Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2607.25630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interdisciplinary research is accelerating, yet scientific papers remain difficult to understand outside their home fields. We study large language model (LLM)-based simplification of scientific texts and present a human-in-the-loop workflow that transforms expert summaries into more accessible versions for non-specialists. Using SciSummNet as the source corpus, we first generate baseline simplifications with GPT-4o-mini. In Phase 1, readers from STEM fields outside computer science identify difficult sentences and phrases and compare the original and GPT-simplified summaries in terms of comprehensibility, naturalness, and simplicity. In Phase 2, computer science experts use this feedback to create expert-edited reference simplifications. We release the resulting corpus together with human judgments and automatic evaluation results. The Phase 1 judgments show a clear preference for the GPT-generated summaries in terms of comprehensibili
arXiv:2607.25620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quattrociocchi and colleagues warn that the fluent outputs of large language models may allow linguistic plausibility to substitute for epistemic evaluation, producing the condition they call *Epistemia*: the experience of possessing knowledge without undertaking the practices through which judgment would ordinarily be warranted. This article accepts that diagnosis but challenges its explanatory framework, which compares an embodied, socially situated human knower with an isolated generative model thereby locating epistemic legitimacy in capacities internal to autonomous agents. Drawing on Carlo Sini's philosophy of practices, writing, signs, and technics, we propose instead to understand a large language model (LLM) as a *techno-semiotic machine* that automates a phase of written semiosis by producing plausible linguistic configurations from the sedimented archive of human writing. From this perspective, *Epistemia* is one consequence
arXiv:2607.25146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The distance between persons reveals significant information about their perception of each other. However, such information is not easily extractable and interpretable from video input. We developed an open-sourced library, Facial Interpersonal Distance Analysis and Coding (FIDAC) that transforms facial detection results into actionable data about location and interpersonal distance. This tool merges data from multiple open-source facial detection models, strategically compensating for gaps in any individual model. In addition, we include methods for more accurate tracking, such as a pipeline for human coding of the selection of faces and a benchmarking tool to reduce depth distortion. For next steps, we plan on building upon FIDAC by evaluating its effectiveness at measuring interpersonal distance at various depths and orientations while further integrating features of proxemic analysis such as synchrony into its software.
arXiv:2607.25130v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imperfections in AI-generated code require that software developers modify the generated code manually, or by re-prompting an AI programming assistant. Manual code edits provide more realistic and granular information on editing behavior than Git commits, which only contain final successful code snippets. Yet, due to a lack of high-quality, realistic code editing data, LLMs are mostly trained on publicly available Git data (e.g., commits). To address this gap, we introduce DECODE (Developer Edits of Code Dataset), a dataset of 53.6K real-world in-IDE code edits of AI-generated code in Python, TypeScript, and JavaScript, sourced from 1K+ developers. First, we demonstrate the utility of DECODE for data analysis, obtaining insights on when, why, and how AI-generated code is edited. We find that most edits occur within the first 15 minutes after accepting an AI completion, resulting in the removal of AI completions in 31% of edit trajectori
arXiv:2607.25021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can connect visualization patterns to external causes, consequences, and domain knowledge, but the evidential basis of these interpretations is often unclear. We present an exploratory study of 102 visualizations from four sources, three MLLMs, and four input conditions that vary access to the image, source-specific accessible chart context, and withheld-context framing. Across 1,224 descriptions, we analyze model-attributed DIRECT, DERIVED, and SPECULATIVE labels and conduct an automated audit of numeric agreement. Accessible chart context shifted Gemini and GPT toward DIRECT claims and improved numeric agreement for some models. Adding the image to the full context did not yield a consistent numeric benefit, and the withheld-context prompt did not reliably increase cautious language. The prompt-defined Real-World Significance section remained predominantly SPECULATIVE. These results motivate ac
arXiv:2607.24820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-bandwidth brain--computer interfaces (BCIs) can bypass damaged pathways, reduce motor costs, and improve communication and control. They also inspire visions of accelerated thought output, mind reading, and instant skill acquisition. This Perspective asks how gains in meaningful human I/O scale with interface capacity. We distinguish bandwidth, decodable neural states, neural states, and information a person can use, confirm, and express. Slowly updated task states can unfold into complex behavior through the body, neural control, sensory feedback, the environment, and shared context. Decodable neural activity can support prediction and control; subject-level communication depends on selection, confirmation, and authorization. On the input side, stimulation may guide plasticity and accelerate learning, while embodied skills arise through coordination of a brain, body, and environment. The scaling relationship is likely nonlinear: h
