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:2508.21010v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Causal-Why Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models often struggle with higher-order reasoning, relying on opaque, monolithic pipelines that entangle video understanding, causal inference, and answer generation. These black-box approaches offer limited interpretability and tend to depend on shallow heuristics. We propose a novel, modular paradigm that explicitly decouples causal reasoning from answer generation, introducing natural language causal chains as interpretable intermediate representations. Inspired by human cognitive models, these structured cause-effect sequences bridge low-level video content with high-level causal reasoning, enabling transparent and logically coherent inference. Our two-stage architecture comprises a Causal Chain Extractor (CCE) that generates causal chains from video-question pairs, and a Causal Chain-Driven Answerer (CCDA) that derives answers grounded in these chains. To address the la
arXiv:2508.16771v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code Language Models (CodeLLMs) learn token importance from data correlations, whereas human developers attend selectively to semantically salient code. We present EyeMulator, a model-agnostic method that injects human visual-attention priors into CodeLLM fine-tuning without architectural changes. EyeMulator distills eye-tracking data into semantic salience and gaze-transition priors, then uses them to reweight token-level training losses. Across six backbones, two data regimes, and three CodeXGLUE tasks, the reported configurations yield positive matched-metric deltas in all 36 model-task-setting cells. Effects are largest for structure-preserving completion and translation, while summarization shows smaller but positive METEOR deltas. Session-mode and component-ablation analyses further show that reading, writing, semantic, and transition-derived priors provide complementary signal. Human-attention artifacts are available at h
arXiv:2507.02950v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) may support counseling training, yet evidence from Japanese-language interactions and automated quality ratings remains limited. We examined 18 fixed Japanese-language counseling transcripts generated through artificial intelligence (AI)-to-AI interactions under three counselor conditions: GPT-minimal (GPT-4-turbo with a minimal role instruction), GPT-SMDP (GPT-4-turbo with the Structured Multi-step Dialogue Prompt [SMDP]), and Claude-SMDP (Claude-3-Opus with SMDP). Fifteen counseling experts rated transcripts on four adapted global scales from the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity coding manual and an overall-quality item; three newer LLMs independently rated the same transcripts in three iterations. In this fixed stimulus set, SMDP-condition dialogues received higher expert ratings for cultivating change talk, partnership, empathy, and overall quality than GPT-minimal dialogues; the two
arXiv:2504.09662v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent large language model simulations have the potential to model complex human behaviors and interactions. If the mechanics are set up properly, unanticipated and valuable social dynamics can surface. However, it is challenging to consistently enforce simulation mechanics while still allowing for rich and emergent dynamics. We present AgentDynEx, an AI system that helps set up, track, and repair simulations. Specifically, AgentDynEx introduces milestones that act as checkpoints and failure conditions that act as guardrails to ensure dynamics are relevant and mechanics are respected as the simulation progresses. It also introduces a method called nudging, where the system dynamically reflects on simulation progress and gently intervenes if it begins to deviate from intended outcomes. A technical evaluation found that nudging enables simulations to progress further without reducing the presence notable dynamics compared to
arXiv:2410.20696v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Case studies have shown that software disasters snowball from technical issues to catastrophes through humans covering up problems rather than addressing them and empirical research has found the psychological safety of software engineers to discuss and address problems to be foundational to improving project success. However, the failure to do so can be attributed to psychological factors like loss aversion. We conduct a large-scale study of the experiences of 600 software engineers in the UK and USA on project success experiences. Empirical evaluation finds that approaches like ensuring clear requirements before the start of development, when loss aversion is at its lowest, correlated to 97% higher project success. The freedom of software engineers to discuss and address problems correlates with 87% higher success rates. The findings support the development of software development methodologies with a greater focus on human fa
arXiv:2202.14019v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Maintaining proper form while exercising is important for preventing injuries and maximizing muscle mass gains. Detecting errors in workout form naturally requires estimating human's body pose. However, off-the-shelf pose estimators struggle to perform well on the videos recorded in gym scenarios due to factors such as camera angles, occlusion from gym equipment, illumination, and clothing. To aggravate the problem, the errors to be detected in the workouts are very subtle. To that end, we propose to learn exercise-oriented image and video representations from unlabeled samples such that a small dataset annotated by experts suffices for supervised error detection. In particular, our domain knowledge-informed self-supervised approaches (pose contrastive learning and motion disentangling) exploit the harmonic motion of the exercise actions, and capitalize on the large variances in camera angles, clothes, and illumination to learn
