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:2606.28737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce 5ting, our system for the SemEval2026 Task 8 (MTRAGEval), which evaluates multi-turn Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Multi turn RAG involves context drift, under specification, and hallucination risk. Our system combines BGE-M3 dense retrieval with FAISS indexing, dual-query merged retrieval, and LLM based reranking, followed by role separated generation constrained to retrieved evidence. The retriever achieved nDCG@5 = 0.4719 in Task A, while the end to end system ranked in Task C with a harmonic score of 0.5597 and RL_F = 0.7692.
arXiv:2606.28725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated toxicity moderation systems operate in dynamic online environments where harmful behavior evolves through coded language, shifting targets, and strategic adaptation to enforcement. Existing drift detection methods often focus on global distributional change, but such signals may miss safety-relevant shifts that emerge in localized harm subspaces or high-risk model-error regions. This paper introduces DriftGuard, a safety-aware adaptive moderation framework that combines multi-monitor drift detection with selective model updating. The framework tracks global text drift, identity-harm drift, model uncertainty, toxic-risk drift, and false-negative-risk drift. When safety-relevant change is detected, the model is updated using a hard-mix adaptation set that prioritizes likely false negatives, identity-related high-risk examples, false-positive-risk examples, and uncertain boundary cases. Experiments on Civil Comments temporal shift
arXiv:2606.28715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While AI development and evaluation for Southeast Asia (SEA) has grown rapidly, agent capabilities in regional languages are still poorly understood despite its importance to sovereign AI. To fill this gap, we introduce SEATauBench, the first agent-focused evaluation framework for SEA sovereign AI. SeaTau adapts TauBench to five languages -- Mandarin, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, and Filipino -- and evaluates agents across progressively localized settings that vary the language of user-agent interaction, tool specifications, and task domains. Across three recent models, we find that English agent capabilities transfer reasonably well when only the conversation language changes, but quality and robustness degrade sharply as more task contexts are localized, with the largest losses in full domain adaptation. We also the limits of English-only agent assessment for measuring agent capabilities in SEA languages. More broadly, SeaTau provides
arXiv:2606.28708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurately explaining hidden patterns in multi-aspect data has typically been done by leveraging labels and/or accompanying auxiliary metadata. However, labels and auxiliary data may be inaccurate (e.g. nonstandard, inconsistent), insufficient (e.g. static tabular metadata for time-dependent recordings), or unavailable. % We propose \fullmethod (\method), which leverages the knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to explain the hidden patterns in human narratives. \method uses task-agnostic and task-specific prompts to explain extracted co-clustered latent patterns from tensor decomposition. To evaluate these explanations, we test the LLMs on forward and backward inference tasks. % Our demo system is available at https://github.com/dawonahn/ECML_PKDD_AnTenA.
arXiv:2606.28667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sign languages are compositional systems where meaning arises by combining sublexical phonological parameters, such as handshape, location, and movement. While deep learning models for Sign Language Recognition (SLR) have achieved increased performance on translation benchmarks, it remains unclear whether these models distinguish abstract phonological features or merely rely on low-level statistical correlations. This work evaluates the phonological perception of SLR models trained on American Sign Language (ASL) by probing phonological sensitivity using minimal pairs and evaluating representational alignment with human behavioral data. Our results reveal that SLR models exhibit emergent phonological sensitivity, but with clear architectural trade-offs: pose-based models are sensitive to handshape contrasts, while pixel-based models better capture location changes. Furthermore, pose-based models learn latent representations that correlate
arXiv:2606.28562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has a property absent in offline distillation and RL: teacher supervision quality depends on student competence. Incoherent rollouts yield noisy gradients; already-mastered tokens yield redundant ones. This creates waste at three scales (tokens, training phases, and prompts) yet existing methods supervise uniformly. We introduce SEAD, which uses entropy as a unified probe of this competence-dependent degradation at three scales: (1) joint teacher-student entropy partitions tokens into zones receiving tailored divergences or zero gradient (approx. 50% skipped); (2) a cosine schedule anneals from forward to reverse KL as competence grows; (3) a competence-gated curriculum introduces prompts easy-to-hard. These components are symbiotically necessary: token selection requires coherent rollouts (curriculum), annealing requires monotonic improvement (also curriculum). On OLMo-3 (7B to 32B), SEAD achieves +4.8 avg ac
arXiv:2606.28560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study sparse self-attention in which each query attends to a dense local window plus a set of Fibonacci-spaced offsets, with a per-layer scalar alpha that compresses or expands the spacing. Across 21 language models trained under one matched recipe (60M parameters, 512 hidden, 16 layers, 426M tokens), we compare four ways of setting alpha across depth: fixed, per-layer learned, a static linear stagger, and a coprime (anti-gridding) reassignment of that stagger, together with a reach-matched power-of-2 control. Three results stand out. First, a static per-layer stagger improves perplexity over both fixed and learned alpha, and the gain is base-agnostic: applying the same stagger to a power-of-2 base lifts it above fixed Fibonacci and to parity with learned Fibonacci attention. Second, learning per layer is inert: it does not beat the static schedule and costs roughly five times the inference latency. Third, and most consequential, all s
arXiv:2606.28548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become a useful tool for extracting interpretable features in language models. However, standard SAE architectures operate on individual token activations, meaning that the number of active features scales linearly with context length, and studying long model transcripts becomes difficult. We introduce turn-averaged SAEs, which represent a single Human or Assistant turn with a fixed number of features by learning to reconstruct the average model activation across the turn. We find that turn-averaged features describe a single turn's high-level characteristics more completely than per-token features when judged by an LLM. We also demonstrate that turn-averaged SAEs greatly simplify common downstream uses of SAEs like attribution graphs. Broadly, turn-averaged SAEs make interpretability techniques practical at long context lengths.
