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:2608.00146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce DiffusionGemma, an experimental open-weight language model that uses discrete diffusion to generate text at exceptionally high speed. Rather than decoding one token at a time, DiffusionGemma iteratively refines blocks of 256 tokens in parallel, avoiding the sequential decoding bottleneck of conventional autoregressive (AR) large language models. Instead of training from scratch, we obtain DiffusionGemma by fine-tuning the mixture-of-experts Gemma 4 model with 3.8B activated and 25.2B total parameters. Our compute-efficient two-stage training pipeline uses fewer than 10% of the starting AR model's total training token budget. The first stage uses supervised fine-tuning to teach bidirectional denoising, while the second stage combines reinforcement learning with sampler distillation to jointly improve generation quality and inference efficiency. DiffusionGemma establishes a new Pareto frontier for the trade-off between generati
arXiv:2608.00123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-native advertising embeds sponsored content directly into model-generated responses, shifting the unit of sale from a fixed slot to a moment within an evolving conversation. Existing LLM ad-auction mechanisms primarily operate within a single response, settling the winner but not the timing. The extension is nontrivial: with one native insertion opportunity per session, the stopping time depends on bids, coupling timing with allocation, so static truthfulness arguments no longer apply. We propose the LLM-based Optimal Stopping Dynamic Auction (LLM-OSDA), a dynamic cost-per-click auction that integrates Bellman optimal stopping, winner allocation, and envelope pricing. A bid-independent LLM layer estimates contextual click quality and seamlessly renders the winning ad, while bids enter only the committed auction mechanism. Under an exact Bellman oracle, the expected discounted-click allocation is monotone in each advertiser's bid, and
arXiv:2608.00059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of connectome mapping now shifts the challenge of understanding the nervous system to the interpretation of neural circuits. Here, we devise a new automated method, LLantia (LLM automated neural circuit inference and analysis), to systematically infer neural circuit function and the role of its component neural cell types. Our approach distills descriptions of cell type function from the literature and, in combination with the connectome, then infers the function for all other cell types, which serves as a basis for subsequent neural circuit function inference. Results are structured hierarchically, with different possible circuit functions organised under multiple possible behavioural and physiological contexts, and each circuit function composed of subcircuit descriptions alongside relevant cell types to facilitate both backtracking to known, published information and support further experimental research. We illustrate our
arXiv:2608.00045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study shows that textual descriptors alone can predict early-stage startup success, defined as Exit, without relying on contextual, financial, or human capital variables. Using venture capital-curated datasets covering 7,419 startups over 20 years, the research isolates text-based framing variables and engineers 850 features through startup narrative mapping. Data subsets and vector embeddings are evaluated for statistical significance, followed by supervised machine learning experiments across six models. LightGBM achieved the highest predictive performance (F1 = 0.48), while textual descriptors alone achieved F1 = 0.30, confirming the standalone predictive value of founder narratives. Feature analysis shows that optimized densities of hyping markers, including adjectives, jargon, and buzzwords, are associated with higher Exit probability, whereas excessive statement or name length reduces it. The study also introduces a quantifiabl
arXiv:2608.00042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain adaptation of small language models (SLMs) has emerged as a practical strategy for deploying capable NLP systems in resource-constrained, high-stakes environments including healthcare, legal services, and financial analysis. While performance gains from parameter-efficient fine-tuning are well characterised, the corresponding impact on trustworthiness (factual calibration and adversarial robustness) remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first systematic cross-domain, cross-architecture empirical study quantifying the trustworthiness cost of domain adaptation across three SLM architectures (TinyLlama 1B, Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), three domains (healthcare, legal, finance), two training-data conditions (benign and adversarially perturbed), and four fine-tuning strategies (baseline LoRA, Safety-DPO, Dark Experience Replay, and Task Arithmetic LoRA, TA-LoRA). Trustworthiness is evaluated through TruthfulQA MC2 (factual ca
arXiv:2608.00036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world document tasks often ask professionals to answer questions from annual reports, regulations, clinical guidelines, and technical manuals that span hundreds or thousands of pages. Some questions also require comparing related reports. Reliable long-document understanding is therefore a prerequisite for using LLMs in compliance, clinical, financial, and engineering workflows, where decisions must be traceable to specific evidence pages and the cost of an unsupported answer is high -- yet most existing benchmarks still measure short-context or single-page QA. We introduce XL-DocBench, a fully human-verified benchmark for extra-long document understanding, with 1,519 retained questions from six professional domains and contexts up to 2,303 pages. XL-DocBench goes beyond page-level lookup. 1,103 examples (72.6\%) use multiple evidence pages. The final set also includes 556 questions (36.6\%) that use tables, charts, or figures, and 1
