@article {2026,
	title = {Formalizing Semi-Structured Interviews for Design Requirement Discovery: A Multi-Agent Framework for Clarification and Empathic Interaction},
	journal = {Available at SSRN 7199726},
	year = {2026},
	abstract = {Accurate requirement discovery remains a central challenge in interactive system design because users often express concrete solutions rather than the latent needs that should guide design. Semi-structured interviews can reveal these latent needs, but they are difficult for human designers to conduct at scale, while monolithic large language model (LLM) interviewers may struggle in long conversations to maintain interview structure, detect vague responses, and balance analytical control with empathic interaction. We propose a methodology-aligned multi-agent framework for AI-supported semi-structured requirement discovery. The framework separates planning, interpretation, dialogue control, and user-facing expression, allowing interview decisions and conversational delivery to be coordinated without collapsing them into a single generation loop. A dual-track evaluation, combining a simulation track against a monolithic LLM baseline with a human track involving academic researchers, suggests that this design improves structural adherence, clarification behavior, terminology reuse, and requirement-evidence extraction while remaining usable in human research contexts. These findings indicate that multi-agent design can support more scalable requirement-discovery interviews while making the interview process easier to inspect, but careful calibration is required before human-facing deployment.},
	doi = {https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7199726},
	url = {https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7199726},
	author = {Zhong, C. and Wu, S. and Yu, J. and Wu, W. and D. Herremans and K. Zhang}
}
@conference {2025,
	title = {Measuring and Mitigating Rapport Bias of Large Language Models under Multi-Agent Social Interactions},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of ICLR},
	year = {2026},
	address = {Rio de Janeiro, Brazil},
	abstract = {Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems (MAS) as components of collaborative intelligence, where peer interactions dynamically shape individual decision-making. Although prior work has focused on conformity bias, we extend the analysis to examine how LLMs form trust from previous impressions, resist misinformation, and integrate peer input during interaction, key factors for achieving collective intelligence under complex social dynamics. We present KAIROS, a benchmark simulating quiz contests with peer agents of varying reliability, offering fine-grained control over conditions such as expert-novice roles, noisy crowds, and adversarial peers. LLMs receive both historical interactions and current peer responses, allowing systematic investigation into how trust, peer action, and self-confidence influence decisions. As for mitigation strategies, we evaluate prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, Group Relative Policy Optimisation (GRPO), across multiple models. Our results reveal that GRPO with multi-agent context combined with outcome-based rewards and unconstrained reasoning achieves the best overall performance, but also decreases the robustness to social influence compared to Base models. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/declare-lab/KAIROS},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18321},
	author = {M. Song and T. D. Pala and W. Jin and A. Zadeh and C. Li and D. Herremans and S. Poria}
}
@article {2025,
	title = {Demystifying deep search: a holistic evaluation with hint-free multi-hop questions and factorised metrics},
	journal = {arXiv:2510.05137},
	year = {2025},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05137},
	author = {M. Song and R. Liu and Wang, Xinyu and Jiang, Yong and Xie, Pengjun and Huang, Fei and Zhou, Jingren and D. Herremans and S. Poria}
}
@article {2025,
	title = {PRESENT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Prosody Control},
	journal = {IEEE Signal Processing Letters},
	year = {2025},
	abstract = {Current strategies for achieving fine-grained prosody control in speech synthesis entail extracting additional style embeddings or adopting more complex architectures. To enable zero-shot application of pretrained text-to-speech (TTS) models, we present PRESENT (PRosody Editing without Style Embeddings or New Training), which exploits explicit prosody prediction in FastSpeech2-based models by modifying the inference process directly. We apply our text-to-prosody framework to zero-shot language transfer using a JETS model exclusively trained on English LJSpeech data. We obtain character error rates (CER) of 12.8\%, 18.7\% and 5.9\% for German, Hungarian and Spanish respectively, beating the previous state-of-the-art CER by over 2x for all three languages. Furthermore, we allow subphoneme-level control, a first in this field. To evaluate its effectiveness, we show that PRESENT can improve the prosody of questions, and use it to generate Mandarin, a tonal language where vowel pitch varies at subphoneme level. We attain 25.3\% hanzi CER and 13.0\% pinyin CER with the JETS model. All our code and audio samples are available online.},
	doi = {10.1109/LSP.2025.3528359},
	url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10838710},
	author = {P. Lam and H. Zhang and N. F. Chen and B. Sisman and D. Herremans}
}
@conference {2022,
	title = {SNIPER Training: Variable Sparsity Rate Training For Text-To-Speech},
	booktitle = {Proc. of IEEE Tencon, Singapore},
	year = {2024},
	abstract = {Text-to-speech (TTS) models have achieved remarkable naturalness in recent years, yet like most deep neural models, they have more parameters than necessary. Sparse TTS models can improve on dense models via pruning and extra retraining, or converge faster than dense models with some performance loss. Inspired by these results, we propose training TTS models using a decaying sparsity rate, i.e. a high initial sparsity to accelerate training first, followed by a progressive rate reduction to obtain better eventual performance. This decremental approach differs from current methods of incrementing sparsity to a desired target, which costs significantly more time than dense training. We call our method SNIPER training: Single-shot Initialization Pruning Evolving-Rate training. Our experiments on FastSpeech2 show that although we were only able to obtain better losses in the first few epochs before being overtaken by the baseline, the final SNIPER-trained models beat constant-sparsity models and pip dense models in performance.},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07283},
	author = {P. Lam and H. Zhang and N. F. Chen and B. Sisman and D. Herremans}
}
@article {2022,
	title = {A Multimodal Model with Twitter Finbert Embeddings for Extreme Price Movement Prediction of Bitcoin},
	journal = {Expert Systems with Applications},
	year = {2023},
	abstract = {Bitcoin, with its ever-growing popularity, has demonstrated extreme price volatility since its origin. This volatility, together with its decentralised nature, make Bitcoin highly subjective to speculative trading as compared to more traditional assets. In this paper, we propose a multimodal model for predicting extreme price fluctuations. This model takes as input a variety of correlated assets, technical indicators, as well as Twitter content. In an in-depth study, we explore whether social media discussions from the general public on Bitcoin have predictive power for extreme price movements. A dataset of 5,000 tweets per day containing the keyword {\textquoteleft}Bitcoin{\textquoteright} was collected from 2015 to 2021. This dataset, called PreBit, is made available online. In our hybrid model, we use sentence-level FinBERT embeddings, pretrained on financial lexicons, so as to capture the full contents of the tweets and feed it to the model in an understandable way. By combining these embeddings with a Convolutional Neural Network, we built a predictive model for significant market movements. The final multimodal ensemble model includes this NLP model together with a model based on candlestick data, technical indicators and correlated asset prices. In an ablation study, we explore the contribution of the individual modalities. Finally, we propose and backtest a trading strategy based on the predictions of our models with varying prediction threshold and show that it can used to build a profitable trading strategy with a reduced risk over a {\textquoteleft}hold{\textquoteright} or moving average strategy.},
	doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120838},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.120838},
	author = {Y. Zou and D. Herremans}
}
