Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2607.19088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision exposes intermediate rationales, but flat rationale targets usually optimize a single reasoning sequence and provide limited supervision on how local conclusions should support later decisions. We introduce Dependency-Aware Intermediate QA Supervision (DAIS), a training-time framework that converts filtered teacher rationales into stage-level QA records. Each intermediate record predicts a local answer conditioned on the previous states needed for that decision, while the final-answer record keeps the original task format; evaluation therefore uses only the original input and optional context. Across GDPR, AIACT, MedQA, and FOLIO with multiple Qwen backbones, DAIS improves average final-answer accuracy over answer-only, flat chain-of-thought, and independent-QA baselines. On policy-compliance benchmarks, it achieves a largest gain of 5.6% and an average gain of 4.2% over the strongest non-DAIS baseline.
arXiv:2607.19049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans are often considered to be the best listeners and seen as the upper-bound performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We present a preliminary comparison of the performances of state-of-the-art ASR systems and Dutch native listeners on the recognition of "diverse" speech, specifically Dutch child and older adults' speech and Flemish. Google Telephony outperformed the other ASR systems. Importantly, the ASR systems showed similar performance to the listeners, and in specific cases even outperformed them. Slight performance differences between the listeners and ASR systems were found related to speaker's age and regional accents and utterance length. Future research should focus on making ASR systems more robust to acoustic variability related to aging and regional accents. A comparison of ASR recognition performances on the test stimuli and the full Jasmin-CGN test sets showed the influence of the specific test sets o
arXiv:2607.19033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete speech tokenizers aim to disentangle semantic from acoustic information, yet targets from self-supervised learning (SSL) models like HuBERT retain non-linguistic variation: speaker identity, prosody, and channel conditions leak into the tokens, inflating entropy. Our key insight is that when enough speakers utter the same words under varying conditions, linguistic content is the only shared factor. We propose PINT (Parallel INvariant Tokenization), which fine-tunes an SSL encoder with alignment losses across parallel utterances and augmentations to distill this shared residual. PINT collapses identical words onto consistent token sequences, drastically reducing conditional entropy. Unlike ASR text, PINT tokens preserve frame-level temporal grounding and serve as drop-in semantic targets for audio codecs. Experiments show a 98.7% relative reduction in speaker probe accuracy (93.1% to 1.2%), a 42% lower ABX error rate, and 27-30% l
arXiv:2607.19011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal humor in memes, cartoons, and comics remains difficult for AI systems because intended meaning depends on non-literal mechanisms, shared cultural knowledge, and communicative intent rather than literal scene description. This survey focuses on visual humor understanding in single-image and multi-panel artifacts, while treating humor generation as an emerging downstream frontier. We position the literature against prior humor, sarcasm, and general MLLM surveys and organize it using a capability-centric hierarchy spanning recognition, interpretation and reasoning, and generation. Under this lens, we synthesize benchmark design, evaluation protocols, and modeling paradigms, tracing the field's shift from task-specific fusion models to large-model approaches based on multimodal alignment, evidence-grounded reasoning, and controlled generation. We conclude by highlighting the main barriers to progress: shortcut-prone evaluation, lim
arXiv:2607.18999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn medical consultation agents must decide what to ask, adapt to patient responses, and determine when the collected evidence is sufficient. However, coupled evaluation conflates the quality of the policy-elicited history with policy-specific terminal diagnosis generation: strong generation can compensate for a thin history, while weaker generation can obscure a rich one. We introduce MedDDC-Eval, a diagnosis-decoupled testbed that treats elicited history as the comparison object and holds the history-to-diagnosis mapping constant through a shared frozen reader. Across two held-out sources, a grounded interface and an auditable diagnosis-trajectory-efficiency (D/T/E) harness measure diagnostic usefulness, information acquisition, and efficiency. Directional semantic coverage followed by deterministic one-to-one assignment yields coherent precision-recall counts for open-ended items, with at most one credited match per prediction o
arXiv:2607.18984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite more than a decade of curriculum learning (CL) research in NLP, the field lacks a principled account of which difficulty function or scheduler to use for a given problem. To understand what has hindered progress towards this account, we propose a fine-grained taxonomy separating difficulty evaluation from training scheduling to enable systematic analysis of CL strategies. For difficulty evaluation, we distinguish attribution source and task dependence, revealing difficulty as a perspectival concept encoding different assumptions about what makes an instance hard to learn. For scheduling, we provide the first formalisation of CL schedulers in terms of expected training contribution, enabling comparison across implementations by introducing retention regimes and monotonicity properties. Applied in a dedicated analysis of CL works in NLP, our taxonomy reveals a systematic incomparability problem: prior works conflate distinct notions
