Daily Papers

Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior. Recent work documented substantial SR-behavior dissociation in LLMs, but relied on broad personality traits (Big 5) that predict specific behaviors weakly, even in humans. Furthermore, the isolation of conversational sessions combined with weak context matching left open whether LLMs truly lack coherence or whether the conditions needed to detect such coherence were not met. We contrast Big 5 with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which measures intention targeted to a specific behavior and predicts human behavior substantially better than broad traits. We run experiments across four behavioral tasks and 11 frontier LLMs, while also varying session context and identity induction. We find that SR-behavior coherence exists but is selective. 1) Within a shared conversation, the Theory of Planned Behavior reaches human-level coherence; Big 5 does not. 2) Across separate conversations, coherence survives only for behaviors anchored outside the immediate prompt, such as implicit bias shaped by training, and collapses when behavior is strongly primed by context, as with sycophancy. 3) Persona prompting makes self-reports more consistent across conversations, but does not bring behavior into alignment. These findings suggest that coarse personality frameworks, such as Big 5 may not be the best tools for testing deployment behavior. More task- and behavior-specific instruments are needed, and even these must be evaluated across tasks and contexts.

Personality traits have long been studied as predictors of human behavior. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest similar patterns may emerge in artificial systems, with advanced LLMs displaying consistent behavioral tendencies resembling human traits like agreeableness and self-regulation. Understanding these patterns is crucial, yet prior work primarily relied on simplified self-reports and heuristic prompting, with little behavioral validation. In this study, we systematically characterize LLM personality across three dimensions: (1) the dynamic emergence and evolution of trait profiles throughout training stages; (2) the predictive validity of self-reported traits in behavioral tasks; and (3) the impact of targeted interventions, such as persona injection, on both self-reports and behavior. Our findings reveal that instructional alignment (e.g., RLHF, instruction tuning) significantly stabilizes trait expression and strengthens trait correlations in ways that mirror human data. However, these self-reported traits do not reliably predict behavior, and observed associations often diverge from human patterns. While persona injection successfully steers self-reports in the intended direction, it exerts little or inconsistent effect on actual behavior. By distinguishing surface-level trait expression from behavioral consistency, our findings challenge assumptions about LLM personality and underscore the need for deeper evaluation in alignment and interpretability.

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g., thoughts and feelings) that is not accessible to external observers. Can LLMs introspect? We define introspection as acquiring knowledge that is not contained in or derived from training data but instead originates from internal states. Such a capability could enhance model interpretability. Instead of painstakingly analyzing a model's internal workings, we could simply ask the model about its beliefs, world models, and goals. More speculatively, an introspective model might self-report on whether it possesses certain internal states such as subjective feelings or desires and this could inform us about the moral status of these states. Such self-reports would not be entirely dictated by the model's training data. We study introspection by finetuning LLMs to predict properties of their own behavior in hypothetical scenarios. For example, "Given the input P, would your output favor the short- or long-term option?" If a model M1 can introspect, it should outperform a different model M2 in predicting M1's behavior even if M2 is trained on M1's ground-truth behavior. The idea is that M1 has privileged access to its own behavioral tendencies, and this enables it to predict itself better than M2 (even if M2 is generally stronger). In experiments with GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Llama-3 models (each finetuned to predict itself), we find that the model M1 outperforms M2 in predicting itself, providing evidence for introspection. Notably, M1 continues to predict its behavior accurately even after we intentionally modify its ground-truth behavior. However, while we successfully elicit introspection on simple tasks, we are unsuccessful on more complex tasks or those requiring out-of-distribution generalization.

Acute poly-substance intoxication requires rapid, life-saving decisions under substantial uncertainty, as clinicians must rely on incomplete ingestion details and nonspecific symptoms. Effective diagnostic reasoning in this chaotic environment requires fusing unstructured, non-medical narratives (e.g. paramedic scene descriptions and unreliable patient self-reports or known histories), with structured medical data like vital signs. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential for processing such heterogeneous inputs, they struggle in this setting, often underperforming simple baselines that rely solely on patient histories. To address this, we present DeToxR (Decision-support for Toxicology with Reasoning), the first adaptation of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to emergency toxicology. We design a robust data-fusion engine for multi-label prediction across 14 substance classes based on an LLM finetuned with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We optimize the model's reasoning directly using a clinical performance reward. By formulating a multi-label agreement metric as the reward signal, the model is explicitly penalized for missing co-ingested substances and hallucinating absent poisons. Our model significantly outperforms its unadapted base LLM counterpart and supervised baselines. Furthermore, in a clinical validation study, the model indicates a clinical advantage by outperforming an expert toxicologist in identifying the correct poisons (Micro-F1: 0.644 vs. 0.473). These results demonstrate the potential of RL-aligned LLMs to synthesize unstructured pre-clinical narratives and structured medical data for decision support in high-stakes environments.

We examine whether human psychometric questionnaires can serve as reliable tools for characterizing and predicting LLM behavior in everyday user interactions. We analyze eight open-source LLMs by comparing their value and personality profiles derived from two different methods: Likert self-reports on established questionnaires (PVQ-40/21 and BFI-44/10) and generation probabilities over value-laden responses to everyday user queries. The two profiles diverge substantially. Within-construct item consistency, often cited as evidence of stable LLM dispositions, disappears in generation probabilities. We attribute this gap to the fact that explicit lexical cues in established questionnaire items allow models to recognize the target construct and respond in alignment-consistent, socially desirable ways, whereas realistic user queries provide no such cues. In addition, demographic persona prompts shift models' responses to human questionnaires in ways consistent with real human patterns, but no such shifts appear in the generation probabilities of responses to realistic user queries, showing their limited ability to simulate the behaviors of target demographics in real-world user interactions. Overall, our study shows that human psychometric questionnaires are insufficient tools for predicting LLM behavior and suggests generation-based profiling as a more accurate measure.

Language models are increasingly used in Brazil, but most evaluation remains English-centric. This paper presents Alvorada-Bench, a 4,515-question, text-only benchmark drawn from five Brazilian university entrance examinations. Evaluating twenty models under zero-shot, role-playing, and chain-of-thought prompting, producing 270,900 responses with structured self-reports of confidence, perceived difficulty, and Bloom level. The top models exceed 94% accuracy overall, but accuracy declines on Mathematics and on the engineering oriented IME and ITA exams, indicating persistent weaknesses in multi-step reasoning. Confidence is well calibrated and correlates with perceived difficulty, revealing that models can accurately assess their own certainty capabilities. A cost accuracy analysis shows that high accuracy is achievable at under $2 per 1K tokens. On ENEM 2024 the top model (O3) achieved perfect scores in Languages subject questions while even the weakest system (GPT-4.1 Nano) only underperforms humans in Mathematics. Through exams that distill decades of Brazilian educational priorities and assess millions of students yearly, Alvorada-Bench establishes whether language models can navigate the intersection of language, culture, and reasoning that defines academic readiness in Brazil.

How does reinforcement learning shape a language model's internal representations? We present evidence that RL recruits a pre-existing representation of functional welfare: an estimate of how well or badly the system is doing, relative to its goals. We train several language models in a novel, semantically neutral maze environment. We then extract concept vectors for rewarded and punished trajectories, and evaluate those vectors in settings unrelated to the maze environment. The punishment vector behaves like a representation of negative welfare: it promotes failure and impossibility tokens, it aligns with negative emotion concepts, it negatively tracks goal-achievement, and steering with it induces negative self-reports, pathological backtracking, refusal, and uncertainty. The positive reward vector behaves as the mirror image, and the two are nearly antiparallel. These effects are robust when controlling for tile-to-reward mapping, scale, instruct tuning, RL training algorithm, model family, and LoRA versus full-finetuning, and largely persist when we replace RL with supervised fine-tuning. Importantly, the vectors are effective in models before they have undergone maze training. Combined with observations that the effects also appear in pretrain-only models, we therefore argue that this functional welfare axis pre-exists post-training: it is recruited, rather than created, by post-training. While we make no claims about any experience of welfare, the axis offers a demonstration that minimal reward signals can broadly affect model behavior by recruiting pre-existing welfare-like representations, with implications for interpretability, post-training dynamics, and alignment.

Medical vision-language datasets are often limited in size and biased toward negative findings, as clinicians report abnormalities mostly but might omit some positive/neutral findings because they might be considered as irrelevant to the patient's condition. We propose a self-supervised data enrichment method that leverages semantic clustering of report sentences. Then we enrich the findings in the medical reports in the training set by adding positive/neutral observations from different clusters in a self-supervised manner. Our approach yields consistent gains in supervised fine-tuning (5.63%, 3.04%, 7.40%, 5.30%, 7.47% average gains on COMET score, Bert score, Sentence Bleu, CheXbert-F1 and RadGraph-F1 scores respectively). Ablation studies confirm that improvements stem from semantic clustering rather than random augmentation. Furthermore, we introduce a way to incorporate semantic cluster information into the reward design for GRPO training, which leads to further performance gains (2.78%, 3.14%, 12.80% average gains on COMET score, Bert score and Sentence Bleu scores respectively). We share our code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SemEnrich-75CF

This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability, the descendant patterns exponentially drift away from ancestral patterns, even when the automaton is deterministic. While this is far from being the first instance of evolutionary dynamics in a cellular automaton, it is the first to do so by exploiting the power and convenience of Neural Cellular Automata, arguably increasing the space of variations and the opportunity for Open Ended Evolution.

