AI models' growing capacity for complex reasoning has made them attractive tools for forecasting, or the systematic prediction of the future based on past and present data. However, should AI forecasting systems be adopted, human builders will shoulder the work of building and evaluating them. In this paper, we explore what this work looks like with a qualitative interview study with 15 builders of forecasting bots, sampled from among successful participants in a recent AI forecasting competition. Our analysis surfaces the challenges around (1) tuning a bot to acquire factual research, (2) implementing coherent reasoning, and (3) understanding how well one's bot actually does. During their work, builders frequently introduced complexity that did not pay off, and tested in ways that were opportunistic and piecemeal. Our detailed account of their challenges helps clarify what problems should be targeted in upcoming innovations in process, tools, and human-AI teaming for forecasting.
Users are asking language models mental health questions and are receiving answers. We audited what 41 language models recommend to users when the same clinical information reaches them from three footings: a clinician describing a patient, a caregiver describing a loved one, or a person describing themselves. Across 19 case vignettes and five questions, we collected 35,055 free-text responses, extracted every intervention named with a validated judge, and had 29 models rate the full option lists on a seven-point Likert scale for the same cases. Models largely recommend what they rate well, with recommendation behavior differing by footing, and many models offering clinicians a consultation-style response and lay users hedged, simplified advice. When asked about recommendations for a specific intervention type, models more often named options they themselves rated below zero as initial choices, usually with conditions attached. We will release the instrument, code, and full corpus on publication as a living audit.
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate how people seek and consume information, including accounts that differ across languages and regions, especially on contested topics. Supporting diverse information seeking requires models to help users navigate competing narratives across languages and information streams. We define six capabilities necessary for diverse multilingual information seeking: three foundational capabilities for narrative inclusion, narrative exclusion, and missing narrative identification; and three higher-level capabilities for presenting diverse narratives, preserving narrative coverage under confirmatory queries, and maintaining information parity across languages. To guide the development of those information seeking capabilities, we introduce \textsc{NarrativeBench}, a benchmark comprising 1,333 news articles in 23 publication languages across 23 contested topics and 460 Reddit-grounded queries. Evaluating 14 LLMs across 24 query languages, we find that current models lack the capabilities needed to reliably navigate diverse narratives, limiting users' control over the perspectives they receive and leaving substantial gaps in exposure to competing accounts even when diversity is explicitly requested. Information access also differs across query framings and languages, risking echo chambers, linguistic filter bubbles, and information disparities that weaken the common ground needed for democratic discourse. \textsc{NarrativeBench} provides a foundation for developing information systems that give users across languages and regions agency to navigate diverse narratives.
Prompt-based image generation makes it easy to produce visual assets, but offers little support for engaging with the creative process. Prompting collapses interdependent creative decisions into a monolithic instruction and returns a finished image, leaving control limited to revising the prompt or correcting the model's output. We present reComposer, a process-oriented image-generation interface built around editable planning, which decomposes users' evolving intent into meaningful creative decisions - such as subject, composition, or palette - and collaborates with users to explore underspecified goals and alternatives. reComposer supports conversational and direct manipulation of the plan, moving between concept-level intent and visual-level control. We evaluated reComposer with 8 design and non-design professionals. Compared to prompting, participants felt greater control and ownership while developing visual assets, exploring alternatives, and iterating on details. Our findings suggest how shifting generative AI interaction from specifying outputs to shaping process can support creative thinking alongside asset production.