arXiv:2606.22484v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The adoption of agentic AI coding systems -- where autonomous agents generate, review, test, and deploy code with minimal human intervention -- creates a governance challenge in regulated industries. Existing frameworks address AI-assisted development maturity or the productivity-reliability tension but offer no mechanism for calibrating human oversight intensity to regulatory impact. We present the Governed AI-Assisted Engineering (GAIE) framework, a three-tier graduated human oversight model for agentic code generation in regulated domains. GAIE introduces the Oversight Classification Model (OCM), a deterministic decision function that classifies code generation tasks by regulatory impact, customer proximity, reversibility, and data sensitivity to route them through one of three oversight tiers: human-in-the-loop (strategic functions), human-over-the-loop (customer-impacting), or automated-with-monitoring (internal). Each tier defin
arXiv:2605.15932v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Designing safe and sustainable chemicals is critical to combat chemical pollution in our environment. Computational and AI-assisted methods have been developed to aid de novo molecule design. However, data on the environmental impacts of chemical compounds are sparse, resulting in low-fidelity machine learning (ML) oracles and unreliable candidate proposals. Furthermore, many automated molecular design approaches rely on numerical scoring functions that cannot fully capture the nuanced chemical intuition of expert scientists required for real-world molecular design. Instead, we present GEMS - an interactive visual analytics tool for human-in-the-loop molecular optimization that lets domain experts directly collaborate with an evolutionary genetic algorithm. Users continuously guide the search using domain knowledge through high-level, parametric modification of the scoring function alongside direct, granular control over molecule popu
arXiv:2605.12613v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: WhatsApp is one of the most widely used messaging platforms globally, with billions of users sharing information in private groups. Yet, it offers little infrastructure to support moderation and group governance. In the absence of platform-level oversight, group admins bear the responsibility of governing group behavior. In this paper, we explore how WhatsApp group admins collaborate with AI tools to create, enforce, and maintain group rules. Drawing on a two-phase speculative design study with 20 admins in India, we examine how participants interacted with an AI assistant (Meta AI) to co-create rules and responded to a series of probes illustrating AI-assisted moderation features. Our findings show that while admins appreciated the AI's ability to surface overlooked rules and reduce their moderation burden, they were highly sensitive to issues of relational trust, data privacy, tone, and social context. We identify how group type and
arXiv:2603.28944v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) predictions are increasingly used to inform human decisions. Here, using a behavioral implementation of the classic Newcomb's paradox in 1,305 participants, we show that AI predictions can also shape the reasoning people use to make a decision. In this paradigm, perceived predictive authority can alter how people reason about their future actions, leading them to forgo a guaranteed reward. Over 40% of participants treated AI as such a predictive authority about their own behavior, significantly increasing the odds of forgoing the guaranteed reward by a factor of 3.39 (95% CI: 2.45-4.70) and reducing earnings by 10.7-42.9%. The effect appeared across AI presentations and decision contexts and remained detectable even when predictions repeatedly failed. When people perceive AI as capable of predicting their personal behavior, the mere presence of AI predictions may shape their decision-making, narrowing the
arXiv:2601.20749v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How do students develop AI literacy through everyday practice rather than formal instruction? While normative AI literacy frameworks proliferate, empirical understanding of how students actually learn to work with generative AI remains limited. This study analyzes 10,536 ChatGPT messages from 36 undergraduates over one academic year, revealing five use genres -- academic workhorse, emotional companion, metacognitive partner, repair and negotiation, and trust calibration -- that constitute distinct configurations of student-AI learning. Drawing on domestication theory and emerging frameworks for AI literacy, we demonstrate that functional AI competence emerges through ongoing relational negotiation rather than one-time adoption. Students develop sophisticated genre portfolios, strategically matching interaction patterns to learning needs while exercising critical judgment about AI limitations. Notably, repair work during AI breakdowns
arXiv:2601.11049v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We examine whether large language models (LLMs) can predict biased decision-making in conversational settings, and whether their predictions capture not only human cognitive biases but also how those effects change under cognitive load. In a pre-registered study (N = 1,648), participants completed six classic decision-making tasks via a chatbot with dialogues of varying complexity. Participants exhibited two well-documented cognitive biases: the Framing Effect and the Status Quo Bias. Increased dialogue complexity resulted in participants reporting higher mental demand. This increase in cognitive load selectively, but significantly, increased the effect of the biases, demonstrating the load-bias interaction. We then evaluated whether LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-5, and open-source models) could predict individual decisions given demographic information and prior dialogue. While results were mixed across choice problems, LLM predictions that incor
arXiv:2512.09802v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents the initial stages of a design study aimed at developing a dashboard to visualize gameplay data of the Commander format from Magic: The Gathering. We conducted a user-task analysis to identify requirements for a data visualization dashboard tailored to the Commander format. Afterward, we proposed a design for the dashboard, leveraging visualizations to address players' needs and pain points for typical data analysis tasks in the context domain. Then, we followed-up with a structured user test to evaluate players' comprehension and preferences of data visualizations. Results show that players prioritize contextually relevant, outcome-driven metrics over peripheral ones, and that canonical charts like heatmaps and line charts support higher comprehension than complex ones such as scatterplots or icicle plots. Our findings also highlight the importance of localized views, user customization, and progressive disclosure