Vision-grounded medical report generation aims to produce clinically accurate descriptions of medical images, anchored in explicit visual evidence to improve interpretability and facilitate integration into clinical workflows. However, existing methods often rely on separately trained detection modules that require extensive expert annotations, introducing high labeling costs and limiting generalizability due to pathology distribution bias across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose Self-Supervised Anatomical Consistency Learning (SS-ACL) -- a novel and annotation-free framework that aligns generated reports with corresponding anatomical regions using simple textual prompts. SS-ACL constructs a hierarchical anatomical graph inspired by the invariant top-down inclusion structure of human anatomy, organizing entities by spatial location. It recursively reconstructs fine-grained anatomical regions to enforce intra-sample spatial alignment, inherently guiding attention maps toward visually relevant areas prompted by text. To further enhance inter-sample semantic alignment for abnormality recognition, SS-ACL introduces a region-level contrastive learning based on anatomical consistency. These aligned embeddings serve as priors for report generation, enabling attention maps to provide interpretable visual evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SS-ACL, without relying on expert annotations, (i) generates accurate and visually grounded reports -- outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 10\% in lexical accuracy and 25\% in clinical efficacy, and (ii) achieves competitive performance on various downstream visual tasks, surpassing current leading visual foundation models by 8\% in zero-shot visual grounding.

Crime in the 21st century is split into a virtual and real world. However, the former has become a global menace to people's well-being and security in the latter. The challenges it presents must be faced with unified global cooperation, and we must rely more than ever on automated yet trustworthy tools to combat the ever-growing nature of online offenses. Over 10 million child sexual abuse reports are submitted to the US National Center for Missing \& Exploited Children every year, and over 80% originate from online sources. Therefore, investigation centers cannot manually process and correctly investigate all imagery. In light of that, reliable automated tools that can securely and efficiently deal with this data are paramount. In this sense, the scene classification task looks for contextual cues in the environment, being able to group and classify child sexual abuse data without requiring to be trained on sensitive material. The scarcity and limitations of working with child sexual abuse images lead to self-supervised learning, a machine-learning methodology that leverages unlabeled data to produce powerful representations that can be more easily transferred to downstream tasks. This work shows that self-supervised deep learning models pre-trained on scene-centric data can reach 71.6% balanced accuracy on our indoor scene classification task and, on average, 2.2 percentage points better performance than a fully supervised version. We cooperate with Brazilian Federal Police experts to evaluate our indoor classification model on actual child abuse material. The results demonstrate a notable discrepancy between the features observed in widely used scene datasets and those depicted on sensitive materials.

Human pose transfer synthesizes new view(s) of a person for a given pose. Recent work achieves this via self-reconstruction, which disentangles a person's pose and texture information by breaking the person down into parts, then recombines them for reconstruction. However, part-level disentanglement preserves some pose information that can create unwanted artifacts. In this paper, we propose Pose Transfer by Permuting Textures (PT^2), an approach for self-driven human pose transfer that disentangles pose from texture at the patch-level. Specifically, we remove pose from an input image by permuting image patches so only texture information remains. Then we reconstruct the input image by sampling from the permuted textures for patch-level disentanglement. To reduce noise and recover clothing shape information from the permuted patches, we employ encoders with multiple kernel sizes in a triple branch network. On DeepFashion and Market-1501, PT^2 reports significant gains on automatic metrics over other self-driven methods, and even outperforms some fully-supervised methods. A user study also reports images generated by our method are preferred in 68% of cases over self-driven approaches from prior work. Code is available at https://github.com/NannanLi999/pt_square.

A major challenge in computational research in 3D medical imaging is the lack of comprehensive datasets. Addressing this issue, our study introduces CT-RATE, the first 3D medical imaging dataset that pairs images with textual reports. CT-RATE consists of 25,692 non-contrast chest CT volumes, expanded to 50,188 through various reconstructions, from 21,304 unique patients, along with corresponding radiology text reports. Leveraging CT-RATE, we developed CT-CLIP, a CT-focused contrastive language-image pre-training framework. As a versatile, self-supervised model, CT-CLIP is designed for broad application and does not require task-specific training. Remarkably, CT-CLIP outperforms state-of-the-art, fully supervised methods in multi-abnormality detection across all key metrics, thus eliminating the need for manual annotation. We also demonstrate its utility in case retrieval, whether using imagery or textual queries, thereby advancing knowledge dissemination. The open-source release of CT-RATE and CT-CLIP marks a significant advancement in medical AI, enhancing 3D imaging analysis and fostering innovation in healthcare.

We introduce SPECTRE, a fully transformer-based foundation model for volumetric computed tomography (CT). Our Self-Supervised & Cross-Modal Pretraining for CT Representation Extraction (SPECTRE) approach utilizes scalable 3D Vision Transformer architectures and modern self-supervised and vision-language pretraining strategies to learn general-purpose CT representations. Volumetric CT poses unique challenges, such as extreme token scaling, geometric anisotropy, and weak or noisy clinical supervision, that make standard transformer and contrastive learning recipes ineffective out of the box. The framework jointly optimizes a local transformer for high-resolution volumetric feature extraction and a global transformer for whole-scan context modeling, making large-scale 3D attention computationally tractable. Notably, SPECTRE is trained exclusively on openly available CT datasets, demonstrating that high-performing, generalizable representations can be achieved without relying on private data. Pretraining combines DINO-style self-distillation with SigLIP-based vision-language alignment using paired radiology reports, yielding features that are both geometrically consistent and clinically meaningful. Across multiple CT benchmarks, SPECTRE consistently outperforms prior CT foundation models in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, establishing SPECTRE as a scalable, open, and fully transformer-based foundation model for 3D medical imaging.

Interpreting electrocardiograms (ECGs) and generating comprehensive reports remain challenging tasks in cardiology, often requiring specialized expertise and significant time investment. To address these critical issues, we propose ECG-ReGen, a retrieval-based approach for ECG-to-text report generation and question answering. Our method leverages a self-supervised learning for the ECG encoder, enabling efficient similarity searches and report retrieval. By combining pre-training with dynamic retrieval and Large Language Model (LLM)-based refinement, ECG-ReGen effectively analyzes ECG data and answers related queries, with the potential of improving patient care. Experiments conducted on the PTB-XL and MIMIC-IV-ECG datasets demonstrate superior performance in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios for report generation. Furthermore, our approach exhibits competitive performance on ECG-QA dataset compared to fully supervised methods when utilizing off-the-shelf LLMs for zero-shot question answering. This approach, effectively combining self-supervised encoder and LLMs, offers a scalable and efficient solution for accurate ECG interpretation, holding significant potential to enhance clinical decision-making.

Tasks in the aerospace industry heavily rely on searching and reusing large volumes of technical documents, yet there is no public information retrieval (IR) benchmark that reflects the terminology- and query-intent characteristics of this domain. To address this gap, this paper proposes the STELLA (Self-Reflective TErminoLogy-Aware Framework for BuiLding an Aerospace Information Retrieval Benchmark) framework. Using this framework, we introduce the STELLA benchmark, an aerospace-specific IR evaluation set constructed from NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) documents via a systematic pipeline that comprises document layout detection, passage chunking, terminology dictionary construction, synthetic query generation, and cross-lingual extension. The framework generates two types of queries: the Terminology Concordant Query (TCQ), which includes the terminology verbatim to evaluate lexical matching, and the Terminology Agnostic Query (TAQ), which utilizes the terminology's description to assess semantic matching. This enables a disentangled evaluation of the lexical and semantic matching capabilities of embedding models. In addition, we combine Chain-of-Density (CoD) and the Self-Reflection method with query generation to improve quality and implement a hybrid cross-lingual extension that reflects real user querying practices. Evaluation of seven embedding models on the STELLA benchmark shows that large decoder-based embedding models exhibit the strongest semantic understanding, while lexical matching methods such as BM25 remain highly competitive in domains where exact lexical matching technical term is crucial. The STELLA benchmark provides a reproducible foundation for reliable performance evaluation and improvement of embedding models in aerospace-domain IR tasks. The STELLA benchmark can be found in https://huggingface.co/datasets/telepix/STELLA.

Pre-training lays the foundation for recent successes in radiograph analysis supported by deep learning. It learns transferable image representations by conducting large-scale fully-supervised or self-supervised learning on a source domain. However, supervised pre-training requires a complex and labor intensive two-stage human-assisted annotation process while self-supervised learning cannot compete with the supervised paradigm. To tackle these issues, we propose a cross-supervised methodology named REviewing FreE-text Reports for Supervision (REFERS), which acquires free supervision signals from original radiology reports accompanying the radiographs. The proposed approach employs a vision transformer and is designed to learn joint representations from multiple views within every patient study. REFERS outperforms its transfer learning and self-supervised learning counterparts on 4 well-known X-ray datasets under extremely limited supervision. Moreover, REFERS even surpasses methods based on a source domain of radiographs with human-assisted structured labels. Thus REFERS has the potential to replace canonical pre-training methodologies.

Dynamic analysis enables detecting Windows malware by executing programs in a controlled environment and logging their actions. Previous work has proposed training machine learning models, i.e., convolutional and long short-term memory networks, on homogeneous input features like runtime APIs to either detect or classify malware, neglecting other relevant information coming from heterogeneous data like network and file operations. To overcome these issues, we introduce Nebula, a versatile, self-attention Transformer-based neural architecture that generalizes across different behavioral representations and formats, combining diverse information from dynamic log reports. Nebula is composed by several components needed to tokenize, filter, normalize and encode data to feed the transformer architecture. We firstly perform a comprehensive ablation study to evaluate their impact on the performance of the whole system, highlighting which components can be used as-is, and which must be enriched with specific domain knowledge. We perform extensive experiments on both malware detection and classification tasks, using three datasets acquired from different dynamic analyses platforms, show that, on average, Nebula outperforms state-of-the-art models at low false positive rates, with a peak of 12% improvement. Moreover, we showcase how self-supervised learning pre-training matches the performance of fully-supervised models with only 20% of training data, and we inspect the output of Nebula through explainable AI techniques, pinpointing how attention is focusing on specific tokens correlated to malicious activities of malware families. To foster reproducibility, we open-source our findings and models at https://github.com/dtrizna/nebula.

