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:2607.06818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For any E-commerce website it is a nontrivial problem to build enduring advertisements that attract shoppers. It is hard to pass the creative quality bar of the website, especially at a large scale. We thus propose a programmatic solution to generate product advertising headlines using retail content. We propose a state of the art application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) Policy gradient methods on Transformer based Masked Language Models. Our method creates the advertising headline by jointly conditioning on multiple products that a seller wishes to advertise. We demonstrate that our method outperforms existing Transformer and LSTM + RL methods in overlap metrics and quality audits. We also show that our model-generated headlines outperform human submitted headlines in terms of both grammar and creative quality as determined by audits.
arXiv:2607.06641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve promising results on medical question answering benchmarks, yet their use in public health is constrained by hallucinations and the rapid evolution of official guidance. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these risks by grounding responses in an explicitly maintained corpus, but end-to-end performance depends critically on retrieval configuration and on evaluation beyond multiple-choice formats. We extend PubHealthBench, a question answering (QA) benchmark of 7,929 questions derived from UK Government public health guidance, into a retrieval-augmented setting and systematically evaluate retrieval and generation choices. We compare dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval across multiple embedding models and corpus variants, and show that hybrid retrieval consistently improves recall and ranking quality, with chunk length and topic interacting with ranking performance. Providing retrieved context
arXiv:2607.06611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatically recognizing the sentiment, positive or negative, from speech is a challenging task, requiring both the analysis of vocal inflections and the interpretation of uttered words. Recent solutions rely on audio foundation models to solve the task, but it remains unclear if such models can take all aspects into account. To this end, we propose a multimodal solution that integrates audio and text information via cross-modal transformers, where text transcripts are automatically generated via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) tool. Moreover, we create multiple text modalities by automatically translating the transcripts into multiple languages via machine translation tools. Audio and multilingual text features are combined via a cascaded architecture comprising cross-modal transformer blocks that integrate modalities one by one. We further distill knowledge from the multimodal model, called teacher, into a unimodal (audio only) m
arXiv:2604.20711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence is increasingly deployed to synthesize large-scale public input in policy consultations and participatory processes. Yet no formal framework exists for auditing whether these summaries faithfully represent the source population, an accountability gap that existing approaches to AI explainability, grounding and hallucination detection do not address because they focus on output quality rather than input fidelity. Here, participatory provenance is introduced: a measurement framework grounded in optimal transport theory, causal inference and semantic analysis that tracks how individual public submissions are transformed, filtered or lost through AI-mediated summarization. Applied to Canada's 2025-2026 national AI Strategy consultation ($n = 5{,}253$ respondents across two independent policy topics), the framework reveals that both official government summaries underperform a random-participant baseline ($-9.
arXiv:2603.15245v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Empathy is central to human connection, yet people often struggle to express it effectively. In blinded evaluations, large language models (LLMs) generate responses that are often judged more empathic than human-written ones. Yet when a response is attributed to AI, recipients feel less heard than when comparable responses are attributed to a human. We built a conversation platform in which participants are asked to offer empathic support to an LLM expressing realistic troubles and conducted a randomized experiment collecting 33,938 messages spanning 2,904 text-based conversations between 968 participants and their LLM conversational partners. We find participants report feeling empathy but systematically fail to express it, but an LLM coaching intervention offering personalized feedback on effective empathic communication significantly boosts it without homogenizing participants' responses. Moreover, we derive a data-driven tax
arXiv:2602.17588v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress in autonomous web agents, human involvement remains essential for shaping preferences and correcting agent behavior as tasks unfold. However, current agentic systems lack a principled understanding of when and why humans intervene, often proceeding autonomously past critical decision points or requesting unnecessary confirmation. In this work, we introduce the task of modeling human intervention to support collaborative web task execution. We collect CowCorpus, a dataset of 400 real-user web navigation trajectories containing over 4,200 interleaved human and agent actions. We identify four distinct patterns of user interaction with agents -- hands-off supervision, hands-on oversight, collaborative task-solving, and full user takeover. Leveraging these insights, we train language models (LMs) to anticipate when users are likely to intervene based on their interaction styles, yielding a 61.4-63.4% improvemen