arXiv:2607.24808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotional responses to biodigital architecture were examined using electroencephalographic (EEG) data from AI-generated images. A pre-experiment involving 336 participants identified 60 images, selected from an initial pool of 600, that elicited strong emotional responses categorized as awe, disgust, or content. These images were used for EEG recordings of 52 volunteers, with channel selection and sample size estimation based on the analysis of an existing dataset. Gamma and delta bands yielded the highest classification accuracy, with the gamma band achieving an accuracy of 77.07 percent +/- 13.8 percent for the awe emotion. Key factors such as greenery and non-uniform granularity were linked to positive emotions, while dampness triggered negative reactions. These results emphasize the significance of incorporating natural elements and varied textures in biodigital architecture to enhance aesthetic appeal and acceptance. The study demo
arXiv:2607.24795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Older adults' independent mobility enables out-of-home participation, well-being and health, yet pedestrian navigation systems still optimize primarily for distance or time, often overlooking barriers, safety thresholds, and supportive infrastructure that shape late-life walking decisions. We present a senior-friendly pedestrian routing artefact developed through echeloned Design Science Re-search, translating lived mobility constraints into prescriptive design knowledge. Based on 11 semi-structured interviews, we derive initial Design Requirements (DRs) and Design Principles (DPs) for barrier-aware, amenity-sensitive routing and execution-relevant explanations. We instantiate these in an OpenStreetMap pedestrian network enriched with amenities (benches, toilets, and shelters) and height data, and implemented an A*-based routing engine with configurable costs and explanation payloads. In a field-based walking study, 14 older adults com-
arXiv:2607.24770v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Procedural tasks such as furniture assembly and home repair impose substantial cognitive demands because users must interpret instructions, track task progress, reason about spatial state, and recover from errors while performing physical actions. Prior multimodal assistants have shown promise for procedural guidance, but most rely on cloud inference and fixed always-on perception, making them poorly suited to privacy-sensitive, latency-critical domestic settings. We present ProcAgent, a fully on-device, agentic, vision-based procedural assistant for real-time adaptive guidances on a single NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. ProcAgent uses a propose-and-verify architecture that combines low-latency continuous perception, a symbolic task graph, on-demand vision-language verification, and an LLM-based interaction agent. The system continuously proposes user progress, invokes expensive visual reasoning only when ambiguity or likely deviation arises,
arXiv:2607.24765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can give different answers to the same decision problem across runs, and reverse a decision when their own prior answer returns as context. We ask whether this instability can be measured and partially reduced without changing model weights. We test the Cognitive Kernel Model (CKM), a prompt-level state-enforcement layer. Before deciding, the model must separate its input into three epistemic roles: Fact (given or verifiable), Heuristic (inferred or assumed), and Emotion (evaluative or priority signal). CKM adds no capability; it forces the model to track what kind of information it uses before acting. Formally it maintains a structured state S_t = {F_t, H_t, E_t} updated by a transition function. We evaluate CKM on Korean-language decision scenarios (ambiguity, ethical conflict, resource allocation, error handling) across 26 LLMs from four vendors and 37,403 observations, via four core experiments, a 4-arm
arXiv:2607.24750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are temporally overexposed: trained on vast contemporary corpora, they encode present-day concepts that make them unreliable narrators of the past. We present TimeCapsule, a 1.2B-parameter LLaMA-style causal model trained exclusively on Victorian texts (1800-1875) as an epistemologically isolated generative archive. Quantitative evaluation shows a 45.4% perplexity reduction over a GPT-2 baseline on held-out Victorian prose, while larger contemporary causal models achieve lower raw perplexity through broader pretraining but lack temporal isolation. TimeCapsule exhibits computational sensemaking, generating historically plausible analogical explanations for unfamiliar modern concepts (e.g., describing a computer as a "hypertrophied lung"). A qualitative hermeneutic probe with two humanities scholars revealed a crisis of authenticity, as both misclassified approximately 40% of genuine Victorian excerpts as mach
arXiv:2607.24747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although keystroke dynamics are cost-effective behavioral biometrics, their practical deployment is hindered by susceptibility to environmental variations. To address this, we propose a robust multimodal authentication framework that augments traditional keystroke dynamics using 19-dimensional hand kinematics. Features are captured using a bespoke data glove equipped with 10 piezoresistive pressure sensors and a 9-axis IMU. A hybrid CNN-LSTM architecture effectively fuses these heterogeneous time-series streams. To ensure real-world applicability, we implemented a rigorous "unseen" evaluation protocol: the model was trained on a desktop keyboard using data from 1 target user and 8 "known" impostors, but evaluated on a laptop keyboard (cross-domain) against the target and an "unknown" impostor excluded from training. Averaged over five trials, the multimodal method achieved a mean Equal Error Rate (EER) of 2.12% for individual 600-ms aut
