Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2608.04183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model follows an in-context conditional rule such as "if P(x) then A else B," does it assemble a runtime circuit with one module that tests the predicate and another that routes the answer? We probe this with activation patching under a four-donor design whose two swapped-rule donors make the condition and the answer word disagree, so each layer reveals which of the two it carries. Across three open models from two families and six languages sharing one fixed item bank, a mid-stack residual band carries the predicate's truth value: patching it reroutes the answer with predicate-outcome flip near 1.0 and mapping flip near 0.0, meeting a strict pre-specified isolation criterion in 17 of 18 cells, and the same localization holds across five predicate families. The router shows the opposite profile. A learned subspace flips A and B near-perfectly within the trained pair yet transfers to a new pair at approximately 0 in every m
arXiv:2608.04170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI co-scientists can generate fluent materials-science hypotheses, but fluency does not show that an answer preserves a scientifically meaningful mechanism. We present a graph-to-answer mechanism-tracing case study for Graph-PRefLexOR-8B, a Qwen3-8B model adapted to expose distinct stages for brainstorming, graph construction, pattern extraction, and synthesis. We organize semantic backtracking, graph corruption, activation-based recovery measurements, and layer-by-token-region grids into a visual diagnostic workflow for inspecting this pathway. Across 100 open-ended materials-science questions, final answers remain closest to the model's own structured stages, especially synthesis. Under graph corruption, a full sweep over 37 residual-stream checkpoints, the embedding output and 36 transformer blocks, shows little mechanism recovery in the earlier transition region at layers 7--10, recovery instead concentrates in late synthesis and answ
arXiv:2608.04160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual evaluations report accuracy at a single output-token cap, but languages need different numbers of tokens to express the same content, so the cap is a hidden experimental variable. We test whether the native-vs-translate gap on MGSM (German, Thai, Swahili) is a token-budget artifact for Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct under four prompting strategies. The measured gap swings by up to 57 points across budgets, length normalization moves it by up to 38.9 points where the cap binds, and at tight caps normalization can reverse which strategy scores higher. We prospectively froze the sweep's three Qwen peaks and its near-zero value at 1024 and evaluated them on 540,000 independently hard-capped decodes: a second frozen family of six Holm-corrected tests rejects every null. The frozen test at $B^*=1024$ still fails to reject because native accuracy has already saturated there; above saturation, the residual difference is a strateg
arXiv:2608.04021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cloze-style probes that vary how often a target token appears implicitly assume that more copies of a target affect prediction the same way regardless of where the readout slot sits. We show this assumption fails. Our two-probe design holds a repeated-target prefix fixed and varies only the readout position: the adjacent probe places the slot immediately after the repeated block; the displaced probe places it inside a fresh sentence frame. Adjacent repetition behaves as priming intuition predicts: $P(\text{target})$ climbs with $N$ and plateaus. Displaced repetition produces an inverted-U: $P(\text{target})$ rises to an early peak and then declines as more copies are added. The displaced inverted-U shows a per-word drop with bootstrap CI excluding zero in all 13 open-access encoder and decoder models we test, and replicates across Spanish, Chinese, German, and French in 42 of 42 multilingual cells. A six-condition causal ablation isolates
arXiv:2608.04015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the increase in digitized resources of Classical Latin texts and modern breakthroughs of Large Language Models (LLMs), I contribute to ancient language research by participating in EvaLatin 2026. This paper describes Team uOttawa's system description and results for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) shared task. The task is divided into two subtasks: coarse-grained NER with 11 classes and fine-grained NER with 28 classes, each evaluated under strict and fuzzy regimes. Through prompt engineering of commercial LLMs gemini-2.5-pro and claude-sonnet-4-5, I show that the underrepresented ancient Latin language can take advantage of cross-lingual transfer learning by using advancements made by the wider LLM development community. Overall, the methods discussed in this report demonstrate very strong results, placing first in both NER subtasks and achieving the best scores across all evaluation metrics and regimes among all submissions.