arXiv:2607.18973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Textual skills provide a lightweight way to improve frozen language-model agents, but their self-evolution normally requires a stable validation signal. Such signals are natural in mathematics or code, where an answer can be checked after it changes, yet are problematic in open-ended dialogue: changing the assistant response also changes the user's next reaction, so a logged reaction cannot directly evaluate a counterfactual response. We propose future-feedback skill evolution, which first redirects self-evolution from prescribing the current answer to predicting whether the observed answer will lead to a positive or negative subsequent user signal. This prediction task is verifiable on fixed logged tuples and therefore supports validation-gated textual optimization. The evolved feedback skill captures interpretable criteria for response quality and can subsequently serve as a diagnostic and optimization target for answer skills. On a pro
arXiv:2607.18946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we address diacritic restoration for Arabic speech transcripts. Most speech data are undiacritized, limiting the ability of modeling fine-grained phonological distinctions. The speech modality has recently been explored as a way to complement text-based diacritic restoration efforts. We propose an efficient non-autoregressive approach for speech-to-text diacritization based on Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). Our method incorporates hard constraints during decoding by constructing a character-level diacritization lattice from an undiacritized transcript and restricting hypotheses to valid diacritized realizations. We evaluate on Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic test sets (namely, ArVoice and ClArTTS) against a more computationally-complex multi-modal diacritic restoration baseline, and show statistically significant reductions in diacritic error rates in both, demonstrating that the proposed approach o
arXiv:2607.18934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern ASR models trained on heterogeneously annotated data treat transcription style (verbatim vs. intended) as an uncontrolled latent variable, causing measurable decoding instability, evaluation confounding (up to 60% of reported WER attributable to style mismatch), and unreliable word-level timing. We show that models already encode both styles; the challenge is controlled activation. Using coverage-aware decoder task tokens trained on parallel verbatim/intended transcript pairs, we raise German disfluency F1 from 10% to 79% zero-shot, despite English-only training. Full English-only fine-tuning surpasses all baselines in verbatim accuracy, disfluency detection, and intended-mode quality across both languages. We further introduce supervised cross-attention fine-tuning that improves word-level timestamps on disfluent speech beyond forced-alignment baselines. Finally, we propose verbatimize, a new task enabling scalable creation and en
arXiv:2607.18915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), modern systems not only possess strong foundational capabilities and extensive knowledge, but can also solve complex problems via long, multi-step reasoning. However, as reasoning traces become longer, LLMs may produce a substantial amount of hallucinated content during the reasoning process, which is often difficult to detect. In this work, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of hallucinations arising in LLM reasoning and find that the reasoning traces are particularly prone to Context-Sensitive Factual Hallucinations: cases where the model actually has the relevant knowledge, yet makes factual errors due to contextual interference during reasoning. To address this issue, we propose Step-level Self-Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization (SSC-GRPO), which assigns step-level rewards to reasoning traces by computing self-consistency scores of individual steps across multiple
arXiv:2607.18912v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages is constrained by orthographic inconsistency, annotation artifacts, missing audio, speaker and domain imbalance, and evaluation procedures that differ from deployment. We present an end-to-end engineering study adapting NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B to Kikuyu, Dholuo, and Kalenjin. Starting from a Kenyan Swahili-adapted checkpoint, we retain its cache-aware FastConformer RNN-T, prompt conditioning, and streaming decoder during full-parameter fine-tuning. The study covers corpus auditing, Unicode normalization, split checks, duration filtering, low-rate continuation, validation-based checkpoint selection, true-streaming evaluation, artifact preservation, and isolated serving. On internal, adaptively consulted evaluation sets excluded from gradient updates at context [56,13], selected Kikuyu and Dholuo models achieve 42.97% and 33.98% WER, respectively. Dholuo records 9.59% C