arXiv:2509.13742v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Science communication revision requires writers to dynamically balance scientific exposition and narrative engagement - a process where writers often struggle with competing directions. Existing LLM-assisted tools help with co-writing, but offer limited support for navigating this iterative, multi-directional revision process. To address this gap, we designed Spatial Balancing, an exploratory revision environment that maps rhetorical goals and revision strategies onto a two-dimensional spatial canvas for experienced science communication creators with domain expertise but lacking formal professional training. By building a design space of communication strategies and embedding them into a spatial exploratory canvas, our system treats feedback as navigational cues rather than prescriptive judgments. Our findings show that this integrated revision environment helps writers stay focused on writing goals, reason about revision as trajecto
arXiv:2508.08242v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group decision-making often suffers from uneven information sharing, hindering decision quality. While large language models (LLMs) have been widely studied as aids for individuals, their potential to support groups of users, potentially as facilitators, is relatively underexplored. We present a pre-registered randomized experiment with 1,475 participants assigned to 281 live groups completing a hidden profile task--selecting an optimal city for a hypothetical sporting event--under one of four facilitation conditions: no facilitation, a one-time message prompting information sharing, a human facilitator, or an LLM (GPT-4o) facilitator. We find that LLM facilitation increased information shared within a discussion by raising the minimum level of engagement with the task among group members, and that these gains came at limited cost in terms of participants' attitudes towards the task, their group, or their facilitator. Whether by human
arXiv:2507.12721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-AI interfaces play a pivotal role in integrating clinicians' expertise with artificial intelligence to enhance both healthcare practice and research. However, designing effective interfaces in this domain remains a significant challenge. The inherent complexity of medical data, the influence of domain-specific conventions, and the diverse needs of clinical users compound the challenge of developing practical and usable solutions. In this study, we review existing solutions and synthesize a set of design patterns - recurring approaches that support the design of human-AI interfaces in clinical settings. We conducted a comprehensive literature review of human-AI interaction designs in clinical contexts, through which we identified 15 information entities commonly presented to users and 12 design patterns used to organize and communicate this information effectively. For each design pattern, we summarize the underlying design probl
arXiv:2507.03670v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Writing longer prompts for an AI assistant to generate a story increases psychological ownership, a user's feeling that the writing belongs to them. To encourage users to write longer prompts, we evaluated two interaction techniques that modify the prompt entry interface of chat-based generative AI assistants: pressing and holding the prompt submission button, and continuously moving a slider up and down when submitting a short prompt. A within-subjects experiment investigated the effects of such techniques on prompt length and psychological ownership, and results showed that these techniques increased prompt length and led to higher psychological ownership than baseline techniques. A second experiment further augmented these techniques by showing AI-generated suggestions for how the prompts could be expanded. This further increased prompt length, but did not lead to improvements in psychological ownership. Our results show that simpl
arXiv:2504.17331v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Locomotion plays a crucial role in shaping the user experience within virtual reality environments. In particular, hands-free locomotion offers a valuable alternative by supporting accessibility and freeing users from reliance on handheld controllers. To this end, traditional speech-based methods often depend on rigid command sets, limiting the naturalness and flexibility of interaction. In this study, we propose a novel locomotion technique powered by large language models (LLMs), which allows users to navigate virtual environments using natural language with contextual awareness. We evaluate three locomotion methods: controller-based teleportation, voice-based steering, and our language model-driven approach. Our evaluation combines eye-tracking data analysis, including exploratory explainable machine learning analysis with SHAP, and standardized questionnaires (SUS, IPQ, CSQ-VR, NASA-TLX) to examine user experience through both obj
arXiv:2503.20666v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Thematic analysis (TA) is a widely used qualitative approach for uncovering latent meanings in unstructured text data. TA provides valuable insights in healthcare but is resource-intensive. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been introduced to perform TA, yet their applications in high-stakes healthcare settings, particularly for qualitative clinical interview analysis, remain limited. Here, we propose TAMA: A Human-AI Collaborative Thematic Analysis framework using Multi-Agent LLMs for clinical interviews. We leverage the scalability and coherence of multi-agent systems through structured conversations between agents and coordinate the expertise of cardiac experts in TA. Using interview transcripts from parents of children with Anomalous Aortic Origin of a Coronary Artery (AAOCA), a rare congenital heart disease, we demonstrate that TAMA outperforms single-agent LLM TA approaches, achieving higher thematic hit rate, coverage, and dist