arXiv:2607.04670v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As autonomous vehicles advance toward driverless mobility, understanding and responding to passenger needs and intentions becomes increasingly important in the absence of a human driver. We propose Intent2Drive, a unified framework for holistic passenger intent understanding and passenger-aligned planning. Unlike existing methods that rely on explicit commands, Intent2Drive models passenger intent as a latent cognitive state inferred from language, personal attributes, emotions, behaviors, and situational context. To support this task, we construct the Holistic Passenger Intent Dataset (HPID) with structured annotations of explicit and implicit passenger-intent cues. A Theory-of-Mind-inspired Passenger Intent Reasoner (PIR) infers a Latent Passenger State (LPS) and converts it into a planner-compatible Passenger Intent Objective (PIO). We validate the downstream utility of PIO by conditioning an existing hierarchical planning pipeline
arXiv:2605.09767v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game Design Pillars are natural language artifacts commonly used in game development to communicate a project's core vision and ensure a coherent player experience. Their linguistic nature aligns well with the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating and interpreting natural language, making them strong candidates for supporting mixed-initiative workflows centered on design pillars. In this study, we introduce a formal definition of game design pillars, present an initial prototype -- SPINE -- and investigate the utility of LLMs in the creation and decision-making processes associated with pillar-driven workflows. We begin with a pre-study to identify an appropriate model, comparing \texttt{gemini-2.0-flash} and \texttt{GPT-4o-mini}. Results show that Gemini is better suited to our tasks due to its greater output variety and consistency. We then conduct a case study by deploying the tool at a local game jam
arXiv:2605.06307v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Student simulation with Large language models (LLMs) offers a scalable alternative for educational research and teacher training. Yet, its validity depends on whether models maintain stable personas across extended interactions. We test this prerequisite using a dual-assessment framework measuring self-reported characteristics and observer-rated behavioral expressions. Across two experiments testing four clinically-grounded ADHD persona conditions, five LLMs, and three prompt designs, we quantify between-conversation stability (N=4,968) and within-conversation stability (N=3,952 across 9 turns). Self-reported characteristics remain stable for high intensities, constituting a necessary prerequisite for valid behavioral simulation. Observer-rated behavioral expression reveals selective instability: within-conversation drift occurs in unscripted dialog for high and moderate ADHD personas. Scripted interactions with explicit task prompts
arXiv:2604.07558v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Digital mental health (DMH) tools have extensively explored personalization of interventions to users' needs and contexts. However, this personalization often targets what support is provided, not how it is experienced. Even well-matched content can fail when the interaction format misaligns with how someone can engage. We introduce generative experience as an approach to DMH support, where the intervention experience is composed at runtime. We instantiate this in GUIDE, a system that generates personalized intervention content and multimodal interaction structure through rubric-guided generation of modular components. In a preregistered study with N=237 participants, GUIDE significantly reduced stress (p=.02) and improved user experience (p=.04) compared to an LLM-based cognitive restructuring control. GUIDE also supported diverse forms of reflection and action through varied interaction flows, while revealing tensions around persona
arXiv:2509.24730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can support experts across various domains, including game design. In this study, we examine the utility of medium-sized LLMs, models that operate on consumer-grade hardware typically available in small studios or home environments. We began by identifying ten key aspects that contribute to a strong game concept and used ChatGPT to generate thirty sample game ideas. Three medium-sized LLMs, LLaMA 3.1, Qwen 2.5, and DeepSeek-R1, were then prompted to evaluate these ideas according to the previously identified aspects. A qualitative assessment by two researchers compared the models' outputs, revealing that DeepSeek-R1 produced the most consistently useful feedback, despite some variability in quality. To explore real-world applicability, we ran a pilot study with ten students enrolled in a storytelling course for game development. At the early stages of their own project
arXiv:2408.15001v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Designing pacing for video games presents a unique set of challenges. Due to their interactivity, non-linearity, and narrative nature, many aspects must be coordinated and considered simultaneously. In addition, games are often developed in an iterative workflow, making revisions to previous designs difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we present PaceMaker, a toolkit designed to enable common design workflows for pacing while addressing the challenges above. We conducted initial research on pacing and then implemented our findings in a platform-independent application that allows the user to define simple state diagrams to deal with the possibility space of games. The user can select paths on the directed graph to visualize a node's data in diagrams dedicated to intensity and gameplay category. After implementation, we created a demonstration of the tool and conducted qualitative interviews. While the interviews raised some co