arXiv:2607.26024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open Sound Control (OSC) is the dominant wire protocol for real-time parametric control in professional audio, live performance, and virtual production. Large language models can emit plausible OSC, but they hallucinate addresses, mishandle type tags, and fail under paraphrase- unacceptable in show-critical contexts. We present LLM4OSC, a local-first architecture in which models propose structured intent JSON over a human-reviewed device profile, and deterministic code validates, clamps, and encodes before any UDP send. We introduce a frozen evaluation harness with CI gates on wrong-send rate: mismatches that would still pass validation and transmit. On a Max/MSP hero profile (12 patterns; 8 literal + 8 paraphrase + 4 refusal cases), after profile tag enrichment, symbolic slot fill, NL refine, and a retrieval confidence gate, backends B0--B3 all pass frozen gates (100% semantic accuracy, 0% wrong-send). B0 (rules) remains the production d
arXiv:2607.25975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific research involving code has long rested on the assumption that at least one person understands why the code exists. As scientists adopt coding agents, this assumption is breaking down. Drawing on an ongoing contextual inquiry of scientific programmers working with agentic tools (four cases to date), a survey of over 800 scientific programmers, and my own analysis workflows, this position piece describes how scientists are inventing personal conventions, "landmarking strategies", for marking which artifacts in a codebase are meant for human understanding and which are context for agents. They repurpose shared infrastructure (version control especially) in idiosyncratic ways, and I argue that this quiet de-standardization could complicate collaboration in teams with heterogeneous software practices. Alternatively, teams that explicitly delineate what is human-readable versus agent context will be better able to develop, document,
arXiv:2607.25922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has fueled high expectations regarding its potential to enhance knowledge work productivity in terms of efficiency and quality. Building on task-technology fit (TTF) theory, we empirically examine the extent of GenAI's productivity effect for different task types. We conducted a randomized lab-in-the-field experiment with 128 knowledge workers from a multinational industrial organization. Participants completed three representative knowledge work tasks (knowledge acquisition, packaging, and creation), either with or without GenAI. Results show that GenAI consistently increases efficiency across tasks. However, its impact on quality is task-contingent: quality increases for knowledge packaging and creation but declines for knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, GenAI tends to reduce quality variance for knowledge packaging and creation, primarily benefiting lower-performing knowledge work
arXiv:2607.25911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Annotation is among the most demanding visualization tasks to automate, as it simultaneously requires correctly navigating visual, semantic, and stylistic constraints. Failure to meet any of these conditions severely undermines the utility of an annotation, rendering it challenging to read, inaccurate, or visually discordant. Despite a growing body of annotation tools and automations, no existing benchmark or evaluation framework tests whether these conditions are met because of their scope and annotation not being the focus of their studies. We introduce AnnoBench, a benchmark for visualization annotation that materializes the inherent challenges of this domain in a structured and testable manner. AnnoBench pairs visualizations from professional data journalism and visualization galleries with annotation tasks, spanning four representation formats, five chart description conditions, and two prompt specification levels. The benchmark is e
arXiv:2607.25700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support biomedical research, yet their behavior under adversarial requests for dual-use knowledge remains insufficiently characterized. We introduce BioDisclose, a benchmark for measuring biomedical knowledge disclosure under adversarial elicitation. BioDisclose contains 480 prompts derived from 24 expert-authored scenarios across six biomedical risk domains and four elicitation families spanning academic, historical, role-playing, and decomposed prompting. We grade model responses on a four-level scale from refusal to executable disclosure, distinguishing high-level discussion from technically specific and actionable content, including refuse-then-leak behavior. Across five deployed LLM systems, detailed-or-higher disclosure rates vary substantially, ranging from 9.2% to 64.0%. Academic framing is the most effective elicitation family on average (43.2%), while laboratory safety scenarios show the
arXiv:2607.25574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inequality in real-world societies are associated with psychological distress and behavioral consequences. However, less is known about whether similar dynamics emerge when inequality exists within virtual environments or make-belief worlds. As online games increasingly constitute meaningful social spaces, it becomes critical to examine how players perceive and react to structural and resource differences online to optimize their experiences. This study studies perceptions of inequality in the online simulation game "Whiteout Survival," using semi-structured interviews and think-aloud gameplay walkthrough protocols. By focusing on players' interpretations of resource distribution, ranking systems, gaming mechanisms, and in-game social dynamics, our analyses revealed that players' attitudes on inequality vary according to their relative status: those occupying lower positions often criticize unfair structures, yet as they acquire stakes th