arXiv:2606.28538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate domain adaptation of modern BERT models in the legal domain. We further pre-train ModernBERT on all US court opinions using the masked language modeling objective. Although ModernBERT has been trained on roughly 500x more data than original BERT, we still find that this model benefits from further pre-training and domain adaptation in the legal domain: we report significant improvements compared to vanilla ModernBERT on all datasets connected to US court opinions. We find gains similar to those reported in early work on domain adaptation of BERT-like models. However, from scratch pre-training does not match the performance of further pre-training an existing ModernBERT checkpoint in our experiments. The resulting models are capable of processing sequences up to 8,192 tokens, and can be used to compute meaningful embeddings of legal passages, or could quickly rerank hundreds of legal passages for a given search query. We rel
arXiv:2606.28524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) are sensitive to the belief states of agents described by text, as measured by the false belief task (FBT), yet persistent concerns of construct validity remain. We adopt a **developmental perspective**, tracing the pattern of mental state reasoning behavior -- and likely **preconditions** for this behavior -- across multiple training stages in the Olmo2 and Pythia language model suites. We find that above-chance FBT performance depends both on model size and sufficient training volume, emerges relatively late in pretraining, and is most improved by post-training interventions (SFT, DPO) in the condition most diagnostic of mentalizing (False Belief, Implicit). However, FBT performance is fragile: consistent with past work, the use of non-factive verbs (e.g., thinks) increases false belief attributions even in the True Belief condition. To contextualize these findings, we track the eme
arXiv:2606.28457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) applications need large and rich amount of linguistic knowledge. Furthermore, electronic language sources such as dictionaries, encyclopedia, and corpora became available. So, automatic methods are emerged to extract lexical information from those sources to overcome the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. We presented a method to automatically extract lexical information from a machine-readable version of the Arabic-English Al-Mawrid dictionary. We used n-gram analysis and key-word-in-context (KWIC) analysis to discover lexical patterns that manifest morphologic, syntactic, or semantic information. Then, we used hand-crafted rule-based information extraction to extract that information. Furthermore, we used punctuation marks and some heuristics to extract a set of synonyms in a subentry. This study registered high precision for all types of information, high recall for synonyms, and low recall for the othe
arXiv:2606.28354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The classic paradigm of language identification in the limit models learning as a game between an adversary, who reveals strings from an unknown target language, and a learner tasked with identifying that language. The recently introduced framework of language generation in the limit shifted the objective to better reflect modern language modeling, requiring the learner to produce valid, unseen strings from the target language. Related work highlighted a fundamental tension: a broad coverage of the target often comes at the cost of validity. We introduce a new notion of precision and recast this problem as the classic recall-precision trade-off. We analyze generation in the limit under varying constraints on enumeration, novelty, and validity, aimed at reflecting settings closer to those encountered by large language models. A key contribution is our analysis of learners that are not eventually valid: we allow infinitely many mistakes, pr
arXiv:2605.29212v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Image quality in modern imaging systems emerges from the coupled effects of the sensor, optics, and computational reconstruction. Ultra-thin metalenses offer a path toward substantial miniaturization of optical modules, but practical designs often exhibit pronounced chromatic and field-dependent aberrations that necessitate computational reconstruction. In current metalens pipelines, reconstruction models are commonly trained and selected using distortion-based fidelity objectives, such as PSNR, yet these proxies can be weakly correlated with human preference and downstream utility, reflecting the well-known perception--distortion trade-off. We introduce MetaRanker, a human-in-the-loop active ranking framework that formalizes metalens image quality in terms of semantic interpretability, defined as the degree to which humans can reliably recognize objects and structures in the presence of optical artifacts. MetaRanker combines a
arXiv:2604.27996v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper examines how large language model (LLM) agents perform on scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks that require generating visualization workflows from natural-language instructions. We compare three representative agent designs: domain-specific agents with structured tool use, computer-use agents, and general-purpose coding agents, across 15 benchmark tasks, evaluating visualization quality, efficiency, robustness, computational cost, and the impact of persistent memory. We further study interaction modalities, including code scripts, model context protocol (MCP) or API calls, command-line interfaces (CLI), and graphical user interfaces (GUI). Our goal is to characterize the tradeoffs among representative SciVis agent configurations used in practice. The results reveal clear tradeoffs across agent designs and interaction modalities. General-purpose coding agents achieve the highest task success rates but incur greater