arXiv:2608.05116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted developer tools increasingly mediate programming through chat panels, terminal agents, generated diffs, and streaming status output. These interaction surfaces may create visual accessibility barriers for blind, low-vision, and color-vision-deficient developers, yet little is known about how such barriers are reported in public tool ecosystems. We analyze issues and forum discussions from five AI developer tool ecosystems: GitHub Copilot in VS Code, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenCode. From 2,652 keyword-retrieved candidates, a three-model ensemble identified 600 unanimously positive visual accessibility reports. A stratified manual sanity check supported this conservative selection. Topic modeling and qualitative analysis identified three recurring categories: screen-reader and assistive-technology barriers; visual presentation, contrast, and differentiation problems; and readability, scaling, and control limita
arXiv:2608.05115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can computer vision help make classrooms safer? In this pilot study, we investigate privacy-aware and computationally efficient classroom incident recognition from CCTV-style observations. This setting remains underexplored, with limited benchmarks and few methods designed for the privacy, efficiency, and generalization demands of real-world deployment. We introduce a novel hybrid benchmark combining generative CCTV-style videos with real-world classroom pose data, and propose a lightweight, but robust motion-reasoning framework motivated by the observation that many incidents differ more in motion direction, speed, acceleration, and intensity than in pose alone. To that end, our method first constructs hierarchical kinematic representations of human actions. Our method then distills hierarchical, multi-order kinematic reasoning from a large teacher into a much smaller single-order student, enabling efficient per-person inference while
arXiv:2608.05013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly applied to open-ended everyday requests that span work, study, and life. These tasks are long-horizon, cross-environment, and multimodal, forcing the agent to preserve goals and constraints across many steps while navigating heterogeneous tools and attachments. While prior work has addressed individual failure modes such as goals drift, states loss, and context overflow, whether a single harness can manage them jointly and remain effective across backends has received less study. We present OneDayAgent, a long-horizon harness for autonomous agents. OneDayAgent turns an open-ended request into a managed execution process that decomposes tasks into bounded subtasks, maintains execution memory under context pressure, and verifies and repairs the final deliverable. We evaluate OneDayAgent on AgentIF-OneDay across 104 tasks. With the GLM-5.2 backend, OneDayAgent sets a new state of the art with an overall score of
arXiv:2608.04148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI is increasingly used to coordinate planning, implementation, review, and testing in software development, yet it often offers limited transparency into its decisions and interactions. Many such systems also assume that users can effectively guide the AI's decisions and validate its outputs. This assumption poses a particular challenge for novices, who must simultaneously learn how agentic AI works, how to collaborate with it effectively, and how to evaluate its outputs critically. To address this challenge, we present \textit{AgentForge}, an immersive learning system in which novices take on one of four software-engineering roles: Task Planner, Patch Author, Code Reviewer, or Test Runner, within a multi-agent code-repair workflow. In each practice session, the novices perform their chosen role while AI agents perform the remaining three. Through role-based scaffolding and metacognitive support, AgentForge clarifies role-speci
arXiv:2608.04072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recognizing the temporal order of overlapping sounds is an underexplored challenge in human-robot interaction (HRI), with direct relevance to applications such as first responder detection systems. This paper presents a deep learning framework for real-time sound order recognition using recordable buzzers that emit distinct non-verbal sounds (cat meows, dog barks, helicopter noises). A multi-branch convolutional neural network (CNN) processes Mel spectrograms, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and short-time Fourier transform (STFT) features, with an attention-based fusion mechanism to emphasize critical temporal cues. Experiments were conducted under same-amplitude, varied-amplitude, and unseen sound conditions. The proposed system achieved 99% accuracy in balanced overlaps, 91% under amplitude variation, and 74% on unseen test data with normalization. These results demonstrate that deep learning can reliably recognize sound
arXiv:2608.04037v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Designing narrative-grounded interactive experiences remains labor-intensive because interactive content must align with the underlying world implied by the narrative. Existing approaches formulate problems such as narrative planning, scene generation, and gameplay generation, each constructing computational representations tailored to specific downstream tasks rather than explicitly reconstructing and maintaining the persistent world that grounds them. We investigate reconstructing explicit persistent worlds from narrative descriptions as the central computational objective for narrative-grounded interactive realization. Rather than treating the world as an implicit by-product of downstream generation, our approach reconstructs and maintains persistent entities, locations, semantic relationships, and evolving world states while inferring only the contextual information required to support coherent interactive experiences. To investigat
arXiv:2608.05134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interdisciplinary research collaboration is crucial for scientific innovation, but it remains difficult to initiate in practice. Existing collaborator discovery approaches are often constrained by disciplinary boundaries and static researcher profiles that do not reflect the specific context of a new collaboration goal. As a result, researchers struggle to translate open-ended collaboration goals into domain-specific tasks, evaluate candidate researchers' fit and complementarity, and establish common ground before initial contact. To address these challenges, we present DeepConnect, an LLM-augmented visual analytics system for interdisciplinary collaborator discovery. DeepConnect translates collaboration ideas into domain-specific tasks, retrieves relevant papers to ground cross-domain exploration, and provides coordinated visualizations for exploring and comparing candidate researchers. It further reveals terminology gaps and overlaps ac