arXiv:2607.18839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient teamwork typically combines global coordination with parallel execution, a principle not yet fully reflected in unified Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based document parsers. Existing unified parsers process an entire page jointly but generate its output through a single token-by-token autoregressive trajectory, creating a sequential bottleneck that grows with document length. Such full-page sequential generation overlooks a key property of document parsing: layout must be analyzed globally, whereas block content can be parsed in parallel. Based on this observation, we introduce HPD-Parsing, which replaces full-page autoregressive generation with a Hierarchical Parallel Decoding paradigm. A main layout branch organizes the overall document structure and dynamically assigns block-level content decoding to concurrent branches, while progressive multi-token prediction (P-MTP) further reduces the decoding steps within each branch. Expe
arXiv:2607.18825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This comprehensive study introduces an advanced Artificial Intelligence for Indian Legal Question Answering (AILQA) system tailored to the Indian legal context. AILQA leverages a variety of embedding and generative models, including recent Large Language Models (LLMs), to address the unique challenges posed by the intricate and diverse nature of Indian legal texts and to enhance the accuracy and reliability of responses to legal questions. We conducted rigorous evaluations using both lexical and semantic metrics, enriched by expert legal feedback, to ensure relevance and accuracy. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm in improving answer quality, particularly in complex legal domains. Additionally, we assessed performance on standardized tests such as the All India Bar Examination (AIBE), thereby providing a robust benchmark for practical applications. Under the study's evaluation p
arXiv:2607.18820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve both the performance and interpretability of large language models (LLMs), yet the generated reasoning may not faithfully support the final answer. We study this problem from a causal perspective, where a faithful CoT process should follow the chain $Z\rightarrow X\rightarrow Y$, with $Z$, $X$, and $Y$ denoting the instruction, reasoning chain, and final answer, respectively. In this process, the instruction should affect the answer only through the reasoning chain. However, conventional autoregressive LLMs condition answer generation on both the instruction and the CoT, which still allows a direct instruction-to-answer shortcut. To address this issue, we propose CASE, a framework that combines training-time causal alignment and inference-time structural enforcement. During training, CASE builds counterfactual-CoT, biased-instruction, and empty-instruction datasets, and applies se
arXiv:2607.18772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have driven rapid progress in electronic design automation (EDA), yet their application to radio-frequency (RF) circuit design remains limited by the scarcity of domain-specific datasets and standardized benchmarks. We present RF-Agent, which addresses this gap through textbook-driven knowledge distillation. A multi-agent Question-Thinking-Solution-Answer (QTSA) pipeline converts a subsection-level corpus from seven canonical RF textbooks into the first-of-its-kind RF-domain reasoning dataset (over 11,000 samples) with a dedicated multiple-choice benchmark. On this benchmark we study two adaptation strategies: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and three retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) configurations (semantic, keyword, hybrid). Across multiple LLM families, domain-specific SFT significantly improves RF reasoning, especially for small and medium-sized models; among RAG configurations, semantic retrieval perform
arXiv:2607.18730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work extends Transformer residual pathways along two complementary axes: historical retrieval selects information from earlier depths, whereas multi-stream methods maintain multiple residual trajectories. These capabilities have largely been studied in isolation, and assigning an independent retriever to each stream still prevents one trajectory from influencing depth selection in another. We propose Dual Attention Residuals (DAR), which brings multi-stream interaction into historical retrieval through reciprocal cross-stream addressing. For each target stream, DAR computes depth weights from normalized states in the opposite stream and applies them to values from the target stream's own history. The retrieved states are combined for an unchanged Transformer branch and updated through constrained gated writes; a block-form variant operates on block-level histories to control overhead. Across dense models from 0.1B to 1B parameters
arXiv:2607.18725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned for critical-domain Question-Answering (QA), yet choosing which small model to adapt, before paying the cost of adaptation, remains difficult. Fine-tuning can improve domain alignment, but it may also erode prior knowledge, weaken instruction-following, or increase hallucination, especially when labeled data are scarce or rapidly evolving as in cybersecurity. We present FiT (Find before Fine-Tune), a task-oriented diagnostic framework that characterizes small LLMs along three capabilities required for cybersecurity QA: vocabulary recognition, parametric knowledge, and contextualization of retrieved information. Using FiT, we conduct an empirical study of five open-weight 7-billion-parameter models under two fine-tuning regimes. We find that fine-tuning does not uniformly help: it consistently degrades vocabulary and parametric knowledge in small models, and the two regimes trade off
