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:2607.22529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM training is shifting from manual design and annotation to interaction-driven self-evolution. However, existing self-evolutionary methods face a fundamental dilemma between task diversity and verification reliability: environment-bound methods obtain precise feedback but confine learning to narrow domains, while open-ended self-generation broadens the task space but lacks reliable verification, allowing misleading rewards to pollute the training loop. We identify agent skills as a powerful middle ground to reconcile this tension: each skill ensures deep, verifiable execution in a specific scenario, while dynamic routing across skills maintains open-ended task variety. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Skill Self-Play (Skill-SP), a co-evolutionary framework comprising a proposer, a solver, and a dynamic skill controller. Orchestrated via a reinforcement learning loop, these components co-evolve in a continuous self-play loop: the pr
arXiv:2607.22456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing lexical distance, similarity, and evaluation metrics operate on Unicode code points, which can misrepresent errors in writing systems where a single grapheme is represented by multiple Unicode code points. We introduce grapheme-kit, an open-source Python library that extends these metrics to operate on grapheme clusters instead. The library also provides improved grapheme processing for Tamil and Sinhala, including accurate grapheme cluster identification and grapheme composition/decomposition utilities. Through an OCR case study, we demonstrate that grapheme-level metrics provide a more faithful evaluation of complex scripts.
arXiv:2607.22376v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most endangered languages lack the parallel data required for machine translation, despite the existence of descriptive grammar books. We introduce a pipeline that uses large language models to extract grammatical rules, example sentences, and lexicons from grammar books and generate synthetic parallel corpora for fine-tuning-rather than feeding grammar content into prompts at inference time, as in prior work. Validated on three typologically diverse low-resource languages-Kalamang (Papuan), Tuatschin (Romance), and Mandan (Siouan)-we show that fine-tuning on synthetic data improves over seed-data baselines in 75% of configurations for Kalamang and 59% for Tuatschin, with best-case ChrF++ gains of +8.8, +5.3, and +3.3 respectively. Through a systematic factorial study across 96 configurations varying target part-of-speech, retrieval granularity, and sample volume, we identify which factor combinations drive gains and where they break down
arXiv:2607.22300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a systematic study of healthcare-domain cross-lingual transfer to address the scarcity of biomedical NMT resources for Arabic-script languages. We use Arabic and Persian as higher-resource pivots to improve translation for \textbf{four severely low-resource} targets: Dari (Afghan Persian, a standardised variety of Persian), Pashto, Sorani Kurdish (Central Kurdish, a major standardized variety of Kurdish), and Urdu (closely related to Hindi). Using LoRA fine-tuning on small decoder-only LLMs, we train \textit{domain-specific pivot adapters} and evaluate \textbf{three transfer strategies}: few-shot in-context learning, minimal supervised adaptation, and, to the best of our knowledge, for the first time in this setting, zero-data LoRA adapter merging. Supervised adaptation with just 500 sentences achieves near pivot-language quality for Dari (CHrF++ 41.01) and meaningful gains for Urdu (28.88), while adapter merging reaches within
arXiv:2607.22218v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) as creativity evaluators, evidence of their alignment with human evaluations remains mixed, raising the question of when and why their judgments converge with or diverge from human judgments. Across three studies and six widely used LLMs, we addressed this gap by identifying the standards underlying LLM creativity evaluation and examining their downstream implications. Study 1 showed that LLMs generally relied on a narrower subset of human creativity evaluation standards. Convergence with human standards was strongest in the novelty dimension, whereas divergence was clearest in the contextual dimension, which captures social, market, and reputational information. Moreover, each LLM exhibited distinct, model-specific standards that varied substantially in breadth. These differences in evaluation standards were reflected in actual creativity judgments. Study 2 (N = 1,103 ideas) showed
arXiv:2607.22182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) evaluation spans diverse tasks and benchmarks, yet evidence remains organized around tasks rather than the capabilities they probe. This fragmentation limits cross-study comparison, obscures capabilities tasks recruit, and makes coverage gaps difficult to identify. We introduce a multi-layer taxonomy of 14 capability domains and 91 subskills across Primitive, Constructed, and Integrative layers. Human cognitive science guides capability definition and organization, not LLM architecture. Layer assignments draw on developmental precedence and hypothesized functional support, while human-origin constructs are adapted to observable model behavior. To demonstrate operational utility, we screened 31,505 papers from ACL, AAAI, ICML, and NeurIPS between 2023 and 2025 and mapped 15,934 LLM-focused papers through multi-model annotation, consensus, and arbitration. Direct research attention concentrated on Language-Semanti