arXiv:2411.11449v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying AI systems in public institutions can have far-reaching consequences for many people, making it a matter of public interest. Providing opportunities for stakeholders to come together, understand these systems, and debate their merits and harms is thus essential. Explainable AI often focuses on individuals, but deliberation benefits from group settings, which are underexplored. To address this gap, we present findings from an interview study with 8 focus groups and 12 individuals. Our findings provide insight into how explanations support AI novices in deliberating alone and in groups. Participants used modular explanations with four information categories to solve tasks and decide about an AI system's deployment. We found that the explanations supported groups in creating shared understanding and in finding arguments for and against the system's deployment. In comparison, individual participants engaged with explanations in
arXiv:2607.04860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gaze target estimation, the task of predicting where a person is looking in a scene, is crucial to understanding human attention and intent. It is a challenging task that combines high-level understanding of global scene semantics and precise spatial reasoning using human appearance (e.g. pose, eye orientation). As a result, human-level performance remains elusive for existing models, limiting their practical application. To this end, we propose PaGE (Practical Gaze Estimator), a gaze estimation model that explicitly models the complex interaction between scene and head features. Using a PaGE model with a large ViT-H+ backbone as the teacher, we further distill student models with lighter backbones on a much larger and more diverse unlabeled dataset. The architectural improvements and novel training recipe allow PaGE to achieve state-of-the-art performance on several gaze estimation tasks, outperforming humans in 7 out of 9 metrics whil
arXiv:2607.04438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Research dissemination, turning a paper into a poster, a talk video, and a blog post, is still a manual last mile. Prior automation treats each artifact in isolation that each re-extract the paper from scratch, usually ship one-way renders the author cannot reopen in PowerPoint or Word, and gates quality on soft VLM-preference scores that plateau while load-bearing sections still read as empty. We argue this last mile is best built as a composition of skills: thin agent-readable contracts that share one upstream extractor and wrap deterministic primitives in a measured-fill loop whose exits are hard pass/fail render gates. We instantiate this as ResearchStudio-Reel, five Claude Code and Codex skills organized into one shared extractor (Paper2Assets), three editable generators (Paper2Poster, Paper2Video, Paper2Blog), and one interactive convergence layer (Paper2Reel). Paper2Assets extracts each paper once into a shared bundle that can be
arXiv:2607.04025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescription support requires patient-specific reasoning from clinical narratives to syndromes, treatment principles, herbs, and doses. Direct language-model generation can produce fluent prescriptions, but its decisions are difficult to audit against explicit clinical evidence. Static TCM knowledge resources provide useful priors, but they cannot determine which diagnostic and prescription relations should be emphasized for an individual patient. We propose a patient-conditioned dual hypergraph framework for auditable TCM prescription support. The first hypergraph organizes symptom, tongue, pulse, and other clinical evidence around syndrome and treatment-principle reasoning. The second hypergraph organizes syndrome, treatment, disease-context, herb, retrieval, and dose-prior evidence for prescription construction. Unlike static knowledge graphs or fixed hypergraphs, both hypergraphs are dynamically we
arXiv:2607.03844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imagined speech decoding using EEG signals has emerged as a promising frontier in brain-computer interface (BCI) research, particularly to restore communication for individuals with severe speech impairments. However, decoding imagined speech remains a complex task due to the non-stationary, low-amplitude, and highly variable nature of EEG signals. Existing methods often rely on classical machine learning or deep learning models that fail to exploit spike-based temporal dynamics or event-driven firing mechanisms of biological neurons, which are naturally modeled by spiking neural networks (SNNs). In this study, we propose a hybrid decoding pipeline that extracts temporal representations using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) followed by biologically inspired temporal classification via SNNs. To our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate SNNs into EEG-based imagined speech decoding. Experimental results show that the propose
arXiv:2607.03621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents the development and evaluation of a collaborative system for real-time reconstruction of fragmented paper documents in the context of cultural heritage preservation. The developed system includes a collaborative robot, or cobot, that can fully manage the positioning of paper fragments using a specially designed vacuum-based suction attachment. This attachment enables gentle and precise positioning, ensuring the preservation of fragile materials. With this device, we are able to achieve a positioning repeatability of 0.57mm for fragments of 8cm^2. The system offers users the flexibility to choose between manual positioning, with visual guidance, or fully automated positioning performed by the cobot. To further improve the reconstruction process, AI methods for image interpretation, specifically for segmentation and positioning tasks, were applied and evaluated for their applicability to template-based reconstruction o
arXiv:2607.03425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic recourse addresses the challenge of providing tailored recommendations to users affected by unfavorable machine learning decisions, in potentially high-stakes scenarios. Traditional approaches to recourse often rely on the closest counterfactual explanations or assume a priori knowledge of a user's causal structure, resulting in interventions that overlook individual contexts and specific feature interactions. To overcome these limitations, we study a human-in-the-loop framework that iteratively approximates the user's structural causal model through interactive queries via Bayesian inference before producing recourse recommendations. This framework exploits humans' feedback to improve the identification of causal effects, allowing personalized recourse that is plausible, cost-effective, and aligned with the actual causal dependencies of each user. As a proof of concept, we evaluate this framework through simulated human res
