pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Distinguishing Predictive and Generative AI in Regulation
Authors: Jennifer Wang, Andrew Selbst, Solon Barocas, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Date: 2025-06-19 00:00:00

Over the past decade, policymakers have developed a set of regulatory tools to ensure AI development aligns with key societal goals. Many of these tools were initially developed in response to concerns with predictive AI and therefore encode certain assumptions about the nature of AI systems and the utility of certain regulatory approaches. With the advent of generative AI, however, some of these assumptions no longer hold, even as policymakers attempt to maintain a single regulatory target that covers both types of AI. In this paper, we identify four distinct aspects of generative AI that call for meaningfully different policy responses. These are the generality and adaptability of generative AI that make it a poor regulatory target, the difficulty of designing effective evaluations, new legal concerns that change the ecosystem of stakeholders and sources of expertise, and the distributed structure of the generative AI value chain. In light of these distinctions, policymakers will need to evaluate where the past decade of policy work remains relevant and where new policies, designed to address the unique risks posed by generative AI, are necessary. We outline three recommendations for policymakers to more effectively identify regulatory targets and leverage constraints across the broader ecosystem to govern generative AI.
The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI
Authors: Barbara Oakley, Michael Johnston, Ken-Zen Chen, Eulho Jung, Terrence J. Sejnowski
Date: 2025-05-03 00:00:00

In the age of generative AI and ubiquitous digital tools, human cognition faces a structural paradox: as external aids become more capable, internal memory systems risk atrophy. Drawing on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, this paper examines how heavy reliance on AI systems and discovery-based pedagogies may impair the consolidation of declarative and procedural memory -- systems essential for expertise, critical thinking, and long-term retention. We review how tools like ChatGPT and calculators can short-circuit the retrieval, error correction, and schema-building processes necessary for robust neural encoding. Notably, we highlight striking parallels between deep learning phenomena such as "grokking" and the neuroscience of overlearning and intuition. Empirical studies are discussed showing how premature reliance on AI during learning inhibits proceduralization and intuitive mastery. We argue that effective human-AI interaction depends on strong internal models -- biological "schemata" and neural manifolds -- that enable users to evaluate, refine, and guide AI output. The paper concludes with policy implications for education and workforce training in the age of large language models.
Unpacking Generative AI in Education: Computational Modeling of Teacher and Student Perspectives in Social Media Discourse
Authors: Paulina DeVito, Akhil Vallala, Sean McMahon, Yaroslav Hinda, Benjamin Thaw, Hanqi Zhuang, Hari Kalva
Date: 2025-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Generative AI (GAI) technologies are quickly reshaping the educational landscape. As adoption accelerates, understanding how students and educators perceive these tools is essential. This study presents one of the most comprehensive analyses to date of stakeholder discourse dynamics on GAI in education using social media data. Our dataset includes 1,199 Reddit posts and 13,959 corresponding top-level comments. We apply sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and author classification. To support this, we propose and validate a modular framework that leverages prompt-based large language models (LLMs) for analysis of online social discourse, and we evaluate this framework against classical natural language processing (NLP) models. Our GPT-4o pipeline consistently outperforms prior approaches across all tasks. For example, it achieved 90.6% accuracy in sentiment analysis against gold-standard human annotations. Topic extraction uncovered 12 latent topics in the public discourse with varying sentiment and author distributions. Teachers and students convey optimism about GAI's potential for personalized learning and productivity in higher education. However, key differences emerged: students often voice distress over false accusations of cheating by AI detectors, while teachers generally express concern about job security, academic integrity, and institutional pressures to adopt GAI tools. These contrasting perspectives highlight the tension between innovation and oversight in GAI-enabled learning environments. Our findings suggest a need for clearer institutional policies, more transparent GAI integration practices, and support mechanisms for both educators and students. More broadly, this study demonstrates the potential of LLM-based frameworks for modeling stakeholder discourse within online communities.
TrajSceneLLM: A Multimodal Perspective on Semantic GPS Trajectory Analysis
Authors: Chunhou Ji, Qiumeng Li
Date: 2025-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Temporal Sequences