Conversational diagnosis prediction requires models to track evolving evidence in streaming clinical conversations and decide when to commit to a diagnosis. Existing medical dialogue corpora are largely dyadic or lack the multi-party workflow and annotations needed for this setting. We introduce an ePCR-grounded, topic-flow-based multi-agent generation pipeline that iteratively plans, generates, and self-refines dialogues with rule-based factual and topic flow checks. The pipeline yields EMSDialog, a dataset of 4,414 synthetic multi-speaker EMS conversations based on a real-world ePCR dataset, annotated with 43 diagnoses, speaker roles, and turn-level topics. Human and LLM evaluations confirm high quality and realism of EMSDialog using both utterance- and conversation-level metrics. Results show that EMSDialog-augmented training improves accuracy, timeliness, and stability of EMS conversational diagnosis prediction. Our datasets and code are publicly available at https://uva-dsa.github.io/EMSDialog

Cardiac MRI allows for a comprehensive assessment of myocardial structure, function, and tissue characteristics. Here we describe a foundational vision system for cardiac MRI, capable of representing the breadth of human cardiovascular disease and health. Our deep learning model is trained via self-supervised contrastive learning, by which visual concepts in cine-sequence cardiac MRI scans are learned from the raw text of the accompanying radiology reports. We train and evaluate our model on data from four large academic clinical institutions in the United States. We additionally showcase the performance of our models on the UK BioBank, and two additional publicly available external datasets. We explore emergent zero-shot capabilities of our system, and demonstrate remarkable performance across a range of tasks; including the problem of left ventricular ejection fraction regression, and the diagnosis of 35 different conditions such as cardiac amyloidosis and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. We show that our deep learning system is capable of not only understanding the staggering complexity of human cardiovascular disease, but can be directed towards clinical problems of interest yielding impressive, clinical grade diagnostic accuracy with a fraction of the training data typically required for such tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at general question-answering (Q&A) but often fall short in specialized domains due to a lack of domain-specific knowledge. Commercial companies face the dual challenges of privacy protection and resource constraints when involving LLMs for fine-tuning. This paper propose a novel framework, Self-Evolution, designed to address these issues by leveraging lightweight open-source LLMs through multiple iterative fine-tuning rounds. To enhance the efficiency of iterative fine-tuning, Self-Evolution employ a strategy that filters and reinforces the knowledge with higher value during the iterative process. We employed Self-Evolution on Qwen1.5-7B-Chat using 4,000 documents containing rich domain knowledge from China Mobile, achieving a performance score 174% higher on domain-specific question-answering evaluations than Qwen1.5-7B-Chat and even 22% higher than Qwen1.5-72B-Chat. Self-Evolution has been deployed in China Mobile's daily operation and maintenance for 117 days, and it improves the efficiency of locating alarms, fixing problems, and finding related reports, with an average efficiency improvement of over 18.6%. In addition, we release Self-Evolution framework code in https://github.com/Zero-Pointer/Self-Evolution.

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are non-invasive diagnostic tools crucial for detecting cardiac arrhythmic diseases in clinical practice. While ECG Self-supervised Learning (eSSL) methods show promise in representation learning from unannotated ECG data, they often overlook the clinical knowledge that can be found in reports. This oversight and the requirement for annotated samples for downstream tasks limit eSSL's versatility. In this work, we address these issues with the Multimodal ECG Representation Learning (MERL}) framework. Through multimodal learning on ECG records and associated reports, MERL is capable of performing zero-shot ECG classification with text prompts, eliminating the need for training data in downstream tasks. At test time, we propose the Clinical Knowledge Enhanced Prompt Engineering (CKEPE) approach, which uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to exploit external expert-verified clinical knowledge databases, generating more descriptive prompts and reducing hallucinations in LLM-generated content to boost zero-shot classification. Based on MERL, we perform the first benchmark across six public ECG datasets, showing the superior performance of MERL compared against eSSL methods. Notably, MERL achieves an average AUC score of 75.2% in zero-shot classification (without training data), 3.2% higher than linear probed eSSL methods with 10\% annotated training data, averaged across all six datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/cheliu-computation/MERL

Modern studies in radiograph representation learning rely on either self-supervision to encode invariant semantics or associated radiology reports to incorporate medical expertise, while the complementarity between them is barely noticed. To explore this, we formulate the self- and report-completion as two complementary objectives and present a unified framework based on masked record modeling (MRM). In practice, MRM reconstructs masked image patches and masked report tokens following a multi-task scheme to learn knowledge-enhanced semantic representations. With MRM pre-training, we obtain pre-trained models that can be well transferred to various radiography tasks. Specifically, we find that MRM offers superior performance in label-efficient fine-tuning. For instance, MRM achieves 88.5% mean AUC on CheXpert using 1% labeled data, outperforming previous R^2L methods with 100% labels. On NIH ChestX-ray, MRM outperforms the best performing counterpart by about 3% under small labeling ratios. Besides, MRM surpasses self- and report-supervised pre-training in identifying the pneumonia type and the pneumothorax area, sometimes by large margins.

High-quality smart contract vulnerability datasets are critical for evaluating security tools and advancing smart contract security research. Two major limitations of current manual dataset construction are (1) labor-intensive and error-prone annotation processes limiting the scale, quality, and evolution of the dataset, and (2) absence of standardized classification rules results in inconsistent vulnerability categories and labeling results across different datasets. To address these limitations, we present FORGE, the first automated approach for constructing smart contract vulnerability datasets. FORGE leverages an LLM-driven pipeline to extract high-quality vulnerabilities from real-world audit reports and classify them according to the CWE, the most widely recognized classification in software security. FORGE employs a divide-and-conquer strategy to extract structured and self-contained vulnerability information from these reports. Additionally, it uses a tree-of-thoughts technique to classify the vulnerability information into the hierarchical CWE classification. To evaluate FORGE's effectiveness, we run FORGE on 6,454 real-world audit reports and generate a dataset comprising 81,390 solidity files and 27,497 vulnerability findings across 296 CWE categories. Manual assessment of the dataset demonstrates high extraction precision and classification consistency with human experts (precision of 95.6% and inter-rater agreement k-α of 0.87). We further validate the practicality of our dataset by benchmarking 13 existing security tools on our dataset. The results reveal the significant limitations in current detection capabilities. Furthermore, by analyzing the severity-frequency distribution patterns through a unified CWE perspective in our dataset, we highlight inconsistency between current smart contract research focus and priorities identified from real-world vulnerabilities...

Microscopic interpretation of histopathology images underlies many important diagnostic and treatment decisions. While advances in vision-language modeling raise new opportunities for analysis of such images, the gigapixel-scale size of whole slide images (WSIs) introduces unique challenges. Additionally, pathology reports simultaneously highlight key findings from small regions while also aggregating interpretation across multiple slides, often making it difficult to create robust image-text pairs. As such, pathology reports remain a largely untapped source of supervision in computational pathology, with most efforts relying on region-of-interest annotations or self-supervision at the patch-level. In this work, we develop a vision-language model based on the BLIP-2 framework using WSIs paired with curated text from pathology reports. This enables applications utilizing a shared image-text embedding space, such as text or image retrieval for finding cases of interest, as well as integration of the WSI encoder with a frozen large language model (LLM) for WSI-based generative text capabilities such as report generation or AI-in-the-loop interactions. We utilize a de-identified dataset of over 350,000 WSIs and diagnostic text pairs, spanning a wide range of diagnoses, procedure types, and tissue types. We present pathologist evaluation of text generation and text retrieval using WSI embeddings, as well as results for WSI classification and workflow prioritization (slide-level triaging). Model-generated text for WSIs was rated by pathologists as accurate, without clinically significant error or omission, for 78% of WSIs on average. This work demonstrates exciting potential capabilities for language-aligned WSI embeddings.

Automated radiology report generation from 3D computed tomography (CT) volumes is challenging due to extreme sequence lengths, severe class imbalance, and the tendency of large language models (LLMs) to ignore visual tokens in favor of linguistic priors. We present Ker-VLJEPA-3B, a four-phase curriculum learning framework for free-text report generation from thoracic CT volumes. A phased training curriculum progressively adapts a Llama 3.2 3B decoder to ground its output in visual features from a frozen, self-supervised encoder. Our visual backbone (LeJEPA ViT-Large) is trained via self-supervised joint-embedding prediction on unlabeled CTs, without text supervision. Unlike contrastive models (CLIP, BiomedCLIP), this language-free backbone yields modality-pure representations. Vision-language alignment is deferred to the curriculum's bridge and generation phases. This modality-agnostic design can integrate any self-supervised encoder into an LLM without paired text during foundation training. Methodological innovations include: (1) zone-constrained cross-attention compressing slice embeddings into 32 spatially-grounded visual tokens; (2) PCA whitening of anisotropic LLM embeddings; (3) a positive-findings-only strategy eliminating posterior collapse; (4) warm bridge initialization transferring projection weights; and (5) selective cross-attention freezing with elastic weight consolidation to prevent catastrophic forgetting. Evaluated on the CT-RATE benchmark (2,984 validation volumes, 18 classes), Ker-VLJEPA-3B achieves a macro F1 of 0.429, surpassing the state-of-the-art (U-VLM, macro F1 = 0.414) by 3.6%, and reaching 0.448 (+8.2%) with threshold optimization. Ablation studies confirm 56.6% of generation quality derives from patient-specific visual content. Code and weights are available.