arXiv:2605.08630v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating visualization systems in niche domains such as genomics is challenging due to scarcity of domain experts and difficulty recruiting a representative user base. While LLM-based synthetic personas are increasingly used to ease evaluation bottlenecks, they face well-founded skepticism. Rather than weighing synthetic personas as substitutes for real users, we ask a fundamental open question: when synthetic personas evaluate a real visualization system, what do they actually produce, and how does that output change when grounded in documented human contexts? We present Sycamore, an exploratory three-condition probe design using Geranium, a search engine for multimodal genomics visualization, as a case study. Sycamore evaluates Geranium using: (1) ungrounded synthetic personas from generic LLM priors; (2) grounded synthetic personas constrained by voice-of-customer artifacts from a prior interview study; and (3) a published baseli
arXiv:2607.07650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Time-constrained interactive systems such as USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data)-based financial services operate under strict session limits and sequential user interaction. While stronger authentication mechanisms improve security, they also increase interaction complexity and time burden, potentially reducing transaction completion. In this work, we model the failure dynamics of such systems and investigate how authentication complexity interacts with user response time and network round-trip time to influence session success rate. We propose and implement a simulation-based framework to investigate these failure dynamics and formally define a non-linear failure phenomenon, termed the \textit{Success Cliff}, where session success rates sharply decline beyond a critical complexity threshold. Through controlled experiments, we quantify the trade-off between security and usability and identify conditions under which secure au
arXiv:2607.07420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety for generalist robots is usually discussed in terms of motion or dialogue. We argue a third question is missing: should the robot take its first hard-to-undo social action at all, such as a greeting, an uninvited grasp, or stepping into someone's space? We call this initiation authorization. Current frameworks rarely treat it as a separate safety layer. Today's stacks often skip this step: a high engagement score or a confident VLA rollout is treated as permission to act. But seeing a person is not the same as having their consent to be addressed. We frame initiation authorization within generalist-robot safety and contrast it with post-plan VLA guardrails, implementing PAS (probe-authorize-speak) on a doorway humanoid, comparing it with direct-init on logged traces, and proposing a three-condition user study, with open questions on metrics, governance, and where initiation ends and foundation-model generation begins.
arXiv:2607.07370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In embodied intelligence systems, the motion controller serves as the critical bridge between semantic reasoning and physical execution. Humanoid control has progressed rapidly through large-scale human motion-capture data and motion-tracking paradigm. However, producing quadruped robots motion corpora with scalability and physical feasibility faces more fundamental obstacles: animal motion data is scarce, and cross-embodiment retargeting remains fragile. We present ABot-C0, a generalist motion-control system for quadruped robots that establishes three complementary behavior foundations: a scalable multi-source motion-data pipeline, robust policy learning across motion tracking, locomotion, and scene interaction, and a unified deployment stack for reliable real-world operation. Fundamentally, we construct a data pyramid through conditional video-generation synthesis, annotated motion capture, teleoperation and human design, producing 16
arXiv:2607.07099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Squint and cataract are major ocular disorders that majorly affect visual perception and interaction capability. This paper proposes a real-time video-based automated detection system for squint and cataract detection based on computer vision and image processing methods. The proposed system uses a media-pipe face-mesh (a 478-point facial landmark detection model) to extract geometric ocular features for multi-class squint classification. Simultaneously, The presence and severity cataract is estimated through grayscale intensity and histogram-based lens opacity analysis. The system records short video sequences with standard laptop or mobile cameras, which can be deployed at low costs and on a large scale. The experimental performance has shown great accuracy in the detection of squint (98.39%) and classification of cataract (96.90%). Besides automatic ocular analysis, the proposed framework is also made accessible for visual impairment
arXiv:2607.07021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans continuously coordinate with others in dynamic interactions, often through implicit, hard-to-quantify social norms that act as shared tacit expectations among interacting agents. As AI agents, including large language models (LLMs), become embedded in daily life, they increasingly participate in such interactions and reshape social interaction structures. Yet they often fail to coordinate with humans in an effective, considerate, and natural manner. We hypothesize that this gap arises because existing approaches align model behavior with human demonstrations without explicitly quantifying the underlying norms that generate such behavior. We selected pedestrian-vehicle interaction as a representative dynamic interaction and developed a simplified experimental platform that captures its key interactive features. From 3,456 dynamic human interactions collected via this platform, we identified three principles underlying human social
arXiv:2607.06608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present key challenges and future research directions in the security and privacy of agentic AI, based on a horizon-scanning exercise that brought together thirty leading international experts from academia, industry, and government to engage in focused discussions and collaborative exercises on the emerging risks associated with the growing agency of AI.