GPS trajectory data reveals valuable patterns of human mobility and urban dynamics, supporting a variety of spatial applications. However, traditional methods often struggle to extract deep semantic representations and incorporate contextual map information. We propose TrajSceneLLM, a multimodal perspective for enhancing semantic understanding of GPS trajectories. The framework integrates visualized map images (encoding spatial context) and textual descriptions generated through LLM reasoning (capturing temporal sequences and movement dynamics). Separate embeddings are generated for each modality and then concatenated to produce trajectory scene embeddings with rich semantic content which are further paired with a simple MLP classifier. We validate the proposed framework on Travel Mode Identification (TMI), a critical task for analyzing travel choices and understanding mobility behavior. Our experiments show that these embeddings achieve significant performance improvement, highlighting the advantage of our LLM-driven method in capturing deep spatio-temporal dependencies and reducing reliance on handcrafted features. This semantic enhancement promises significant potential for diverse downstream applications and future research in geospatial artificial intelligence. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/februarysea/TrajSceneLLM.
PhantomHunter: Detecting Unseen Privately-Tuned LLM-Generated Text via Family-Aware Learning
Authors: Yuhui Shi, Yehan Yang, Qiang Sheng, Hao Mi, Beizhe Hu, Chaoxi Xu, Juan Cao
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: LLM-generated Text Detection, Misinformation, Text Detection

With the popularity of large language models (LLMs), undesirable societal problems like misinformation production and academic misconduct have been more severe, making LLM-generated text detection now of unprecedented importance. Although existing methods have made remarkable progress, a new challenge posed by text from privately tuned LLMs remains underexplored. Users could easily possess private LLMs by fine-tuning an open-source one with private corpora, resulting in a significant performance drop of existing detectors in practice. To address this issue, we propose PhantomHunter, an LLM-generated text detector specialized for detecting text from unseen, privately-tuned LLMs. Its family-aware learning framework captures family-level traits shared across the base models and their derivatives, instead of memorizing individual characteristics. Experiments on data from LLaMA, Gemma, and Mistral families show its superiority over 7 baselines and 3 industrial services, with F1 scores of over 96%.
Minding the Politeness Gap in Cross-cultural Communication
Authors: Yuka Machino, Matthias Hofer, Max Siegel, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Robert D. Hawkins
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00

Misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication often arise from subtle differences in interpretation, but it is unclear whether these differences arise from the literal meanings assigned to words or from more general pragmatic factors such as norms around politeness and brevity. In this paper, we report three experiments examining how speakers of British and American English interpret intensifiers like "quite" and "very." To better understand these cross-cultural differences, we developed a computational cognitive model where listeners recursively reason about speakers who balance informativity, politeness, and utterance cost. Our model comparisons suggested that cross-cultural differences in intensifier interpretation stem from a combination of (1) different literal meanings, (2) different weights on utterance cost. These findings challenge accounts based purely on semantic variation or politeness norms, demonstrating that cross-cultural differences in interpretation emerge from an intricate interplay between the two.
MAARTA:Multi-Agentic Adaptive Radiology Teaching Assistant
Authors: Akash Awasthi, Brandon V. Chang, Anh M. Vu, Ngan Le, Rishi Agrawal, Zhigang Deng, Carol Wu, Hien Van Nguyen
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Radiology students often struggle to develop perceptual expertise due to limited expert mentorship time, leading to errors in visual search and diagnostic interpretation. These perceptual errors, such as missed fixations, short dwell times, or misinterpretations, are not adequately addressed by current AI systems, which focus on diagnostic accuracy but fail to explain how and why errors occur. To address this gap, we introduce MAARTA (Multi-Agentic Adaptive Radiology Teaching Assistant), a multi-agent framework that analyzes gaze patterns and radiology reports to provide personalized feedback. Unlike single-agent models, MAARTA dynamically selects agents based on error complexity, enabling adaptive and efficient reasoning. By comparing expert and student gaze behavior through structured graphs, the system identifies missed findings and assigns Perceptual Error Teacher agents to analyze discrepancies. MAARTA then uses step-by-step prompting to help students understand their errors and improve diagnostic reasoning, advancing AI-driven radiology education.
Using Machine Learning in Analyzing Air Quality Discrepancies of Environmental Impact
Authors: Shuangbao Paul Wang, Lucas Yang, Rahouane Chouchane, Jin Guo, Michael Bailey
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00

In this study, we apply machine learning and software engineering in analyzing air pollution levels in City of Baltimore. The data model was fed with three primary data sources: 1) a biased method of estimating insurance risk used by homeowners loan corporation, 2) demographics of Baltimore residents, and 3) census data estimate of NO2 and PM2.5 concentrations. The dataset covers 650,643 Baltimore residents in 44.7 million residents in 202 major cities in US. The results show that air pollution levels have a clear association with the biased insurance estimating method. Great disparities present in NO2 level between more desirable and low income blocks. Similar disparities exist in air pollution level between residents' ethnicity. As Baltimore population consists of a greater proportion of people of color, the finding reveals how decades old policies has continued to discriminate and affect quality of life of Baltimore citizens today.
Performative Validity of Recourse Explanations
Authors: Gunnar König, Hidde Fokkema, Timo Freiesleben, Celestine Mendler-Dünner, Ulrike Von Luxburg
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, valid