arXiv:2607.18693v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stance detection aims to identify whether a text expresses a favorable or opposing attitude toward a given target, and serves as an important task for various downstream applications. Although existing studies have achieved strong performance in monolingual settings, especially in English, many low-resource languages such as Catalan still lack sufficient annotated data for training effective models. Cross-lingual stance detection alleviates this problem by transferring stance knowledge from resource-rich languages to low-resource languages. However, most existing methods mainly rely on semantic alignment between texts and targets, while ignoring the reasoning process required for reliable stance inference. Although Large Language Models provide strong reasoning ability, their high computational cost and inference latency limit practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose a rationale-guided knowledge distillation framewor
arXiv:2607.18666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A single embedding space that covers text, images, video, and audio lets one index serve every query a user can pose. Embedding models built on vision-language backbones now lead text/image/video retrieval benchmarks but lack audio entirely, while audio-text retrieval is led by specialist systems that serve no other modality. We present the Fusion Embedding family, which adds audio to a frozen vision-language embedding base whose parameters are never updated: generation 1 (fusion-embedding-1) trains only a 16.4M-parameter connector between a frozen audio tower and the frozen base, and generation 2 (fusion-embedding-2) adds modality-gated deep adapters (44.2M parameters) whose branch never executes on text, image, or video inputs: their outputs are bit-for-bit those of the released base, verified after every training run. Because the base already binds text, images, and video, aligning audio to text alone makes audio-image retrieval emerge
arXiv:2607.18618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent-reasoning looped language models (LoopLMs) offer a different scaling path for machine translation (MT): instead of increasing parameter count or emitting explicit chain-of-thought tokens, they spend additional recurrent computation inside hidden states. We introduce LatentMT, the first systematic study of latent-reasoning LoopLMs for machine translation. LatentMT adapts a small 2.6B-parameter backbone model with lightweight training. Across 32 translation directions spanning high-, mid-, and low-resource languages, LatentMT achieves performance comparable to models three to five times larger. It is competitive in a high-resource language and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both mid-resource and low-resource languages. Studying the behavior of scaling the number of recurrent reasoning steps, we find that recurrent computation consistently improves translation quality in early steps, then saturates quickly afterwards. Our me
arXiv:2607.18615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning for vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. Unlike language models, VLMs combine a language backbone with visual components, which makes unlearning more complex. There is a surprising phenomenon when moving from single-modality unlearning to VLM unlearning: a target forgotten by the standalone language backbone can still be recovered when image information is given to the full VLM. This shows that text-only feedback is not enough for reliable VLM unlearning. Motivated by this observation, we propose Stochastic Meta-Unlearning (SMU), a bilevel framework that uses VLM-level feedback to learn an unlearning-ready initialization. In the inner loop, SMU applies a few unlearning steps to the language backbone using text data. In the outer loop, SMU recomposes the updated backbone with the frozen VLM and evaluates forgetting and utility at the VLM level. This design makes the unlearning update aware of the final mu
arXiv:2607.18570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discourse relations provide document structure, critical to language understanding and enabling language model performance and ethicality. In this work, we investigate how instruction-tuned Transformer models (LLaMA and Mistral) encode discourse relations in English, with a particular focus on the contrasting relations of causation and antithesis. Framing the task as a next-token prediction task and applying a suite of interpretability techniques to test model internals, our findings show that certain early layers make predictive decisions at mid-sequence tokens, while some mid-level layers finalize their decisions closer to the last token. Most of the remaining layers primarily propagate earlier decisions rather than actively influencing them. Additionally, we observe that some layers exhibit a preference for one answer over alternatives, suggesting asymmetric representation of discourse-based reasoning.\footnote{Our code is available at
arXiv:2607.18566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persona prompting is widely used to steer LLM agent behavior, yet the narrative framing of a task can matter more than the assigned persona. We isolate this effect through structural isomorphism, constructing three text-based investigation games that share the same action space, stage progression, and resource constraints while varying only task narrative: disease investigation, IT troubleshooting, and murder mystery. Across 1,890 sessions spanning 3 models and 10 personas, we identify narrative priors: systematic action tendencies activated by a task's story framing, independent of its decision structure. Narrative priors explain 5-31x more behavioral variance than persona, are consistent across model architectures, and in two of three domains are negatively associated with task success. Persona effects that do transfer across narratives arise from behavioral anchors, persona descriptions whose language maps directly onto shared actions.
