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Researcher profile

Paulo Shakarian

Paulo Shakarian contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Social and Information NetworksArtificial IntelligenceLogic in Computer ScienceMachine Learningphysics.soc-phCryptography and Security

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Machine Learning Model Integration with Open World Temporal Logic for Process Automation

Recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) have produced models that extract structured information from complex data. However, a significant challenge lies in translating these perceptual or extractive outputs into actionable and explainable decisions within complex operational workflows. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel approach that integrates the outputs of various machine learning models directly with the PyReason framework, an open-world temporal logic programming reasoning engine. PyReason's foundation in generalized annotated logic allows for the incorporation of real-valued outputs (e.g., probabilities, confidence scores) from a diverse set of ML models, treating them as truth intervals within its logical framework. Crucially, PyReason provides mechanisms, implemented in Python, to continuously poll ML model outputs, convert them into logical facts, and dynamically recompute the minimal model to enable decision-making in real-time. Furthermore, its native support for temporal reasoning, knowledge graph integration, and fully explainable interface traces enables an analysis of time-sensitive process data and existing organizational knowledge. By combining the strengths of perception and extraction from ML models with the logical deduction and transparency of PyReason, we aim to create a powerful system for automating complex processes. This integration is well suited for use cases in numerous domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, and business operations.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Position: Artificial Intelligence Needs Meta Intelligence -- the Case for Metacognitive AI

This position paper argues for metacognition as a general design principle for creating more accurate, secure, and efficient AI. The metacognitive solution involves systems monitoring their own states and judiciously allocating resources depending on each problem instance's difficulty or cost of mistakes. Drawing inspiration both from past work on resource-rational AI and from well-documented metacognitive strategies in psychology and cognitive science, we identify specific challenges in embedding these strategies into AI design and highlight open theoretical and implementation problems. We showcase these principles through a tangible example of improved learning efficiency, effectiveness, and security in a Federated Learning (FL) case study. We show how these principles can be translated into practice with a novel software framework developed specifically to allow the community to design, deploy, and experiment with metacognition-enabled AI applications.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Reasoning about Medical Triage Optimization with Logic Programming

We present a logic programming framework that orchestrates multiple variants of an optimization problem and reasons about their results to support high-stakes medical decision-making. The logic programming layer coordinates the construction and evaluation of multiple optimization formulations, translating solutions into logical facts that support further symbolic reasoning and ensure efficient resource allocation -- specifically targeting the "right patient, right platform, right escort, right time, right destination" principle. This capability is integrated into GuardianTwin, a decision support system for Forward Medical Evacuation (MEDEVAC), where rapid and explainable resource allocation is critical. Through a series of experiments, our framework demonstrates an average reduction in casualties by 35.75% compared to standard baselines. Additionally, we explore how users engage with the system via an intuitive interface that delivers explainable insights, ultimately enhancing decision-making in critical situations. This work demonstrates how logic programming can serve as a foundation for modular, interpretable, and operationally effective optimization in mission-critical domains.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Tokens-per-Parameter Coverage Is Critical for Robust LLM Scaling Law Extrapolation

Neural scaling laws approximate a language model's loss as a power-law function of parameter count $N$ and token count $D$. Following Chinchilla-style compute-optimal training, many studies fit scaling laws from runs performed under a fixed tokens-per-parameter (TPP) ratio $k$ and set $D = kN$. We show that this collinear design, combined with the empirically common near-equality of the exponents governing $N$ and $D$, induces an inherent ill-conditioning in the Gauss-Newton least-squares problem: the condition number of the design grows as the inverse square of the gap between the $N$ and $D$-exponents. The scale coefficients become practically unidentifiable, with confidence intervals inflating by an order of magnitude or more, yielding a ``sloppy'' model whose extrapolations degrade sharply off the training ray. We prove this for four scaling-law formalisms and derive a closed-form TPP-diversity threshold that is necessary and sufficient for well-conditioned estimation. Empirically, non-collinear designs outperform collinear ones on held-out splits with a 97.3\% win rate across four laws, five corpora, multiple floating point precision modes. We further show the degeneracy is rooted in Jacobian geometry and is not an artifact of the loss function: any smooth estimation objective whose curvature involves the Jacobian inherits the same ill-conditioning.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

A Feature-Driven Approach for Identifying Pathogenic Social Media Accounts

Over the past few years, we have observed different media outlets' attempts to shift public opinion by framing information to support a narrative that facilitate their goals. Malicious users referred to as "pathogenic social media" (PSM) accounts are more likely to amplify this phenomena by spreading misinformation to viral proportions. Understanding the spread of misinformation from account-level perspective is thus a pressing problem. In this work, we aim to present a feature-driven approach to detect PSM accounts in social media. Inspired by the literature, we set out to assess PSMs from three broad perspectives: (1) user-related information (e.g., user activity, profile characteristics), (2) source-related information (i.e., information linked via URLs shared by users) and (3) content-related information (e.g., tweets characteristics). For the user-related information, we investigate malicious signals using causality analysis (i.e., if user is frequently a cause of viral cascades) and profile characteristics (e.g., number of followers, etc.). For the source-related information, we explore various malicious properties linked to URLs (e.g., URL address, content of the associated website, etc.). Finally, for the content-related information, we examine attributes (e.g., number of hashtags, suspicious hashtags, etc.) from tweets posted by users. Experiments on real-world Twitter data from different countries demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in identifying PSM users.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Leveraging Motifs to Model the Temporal Dynamics of Diffusion Networks