arXiv:2607.06577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physiological tremor of the upper limb is a sensitive neuromuscular indicator that may be modulated by cognitive load and competitive stress, yet its behaviour in real esports conditions remains uncharacterised. We measured wrist accelerometer-based tremor in 16 healthy adult male StarCraft~2 players across two tournament days, computing log power spectral density ($log(PSD)$) and dominant frequency in four bands (2--4, 8--14, 10--20, and 1--25Hz) and comparing them to published population norms using linear mixed models. Players deviated significantly from the reference in all bands: $log(PSD)$ was elevated at 2--4~Hz and substantially reduced at higher frequencies (Cohen's $d = 1.6$--$2.3$), suggesting long-term neuromuscular adaptation to the fine-motor demands of esports. Tremor indicators declined systematically over the tournament day. Contrary to the fatigue-related increases typical of traditional motor tasks. Neither game outco
arXiv:2607.07522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlled research on AI ideation typically compares independent agents, while field studies of human-AI collaboration sacrifice experimental control. We introduce a controlled, two-player extension of the Alternate Uses Test (AUT) that enables comparison of human-human and human-AI co-creation under matched interactive conditions, alongside calibrated non-interactive baselines. The platform supports decomposition of performance into three typically confounded factors: participant traits, partner perceptions, and content dynamics. An in-person pilot (N = 62) demonstrates its utility. Under matched time limits, originality with a GPT-4 partner is statistically equivalent to that with a human partner. Approach motivation (BAS Drive) moderates whether interactive partnership benefits originality, and self-reported cognitive outsourcing predicts lower originality specifically in human-human dyads. Prior exposure to highly creative ideas impr
arXiv:2607.07521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents that generate final answers based on user input often do not meet the needs of creative fields. Fields such as structural design and architecture need interactive systems that help users externalise and develop ideas, explore alternatives, and refine partial solutions. The final product of such designs needs to comply with many constraints concerning, e.g., spatial configuration, mechanical behaviour, material quantities, and costs. These constraints create friction in the design process, which can stimulate novel and creative solutions. In this paper, we discuss the misalignment between current generative AI goals to remove friction and provide final solutions and the needs of creators, such as structural designers, who develop ideas through iterative work. We present the design dimensions of systems allowing for constrained human-AI co-creation that rely on vision-language models making structural exploration conversational, m
arXiv:2607.07463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A perennial research question in visualization involves identifying which visual encodings for a particular dataset are most effective for users in performing a specific task. The relative effectiveness of the different encodings are commonly identified through controlled experiments. However, designing an experiment involves making many, often ad hoc, decisions about the experimental setup such as whether to include a training module, whether to provide performance-based incentives to participants, etc. Yet, there is limited guidance on how these decisions should be made, and we do not fully understand the impact of these subjective decisions on empirical results. In this paper, we investigate the impact of one such key design decision: monetary rewards. Specifically, we ask: does providing or not providing participants with performance-based financial incentives affect the results and the conclusions that we draw from visualization stud
arXiv:2607.07185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurological injury affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, yet the loss of motor or communication functions resulting from stroke, spinal cord injury, and neurodegenerative disease remains largely irreversible with existing therapies. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising pathway for restoring these functions by decoding neural activity into commands that control an external device. Here, we present the first quantitative analysis of China's BCI translational ecosystem, integrating evidence from three pillars: investigator-initiated trials (IITs), registered clinical trials, and regulatory-approved products. We analyzed 134 clinical trials from the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR), 26 IITs, and five BCI-related products approved by the National Medical Products Administration as of June 2026. Results demonstrate that clinical trial registration has increased rapidly since 2020, with research centers concent
arXiv:2607.07116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In some cases, end-user programming allows the design of stand-alone applications. But none of the existing approaches is concerned by safety aspects of programming. Heavy techniques exist to develop safe applications, particularly in non-interactive domains. They involve software engineering techniques, and sometimes, formal methods. All these techniques are very far from end-users. Our idea is to let this part to experts, and to connect end-user programming onto this safe conventional development. Starting from an existing functional core, we built an interactive end-user programming environment called GenBuild, which allows designing interactive stand-alone applications. GenBuild is composed of two distinct modules. The Generator is the first one. It is a specialized tool developed for a domain expert who sets out a safe functional core. The Builder is the second module. It is a purely interactive tool that allows an end-user to develo