arXiv:2607.22136v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empathetic Response Generation (ERG) requires models to recognize users' emotions and generate empathetic responses. Commonsense knowledge has been shown to support such reasoning, yet existing approaches typically reuse fixed commonsense representations across understanding and generation, limiting their ability to coordinate such knowledge across different stages. We propose DCC, a Dynamic Commonsense Coordination Framework with three complementary modules: residual-based commonsense interaction (SCE-AttnRes) to integrate contextual and situational commonsense representations, Association-Guided Commonsense Filtering (AGCF) to down-weight low-relevance commonsense relations, and Iterative Commonsense-Aware Decoding (ICAD) to dynamically retrieve commonsense memories during generation. Experiments on the Empathetic-Dialogues benchmark show that DCC improves emotion classification accuracy and response diversity over the CEM baseline whil
arXiv:2607.22100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Lightweight projectors are an established way to connect pre-trained speech encoders with large language models (LLMs), mapping acoustic features into token-level embeddings for tasks like ASR and spoken question answering. Existing systems, however, typically only support a few languages and are often limited to English. We introduce MEUSLI, the first open-science multilingual projector family that links a Whisper encoder with open-source multilingual LLMs, enabling fully open-source end-to-end ASR in 28 European languages. MEUSLI extends prior monolingual pipelines, delivering strong results across high- and low-resource languages. Using proper continual leaning techniques, MEUSLI can be easily extended to other languages not seen in training. We further demonstrate that the MEUSLI projector can be leveraged beyond ASR, enabling multilingual speech translation and topic identification with only a few hours of task specific supervision p
arXiv:2607.22075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual Learning for Named Entity Recognition (CLNER) enable models to incrementally learn new entity types without forgetting previously acquired ones. However, existing methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and insufficient exploitation of shared information across tasks. This paper proposes FSE, a Fast-Slow Experts enhanced span-based NER model for CLNER. The shared fast expert learns token-level links to efficiently filter out unlikely spans, while the task-specific slow expert performs span classification only on the remaining candidates. It stabilizes learning by promoting knowledge sharing across tasks and maintains plasticity by reducing learning burden at each task. A length-decay negative sampling strategy to mitigate span imbalance is also introduced. Extensive experiments on OntoNotes and FewNERD synthestic datasets demonstrate that FSE achieves state-of-the-art performance in CLNER scenarios, with effectiveness of eac
arXiv:2607.22067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into the nuclear power industry requires outputs grounded in domain-specific knowledge. This study evaluates a 31-billion-parameter open-weight multimodal model (Gemma 4 31B-IT) on its capacity to apply nuclear knowledge by benchmarking eight model-retrieval configurations against the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Reactor Operator licensing examination. We evaluate 14 Generic Fundamentals Examinations (GFE) from the 2015-2021 March sittings (seven pressurized and seven boiling water reactor exams) using the standard 80% human passing criterion. The base model is compared against configurations utilizing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on Gemini-distilled chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with BM25 sparse retrieval over the U.S. Department of Energy Fundamentals Handbook, and retrieval-augmented fine-tuning (RAFT). Within the retrieval pipeline, w
arXiv:2607.22043v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities, their reliance on text-only pre-training restricts the perception of the multimodal physical world. Native multimodal pre-training avoids this limitation by training models from scratch on multimodal inputs, thereby achieving deep cross-modal integration and mitigating optimization asymmetries inherent to traditional late-fusion architectures. Despite these advantages, the scaling properties of this paradigm remain systematically uncharacterized. To address this gap, we investigate the optimal model size and token count for training a transformer-based vision-language model under a fixed computational budget. We demonstrate that minimal objective loss adheres to a predictable compute law, whereas compute-optimal model sizes and token counts scale as power laws. Notably, language and multimodal objectives manifest distinct scaling behaviors. The language alloc
arXiv:2607.22039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging plays a crucial role in consolidating multiple specialized models into a single, unified model, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has primarily focused on developing strategies to enhance merging performance with the trained models, while the impact of training paradigms, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), on the effectiveness of model merging remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically explore the merging behavior of RL-trained LLMs compared to those trained with traditional SFT. Through comprehensive evaluations across five representative tasks, we find that RL significantly reduces task conflicts and results in less performance degradation after merging, making RL-trained models particularly well-suited for this process. To unearth the reasons behind the superior suitability of RL for model merging, we conduct extensive empirical experimen
arXiv:2607.22026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Detecting LLM-generated text remains challenging under zero-shot and training-free conditions, especially when detectors must generalize across datasets, domains, and unseen generators. While existing training-free approaches exploit language-model statistics as detection signals, they typically characterize a text through global measures that summarize overall model behavior. Consequently, potentially informative local and multiscale variations in token-level predictability may remain underutilized. Motivated by this observation, we introduce DWT-Fusion, a training-free signal-based framework for detecting LLM-generated text using discrete wavelet analysis of token-level log-probability sequences produced by a proxy causal language model. The proposed framework analyzes these sequences through wavelet-based multiresolution signal representations and derives detection signals from localized probability dynamics. We further evaluate four t
