Rafael Teixeira Sousa
2026
MedPT: A Massive Medical Question Answering Dataset for Brazilian-Portuguese Speakers
Fernanda Bufon Farber | Iago Alves Brito | Julia Soares Dollis | Pedro Schindler Freire Brasil Ribeiro | Rafael Teixeira Sousa | Arlindo R. Galvão Filho
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Fernanda Bufon Farber | Iago Alves Brito | Julia Soares Dollis | Pedro Schindler Freire Brasil Ribeiro | Rafael Teixeira Sousa | Arlindo R. Galvão Filho
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
While large language models (LLMs) show transformative potential in healthcare, their development remains focused on high-resource languages. This creates a critical barrier for other languages, as simple translation fails to capture unique clinical and cultural nuances, such as endemic diseases. To address this, we introduce MedPT, the first large-scale, real-world corpus of patient-doctor interactions for the Brazilian Portuguese medical domain. Comprising 384,095 authentic question-answer pairs and covering over 3,200 distinct health-related conditions, the dataset was refined through a rigorous multi-stage curation protocol that employed a hybrid quantitative-qualitative analysis to filter noise and contextually enrich thousands of ambiguous queries, resulting in a corpus of approximately 57 million tokens. We further utilize of LLM-driven annotation to classify queries into seven semantic types to capture user intent. To validate MedPT’s utility, we benchmark it in a medical specialty classification task: fine-tuning a 1.7B parameter model achieves an outstanding 94% F1-score on a 20-class setup. Furthermore, our qualitative error analysis shows misclassifications are not random but reflect genuine clinical ambiguities (e.g., between comorbid conditions), proving the dataset’s deep semantic richness. We publicly release MedPT on Hugging Face to support the development of more equitable, accurate, and culturally-aware medical technologies for the Portuguese-speaking world.
2025
Proxy Barrier: A Hidden Repeater Layer Defense Against System Prompt Leakage and Jailbreaking
Pedro Schindler Freire Brasil Ribeiro | Iago Alves Brito | Rafael Teixeira Sousa | Fernanda Bufon Färber | Julia Soares Dollis | Arlindo Rodrigues Galvão Filho
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Pedro Schindler Freire Brasil Ribeiro | Iago Alves Brito | Rafael Teixeira Sousa | Fernanda Bufon Färber | Julia Soares Dollis | Arlindo Rodrigues Galvão Filho
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Prompt injection and jailbreak attacks remain a critical vulnerability for deployed large language models (LLMs), allowing adversaries to bypass safety protocols and extract sensitive information. To address this, we present Proxy Barrier (ProB), a lightweight defense that interposes a proxy LLM between the user and the target model. The proxy LLM is tasked solely to repeat the user input, and any failure indicates the presence of an attempt to reveal or override system instructions, leading the malicious request to be detected and blocked before it reaches the target model. ProB therefore requires no access to model weights or prompts, and is deployable entirely at the API level. Experiments across multiple model families demonstrate that ProB achieves state-of-the-art resilience against prompt leakage and jailbreak attacks. Notably, our approach outperforms baselines and achieves up to 98.8% defense effectiveness, and shows robust protection across both open and closed-source LLMs when suitably paired with proxy models, while also keeping response quality intact.
Modeling, Evaluating, and Embodying Personality in LLMs: A Survey
Iago Alves Brito | Julia Soares Dollis | Fernanda Bufon Färber | Pedro Schindler Freire Brasil Ribeiro | Rafael Teixeira Sousa | Arlindo Rodrigues Galvão Filho
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Iago Alves Brito | Julia Soares Dollis | Fernanda Bufon Färber | Pedro Schindler Freire Brasil Ribeiro | Rafael Teixeira Sousa | Arlindo Rodrigues Galvão Filho
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
As large language models (LLMs) become integral to social and interactive applications, the ability to model, control, and evaluate their personality traits has become a critical area of research. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of the LLM-driven personality scenario. We introduce a functional taxonomy that organizes the field by how personality is modeled (from rule-based methods to model-centric and system-level LLM techniques), across which modalities it is expressed (extending beyond text to vision, speech, and immersive virtual reality), and how it is validated (covering both qualitative and quantitative evaluation paradigms). By contextualizing current advances and systematically analyzing the limitations of existing methods including subjectivity, context dependence, limited multimodal integration, and the lack of standardized evaluation protocols, we identify key research gaps. This survey serves as a guide for future inquiry, paving the way for the development LLMs with more consistent consistent, expressive, and trustworthy personality traits.