arXiv:2607.07105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Composition in Traditional Chinese Paintings (TCPs) carries spatial, narrative, and cultural-aesthetic meaning. Systematic compositional analysis is therefore important for understanding their visual language and artistic meaning. Traditional compositional analysis is mainly qualitative and interpretation-driven. It supports close reading of individual paintings, but it is difficult to discover, compare, and verify compositional patterns across large painting collections. To better understand these challenges, we conducted a literature review and in-depth interviews with two art historians. Based on these findings, we introduce the Composition Graph, a scene-graph-based representation for TCP composition. It models a painting through four layers: entities, relations, void space, and context. Based on this representation, we develop CompoVista, a canvas-based visual analytics system for composition-oriented exploration of TCPs. CompoVista
arXiv:2607.07073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Searching for time-series segments that match user-defined patterns is important in domains such as finance, climate science, and healthcare. However, existing visual query tools often struggle to support vague, composite, or fuzzy pattern descriptions, often requiring users to express their intent through precise sketches or rigid structured filters. We present ShapeTalk, a coordinated natural-language and sketch-based querying system for univariate time-series pattern search. Rather than treating text and sketch as a fused input stream, ShapeTalk uses them as complementary representations of analytic intent: natural language supports semantic and compositional pattern descriptions, while sketching supports direct geometric refinement. The two modalities are linked through a shared visual context, editable feature representations, and synchronized result views, enabling users to move between text and sketch during iterative query formula
arXiv:2607.06996v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sign language recognition technologies can improve communication between deaf individuals and the broader community, but many existing systems face challenges in real-world deployment. This paper presents a deployable smart glove system for sign language recognition that integrates wearable sensing and deep learning. The glove incorporates flex sensors and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to capture finger articulation and hand motion, while facial cues are obtained through a camera. Sensor data are transmitted via an ESP32-C6 microcontroller and processed using a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to model temporal gesture dynamics. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves an overall recognition accuracy of approximately 95%. The trained model is further converted to TensorFlow Lite for real-time inference. This demonstrates the feasibility of the system for practical sign language translation applications.
arXiv:2607.06901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Virtual reality (VR) nature immersion is an increasingly popular field of research due to its potential to help people who do not have access to real nature. There are many questions surrounding how virtual forests can be designed to effectively reduce stress and restore attention. Many of these questions relate solely to visual aspects, but more recent literature has started exploring multisensory experiences. In these experiences, senses are treated as additive; however, certain results from the current literature may indicate that there are more complex, cross-sensory interactions occurring. For example, adding sound to visuals can increase stress reduction potential, but certain natural sounds can feel threatening if they are out of place within the virtual nature scene. Overall, cross-sensory interactions in VR nature environments (VNEs) are underexplored and challenge our current understanding of multisensory VNEs, and future explor
arXiv:2607.06778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Augmented reality (AR) can enhance visual perception for people with low vision (PLV) by overlaying multimodal information. Selection-based augmentation further allows users to flexibly choose and augment relevant information while reducing distraction and visual clutter. However, little is known about the ability and preferences of PLV in performing object selection techniques in AR, considering their potential visual and gaze control challenges. To understand what selection techniques are suitable for PLV to support selection-based AR augmentations, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 20 PLV and 18 sighted controls who performed target selection tasks using three input techniques -- head, gaze, and finger pointing with dwell-based confirmation -- in two real-world scenarios (sitting vs. on the go). We found that for PLV, gaze-based selection enabled the fastest initial pointing when sitting and comparable overall selection time to h