arXiv:2607.18532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning-specialized language models show large performance gains over base models, yet the internal changes responsible for improved multi-step reasoning remain poorly understood. It is unclear whether reasoning fine-tuning improves local token-level competence or globally reorganizes how models structure inference over time. We address this question by modeling Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a switching dynamical system (SDS), in which internal representations evolve under discrete latent policy states. Our framework combines time-aware contrastive representation learning with discrete regime discovery to recover latent policies from activation trajectories. Across four benchmarks and model scales from 1.5B to 32B parameters, reasoning-fine-tuned models exhibit richer latent-policy organization than their base counterparts, characterized by more differentiated transition structure and model-dependent changes in state utilization, persis
arXiv:2607.18481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) requires navigating from topic entities to an answer several relations away. Recent methods prompt a frontier LLM to explore the graph through a retrieval tool, but their reliance on frontier-scale inference makes them costly to deploy. We present Search-on-Graph-R1 (\sogrone{}), which internalizes this navigation into a compact 8B model through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL). Our central idea is to scaffold a frontier teacher with each question's gold SPARQL query, so the teacher traverses a known answer-bearing path with a live \texttt{Search} tool rather than having to discover the path itself. Since every call executes against a live Freebase server, the resulting trajectories are grounded in the knowledge graph by construction. On WebQSP, CWQ, and GrailQA, \sogrone{} at 8B surpasses every frozen frontier-LLM system in our comparison and posts the stronges
arXiv:2607.18476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model must choose one answer from a large space of equally valid options, a format clause -- "Reply with JSON only" -- changes which answer it chooses. We re-run the One-Word Census (arXiv:2607.12796): 31 wide-answer-space category prompts asked of 44 models, now with the reply requested in JSON -- no schema enforcement, no constrained decoding, only the request. Convergence deepens sharply: on the unconstrained "Pick a word" prompt the modal answer rises from 41% to 64% of the pool and distinct answers fall from 52 to 36; mean answer-choice surprisal drops from 1.80 to 1.58 bits. The tax is progressive: six of 44 models move individually (BH-FDR q=.10), all toward the mode, led by the most distinctive models, while the conformist floor is immobile. It is a sharpener, not a re-indexer -- the plain-chat modal answer survives in 28 of 31 categories. Defaults are register-indexed: a within-run re-sample (n=20) finds JSON shif
arXiv:2607.18448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pathology report generation from whole-slide images (WSIs) is a rapidly growing multimodal learning problem, yet progress is difficult to measure because existing studies use heterogeneous datasets, model settings, visual encoders, and evaluation protocols. Moreover, commonly used natural language generation metrics, including BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, primarily reward lexical similarity and often fail to detect clinically consequential errors such as omitted diagnoses, hallucinated findings, or discordant tumor attributes. We present a standardized benchmark and evaluation framework for pathology report generation. The benchmark evaluates four representative methods across three datasets (TCGA, HistAI, and REG 2025) using three pathology foundation encoders (CONCHv1.5, UNI2-h, and H-Optimus-1). Our framework standardizes preprocessing, feature extraction, training, decoding, and evaluation, enabling fair comparison across models while pro
arXiv:2607.18443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification. Here we propose a framework, ScAffolded Generative models for Explanation (SAGE), that combines the explanatory transparency of cognitive models with the generative flexibility of language models (LMs). SAGE decomposes a pragmatic process into three kinds of modules: proposers, which use LMs to generate an open-ended space of candidate alternatives; evaluators, which assess those alternatives (e.g., their semantics, complexity, or typicality); and selectors, which implement the rule-based computational steps of a cognitively motivated task analysis. We assess SAGE in three case studies s
arXiv:2607.18438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Introducing Relay-Bench, an unsaturated, holistic, text-only benchmark that measures LLMs' ability to complete an assortment of tasks from distinct domains in a single prompt. The leading model, GPT-5.5 (xHigh), scores 43.3%. The test set entirely consists of composite problems: groups of single-domain subproblems that are strung together into challenges that require reasoning across multiple domains in combination. Many of these problems then have layers of complexity added through prompt encoding and deliberate context bloat. Domains tested include visual reasoning, coding, math, information extraction (with a focus on web search), problem-solving, general knowledge, and data analysis. No restrictions are imposed outside of the model harness, and models are explicitly encouraged to leverage code-execution, web searches, and all available tools. All problems are composed of two to thirteen subproblems and do not require multi-modal input
arXiv:2607.18432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper reports on a collaboration between the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) and the European Master's in Translation (EMT) to localise the MMLU dataset into 11 European languages. Beyond creating a more inclusive benchmark for LLM evaluation, the project offers master's students authentic, project-based professional training in translation, revision, project management, and multilingual coordination, while highlighting key methodological, administrative, and workflow challenges.