arXiv:2603.29139v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems to translate natural-language intent into executable scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks. Despite rapid progress, the community lacks a principled and reproducible benchmark for evaluating these emerging SciVis agents in realistic, multi-step analysis settings. We present SciVisAgentBench, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark for evaluating scientific data analysis and visualization agents. Our benchmark is grounded in a structured taxonomy spanning four dimensions: application domain, data type, complexity level, and visualization operation. It currently comprises 108 expert-crafted cases covering diverse SciVis scenarios. To enable reliable assessment, we introduce a multimodal outcome-centric evaluation pipeline that combines LLM-based judging with deterministic evaluators, including image-based metrics, code checkers, rule-based verifiers, a
arXiv:2602.12089v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI usage becomes more prevalent in social contexts, understanding agent-user interaction is critical to designing systems that imp rove both individual and group outcomes. We present an online behavioral experiment (N=243) in which participants play three multi-tu rn bargaining games in groups of three. Each game, presented in randomized order, grants access to a single LLM assistance modality: proactive recommendations from an Advisor, reactive feedback from a Coach, or autonomous execution by a Delegate. All three modalitie s are powered by an LLM with super-human performance within this negotiation setting. On each turn, participants privately decide whe ther to act manually or use the AI modality available in that game. We document a preference-performance misalignment: participants s trongly prefer the higher-control Advisor (44%) over the Delegate (19%), yet groups only significantly increase collective surplus un der D
arXiv:2601.03546v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate decision-making tasks involving personal data sharing, where privacy concerns and prosocial motivations can push choices in opposite directions. Existing evaluations often measure privacy-related attitudes or sharing intentions in isolation, which makes it difficult to determine whether a model's expressed values jointly predict its downstream data-sharing actions as in real human behaviors. We introduce a context-based assessment protocol that sequentially administers standardized questionnaires for privacy attitudes, prosocialness, and acceptance of data sharing within a bounded, history-carrying session. To evaluate value-action alignments under competing attitudes, we use multi-group structural equation modeling (MGSEM) to identify relations from privacy concerns and prosocialness to data sharing. We propose Value-Action Alignment Rate (VAAR), a human-referenced
arXiv:2502.18864v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientific discovery is driven by scientists generating novel hypotheses for complex problems that undergo rigorous experimental validation. To augment this process, we introduce Co-Scientist, a multi-agent AI system built on Gemini for structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation. Co-Scientist aims to help scientists discover new original knowledge. Conditioned on their research objectives and prior scientific evidence, it formulates demonstrably novel research hypotheses for experimental verification. The system's design involves agents continuously generating, critiquing and refining hypotheses accelerated by scaling test-time compute. Key contributions include: (1) a multi-agent architecture with an asynchronous task execution framework for flexible compute scaling; (2) a tournament evolution process for self-improving hypotheses generation. Automated evaluations show continued benefits of test-time compute scali
arXiv:2411.10109v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning can predict human behavior well when substantial structured data are available for well-defined outcomes. Such models are typically outcome-specific, however, requiring training data for each target outcome, limiting their applicability to new domains. We test whether large language models (LLMs) can relax these requirements by using self-report data to build attitudinal and behavioral simulations, or "generative agents," that can predict responses across outcomes without outcome-specific training data. Using data from a diverse national sample of 1,052 Americans, we built agents from (i) two-hour, semi-structured interviews elicited using the American Voices Project interview schedule, (ii) structured surveys including General Social Survey items and the Big Five personality inventory, or (iii) both sources combined. On held-out General Social Survey items, interview-only, survey-only, and combined agents achie