arXiv:2608.00030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Specialised retrieval agents typically surface higher quality results than general-purpose search, but selecting the optimal agent for a given query remains an open problem. Current approaches route queries based on inferred topic or intent, however intent-based selection is fundamentally limited: it does not incorporate signal from retrieved content, and cannot detect when a topically aligned agent produces low-relevance results. We address this by training a small language model via supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning to jointly perform agent selection and structured parameter generation for downstream tool calls, using a hierarchical reward function grounded in retrieval relevance along with query-agent topic alignment. This enables the model to learn task-dependent agent suitability from retrieval performance: which agents reliably yield high-relevance results for which query distributions, and when to redirect q
arXiv:2608.00024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although diffusion models have revolutionized continuous domains like image synthesis through high quality generations and controllable guidance mechanisms, bringing this controllability to the discrete, sequential nature of text remains an open challenge. Meanwhile, current sampling strategies and guidance methods adjust token likelihoods without capturing the broader semantic landscape, leading to a suboptimal balance between fidelity and diversity. In this work, we introduce a novel training-free Semantic-Aware Kernel Entropy (SAKE) guidance method. Our method computes the order-2 R\'enyi entropy over a kernel Gram matrix that captures both cross-token semantic interactions and relative token positions. By linearizing this objective in the embedding space, we derive a tractable guidance signal that dynamically adjusts the sampling distribution, flattening it to encourage exploration during redundancy and sharpening it for fidelity when
arXiv:2608.00023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social simulations built from language-model agents need role-conditioned behavior that can be checked before agents are placed into a simulated population. We introduce an activation-steering screening workflow for role-conditioned agents: define a role profile, extract a role-specific direction, sweep four steering coefficients, evaluate role-profile alignment, and pass or flag each candidate configuration. On OLMo-3-7B-Instruct, we apply the workflow to a mixed 275-role inventory with 228 role-agnostic questions, GPT-4.1-mini prompted role references, and GPT-4.1-mini judges. Role-specific directions receive higher judged role-profile alignment than an assistant-axis directional control from prior persona-vector work, with mean overall scores of 63.2 versus 41.1 across the tested grid. They also preserve high lexical diversity, while the control drops sharply at larger coefficients. The role-level screen is the main practical output: m
arXiv:2608.00013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Choosing the right large language model (LLM) backbone is the most consequential decision when building a vision-language model (VLM), yet it remains fundamentally unprincipled: compute-based scaling laws fail to generalize across model families, and no framework exists for directly predicting VLM performance before training begins. We propose the Capability-Driven Multimodal Scaling Law, the first cross-family framework that predicts VLM benchmark accuracy from directly observable textual capability. Given a low-dimensional capability score $S$ extracted from LLM textual benchmarks via PCA, we model VLM performance as a function of $S$, with a per-backbone transfer rate and an absorption rate that quantifies data-scaling efficiency. To fit and validate the framework, we train over 150 VLMs on 34 LLMs spanning 7 model families under a strictly controlled recipe. Evaluations on more than 200 textual and 50 multimodal benchmarks show that t
arXiv:2608.00011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current text-to-speech systems face a trade-off: autoregres- sive codec language models produce highly intelligible speech but require large-scale models and training data and decode tokens sequentially, while non-autoregressive approaches im- prove speed at the cost of linguistic accuracy. We present DLLM-TTS, a framework that formulates TTS as conditional block discrete diffusion over X-Codec2 neural audio codec to- kens. The model decomposes sequences into blocks and applies masked diffusion within each block while processing blocks se- quentially, learning both local acoustic coherence and global text-speech alignment. During inference, parallel token pre- diction within blocks enables efficient generation with a real- time factor (RTF) of 0.15. A 0.6B-parameter model trained on 20K hours achieves competitive performance on the Seed- TTS-eval benchmark, demonstrating that block discrete diffu- sion language models enable practical and
arXiv:2608.00009v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory remains a critical bottleneck for conversational AI agents, whose finite context windows cannot support coherent recall across thousands of turns. We present AgentMemBench, a unified, reproducible benchmark evaluating five memory management strategies under identical conditions: in-context windowing (ICW), external key-value store (EKV), graph-based episodic memory (GEM), compression-based summarisation (CBS), and web-augmented memory (WAM). All are assessed across three public datasets covering long-term multi-session dialogue (LoCoMo), task-oriented document grounding (MultiDoc2Dial), and persona-grounded multi-session chat (MSC), using Recall@k, MRR, nDCG@k, Answer F1, an LLM-judge Faithfulness score, Memory Footprint, and Latency over 491 annotated question turns. Generation and judging both use Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (4-bit), with greedy decoding for determinism. Our results show that (1) EKV dominates on every quality
arXiv:2608.00007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with human-like personas is crucial for agentic applications, such as role-play and user simulation. Traditional prompt-based methods rely on descriptive conditioning by injecting static textual profiles, which often makes agents show generic behaviors due to a lack of realistic life memory. To fill this gap, we introduce memory-based conditioning, a paradigm inspired by the cognitive psychology, which replaces abstract profiles with an autobiographical memory base, enabling frozen LLMs to dynamically retrieve situation-relevant memory to guide their behaviors. We formalize its enabling task as customized lifelong memory synthesis and propose MemoryForge, a novel framework to synthesize such lifelong memory from brief target personas. MemoryForge has three key components: a context generator for socio-historical grounding, a life organizer for developmental coherence toward the target identity, and a