arXiv:2607.18413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) largely rely on Transformers, where self-attention provides global token interaction but does not explicitly encode the locality of natural language. We study whether lightweight depthwise convolutions can supply this local inductive bias without materially increasing model size. Our macro-level ablation compares convolution at 17 locations in a Qwen3 Transformer block and finds the best results when convolution is applied to the projected queries, keys, and values before attention. A subsequent micro-level study favors a residual depthwise convolution with kernel size $k=3$, without additional normalization or activation. Across Qwen3 models and several pre-training data budgets, this design improves the average accuracy on seven downstream benchmarks while adding less than $0.01\%$ parameters. A representation-level case study further suggests that the convolution makes repeated token IDs more sensitive to t
arXiv:2607.18358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Document classification is a solved problem in the laboratory and an unsolved one in the enterprise. The blocker is rarely model architecture; it is the labeling project that must precede a model and the institutional fear of letting a model retrain itself once one exists. We present SIFT (Self-Improving, Frozen-gate Training), a dynamic classifier service, which attacks both. SIFT serves classification from a deliberately cheap, CPU-bound pipeline, a SPLADE sparse encoder feeding a LightGBM head, and escalates only the low-confidence minority of pages to an LLM judge. The judge's verdicts are written back into a labeled corpus, so the expensive model continuously teaches the cheap one: the escalation rate falls, the corpus grows from production traffic rather than from an up-front annotation effort, and accuracy compounds with use. Onboarding a new document family requires only a declarative bundle, label space, anchor phrases, and a jud
arXiv:2607.18321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans invented reading and have passed down this complex skill across generations through language. This study provides empirical evidence of the neural mechanisms underlying bottom-up (related to high-order linguistic structure) and top-down (related to next-word predictability) processes, which interact to guide comprehension during reading. While previous studies have focused on either the N400 effects of predictability or lexical categories, research on how predictability influences N400 responses across different lexical categories is limited, mainly due to constraints in publicly available datasets. Here, we examine how predictability influences brain responses, recorded at millisecond resolution using electroencephalography (EEG), with a focus on the N400 time window (300-500 ms post-stimulus) across different lexical and grammatical categories. Our results indicate that significant differences in N400 responses between high and l
arXiv:2604.10895v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots can be endowed with such social intelligence by modelling the dynamic relationship between user's internal states (latent) and actions (observable state). Our premise is that these states arise from the same underlying socio-cognitive process and influence each other dynamically. Drawing inspiration from theories in Cognitive Science, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework, termed as \textbf{SocialLDG} that explicitly models the dynamic relationship among the states represent as six distinct tasks. Our framework uses a language model to introduce lexical priors for each task and employs dynamic graph learning to model task affinity evolving with time. SocialLDG has three advantages: First,
arXiv:2603.17238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Navigation aids are central to immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences that involve physical locomotion. Their effectiveness depends not only on how much spatial information they provide, but also on how directly that information supports movement decisions. We compared three common guidance techniques for immersive VR wayfinding: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass. In a controlled room-scale VR study with 42 participants completing 1008 trials, participants navigated to target landmarks in a time-pressured maze with reduced visibility and forced route replanning. Across behavioral and eye-tracking measures, arrow guidance produced the strongest navigation performance, minimap guidance yielded intermediate performance, and compass cues performed worst, suggesting that during immersive locomotion users benefit from guidance that can be interpreted rapidly while moving. These results suggest that in demanding immersive loc
arXiv:2512.04692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive communication (IC), i.e., the reciprocal exchange of information between two or more interactive partners, is a fundamental part of human nature. As such, it has been studied across multiple scientific disciplines with different goals and methods. This article provides a cross-disciplinary and selective primer on contemporary IC integrating psychological mechanisms with speech signal, acoustic and media-technological constraints in theory, measurement, and applications. First, we outline theoretical frameworks that account for verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal aspects of IC, including distinctions between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Second, we summarize key methodological approaches, including behavioral, cognitive, and experiential measures of communicative synchrony and acoustic signal quality. Third, we discuss selected applications, applications in which speech transmission, signal enhancement, me
arXiv:2607.18983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AutoJourn, a demonstration system for multi-perspective news generation and bias-aware evaluation using large language models (LLMs). The system tackles three core challenges in responsible automated journalism: extracting diverse perspectives from unstructured social media discussions, generating summaries that preserve viewpoint diversity, and detecting or mitigating bias in AI-generated news. The pipeline integrates advanced prompt engineering with optional retrieval augmentation to produce semantically diverse perspective sets, a multi-perspective summarisation module that merges conflicting viewpoints into balanced summaries, and a bias analysis suite supporting sentence-level bias detection and type classification in the generated news article, and automatic neutralisation. Users can inspect perspective clusters, compare stance-specific summaries, generate news articles, and apply bias-aware rewrites directly in the int