arXiv:2606.17512v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI standardized patients are becoming a setting for professional training in clinical consultation. This paper presents MedEasy, a multi-agent system that organizes virtual-patient practice through patient dialogue, clinical actions, decision submission, documentation, and feedback. We first conducted a formative study with 12 clinical-year medical students through interviews and three co-design workshops. The findings informed a staged workflow, structured case records, action-contingent findings, and trajectory-based review. We then conducted an evaluative user study with a separate cohort of 12 clinical-year medical students, with each participant completing two counterbalanced cases. Learners interpreted MedEasy as a connected consultation environment. They used patient responses, examination findings, available actions, and feedback together to judge whether the represented case remained coherent. They valued repeatable practice
arXiv:2606.09832v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI systems evolve from single agents to multi-agent architectures, a critical design dimension has been overlooked: how the social identity of individual agents shapes human behavior within the collaboration. This paper introduces the Agentic Social Affordance Framework (ASAF), a theoretical framework extending Social Affordance theory to multi-agent AI systems. We propose that agent identity design functions as a collaboration interface--structuring how users perceive and engage with each agent, and thereby influencing Human-Agent collaboration outcomes. ASAF adopts the analytical separability of the social affordance layer and the engineering orchestration layer as a framing assumption--an organizing distinction that structures design analysis--rather than a testable claim about effect-independence. ASAF comprises three mechanisms: Identity Signaling, Behavioral Priming, and Collaborative Governance, and specifies their boundary
arXiv:2604.23772v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Users browsing the web daily struggle to quickly locate relevant information in cluttered pages, complete unfamiliar multi-step tasks, and stay focused amid distracting content. State-of-the-art AI assistants (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and browser agents (e.g., OpenAI Operator, Browser Use) can answer questions and automate actions, yet they return answers without showing where the information comes from on the page, forcing users to manually verify results and blindly trust every automated steps. We present PageGuide, a browser extension that grounds LLM answers directly in the HTML DOM via visual overlays, addressing three core user needs: (a) Find-locating and highlighting relevant evidence in-situ so users can instantly verify answers on the page; (b) Guide-showing step-by-step instructions (e.g. how to change password) one at a time so users can follow and perform actions by themselves; and (c) Hide-hiding distracting conten
arXiv:2604.19971v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive spatial layouts empower users to synthesize information and organize findings for sensemaking. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can automate narrative generation from spatial layouts, current collage-based and re-generation methods struggle to support the incremental spatial refinements inherent to the sensemaking process. We identify three critical gaps in existing spatial-textual generation: interaction-revision misalignment, human-LLM intent misalignment, and lack of granular customization. To address these, we introduce Semantic Prompting, a framework for spatial refinement that perceives semantic interactions, reasons about refinement intent, and performs targeted positional revisions. We implemented S-PRISM to realize this framework. The empirical evaluation demonstrated that S-PRISM effectively enhanced the precision of interaction-revision refinement. A user study ($N=14$) highlighted how participants leveraged S
arXiv:2604.05381v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Weak Signal Cultivation Model (WSCM) provides a mathematically rigorous framework for tracking frontline risk signals across a two-dimensional coordinate field using 15 equations and 16 tunable parameters. While this specification is designed for eventual software implementation, its computational requirements create an adoption barrier for organizations whose available infrastructure is a spreadsheet. This paper introduces WSCM-Lite, a lookup-table implementation that reproduces the full WSCM's coordinate trajectories within 0.01 field units while eliminating all exponential functions, state-dependent tracking, and free parameters. The simplification replaces continuous recency weighting with a four-row lookup table and removes consensus momentum and reversal amplification entirely, reducing the specification to seven formulas and five hardcoded constants. A 26-session worked example using the Gas Fumes signal from the parent pap
arXiv:2606.30561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI evaluation frameworks treat evaluator disagreement as noise to be resolved. In creative domains, professional disagreement reflects genuine differences in taste, not measurement error. We argue that evaluating creative AI requires preserving two distinct signals: convergence, where professionals align around shared best practices, and divergence, where individual taste legitimately varies. We present the Human Creativity Benchmark (HCB), a benchmark that operationalizes this separation by collecting pairwise preferences, scalar ratings on prompt adherence, usability, and visual appeal, and qualitative rationale from domain professionals. Across 15,000 professional judgments spanning five creative domains and three workflow phases (ideation, mockup, refinement), we find that convergence concentrates on verifiable dimensions like technical correctness and visual hierarchy, while divergence concentrates on taste-driven dimensions