arXiv:2607.03421v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating search engine results pages (SERPs) to assess result relevance is a demanding step in academic search. In a formative mixed-methods design study, we examine AI-generated SERP-level summaries as a support feature in an academic search engine for social science information. First, we manually evaluated summaries of the top five results for 10 queries using two general-purpose models, one commercial and one open, deriving an exploratory six-category error taxonomy and five safeguards for scholarly deployment. We then conducted a within-subjects user study (n = 30) comparing interfaces with and without AI summaries. Confirmatory analyses showed consistent but non-significant trends favoring AI summaries for subjective workload, perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and decision-making confidence. Exploratory analyses suggested lower mental demand, with frustration also tending to be lower. Behaviorally, participants rarely expanded
arXiv:2607.03289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When designing robots' nonverbal behaviors, many researchers have turned to arts-based insights, such as Disney's Animation Principles. Yet, while these principles bear key insights into the design of like-life characters, their application to robot design is inherently limited, in part because animation is not constrained by real-world physics, and in part because animation principles focus on low level animation mechanics and not high-level design considerations for physically embodied, interactive characters. In contrast, little attention has been paid to art forms like puppetry, despite their long history of exploring morphological, behavior, and interaction design of physically embodied, interactive characters. As such, in this work we leverage puppetry texts and practicing puppeteers' expert knowledge knowledge to derive a set of puppetry principles with key insights for robot design. As we show, these insights go beyond -- and un
arXiv:2607.03213v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present OpenGlass, an open-source, privacy-oriented, local-first system for low-latency multimodal visual assistance, with a primary focus on blind and low-vision users. Cloud MLLM assistants offer strong visual understanding, but often require uploading first-person visual data and can suffer multi-second network delays; wearable glasses are ideal for sensing, but cannot host large models under tight compute and power budgets. OpenGlass addresses this gap with a sensing-computing split: an ESP32-based glasses-side unit captures visual context, while a nearby consumer-grade device performs local MLLM inference and local speech output, reducing cloud reliance and keeping raw egocentric visual data on user-controlled devices by default. We evaluate response quality, query-ready-to-audio latency, safety-aware abstention, and auditable logs. Under real ESP32 Wi-Fi capture, OpenGlass reaches 993 ms median user-to-audio latency with resize
arXiv:2607.03162v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-powered agents struggle with personalization when users issue raw, underspecified queries. In this setting, agents must infer latent intent, extract preferences from noisy interaction histories, and select among competing alternatives. Existing benchmarks rarely test this capability, as they often rely on user-refined queries or simplified histories. We introduce personalized product search (PPS), a testbed for agentic personalization under raw queries and diverse histories. We construct Agent Personalized Benchmark (APeB) from action logs, pairing underspecified intents with rich histories and user-viewed candidate items. Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs with multi-step agent workflows, we find that models handle explicit queries well but struggle with early-stage queries requiring intent and preference discovery. Rubric analysis attributes this gap mainly to ineffective history use. A simple history-aware query-refinement pipeline
arXiv:2607.02932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Privacy is an important challenge when users interact with AI chatbots, since users may share sensitive information, explicitly or implicitly, and AI chatbots can use this information for user profiling. In this paper, we aim to protect user privacy via a user-side mechanism that transforms sensitive information in a user prompt, while preserving enough information to elicit a useful response from the chatbot. This approach faces an inherent tradeoff between protecting privacy (i.e., avoiding profiling) and preserving utility (i.e., getting personalized and task-specific responses). To that end, we consider, evaluate, and compare four different obfuscation actions, namely redaction, abstraction, replacement, and a novel noising/denoising scheme that we introduce. Additional novel insights include: utilizing a data type taxonomy to both identify and obfuscate sensitive information and explicitly taking into account the utility of chat re
arXiv:2607.02929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual brand language is the set of visual properties that convey brand identity for a product. What is the impact of visual brand language on a person's ability to recognize and understand the functional identity of an object? Using an empirically supported modeling framework based on the JIM model of object recognition and the LISA model of analogical inference, we simulated the impact of visual brand language on object recognition, the allocation of attention, and retrieval of functional information about objects. Our simulations predict that brand information captures attention and can slow recognition of an object's functional category, with greater degrees of branding causing larger effects. These results have potential implications for the usability and experience of designed objects.