arXiv:2608.05026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality annotation of artworks is essential for computational art research, yet extracting implicit semantics remains challenging due to the reliance on culturally grounded meanings and deep contextual knowledge behind the images. Current AI-assisted annotation tools often lack assistance or rely on one-way workflows where experts have to perform extra manual calibrations to improve AI models, resulting in limited efficiency. To address this, we propose Bidirectional Human-AI Augmentation(BiHAA), a closed-loop framework in which skills and domain knowledge base evolve through real-time interaction and bidirectional HAI augmentation. Informed by a formative study with 20 artwork annotators from different backgrounds, we implement this framework in ArtAnno, an artwork annotation system driven by a multi-agent architecture. The system includes a Proactive Agentic Support Module, where AI augments humans through semantic mining and label
arXiv:2608.04971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersive exhibitions increasingly combine large-scale projections with mixed reality (MR) head-mounted displays (HMDs), but how users perceive transitions across these heterogeneous visualization environments remains underexplored. We investigate cross-reality (CR) object- and scene-level transitions in a hybrid immersive art installation spanning projection, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). In a within-subjects study (N=24), we compared a calibrated condition with a bundled inconsistency condition introducing noticeable differences in spatial alignment, visual appearance, and cross-device latency. This contrast was used not to establish perceptual thresholds or hardware targets, but as a diagnostic probe to make transition disruptions more perceptible and discussable. The inconsistency condition reduced presence and increased workload. Interviews showed that spatial misalignment disrupted action-outcome predictability,
arXiv:2608.04951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Content creators on social media sites occupy highly visible positions on their channels. As a result, creators, especially those with large followings, experience disproportionate levels of online harm. To address such harm, they enact a range of moderation strategies, which in turn shape the visibility of content that their audiences encounter. This paper examines how content creators perceive three moderation strategies to address hateful comments (deleting, replying to, or simply ignoring) and how they decide which strategy to deploy. While creator moderation is usually examined through the lens of safety, creators' regulation decisions may also be shaped by concerns about how their actions appear to audiences and how they are rewarded or penalized by platforms' recommendation algorithms. Conducting a survey of 584 content creators, we found that in their view, (1) deleting is the most beneficial for achieving safety, (2) both deletin
arXiv:2608.04912v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended reality (XR) is increasingly used to help users understand complex virtual environments through multiple viewpoints across different immersion levels, positions, and scales. While numerous techniques address viewpoint transitions for self-guided exploration, many scenarios require externally-guided transitions where a system or presenter controls the user's viewpoint, leaving the user with limited spatial knowledge and control over the transition process, which can increase susceptibility to disorientation and discomfort. We present three transition techniques for externally-guided multi-scale XR viewpoint changes and evaluate them against a fade-to-black baseline in a within-subjects study (N=20). Participants transitioned between world-in-miniature, street-level, and indoor destination views. We combined spatial recall measures, standardized questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews to assess orientation, workload, comfort
arXiv:2608.04910v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tutorial videos are widely used for learning feature-rich software, yet following screencast tutorials often breaks down in practice. Through a survey and contextual inquiry, we found that learners frequently rewind or get stuck because critical input information, especially mouse actions and keyboard-modified operations, is often implicit or missing in tutorials without input metadata. To address this problem, we present AutoCue, a multimodal LLM-assisted, human-in-the-loop tutorial augmentation pipeline for externalizing implicit inputs as instructional visual cues. AutoCue integrates frame-to-frame visual changes, narration signals, and operation guidance from official software manuals to infer likely mouse and key-modifier actions, then produces aligned cue layers and editable artifacts for human refinement. Grounded in multimedia learning and cognitive load theory, we further develop a visual cue grammar for representing mouse, keybo
arXiv:2608.04831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In 2024, Google introduced "AI Overviews," a feature that displays an AI-generated result summary at the top of many Google search pages. This study investigates the role of AI in Google search using one month of web browsing data from a representative panel of 900 U.S. adults. Our analysis of the panelists' Google searches sheds light on AI Overviews, when they appear in Google search results, and what user behaviors are associated with AI Overviews. We identify several attributes that make a search query more likely to generate an AI Overview, including the length of a query, whether the query begins with a question word, and whether the query contains both a noun and verb. When it comes to user behavior, we find that clicks to sources cited in AI Overviews are very rare, occurring in only about 1% of visits to AI Overviews. We also find that AI Overviews are associated with fewer clicks and higher rates of ending browsing sessions. Imp