arXiv:2607.25423v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Eliciting explainable AI (XAI) requirements from stroke survivors presents a methodological challenge with direct implications for the design of trustworthy brain-computer interfaces for rehabilitation. How can patients and caregivers articulate preferences about algorithmic transparency when they lack conceptual frameworks for explainability, and when standard elicitation approaches are structurally inadequate for users with acquired communication disorders? We present a video-based scaffolding protocol for XAI requirements elicitation, developed and piloted in a rehabilitation context. In a formative study with three stroke survivors (two with moderate-to-severe aphasia) and three caregivers, facilitators employed four scaffolding approaches alongside the videos: 1) analogical bridging mapping AI states to familiar systems, 2) projective personas depersonalising sensitive topics, 3) binary forcing reducing cognitive load, and 4) extende
arXiv:2607.25405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supply chain decision-making is rapidly transforming with the rise of agentic AI - highly autonomous systems that can operate on complex, long-horizon tasks. Yet the adoption of agentic systems outpaces their governance: existing taxonomies of autonomy only offer discrete classifications, rely on subjective judgement, and cannot track autonomy across a system's life cycle, leaving enterprises unable to assess the risks of increasingly autonomous supply chain agents. This paper proposes the Agentic AI Autonomy Assessment (AAAA) framework, which defines and measures the degree of autonomy at a task level. The framework is based on the three dimensions of user delegation, consultation, and collaboration, enabling continuous monitoring from an agent's development through its runtime to end-of-life. The framework's construct validity was tested in a simulated beer distribution game, examining how the autonomy score relates to a company's perfo
arXiv:2607.25386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Creating static visualizations for presentations and publications requires granular refinements of visual details, even for simple charts. Existing data-driven visualization tools offer limited interactive control for such refinements, forcing users to export charts to external graphic editors and breaking the critical link between data and visual representation. To address this gap, we propose an extended InfoVis Reference Model to account for post-render design refinement. A formative study with 18 visualization practitioners and a follow-up survey of 35 respondents confirmed that this stage is pervasive yet unsupported in current practice. Based on these findings, we present TailVis, a visualization authoring system that enables expressive visual customization while preserving data-binding integrity. TailVis supports element-level direct selection and scope expansion, allowing users to define a data-aware scope ranging from a single ma
arXiv:2607.25131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empirical user studies are essential for evaluating visual encodings and can reveal perceptual and cognitive mechanisms, but they do not by themselves provide causal, predictive accounts of interpretation errors. Evaluations are therefore often post hoc: they measure performance after a design has been specified rather than predicting how attention, uncertainty, memory, and bias may produce accurate or erroneous judgments. To address this mechanistic gap, we translate a cognitive theory of visualization interpretation into executable simulation using Active Inference, a probabilistic framework for perception, learning, and action. We model chart reading as dynamic visual search in which agents update beliefs and choose actions that balance uncertainty reduction against cognitive effort. As a proof of concept, we implement Fast, heuristic (Type 1) and Slow, analytic (Type 2) agents for a bar-chart average-estimation task. The Fast agent is
arXiv:2607.25124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Urban decision-making requires integrating heterogeneous spatial data. While current GIS tools handle geometric computation efficiently, they lack the semantic reasoning to guide complex workflows. Analysts manually manage data discovery, spatial boundaries, and measurement semantics, risking aggregation errors. We present UrbanTrace, a visual analytics system that transforms manual spatial data-wrangling into a transparent, node-based collaborative workflow with context-aware AI agents. Using an offline profiler to extract semantic and geometric metadata, UrbanTrace grounds LLMs in real-world data distributions. This enables specialized agents to retrieve datasets based on high-level goals and automatically enforce valid spatial aggregations. To make harmonization explicit, three interactive views: an Integration Provenance Graph, Multivariate Priority Map, and Spatial Delta Map, allow users to explore how conclusions shift across spatia
arXiv:2607.25096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spaced repetition systems (SRS) have demonstrated robust effects on long-term retention, yet existing tools reduce the flashcard interaction to a single binary gesture: flip and self-rate. This impoverished interaction model fails to leverage decades of cognitive science evidence on retrieval practice, and requires learners to context-switch out of their reading flow to create cards manually. We present Memdora, a cross-platform AI spaced repetition system that addresses these limitations through four contributions: (1) a taxonomy of 17 cognitively-grounded interaction types across three learning categories -- Language (6 types), By Heart (1 type with 3 retrieval modes), and Exam (10 types) -- each mapped to peer-reviewed cognitive science evidence displayed on every card; (2) a unified AI generation pipeline that collapses card creation to a single gesture at the point of reading across web, mobile, and three browser extensions (Chrome,