When applicants get rejected by an algorithmic decision system, recourse explanations provide actionable suggestions for how to change their input features to get a positive evaluation. A crucial yet overlooked phenomenon is that recourse explanations are performative: When many applicants act according to their recommendations, their collective behavior may change statistical regularities in the data and, once the model is refitted, also the decision boundary. Consequently, the recourse algorithm may render its own recommendations invalid, such that applicants who make the effort of implementing their recommendations may be rejected again when they reapply. In this work, we formally characterize the conditions under which recourse explanations remain valid under performativity. A key finding is that recourse actions may become invalid if they are influenced by or if they intervene on non-causal variables. Based on our analysis, we caution against the use of standard counterfactual explanations and causal recourse methods, and instead advocate for recourse methods that recommend actions exclusively on causal variables.
Transit for All: Mapping Equitable Bike2Subway Connection using Region Representation Learning
Authors: Min Namgung, Janghyeon Lee, Fangyi Ding, Yao-Yi Chiang
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Representation Learning

Ensuring equitable public transit access remains challenging, particularly in densely populated cities like New York City (NYC), where low-income and minority communities often face limited transit accessibility. Bike-sharing systems (BSS) can bridge these equity gaps by providing affordable first- and last-mile connections. However, strategically expanding BSS into underserved neighborhoods is difficult due to uncertain bike-sharing demand at newly planned ("cold-start") station locations and limitations in traditional accessibility metrics that may overlook realistic bike usage potential. We introduce Transit for All (TFA), a spatial computing framework designed to guide the equitable expansion of BSS through three components: (1) spatially-informed bike-sharing demand prediction at cold-start stations using region representation learning that integrates multimodal geospatial data, (2) comprehensive transit accessibility assessment leveraging our novel weighted Public Transport Accessibility Level (wPTAL) by combining predicted bike-sharing demand with conventional transit accessibility metrics, and (3) strategic recommendations for new bike station placements that consider potential ridership and equity enhancement. Using NYC as a case study, we identify transit accessibility gaps that disproportionately impact low-income and minority communities in historically underserved neighborhoods. Our results show that strategically placing new stations guided by wPTAL notably reduces disparities in transit access related to economic and demographic factors. From our study, we demonstrate that TFA provides practical guidance for urban planners to promote equitable transit and enhance the quality of life in underserved urban communities.
Mapping Caregiver Needs to AI Chatbot Design: Strengths and Gaps in Mental Health Support for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers
Authors: Jiayue Melissa Shi, Dong Whi Yoo, Keran Wang, Violeta J. Rodriguez, Ravi Karkar, Koustuv Saha
Date: 2025-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Family caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia (AD/ADRD) face significant emotional and logistical challenges that place them at heightened risk for stress, anxiety, and depression. Although recent advances in generative AI -- particularly large language models (LLMs) -- offer new opportunities to support mental health, little is known about how caregivers perceive and engage with such technologies. To address this gap, we developed Carey, a GPT-4o-based chatbot designed to provide informational and emotional support to AD/ADRD caregivers. Using Carey as a technology probe, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 family caregivers following scenario-driven interactions grounded in common caregiving stressors. Through inductive coding and reflexive thematic analysis, we surface a systemic understanding of caregiver needs and expectations across six themes -- on-demand information access, emotional support, safe space for disclosure, crisis management, personalization, and data privacy. For each of these themes, we also identified the nuanced tensions in the caregivers' desires and concerns. We present a mapping of caregiver needs, AI chatbot's strengths, gaps, and design recommendations. Our findings offer theoretical and practical insights to inform the design of proactive, trustworthy, and caregiver-centered AI systems that better support the evolving mental health needs of AD/ADRD caregivers.
Hypothesis Testing for Quantifying LLM-Human Misalignment in Multiple Choice Settings
Authors: Harbin Hong, Sebastian Caldas, Liu Leqi
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Marketing, Multiple-choice

As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly appear in social science research (e.g., economics and marketing), it becomes crucial to assess how well these models replicate human behavior. In this work, using hypothesis testing, we present a quantitative framework to assess the misalignment between LLM-simulated and actual human behaviors in multiple-choice survey settings. This framework allows us to determine in a principled way whether a specific language model can effectively simulate human opinions, decision-making, and general behaviors represented through multiple-choice options. We applied this framework to a popular language model for simulating people's opinions in various public surveys and found that this model is ill-suited for simulating the tested sub-populations (e.g., across different races, ages, and incomes) for contentious questions. This raises questions about the alignment of this language model with the tested populations, highlighting the need for new practices in using LLMs for social science studies beyond naive simulations of human subjects.
Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion
Authors: William MacAskill, Fin Moorhouse
Date: 2025-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