arXiv:2608.00005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Peer review at major venues is under unprecedented submission pressure, motivating the use of large language models (LLMs) as review assistants. Existing LLM-based reviewers, however, face two structural limitations. First, they map manuscripts directly to reviews, leaving the underlying rubric implicit and entangling its derivation with the judgement. Second, the prevailing paradigms each capture only half of a good review: training-free agents gather broad evidence but produce undirected critiques, while training-based reviewers inherit human discriminative judgement together with its noise and uneven coverage. We introduce RubricReviewer, a fully rubric-driven framework that addresses both limitations. It makes rubric generation an explicit intermediate step, so that both review generation and the final assessment are conditioned on paper-adaptive rubrics. It further combines a training-free agent (Scout) that gathers external evidence
arXiv:2608.00004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grading natural-language mathematical proofs is a recurring cost in evaluating math-reasoning systems, and frontier LLM judges are expensive. We ask whether cheap open-weight models can serve as reliable judges given a candidate proof, a ground-truth proof, and a human-grading rubric. On a 200-instance validation sample of IMO-GradingBench, three cheap judges (GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek-V4 Flash, Gemma-4 31B) agree with human pass/fail decisions at rates statistically indistinguishable from Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, at up to $100\times$ lower cost. We had expected a majority vote of the three to be the best budget option; it matched the frontier but did not improve on its strongest member. Extending to the full 1000-instance benchmark and exploring consensus rules, we found that requiring unanimous agreement (all-three-pass) reaches the highest pass-agreement and precision and, on four replicate runs, the smallest run-to-run spread.
arXiv:2606.13485v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe rehabilitation is an interaction-dynamics problem: the controller must regulate a prescribed motion while absorbing involuntary spasm, voluntary effort, actuator compliance, and model mismatch as disturbances. This paper instantiates the predictive interaction-dynamics framework of the base pHRI formulation on a SEA knee joint. SEA feedforward reduces the gravity-compensated knee to the same scalar double integrator as the base framework, while a dynamic-residual measurement from spring deflection supplies an interaction-disturbance observation. A steady-state target converts the estimated disturbance into a cancelling input, and a finite-horizon quadratic program regulates deviations from that target under range-of-motion, torque, and velocity constraints. The evaluation matches stiffness and damping across controllers so gains cannot be attributed to higher impedance. Under a motion-opposing $15\unit{Nm}$ step, classical
arXiv:2606.04987v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-party dialogue is a critical setting for studying collaborative reasoning and decision-making, yet existing datasets rarely focus on structured, reasoning-intensive tasks. We introduce DeliChess, a dataset of group deliberation dialogues in which participants collaboratively solve multiple-choice chess puzzles. Participants first answer independently, then engage in multi-party deliberation and revise their individual answers. The dataset comprises 107 dialogues with full transcripts, pre- and post-deliberation choices, and utterance-level annotations of communicative function, epistemic stance, and usefulness for supporting deliberation. Our analyses show that greater diversity in initial solution quality is associated with larger gains, while answer trajectories reveal how deliberation can recover, discover, or lose strong answers. Cases in which groups surpass every independent answer are associated with sustained reaso
arXiv:2605.14941v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are highly susceptible to artifacts, resulting in a low signal-to-noise ratio, which makes extraction of meaningful neural information challenging. Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) is one of the most widely used artifact filtering techniques in EEG-based BCI applications, owing to its real-time applicability. ASR reconstructs artifact-free signals by operating in Principal Component (PC) space within sliding windows. However, ASR performance is critically sensitive to its threshold parameter -- an incorrect threshold risks removing task-relevant neural features alongside artifacts. Furthermore, since PCs are linear combinations of all channels, subspace reconstruction in PC space may alter the underlying data structure, potentially discarding essential neural information. To address these limitations, we propose nASR, a novel end-to-end trainable Keras layer that jointly optimizes artifac
arXiv:2605.14883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is a prevalent condition that remains difficult to diagnose in its early stages. Oculomotor dysfunction is a well-established marker of mTBI, motivating the development of portable tools that capture both eye-movement behavior and underlying neurophysiology. In this work, we present an initial framework that integrates electroencephalogram (EEG) with augmented-reality (AR)-based Vestibular/Ocular Motor Screening (VOMS) tasks to estimate subject-specific ocular response times. Pre-processed EEG signals, obtained through band-pass filtering and average referencing, are analyzed using a Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT)-driven deep neural framework. The RDWT coefficients are subjected to trainable zero-phase convolutional filtering and reconstructed into the time domain via inverse RDWT, followed by channel-wise temporal and spatial filtering using 2D convolution layers and convolutional