arXiv:2608.04798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When manipulating objects in immersive platforms through speech and gesture, users naturally construct spatial references, referring to scene entities, their bodies, or the environment. Leveraging spatial cognition theories, this work systematically examines how users construct and communicate spatial intent. Using a custom toolkit, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz study to observe unconstrained multimodal (speech + gesture) input patterns in Virtual Reality for scene construction. Based on these findings, we formalize a framework that decomposes spatial references into three core components: Source, Anchor, and Frame, while characterizing their compositional strategies and explicitness. We demonstrate the utility of this Reference-based Manipulation framework by implementing an LLM-based pipeline featuring a set of example interaction techniques with a preliminary technical evaluation. Finally, we discuss key lessons learned for supporting re
arXiv:2608.04707v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anatomical liver resection (ALR) surgery is the most important treatment for liver cancer, yet preoperative planning demands complex, multi-stage clinical reasoning under competing safety constraints. Current 2D desktop tools are not well equipped to support this process, exhibiting three fundamental limitations: reliance on monolithic interfaces that fail to adapt to the distinct cognitive demands of each planning stage; a perceptual bottleneck caused by limited anatomical spatial representation and missing plane-vessel intersection visualization; and an attention bottleneck stemming from fragmented critical safety criteria display across separate views. We present LiverPlan, a stage-adaptive immersive visual analytics framework for ALR planning, grounded in an 8-month collaboration with two expert hepatobiliary surgeons. Decomposing the surgical planning process into three sequential yet cognitively distinct stages, LiverPlan externaliz
arXiv:2608.04605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of AI systems capable of emotionally resonant communication remains a significant challenge. This study examines how humans influence emotions in social deception games by comparing professional and non-professional players. We measured electrodermal activity during gameplay to capture physiological emotional responses and analyzed communication patterns during periods of high emotional arousal. Our results revealed distinct communication strategies: professional players maintained persuasion-based approaches under high arousal, while nonprofessional players shifted toward information-focused communication. Statistical analysis confirmed significant differences in expression patterns between expertise levels. Professional players exhibited more stable emotional states during gameplay, indicating better emotional regulation. These findings inform the design of AI systems that can adapt their communication strategies based o
arXiv:2608.04475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the promise of virtual reality (VR) for intuitive spatial interaction, volume visualization (VolVis) in VR remains constrained by high rendering costs and motion discomfort. Recent advances have shown that representing volumetric scenes with 3D Gaussian splatting enables high-performance rendering, making this representation well-suited for VR. However, existing Gaussian-based scene editing workflows remain limited by slow offline segmentation and fatigue-inducing manual selection. To address these challenges, we present Super-Gaussian, a novel VolVis framework that enhances scene editing and interaction in VR through intuitive 3D Gaussian selection and natural language interaction (NLI). Our approach groups Gaussian primitives into higher-level units via feature-aware clustering, enabling efficient selection of complex volumetric regions, such as tumors in medical images or filaments in cosmological data, without point-by-point i
arXiv:2608.04435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Established channel effectiveness rankings primarily assess magnitude estimation accuracy in complete chart contexts, often neglecting other perceptual tasks such as discriminability, separability, and pop-out. To address this gap, we conducted crowdsourced experiments on seven core visual channels (position, length, tilt, area, curvature, luminance, and saturation) using primitive visual stimuli, a set of visual marks without chart-specific scaffolding to isolate channel-level variation. We evaluated these channels across four perceptual tasks (accuracy, discriminability, separability, and pop-out) and found that channel effectiveness is fundamentally multi-dimensional, with rankings shifting substantially across tasks. For instance, while spatial channels maintain an overall advantage, accuracy depends strongly on whether a fixed spatial anchor is available. Discriminability varies dramatically across channels and value ranges, a patter
arXiv:2608.04416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI assistants are typically reactive, relying on users to initiate interactions. Proactive assistants go beyond this paradigm by autonomously initiating interactions based on users' activity contexts. However, appropriate interaction timing is user-specific and difficult to determine in advance, while online feedback offers valuable signals for personalization. Direct feedback-driven adaptation is therefore appealing, but remains challenging due to sparse interaction-worthy moments scattered across fine-grained user states. To address the issues, we propose Evidence-driven Online Preference Adaptation (EOPA), which grounds a user's interaction-timing preferences in measurable contextual evidence through two evidence carriers: temporal preference anchors and evidence-bearing activity prototypes. At each polling step, EOPA derives temporal and activity evidence from the carriers through user-prior-smoothed evidence estimation and uncertaint
arXiv:2608.04331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In human-AI collaborative data analysis, as analyses rapidly evolve, the artifacts meant to capture shared understanding often become incomplete or difficult to interpret, leading to undocumented assumptions, cross-user misaligned intent, context-poor prompts, and unwanted agent behaviors. To address these challenges, we introduce a rule-based coordination layer with two interaction mechanisms, intent scaffolding and prompt-time linting, that make analytic intent explicit and actionable during human-AI collaborative data analysis. We implement them in IntentLint, a proof-of-concept system that infers analytic intent from shared notebooks, represents it as structured, editable rules, and checks users' prompts against shared rules. IntentLint helps analysts externalize and refine their intent and proactively checks prompts for potential conflicts. A study with 16 data analysts shows that IntentLint improves awareness of collaborators' inten