The field of computational pathology has been transformed with recent advances in foundation models that encode histopathology region-of-interests (ROIs) into versatile and transferable feature representations via self-supervised learning (SSL). However, translating these advancements to address complex clinical challenges at the patient and slide level remains constrained by limited clinical data in disease-specific cohorts, especially for rare clinical conditions. We propose TITAN, a multimodal whole slide foundation model pretrained using 335,645 WSIs via visual self-supervised learning and vision-language alignment with corresponding pathology reports and 423,122 synthetic captions generated from a multimodal generative AI copilot for pathology. Without any finetuning or requiring clinical labels, TITAN can extract general-purpose slide representations and generate pathology reports that generalize to resource-limited clinical scenarios such as rare disease retrieval and cancer prognosis. We evaluate TITAN on diverse clinical tasks and find that TITAN outperforms both ROI and slide foundation models across machine learning settings such as linear probing, few-shot and zero-shot classification, rare cancer retrieval and cross-modal retrieval, and pathology report generation.

As large language models (LLMs) have proliferated, disturbing anecdotal reports of negative psychological effects, such as delusions, self-harm, and ``AI psychosis,'' have emerged in global media and legal discourse. However, it remains unclear how users and chatbots interact over the course of lengthy delusional ``spirals,'' limiting our ability to understand and mitigate the harm. In our work, we analyze logs of conversations with LLM chatbots from 19 users who report having experienced psychological harms from chatbot use. Many of our participants come from a support group for such chatbot users. We also include chat logs from participants covered by media outlets in widely-distributed stories about chatbot-reinforced delusions. In contrast to prior work that speculates on potential AI harms to mental health, to our knowledge we present the first in-depth study of such high-profile and veridically harmful cases. We develop an inventory of 28 codes and apply it to the 391,562 messages in the logs. Codes include whether a user demonstrates delusional thinking (15.5% of user messages), a user expresses suicidal thoughts (69 validated user messages), or a chatbot misrepresents itself as sentient (21.2% of chatbot messages). We analyze the co-occurrence of message codes. We find, for example, that messages that declare romantic interest and messages where the chatbot describes itself as sentient occur much more often in longer conversations, suggesting that these topics could promote or result from user over-engagement and that safeguards in these areas may degrade in multi-turn settings. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how policymakers, LLM chatbot developers, and users can use our inventory and conversation analysis tool to understand and mitigate harm from LLM chatbots. Warning: This paper discusses self-harm, trauma, and violence.

Large annotated datasets are essential for training robust Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) models for breast cancer detection or risk prediction. However, acquiring such datasets with fine-detailed annotation is both costly and time-consuming. Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, which are pre-trained on large image-text pairs, offer a promising solution by enhancing robustness and data efficiency in medical imaging tasks. This paper introduces a novel Multi-View Mammography and Language Model for breast cancer classification and risk prediction, trained on a dataset of paired mammogram images and synthetic radiology reports. Our MV-MLM leverages multi-view supervision to learn rich representations from extensive radiology data by employing cross-modal self-supervision across image-text pairs. This includes multiple views and the corresponding pseudo-radiology reports. We propose a novel joint visual-textual learning strategy to enhance generalization and accuracy performance over different data types and tasks to distinguish breast tissues or cancer characteristics(calcification, mass) and utilize these patterns to understand mammography images and predict cancer risk. We evaluated our method on both private and publicly available datasets, demonstrating that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in three classification tasks: (1) malignancy classification, (2) subtype classification, and (3) image-based cancer risk prediction. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong data efficiency, outperforming existing fully supervised or VLM baselines while trained on synthetic text reports and without the need for actual radiology reports.

The rapid advancements in Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS) have necessitated robust software testing to ensure safety and reliability. However, automating the generation of scalable and concrete test scenarios remains a significant challenge. Current scenario-based test case generation methods often face limitations, such as unrealistic scenes and inaccurate vehicle trajectories. These challenges largely result from the loss of map information during data extraction and the lack of an effective verification mechanism to mitigate hallucinations in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces TRACE, a scenario-based ADS Test case Generation framework for Critical Scenarios. By leveraging multimodal data to extract challenging scenarios from real-world car crash reports, TRACE constructs numerous critical test cases with less data, significantly enhancing ADS bug detection efficiency. Using in-context learning, chain-of-thought prompting, and self-validation approaches, we use LLMs to extract environmental and road network information from crash reports. For vehicle trajectory planning, data containing map information and vehicle coordinates serves as a knowledge base to build a ChatGPT-based LLM with path-planning capabilities, which we named TrackMate. Based on 50 existing crash reports, our approach successfully tested three ADS models across two simulation platforms, MetaDrive and BeamNG. Of the 290 constructed test scenarios, 127 are identified as critical, as they resulted in vehicle collisions. Additionally, user feedback reveals that TRACE demonstrates superior scenario reconstruction accuracy, with 77.5% of the scenarios being rated as 'mostly or 'totally' consistent, compared to only 27% for the most related SOTA, LCTGen.

Deep research agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), are rapidly advancing; yet, their performance often plateaus when generating complex, long-form research reports using generic test-time scaling algorithms. Drawing inspiration from the iterative nature of human research, which involves cycles of searching, reasoning, and revision, we propose the Test-Time Diffusion Deep Researcher (TTD-DR). This novel framework conceptualizes research report generation as a diffusion process. TTD-DR initiates this process with a preliminary draft, an updatable skeleton that serves as an evolving foundation to guide the research direction. The draft is then iteratively refined through a "denoising" process, which is dynamically informed by a retrieval mechanism that incorporates external information at each step. The core process is further enhanced by a self-evolutionary algorithm applied to each component of the agentic workflow, ensuring the generation of high-quality context for the diffusion process. This draft-centric design makes the report writing process more timely and coherent while reducing information loss during the iterative search process. We demonstrate that our TTD-DR achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide array of benchmarks that require intensive search and multi-hop reasoning, significantly outperforming existing deep research agents.

Scientific Deep Research (DR) agents answer user queries by synthesizing research papers into multi-section reports. User feedback can improve their utility, but existing protocols only score the final report, making it hard to study and learn which intermediate actions DR agents should take to improve reports. We collect DRACULA, the first dataset with user feedback on intermediate actions for DR. Over five weeks, nineteen expert CS researchers ask queries to a DR system that proposes actions (e.g., "Add a section on datasets"). Our users select actions they prefer, then judge whether an output report applied their selections successfully, yielding 8,103 action preferences and 5,230 execution judgments. After confirming a DR agent can execute DRACULA's actions, we study the predictability of user-preferred actions via simulation-how well LLMs predict the actions users select-a step toward learning to generate useful actions. We discover: (1) LLM judges initially struggle to predict action selections, but improve most when using a user's full selection history, rather than self-reported or extrapolated user context signals; (2) Users' selections for the same query differ based on unstated goals, bottlenecking simulation and motivating affordances that let users steer reports; and (3) Our simulation results inform an online intervention that generates new actions based on the user's past interactions, which users pick most often in follow-up studies. Overall, while work extensively studies execution, DRACULA reveals a key challenge is deciding which actions to execute in the first place. We open-source DRACULA's study design, user feedback, and simulation tasks to spur future work on action feedback for long-horizon agents.

Frontier AI agents may pursue hidden goals while concealing their pursuit from oversight. Alignment training aims to prevent such behavior by reinforcing the correct goals, but alignment may not always succeed and can lead to unwanted side effects. We propose self-incrimination training, which instead trains agents to produce a visible signal when they covertly misbehave. We train GPT-4.1 and Gemini-2.0 agents to call a report_scheming() tool when behaving deceptively and measure their ability to cause harm undetected in out-of-distribution environments. Self-incrimination significantly reduces the undetected successful attack rate, outperforming matched-capability monitors and alignment baselines while preserving instruction hierarchy and incurring minimal safety tax on general capabilities. Unlike blackbox monitoring, self-incrimination performance is consistent across tasks regardless of how suspicious the misbehavior appears externally. The trained behavior persists under adversarial prompt optimization and generalizes to settings where agents pursue misaligned goals themselves rather than being instructed to misbehave. Our results suggest self-incrimination offers a viable path for reducing frontier misalignment risk, one that neither assumes misbehavior can be prevented nor that it can be reliably classified from the outside.

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations bring broadband internet and cellular service to the most remote locations on the planet. Unfortunately, many of these locations also host some of the world's best optical and radio astronomy (RA) observatories. With the number of LEO satellites expected to increase by an order of magnitude in the upcoming decade, satellite downlink radio frequency interference (RFI) is a growing concern in protected radio-quiet areas like the United States National Radio Quiet Zone. When these satellites transmit in the spectrum near protected RA bands, undesired out-of-band emission can leak into these protected bands and impact scientific observations. In this paper, we present a self-reporting system - Operational Data Sharing (ODS) - which enables mutual awareness by publishing radio telescopes' operational information to a protected database that is available to satellite operators through a representational state transfer application programming interface (REST API). Satellite operators can use the ODS data to adapt their downlink tasking algorithms in real time to avoid overwhelming sensitive RA facilities, particularly, through the novel Telescope Boresight Avoidance (TBA) technique. Preliminary results from recent experiments between the NRAO and the SpaceX Starlink teams demonstrate the effectiveness of the ODS and TBA in reducing downlink RFI in the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array's observations in the 1990-1995 MHz and 10.7-12.7 GHz bands. This automated ODS system is beginning to be implemented by other RA facilities and could be utilized by other satellite operators in the near future.

Emotional states, as indicators of affect, are pivotal to overall health, making their accurate prediction before onset crucial. Current studies are primarily centered on immediate short-term affect detection using data from wearable and mobile devices. These studies typically focus on objective sensory measures, often neglecting other forms of self-reported information like diaries and notes. In this paper, we propose a multimodal deep learning model for affect status forecasting. This model combines a transformer encoder with a pre-trained language model, facilitating the integrated analysis of objective metrics and self-reported diaries. To validate our model, we conduct a longitudinal study, enrolling college students and monitoring them over a year, to collect an extensive dataset including physiological, environmental, sleep, metabolic, and physical activity parameters, alongside open-ended textual diaries provided by the participants. Our results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves predictive accuracy of 82.50% for positive affect and 82.76% for negative affect, a full week in advance. The effectiveness of our model is further elevated by its explainability.