arXiv:2605.04227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Procedural tasks with multiple ordered steps are ubiquitous in daily life. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enabled personal assistants that support daily activities. However, existing systems primarily provide reactive guidance triggered by user queries, or limited proactive assistance for isolated short-term events rather than long-horizon procedural tasks. In this work, we introduce Pro$^2$Assist, a step-aware proactive assistant that continuously tracks fine-grained task progress and reasons over the user's evolving state to provide timely assistance throughout tasks. Pro$^2$Assist leverages multimodal data from augmented reality (AR) glasses to achieve motion-based perception. It then extracts step-oriented procedural context from multi-scale temporal dynamics and task-specific expert knowledge. Based on both sensory input and procedural context, Pro$^2$Assist performs continuous reasoning to
arXiv:2604.08888v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI development is embracing open-source paradigm, but the fundamental distinction between AI models and traditional software artifacts may lead to a divergent open-source development paradigm with different collaborative practices, which remains unexplored. We therefore bridge the knowledge gap by quantifying and characterizing the differences in the collaborative development paradigms of traditional open source software (OSS) and open source AI models (OSM), and investigating the underlying factors that may drive these distinctions. We collect 1,428,792 OSS repositories from GitHub and 1,440,527 OSM repositories from HF Hub, and conduct comprehensive statistical, social network and content analyses to measure and understand the differences in collaboration intensity, collaboration openness, and user innovation across the two development paradigms, complementing these quantitative results with semi-structured interviews. In cons
arXiv:2602.01347v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Millions of users turn to consumer AI chatbots to discuss emotional, behavioral, and mental-health concerns, creating an urgent need for rigorous and scalable safety evaluations. Here we introduce SIM-VAIL, a clinically validated framework for auditing chatbot behavior in mental-health contexts. SIM-VAIL simulates users with specific psychiatric vulnerabilities and conversational intents, engages them in multi-turn conversations with frontier AI chatbots (including Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and Llama models), and scores each exchange across 13 clinically grounded risk dimensions. Across 810 conversations, spanning 9 target chatbots and 30 simulated user profiles, concerning behavior in target chatbots was widespread, albeit reduced in newer models. Concerning behavior varied by user vulnerability and conversational intent, accumulated over turns, and could be reduced by interventions at early escalation points. Risk was high
arXiv:2601.20487v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into human groups raises questions about how they influence cooperative social norms. Prior work has examined human-AI and human-robot teaming in small groups, but less is known about whether an AI label alters cooperation and norm-related outcomes in repeated group interactions. We report an online experiment using a repeated four-player Public Goods Game. Each group comprised three human participants and one bot, framed either as human or AI, following one of three predefined strategies: unconditional cooperation, conditional cooperation, or free-riding. Among 236 participants, cooperation was primarily associated with the group's contribution in the previous round and with participants' own previous contributions. These patterns were similar across human- and AI-labelled conditions, and cooperation levels did not differ significantly by agent label; a formal equivalence
arXiv:2507.03156v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model assistants (LLM-assistants) present new opportunities to transform software development. Developers are increasingly adopting these tools across tasks, including coding, testing, debugging, documentation, and design. Yet, despite growing interest, there is no synthesis of how LLM-assistants affect software developer productivity. In this paper, we present a systematic review and mapping of 39 peer-reviewed studies published between January 2014 and December 2024 that examine this impact. Our analysis reveals that the majority of studies report considerable benefits from LLM-assistants, though a notable subset identifies critical risks. Commonly reported gains include accelerated development, minimized code search, and the automation of trivial and repetitive tasks. However, studies also highlight concerns around cognitive offloading and reduced team collaboration. Our study reveals that whether LLM-based ass
arXiv:2505.20894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite recognized limitations in modeling long-range temporal dependencies, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has traditionally relied on a sliding window approach to segment labeled datasets. Deep learning models like the DeepConvLSTM typically classify each window independently, restricting learnable temporal context to within-window information and producing fragmented, temporally incoherent activity timelines. To address this constraint, we propose DeepConvContext, a multi-scale time series classification framework for HAR. Drawing inspiration from the vision-based Temporal Action Localization community, DeepConvContext models both intra- and inter-window temporal patterns separately by processing sequences of time-ordered windows. Across six widely-used HAR benchmarks, DeepConvContext achieves an average 5% improvement in F1-score and up to 18-point improvement in mAP over related approaches, while achieving latency and thr