AI that can accelerate research could drive a century of technological progress over just a few years. During such a period, new technological or political developments will raise consequential and hard-to-reverse decisions, in rapid succession. We call these developments grand challenges. These challenges include new weapons of mass destruction, AI-enabled autocracies, races to grab offworld resources, and digital beings worthy of moral consideration, as well as opportunities to dramatically improve quality of life and collective decision-making. We argue that these challenges cannot always be delegated to future AI systems, and suggest things we can do today to meaningfully improve our prospects. AGI preparedness is therefore not just about ensuring that advanced AI systems are aligned: we should be preparing, now, for the disorienting range of developments an intelligence explosion would bring.
Generating Reliable Adverse event Profiles for Health through Automated Integrated Data (GRAPH-AID): A Semi-Automated Ontology Building Approach
Authors: Srikar Reddy Gadusu, Larry Callahan, Samir Lababidi, Arunasri Nishtala, Sophia Healey, Hande McGinty
Date: 2025-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

As data and knowledge expand rapidly, adopting systematic methodologies for ontology generation has become crucial. With the daily increases in data volumes and frequent content changes, the demand for databases to store and retrieve information for the creation of knowledge graphs has become increasingly urgent. The previously established Knowledge Acquisition and Representation Methodology (KNARM) outlines a systematic approach to address these challenges and create knowledge graphs. However, following this methodology highlights the existing challenge of seamlessly integrating Neo4j databases with the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Previous attempts to integrate data from Neo4j into an ontology have been discussed, but these approaches often require an understanding of description logics (DL) syntax, which may not be familiar to many users. Thus, a more accessible method is necessary to bridge this gap. This paper presents a user-friendly approach that utilizes Python and its rdflib library to support ontology development. We showcase our novel approach through a Neo4j database we created by integrating data from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database. Using this dataset, we developed a Python script that automatically generates the required classes and their axioms, facilitating a smoother integration process. This approach offers a practical solution to the challenges of ontology generation in the context of rapidly growing adverse drug event datasets, supporting improved drug safety monitoring and public health decision-making.
Higher-Order Graph Databases
Authors: Maciej Besta, Shriram Chandran, Jakub Cudak, Patrick Iff, Marcin Copik, Robert Gerstenberger, Tomasz Szydlo, Jürgen Müller, Torsten Hoefler
Date: 2025-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Subgraph Counting

Recent advances in graph databases (GDBs) have been driving interest in large-scale analytics, yet current systems fail to support higher-order (HO) interactions beyond first-order (one-hop) relations, which are crucial for tasks such as subgraph counting, polyadic modeling, and HO graph learning. We address this by introducing a new class of systems, higher-order graph databases (HO-GDBs) that use lifting and lowering paradigms to seamlessly extend traditional GDBs with HO. We provide a theoretical analysis of OLTP and OLAP queries, ensuring correctness, scalability, and ACID compliance. We implement a lightweight, modular, and parallelizable HO-GDB prototype that offers native support for hypergraphs, node-tuples, subgraphs, and other HO structures under a unified API. The prototype scales to large HO OLTP & OLAP workloads and shows how HO improves analytical tasks, for example enhancing accuracy of graph neural networks within a GDB by 44%. Our work ensures low latency and high query throughput, and generalizes both ACID-compliant and eventually consistent systems.
LIGHTHOUSE: Fast and precise distance to shoreline calculations from anywhere on earth
Authors: Patrick Beukema, Henry Herzog, Yawen Zhang, Hunter Pitelka, Favyen Bastani
Date: 2025-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

We introduce a new dataset and algorithm for fast and efficient coastal distance calculations from Anywhere on Earth (AoE). Existing global coastal datasets are only available at coarse resolution (e.g. 1-4 km) which limits their utility. Publicly available satellite imagery combined with computer vision enable much higher precision. We provide a global coastline dataset at 10 meter resolution, a 100+ fold improvement in precision over existing data. To handle the computational challenge of querying at such an increased scale, we introduce a new library: Layered Iterative Geospatial Hierarchical Terrain-Oriented Unified Search Engine (Lighthouse). Lighthouse is both exceptionally fast and resource-efficient, requiring only 1 CPU and 2 GB of RAM to achieve millisecond online inference, making it well suited for real-time applications in resource-constrained environments.