arXiv:2605.25454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for emotional support. They are also being developed for formal therapy purposes. However, LLMs like ChaptGPT or Llama are often developed with content moderation guardrails that prevent them from discussing sensitive subjects with users for both liability and safety purposes, and this inability to broach these subjects may affect their capacity as therapists. In this study, we perform an algorithm audit on three state-of-the-art moderation systems (OpenAI's moderation endpoint, Meta's Llama Guard, and Google's Shield Gemma) to investigate the extent to which these systems flag the content of real-life therapy sessions as undesirable. Our results raise implications for the limitations that users and organizations may encounter when designing LLMs to play the part of a therapist.

arXiv:2603.29288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Social and personal decisions in relational domains such as matchmaking are deeply entwined with cultural norms and historical hierarchies, and can potentially be shaped by algorithmic and AI-mediated assessments of compatibility, acceptance, and stability. In South Asian contexts, caste remains a central aspect of marital decision-making, yet little is known about how contemporary large language models (LLMs) reproduce or disrupt caste-based stratification in such settings. In this work, we conduct a controlled audit of caste bias in LLM-mediated matchmaking evaluations using real-world matrimonial profiles. We vary caste identity across Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Dalit, and income across five buckets, and evaluate five LLM families (GPT, Gemini, Llama, Qwen, and BharatGPT). Models are prompted to assess profiles along dimensions of social acceptance, marital stability, and cultural compatibility. Our analysis reveals consistent hierarchical patterns across models: same-caste matches are rated most favorably, with average ratings up to 25% higher (on a 10-point scale) than inter-caste matches, which are further ordered according to traditional caste hierarchy. These findings highlight how existing caste hierarchies are reproduced in LLM decision-making and underscore the need for culturally grounded evaluation and intervention strategies in AI systems deployed in socially sensitive domains, where such systems risk reinforcing historical forms of exclusion.

arXiv:2510.14889v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On social media, several individuals experiencing suicidal ideation (SI) do not disclose their distress explicitly. Instead, signs may surface indirectly through everyday posts or peer interactions. Detecting such implicit signals early is critical but remains challenging. We frame early and implicit SI as a forward-looking prediction task and develop a computational framework that models a user's information environment, consisting of both their longitudinal posting histories as well as the discourse of their socially proximal peers. We adopted a composite network centrality measure to identify top neighbors of a user, and temporally aligned the user's and neighbors' interactions -- integrating the multi-layered signals in a fine-tuned DeBERTa-v3 model. In a Reddit study of 1,000 (500 Case and 500 Control) users, our approach improves early and implicit SI detection by an average of 10% over all other baselines. These findings highlight that peer interactions offer valuable predictive signals and carry broader implications for designing early detection systems that capture indirect as well as masked expressions of risk in online environments.