Information diffusion mechanisms based on social influence models are mainly studied using likelihood of adoption when active neighbors expose a user to a message. The problem arises primarily from the fact that for the most part, this explicit information of who-exposed-whom among a group of active neighbors in a social network, before a susceptible node is infected is not available. In this paper, we attempt to understand the diffusion process through information cascades by studying the temporal network structure of the cascades. In doing so, we accommodate the effect of exposures from active neighbors of a node through a network pruning technique that leverages network motifs to identify potential infectors responsible for exposures from among those active neighbors. We attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the components used in modeling cascade dynamics and especially whether the additional effect of the exposure information is useful. Following this model, we develop an inference algorithm namely InferCut, that uses parameters learned from the model and the exposure information to predict the actual parent node of each potentially susceptible user in a given cascade. Empirical evaluation on a real world dataset from Weibo social network demonstrate the significance of incorporating exposure information in recovering the exact parents of the exposed users at the early stages of the diffusion process.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Mining user interaction patterns in the darkweb to predict enterprise cyber incidents

With rise in security breaches over the past few years, there has been an increasing need to mine insights from social media platforms to raise alerts of possible attacks in an attempt to defend conflict during competition. In this study, we attempt to build a framework that utilizes unconventional signals from the darkweb forums by leveraging the reply network structure of user interactions with the goal of predicting enterprise related external cyber attacks. We use both unsupervised and supervised learning models that address the challenges that come with the lack of enterprise attack metadata for ground truth validation as well as insufficient data for training the models. We validate our models on a binary classification problem that attempts to predict cyber attacks on a daily basis for an organization. Using several controlled studies on features leveraging the network structure, we measure the extent to which the indicators from the darkweb forums can be successfully used to predict attacks. We use information from 53 forums in the darkweb over a span of 17 months for the task. Our framework to predict real world organization cyber attacks of 3 different security events, suggest that focusing on the reply path structure between groups of users based on random walk transitions and community structures has an advantage in terms of better performance solely relying on forum or user posting statistics prior to attacks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Understanding and forecasting lifecycle events in information cascades

Most social network sites allow users to reshare a piece of information posted by a user. As time progresses, the cascade of reshares grows, eventually saturating after a certain time period. While previous studies have focused heavily on one aspect of the cascade phenomenon, specifically predicting when the cascade would go viral, in this paper, we take a more holistic approach by analyzing the occurrence of two events within the cascade lifecycle - the period of maximum growth in terms of surge in reshares and the period where the cascade starts declining in adoption. We address the challenges in identifying these periods and then proceed to make a comparative analysis of these periods from the perspective of network topology. We study the effect of several node-centric structural measures on the reshare responses using Granger causality which helps us quantify the significance of the network measures and understand the extent to which the network topology impacts the growth dynamics. This evaluation is performed on a dataset of 7407 cascades extracted from the Weibo social network. Using our causality framework, we found that an entropy measure based on nodal degree causally affects the occurrence of these events in 93.95% of cascades. Surprisingly, this outperformed clustering coefficient and PageRank which we hypothesized would be more indicative of the growth dynamics based on earlier studies. We also extend the Granger-causality Vector Autoregression (VAR) model to forecast the times at which the events occur in the cascade lifecycle.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Use of a controlled experiment and computational models to measure the impact of sequential peer exposures on decision making

It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the pattern by which it receives these signals vary and when peer influence is directed towards choices which are not optimal. To investigate that, we manipulate social signal exposure in an online controlled experiment using a game with human participants. Each participant in the game makes a decision among choices with differing utilities. We observe the following: (1) even in the presence of monetary risks and previously acquired knowledge of the choices, decision-makers tend to deviate from the obvious optimal decision when their peers make similar decision which we call the influence decision, (2) when the quantity of social signals vary over time, the forwarding probability of the influence decision and therefore being responsive to social influence does not necessarily correlate proportionally to the absolute quantity of signals. To better understand how these rules of peer influence could be used in modeling applications of real world diffusion and in networked environments, we use our behavioral findings to simulate spreading dynamics in real world case studies. We specifically try to see how cumulative influence plays out in the presence of user uncertainty and measure its outcome on rumor diffusion, which we model as an example of sub-optimal choice diffusion. Together, our simulation results indicate that sequential peer effects from the influence decision overcomes individual uncertainty to guide faster rumor diffusion over time. However, when the rate of diffusion is slow in the beginning, user uncertainty can have a substantial role compared to peer influence in deciding the adoption trajectory of a piece of questionable information.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access