arXiv:2608.04300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The use of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), an assisted reproductive technique (ART), is increasing widely. ICSI is currently performed by specially skilled embryologists. However, with the increasing demand for ART, the shortage of skilled embryologists has become a problem. Therefore, we propose an immersive micromanipulation system that requires no special skills for efficient and accurate micromanipulation. Our proposed system is composed of a real-time three-dimensional (3D) imaging microscope and 3D operation interfaces. The 3D operation interfaces are stationary pen-type or wearable glove-type interfaces. In this system, an operator wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) and using 3D operation interfaces is immersed in a virtual micromanipulation space. The operator can move the pipettes by 3D operation interface and freely change the viewpoint. We verified that the proposed system improves the speed and accuracy of operating
arXiv:2608.04293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative user interface design tools enable rapid prototyping but often operate as black boxes with limited transparency and controllability. When outputs diverge from the designer's intent, users are left tweaking prompts via trial-and-error with little insight into the model's reasoning. We present LegoUI, a staged generative framework that structures the interface design process into sequential, interpretable steps along key design dimensions, capturing each step's result in a UI domain-specific language (UI-DSL) enriched with provenance. This approach exposes the model's intermediate reasoning and enables user intervention and iterative refinement. In a technical evaluation on 40 real-world design prompts, LegoUI's requirement analysis stage captured explicit requirements with over 95% accuracy, near-complete coverage, and zero redundancy. In user studies, participants using LegoUI reported significantly greater transparency, contro
arXiv:2608.04274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social media recommendation feeds often optimize for users' immediate impulses rather than preferences they would hold after deeper reflection. Some systems address this misalignment by incorporating users' explicit preferences via a configuration page or in-feed controls instead of just behavioral signals. However, users typically have evolving preferences, and their stated preferences and behavior naturally diverge, necessitating continuous reflection and feed realignment. But existing strategies require the user to take initiative and are often effortful; as a result, in practice they are rarely invoked. We present Compass, a system that aligns a user's feed with their reflective preferences by helping users reflect on and articulate their preferences given their behavior. To enable continuous reflection during everyday browsing, Compass surfaces in-situ reflections via lightweight notifications, while feed alignment is achieved by per
arXiv:2608.04166v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI agents are increasingly used in interaction design to facilitate ideation and offer critique, often following their own internal reasoning. These interactions tend to add design ideas and expand the design space. Our work explores an antagonistic role for design agents, prompting designers to engage with stakeholder tension. We built an AI agent inspired by adversarial design theory that enacts constructive conflict. We examine the agent's influence in a between-subjects experiment with 45 design students across three conditions: Self Reflection (unsupported review of the design proposal), Stepwise Guidance (written prompts that walk designers through a constructive-conflict framework), and Interactive Engagement (an AI agent that enacts the constructive-conflict framework interactively by synthesizing stakeholder pushback). The latter two conditions share the framework but differ in whether it is self-enacted or agent-enact
arXiv:2608.04120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As political disruption intensifies online discourse, Bluesky has become an important platform for political discussion and public reaction. In this study, we examine large-scale discourse on Bluesky related to U.S. policy developments associated with the Trump administration. Using the historical retrieval API, we collected all available posts matching Trump and related keywords from 2019 to 2026, yielding 38.5 million posts. We leverage a large language model (LLM)-assisted clustering pipeline, combined with human validation, to identify 14 interpretable thematic domains in English-language posts and 19 thematic categories across 258 executive orders (EOs) signed between January 20, 2025, and May 1, 2026. Our findings identify several dominant themes in Bluesky discourse, including executive governance, political identity, and national security, as well as recurring themes in EOs, including executive task forces, border enforcement, and
arXiv:2606.23462v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientists do not, by profession, wage war. Yet warfare's vocabulary consistently appears in their abstracts. To quantify the extent to which warfare's vocabulary pervades scientific abstracts, we analyze 21.4 million papers (2010-2025; OpenAlex, PubMed). We additionally run a within-subject war-framing experiment ($N = 801$; 32{,}040 trials) designed to provide causal insight into the effects of militaristic language on persuasion. Between 2010 and 2025, the presence of militaristic terms in scientific abstracts rose 48\% in OpenAlex and 32\% in PubMed, with the rise accelerating sharply after 2019 (cross-database $r = 0.96$, $p < 10^{-8}$). The prevalence of militaristic language is conflict-aligned at both country and annual scales (Uppsala Conflict Data Program; $r = 0.77$-$0.84$), with the abstracts from the Global South displaying the fastest rise in militaristic language. Among disciplines, social sciences leads in level