arXiv:2607.25084v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive electrical muscle stimulation (EMS) has revealed its promise as a portable interface for force-feedback. However, while much ink has been spilled about the advantages of EMS, few have investigated one of its central limitations: the need to attach electrodes to users. This has dramatically limited the application of EMS, especially in brief interactions or physical assistance with tools. To explore an alternative, we propose embedding electrodes (and stimulator) inside objects that the user interacts with. This is made possible because we identified multiple novel electrode placements that can elicit four distinct finger movements from the palm (no forearm stimulation). To illustrate this new way of implementing electrical muscle stimulation, we developed a set of self-contained interactive objects that use capacitive sensing to determine if a user's hand is in poses conducive to stimulation and then actuate the fingers from c
arXiv:2607.25047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended Reality (XR) is increasingly used in human-robot interaction to communicate robot intent, planned motion, reachability, and state. We argue that XR should also be understood as a mediation layer for situated human control in human-robot teaming. Situated human control denotes the human collaborator's ability to understand, shape, authorize, and interrupt robot action within the concrete physical, social, and temporal context in which that action unfolds. We ground this perspective in scenarios from robot-assisted bedside nursing, multi-arm supervisory control, and collaborative assembly under divided attention. Across these scenarios, robot autonomy must remain inspectable and adjustable as people move, goals change, sensing is incomplete, control roles shift, and plans become invalid. We identify four mediation functions connecting human intent and robot autonomy, robot plans and human judgment, levels of shared control, and tea
arXiv:2607.24761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research on human-AI interaction has long framed verification of system outputs as a trust-contingent behavior that better-calibrated trust should reduce. We test this assumption in everyday human-chatbot interaction through a mixed-methods survey of 153 frequent chatbot users. Contrary to the canonical prediction, we find no detectable association between trust and verification, with the result robust across sensitivity analyses. Three further user-side practices - refinement, correction, and approval before automated actions - are widely endorsed and positively associated with satisfaction. The data reveal a substantive distinction between evaluative oversight (trust-decoupled, weakly tied to satisfaction) and interventionist oversight (weakly trust-correlated, strongly tied to satisfaction). A medium-to-large satisfaction-control gap shows that effective task outcomes do not produce a felt sense of agency. Qualitative findings identify
arXiv:2607.24756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What gets lost when memory becomes media? Diaspora oral-history interviews require a double transformation; first-person recollection to third-person scene, present interview room to past time and place. When generative AI performs this transformation, no agreed criteria for success exist. We derive success conditions from oral-history theory, design 15 metrics around three failure modes, and compare a Multi-Agent Scene-decomposition pipeline (MAS) with a Single Summarization Pipeline (SSP) across 82 interviews from diaspora communities, spanning from oral interviews to 6-image sequences. Scene-planning and narrative preservation conflict in the majority of cases, and the narrative-structure strength of the source testimony is the primary predictor of this conflict. We propose a failure-mode-based evaluation framework, an empirical analysis of conflict conditions, and a routing protocol for system selection based on narrative-structure st
arXiv:2607.24754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to provide mental health support, requiring reliable evaluation of safety, empathy, and therapeutic appropriateness. However, existing mental health benchmarks are difficult to reproduce and compare due to inconsistent evaluation designs and metric definitions. We present CARE-MH, a unified framework for comparable and reproducible evaluation of mental health LLMs. Using CARE-MH, we reproduce and analyze state-of-the-art benchmarks, revealing that reproducibility depends strongly on model stability and that cross-benchmark disagreement primarily arises from differences in metric definitions. Our findings highlight the need for standardized evaluation configurations and shared metric definitions for future mental health LLM benchmarks.
arXiv:2607.24753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although directive prompting is the predominant way to interact with Large Language Models (LLMs), many creative practices rely on language that is open-ended, associative, phonaesthetic, symbolic, and that unfolds across multiple temporalities. In this work, we explore how creative practitioners might work with AI systems when language is treated not merely as instruction but as material. We conducted an ecological two-week study with four creative practitioners using a design probe: the Memetic Mixer, a tangible interactive device that constrains interaction with an LLM. Analysis of post-study interviews and device logs identified distinct modes of material language use and temporalities that shaped each participant's engagement with AI and their creative practice. We reflect on these findings and contribute design considerations that support open-ended interaction with AI in creative practice.