arXiv:2607.06761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a rehearsal-oriented system for creating responsive built environments during theatre devising workshops. The system connects bespoke sensing modules for gesture, position, and speech recognition to light and sound outputs through a visual no-code programming layer. It was developed, used, and refined across six workshops with eight professional performance-makers, where participants created light-and-sound scores, gesture- and position-triggered scenes, responsive architectures, participatory prototypes, and a multi-room scratch performance. Rather than presenting a production-ready show-control platform, this demo focuses on how sensing and actuation can be made available as compositional materials during early-stage creative experimentation for immersive theatrical compositions. The system is designed to support quick configuration, visible mappings, and in-room testing, allowing performers to experiment with responsive spac
arXiv:2607.06754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more readily than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design with families. Across three workshops and user testing, applied theatre methods supported families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles that shaped the public event. We show how theatrical co-design can rebalance child-adult participation through playful status shifts, and how selected workshop dynamics can be re-staged within a public mixed-reality installation. We contribute a theatrical account
arXiv:2607.06721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building upon found examples is a popular way people learn to code, especially in creative coding communities where sharing projects and remixing are common practices. But effectively doing so requires being able to 1) understand how existing code works, and 2) extend it by writing code that implements your own ideas, practices that can be challenging for new creative coders. We explored how to support these two processes through the design of Flowcode, a creative coding programming environment that integrates a flowchart for visualizing code structure and a chat interface tailored to support learning to code over vibe coding. We share how we iterated on the design of Flowcode over two studies with new creative coders, reflecting on the roles visualization and friction may play in enabling productive AI-use in computing education.
arXiv:2607.06687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-mediated communication is increasingly being utilized to help facilitate interactions; however, in privacy sensitive domains, an AI mediator has the additional challenge of considering how to preserve privacy. In these contexts, a mediator may redact or withhold information, raising questions about how users perceive these interventions and whether explanations of system behavior can improve trust. In this work, we investigate how explanations of redaction operations can affect user trust in AI-mediated communication. We devise a scenario where a validated system removes sensitive content from messages and generates explanations of varying detail to communicate its decisions to recipients. We then conduct a user study with 180 participants that studies how user trust and preferences vary for cases with different amounts of redacted content and different levels of explanation detail. Our results show that participants believed our syste
arXiv:2607.06681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge workers switch between applications thousands of times per day, spending nearly a tenth of the work year transitioning between digital applications in a process called digital fragmentation. Whether this fragmentation reflects who an employee is, where they work, or what kind of day they are having, has remained an open question. We analyzed 103 million application events recorded second-by-second from 1,017 employees across eight organizations that largely employ knowledge workers (e.g., law, financial services). Day-to-day variation in fragmentation within individual employees accounted for 44.6% of the variation in digital fragmentation, slightly exceeding stable individual differences between employees (35.8%), and far exceeding variation between organizations (19.6%). Fragmentation rose over the work week and reset after weekends and holidays. Higher-than-typical use of communication applications coincided with more fragmen
arXiv:2604.11840v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models are increasingly used to simulate people: survey respondents, negotiators, stakeholders in policy exercises. In that role a model should reproduce how people plausibly behave, hesitating, conceding late, and settling for imperfect deals, rather than playing the best move. We call this the sampler role, in contrast to the solver role of finding the best move, and we test how the reasoning modes providers ship to strengthen models as solvers affect it. Our testbed is multi-party negotiation: five agents bargain over a regulation for fifteen turns, and unresolved issues are decided by an authority. Agents without a structured memory of the negotiation almost never reach agreement, whether reasoning is on or off: 314 of 315 such runs end with the authority deciding. What reasoning changes is how the failure looks. With reasoning enabled, one model family negotiates visibly, with varied moves, concessions in most runs