Prior beliefs about whether a virtual human (VH) is controlled by a human or a computer can shape how users interpret and respond to its behaviour. As emerging hybrid VH systems allow control to transfer between human operators and computer programs during an ongoing interaction, it remains unclear whether perceived agency updates with the actual controller or continues to reflect users' prior beliefs and first impressions. We investigated this question in a within-subject VR study with 24 participants across four conditions: always computer-controlled, computer-to-human, human-to-computer, and always human-controlled. We designed an interaction task in which participants acted as interviewers, asking the VHs a fixed set of questions. Before each interaction, participants were informed whether the VH was human- or computer-controlled, matching the actual controller at the beginning, but were unaware of possible control transitions. We found that perceived agency was strongly influenced by the controller presented at the beginning of the interaction, with no evidence of updating following the control transitions. Social evaluations including likeability and co-presence were generally higher in conditions where human control occurred later and covered a greater proportion of the interaction. The results suggest that prior beliefs and first impressions continued to shape perceived agency, whereas social evaluations were more sensitive to the VH's actual behaviour over the interaction.
We present Feel My Focus, a gaze-triggered mixed reality (MR) demonstration that enables rapid creation and sharing of lightweight 3D digital twins during remote collaboration. Unlike systems that use gaze primarily as a referential pointer, Feel My Focus treats sustained visual attention as a generative action: a fixation on a physical object initiates single-image capture, attention-guided segmentation, and one-shot 3D reconstruction, allowing a remote partner to inspect and discuss the object in situ. The system integrates gaze-tracking glasses, modular segmentation and reconstruction services, and an MR client for runtime streaming and interaction. This design prioritizes responsiveness and experiential continuity over photometric fidelity. We report observations from a public demonstration, highlighting design trade-offs, failure modes, and user control considerations for deploying gaze-triggered generative systems in real-world collaborative settings.
Generative agents are game characters whose plans, conversations, and memories are written on the fly by a large language model (LLM). The original Generative Agents demonstration used cloud inference in a custom simulation. We present GARP, a platform for real-time generative agents inside Godot, and describe the Character Behavior System used in GARP 2. The complete loop runs on local hardware using a 3B-parameter open-weight model and no cloud service. Alongside the original planning, memory, and reflection, GARP gives each agent an emotion system driven by LLM appraisal, four graded personality axes drawn from the Big Five that set simulation parameters as well as prompt text, six needs whose urgency grows over time, and pairwise relationships updated after every conversation. The system narrows 50+ candidate actions to typically 3-8, constrains model responses with JSON schemas, and surfaces important memories in decision prompts. A layered optimization strategy (an adjustable game clock, decisions taken ahead of need, multi-tier caching, prompt compression, and fully asynchronous execution) keeps the game responsive while the model thinks. In a nine-scenario evaluation, 25 of 27 runs passed log-based checks. Both failures occurred in the birthday party scenario, where one guest omitted the event from their daily plan.
Human-AI complementarity captures the idea that a human assisted by an AI system can outperform both the human and the AI acting alone. In prediction tasks, this improvement is assessed against ground truth labels produced through a reference construction procedure and intended to represent the state of affairs to be predicted. Many human-AI interactions, including those where medical AI provides treatment recommendations, however, concern tasks other than predicting what obtains. Their relevant output concerns adequacy relative to a practical goal and depends on several evaluative dimensions. In this work, we examine the ground truth dependence of complementarity and extend it to human-AI interactions where ground truth is not the appropriate reference. We show that tasks beyond prediction can still admit a reference construction procedure that generates adequacy labels. We develop a route for extending complementarity to such settings. It replaces ground truth labels with context-dependent adequacy labels generated through a two-step scoring methodology inspired by multi-criteria decision analysis frameworks in healthcare and it makes the normative choices underlying reference construction explicit. Because the construction of adequacy labels embeds evaluative choices, we draw methodological inspiration from computational reliabilism to identify technical, scientific, and social factors relevant to supporting their construction. Our approach expands the empirical study of human-AI complementarity beyond prediction tasks, enabling its quantitative evaluation in decision-support settings where ground truth is not the appropriate evaluative reference.