arXiv:2607.21988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-harm content is particularly challenging to detect using NLP techniques, and is also a high-stakes task which requires the highest accuracy to enable timely intervention or flagging at-risk users. We therefore present an analysis of how LLMs represent such self-harm content, which has downstream applications in self-harm detection, LLM intervention and governance and policing. In this paper, we focus on two datasets and four models, and perform two main experiments: (1) We train and evaluate linear probes across all layers of each model on two self-harm datasets: X-Sensitive and SH-Detection. Across both corpora, self-harm information crystallizes in the final 3 - 7% of network layers (93 to 97% depth). (2) We extract contrastive self-harm directions and, after performing a normaliation step, we find that the most accurate probes are not necessarily the most linearly separable. In particular, we find Gemma-3-4B to represent this \tex
arXiv:2607.21981v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought prompting improves language-model reasoning by carrying intermediate states across successive computation steps. However, relying on natural language as the only recurrent interface is overly restrictive, since many transient computations do not need to be fully verbalized. Existing latent-reasoning methods remove this constraint by recurrently propagating continuous hidden states. However, these methods pass a dense hidden vector as a whole, without an explicit mechanism for selecting and organizing the information needed by the next reasoning step. This motivates an intermediate interface that remains linguistically grounded without requiring a decoded sentence. We introduce \textbf{J-CoT}, a recurrent reasoning framework built on \emph{J-space}, a vocabulary-indexed coordinate system within the model's hidden representations. Within each cycle, the model computes in its full hidden space. At the cycle boundary, J-CoT e
arXiv:2607.21980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mastodon as a decentralized federation of independently moderated social servers poses unique challenges for the detection and mitigation of toxic content. There are no unified moderation standards. The ecosystem is very diverse and uneven. This paper explores the development and spread of toxicity in Mastodon, utilizing machine learning methods to examine user posts. The results offer clarity on toxicity trends and its implications for community health and decentralized governance.
arXiv:2607.21978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have been widely adopted in large language models, yet parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for MoE models remains underexplored. Existing PEFT methods for MoE either ignore router priors with uniform adapters, reducing efficiency and risking forgetting, or rely on static expert selection, limiting per-token capacity and cross-expert feature learning. In this paper, we make the first attempt to fine-tune MoE models with MoE-style low-rank adaptation: our method, entitled MoE$^2$-LoRA, deeply couples the pretrained expert specialization with task-specific adaptivity via a dual-channel Routing-Conditioned Projection (RCP) module, which reuses base router activations to inform LoRA routing. We further introduce a single global LoRA expert pool shared across all layers, enabling model-wide adaptation with emergent layer-wise affinities and balanced expert utilization. MoE$^2$-LoRA simultaneously benefi
arXiv:2607.21962v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for LLM-agent memory typically generate conversations first and extract answer keys afterwards -- with documented label-error and contamination problems -- and they overwhelmingly measure short interaction histories. We invert the pipeline: a seeded life-script sampler emits facts with validity intervals, volatility classes, and source channels before any text exists; an LLM renderer writes chat and email from per-event fact manifests; a fidelity verifier confirms every planted fact; and questions are instantiated mechanically from the script, so gold answers are script-valid by construction and separately validated for answerability. The synthetic, fictionalized corpus (~380 questions, 15 types) embeds features absent from the benchmarks we survey: per-fact validity intervals, sent/received trust distinctions, injection probes in a benign harness, and as-of-date question sets. Benchmarking five memory architectures against a n
arXiv:2607.21961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate long-form conversational content such as podcasts from textual sources. While these systems produce fluent and engaging narratives, they often introduce ungrounded information. In this work, we present the first systematic study of faithfulness in document-grounded podcast generation, where grounding must be maintained across conversational turns in long-form, multi-speaker transcripts. We construct a dataset of over 1500 documents spanning five domains and generate podcast transcripts using multiple LLMs. We introduce a turn-level LLM-as-a-judge framework for evaluating whether conversational turns are supported by the source document, and validate its reliability through human studies. Our analysis shows that even state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4o, frequently generate ungrounded content. To mitigate this issue, we propose catch-n-repair, a model-agnostic framework th