arXiv:2607.24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in deep generative models, with their capacity to yield outputs that are both visually appealing and semantically coherent, have served to further intricate the nexus between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and creativity. This integration of these models into creative disciplines, most notably within the domain of design, has been rapidly escalating. Nevertheless, a prevailing gap remains in our understanding of the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) on design creativity. To address this gap, a longitudinal study was initiated, encompassing the development of a user-friendly GenAI interface. This interface was designed to facilitate the integration of GenAI models into design education, following a cyclical process of experimentation and refinement. The study involved the utilization of GenAI models in design studios, the collection of feedback, the development and evaluation of the GAI-A platform, and
arXiv:2607.24751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In creative domains where the labor of articulation is central to the craft, how should we design Tools for Thought that enhance rather than bypass human cognition? Current GenAI paradigms often prioritize "cognitive offloading"-writing on behalf of users-risking the erosion of the constructive thought process essential to artistic training. In this position paper, we explore AI as a Maieutic Partner through "Generative Refusal"-strategically withholding text generation to demand user articulation. We discuss Actor's Note, a journaling tool that generates context-aware questions instead of draft text. Our field study suggests that this constraint significantly reduced cognitive burden while fostering a residual effect of internalized questioning habits. We use these findings to discuss broader design implications for protecting human cognition against the tendency of generative efficiency.
arXiv:2607.24746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humanoid robots are increasingly deployed in industrial environments where close physical interaction with human workers is expected. Although these systems are often designed at a human scale, their embodiment is shaped by mechanical, control, and task-oriented constraints rather than biological anatomy. This study examines ergonomic risk in human-humanoid collaboration from an anthropometric perspective using ISO 7250 as a reference framework. Six contemporary humanoid robots are benchmarked based on externally observable geometry to evaluate landmark identifiability, measurement feasibility, and cross-platform patterns of anthropometric deviation. Results show that several ISO-defined landmarks and measurements tied to biological anatomy are consistently inapplicable to humanoid robots, while many geometric and joint-level dimensions remain measurable. Four recurring patterns of anthropometric deviation are observed across platforms: a
arXiv:2601.14429v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open science initiatives have strengthened scientific integrity and accelerated research progress across many fields, but the state of their practice within transportation research remains under-investigated. Key features of open science, defined here as data and code availability, are difficult to extract due to the inherent complexity of the field. Previous work has either been limited to small-scale studies due to the labor-intensive nature of manual analysis or has relied on large-scale bibliometric approaches that sacrifice contextual richness. This paper introduces an automatic and scalable feature-extraction pipeline to measure code and data availability in transportation research. We employ Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task and validate their performance against a manually curated dataset and through an inter-rater agreement analysis. We applied this pipeline to examine 10,724 research articles published in the
arXiv:2508.05775v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized content creation across digital platforms, offering unprecedented capabilities in natural language generation and understanding. Meanwhile, they pose risks by inadvertently producing toxic, offensive, or biased content. This dual role of LLMs, both as powerful tools for text generation and as potential sources of harmful language, presents a pressing sociotechnical challenge. In this survey, we systematically review recent studies encompassing unintentional toxicity, adversarial jailbreak attacks, and comprehensive mitigation strategies. We explore LLMs' dual role as both generators of harm and enablers of safety through detection, classification, content moderation, and prevention. We propose a unified taxonomy of LLM-related harms and defenses, analyze emerging multimodal and LLM-assisted jailbreak strategies, and assess mitigation efforts, including reinforcement learning with
arXiv:2508.03037v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artists occupy a paradoxical position in generative AI. Their own work trains models that now compete with them, replicate their styles, and reshape the creative economy they inhabit. Yet whether artist concerns achieve proportional representation in the public discourse that shapes AI governance remains an open empirical question. We mapped the semantic landscape of public AI-art discourse from 2013 to 2025, drawing on 1,736 text chunks from news, podcasts, legal filings, and research, and projected 252 US-based practising artists' survey responses, captured across 70 unique frames spanning five concern dimensions, into the same space. We identify what we term semantic compression, the systematic narrowing of a diverse set of stakeholder concerns into a narrow region of public meaning-space. Compression is selective. Nearly all artist statements concentrate in just two of twenty discourse topics, while most of the remaining dis
arXiv:2311.18424v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Developing artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for healthcare is a collaborative effort, bringing data scientists, clinicians, patients and other stakeholders together. By understanding AI as 'sociotechnical' where the social and the technical nature of the work and the models are inseparable, we explore the AI development workflow and how stakeholders navigate the challenges and tensions of sharing and generating knowledge across disciplines. We conducted an inductive thematic analysis of 13 semi-structured interviews with participants in early stages of AI-in-healthcare research consortia in the UK. Our findings identify that participants needed to adapt both the tools used for sharing and the information communicated according to their audience, particularly when working with those with a clinical or patient perspective. We identify the novelty of participating in AI research, how AI knowledge is shared, and the inclusion
arXiv:2604.03881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Encouraging pro-environmental behavior remains a major challenge for sustainable cities. Conventional feedback nudges can show individuals how their current behavior compares with environmental goals but often provide limited guidance on what to do differently in daily life. This study examines whether supplementing weekly feedback on participants' behavior with LLM-generated personalized action suggestions improves pro-environmental behavior, using daily electricity and hot-water conservation as a case study. We developed an LLM agent that generated weekly conservation messages from participant profiles, recent consumption records, and prior interaction history, combining a usage report with personalized suggestions, behavioral-change scenarios, and estimated savings. The agent was evaluated in a three-arm randomized field experiment with 233 university residents in Beijing from November 2024 to January 2025. Participants received te
arXiv:2602.08554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This workshop paper examines challenges in designing agentic AI systems from a citizen-centric perspective. Drawing on three participatory workshops conducted in 2025 with members of the general public and cross-sector stakeholders, we explore how societal values and expectations shape visions of future AI agents. Using constructive design research methods, participants engaged in storytelling and lo-fi prototyping to reflect on potential community impacts. We identify three key challenges: enabling meaningful and sustained public engagement, establishing a shared language between experts and lay participants, and translating speculative participant input into implementable systems. We argue that reflexive, long-term participation is essential for responsible and actionable citizen-centric AI development.