arXiv:2410.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many modern software applications present numerous ethical concerns due to conflicts between users' values and companies' priorities. Intersectional communities, those with multiple marginalized identities, are disproportionately affected by these ethical issues, leading to legal, financial, and reputational consequences for software companies, as well as real-world harm for intersectional users. Historically, the voices of intersectional communities have been systematically marginalized and excluded from contributing their unique perspectives to software design, perpetuating software-related ethical concerns. This work aims to fill the gap in research on intersectional users' software-related perspectives and provide software practitioners with a methodology for analyzing intersectional voices in software ethics discourse. We collected 36,777 posts from over 700 intersectional subreddits discussing software applications and uti
arXiv:2606.02970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intelligent tutoring systems excel at generating explanations but rarely provide principled diagnosis of where and why a learner is wrong. We introduce a misstep-aware coaching capability for Ivy, a neurosymbolic AI coach, built on a two-model architecture that augments a Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) model with a new Pedagogical Model (PM) in the context of an online graduate AI course at Georgia Tech. The PM makes instructor diagnostic knowledge explicit and machine-readable by encoding, for each quiz question and incorrect response, the learner's underlying belief(a brief statement of the incorrect idea or missing knowledge), a TMK locus(the source of the misunderstanding), a misconception type and targeted scaffolding derived from the instructor's Q\&A key. Using quiz questions from the course, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept pipeline that detects and classifies learner errors and generates diagnosis-grounded scaffolding, moving I
arXiv:2602.15631v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Business plan (BP) writing plays a key role in entrepreneurship education by helping learners construct, evaluate, and iteratively refine their ideas. However, conventional BP writing remains a rigid, linear process that often fails to reflect the dynamic and recursive nature of entrepreneurial ideation. This mismatch is particularly challenging for novice entrepreneurial students, who struggle with the substantial cognitive demands of developing and refining ideas. While reflection and meta-reflection are critical strategies for fostering divergent and convergent thinking, existing writing tools rarely scaffold these higher-order processes. To address this gap, we present the Meflex System, a large language model (LLM)-based writing tool that integrates BP writing scaffolding with a nonlinear idea canvas to support iterative ideation through reflection and meta-reflection. We report findings from an exploratory user study with 30 par
arXiv:2504.04198v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As virtual reality (VR) continues to evolve, traditional input methods such as handheld controllers and gesture systems often face challenges with precision, social accessibility, and user fatigue. These limitations motivate the exploration of microgestures, which promise more subtle, ergonomic, and device-free interactions. We introduce microGEXT, a lightweight microgesture-based system designed for text editing in VR without external sensors, which utilizes small, subtle hand movements to reduce physical strain compared to standard gestures. We evaluated microGEXT in three user studies. In Study 1 ($N=20$), microGEXT reduced overall edit time and fatigue compared to a ray-casting + pinch menu baseline, the default text editing approach in commercial VR systems. Study 2 ($N=20$) found that microGEXT performed well in short text selection tasks but was slower for longer text ranges. In Study 3 ($N=10$), participants found microGEXT in
arXiv:2408.09601v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social media platforms continue to change our digital relationships nowadays. Therefore, recognizing the complex consequences of infinite scrolling is essential. This paper explores two distinct angles of social media engagement: mindless scrolling and mindful scrolling. This extensive study dives into numerous aspects of social media user behavior and satisfaction via the perspective of multiple surveys. We investigate the psychological exploit of infinite scrolling design to keep users engaged, illuminating its effect on users' emotional well-being. Furthermore, we explore its diverse effects on various groups, such as teenagers, professional people, and pregnant women, to better understand how digital activity differs throughout life phases. Furthermore, our study reveals the psychological consequences of being exposed to unfavorable news material. In the context of nutritional objectives, we examine the problems users confront as
arXiv:2608.02541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The "doer effect" suggests that actively doing practice activities is more strongly associated with learning outcomes than passively viewing content. In the doer effect literature, "doing" refers specifically to active practice. However, this categorization treats different forms of active practice as equivalent, leaving open whether some types of active practice are more effective than others. In this paper, we investigate whether the doer effect extends to computer science instruction and whether some forms of doing stand out compared to other forms. We analyze log data from 334 students across 11 semesters of introductory and intermediate Java who used an interactive practice system with five content types: Code Writing, Code Tracing, Code Completion, Code Visualizations, and Code Explanations. Consistent with prior doer effect work, we find that active practice activities were associated with 3.2 times better learning outcomes than
arXiv:2608.02083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Closed-loop lower-limb exoskeleton control via Electroencephalography (EEG) remains limited by motion artifacts, low signal-to-noise ratio, and binary gait formulations that fail to capture full cortical gait complexity. We propose a 2-block Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) architecture: a trainable session-specific Feature Extraction Block with real-time artifact suppression and multi-domain feature extraction, coupled with a Decoder Block built on a novel Polynomial Time-Varying Layer (PolyTVL)+LSTM for four-state gait classification (Stand, Initiate, Execute, Terminate). Ablation confirmed v01 (PolyTVL+LSTM) outperformed all variants (validation MCC: 0.435, gap: 0.187), with consistent EEG feature discriminability across ROIs and sub-bands (p<0.05). Closed-loop deployment with v01 achieved 55.3% (Rex-assisted) and 52.7% (volitional) gait initiation success, with a mean prediction time of 70.5~ms (+/-41.5), validating real-time feasibil