arXiv:2607.18663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Defensive driving is widely recognized as an advanced driving skill. However, whether and how defensive driving affects driving safety remains insufficiently investigated. This study examines the behavioral characteristics of defensive driving, its impact on driving safety, and the underlying mechanisms. First, defensive driving is defined regarding operational timing and application scenario. Then, 82 participants are recruited for driving simulator experiments, with their behavioral and eye movement data being collected. Following the experiments, participants are categorized into groups based on the frequency of defensive driving behaviors exhibited. Finally, both inter-group and inter trial comparisons are performed on the experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate that in the inter-group comparison, the high defensive driving capability group exhibits higher acceleration and deceleration magnitudes, lower average speeds, a
arXiv:2607.18614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the speaker a listener attends to from neural responses like electroencephalography (EEG), making it a key algorithm in neuro-steered hearing aids. However, most neural AAD models are trained as independent short-window classifiers, despite auditory attention being a temporally persistent cognitive state and short-window EEG--audio evidence often being noisy and ambiguous. We propose an end-to-end Markov AAD framework based on conditional random field (CRF) that trains window-level neural emissions under a two-state attention prior. The framework treats the logits of any AAD backbone as Markov emissions, learns the transition rate from a standard HMM initialization, and jointly optimizes cross-entropy and CRF objectives, allowing temporal continuity to guide representation learning rather than merely smoothing predictions after training. We also introduce ESCNet, an EEG--speech correlation ba
arXiv:2607.18609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Matthew effect is a big challenge in Recommender Systems (RSs), where popular items tend to receive increasing attention, while less popular ones are often overlooked, perpetuating existing disparities. Although many existing methods attempt to mitigate Matthew effect in the static or quasi-static recommendation scenarios, such issue will be more pronounced as users engage with the system over time. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Multi-Hypergraph Boosted Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning for Conversational Recommendation (HiCore), aiming to address Matthew effect in the Conversational Recommender System (CRS) involving the dynamic user-system feedback loop. It devotes to learn multi-level user interests by building a set of hypergraphs (i.e., item-, entity-, word-oriented multiple-channel hypergraphs) to alleviate the Matthew effec. Extensive experiments on four CRS-based datasets showcase that HiCore attains a new
arXiv:2607.18496v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for a range of software, hardware and human-centered security tasks. Consequently, LLM performance on security tasks is an active area of measurement and research, often with a focus on identifying areas in which LLM security ``knowledge'' may be insufficient. Popular strategies for identifying LLM security knowledge gaps include building corpora of challenge questions or task benchmarks, strategies that require substantial manual work and security expertise to design and execute. We introduce a partially-automated method for assessing LLM knowledge of a security area.The method uses authoritative information from Consumer Protection Agencies (CPAs) to identify instability in LLM responses that can be indicative of knowledge gaps. We demonstrate the method for 2 security topics, identity theft and impostor scams, and 5 LLMs in 2 leading LLM families, Gemini and GPT, using publicly avail
arXiv:2607.19007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People with dementia in residential care often experience reduced social connectedness. Person-centered care approaches foreground meaningful social interactions to support well-being, but staff and time pressures increasingly constrain opportunities for such care. Generative AI (GenAI) technologies offer possibilities for helping care professionals facilitate social connectedness, despite increasing care pressures. Yet, the meaningful integration of such technologies into the complex sociotechnical setting of residential dementia care is not straightforward. To responsibly design GenAI technologies for dementia care, we need to investigate how care professionals recognize and foster social connectedness and how technologies intersect with those approaches in care contexts. We conducted five workshops with 15 care professionals from three care organizations to pursue this objective. Our findings show that fostering social connectedness in
arXiv:2607.18884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into healthcare to support diagnostics, decision-making, and administrative processes. However, the successful implementation of AI depends not only on technical performance but also on public perceptions of its helpfulness, riskiness, and fairness. This study examines public perceptions of automated decision-making (ADM) in healthcare. Data were drawn from the first wave of an ongoing longitudinal survey panel. The final sample consisted of 3,915 respondents and was analyzed with structural equation modeling. Perceptions of ADM in healthcare as helpful, risky, and fair were treated as the dependent variables. AI literacy, familiarity with different forms of AI, confidence in clinicians' ability to distinguish AI- from human-generated content, use of conversational agents for health information, and use of traditional digital health information sources were included as exogenous. Gre
arXiv:2607.18864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nemo Explain Visualizer (nev) is an interactive visual query tracer and builder for Nemo, a powerful Datalog reasoner with extended features. Our tools were developed with and for expert users. However, considering the lack of resources to learn Datalog and similar declarative logic programming languages, we conducted a qualitative user study to assess how our tools might help students. The study, interviewing 14 participants with varying levels of involvement with the content of a university course on knowledge graphs, revealed a very positive assessment of our tools, which strengthens the value of visual explanation tools beyond their intended use.