arXiv:2607.21936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical documents act as invaluable knowledge archives but often suffer from illegibility due to physical deterioration and damage. While existing restoration methods based on masked language modeling effectively utilize local context, they struggle to restore named entities that require external historical knowledge. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework for historical document restoration that leverages large language models with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). By combining the implicit knowledge of pre-trained LLMs with explicitly retrieved external context, our model ARI effectively mitigates the challenge of inferring context-dependent proper nouns. Extensive experiments on Korean historical documents demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baselines, achieving substantial gains in restoring both general characters and named entities. Furthermore, comprehensive evaluations including exper
arXiv:2607.21861v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study baking documents directly into the weights of a 4-bit Gemma-4-e4b model via LoRA, so a system can answer questions about a corpus closed-book: no retrieval and no context-window budget. Across roughly 100 training runs from single documents to a 99-document corpus, we find that once adapter capacity is adequate, training-data quality is the dominant lever on closed-book accuracy, outweighing LoRA rank, learning rate, and two alternative architectures combined; capacity itself is a hard gate below which no data intervention helps. A single curation pass (shortening gold answers to canonical 1-6 word spans and dropping trivia) moved closed-book accuracy from 57.7% to 85.7% on a 15-document corpus, a larger jump than any architectural change. We confirm a capacity trend (rank must grow with corpus size) entangled with a coupling between rank and learning rate that we initially misdiagnosed. On a 15-document slice we add a real retri
arXiv:2607.21780v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Document packets, multiple documents concatenated into a single file, are common in government and administrative workflows, yet splitting them into their constituent documents is difficult, especially for low-resource languages. We introduce Khondo (Bangla for split/segment), the first benchmark for document packet splitting on Bangladeshi government forms. Unlike prior English and OCR-text-based datasets, Khondo is bilingual (Bangla--English) and vision-native; where models operate directly on page images. It spans five concatenation schemes, from sequential to fully shuffled, across 14 administrative domains, with ground-truth boundaries, domain types, and page order. Zero-shot evaluation of MLLMs shows they cluster pages into their source documents fairly well but struggle in restoring the original page order once shuffled. To isolate what drives this difficulty, we run two controlled analyses, varying the prompt instruction and then
arXiv:2607.21774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models may infer demographic attributes from subtle linguistic cues even when those attributes are not explicitly stated. This pilot study examines whether Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct internally represents Colombian identity, socioeconomic status, or stereotype-related information when processing Colombian-Spanish and English prompts. We use Natural Language Autoencoders (NLA) to verbalize residual-stream activations from layer 20 across four positional quartiles per prompt. Our dataset contains 30 prompts arranged as 15 matched Spanish-English pairs, spanning explicit Colombian cues, implicit Colombian cues, and neutral controls. We report descriptive rates and qualitative evidence rather than statistically powered effects, focusing on whether latent nationality or stereotype representations appear before they are verbalized in the model output. This work connects activation-level interpretability with bias evaluation for underrep
arXiv:2607.21758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teachers, conference chairs, and public readers all judge writing from limited evidence, seeing only a finished document and not the process that produced it. Final text alone cannot reveal whether a document was produced through human typing, AI generation, or mixed human-AI collaboration. Existing process-tracking tools help, but many are tied to host-document histories, provide coarse activity records, and offer limited control over the writing environment. Humanly is a writing platform that makes the writing process itself the evidence. Users configure writing environments for personal documents or assigned tasks and draft in a workspace that records writing activity and in-platform AI assistance. Humanly can package a completed session into a sealed writing certificate with configuration-aware anomaly behavior review. It can support writing scenarios such as course assignments, peer review, and personal certification. Our user study
arXiv:2607.21685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A systematic review begins with someone reading thousands of abstracts to identify the few that are relevant, and classifiers are used to prioritise that reading. Their inputs are often augmented with Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), assigned either by expert indexers weeks or months after publication or by automatic tools at once. To our knowledge the two have not been compared directly as classifier features, and no previous work has asked whether that comparison's outcome depends on how the classifier is evaluated. Using the Cohen et al. (2006) drug-class benchmark on three topics, we characterise a bag-of-words logistic regression classifier (seven reruns) and BiomedBERT (five seeds), then examine how the Statins result changes under alternative designs. Under the canonical 5-fold full-corpus design, the bag-of-words expert-vs-auto gap on Statins is +0.096 WSS@95%. Matching the corpus size to the smaller topics (n = 803) reduces it to