arXiv:2603.26772v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated semantic annotation of broadcast television content presents distinctive challenges, combining structured audiovisual composition, domain-specific editorial patterns, and strict operational constraints. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong general-purpose video understanding capabilities, their comparative effectiveness across pipeline architectures and input configurations in broadcast-specific settings remains empirically undercharacterized. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of multimodal annotation pipelines applied to broadcast television news in the Italian setting. We construct a domain-specific benchmark of clips labeled across four semantic dimensions: visual environment classification, topic classification, sensitive content detection, and named entity recognition. Two different pipeline architectures are evaluated across nine frontier models, including Gemini 3.0 P
arXiv:2509.08299v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientific progress depends on researchers' ability to access and build upon the work of others. Yet, much published work remains behind expensive paywalls, and even accessible articles often rest on datasets shared only "upon reasonable request" to the authors. Researchers can try to overcome these barriers through informal channels, such as emailing authors directly, but whether such channels are hindered by racial or institutional biases remains unknown. Here we combine survey data, semi-structured interviews, large-scale observational analysis, and two randomized audit experiments to examine disparities in access to scientific knowledge. Surveyed researchers in the Global South report markedly lower institutional access to the literature and depend more heavily on informal channels to obtain papers and data; interviews elaborate the workarounds and racialized frictions they encounter. Our analysis of 250 million articles rev
arXiv:2402.01811v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Credit scoring has been catalogued by the European Commission and the Executive Office of the US President as a high-risk classification task, in light of the potential harms of making loan approval decisions based on models that would be biased against certain groups. To address this concern, recent credit scoring research has considered a range of fairness-enhancing techniques put forward by the machine learning community to reduce bias and unfair treatment in classification systems. While the definition of fairness or the approach they follow to impose it may vary, most of these techniques, however, disregard the robustness of the results. This can create situations where unfair treatment is effectively corrected in the training set, but when producing out-of-distribution classifications, unfair treatment is incurred again. Instead, in this paper, we will investigate how to apply Distributionally Robust Optimisation (DRO) met
arXiv:2606.20995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping scientific practices, yet its epistemic implications remain underanalyzed. While recent advances in large language models are substantial, machine learning (ML) has a deeper history across disciplines. This manuscript examines 4.9 million publications and 255 ML techniques to understand how the latter are reconfiguring scientific methods and knowledge production. Through embedding-based mapping, we reconstructed the semantic space of ML research, and found a core-periphery structure where physical sciences form the methodological core and health sciences represent the primary area of adoption. Methodological profiles vary by domain: predictive techniques are concentrated in computer sciences, while inferential approaches remain distributed across applied fields. Predictive architectures, however, are displacing inference-oriented techniques in domains that have traditionally prioritized interp
arXiv:2605.27395v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the rapid proliferation of AI systems and harms spurs efforts in AI governance around the world, prioritizing among competing policy options has become increasingly challenging for policymakers and researchers. We introduce a methodology for identifying viable policy options to mitigate specified AI harms, helping policymakers and researchers target areas that warrant greater time and resource investment. This method combines participatory evaluation of policies, expert assessment of implementation costs, and an LLM-based assessment of perceived harm mitigation under each policy option. We leverage a genetic algorithm-based simulation study to explore a vast solution space of potential policy combinations, and examine how outcomes change under different weightings of cost, participatory input, and harm mitigation. We find that this method enables exploration of different balances between participatory and expert components, allowin
arXiv:2604.26075v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Governments increasingly deploy AI in public services, making transparency essential for accountability and public trust. Australia's Standard for AI Transparency Statements (AITS) requires government bodies to disclose how AI is used in practice, yet little empirical evidence exists on how these requirements are realised in documents. This paper presents a government AITS dataset, dubbed AITS-101, and provides one of the first systematic analysis of their content. Using stylometric, quantitative, and qualitative document analyses, we examine disclosure coverage, structure, and recurring patterns. Our findings reveal substantial variation in AI-related practice disclosure, highlight gaps between policy intent and implementation, and inform the design of more effective public-sector AI transparency standards.
