Artificial behavioral agents are often evaluated based on their consistent behaviors and performance to take sequential actions in an environment to maximize some notion of cumulat…

cs.LG2020

Online learning with Corrupted context: Corrupted Contextual Bandits

Djallel Bouneffouf

We consider a novel variant of the contextual bandit problem (i.e., the multi-armed bandit with side-information, or context, available to a decision-maker) where the context used…

cs.AI2025

Agentic AI Needs a Systems Theory

Erik Miehling, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Kush R. Varshney +11

The endowment of AI with reasoning capabilities and some degree of agency is widely viewed as a path toward more capable and generalizable systems. Our position is that the current…

cs.LG2022

Reinforcement Learning with Algorithms from Probabilistic Structure Estimation

Jonathan P. Epperlein, Roman Overko, Sergiy Zhuk +4

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases,…

cs.IR2013

Evolution of the user's content: An Overview of the state of the art

Djallel Bouneffouf

The evolution of the user's content still remains a problem for an accurate recommendation.This is why the current research aims to design Recommender Systems (RS) able to continua…

cs.CL2024

Alignment Studio: Aligning Large Language Models to Particular Contextual Regulations

Swapnaja Achintalwar, Ioana Baldini, Djallel Bouneffouf +16

The alignment of large language models is usually done by model providers to add or control behaviors that are common or universally understood across use cases and contexts. In co…

cs.AI2022

Survey on Applications of Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence

Djallel Bouneffouf, Charu C. Aggarwal

In recent years, the Neurosymbolic framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and finance.…

cs.AI2014

Recommandation mobile, sensible au contexte de contenus évolutifs: Contextuel-E-Greedy

Djallel Bouneffouf

We introduce in this paper an algorithm named Contextuel-E-Greedy that tackles the dynamicity of the user's content. It is based on dynamic exploration/exploitation tradeoff and ca…

cs.LG2019

A Survey on Practical Applications of Multi-Armed and Contextual Bandits

Djallel Bouneffouf, Irina Rish

In recent years, multi-armed bandit (MAB) framework has attracted a lot of attention in various applications, from recommender systems and information retrieval to healthcare and f…

cs.IR2013

Applying machine learning techniques to improve user acceptance on ubiquitous environement

Djallel Bouneffouf

Ubiquitous information access becomes more and more important nowadays and research is aimed at making it adapted to users. Our work consists in applying machine learning technique…

cs.AI2025

Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind

Mouad Abrini, Omri Abend, Dina Acklin +105

This volume includes a selection of papers presented at the Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind held at AAAI 2025 in Philadelphia US on 3rd March 2…

cs.AI2026

Mitigating Misalignment Contagion by Steering with Implicit Traits

Maria Chang, Ronny Luss, Miao Liu +3

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes, multi-agent settings, where following instructions and maintaining value alignment are critical. Most alignment research…

cs.LG2020

A Story of Two Streams: Reinforcement Learning Models from Human Behavior and Neuropsychiatry

Baihan Lin, Guillermo Cecchi, Djallel Bouneffouf +2

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a more general and flexible parametric framework for reinforcement learning that extends st…

cs.IR2013

Mobile Recommender Systems Methods: An Overview

Djallel Bouneffouf

The information that mobiles can access becomes very wide nowadays, and the user is faced with a dilemma: there is an unlimited pool of information available to him but he is unabl…

cs.IR2014

Context-Based Information Retrieval in Risky Environment

Djallel Bouneffouf

Context-Based Information Retrieval is recently modelled as an exploration/ exploitation trade-off (exr/exp) problem, where the system has to choose between maximizing its expected…

cs.AI2025

Position: Theory of Mind Benchmarks are Broken for Large Language Models

Matthew Riemer, Zahra Ashktorab, Djallel Bouneffouf +4

Our paper argues that the majority of theory of mind benchmarks are broken because of their inability to directly test how large language models (LLMs) adapt to new partners. This…

cs.AI2017

Context Attentive Bandits: Contextual Bandit with Restricted Context

Djallel Bouneffouf, Irina Rish, Guillermo A. Cecchi +1

We consider a novel formulation of the multi-armed bandit model, which we call the contextual bandit with restricted context, where only a limited number of features can be accesse…

cs.LG2020

Hyper-parameter Tuning for the Contextual Bandit

Djallel Bouneffouf, Emmanuelle Claeys

We study here the problem of learning the exploration exploitation trade-off in the contextual bandit problem with linear reward function setting. In the traditional algorithms tha…

cs.AI2017

Bandit Models of Human Behavior: Reward Processing in Mental Disorders

Djallel Bouneffouf, Irina Rish, Guillermo A. Cecchi

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a general parametric framework for multi-armed bandit problem, which extends the standard T…

cs.IR2014

Étude des dimensions spécifiques du contexte dans un système de filtrage d'informations

Djallel Bouneffouf

In the context of business information systems, e-commerce and access to knowledge, the relevance of the information provided to use is a key fact to the success of information sys…

cs.AI2026

Contextual Value Alignment via Multilayer Combinatorial Fusion

Yuanhong Wu, Djallel Bouneffouf, D. Frank Hsu

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values remains a major challenge, especially for trustworthy AI. While existing approaches such as RLHF, CAI, and their variants ha…

cs.AI2013

Exponentiated Gradient LINUCB for Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits

Djallel Bouneffouf

We present Exponentiated Gradient LINUCB, an algorithm for con-textual multi-armed bandits. This algorithm uses Exponentiated Gradient to find the optimal exploration of the LINUCB…

cs.LG2021

Etat de l'art sur l'application des bandits multi-bras

Djallel Bouneffouf

The Multi-armed bandit offer the advantage to learn and exploit the already learnt knowledge at the same time. This capability allows this approach to be applied in different domai…

cs.LG2019

An ADMM Based Framework for AutoML Pipeline Configuration

Sijia Liu, Parikshit Ram, Deepak Vijaykeerthy +6

We study the AutoML problem of automatically configuring machine learning pipelines by jointly selecting algorithms and their appropriate hyper-parameters for all steps in supervis…

cs.AI2025

The Ultimate Test of Superintelligent AI Agents: Can an AI Balance Care and Control in Asymmetric Relationships?

Djallel Bouneffouf, Matthew Riemer, Kush Varshney

This paper introduces the Shepherd Test, a new conceptual test for assessing the moral and relational dimensions of superintelligent artificial agents. The test is inspired by huma…

cs.CL2022

SupervisorBot: NLP-Annotated Real-Time Recommendations of Psychotherapy Treatment Strategies with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Baihan Lin, Guillermo Cecchi, Djallel Bouneffouf

We propose a recommendation system that suggests treatment strategies to a therapist during the psychotherapy session in real-time. Our system uses a turn-level rating mechanism th…

cs.LG2018

Interpretable Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning through Policy Orchestration

Ritesh Noothigattu, Djallel Bouneffouf, Nicholas Mattei +6

Autonomous cyber-physical agents and systems play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that agents behave in ways aligned with the values of the societies in which th…