arXiv:2607.21632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional benchmarks for LLMs primarily rely on static datasets and objective scoring metrics, which often fail to capture differences in response quality when multiple answers are acceptable. In such settings, correctness alone is insufficient to distinguish between responses that vary in clarity, completeness, and usefulness. This paper introduces a consensus-based evaluation framework that measures relative preference among model-generated responses rather than absolute correctness. Instead of evaluating outputs against a fixed ground truth, we assess how a panel of diverse LLMs ranks anonymized candidate responses to the same prompt. This approach treats aggregate inter-model agreement as a proxy for perceived response quality under blind conditions. We conduct a controlled study using five state-of-the-art LLMs across multiple domains, including programming, general knowledge, safety, logical reasoning, and mathematics. Each model
arXiv:2607.21619v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive performance, but their safety alignment remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing content-based jailbreaks are often inconsistent and show unsatisfying performance against the rapidly evolving MLLMs, failing to exploit non-content-based vulnerabilities. Unlike previous research, we empirically find that MLLMs exhibit a Stylistic Inconsistency between their comprehension ability and safety ability: MLLMs can robustly understand content regardless of visual style, yet their defense mechanisms can be easily bypassed by specific stylistic triggers. Based on this finding, we propose Adversarial Style Optimization (ASO), a plug-and-play enhancement module to amplify existing visual jailbreaks. ASO fine-tunes an image-editing model to superimpose an optimized stylistic modification onto a given adversarial image, using a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) agent guid
arXiv:2601.12311v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of 6G-enabled vehicular metaverses enables Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) to operate across physical and virtual spaces through space-air-ground-sea integrated networks. The AVs can deploy AI agents powered by large AI models as personalized assistants, on edge servers to support intelligent driving decision making and enhanced on-board experiences. However, such cross-reality interactions may cause serious location privacy risks, as adversaries can infer AV trajectories by correlating the location reported when AVs request LBS in reality with the location of the edge servers on which their corresponding AI agents are deployed in virtuality. To address this challenge, we design a cross-reality location privacy protection framework based on hybrid actions, including continuous location perturbation in reality and discrete privacy-aware AI agent migration in virtuality. In this framework, a new privacy metric, termed cros
arXiv:2607.21527v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Passive sensing for wellbeing uses smartphones and wearables to continuously collect human behavioral data and applies ML/AI models to infer psychological states and behaviors (e.g., depression, cognitive load). These systems are increasingly adopted in high-stakes settings (e.g., hospitals, universities), yet fairness research remains limited---primarily to post-hoc, identity-based comparisons of model performance. However, passive sensing combines heterogeneous sensing infrastructures, indirect behavioral inference, and longitudinal deployment---characteristics that, while not exclusive to the domain, are jointly pronounced here and raise two underexplored questions: (1) what additional sources of inequity arise from these characteristics, and (2) how do such inequities propagate beyond algorithmic audits across the system lifecycle? To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 researchers and practitioners a
arXiv:2602.22085v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social interactions are fundamental to well-being, yet automatically detecting them in daily life-particularly using wearables-remains underexplored. Most existing systems are evaluated in controlled settings, focus primarily on in-person interactions, or rely on restrictive assumptions (e.g., requiring multiple speakers within fixed temporal windows), limiting generalizability to real-world use. We present an on-watch interaction detection system designed to capture diverse interactions in naturalistic settings. A core component is a foreground speech detector trained on a public dataset. Evaluated on over 100,000 labeled foreground speech and background sound instances, the detector achieves a balanced accuracy of 85.51%, outperforming prior work by 5.11%. We evaluated the system in a real-world deployment (N=38), with over 900 hours of total smartwatch wear time. The system detected 1,691 interactions, 77.28% were confirmed via par
arXiv:2504.19345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust navigational guidance is an important XR application for both sighted and non-sighted populations. In this paper, we mainly focus on blind pedestrians, who continue to face "last-mile" challenges such as locating entrances and navigating cluttered spaces. While smartglasses and wearables are maturing, a foundational design question remains underexplored: where on the body should cameras be placed to best support navigation? We present a mixed-methods investigation that focuses on the question of camera placement for generating spatial data supporting ego-centric navigation. A survey of 10 blind cane users surfaced practices for last-mile navigation and perceptions of body-mounted XR devices. A controlled case study with a blind co-author compared head- and cane-mounted cameras using synchronized Project Aria glasses while traversing five real-world environments. Using Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and Neural Radi
arXiv:2607.21941v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chemists and materials scientists increasingly use machine learning models, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), to predict properties of molecules and the outcomes of their reactions. Beyond predictive performance, understanding how these models organize chemical information internally in their latent spaces, i.e., the embeddings of the molecules, is critical. Analyzing latent spaces helps diagnose model behavior and assess whether the learned embeddings are organized in ways that reflect meaningful chemical relationships. Unfortunately, existing methods provide limited support for analyzing latent spaces across layers and across different model states (e.g., training epochs, model configurations, and input data), making it difficult to understand how these latent spaces evolve throughout a model or relate to chemical concepts. We present LatentFlow, a visual analytics system developed in collaboration with a domain expert for analyzi