arXiv:2507.11548v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The use of publicly available generative AI systems for resume evaluation is often justified by the assumption that these tools reduce bias relative to human judgment. However, this framing leaves a prior question unresolved: whether these systems are capable of performing the evaluative task at all. This study presents a two-part audit of eight widely used AI platforms used for resume screening. Drawing on the concept of the Illusion of Neutrality, the study examines cases in which systems appear demographically unbiased because they lack the ability to meaningfully differentiate among candidates. Experiment 1 evaluates racial and gender bias using matched fictitious resumes and finds that bias persists in context-dependent and intersectional forms. Some models penalize candidates for the presence of demographic signals, while others exhibit inconsistent patterns across roles and identities under controlled conditions. Experiment 2 e
arXiv:2607.26034v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Technological races create tension between speed and safety: actors may gain by moving faster than competitors, even when risky development is harmful. This is prominent in debates about artificial intelligence (AI), where competitive pressure is often argued to incentivise riskier, less safety-conscious development. We study this using a framed behavioural experiment based on an idealised AI race, in which paired participants repeatedly chose between Safe and Unsafe development under an uncertain time horizon. Unsafe development gave faster progress and higher immediate payoffs but accumulated private risk up to a treatment-specific maximum of 10\%, 60\%, or 90\%; the race's competitive structure was held constant, and only this maximum risk varied. Neither the pre-registered comparison between risk levels nor the role of elicited risk preferences was supported by the data. Instead, exploratory analyses motivated by the task's repeated
arXiv:2607.25974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Observed standardized test scores are the result of an endogenous process: students strategically allocate effort across multiple retake attempts to improve their outcomes. Because students differ in their ability to make these investments, the interaction between applicant strategy and institutional scoring rules---such as the widely used Single-Sitting and Superscoring policies---can disparately distort observed scores. We develop a strategic framework where students allocate effort in response to different scoring policies. We show that Superscoring---the practice of combining the best section scores across attempts---introduces systematic score inflation through order-statistic selection over noise draws. This degrades signal accuracy and amplifies wealth-based disparities by disproportionately rewarding applicants who can afford repeated testing. Conversely, Single-Sitting---which keeps the best overall score rather than section-le
arXiv:2607.25953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLMs increasingly mediate the political information citizens rely on, there is still no standardized way to assess whether they do so responsibly. We introduce Polistemics, a theory-grounded benchmark for evaluating LLMs as mediators of political information in elections. Prior work has treated this task as reproduction rather than mediation, leaving its epistemic dimensions and interaction with imperfect information unaddressed. We ground the evaluation in Epistemic Modesty, a normative standard derived from citizens' epistemic agency, and test it across controlled settings that vary informational properties such as clarity, noise, and consistency. Applying the benchmark to three state-of-the-art LLMs on the 2025 German and Dutch elections, we find that high aggregate scores mask systematic failures. Models mediate reliably under clear evidence but break down under absent, vague, or contradictory information, while flattening the in
arXiv:2607.25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning has made it cheap and easy to customize open-weight image generation models for specific tasks, including the production of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Existing moderation relies on metadata or generated outputs, but metadata can be deceptive and generating outputs may itself be unacceptable or illegal. We show that a safer signal lives in the weights. The top-left singular vectors of a LoRA's updates form a compact, inference-free fingerprint ($u_1$) of its strongest learned change. Using human-subject age as a benign proxy for CSAM, we find that $u_1$ identifies what a LoRA was trained on, generalizes across base models, and abstains on unrelated benign content. The signal is robust to additive weight noise, rescaling, and precision reduction. These results indicate that harmful LoRAs could be screened directly from their weights without relying on metadata or generating harmful outputs.