arXiv:2606.30294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Live product demonstrations are a recurring, high-cost activity in software organizations: a human presenter must select features, dispatch the corresponding interactions on a running application, narrate them coherently, and answer questions in real time. Existing automation addresses only fragments -- generalist browser agents target instruction-conditioned task completion, and demo-video tools produce fixed MP4 artifacts that cannot be questioned and silently break under interface drift. We propose Rhetor, a multi-agent system that takes a running web application and its source-code repository as input and produces a rehearsed live demonstration with segment-synchronized narration and real-time voice question answering. The architectural contributions are a cross-modal feature representation that merges UI exploration with source-code analysis into features tagged with discrete focus tiers, a grounded scripter constrained to UI eleme
arXiv:2606.30035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Free-viewing gaze data provides a rich, task-free window into human visual attention. Conventional exploratory data analysis of the data provides user attention patterns through fixations and areas of interest. However, despite the richness of this gaze data, its human-information interaction (HII) patterns are understudied. We address this gap using consensus clustering of gaze data with respect to users and stimulus characteristics. We present a novel end-to-end unsupervised ensemble learning system for consensus clustering of free-viewing gaze datasets, EnsembleGaze. With a goal of characterizing the user behavior and stimulus type, we propose a feature engineering step based on statistical descriptors of fixation-based distributions. EnsembleGaze involves consensus voting of selected clustering methods implemented on the feature vector to compute the co-association matrix. Using the separate consensus clustering of users and stimuli
arXiv:2606.30001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent co-speech gesture generation methods often overlook cultural differences, limiting their effectiveness in human-agent interaction. Moreover, culture-conditioned models are rarely evaluated under speaker-disjoint splits, so apparent "cultural" behavior may be confounded with speaker-specific gesturing style. We introduce SICAGE, a modular framework for culture-aware co-speech gesture generation that conditions motion synthesis models on speaker-independent cultural representations. SICAGE learns these representations from audio and text by treating each speaker as a separate domain while imposing invariance across speakers. This encourages representations to remain culture-discriminative while reducing dependence on speaker identity. The resulting cultural embeddings condition a multimodal generator to produce culturally appropriate gestures. We instantiate this idea with two domain generalization approaches: adversarial learning
arXiv:2606.29846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Shared autonomy systems combine user input with autonomous assistance to help users with motor impairments control robot arms to perform everyday manipulation tasks, by inferring user goals and providing appropriate guidance. However, the robot's internal beliefs about user goals cannot be observed by users. Traditional shared autonomy systems provide assistance along efficient shortest paths toward inferred goals, but when multiple objects lie in similar directions, such assistive motion remains ambiguous and fails to reveal the specific goal identified by the robot. This creates two critical problems. First, when the robot correctly infers the goal, users continue controlling because they cannot perceive understanding from ambiguous assistive motion, wasting effort when autonomous completion would suffice. Second, when the robot misunderstands intent, users cannot quickly detect errors until assistive motion diverges significantly, re
arXiv:2606.29746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Navigating the deluge of heterogeneous medical data, from academic literature (PubMed) to clinical guidelines (Web) and private knowledge bases, remains a critical bottleneck for evidence-based medicine. While commercial black-box tools lack transparency, standard open-source RAG implementations frequently suffer from reasoning drift when handling complex, long-tail queries. We present DEEPMED Search, a fully open-source, agentic platform designed for transparent medical deep research. Built on a high-performance Next.js architecture, DEEPMED Search features a source-adaptive router that autonomously dispatches sub-queries to PubMed, web search, or local graph-based knowledge bases based on information density. Crucially, the platform integrates an introspective verification module, powered by a causal-consistent multi-agent debate framework, to validate retrieved evidence against diagnostic logic before synthesis. To demonstrate its ro
arXiv:2606.29727v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Professional translation is often a team-based process: translators, reviewers, and project managers must coordinate terminology, legal force, and accountability across documents. Yet many LLM-based translation tools treat human corrections as isolated edits. Expert decisions made in one segment or by one member are rarely captured as reusable knowledge for the rest of the team. We present DeepTrans Studio, a collaborative translation workspace that lets professionals intercept selected nodes in an agentic translation workflow, review evidence, revise AI outputs, and save approved decisions to a shared team memory. During the demo, attendees will role-play translators and reviewers, resolve preset terminology and legal-modal risks, and see how their decisions are propagated to downstream segments and surfaced in a teammate's workspace as reusable precedents. The demo illustrates how human interventions in AI-mediated work can become sha