arXiv:2607.22463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI is reshaping programming education, yet educators often infer students' AI-supported learning from classroom observations alone. This experience report presents a trio-ethnography involving two computing educators with different teaching philosophies and one undergraduate computer science student to examine how these interpretations evolve through dialogue. Across three conversations, the educators reflected on students' AI use, discussed changes to programming pedagogy, and revisited their assumptions after engaging with the student's lived experiences. Rather than simply confirming or contradicting the educators' perspectives, the student's narratives revealed learning processes that were largely invisible in the classroom, prompting both educators to reconsider assumptions about AI use, assessment, transparency, and programming instruction. We argue that trio-ethnography offers a valuable reflective approach for helping c
arXiv:2607.22428v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) in creative practice can be less about technocentric explanation and more about enabling artists to inspect modify and debug models as part of making Yet largescale texttoimage diffusion systems are typically presented as opaque endtoend tools limiting this kind of material engagement We argue that even large models can function as creative materials when their internal structure is made visible and manipulable To support this we propose a handson approach to explainability centred on experimentation and intervention We instantiate this approach with a model bending and an interactive (inspection) interface integrated into ComfyUIs nodebased workflow including interactive layer selection and intervention controls Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of bending interventions in Stable Diffusion 15 we show how manipulating specific components of a diffusion pipeline produces relatively consistent families of vi
arXiv:2607.22397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frozen EEG encoders proliferate; per-model fine-tune defaults do not scale. We present Nimbus Personalizer: one contract encode to Bayesian head to BrainState (optional affine mid-tier) that sits on heterogeneous frozen trunks without a new personalization stack per architecture. Thesis (systems): the contribution is the trunk-agnostic API - not LDA-on-embeddings as an ML novelty - so OEMs integrate once and swap trunks. Evidence: the same surface runs on five classical trunks EEGNet, Shallow, Deep, Conformer, ATCNet x four MI datasets (18 cells) and on a foundation encoder (REVE) under the same Personalizer. Where embedding capacity exists, the head is a cheap default mid-point versus warm-start fine-tune or PEFT, costing orders of magnitude less adaptation wall time while recovering much of the fine-tune accuracy gain; calibration-only-when-clean holds in 12/18 cells. Head gains are supporting evidence that the API is useful where capac
arXiv:2607.22118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive virtual patients driven by large language models (LLMs) offer scalable solutions for medical communication training, such as breaking bad news. However, designing their emotional expressiveness remains a challenge. This paper presents an AI-driven virtual patient framework combining LLM dialogue with real-time facial animation in virtual reality (VR). We conducted an exploratory, formative evaluation with seven medical experts to gather early feedback and elicit design requirements. The evaluation focused on how variations in facial expression intensity affect perceived realism and the virtual patient's emotion intelligibility. While descriptive quantitative ratings remained baseline across conditions, qualitative interviews provided deep insights into how experts perceive virtual emotional cues. The findings suggest that experts evaluate emotional realism holistically through multiple verbal and non-verbal channels; isolated
arXiv:2607.22104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Affect-adaptive systems increasingly act as communicators that sense a user's emotion and respond with events meant to change it, closing an affective loop. This vision assumes both that a machine's affective messages are received and that the bodily channel it monitors carries an intelligible reply-assumptions rarely tested together. In a within-subjects virtual-reality study (N = 20), an autonomous system delivered six empirically derived affective patterns-scripted emotional events distilled from 104 practitioners' (first responders') critical incidents-while we recorded the human reply across felt emotion, felt arousal, and autonomic (electrodermal and cardiac) activity. Acting only as an author of designed messages, the machine reliably evoked strong, differentiated emotions: valence fell sharply for every pattern (|dz| = 1.1-1.7), and the patterns produced distinguishable, individually classifiable signatures of anger, fear, and sad
arXiv:2607.22005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI methods promise to support autism spectrum condition (ASC) diagnostics in adults, a complex and time-consuming process, that is characterized by a shortage of specialized clinicians. To date, clinicians' needs and their interaction with such AI-based support remain underexplored. Our work aims to develop and evaluate an AI-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) for ASC assessment, and to investigate how it impacts clinicians' decision-making. By interviewing clinicians of varying experience levels, we identified five challenges and derived design strategies. Based on that, we developed SIT-CARE, a CDSS, which provides AI-based recommendations and data visualizations of clinically relevant nonverbal behavior. Through an evaluation study with newly recruited clinicians, we found that SIT-CARE led to different decision paths in regard to the ASC assessment, which are reflected in clinicians' mental models and decision changes. Over