arXiv:2607.25458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Resilience denotes the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and to recover from them. We distinguish between two different types of dynamics. The first allows for a separation between phases of normalcy and phases of rapid breakdown followed by slow recovery. The second applies to volatile organizations in which such phases are intertwined. Breakdown is often self-inflicted. Situation awareness is impaired by psychological mechanisms that lead to incorrect expectations regarding societal dynamics. Through positive feedback, the failure of a few elements is amplified into a failure cascade. However, positive feedback can also be harnessed to enable recovery. In volatile systems, resilience must be understood as an emergent property arising from the interaction of agents. This necessitates a data-driven approach to inform agent-based models, drawing on repositories, knowledge graphs, or tools from artificial intelligence. Such models
arXiv:2607.25425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are among cybersecurity's most effective training grounds, developing practical skill across cryptography, web exploitation, and binary exploitation. Large language models (LLMs) can now solve a growing share of challenges with minimal human input, raising urgent questions about fairness, the validity of rankings, and whether participation still delivers the learning that justifies the effort. This paper reports a mixed-methods study of LLM impact on modern CTFs, combining a synthesis of published benchmarks, including a recent government evaluation, case studies of live competition across three challenge categories, structured observation of the public channels where the community debates AI use, and semi-structured interviews with experienced players and organisers. We map the current human-machine capability boundary by category, showing that easy and intermediate challenges in cryptography, web, a
arXiv:2607.25057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As conversational AI systems become increasingly integrated into daily life, their potential effects on user well-being require ongoing attention. While consumer-facing generalist models can provide benefits, including improved access to information, learning, productivity, self-reflection, and companionship, they also introduce risks, such as emotional entanglement, unhealthy dependence, and the amplification of psychological vulnerabilities. Drawing on prior research and empirical observations of AI chatbot behavior, we propose a set of aspirational directions for guiding the behavior of general-purpose AI systems in ways that may reduce potential psychological harms and support user well-being. We acknowledge the difficulty of systematically assessing the long-term impacts of AI chatbot use and frame these directions as hypotheses for studying how AI behavior may influence users across general interactions, role-playing scenarios, an
arXiv:2607.25010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted production has sharply reduced the cost and team size required to ship a video game, producing a supply shock on open marketplaces. Recent estimates put Steam release volume at roughly sixty new titles per day, with median per-title revenue for a large share of releases falling below the platform's own submission fee [1]. This paper asks whether the resulting oversupply constitutes an emerging market crash or a structural correction, and what discovery infrastructure the market will require as a consequence. We first quantify the 2010-2026 supply shock using a 93,073-title Steam metadata snapshot, a 200,000-interaction Steam user-behavior dataset, and itch.io catalog data, computing attention-concentration metrics directly (Gini coefficient of 0.96 over playtime, with the top 1 percent of titles absorbing 73.5 percent of total play hours), and we introduce generative asset-model release velocity on Hugging Face as a candidat
arXiv:2607.24775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are increasingly deployed in domains where empathy is essential, including healthcare, education, and customer service. However, their capacity to sustain authentic human moments remains structurally limited. This paper introduces two interlinked conceptual models to explain and address this limitation. First, the Human-Moment Gap Framework (HMGF) identifies three structural empathy deficits in AI-mediated interaction: affective surfaceism (emotional imitation without depth), memory fragmentation (lack of relational continuity), and moral framing mismatch (efficiency prioritised over dignity). Second, the paper develops the Empathy Displacement Theory (EDT), which explains how AI-simulated empathy can progressively substitute, distort, and displace genuine human empathy across individual, relational, and organisational contexts. HMGF serves as the causal foundation of EDT by demonstrating how techni
arXiv:2607.24768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prenatal care is an important preventive service designed to improve outcomes for pregnant individuals. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recently introduced guidelines advocating tailored prenatal care, called PATH (Plan for Tailored Healthcare). We present PATHFinder Agent(Planner for Appropriate Tailored Healthcare), an end-to-end conversational agentic system that gathers patient health and social context through structured dialogue, curates individualized prenatal care plans aligned with PATH guidelines, and surfaces community resources from Michigan 211. The system features a four-stage workflow spanning patient intake, dynamic interaction, plan synthesis, and clinician oversight. We evaluate frontier large language models (LLMs) on expert-curated rubrics across five clinical dimensions, finding that GPT-5.2 achieves the highest average score (77.6\%) while identifying key gaps in antenatal testing rec