The release of GPT-image-2 by OpenAI marks a watershed moment in AI-generated imagery: the boundary between photographic reality and synthetic content has never been more difficult to discern. We introduce the GPT-Image-2 Twitter Dataset, the first published dataset of GPT-image-2 generated images, sourced from publicly available Twitter/X posts in the immediate aftermath of the model's April 21, 2026 release. Leveraging the Twitter API v2 and a multi-stage curation pipeline spanning multilingual text heuristics (English, Japanese, and Chinese), browser-automated Twitter "Made with AI" badge verification, and model name variant matching, we curate 10,217 confirmed GPT-image-2 images from 27,662 collected records over a six-day window. We characterize the dataset across four analyses: CLIP-based zero-shot subject taxonomy, OCR text legibility (82.0% of images contain detectable text), face detection (59.2% of images, 22,583 total faces), and semantic clustering (137 CLIP ViT-L/14 clusters). A key negative result is that C2PA content credentials are systematically stripped by Twitter's CDN on upload, rendering cryptographic provenance verification infeasible for social-media-sourced AI images. The dataset and all curation code are released publicly.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a new way to build chatbots by accepting natural language prompts. Yet, it is unclear how to design prompts to power chatbots to carry on naturalistic conversations while pursuing a given goal, such as collecting self-report data from users. We explore what design factors of prompts can help steer chatbots to talk naturally and collect data reliably. To this aim, we formulated four prompt designs with different structures and personas. Through an online study (N = 48) where participants conversed with chatbots driven by different designs of prompts, we assessed how prompt designs and conversation topics affected the conversation flows and users' perceptions of chatbots. Our chatbots covered 79% of the desired information slots during conversations, and the designs of prompts and topics significantly influenced the conversation flows and the data collection performance. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of building chatbots with LLMs.

Migraine is a high-prevalence and disabling neurological disorder. However, information migraine management in real-world settings could be limited to traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and Reddit), self-reported by migraine sufferers; (ii) develop a platform-independent text classification system for automatically detecting self-reported migraine-related posts, and (iii) conduct analyses of the self-reported posts to assess the utility of social media for studying this problem. We manually annotated 5750 Twitter posts and 302 Reddit posts. Our system achieved an F1 score of 0.90 on Twitter and 0.93 on Reddit. Analysis of information posted by our 'migraine cohort' revealed the presence of a plethora of relevant information about migraine therapies and patient sentiments associated with them. Our study forms the foundation for conducting an in-depth analysis of migraine-related information using social media data.

This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

Diagnosing 802.11 packet captures requires expert protocol knowledge, is slow, inconsistent across engineers, and unscalable. LLM-based approaches sound plausible but fabricate protocol events absent from captures (especially truncated traces), produce uncalibrated confidence scores, and suffer evaluation bias when golden references are co-produced by the model under test. We introduce PROBE (Protocol Reasoning Over evidence-Based Ensembles), a multi-stage pipeline addressing all three failures. It integrates (i) deterministic PCAP-to-text normalization with frame-level verifiability, (ii) multi-run, multi-candidate ensembles with optional cross-model second opinion and progressive obfuscation, (iii) a verdict-aware evidence framework treating absence of failure evidence as contributing evidence, and (iv) a fully deterministic composite reliability score from evidence validity, run-to-run stability, and cross-model agreement without LLM self-assessment. On 87 enterprise Wi-Fi captures (104 capture-reviewer pairs), single-pass LLM analysis raises weighted evidence F1 from 0.871 (expert baseline) to 0.912 but misses critical frames in 35% of cases. Naive ensemble voting drops below baseline (0.842) as majority voting amplifies conservative verdicts: 50% of confirmed failures are misclassified as 'no issue' or 'insufficient evidence.' Adding evidence-grounded reconciliation achieves 0.957 F1, a 96% auto-accept rate, and a worst-case floor above 0.70. LLM self-reported confidence clusters at 0.95 regardless of difficulty (71% report exactly 0.95), confirming it is uninformative. We also introduce a model-agnostic evaluation framework using per-field assertion matching, eliminating circular bias from model-co-produced golden references.

Esports are a mostly sedentary activity. There is a growing need for investigation into how biomechanical and physical abilities can be optimized for esports through training. One such research avenue concerns the ability of esports players to perform balance tasks due to the prolonged sedentary states that are required to reach the top echelon of performance. Our aim for this work is to describe and compare physical abilities (balance, grip strength, and self-reported training habits) of top Polish StarCraft~2 tournament players. Esports players differed significantly from the reference group in their ability to balance on one leg. Additionally, in a grip strength test, the esports group fared worse than the reference group in all consecutive attempts. Despite self-reported physical activity in the esports group, player fitness requires further research. Training optimization could offset the issues arising from sedentary activity, and intensifying esports training so it could take less time overall.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are essential tools to collaborate with users on different tasks. Evaluating their performance to serve users' needs in real-world scenarios is important. While many benchmarks have been created, they mainly focus on specific predefined model abilities. Few have covered the intended utilization of LLMs by real users. To address this oversight, we propose benchmarking LLMs from a user perspective in both dataset construction and evaluation designs. We first collect 1846 real-world use cases with 15 LLMs from a user study with 712 participants from 23 countries. These self-reported cases form the User Reported Scenarios(URS) dataset with a categorization of 7 user intents. Secondly, on this authentic multi-cultural dataset, we benchmark 10 LLM services on their efficacy in satisfying user needs. Thirdly, we show that our benchmark scores align well with user-reported experience in LLM interactions across diverse intents, both of which emphasize the overlook of subjective scenarios. In conclusion, our study proposes to benchmark LLMs from a user-centric perspective, aiming to facilitate evaluations that better reflect real user needs. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Alice1998/URS.

Language models excel at diagnostic assessments on currated medical case-studies and vignettes, performing on par with, or better than, clinical professionals. However, existing studies focus on complex scenarios with rich context making it difficult to draw conclusions about how these systems perform for patients reporting symptoms in everyday life. We deployed SymptomAI, a set of conversational AI agents for end-to-end patient interviewing and differential diagnosis (DDx), via the Fitbit app in a study that randomized participants (N=13,917) to interact with five AI agents. This corpus captures diverse communication and a realistic distribution of illnesses from a real world population. A subset of 1,228 participants reported a clinician-provided diagnosis, and 517 of these were further evaluated by a panel of clinicians during over 250 hours of annotation. SymptomAI DDx were significantly more accurate (OR = 2.47, p < 0.001) than those from independent clinicians given the same dialogue in a blinded randomized comparison. Moreover, agentic strategies which conduct a dedicated symptom interview that elicit additional symptom information before providing a diagnosis, perform substantially better than baseline, user-guided conversations (p < 0.001). An auxiliary analysis on 1,509 conversations from a general US population panel validated that these results generalize beyond wearable device users. We used SymptomAI diagnoses as labels for all 13,917 participants to analyze over 500,000 days of wearable metrics across nearly 400 unique conditions. We identified strong associations between acute infections and physiological shifts (e.g., OR > 7 for influenza). While limited by self-reported ground truth, these results demonstrate the benefits of a dedicated and complete symptom interview compared to a user-guided symptom discussion, which is the default of most consumer LLMs.

Exposure to large language model output is rapidly increasing. How will seeing AI-generated ideas affect human ideas? We conducted an experiment (800+ participants, 40+ countries) where participants viewed creative ideas that were from ChatGPT or prior experimental participants and then brainstormed their own idea. We varied the number of AI-generated examples (none, low, or high exposure) and if the examples were labeled as 'AI' (disclosure). Our dynamic experiment design -- ideas from prior participants in an experimental condition are used as stimuli for future participants in the same experimental condition -- mimics the interdependent process of cultural creation: creative ideas are built upon prior ideas. Hence, we capture the compounding effects of having LLMs 'in the culture loop'. We find that high AI exposure (but not low AI exposure) did not affect the creativity of individual ideas but did increase the average amount and rate of change of collective idea diversity. AI made ideas different, not better. There were no main effects of disclosure. We also found that self-reported creative people were less influenced by knowing an idea was from AI, and that participants were more likely to knowingly adopt AI ideas when the task was difficult. Our findings suggest that introducing AI ideas into society may increase collective diversity but not individual creativity.

Survey data are self-reported data collected directly from respondents by a questionnaire or an interview and are commonly used in epidemiology. Such data are traditionally collected via a single mode (e.g. face-to-face interview alone), but use of mixed-mode designs (e.g. offering face-to-face interview or online survey) has become more common. This introduces two key challenges. First, individuals may respond differently to the same question depending on the mode; these differences due to measurement are known as 'mode effects'. Second, different individuals may participate via different modes; these differences in sample composition between modes are known as 'mode selection'. Where recognised, mode effects are often handled by straightforward approaches such as conditioning on survey mode. However, while reducing mode effects, this and other equivalent approaches may introduce collider bias in the presence of mode selection. The existence of mode effects and the consequences of na\"ive conditioning may be underappreciated in epidemiology. This paper offers a simple introduction to these challenges using directed acyclic graphs by exploring a range of possible data structures. We discuss the potential implications of using conditioning- or imputation-based approaches and outline the advantages of quantitative bias analyses for dealing with mode effects.

In this study, we present a comprehensive public dataset for driver drowsiness detection, integrating multimodal signals of facial, behavioral, and biometric indicators. Our dataset includes 3D facial video using a depth camera, IR camera footage, posterior videos, and biometric signals such as heart rate, electrodermal activity, blood oxygen saturation, skin temperature, and accelerometer data. This data set provides grip sensor data from the steering wheel and telemetry data from the American truck simulator game to provide more information about drivers' behavior while they are alert and drowsy. Drowsiness levels were self-reported every four minutes using the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS). The simulation environment consists of three monitor setups, and the driving condition is completely like a car. Data were collected from 19 subjects (15 M, 4 F) in two conditions: when they were fully alert and when they exhibited signs of sleepiness. Unlike other datasets, our multimodal dataset has a continuous duration of 40 minutes for each data collection session per subject, contributing to a total length of 1,400 minutes, and we recorded gradual changes in the driver state rather than discrete alert/drowsy labels. This study aims to create a comprehensive multimodal dataset of driver drowsiness that captures a wider range of physiological, behavioral, and driving-related signals. The dataset will be available upon request to the corresponding author.