arXiv:2608.01843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This brief presents a conductive-textile interconnection scheme for batteryless distributed wearable modules. Two conductive textile layers separated by an insulating fabric layer are used as a transmission line that simultaneously conveys DC power and pulse-based data signals without point-to-point wiring. To minimize the circuit overhead of each module, universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) pulses are directly coupled onto the textile through AC-coupling capacitors without carrier modulation. The textile waveform is modeled as the transient response of a second-order circuit, and design conditions for comparator-based waveform recovery and high-bitrate transmission are analytically derived. The resulting design framework determines whether a given combination of data rate, textile capacitance and resistance is feasible, and also provides the corresponding design range of the decoupling inductors. These results establish a
arXiv:2608.01783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scoring open-ended music analysis responses is time-consuming and requires nuanced judgments of harmonic knowledge and formal understanding. This study evaluates the validity and repeatability of GPT-4o-mini for rubric-based scoring of music analysis essays, using teacher mean scores as the benchmark. A dataset of 300 university-level student responses was scored by teachers on four dimensions: Harmony, Form, Reasoning, and Terminology. GPT-4o-mini scored the same responses using three prompting strategies: few-shot prompting with chain-of-thought reasoning (Fs+CoT), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and self-consistency based on five internal generations per administration (SC). Each strategy was administered three times with the model, prompt, rubric, and response held constant. Single-pass scores represented an operational scoring condition, whereas median aggregation across three runs was used to examine robustness. Agreement wi
arXiv:2608.01724v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group conversations are fundamental to human collaboration, yet standard large language models (LLMs) still struggle with the complexities of multi-party interaction. This challenge persists in part because existing group conversation datasets are often limited to short-term lab settings with contrived tasks, failing to capture the long-term social dynamics of real-world teams. To bridge this gap, we introduce TIDES, a high-resolution longitudinal dataset tracking 12 university project teams over a full semester. Comprising 75,971 utterances in both English and Korean from in-person meetings, TIDES provides a naturalistic record of teams working on self-managed projects. Our socio-structural annotations-covering interaction types, emergent roles, and development stages-allow for modeling of team evolution over months. Experiments show that fine-tuning on TIDES improves next-speaker prediction by 13.8 percentage points over a bigram base
arXiv:2608.01704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A benchmark score means nothing without knowing what a trivial method achieves and what the best possible method could achieve. We construct both bounds for a task with a rare kind of ground truth: predicting which sentences a crowd of readers -- highlighting for their own purposes, unpaid, uninstructed, and blind to each other -- marked in 120 web documents. The floor is naive truncation (lead); the ceiling is a split-half oracle: half the crowd predicting the other half. The gap between them is +0.2028 AP [+0.1698, +0.2342, domain-clustered], and three findings structure it. First, the gap is semantic: position and length features recover 5% of it. Second, frontier language models reach 35-53% of it zero-shot -- far above classical baselines, far below the crowd; a state-of-the-art prompt compressor (LLMLingua-2) lands below the floor, indistinguishable from random selection. Third, an unweighted cross-vendor fusion of five frontier r
arXiv:2608.01042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise AI agents act across many apps whose data changes continuously, so an answer is correct only relative to what data existed and who could see it at the moment it was asked. Offline evaluation today grades against a single static snapshot, effectively the end of the episode. So, it can only evaluate one situation, the final one, even though every earlier moment of the episode is a different situation that invites its own realistic questions with its own correct answers. Recreating each of those moments as a separate snapshot would mean re-provisioning a whole tenant per instant, which is prohibitively costly; and even a single snapshot leaks future state hidden inside records and cannot represent the multi-app, time-ordered way real work happens. Our system closes two gaps at once: it generates a realistic, persona-driven, temporally-evolving enterprise world from real research, and replays that world at any chosen moment to ev
arXiv:2608.00868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many open educational resources are lacking in accessibility, especially in-depth image descriptions. In subjects like Science and Mathematics, however, it can be particularly difficult to write image descriptions since there can be many complicated expressions and names depending upon the course level. To help fill that gap in a small way, we introduce Math Image Descriptions for Accessible Learning (MIDAL), a math image-description dataset of 2,020 mathematical images spanning multiple educational levels, to aid in training vision language models to create image descriptions following accessibility best practices. We hope MIDAL is a valuable resource in enhancing the conversation and innovation regarding accessibility of STEM content in higher education. This dataset is however not just limited in math description generation but can also be used to fine-tune language models that can have improved mathematical reasoning and answers.