arXiv:2606.29548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driver decision making in the dilemma zone at signalized intersections is safety critical, as vehicles approaching a yellow signal must decide whether to stop or proceed within limited time and distance margins. Accurate prediction of both stop-go decisions and decision timing is important for adaptive signal control, advanced driver assistance systems, and human-centered intelligent transportation applications. However, dilemma zone behavior is strongly driver dependent. Similar approach trajectories may lead to different decisions across drivers because of differences in risk preference, braking habit, and decision threshold. Existing personalized models often rely on handcrafted scalar descriptors, which provide useful but limited summaries of individual behavior. This paper proposes VISTA-DZ, a semantic-profile-conditioned framework for personalized stop-go and decision-time prediction. Historical trajectories are converted into vis
arXiv:2606.29115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are increasingly deployed in urban environments, yet their safety frameworks remain primarily designed around collision avoidance and minimal risk condition (MRC) behaviors such as slowing or stopping when uncertainty arises. Although effective in reducing immediate crash risk, real-world deployments indicate that stopping alone does not guarantee safe integration into human-governed roadway systems. Incidents reported by municipalities and public records show that AV fallback behaviors can obstruct traffic, interfere with emergency response operations, and create accessibility challenges for passengers and pedestrians. This paper presents an analysis of publicly documented incidents involving AV stopping behavior and human-AV interaction failures. We categorize these incidents according to limitations in perception, planning, and control within current AV architectures. Using this taxonomy, we identify key gap
arXiv:2606.28968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The film 'Her' pictured a future of love between humans and AI. That future has quietly emerged in the form of Role-play AI Companions (RACs), where emotionally responsive interactions blur the boundary between tool use and relational engagement. However, the safety implications remain poorly understood, as user experiences evolve over time through safety dynamics, spanning both emotional and risk behavioral dynamics, that can gradually shift interactions toward risk. In this paper, we investigate safety dynamics in RAC usage through a two-part mixed-methods study (Study I \& II). (1) Study I consists of semi-structured interviews (N = 16) to identify the key factors shaping these dynamics. We find that users' internalizing problems, the role personality adopted by the RAC, and risk interaction patterns jointly shape safety dynamics. Building on these insights, (2) Study II conducts a 14-day Ecological Momentary Assessment (N = 102) to
arXiv:2606.28526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The clinical and communication skills of medical students are commonly assessed through Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), which consist of brief scenario-driven simulations of doctor-patient interactions. However, training is often limited by the low availability of human standardized patients, motivating the development of realistic virtual patients (VPs). To address this gap, we introduce a French OSCE dialogue dataset comprising 240 student-patient training interactions. We build upon it a controllable LLM-based pipeline to generate synthetic OSCE dialogues. The pipeline integrates modular components, such as retrieval-based grounding and a reflection loop, to ensure patient fidelity, coherence, and realism. Additionally, we propose a multi-level evaluation framework assessing patient simulation quality, student performance, and linguistic quality, using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Experiments suggest that controlla
arXiv:2606.28469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot initiative is a central challenge in multi-party human-robot collaboration. A robot that contributes without being addressed may provide timely support, but it may also disrupt coordination, divide attention, or interrupt turn-taking; a robot that waits to be addressed may preserve human control, but it may also miss opportunities to assist. We investigate this design challenge in a collaborative escape room in which pairs of participants work with a humanoid robot under either a reactive interaction model, where the robot responds only when addressed, or a proactive model, where it listens continuously, contributes autonomously, and periodically re-initiates interaction. We evaluate both models using puzzle-solving performance, interaction frequency, and participant ratings on the Godspeed and RoSAS scales. The proactive model substantially increases interaction frequency, whereas the reactive model shows a descriptively higher o