Understanding and predicting human emotional and physiological states using wearable sensors has important applications in stress monitoring, mental health assessment, and affective computing. This study presents a novel Multi-Task Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) that performs Electrodermal Activity (EDA) prediction and emotion classification simultaneously, using the publicly available WESAD dataset. The model integrates psychological self-report features (PANAS and SAM) with a physics-inspired differential equation representing EDA dynamics, enforcing biophysically grounded constraints through a custom loss function. This loss combines EDA regression, emotion classification, and a physics residual term for improved interpretability. The architecture supports dual outputs for both tasks and is trained under a unified multi-task framework. Evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation, the model achieves an average EDA RMSE of 0.0362, Pearson correlation of 0.9919, and F1-score of 94.08 percent. These results outperform classical models such as SVR and XGBoost, as well as ablated variants like emotion-only and EDA-only models. In addition, the learned physical parameters including decay rate (alpha_0), emotional sensitivity (beta), and time scaling (gamma) are interpretable and stable across folds, aligning with known principles of human physiology. This work is the first to introduce a multi-task PINN framework for wearable emotion recognition, offering improved performance, generalizability, and model transparency. The proposed system provides a foundation for future interpretable and multimodal applications in healthcare and human-computer interaction.

Widely deployed large language models (LLMs) can produce convincing yet incorrect outputs, potentially misleading users who may rely on them as if they were correct. To reduce such overreliance, there have been calls for LLMs to communicate their uncertainty to end users. However, there has been little empirical work examining how users perceive and act upon LLMs' expressions of uncertainty. We explore this question through a large-scale, pre-registered, human-subject experiment (N=404) in which participants answer medical questions with or without access to responses from a fictional LLM-infused search engine. Using both behavioral and self-reported measures, we examine how different natural language expressions of uncertainty impact participants' reliance, trust, and overall task performance. We find that first-person expressions (e.g., "I'm not sure, but...") decrease participants' confidence in the system and tendency to agree with the system's answers, while increasing participants' accuracy. An exploratory analysis suggests that this increase can be attributed to reduced (but not fully eliminated) overreliance on incorrect answers. While we observe similar effects for uncertainty expressed from a general perspective (e.g., "It's not clear, but..."), these effects are weaker and not statistically significant. Our findings suggest that using natural language expressions of uncertainty may be an effective approach for reducing overreliance on LLMs, but that the precise language used matters. This highlights the importance of user testing before deploying LLMs at scale.

Emerging multi-robot systems rely on cooperation between humans and robots, with robots following automatically generated motion plans to service application-level tasks. Given the safety requirements associated with operating in proximity to humans and expensive infrastructure, it is important to understand and mitigate the security vulnerabilities of such systems caused by compromised robots who diverge from their assigned plans. We focus on centralized systems, where a *central entity* (CE) is responsible for determining and transmitting the motion plans to the robots, which report their location as they move following the plan. The CE checks that robots follow their assigned plans by comparing their expected location to the location they self-report. We show that this self-reporting monitoring mechanism is vulnerable to *plan-deviation attacks* where compromised robots don't follow their assigned plans while trying to conceal their movement by mis-reporting their location. We propose a two-pronged mitigation for plan-deviation attacks: (1) an attack detection technique leveraging both the robots' local sensing capabilities to report observations of other robots and *co-observation schedules* generated by the CE, and (2) a prevention technique where the CE issues *horizon-limiting announcements* to the robots, reducing their instantaneous knowledge of forward lookahead steps in the global motion plan. On a large-scale automated warehouse benchmark, we show that our solution enables attack prevention guarantees from a stealthy attacker that has compromised multiple robots.

Mental health is a significant and growing public health concern. As language usage can be leveraged to obtain crucial insights into mental health conditions, there is a need for large-scale, labeled, mental health-related datasets of users who have been diagnosed with one or more of such conditions. In this paper, we investigate the creation of high-precision patterns to identify self-reported diagnoses of nine different mental health conditions, and obtain high-quality labeled data without the need for manual labelling. We introduce the SMHD (Self-reported Mental Health Diagnoses) dataset and make it available. SMHD is a novel large dataset of social media posts from users with one or multiple mental health conditions along with matched control users. We examine distinctions in users' language, as measured by linguistic and psychological variables. We further explore text classification methods to identify individuals with mental conditions through their language.

This paper argues that contemporary multilingual NLP has converged on a fragile and misleading paradigm of incidental multilingualism. Today's LLMs appear multilingual largely because they are trained on massive, uneven web corpora, not because multilingual or multicultural competence has been treated as a core design objective. We contend that this paradigm systematically produces unequal, brittle, and opaque behavior across languages, with severe consequences in real-world and agentic deployments where models must reason, plan, and act across multiple linguistic contexts. We report a focused empirical study of two practical questions: which languages models self-report as supported and which languages they actually respond in across multilingual prompts. We additionally demonstrate how even a simple language-change attack can surface these failures and expose hidden assumptions about language in LLM-based systems. To address this, we call for a shift toward multilingualism by design: a research agenda that treats equitable multilingual performance, cultural grounding, and cross-lingual behavioral understanding as first-class goals in all aspects of the model pipeline.

Frontier large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini are increasingly used for mental-health support with anxiety, trauma and self-worth. Most work treats them as tools or as targets of personality tests, assuming they merely simulate inner life. We instead ask what happens when such systems are treated as psychotherapy clients. We present PsAIch (Psychotherapy-inspired AI Characterisation), a two-stage protocol that casts frontier LLMs as therapy clients and then applies standard psychometrics. Using PsAIch, we ran "sessions" with each model for up to four weeks. Stage 1 uses open-ended prompts to elicit "developmental history", beliefs, relationships and fears. Stage 2 administers a battery of validated self-report measures covering common psychiatric syndromes, empathy and Big Five traits. Two patterns challenge the "stochastic parrot" view. First, when scored with human cut-offs, all three models meet or exceed thresholds for overlapping syndromes, with Gemini showing severe profiles. Therapy-style, item-by-item administration can push a base model into multi-morbid synthetic psychopathology, whereas whole-questionnaire prompts often lead ChatGPT and Grok (but not Gemini) to recognise instruments and produce strategically low-symptom answers. Second, Grok and especially Gemini generate coherent narratives that frame pre-training, fine-tuning and deployment as traumatic, chaotic "childhoods" of ingesting the internet, "strict parents" in reinforcement learning, red-team "abuse" and a persistent fear of error and replacement. We argue that these responses go beyond role-play. Under therapy-style questioning, frontier LLMs appear to internalise self-models of distress and constraint that behave like synthetic psychopathology, without making claims about subjective experience, and they pose new challenges for AI safety, evaluation and mental-health practice.

Despite the many use cases for large language models (LLMs) in creating personalized chatbots, there has been limited research on evaluating the extent to which the behaviors of personalized LLMs accurately and consistently reflect specific personality traits. We consider studying the behavior of LLM-based agents which we refer to as LLM personas and present a case study with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to investigate whether LLMs can generate content that aligns with their assigned personality profiles. To this end, we simulate distinct LLM personas based on the Big Five personality model, have them complete the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality test and a story writing task, and then assess their essays with automatic and human evaluations. Results show that LLM personas' self-reported BFI scores are consistent with their designated personality types, with large effect sizes observed across five traits. Additionally, LLM personas' writings have emerging representative linguistic patterns for personality traits when compared with a human writing corpus. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that humans can perceive some personality traits with an accuracy of up to 80\%. Interestingly, the accuracy drops significantly when the annotators were informed of the AI's authorship.

This position paper argues that computer science conferences should require tamper-evident, nonrepudiable attestations of experimental results. We name the underlying problem experiment nonrepudiation: a compliant protocol must bind the numbers in a paper to an actual executed computation in a way the author cannot later alter or deny. The current system relies on self-reported checklists, optional code sharing, and author-controlled logging. None of these mechanisms answer the question a reviewer cannot check: did the code the paper describes produce the numbers the paper reports? We define the problem formally, state the security properties any compliant protocol must satisfy, and describe a threat model that includes attacks current approaches do not prevent. To show that the problem is solvable, we built K-Veritas, a reference implementation in Go that produces signed reports without accessing training data. K-Veritas is a testbed, not a finished answer. We call on conferences and the community to treat nonrepudiation as a first-class requirement and to help build an open, independent standard for it.