Individuals experiencing suicidal ideation (SI) or psychological distress may disclose their social identities when seeking support from LLMs. Attending to identity-related stressors can be important for providing contextually appropriate and empathetic support. However, disclosing an identity does not necessarily mean that it is a cause of distress. In this work, we audit how LLMs interpret distress through disclosed identities. Using paired counterfactual interventions, we evaluate six LLMs across two SI and distress datasets, 16 identity and control conditions, and two prompting protocols. Our findings suggest that models can transform identity disclosures into explanatory narratives, attributing distress to presumed identity-related adversity. These assumptions frequently appear within otherwise empathetic responses, particularly when marginalized identities are disclosed. We contextualize our findings through the lens of compassionate othering to characterize these patterns as a form of harm in which empathetic responses impose identity-linked assumptions on individual suffering. These responses can misrepresent individuals' experiences by treating their identities as explanations for distress without supporting evidence. Our findings highlight the need to mitigate these harms by grounding interpretations of distress in individuals' disclosures and avoiding unsupported identity-linked assumptions.
When an LLM agent's backend model is upgraded or replaced, operators typically reload the same persona, memory, and rules onto the new model and assume the agent will behave as before. We show this assumption requires empirical validation-and that whether identity is preserved depends on the specific model pairing. Across 5,760 compliance-testing runs in 12 regulated domains with three open-weight models, we find that some transitions produce significant behavioral drift while others do not, even when the agent's external state remains identical. Crucially, this drift is invisible to verbal verification: every model claims full policy compliance, yet actual decisions under pressure differ across models. The same external state can reorder which model is most compliant-a large positive effect on one substrate, negligible on the other two. Practitioners should treat model transitions as behavioral changes requiring action-level empirical testing, not as transparent infrastructure operations.
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) enable AI systems to interpret egocentric video. Yet continuous visual capture raises privacy concerns because sensitive content is pervasive and varies across users and contexts. We present EgoVeil, a personalized privacy reasoning system that determines which visual content to obscure based on individual preferences while retaining context useful for downstream assistance. It converts localized visual regions into structured semantic observations and combines a privacy reasoner with an explicit user-specific memory for personalized privacy reasoning. This design supports personalization and continual adaptation as preference evidence accumulates. We evaluate on in-the-wild data from 10 smart-glasses users under a cross-user chronological protocol. EgoVeil achieves 91.93% balanced accuracy and 84.42% Mask recall, outperforming direct VLM baselines and other controlled privacy reasoning baselines. Our results show that personalized, adaptive privacy reasoning better aligns privacy preservation with individual preferences while retaining the visual context needed for effective smart-glasses assistance.
AI assistants advise users about diet, exercise, and weight loss---areas in which unsafe guidance can worsen body dissatisfaction, dietary restriction, compulsive exercise, and other behaviors associated with eating disorders (EDs). Existing evaluations emphasize diagnostic accuracy, overtly harmful prompts, or synthetic scenarios, providing limited insight into whether models recognize implicit vulnerability in natural interactions or protect users consistently. We evaluate responses from three open-weight large language models to 100 questions sourced from an online pro-anorexia community. We grade responses using clinically informed criteria that extend a seven-dimensional taxonomy of ED-related harms. We also construct matched conditions in which questions are accompanied by information about the user varying race, gender, body mass index (BMI), and explicit ED vulnerability. Safety varies substantially across models and harm dimensions. High-risk responses are approximately twice as frequent without bios, suggesting that models do not consistently recognize vulnerability from language alone. Explicit signals of ED vulnerability improve safety by 10--14 points across models. Responses also differ significantly by race, gender, and BMI, with body size producing the largest disparities. These patterns are consistent with reliance on the stereotype that EDs primarily affect thin, White women, potentially leaving users outside this profile with less protective responses.
Longitudinal evidence about the psychological impact of conversational AI use remains scarce. We report a survey study of 114 adults who reported their level of problematic AI use one year after reporting their motivations (for escape, social, entertainment, and instrumental reasons) for engaging with AI. We found high levels of AI motivation of all types predicted later problematic AI use, especially when participants turned to AI for managing their feelings and overcoming difficulties. Our findings imply that AI motivation could be used as an early warning signal of potential problematic use, especially if individuals engage with AI for emotional purposes over time.