arXiv:2608.00826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extended Reality (XR) technologies are transforming healthcare through immersive training, remote consultation, and patient rehabilitation. However, their extensive sensing capabilities and complex data pipelines introduce distinct security, privacy, and safety risks. Existing research lacks a unified quantitative framework for assessing and prioritizing these risks. We review 65 peer-reviewed studies on XR security and privacy published from 2017 to 2024, synthesizing a four-layer threat taxonomy consisting of Device, Network, User, and Cloud layers, along with a corresponding catalog of defenses. Building on this analysis, we introduce XR-PRISM, a six-factor weighted Privacy and Risk Impact Scoring Metric that integrates threat likelihood, system vulnerability, attack surface, safety impact, privacy impact, and control effectiveness into a single actionable risk score. Our analysis shows that more than 70% of the identified countermea
arXiv:2608.00803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wearable silent speech interfaces (SSIs) are limited to small, closed vocabularies. Approaches achieving larger vocabularies require obtrusive hardware such as facial electrodes. We present SoniSpeech, the first large-scale, open-vocabulary, trimodal dataset for wearable SSI using acoustic-sensing eyewear. It contains 34 hours across 18,000 utterances with three synchronized modalities: ultrasound echo profiles, voiced audio, and frontal video, in both voiced and silent modes. The corpus draws from the SODA dialogue dataset, providing contemporary conversational English with 5,356 unique words and full phoneme coverage. A CTC-based ResNet-34 baseline achieves 26.3% word error rate (WER) on open-vocabulary silent speech recognition, the first benchmark for this task. Dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.7298/xjjr-9m85
arXiv:2608.00775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ORCESTRA is a mixed-reality system for programming robot digital twins through no-code waypoint teaching and language-guided control. In a passthrough mixed-reality workspace, users place robot twins on real surfaces, teach trajectories, save robot-relative episodes, or issue spoken/typed commands that a vision-language model converts into structured digital-twin plans. Both interaction modes share a backend for metric grounding, embodiment-aware validation, preview, confirmation, and digital-twin execution. The system supports heterogeneous robot embodiments, including fixed-base manipulators, a mobile base, and a humanoid robot, demonstrating MR validation as a safety layer for language-guided robot programming before physical deployment.
arXiv:2608.00672v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Security Operations Centers (SOCs) process large volumes of security events, requiring analysts to accurately detect and assess ongoing cyberattacks under time pressure. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest potential benefits for security operations, yet their practical suitability for real-world SOC workflows remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with SOC practitioners who had prior experience with LLMs, complemented by interactive scenarios to anticipate challenges and identify opportunities for the responsible integration of LLM-based tools into SOC workflows. We identified 15 LLM use cases grouped into six functional categories. While LLMs are valued for automating repetitive, low-level tasks such as report automation, practitioners rate high-impact tasks such as incident analysis as not yet feasible, reporting limitations in technical depth, context awareness,
arXiv:2608.00549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an extension of Triangolazioni (a Cultural Heritage webapp) to enrich curated content with context-dependent, external information provided by Large Language Models (LLMs) within a loosely-coupled architecture agnostic to the LLM. The system supports context-dependent information search and presentation within an architecture agnostic to the exploited LLM.