arXiv:2607.18818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) provides continuous heart-rate measurements, but its accuracy degrades under motion. In the ring-platform benchmark, the best supervised baseline reaches 5.33 BPM mean absolute error (MAE) on the overall heart-rate task. In the motion-focused ring-only audit, a supervised LSTM baseline reaches $14.39 \pm 0.47$ BPM MAE on motion windows, and simple smoothing and ACC priors reduce this only to $13.00 \pm 0.41$ BPM. This thesis addresses motion-corrupted HR estimation through three connected stages: candidate-frequency identification, temporal decoding, and reliability-aware reporting. The study first evaluates two wearable PPG ring variants against clinical references for heart rate, respiration, SpO$_2$, and blood pressure in 54 participants. The proposed system then uses two layers. The estimation layer converts each window into approximately 140 frequency candidates, scores candidates using agreement a
arXiv:2607.18671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most existing EEG-based emotion recognition studies formulate affective decoding as static category prediction, although emotions elicited by continuous stimulation evolve over time, accumulate, reach peak intensity, and then recover. This motivates EEG-based dynamic affective trajectory prediction, which estimates continuous affective intensity curves from sequential EEG observations. Existing temporal regression models can capture coarse intensity trends but often fail to preserve peak-centered structure, leading to inaccurate peak timing and terminal-peak bias, where the predicted maximum is shifted toward the end of a trial. To address this issue, we propose PeakFlow, a peak-guided coarse-to-refined framework for EEG-based dynamic affective trajectory prediction. PeakFlow first learns a coarse affective flow through EEG temporal tokenization and masked temporal modeling, then applies a lightweight residual refiner for peak-guided boun
arXiv:2607.18628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distracted driving remains a major safety concern, motivating approaches that aim to reduce visual overload before attention breaks down. However, visual overload varies across individuals, making it difficult to determine appropriate interventions for each driver. We investigate whether controllable visual blur can simplify the driving scene and mitigate distraction. To address this challenge, we propose BlurDriving, a target-selective, distance-aware blur system in a Virtual Reality (VR) urban driving simulator, and employ a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (HITL-MOBO) framework to personalize blur configurations. Across two VR user studies, we evaluated driving under normal conditions in Study 1 and under cognitively demanding conditions in Study 2. We found that personalization revealed strong individual differences in blur preference but did not lead to significant improvements in objective driving performance
arXiv:2607.18605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is identified as the most prevalent neurodivergent condition in the construction industry. While the construction industry may broaden employment opportunities, little is known about how ADHD traits shape workers' performance, sustained attention, and situational awareness in dynamic job-site environments. This work presents an exploratory interview study aimed at understanding how ADHD traits influence construction-specific productivity and how future interventions can reduce challenges while amplifying strengths. We conducted semi-structured interviews with construction workers with ADHD, safety managers, and ADHD researchers to capture their perspectives on attentional demands, task coordination, and workplace adaptation. As part of these discussions, participants also reflected on the potential of combining artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) to support future ADHD work
arXiv:2607.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bowed string instruments demand fine-grained bodily coordination that is typically taught through visual demonstration, creating persistent barriers for musicians with blindness and low-vision (BLV). To understand these challenges and explore new design opportunities, we conducted a design study with four advanced string musicians with BLV and three of their instructors. Our team, spanning violin performance and music education, disability studies in music, HCI design, and engineering employed a qualitative, multi-method approach including practice video analysis, lesson observation, expert interviews. Our analysis identifies recurring difficulties in right-hand bow control, left-hand coordination, score access, and memory-intensive practice. Building on these findings, we conducted an exploratory design ideation phase informed by empirical findings and feedback from one musician with BLV. We developed speculative design directions that c
arXiv:2607.18564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery is essential yet inefficient, primarily because generating hypotheses within a vast search space hinders breakthroughs. While current AI systems assist in generating new hypothesis candidates, they lack interactive support for the reasoning process by which users develop these outputs into promising hypotheses, resulting in surface-level hypotheses. To address this issue, we present co-abduction, a human-AI collaborative framework for abductive reasoning in scientific hypothesis generation. To operationalize co-abduction, we build HALO, a human-AI collaborative system for molecular hypothesis generation in drug discovery, enabling improved candidate clustering, strategy identification, and multi-strategy synthesis. In expert studies involving 10 medicinal chemists, HALO significantly facilitated abductive reasoning for hypothesis generation -- efficient candidate observation, systematic strategy identification, and co