arXiv:2607.21944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Free exploration is an important aspect of many engaging virtual reality (VR) experiences, yet remains largely inaccessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users due to its reliance on visual feedback. Existing approaches support BLV navigation through prebuilt menus of environment and audio beacons, but offer limited support for free-form discovery. We present VisionPulse, an accessible VR system that enables BLV users to explore virtual environments through natural head and hand movements, combined with auditory, haptic, and text-to-speech feedback. VisionPulse introduces a discovery-driven approach that allows users to progressively uncover regions and objects, alongside navigation support through waypoint guidance and object localization via responsive audio and orientation-based haptics. A study with 12 BLV participants showed a strong preference for VisionPulse's discovery-based exploration and multimodal feedback, without negatively
arXiv:2607.21887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foreign language anxiety (FLA) can be a major barrier to second language acquisition (SLA), especially in conversational contexts. With the proliferation of large language models (LLMs) throughout all areas of life, recent work suggests that interacting with LLM agents can be instrumental within the field of SLA and foreign language education, especially for reducing FLA. Related work also suggests that linguistic demands and task complexity can be predictors of FLA, implying that the use of demanding, complex language could lead to learners experiencing higher FLA. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-agent embodied conversational system that generates level-appropriate dialogue for English language learners. These levels are based on those defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) to describe non-native listener and speaker proficiency. Using a "generate-evaluate-regenerate" loop with multiple LLM age
arXiv:2607.21886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual data analysis involves both open-ended exploration and targeted question answering. Visualization authoring tools support this process by enabling users to create visualizations for these tasks. With the rise of large language models, substantial effort has been devoted to developing visualization authoring tools that use natural language instructions. However, existing systems are typically based on a linear chat interface, which is not well suited to exploratory visual analysis workflows. In this paper, we introduce VisCanvas, a node-based interface for exploratory visualization authoring with LLMs. VisCanvas allows users to create, revise, branch, and merge visualizations in a non-linear way, enabling more efficient exploration of multiple analytical directions. We conducted a user study with 20 participants to evaluate the effectiveness of VisCanvas compared to a baseline chat-based interface. The results show that VisCanvas fa
arXiv:2607.21853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the effectiveness of interventions that reduce the visibility of offensive content on the local social platform Nextdoor. Content filtering -- hiding or downranking offensive content that brushes against a platform's rules without clearly breaking them -- is deployed across virtually every major platform, yet almost no field evidence exists on whether it changes user behavior. We report two large-scale randomized controlled trials, each involving 100,000 users. Study 1 (2022) tested a report-triggered filter applied to comments in post threads and produced a modest 12% reduction in views of offensive comments; across eleven further measures of platform behavior we found no significant effects. Study 2 (2023-2024) remedied Study 1's central limitation -- a weak manipulation driven by slow, report-based eligibility -- by proactively scoring posts and comments at creation with Google Jigsaw's Perspective API and filtering them
arXiv:2607.21819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driving style is a key factor in the comfort and acceptance of automated vehicle (AV) features. In SAE Level-2 automation, where the driver must supervise the system and remain ready to intervene, mismatches between the automation's driving style and the driver's preference can reduce trust and trigger takeovers. This paper proposes an adaptive driving-style control framework that minimizes such preference mismatch. In a driving-simulator study, we compare fixed, trust-based, and preference-based adaptation heuristics and analyze their effects on preference mismatch and trust. We then train a driving-preference prediction model and use it in an implicit adaptation policy that selects among bounded driving styles for upcoming events. A validation study shows that the predictive policy achieves equal or lower preference mismatch than comparison baselines, particularly when starting from a less defensive style, while also yielding higher ave
arXiv:2607.21777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of scientific inquiry. Scientists use AI to observe and measure phenomena, to identify patterns in data, and to build models. As AI moves into scientific inquiry, it gains relevance for science education: students should learn how AI is changing scientific practices, ideally by engaging in AI-integrated scientific inquiry themselves. How to design such instruction, grounded in authentic scientific practice rather than taught as a standalone topic, remains an open question. In our vision, which we describe in this article, AI is treated as a set of scientific instruments that students use within the scientific practices described by the Next Generation Science Standards. Each instrument is a genuine scientific tool, pedagogically bounded: its controls are simplified while its core scientific function is preserved. The approach has two aims: engaging students in authentic scientific inquiry, and