arXiv:2608.00541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Digital forensics has become an integral part of modern criminal proceedings, yet its effective integration remains challenging because of increasing data volumes, evolving technologies, and complex interactions between technical and legal stakeholders. Although prior work has focused primarily on digital forensic tools and methods, its broader procedural and organizational context has received limited attention. Building on emerging perspectives inspired by usability research and human-centered security, we conceptualize digital forensics as part of a socio-technical system within criminal proceedings. We consequently investigate this perspective through a survey of 101 practitioners from the judiciary of the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, including public prosecutors, judges, and digital forensic experts. The results indicate a strong demand for improved integration of digital forensics into workflows, enhanced cross-
arXiv:2608.00478v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotional Support (ES) systems have long optimized a single objective: alleviating the user's emotional distress in the moment. We argue that a complementary need, helping users see themselves more clearly, defines a distinct paradigm we call Personality Support (PS). PS is not counseling or clinical intervention: it targets cognitive clarity and self-articulation, not symptom relief or diagnosis. We instantiate this paradigm in three layers. First, we present DSD, a Chinese self-discovery PS Dataset of 8,590 samples collected through real longitudinal interaction across five minimal units, Coach, Warm, Tsukkomi, Real, and Gonzo. Second, we build DeepSupport, a multi-persona PS system trained with OrthoTune, a PS-tailored framework with style-specific adapters and a style-consistency regularizer. Third, we unify the five DeepSupport personas into Ekova, a persistent personality-support agent with a unified cross-session memory layer, su
arXiv:2608.02512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What makes a Gantt chart? This question proved unexpectedly difficult to answer when we set out to build a design space for Gantt charts. Existing definitions, each shaped by their respective research goals, made different scope choices that we could not directly reconcile. We reasoned about what should and should not count as a Gantt chart, developing concepts and tools along the way. We distinguish features that are essential to a chart type's identity from those that can vary, and use these distinctions to map how chart types relate through what they share and lack. Applying these ideas to Gantt charts, radar charts, and table cartograms, we produce key insights on what boundary work reveals: definitions diverge for functional reasons, drawing boundaries exposes hidden structure in descriptive vocabulary such as feature entanglements, and scope choices shape how far findings can generalize. We came to understand that there is not a def
arXiv:2608.02283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The growing global demand for mental health support increasingly exceeds the supply of qualified practitioners, creating an urgent need for scalable digital interventions that can deliver meaningful emotional connection. In response, we present a novel multimodal application that operationalises the Self-Initiated Humour Protocol (SIHP) within a Self-Attachment Technique (SAT) framework. Our mobile application integrates customisable 3D childhood avatars, augmented reality, and an LLM-driven virtual therapist capable of automated emotion mirroring. An eight-day user study (N=16) indicates the system's feasibility and improvements in self-reported mood. Results show that personalised avatars and text-to-speech output strengthen emotional bonding and perceived empathy. Although emotion mirroring boosts engagement, its effectiveness depends heavily on classification accuracy and animation intensity. Moreover, findings indicate a shift in use
arXiv:2608.02232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With this work, we explore the unique potential of data visualization on novel foldable mobile devices (foldables). Even though foldables are already commercially available, there is limited knowledge of how to leverage their distinct characteristics for visualization. This gap will only grow as their form factors become increasingly diverse. To address this, we use a two-step approach. First, we present a device-centered design space, structured around physical and usage properties of foldable devices. Second, we introduce a conceptual framework that investigates visualization on foldables from four complementary perspectives: More Displays - distributing multiple views to leverage additional display space; More Shapes - mapping visualizations to spatial fold states; More Interactions - coupling visualization tasks and folding interactions; and More States - enabling responsive visualization through folding. We complement the design spac
arXiv:2608.02100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI increasingly participates in human decision making, understanding how decision-making authority is distributed between humans and AI has become a fundamental behavioural question. We introduce a behavioural measurement framework combining intent and delegated decision authority to quantify what consumers seek from AI and how much decision-making authority they assign to it. Applied to 1.5 million real-world ChatGPT and Gemini interactions from 6,304 users in the United States and India, we find that financial services are already a substantial AI use case. Consumers overwhelmingly use AI to retrieve information and shape financial judgement, while delegation of financial execution remains rare. By shifting attention from conversation topics to delegated decision authority, this work establishes a behavioural baseline for measuring the transition to increasingly agentic AI.
arXiv:2608.01974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Haptic feedback is widely employed to enhance immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) environments. However, designing haptic stimuli that cover diverse interaction conditions remains a significant scalability challenge. Data-driven haptic generation has emerged as a promising approach, yet existing models face an inherent trade-off between waveform expressiveness and inference responsiveness, which becomes increasingly critical as training data grow in scale and diversity. To address this challenge, we propose HaptoFlow, a vibrotactile generative model based on Flow Matching, designed for interactive real-time haptic rendering in VR. Flow Matching learns a continuous vector field that transforms a base distribution into the target data distribution, enabling efficient representation of complex haptic data distributions and thereby facilitating both high-quality generation and computational efficiency. We train HaptoFlow conditioned on material