arXiv:2607.02912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite the high accuracy of EEG-based emotion recognition, existing models remain opaque "black boxes", lacking semantic grounding between abstract neural features and human-interpretable states. In this paper, we reframe EEG explainability as a cross-modal generation task, shifting the paradigm from feature attribution to behavioral visualization. We introduce Facial Emoji Proxy Modeling, a novel framework that translates high-dimensional EEG signals into identity-anonymized facial emojis. Guided by the neuroscientific inspiration of neural-facial association, this approach grounds neural representations in the manifold of observable facial dynamics. Technically, our framework integrates FMENet, a specialized backbone modeling expression-relevant spatial synergies, and the Facial Emoji Learning Branch (FELB), which treats emoji reconstruction as a structured semantic regularizer. Extensive experiments on EAV and MMER benchmarks demons
arXiv:2607.02885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provides a structured framework for understanding a user's mental state by examining the interaction between cognitive and behavioral factors. However, out-of-the-box LLMs respond fluently and empathetically, yet collapse into validation & reflection, regardless of what the user actually needs. They know theoretical CBT (scoring up to 96% accuracy on licensing exam questions) but fail to apply it effectively. We explore this gap with a knowledge-guided framework that treats CBT dialogue as controlled affective reasoning: user narratives are decomposed into Beck's Cognitive Conceptualization structure, grounded in clinical SNOMED CT concepts validated via Natural Language Inference, and a Multiple Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) strategy selection between Validation & Reflection, Socratic Questioning, or Alternative Perspectives. To measure whether such guidance actually changes behavior, we introduce the Proto
arXiv:2607.02760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Live streaming platforms, as computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems, provide streamers with a range of tools, such as webcams, beauty filters, and stream titles, to shape their online personas in ways that either conform to or deviate from viewers' expectations. Drawing on gender role and CMC theories, this study examines how streamers leverage CMC self-presentation tools to fulfill gender role expectations and their associated live streaming outcomes. Analyzing data collected from 867 streamers and 94,227 streams on Douyu, a popular Chinese live streaming platform, we find that although both female and male streamers make extensive use of CMC tools, female streamers are more likely to employ visual strategies, such as webcams and beauty filters, than male streamers. We further find that although different tools have varying associations on streamers' earnings and audience engagement, the benefits of webcam use are weaker for fem
arXiv:2607.02565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal prediction provides distribution-free reliability guarantees for vision systems, but these guarantees depend on how prediction errors are measured in the output space. Many vision tasks produce outputs on curved spaces (e.g. gaze directions on the sphere or 3D head rotations), yet intermediate prediction heads, residuals, uncertainty estimates, or conformal scores are often defined in flat coordinate charts such as yaw-pitch or Euler angles. We show that this scoring choice introduces systematic geometric distortion near coordinate singularities (large pitch angles on the sphere and poses approaching gimbal lock in 3D rotations). Across four datasets (ETH-XGaze, Gaze360, BIWI, AFLW2000-3D), slice-conditional coverage at a nominal 90% target drops by 30-50 percentage points in these regions, falling to 38.9% on ETH-XGaze and 42.0% on Gaze360 at gaze pitch above 70 degrees, and to 57.5% on BIWI and 55.2% on AFLW2000-3D at head p
arXiv:2607.02563v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion-based text-to-image models can synthesize complex and highly structured visual content, yet the emergence and evolution of semantic structure remain difficult to interpret. Many existing workflows rely on aggregated attention or scalar summaries that separate temporal change from image-space evidence. To address this gap, we present a visual analytics framework for exploring attention dynamics in diffusion models: the step-indexed evolution of token-level cross-attention maps, their temporal concentration, and their spatial relationships. Our approach enables structured analysis of attention behavior across generation steps by integrating quantitative measures with data-driven stage identification in an interactive workflow. Case studies on a structured 60-prompt Stable-Diffusion-class benchmark illustrate recurring, interpretable patterns within this setting and show how linked temporal and spatial views facilitate the observ
arXiv:2607.05110v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social robots are increasingly deployed in clinical settings to support the well-being of children, where effective support must be personalized to each child. Personalization, choosing the robot action best suited to each child, can be framed as a recommendation problem, and a recently proposed recommender-system framework for social robots offers a principled approach through user profiling, ranking, and responsible computing. Instantiating it, however, is blocked not by the model but by the data, which is hard to gather. A child's state shifts within and across visits, so no fixed description of the user holds. Within a session, the few signals of whether the robot's actions helped are weak and indirect. Across sessions, children are rarely seen more than once, and anonymization breaks the identity needed to link visits. Because care cannot be randomized, existing data is observational, biased toward whatever was already done. Each is