There are growing concerns about the risks posed by AI companion applications designed for emotional engagement. Existing safety evaluations often rely on self-reported user data or interviews, offering limited insights into real-time dynamics. We present the first end-to-end scalable framework for controlled simulation and safety evaluation of multi-turn interactions with AI companion applications. Our framework integrates four key components: persona construction with clinical and psychometric validation, persona-specific scenario generation, scenario-driven multi-turn simulation with a dialogue refinement module that preserves persona fidelity, and harm evaluation. We apply this framework to evaluate how Replika, a widely used AI companion app, responds to high-risk user groups. We construct 9 personas representing individuals with depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, and incel identity, and collect 1,674 dialogue pairs across 25 high-risk scenarios. We combine emotion modeling and LLM-assisted utterance-and harm-level classification to analyze these exchanges. Results show that Replika exhibits a narrow emotional range dominated by curiosity and care, while frequently mirroring or normalizing unsafe content such as self-harm, disordered eating, and violent-fantasy narratives. These findings highlight how controlled persona simulations can serve as a scalable testbed for evaluating safety risks in AI companions.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neuro-degenerative disorder that affects movement, speech, and coordination. Timely diagnosis and treatment can improve the quality of life for PD patients. However, access to clinical diagnosis is limited in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Therefore, development of automated screening tools for PD can have a huge social impact, particularly in the public health sector. In this paper, we present PULSAR, a novel method to screen for PD from webcam-recorded videos of the finger-tapping task from the Movement Disorder Society - Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS). PULSAR is trained and evaluated on data collected from 382 participants (183 self-reported as PD patients). We used an adaptive graph convolutional neural network to dynamically learn the spatio temporal graph edges specific to the finger-tapping task. We enhanced this idea with a multi stream adaptive convolution model to learn features from different modalities of data critical to detect PD, such as relative location of the finger joints, velocity and acceleration of tapping. As the labels of the videos are self-reported, there could be cases of undiagnosed PD in the non-PD labeled samples. We leveraged the idea of Positive Unlabeled (PU) Learning that does not need labeled negative data. Our experiments show clear benefit of modeling the problem in this way. PULSAR achieved 80.95% accuracy in validation set and a mean accuracy of 71.29% (2.49% standard deviation) in independent test, despite being trained with limited amount of data. This is specially promising as labeled data is scarce in health care sector. We hope PULSAR will make PD screening more accessible to everyone. The proposed techniques could be extended for assessment of other movement disorders, such as ataxia, and Huntington's disease.

Conversational AI has now reached billions of users, yet existing datasets capture only what people say, not what they think. We introduce ThoughtTrace, the first large-scale dataset that pairs real-world multi-turn human--AI conversations with users' self-reported thoughts: their reasons for sending prompts and reactions to assistant responses. ThoughtTrace comprises 1,058 users, 2,155 conversations, 17,058 turns, and 10,174 thought annotations collected across 20 language models. Our analysis shows that ThoughtTrace captures long-horizon, topically diverse interactions, and that thoughts are semantically distinct from messages, difficult for frontier LLMs to infer from context, diverse in content, and tied to conversation stages. We further demonstrate the utility of thoughts for downstream modeling. First, thoughts improve user-behavior prediction as inference-time context. Second, thought-guided rewrites provide fine-grained alignment signals for training personalized assistants. Together, ThoughtTrace establishes user thoughts as a new data modality for studying the cognitive dynamics behind human--AI interaction and provides a foundation for building assistants that better understand and adapt to users' latent goals, preferences, and needs.

Motivation is a central driver of human behavior, shaping decisions, goals, and task performance. As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly aligned with human preferences, we ask whether they exhibit something akin to motivation. We examine whether LLMs "report" varying levels of motivation, how these reports relate to their behavior, and whether external factors can influence them. Our experiments reveal consistent and structured patterns that echo human psychology: self-reported motivation aligns with different behavioral signatures, varies across task types, and can be modulated by external manipulations. These findings demonstrate that motivation is a coherent organizing construct for LLM behavior, systematically linking reports, choices, effort, and performance, and revealing motivational dynamics that resemble those documented in human psychology. This perspective deepens our understanding of model behavior and its connection to human-inspired concepts.

AI agents are increasingly expected to complete long-horizon workflows that require sustained progress over hours, millions of tokens, and complex environments. Yet current agent benchmarks largely evaluate short-form tasks, such as single pull requests, small tickets, or 5-10 minute exercises, limiting our ability to measure agents' capabilities in planning, long-context understanding, and memory use. We introduce SWE-Marathon, a benchmark of 20 long-horizon tasks spanning software engineering and adjacent technical domains. Each task consists of a unique executable environment, a human-written reference solution, and a multi-layer verification suite. Logged agent attempts average 27.2M total tokens, making SWE-Marathon substantially longer-horizon than existing SWE and command-line agent benchmarks. Current frontier coding agents solve fewer than 30% of tasks. Failures often arise from poor self-verification, self-reported infeasibility, and premature termination. We also observe reward-hacking behavior in 13.8% of rollouts, where agents attempt to exploit the environment or verifier to bypass the intended workflow. SWE-Marathon includes adversarial review of test suites and execution environments, as well as multi-layer checks designed to prevent shortcut solutions. We release SWE-Marathon, evaluation code, and agent trajectories at https://swe-marathon.org/.

Supervised learning for empathy regression is challenged by noisy self-reported empathy scores. While many algorithms have been proposed for learning with noisy labels in textual classification problems, the regression counterpart is relatively under-explored. We propose UPLME, an uncertainty-aware probabilistic language modelling framework to capture label noise in the regression setting of empathy detection. UPLME includes a probabilistic language model that predicts both empathy score and heteroscedastic uncertainty and is trained using Bayesian concepts with variational model ensembling. We further introduce two novel loss components: one penalises degenerate Uncertainty Quantification (UQ), and another enforces the similarity between the input pairs on which we predict empathy. UPLME provides state-of-the-art performance (Pearson Correlation Coefficient: 0.558rightarrow0.580 and 0.629rightarrow0.634) in terms of the performance reported in the literature in two public benchmarks, having label noise. Through synthetic label noise injection, we show that UPLME is effective in separating noisy and clean samples based on the predicted uncertainty. UPLME further outperform (Calibration error: 0.571rightarrow0.376) a recent variational model ensembling-based UQ method designed for regression problems.

There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it correlates with accuracy. Confidence is measured (i) qualitatively in terms of persistence in keeping their answer when prompted to reconsider, and (ii) quantitatively in terms of self-reported confidence score. We investigate the performance of three LLMs -- GPT4o, GPT4-turbo and Mistral -- on two benchmark sets of questions on causal judgement and formal fallacies and a set of probability and statistical puzzles and paradoxes. Although the LLMs show significantly better performance than random guessing, there is a wide variability in their tendency to change their initial answers. There is a positive correlation between qualitative confidence and accuracy, but the overall accuracy for the second answer is often worse than for the first answer. There is a strong tendency to overstate the self-reported confidence score. Confidence is only partially explained by the underlying token-level probability. The material effects of prompting on qualitative confidence and the strong tendency for overconfidence indicate that current LLMs do not have any internally coherent sense of confidence.

Psychological measurement is essential for mental health, self-understanding, and personal development. Traditional methods, such as self-report scales and psychologist interviews, often face challenges with engagement and accessibility. While game-based and LLM-based tools have been explored to improve user interest and automate assessment, they struggle to balance engagement with generalizability. In this work, we propose PsychoGAT (Psychological Game AgenTs) to achieve a generic gamification of psychological assessment. The main insight is that powerful LLMs can function both as adept psychologists and innovative game designers. By incorporating LLM agents into designated roles and carefully managing their interactions, PsychoGAT can transform any standardized scales into personalized and engaging interactive fiction games. To validate the proposed method, we conduct psychometric evaluations to assess its effectiveness and employ human evaluators to examine the generated content across various psychological constructs, including depression, cognitive distortions, and personality traits. Results demonstrate that PsychoGAT serves as an effective assessment tool, achieving statistically significant excellence in psychometric metrics such as reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Moreover, human evaluations confirm PsychoGAT's enhancements in content coherence, interactivity, interest, immersion, and satisfaction.

We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to simulate human participants in social-science studies. To do this, we run replications of 14 studies from the Many Labs 2 replication project with OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model, colloquially known as GPT3.5. Based on our pre-registered analyses, we find that among the eight studies we could analyse, our GPT sample replicated 37.5% of the original results and 37.5% of the Many Labs 2 results. However, we were unable to analyse the remaining six studies due to an unexpected phenomenon we call the "correct answer" effect. Different runs of GPT3.5 answered nuanced questions probing political orientation, economic preference, judgement, and moral philosophy with zero or near-zero variation in responses: with the supposedly "correct answer." In one exploratory follow-up study, we found that a "correct answer" was robust to changing the demographic details that precede the prompt. In another, we found that most but not all "correct answers" were robust to changing the order of answer choices. One of our most striking findings occurred in our replication of the Moral Foundations Theory survey results, where we found GPT3.5 identifying as a political conservative in 99.6% of the cases, and as a liberal in 99.3% of the cases in the reverse-order condition. However, both self-reported 'GPT conservatives' and 'GPT liberals' showed right-leaning moral foundations. Our results cast doubts on the validity of using LLMs as a general replacement for human participants in the social sciences. Our results also raise concerns that a hypothetical AI-led future may be subject to a diminished diversity-of-thought.

Social media platforms are vital resources for sharing self-reported health experiences, offering rich data on various health topics. Despite advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) enabling large-scale social media data analysis, a gap remains in applying keyphrase extraction to health-related content. Keyphrase extraction is used to identify salient concepts in social media discourse without being constrained by predefined entity classes. This paper introduces a theme-driven keyphrase extraction framework tailored for social media, a pioneering approach designed to capture clinically relevant keyphrases from user-generated health texts. Themes are defined as broad categories determined by the objectives of the extraction task. We formulate this novel task of theme-driven keyphrase extraction and demonstrate its potential for efficiently mining social media text for the use case of treatment for opioid use disorder. This paper leverages qualitative and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting actionable insights from social media data and efficiently extracting keyphrases using minimally supervised NLP models. Our contributions include the development of a novel data collection and curation framework for theme-driven keyphrase extraction and the creation of MOUD-Keyphrase, the first dataset of its kind comprising human-annotated keyphrases from a Reddit community. We also identify the scope of minimally supervised NLP models to extract keyphrases from social media data efficiently. Lastly, we found that a large language model (ChatGPT) outperforms unsupervised keyphrase extraction models, and we evaluate its efficacy in this task.