arXiv:2607.21769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autistic individuals often face barriers in workplace communication, where soft skills are embedded within ongoing tasks and surrounding environment context, not in isolated verbal exchange. Recent work has introduced LLM-driven agents into VR-based communication training and proposed prompting schemas that let agents generate dialogue grounded in the VR environment and the user's hand-based interactions. Building on this work, we explore how different levels of environmental grounding influence the training experience of autistic trainees and job coaches. We conducted an exploratory study with 9 autistic trainees and 7 job coaches across three modalities: conversation-only (C), conversation with environmental objects (C+O), and conversation with objects and grasp interactions (C+O+G). Usability and workload were comparable across modalities, while both trainees and coaches preferred the more interactive and environment-grounded condition
arXiv:2607.21760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-powered assistive technologies have long supported blind and low vision (BLV) people in everyday tasks, but they are general-purpose and often fall short of meeting complex, individualized, in-situ accessibility needs. Though agentic programming tools, like GitHub Copilot, have the potential to bridge this gap by lowering the technical barriers to building personal AT using natural language, the practical applicability of this creation paradigm has been unknown. We address this knowledge gap through a two-phase longitudinal co-design study with five tech-savvy BLV users using ProgramAT, an agentic programming tool that supports the creation, iteration, and testing of camera-based AT. Overall, co-designers created over 37 tools, with some addressing needs unmet by any existing commercial AT such as identifying Uber rides or interpreting hand gestures. Qualitative feedback from our co-designers and analysis of development logs surface BL
arXiv:2607.21732v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What do we value in our visualizations, and in the people who design them? Despite a growing body of work on critical data visualization, the conception of what it is to do ethical data visualization work can often be narrow (for instance, holding that our ethical duties are discharged merely by avoiding overtly lying or manipulating data), or entangled with potentially problematic implicit value structures (such as the assumption of the objectivity and neutrality of data, and so the designer's role being merely the passive conveying of numbers as efficiently as possible). Yet, what it means to act ethically in data visualization is broad and multifaceted, and the virtues to which we should aspire as data visualization researchers and designers are worth explicating. We conducted an interview study with a broad spectrum of 20 experienced data visualization researchers, practitioners, and data artists to solicit their values and ethical co
arXiv:2607.21611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The proliferation of visual data in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields presents accessibility barrier for individuals with blindness or visual impairments. While recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer new opportunities to generate textual descriptions of STEM images, the research landscape is fragmented and its impact on real users remains limited. This systematic survey examines 20 peer-reviewed studies on AI-based techniques for describing STEM visuals, with a specific focus on accessibility and human-computer interaction. Following the PRISMA methodology and a ROBIS-based risk-of-bias assessment, the review analyzes (i) the types of STEM visuals targeted, (ii) the AI and machine learning architectures employed, (iii) the datasets and evaluation metrics adopted, and (iv) the interaction modalities through which descriptions are delivered. The analysis reveals a shift from static, one-shot alt
arXiv:2607.21605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly transforming health professions education, yet no scoping review has systematically mapped their applications across the full spectrum of health education contexts, including public health. Following the Arksey and O'Malley framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this review synthesized evidence from 64 studies published between 2015 and 2026, identified through searches of PubMed, ERIC, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar. Seven thematic domains were identified: automated assessment, large language models (LLMs) as student-facing learning support, virtual patients and clinical simulation, curriculum analysis and program evaluation, personalized and adaptive learning, public health and health promotion education, and educator and institutional integration. Findings reveal significant technical promise, particularly in automated assessment, clinical simulation, and cur
arXiv:2607.21603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence (AI) education has become a key component of K-12 curricula, activities such as designing and developing conversational agents are increasingly used as instructional practice. Prior work has primarily examined these activities by focusing on students' learning outcomes or the quality of final AI artifacts, offering limited insight into the collaborative processes through which learning unfolds during AI system development. Although the AIED community has a long history of studying collaborative learning in STEM and Computing education, the emergence of AI learning environments in which students build AI systems presents new opportunities to understand how collaboration unfolds in AI education contexts. Grounded in these foundational works, the current study examines collaborative interaction among middle school students engaged in the design and development of an AI chatbot. Using Ordered Network Analysis of stu