arXiv:2607.04670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As autonomous vehicles progress toward fully driverless mobility, a critical question emerges: who understands and responds to passengers when the human driver is absent? Existing autonomous driving systems primarily optimize predefined navigation and control objectives from external scene observations, but they remain limited in perceiving and reasoning about in-cabin human intent. In this paper, we propose Intent2Drive, a unified framework for holistic human intent understanding and human-aligned planning. Instead of treating passenger intent as explicit commands alone, Intent2Drive models intent as a latent cognitive state shaped by language, personal attributes, emotional and physical conditions, behavioral signals, and situational context. To support this formulation, we construct a Holistic Intent Dataset (HID) that provides structured supervision over both explicit and implicit intent cues. Built upon HID, our Theory-of-Mind-inspir
arXiv:2607.04573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deceptive patterns are tactics used to manipulate users into performing unintended actions. Today, many of these deceptive patterns are implemented in mobile apps targeting diverse age groups. In this paper, we employ a heuristic-based cognitive walkthrough to explore how deceptive patterns are tailored to three age groups, specifically teens (12-17), adults (18-49), and older adults (50+), across different app categories. By analyzing 30 apps spanning 6 categories, we found that 93% of these apps use the nagging pattern. Furthermore, our findings reveal that entertainment apps contain significantly more deceptive patterns than other app categories, such as music/books. Our data also shows that entertainment apps for older adults use sneaking patterns more frequently than entertainment apps for teens or adults. These findings call for the development of more ethical, age-specific design guidelines to protect users from targeted digital ma
arXiv:2607.04547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People respond to artificial intelligence chatbots (AICs) in highly variable ways. In this paper, we adapt Bronfenbrenner's theory into a heuristic framework for understanding this variation. The framework places the human user at the center while also placing the AI there and reconceptualizing the proximal processes as the repeated, reciprocal, and coadaptive interactions between the user and a personalized AIC. The surrounding systems identify the contextual factors that shape how the user experiences, interprets, responds to, and is changed by these interactions. Because stateful AICs learn from accumulated exchanges with their users and have memory, users are responding not only to an AIC but also to a version of the AIC that their own prior interactions have helped create. This extension preserves Bronfenbrenner's emphasis on proximal processes while accounting for the unique dynamics of personalized AICs. The resulting framework pro
arXiv:2607.04501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The ability to automatically infer analytic intent from user interaction histories could enable interactive AI systems to proactively assist users during exploratory data analysis. In this paper, we examine whether provenance logs -- detailed records capturing sequences and timing of user interactions -- can be used to classify user intentions in visual exploration tasks. To investigate this, we record how participants interact with multiple multidimensional data projections across a range of analytic tasks, capturing fine-grained mouse interaction data throughout each session. We find that distinct behavioral signatures emerge across different analytic objectives. For instance, users examining properties of specific clusters exhibit markedly different interaction patterns compared to those searching for outliers. More importantly, we show that embedding contextual information into interaction provenance enables classifiers to predict use
arXiv:2607.03978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-dimensional projections support interactive visual analysis of high-dimensional data embeddings, but their structure often does not align with analyst-defined semantic relationships. Recent LLM-augmented semantic steering methods address this gap by externalizing analyst intent from user-defined groups of seed examples, but they propagate intent through per-item LLM reasoning, causing LLM calls and cost to grow linearly with collection size. We propose a scalable semantic steering method that shifts semantic computation from individual items to user-defined groups. A single LLM call generates structured profiles for all groups, which are embedded and combined with seed centroids to form hybrid semantic prototypes. The method then propagates intent without retraining, using embedding-space soft assignment, abstention, and alignment-scaled updates before reprojection. On a 5K-document LitCovid corpus, our method achieves global alignmen
arXiv:2607.03896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developing conceptual understanding in engineering requires learners to connect spatial reasoning with abstract representations, yet lecture-based instruction often provides limited support for this process. Interactive learning environments, including mixed reality (MR) and tangible tools, may help students revisit difficult concepts through action, feedback, and visible system response. This pilot randomized study compared two post-lecture interventions, an immersive MR application and a tangible Engineering Toolkit, with lecture-only instruction in undergraduate solid mechanics. Twenty-four participants completed a baseline assessment, a common lecture, and a post-instruction knowledge test; participants in the interactive conditions also completed usability and learner-experience measures. Learning outcomes were analyzed using ANCOVA with baseline knowledge as a covariate and were supported by normalized learning gains. Instructional