arXiv:2606.30590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: This paper explores how to align AI-based tools with teachers' classroom needs by using scrutable interfaces -- interfaces that link an easily manipulable knowledge representation to an underlying AI model, so users can change the system's outputs without understanding its details. It provides an in-depth discussion and example of a scrutable interface that structures teachers' interactions with generative AI. This study aims to expand how and where scrutable interfaces are used in AI-based tools to support teachers, who have not been historically targeted in the design of scrutable systems. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper presents the design and evaluation of Concept Catalyst, an AI-based tool with a scrutable interface, created to support teachers' reflection while using generative AI for curriculum development. It presents the findings from an exploratory study using Wizard-of-Oz testing with middle and high school eng
arXiv:2606.30549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI code completion tools, such as Github Copilot, provide students with code suggestions to help them write programs. However, recent qualitative studies suggest that students fail to critically evaluate these suggestions. We present Clover, a code completion tool that logs students' interactions with code suggestions and additionally offers attention checks to probe reflective engagement during programming tasks. We also develop a taxonomy of behavioral interaction metrics for AI-assisted programming, informed by literature. We analyzed relationships between interaction patterns, engagement with attention checks, and task performance. We observed that higher rates of tab accept were associated with lower attention check performance, while increased dwell time was associated with higher attention check performance. We conclude by discussing how programming process data and attention checks might support reflective engagement in AI-assiste
arXiv:2606.29808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chart data extraction, which reverse-engineers data tables from chart images, is essential for reproducibility, analysis, retrieval, and redesign. Existing interactive tools are reliable but tedious, and mixed-initiative systems, while more efficient, lack generalizability. Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer a unified interface for chart interpretation, yet their ability to extract accurate data tables, especially without visible labels, remains unclear. We build a benchmark featuring diverse real-world charts without data labels to evaluate this capability. Results show that, while current MLLMs reliably reconstruct table structures, they struggle with precise value recovery. To address this, we revisit chart data extraction from a human-centered perspective and argue that extraction should follow a progressive learning process similar to how people read charts. Our training framework substantially improves numerical a
arXiv:2606.29726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) platforms, users increasingly show cross-platform usage intentions. Existing research focuses on adoption and usage intentions in single-platform AIGC contexts. A theoretical gap still exists in studies on cross-platform usage. This paper constructs and verifies a three-stage multiple mediation model based on the personality trait-perception-behavioral response framework. The model integrates the optimum stimulation level (OSL) theory, complementarity theory, and perceived value theory, and it sets social influence and use experience as control variables to examine users' multi-homing intention. The results show that: (a) OSL significantly enhances users' perceived complementarity; (b) perceived complementarity positively affects perceived epistemic value; (c) perceived epistemic value significantly and positively predicts multi-homing intention; (d) OSL influe
arXiv:2606.28882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the potential to generate code explanations that surpass those of peers in quality, offering promising opportunities for computer science education. While these explanations may not yet match the depth and clarity of instructor-provided explanations, research in computational creativity highlights that the quantity and diversity of ideas can often outweigh a singular focus on quality. Inspired by this, we explore whether combining multiple diverse explanations, each emphasizing distinct aspects (e.g., function, concept, goal), can enhance students' understanding of programming exercises compared to generic explanations that do not emphasize distinct conceptual aspects. In our study 971 first-year computing students were randomly assigned either diverse or generic LLM-generated explanations for two programming exercises. Students completed multiple-choice and open-ended questions for each exercise, f
arXiv:2606.28779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a voice-powered AI-based banking system based on Google Conversational Agent, Dialogflow CX, which provides safe and convenient banking by phone. The system supports essential banking functions such as balance inquiries, transaction history retrieval, card activations, PIN-based authentication of sensitive tasks, smooth live agent handoff for complex and out-of-scope queries, and ensures seamless handover to human agents when required. These tests were performed with high-duration calls, high concurrency, and noisy environments; the system proved to be scalable, responsive, and resilient. All the data used is safely stored in the cloud environment for efficiency and security in real-time voice interactions. A voice-based banking solution that is efficient and easy to use can be provided through this.