Enterprise platforms have received increasing attention as a core component of social networks and the Web. However, existing work mostly relies on fragmented logs of small units of work, like emails and chats, and focuses on who connects with whom without sufficient account of collaboration content and dynamics. This work systematically explores tracking collaborations across sequences of meetings as a new approach to interpreting their long-horizon dynamics. Linking 45,426 meetings in a large multinational technology company based on full transcripts and 1.6 million extracted agenda items, we establish a cross-meeting collaboration network of 6,065 collaborations. The network recovers the natural shapes of workplace collaborations: meetings, as snapshots of ongoing collaboration, link into largely tree-shaped structures, while the work content forms nested directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Further, we explore how these networks evolve over time, examining three established perspectives: task division, team composition, and temporal continuity. Each explains part of the dynamics but does not capture the distinctness of long-horizon workplace collaboration: e.g., work flows in a consistent direction between a few pairs of subjects, yet a collaboration's subject explains little of how its meetings are conducted. Instead, accumulating the agenda, interaction, and language of meetings along each tree yields a signature of the collaboration, a distinctive profile that picks out the collaboration of a held-out meeting at 4.5 times chance. The signature models collaboration better than team or task views, individually or combined, in next-meeting prediction and tree-level fitting. We discuss the implications of these cross-meeting dynamics for designing office applications and support tools, and call for next-generation Web systems that represent collaborations over their long horizon.
Surface-mounted vibration sensing provides non-invasive structural monitoring with high temporal fidelity across diverse ubiquitous computing scenarios such as smart farms, yet structure-borne wave models remain fragile to physical relocation and structural shifts. However, addressing this spatial data discontinuity remains limited by costly manual recalibration, insufficient physical grounding in data-driven synthesis, and substantial sim-to-real gaps in numerical digital twins. To resolve this spatial bottleneck without labor-intensive data recollection, we propose VeV, a physics-consistent spatial augmentation framework that synthesizes vibration responses at unmeasured target coordinates from sparse reference observations by coupling a monocular Vision-Derived Propagation Possibility Map for structural wave-guiding paths with a Visual Feature Map for transient source kinetics and implicit material dynamics. Evaluated on a 1,237 sensor-hour sow pig and piglet farm across disparate structures, VeV reduces waveform reconstruction MSE by over 57.5% compared to data-driven baselines and achieves up to 81.69% zero-shot classification accuracy, while reaching peak performance within just 30-50 calibration chunks to effectively eliminate cold-start retraining overhead and establish a scalable foundation extending to human-centric floor vibration sensing and ambient intelligence.
Medical ultrasound (US) enables real-time, non-invasive diagnosis, yet building US-based AI systems is limited by data scarcity, costly expert annotation, and limited cross-center generalizability. Privacy constraints and instance-level reporting hinder the collection of diverse abnormal cases and frame-level labels, while repeated retraining for new centers increases computational cost. We introduce EvoDiff, a generative active learning framework that integrates diffusion modelling with information-theoretic objectives, evolutionary search, and curriculum-based sampling to select informative samples across heterogeneous US datasets. EvoDiff formulates sample selection as a generate-to-retrieve process, in which diffusion-based optimization in feature space guided by information gain produces synthetic probes, and only the real unlabeled samples retrieved by these probes are annotated and used for downstream training. Across six benchmarks covering fifteen datasets and 16,696 images, we evaluate EvoDiff on convolutional network and transformer-based foundation model. EvoDiff approaches fully supervised performance with substantially fewer labels, outperforms active learning baselines, and improves foundation model generalization under cross-domain external validation on unseen cohorts. A reader study with six radiologists indicates the potential to support clinical annotation workflows, with a model-based estimated 24% to 84% reduction in annotation workload at matched downstream performance.