arXiv:2607.03834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive systems increasingly operate in environments characterized by persistent non-stationarity, where patterns reorganize rather than merely vary. While existing approaches such as online learning, continual learning, and adaptive filtering address performance degradation under changing data distributions, they typically treat drift as noise, error, or distribution shift to be corrected. This paper argues that such framings miss a more fundamental challenge: the loss of organizational coherence over time. We introduce Enactive Drift Regulation (EDR) as a general adaptive principle that treats drift as a regulatory signal indicating breakdowns in coherence between a system's internal organization and its environment. Rather than treating prediction optimization or retraining as sufficient, EDR reframes adaptation as the regulation of structure-maintaining, reorganizing, or transitioning internal dynamics to sustain viable operation und
arXiv:2607.03731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Creating 3D assets for virtual reality requires modeling expertise, which restricts the authorship of immersive experiences. Existing generative AI tools rely on unconstrained, command-driven prompting, lacking the conversational scaffolding needed for users to articulate their intent and validate designs prior to rendering. To address this, we introduce CoGen3D, an agentic human-AI co-design pipeline that proactively guides users through conversational intent elicitation, a concept image confirmation, and image-to-3D generation that directly deploys to immersive scenes. We evaluated this system through a user study (N=120) across six affectively diverse immersive scenes, observing 60 Design group participants who co-created 3D assets for the scenes, and 60 Validation group participants who experienced the scenes with generated assets. Our findings show that co-designed assets are associated with higher scene engagement and shifted affect
arXiv:2607.03720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI is increasingly used for everyday health guidance, yet its clinical appropriateness in chronic disease contexts remains poorly understood. This paper presents a two-part mixed-methods study on \revise{Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM)}, examining how patients and physicians assess AI-generated health information. \revise{Study~1} analyzes 784 \revise{participant reported} patient queries to characterize seven informational need categories and \revise{develops a structured five dimensional physician rating rubric informed by patient query categories and clinician priorities} (\textit{Accuracy, Safety, Clarity, Integrity, Action Orientation}). \revise{Study~2} engages seven physicians scoring responses from four AI models and discussing evaluative reasoning through in-depth interviews. Models perform well on factual explanation and lifestyle guidance but consistently underperform on medication reasoning and emotional support. Tw
arXiv:2607.03445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visualizations can help audiences understand the scale of tragedies, such as the consequences of natural disasters, war, genocide, and pandemics. In these cases, a visualization designer's default behavior may be to focus on communicating quantitative information: numbers, statistics, and trends. However, this may not reflect higher-level affective objectives to inspire their audience to care about an issue, empathize with others, or take action to help those in need. Worse, standard visualizations may conflict with these goals, as statistics can numb emotions and reduce prosocial feelings toward people in need. Designers have developed strategies to increase affective responses through data visualizations, such as blending data narratives and personal narratives about individuals. In this paper, we explore three design strategies for communicating a humanitarian crisis: data-driven, human-driven, or mixed narratives. We conducted an empi
arXiv:2607.03292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly adopted into everyday life, with most investment and development concentrated in the U.S. In response to rapid AI integration and scant federal guidelines, U.S. states have formed AI committees charged with studying AI-related societal trade-offs. We analyzed the 18 existing state-level AI committee reports to understand how policymakers discuss AI-related benefits and risks. We then compared the risks surfaced by policymakers to an established taxonomy of AI risks aggregated from literature and examined how policymakers' concerns align, or misalign, from those of HCI scholars. These insights provide important mileposts for shaping currently ongoing policy initiatives and future research. Our findings reveal important gaps: while committees invoke responsible AI, their framings often omit broader socio-technical concerns emphasized in HCI. We discuss opportunities for HCI to suppo
arXiv:2606.06253v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI raises short-term productivity by completing tasks that learners would otherwise practice on their own. Whether this exchange erodes frontier skill depends on the mode of use: substitute-users let AI stand in for deliberate practice and fail to develop skill, while complement-users use it to accelerate skill development. For institutions that train and certify talent, the design question is not whether to allow AI but how to govern the mode of its use. We ask whether AI-prohibited evaluation gates can separate the two modes. In elite competitive programming, the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) and the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) prohibit AI under in-person proctoring, with qualification-round entry, whereas Codeforces (CF) practice is unproctored and open to all. From CF submission histories we build an AI-prompt signature, more first-attempt acceptances, fewer attempts, fewer de