arXiv:2604.26233v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as legal decision assistants, and even first-instance decision-makers, across a range of judicial and administrative contexts, it becomes essential to explore how they answer legal questions, and in particular the factors that lead them to decide difficult questions. A specific feature of legal decisions is the need to respond to arguments advanced by contending parties. A legal decision-maker must be able to engage with, and respond to, including through being potentially persuaded by, these arguments. Conversely, they should not be unduly persuadable, deciding cases based on the skills of the advocates rather than the merits of the case. In this paper we explore how frontier open- and closed-weights LLMs respond to legal arguments. We propose a metric to measure persuadability in the trilateral setting in which competing advocates seek to persuade a judge of opposite conclusions. We
arXiv:2604.11459v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Algorithmic systems, particularly social media recommenders, have achieved remarkable success in predicting behavior. By optimizing for observable signals such as clicks, views, and engagement, these systems effectively capture user attention and guide interaction. Yet their widespread adoption has coincided with troubling outcomes, including rising mental health concerns, increasing polarization, and erosion of trust. This paper argues that these effects are consequences of a structural functional misalignment between what algorithms optimize - predictable behavior - and the human goals these predictions are intended to serve. We propose that this misalignment arises through three mechanisms: (1) a bias toward modeling fast, reactive behavioral signals over reflective judgment, (2) feedback loops that couple user behavior with algorithmic learning, and (3) emergent collective dynamics that amplify these effects at scale. Together, th
arXiv:2601.23112v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI safety benchmarks are pivotal for safety in advanced AI systems; however, they have significant technical, epistemic, and sociotechnical shortcomings. We present a review of 210 safety benchmarks that maps out common challenges in safety benchmarking, documenting failures and limitations by drawing from engineering sciences and long-established theories of risk and safety. We argue that adhering to established risk management principles, mapping the space of what can(not) be measured, developing robust probabilistic metrics, and efficiently deploying measurement theory to connect benchmarking objectives with the world can significantly improve the validity and usefulness of AI safety benchmarks. The review provides a roadmap on how to improve AI safety benchmarking, and we illustrate the effectiveness of these recommendations through quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We also provide workflow-oriented guiding questions with i
arXiv:2504.14053v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rating systems on accommodation platforms suffer from a familiar problem: nearly every listing displays a nearly perfect score, so the number that is supposed to separate good listings from bad ones barely varies. Whether the review text accumulating beneath those scores still carries usable information is an open question. I ask a dynamic version of it: does the text guests have already written predict where a listing's displayed rating moves next? Treating text and ratings as parallel channels that aggregate guest experience at different speeds, I construct a prespecified sentiment index from the complete review history of each listing in a two-wave panel of more than two hundred thousand listings across 34 U.S. markets. Because the broader project had explored these data before, I locked the model and its falsification checks in advance and reserved half of the markets, untouched, for a single confirmatory estimation. On those held
arXiv:2608.04641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI is transforming legal translation by introducing opportunities alongside linguistic, technical, legal, ethical and cognitive risks. This chapter examines the implications of AI for professional legal translation and proposes an AI literacy framework tailored to the profession. It argues that AI does not change the fundamental objectives of legal translation but requires an extension of professional competence through AI literacy. The proposed framework comprises four mutually reinforcing dimensions, foundational, procedural, critical and strategic, and conceptualises AI literacy as a transversal component of legal translation competence that fosters digital resilience. It further discusses the pedagogical implications of this framework by proposing classroom activities designed to develop AI literacy in legal translator education, enabling future translators to integrate AI critically, responsibly and in accordance with pr
arXiv:2608.04571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This report analyses data centre (DC) sustainability and circularity, revealing existing synergies and trade-offs: The PUE is too coarse, mixing cooling and power provisioning. It wrongly attributes server fan consumption and transformation losses to IT energy. It does not measure compute but infrastructure efficiency, which is already outstanding. Compute energy, however, is exploding. Better energy metrics for DCs would thus cover i) compute efficiency, ii) transformation efficiency, and iii) cooling overhead. Trade-offs exist between cooling energy and water as well as on-site and upstream water: Consuming water on-site lowers the cooling energy, which also lowers the water consumed upstream in power generation. For 'wet' electricity, there is little competition: It is worth spending more on-site energy to save both electricity and related upstream water. For 'dry' electricity, there is a trade-off. Waste heat recovery brings energy
arXiv:2608.04365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audits have emerged as a critical instrument for algorithmic governance, providing a mechanism for external scrutiny and governance of machine learning models. However, ensuring the integrity of such assessments remains a challenging issue. For instance in regulatory contexts, audits are typically declared or easily detected, thus enabling model providers to manipulate the process, whether intentionally or inadvertently. This vulnerability is particularly acute in the context of fairness evaluations, in which providers can often infer sensitive attributes and strategically equalize allocation rates between groups to satisfy fairness metrics. In this paper, we introduce a novel audit protocol designed to significantly increase the post-audit detectability of such manipulations by enabling the auditor to query the model in an oblivious manner. Our approach leverages a Private Information Retrieval mechanism to require the provider to labe