arXiv:2603.03532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Voting Advice Applications (VAA) are tools designed to help voters compare political candidates on policy preferences prior to elections. VAAs are popular tools in European countries and in other countries with multi-party democratic systems. Through a freedom of information request we got access to the inner workings of a popular Danish VAA called the 'textit{Kandidattest' which is implemented by a major Danish news outlet and has been used for general, municipal, and European elections. Users and politicians from every political party answer the same online questionnaire and get matched based on the agreement percentage stemming from their answers. VAAs play a significant role in elections with 45\% of surveyed voters reporting they followed their recommendations in the past Danish general election. However, the inner workings of VAAs have not been thoroughly evaluated until now. We find that the algorithm is not robust enough for u
arXiv:2601.18644v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The European Central Bank (ECB) is working on the "digital euro", an envisioned retail central bank digital currency for the Euro area. In this article, we take a closer look at the "digital euro FAQ", which provides answers to 26 frequently asked questions about the digital euro, and other published documents by the ECB on the topic. We question the provided answers based on our analysis of the current design in terms of privacy, technical feasibility, risks, costs and utility. In particular, we discuss the following key findings: (KF1) Central monitoring of all online digital euro transactions by the ECB threatens privacy even more than contemporary digital payment methods with segregated account databases. (KF2) The ECB's envisioned concept of a secure offline version of the digital euro offering full anonymity is in strong conflict with the actual history of hardware security breaches and mathematical evidence against it. (KF3) Th
arXiv:2508.15516v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Urban parks play a key role in supporting public health. Landscape architecture typically considers parks through the lens of form and function. While past research on equitable access has focused mainly on park form, studies addressing functional uses have been constrained by limited scale and coarse measurement techniques. Existing efforts have partially quantified park functions through small-scale surveys and movement data or general usage data, but have not effectively captured the specific activities and motivations underlying park visits. As a result, our understanding of the functional roles urban parks play remains incomplete. We introduce a novel method that refines mobile base station coverage using antenna azimuths, enabling more precise distinction of mobile traffic within parks versus surrounding areas. Using Paris as a case study, we analyze a large-scale dataset of passively collected per-app mobile network traffic acr
arXiv:2505.14215v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite the growing integration of retrieval-enabled AI agents into society, their safety and ethical behavior remain inadequately understood. In particular, the integration of LLMs and AI agents with external information sources and real-world environments raises critical questions about how they engage with and are influenced by these external data sources and interactive contexts. This study investigates how expanding retrieval access -- from no external sources to Wikipedia-based retrieval and open web search -- affects model reliability, bias propagation, and harmful content generation. Through extensive benchmarking of censored and uncensored LLMs and AI agents, our findings reveal a consistent degradation in refusal rates, bias sensitivity, and harmfulness safeguards as models gain broader access to external sources, culminating in a phenomenon we term safety degradation. Notably, retrieval-enabled agents built on aligned LLMs
arXiv:2607.07277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Harmful online communication often contains slang, coded terms, abbreviations, and community-specific expressions, which make messages difficult to interpret. This paper presents an exploratory study of interpretation difficulty in Discord chats related to cybercrime. We construct reference interpretations of purposefully selected difficult messages, which were reviewed by an expert. We then use them to evaluate human and large language model (LLM) interpretations under different context conditions. The results show that local context alone is often insufficient for humans, while external knowledge and extended conversational context substantially improve human interpretation. For LLMs, local context also improves interpretation, and the larger model performs better. We further conduct a qualitative error analysis and propose a preliminary classification of factors that make harmful chats difficult to interpret. These findings suggest t
arXiv:2607.07652v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search engines have long allocated attention on the web by routing users from queries to websites. AI search changes this arrangement because information needs can be resolved inside the intermediary. Using URL-level Comscore U.S. desktop clickstream, we compare ChatGPT and Google information-seeking occasions and exploit ChatGPT Search access expansions to estimate traditional search displacement. ChatGPT produces outbound clicks in only 5.2% of conversation sessions, far below Google's referral ratio. The remaining clicks are not a scaled-down Google stream: they skew toward specialized destinations and away from ad-supported sites. Wider access cuts search use by 9.4%, with search-referral losses largest for informational categories. Our findings identify a central economic shift in digital intermediation: AI search might satisfy information needs inside the intermediary while weakening the referral bargain that has linked search, traf
arXiv:2607.07612v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving from generative systems to agentic AI capable of autonomously planning and executing tasks. Widely characterized as the Year of Agentic AI, 2025 marked accelerated development and deployment, introducing new ethical and governance challenges. This paper presents a systematic review of the emerging literature on agentic AI governance. Our analysis identifies features that distinguish agentic AI from traditional systems and why it warrants targeted governance attention. We synthesize prevailing governance priorities, proposed mechanisms, and stakeholder roles shaping this evolving domain. As an initial scholarly effort, this review lays the preliminary groundwork for developing a structured roadmap to guide responsible and adaptive agentic AI governance.