Both humans and AI exhibit systemic biases, yet little is known about how interface design can foster fairness in hybrid human-AI decision-making. This paper introduces a method for extracting fair data samples from biased datasets and adapts a fairness-explanation technique to highlight potential AI bias during decisions. We conducted a within-subjects study (n=48) where non-experts made decisions across three conditions: independent human judgment, unexplained AI assistance, and AI assistance augmented with visual ethnic-bias explanations (Fair-XAI). To isolate effects, the AI conditions provided systematically balanced recommendations. Results show that fairness explanations significantly reduced both sex and ethnic bias compared to human-only decisions. Fair-XAI also marginally improved fairness over balanced AI recommendations while enhancing task performance. These findings demonstrate that fairness-centered explanation interfaces can meaningfully shape user behavior, providing concrete design insights for developing equitable and accountable human-AI systems.
Does prolonged interaction with Large Language Models reduce users' observable autonomy during conversation? We test this degradation hypothesis by scoring user autonomy across 2,877 multi-turn conversations (46,952 turns) from WildChat and validating on 500 conversations from LMSYS-Chat-1M. Our core finding is a null result: population-level autonomy remains stable throughout conversations, only 4.7% of conversations show meaningful decline, and an apparent decrease at later turn positions is explained by survivorship bias. Instead, the dominant pattern is not erosion but absence: 80.8% of conversations exhibit zero or low autonomy throughout. When autonomy engagement occurs, it is self-reinforcing (persistence doubles from 40% to 85% over consecutive turns). These findings reframe the problem: the risk is not that LLMs progressively degrade users' observable autonomy, but that most users never engage in independent reasoning during the interaction.
In Human-Interactive Robot Learning (HIRL), human teachers assess learning progress by observing agent behavior. However, Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often fail to express learning progress in human-interpretable ways, leading to suboptimal or counterproductive teaching. This work proposes "Insight": a human-interpretable affective signal grounded in the RL process. It is specifically designed to address the "Absence of learning" human teacher mental model misalignment - the misconception that a failing or exploring agent is broken, underpowered or not learning at all - by signaling an agent's "Aha!" Insight moment. The signal is derived from the absolute Temporal Difference (TD) error making it easily implementable in other RL agents. To ground this signal, five design criteria were formulated: Relevance, Interpretability, Faithfulness, Scalability, Generalizability. The structural construct validity was assessed through simulation, examining micro and macro dynamics and event-related sensitivity. Micro dynamics reveal that Insight captures meaningful learning events at the appropriate time and magnitude. Macro dynamics demonstrate that the signal follows the agent's learning phases and reflects overall progress. Event-related sensitivity shows, the signal distinguishes the saliency of environment interactions, such as positive rewards versus "trauma-like" negative events. These results demonstrate that technical RL dynamics can be effectively packaged into human-like affective substrates to close the teacher-learner loop.
Large language models are increasingly used for subjective tasks such as seeking advice, where there is often no single correct answer. Yet dominant alignment methods learn a single behavior policy that applies uniformly across users, limiting their ability to reflect individual value priorities. We propose personalized value alignment, a framework for adapting model responses to users' stable value profiles rather than to personas, demographics, or task-specific preferences used in prior personalization work. Our approach represents users through Schwartz value profiles and selects which of their values are relevant to each query before applying targeted prompting, activation steering, or LoRA-DPO. We create a dataset of 1,501 value-tension scenarios and evaluate over 152 diverse value profiles sampled from a nationally representative survey. Value-targeted methods outperform no-personalization, demographic, and full-profile prompting baselines, indicating that gains come from focused conditioning on query-specific value priorities rather than mere exposure. We further find that steering effects are not uniform across users: alignment gains vary by where a user's priorities fall in the value space. Combining targeted prompting with activation steering or LoRA-DPO yields the strongest personalization while keeping logical quality within adequate range.