arXiv:2608.04056v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When people label text for sexism, they often disagree, and not because some of them are wrong: they genuinely perceive sexism differently. Most NLP systems discard this disagreement by collapsing it into a majority vote. We propose the Multi-Agent Perspectivist Preference Optimization (MAP-PO) framework to keep these different perspectives. On the EXIST 2024 dataset of labeled English and Spanish tweets, we first cluster annotators by their labeling behavior rather than their demographic attributes. We then fine-tune one Large Language Model agent per cluster to reproduce that cluster's annotation behavior, and coordinate the agents with preference optimization that combines individual and team-level rewards. We evaluate MAP-PO in four settings defined by two languages and two backbone language models, asking whether each agent reproduces the annotations of its own cluster and whether the agents together reproduce the majority label. T
arXiv:2608.04030v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed text-to-image synthesis, yet its ability to represent specialized engineering domains remains largely unexplored. As an exmaple in nuclear engineering, general-purpose foundation models frequently generate physically incorrect or conceptually inconsistent images because they lack domain-specific knowledge. This work presents one of the first systematic studies of domain adaptation for nuclear text-to-image generation through fine-tuning of open-source diffusion models. We curate a dataset of 1,000 captioned nuclear energy images spanning reactors, fuel cycles, radiation, and related concepts, and use it to fine-tune three state-of-the-art open-source models: Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), SD-v3.5-Medium, and the flow-matching Flux.1 model. Their performance is evaluated using both quantitative image-similarity metrics and qualitative expert assessment against the corresponding zero-sh
arXiv:2608.05050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Against the backdrop of violence in police interactions with the U.S. public, we explore how deferentially police officers speak to virtual characters depicted as Black adult males in vir- tual reality (VR) simulations. We evaluate the effect of seeing and communicating with these characters through a causal in- ference lens, where the assignment of the Black man character to a police officer and simulation is the treatment variable. Our (marginal) average treatment effect AT E measures the social impact of the character on the deference of officer statements with each turn of the conversation. Soberingly, we find that most officers speak less deferentially to Black man characters, except for White, biracial, and multiracial female officers, es- pecially in settings where the VR character was known to be a suspect. Across a full conversation of a typical VR scene, these marginal AT Es can result in notable changes in def- erence of tone (
arXiv:2608.05008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents the first empirical study of advertising content being rolled out in the user-facing online interfaces of large language models (LLMs). We systematically examine possible demographic differences in ad content shown to U.S. users of ChatGPT using a sock puppet audit methodology. We create and deploy 91 sock puppets in a 3x3 factorial design, using geolocation cues (account IP proxies and location-signaling prompts) to signal three racial/ethnic groups (Black, Hispanic, and White) and three income terciles (low, medium, and high). We conduct data collection starting in February 2026, collecting over 3,000 advertisements from 186 unique advertisers in response to 335 prompts on a range of realistic user queries. We find that accounts begin receiving ads 14 days after account creation, and that lower-income accounts, regardless of race, are more likely to receive ads. In this first phase of ChatGPT ads, the ads themselves
arXiv:2608.04892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems that adapt instruction to individual learners are increasingly deployed in K-12 classrooms, yet empirical evidence on their effects in authentic elementary settings remains limited, particularly for students with mathematics learning difficulties. This dissertation examines AI-powered personalized learning during primary school fraction instruction, a domain that is foundational to later mathematics and STEM achievement. The first manuscript presents a systematic review of research on artificial intelligence in mathematics education published between 2020 and 2024. The second manuscript reports a quasi-experimental study evaluating Mathbot, a chatbot-based personalized learning platform, against business-as-usual classroom instruction. Repeated measures ANOVA was used to assess change in fraction comprehension and situational interest across time points. Results indicated modest improvements in fraction com
arXiv:2608.04774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Echo chambers are an inevitable consequence of the human cognitive system being evolutionarily designed to prioritize processing of high-relevance information at the small-group scale, combined with algorithms that optimize engagement as their sole objective. Conventional prescriptions that normatively criticize echo chambers and demand individual behavioral change have low feasibility given these cognitive constraints. This paper constructs an Agenda Democratization Index (ADI) that quantities the decentralization of agenda-setting power using four variables barrier to entry, granularity, interactivity, and feedback resolution and a SocialInformation Health (SIH) model that integrates ADI with the strength of bridging mechanisms. Based on this model, we propose domain-selective bridging, which incorporates not only engagement but also bridging into algorithmic scoring functions, optimizing the bridging weight for each information domain