arXiv:2607.07605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study adopts a behavioural bottom-up approach to AI value alignment to investigate whether an implicitly conveyed user identity shifts the moral evaluations of large language models (LLMs). Through a structured, multi-turn conversational protocol across 12,000 interactions, we evaluate AI value alignment in two non-reasoning models, gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14 and gemini-2.5-flash-lite. Rather than instructing the models to adopt a persona or prompting them with explicit moral stances, the user's professional role is introduced purely through value-neutral reasoning. The models are then asked for wrongness ratings from 0-100 on ten common-morality rules from Gert's moral framework. The results show that moral judgments vary with the user's role across both models. While grave-harm acts like killing exhibit a strong ceiling effect, contestable rule-governed acts demonstrate role-conditioned shifts that mirror the relationship between the
arXiv:2607.07267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims about the universality of human concepts have been predominantly assessed through linguistic similarity across languages and cultures. However, words are effective as communication devices because they compress rich experiential variation into shared conventions, potentially obscuring hidden individual and cultural differences in how concepts are mentally represented. Here, we analyse 2.6 billion human-made sketches of common concepts from 236 countries and territories to examine conceptual structure through people's visual imagination. Consistent with recent work on image-based cognition, we find that single concepts unfold into multiple distinct visual exemplars, revealing latent information about similarities and differences in conceptual structure across cultures. This variation is strongest for concepts involving haptic interaction, suggesting that visual imagery reflects variation in embodied experience as much as conventiona
arXiv:2607.06984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Misinformation often harms society not just by spreading a single false belief, but by breaking down the shared trust people rely on to evaluate what is true. This paper presents an agent-based simulation that frames trust as a collective resource and attention as a scarce private budget: when aggregate attention shifts toward low credibility content, the trust environment degrades, making credible information harder to process and correct. Across experiments, the model produces four recurring modes: credible stability, misinformation dominance, polarization, and a mixed baseline, with distinct signatures in trust trajectories and network structure. The results separate two control problems that matter for simulation-based policy exploration: the balance of trust repair versus harm largely determines whether the system recovers or collapses, while homophily and rewiring determine whether disagreement remains integrated or separates into p
arXiv:2607.06913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in public health applications, yet their robustness to non-clinical user inputs remains underexplored. We propose a domain specific robustness benchmark that evaluates LLMs under two perturbation types that commonly arise when non-clinical users interact with health AI systems: misinformation framing (MF), where prompt might be injected by false health claims, and layperson rewriting (LR), where patients describe symptoms in everyday language rather than medical terminology. Our goal is to evaluate the stability of LLMs under these perturbation. Experiments show that MF degrades accuracy by 7.2 pp on average with prediction flip rates of 9-38 percent, even when claims are explicitly labelled as unsupported; LR causes only 1.4 pp degradation. These findings highlight two distinct deployment risks in public health settings: models may produce incorrect outputs when users unintentionally
arXiv:2607.06784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of digital revolution many contemporary events that changed the world were shaped through the internet. Nowadays, the emergence of internet of things (IoT), combining physical objects with virtual networks is expected to have even more influence. This new 'decentralised' structure in the world raises questions such as power, governance and the notion of democracy online. The aim of this paper is to investigate these notions. We have taken the examples of Bitcoin and Wikipedia and examined their decision-making process. Our analysis has found some inconsistencies in their policies, that are in contradiction with democracy and consensus principles of governance. Starting from our findings, we present further improvements that can be used to achieve more democracy and equity in the digital context.
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Three ways South Fayette Township School District brings their “Portrait of a Learner” to life.