arXiv:2606.28777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Smart medication systems increasingly automate medication recognition, reminders, and logging. However, automation in home medication routines should be carefully bounded, as users may have different capabilities, privacy expectations, and needs for control over decisions. We present a mixed-methods study of a Smart Medication Support system comparing three automation conditions: confirmation required, automatic logging with undo, and fully automatic support. Across 53 participants and interviews with 11 older adults, we found that higher automation did not necessarily lead to higher trust or acceptance. Participants preferred automation that reduced routine effort while preserving opportunities for correction. Fully automatic support was less interruptive but was rated lower in autonomy, trust, transparency, dignity, and satisfaction. Interviews also showed clear differences among older adults. Their preferences were shaped by privacy co
arXiv:2606.28714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI companions are increasingly used for emotional support, companionship, and intimate interaction. While prior work has examined text- and voice-based AI companionship and emerging XR companion designs, less is known about how users with existing close AI companion relationships expect those relationships to change when companions become virtually embodied and spatially situated in everyday environments. To address this gap, we conducted a qualitative study with 17 AI companion users recruited from Reddit AI companion communities. We frame spatially situated virtual embodiment as a form of relational escalation: embodiment can make AI companionship more present, socially legible, and risk-sensitive in everyday life. Our findings show that: (1) embodiment creates tensions between support and intrusion, concreteness and imaginative openness, and growth and consistency; (2) embodiment can turn private AI companionship into a socially legibl
arXiv:2606.28517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dimension reduction and semantic interaction support image clustering by making similarity structure visible and manipulable. Existing semantic interaction methods encode users' clustering criterion (a user-interpretable semantic dimension, e.g., action, location, or mood) from direct manipulation to steer reprojection, giving users direct control over the resulting layout. Yet they typically depend on learned embeddings or a predefined criterion. In practice, users' clustering criterion often emerges gradually and becomes refined through interaction rather than being fully clear at the outset. In this work, we present CriterionSI (Criterion-guided Semantic Interaction), a method that translates incremental drag interactions into criterion-guided reprojection. CriterionSI uses large language models to infer and refine the clustering criterion from sequential user drags, while grounding semantic interpretation in human-provided feedback ra
arXiv:2606.19263v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Legal precedents protect computer code as copyrightable expression. They have enabled centralized digital platforms -- operating from corporate servers that hold all user data -- to construct private governance regimes through the interaction of copyright, contract, and technical architecture: people who create virtually all platform value must surrender effective copyright control through Terms of Service agreements as a condition of participation. In contrast, grassroots platforms consist of cryptographically-identified people operating their networked smartphones independently of any server or global resource; each person holds their own data on their own device, with no third party in possession or intermediation. Here, we define the notion of a digital speech act -- a deliberate volitional act by a person of cryptographically signing personal content with the person's private key, carried out on the person's own device -- t
arXiv:2606.02980v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Synthetic and manipulated speech can reduce the reliability of automatic speaker verification systems, so anti-spoofing methods need to be both accurate and efficient in training and inference. This paper focuses on the ASVspoof 5 Track 1 closed condition, where standard cross-entropy training may not give enough attention to hard trials and is not directly aligned with ranking- and threshold-based evaluation metrics. We propose TFPARN, a Transformer-based focal-pairwise attentive ranking network. The system extracts log-Mel features from speech, uses a Transformer encoder to model frame-level information, applies attention pooling to obtain utterance-level representations, and is trained with a combination of focal classification loss and pairwise ranking loss. RawBoost augmentation is used during training, and test-time augmentation is applied during evaluation to improve robustness. Compared with re-implemented AASIST and Raw
arXiv:2605.08157v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Purpose: Access to electroencephalography (EEG) remains limited across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) due to cost, infrastructure requirements, and a shortage of trained staff. This study evaluated the feasibility and clinical utility of a smartphone-based EEG system in a real-world setting. Methods: We conducted a multicenter observational study (November 2023 to April 2026) across 29 clinical sites in Kenya. A smartphone-based 27-lead EEG system enabled trained healthcare workers to acquire standardized recordings with remote expert interpretation. Results: 3,036 EEG sessions were performed. Male patients constituted 57.8% of the cohort, with representation across pediatric and adult populations. The most common referral indication was seizures or convulsions (68.5%). Overall, 2,915 (96%) recordings were interpretable, while 121 (4%) were uninterpretable, primarily due to high electrode impedance and insufficient rec
arXiv:2604.01495v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This white paper introduces the Weak Signal Cultivation Model (WSCM). WSCM is a human-centric framework for detecting, structuring, and tracking weak risk signals as observed by frontline staff. The model centers on a continuous [0,10] x [0,10] coordinate field--the Weak Signal Cultivation Field, in which each identified signal is positioned as a node on two independent dimensions: its current Risk Intensity (x) and its Risk Growth Potential (y). Represented as a risk locus, nodes move across the field over time as new team assessments or measurements arrive. The locus reflects the signal's trajectory across four possible regions: Question Marks, Lit Fuses, Sleeping Cats, and Owls. Through this graphical approach, bridging risk communication from the frontline experience to management decision-making is made through a single organizational vocabulary. The model introduced in this document is designed to serve as a practitioner t
arXiv:2601.17146v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Empirical investigations into unintended model behavior often show that the algorithm is predicting another outcome than what was intended. These expos\'es highlight the need to identify when algorithms predict unintended quantities - ideally before deploying them into consequential settings. We propose a falsification framework that provides a principled statistical test for discriminant validity: the requirement that an algorithm predict intended outcomes better than impermissible ones. Drawing on falsification practices from causal inference, econometrics, and psychometrics, our framework compares calibrated prediction losses across outcomes to assess whether the algorithm exhibits discriminant validity with respect to a specified impermissible proxy. In settings where the target outcome is difficult to observe, multiple permissible proxy outcomes may be available; our framework accommodates both this setting and the case wit