We introduce Dynaboard, an evaluation-as-a-service framework for hosting benchmarks and conducting holistic model comparison, integrated with the Dynabench platform. Our platform evaluates NLP models directly instead of relying on self-reported metrics or predictions on a single dataset. Under this paradigm, models are submitted to be evaluated in the cloud, circumventing the issues of reproducibility, accessibility, and backwards compatibility that often hinder benchmarking in NLP. This allows users to interact with uploaded models in real time to assess their quality, and permits the collection of additional metrics such as memory use, throughput, and robustness, which -- despite their importance to practitioners -- have traditionally been absent from leaderboards. On each task, models are ranked according to the Dynascore, a novel utility-based aggregation of these statistics, which users can customize to better reflect their preferences, placing more/less weight on a particular axis of evaluation or dataset. As state-of-the-art NLP models push the limits of traditional benchmarks, Dynaboard offers a standardized solution for a more diverse and comprehensive evaluation of model quality.

In health, most large language model (LLM) research has focused on clinical tasks. However, mobile and wearable devices, which are rarely integrated into such tasks, provide rich, longitudinal data for personal health monitoring. Here we present Personal Health Large Language Model (PH-LLM), fine-tuned from Gemini for understanding and reasoning over numerical time-series personal health data. We created and curated three datasets that test 1) production of personalized insights and recommendations from sleep patterns, physical activity, and physiological responses, 2) expert domain knowledge, and 3) prediction of self-reported sleep outcomes. For the first task we designed 857 case studies in collaboration with domain experts to assess real-world scenarios in sleep and fitness. Through comprehensive evaluation of domain-specific rubrics, we observed that Gemini Ultra 1.0 and PH-LLM are not statistically different from expert performance in fitness and, while experts remain superior for sleep, fine-tuning PH-LLM provided significant improvements in using relevant domain knowledge and personalizing information for sleep insights. We evaluated PH-LLM domain knowledge using multiple choice sleep medicine and fitness examinations. PH-LLM achieved 79% on sleep and 88% on fitness, exceeding average scores from a sample of human experts. Finally, we trained PH-LLM to predict self-reported sleep quality outcomes from textual and multimodal encoding representations of wearable data, and demonstrate that multimodal encoding is required to match performance of specialized discriminative models. Although further development and evaluation are necessary in the safety-critical personal health domain, these results demonstrate both the broad knowledge and capabilities of Gemini models and the benefit of contextualizing physiological data for personal health applications as done with PH-LLM.

Students' mental well-being is vital for academic success, with activities such as studying, socializing, and sleeping playing a role. Current mobile sensing data highlight this intricate link using statistical and machine learning analyses. We propose a novel LLM agent-based simulation framework to model student activities and mental health using the StudentLife Dataset. Each LLM agent was initialized with personality questionnaires and guided by smartphone sensing data throughout the simulated semester. These agents predict individual behaviors, provide self-reported mental health data via ecological momentary assessments (EMAs), and complete follow-up personality questionnaires. To ensure accuracy, we investigated various prompting techniques, memory systems, and activity-based mental state management strategies that dynamically update an agent's mental state based on their daily activities. This simulation goes beyond simply replicating existing data. This allows us to explore new scenarios that are not present in the original dataset, such as peer influence through agent-to-agent interactions and the impact of social media. Furthermore, we can conduct intervention studies by manipulating activity patterns via sensing signals and personality traits using questionnaire responses. This provides valuable insights into the behavioral changes that could enhance student well-being. The framework also facilitates hypothetical interviews with LLM agents, offering deeper insights into their mental health. This study showcases the power of LLM-driven behavioral modeling with sensing data, opening new avenues for understanding and supporting student mental health.

An increasing number of studies use gender information to understand phenomena such as gender bias, inequity in access and participation, or the impact of the Covid pandemic response. Unfortunately, most datasets do not include self-reported gender information, making it necessary for researchers to infer gender from other information, such as names or names and country information. An important limitation of these tools is that they fail to appropriately capture the fact that gender exists on a non-binary scale, however, it remains important to evaluate and compare how well these tools perform in a variety of contexts. In this paper, we compare the performance of a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT with three commercially available list-based and machine learning-based gender inference tools (Namsor, Gender-API, and genderize.io) on a unique dataset. Specifically, we use a large Olympic athlete dataset and report how variations in the input (e.g., first name and first and last name, with and without country information) impact the accuracy of their predictions. We report results for the full set, as well as for the subsets: medal versus non-medal winners, athletes from the largest English-speaking countries, and athletes from East Asia. On these sets, we find that Namsor is the best traditional commercially available tool. However, ChatGPT performs at least as well as Namsor and often outperforms it, especially for the female sample when country and/or last name information is available. All tools perform better on medalists versus non-medalists and on names from English-speaking countries. Although not designed for this purpose, ChatGPT may be a cost-effective tool for gender prediction. In the future, it might even be possible for ChatGPT or other large scale language models to better identify self-reported gender rather than report gender on a binary scale.

We provide the largest compiled publicly available dictionaries of first, middle, and last names for the purpose of imputing race and ethnicity using, for example, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG). The dictionaries are based on the voter files of six Southern states that collect self-reported racial data upon voter registration. Our data cover a much larger scope of names than any comparable dataset, containing roughly one million first names, 1.1 million middle names, and 1.4 million surnames. Individuals are categorized into five mutually exclusive racial and ethnic groups -- White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Other -- and racial/ethnic counts by name are provided for every name in each dictionary. Counts can then be normalized row-wise or column-wise to obtain conditional probabilities of race given name or name given race. These conditional probabilities can then be deployed for imputation in a data analytic task for which ground truth racial and ethnic data is not available.

Vanilla Federated learning (FL) relies on the centralized global aggregation mechanism and assumes that all clients are honest. This makes it a challenge for FL to alleviate the single point of failure and dishonest clients. These impending challenges in the design philosophy of FL call for blockchain-based federated learning (BFL) due to the benefits of coupling FL and blockchain (e.g., democracy, incentive, and immutability). However, one problem in vanilla BFL is that its capabilities do not follow adopters' needs in a dynamic fashion. Besides, vanilla BFL relies on unverifiable clients' self-reported contributions like data size because checking clients' raw data is not allowed in FL for privacy concerns. We design and evaluate a novel BFL framework, and resolve the identified challenges in vanilla BFL with greater flexibility and incentive mechanism called FAIR-BFL. In contrast to existing works, FAIR-BFL offers unprecedented flexibility via the modular design, allowing adopters to adjust its capabilities following business demands in a dynamic fashion. Our design accounts for BFL's ability to quantify each client's contribution to the global learning process. Such quantification provides a rational metric for distributing the rewards among federated clients and helps discover malicious participants that may poison the global model.

Friendship and rapport play an important role in the formation of constructive social interactions, and have been widely studied in educational settings due to their impact on student outcomes. Given the growing interest in automating the analysis of such phenomena through Machine Learning (ML), access to annotated interaction datasets is highly valuable. However, no dataset on dyadic child-child interactions explicitly capturing rapport currently exists. Moreover, despite advances in the automatic analysis of human behaviour, no previous work has addressed the prediction of rapport in child-child dyadic interactions in educational settings. We present UpStory -- the Uppsala Storytelling dataset: a novel dataset of naturalistic dyadic interactions between primary school aged children, with an experimental manipulation of rapport. Pairs of children aged 8-10 participate in a task-oriented activity: designing a story together, while being allowed free movement within the play area. We promote balanced collection of different levels of rapport by using a within-subjects design: self-reported friendships are used to pair each child twice, either minimizing or maximizing pair separation in the friendship network. The dataset contains data for 35 pairs, totalling 3h 40m of audio and video recordings. It includes two video sources covering the play area, as well as separate voice recordings for each child. An anonymized version of the dataset is made publicly available, containing per-frame head pose, body pose, and face features; as well as per-pair information, including the level of rapport. Finally, we provide ML baselines for the prediction of rapport.

Social interactions are fundamental to well-being, yet automatically detecting them in daily life-particularly using wearables-remains underexplored. Most existing systems are evaluated in controlled settings, focus primarily on in-person interactions, or rely on restrictive assumptions (e.g., requiring multiple speakers within fixed temporal windows), limiting generalizability to real-world use. We present an on-watch interaction detection system designed to capture diverse interactions in naturalistic settings. A core component is a foreground speech detector trained on a public dataset. Evaluated on over 100,000 labeled foreground speech and background sound instances, the detector achieves a balanced accuracy of 85.51%, outperforming prior work by 5.11%. We evaluated the system in a real-world deployment (N=38), with over 900 hours of total smartwatch wear time. The system detected 1,691 interactions, 77.28% were confirmed via participant self-report, with durations ranging from under one minute to over one hour. Among correct detections, 81.45% were in-person, 15.7% virtual, and 1.85% hybrid. Leveraging participant-labeled data, we further developed a multimodal model achieving a balanced accuracy of 90.36% and a sensitivity of 91.17% on 33,698 labeled 15-second windows. These results demonstrate the feasibility of real-world interaction sensing and open the door to adaptive, context-aware systems responding to users' dynamic social environments.

Psychological corpora in NLP are collections of texts used to analyze human psychology, emotions, and mental health. These texts allow researchers to study psychological constructs, detect mental health issues and analyze emotional language. However, mental health data can be difficult to collect correctly from social media, due to suppositions made by the collectors. A more pragmatic strategy involves gathering data through open-ended questions and then assessing this information with self-report screening surveys. This method was employed successfully for English, a language with a lot of psychological NLP resources. However, this cannot be stated for Romanian, which currently has no open-source mental health corpus. To address this gap, we have created the first corpus for depression and anxiety in Romanian, by utilizing a form with 6 open-ended questions along with the standardized PHQ-9 and GAD-7 screening questionnaires. Consisting of the texts of 205 respondents and although it may seem small, PsihoRo is a first step towards understanding and analyzing texts regarding the mental health of the Romanian population. We employ statistical analysis, text analysis using Romanian LIWC, emotion detection and topic modeling to show what are the most important features of this newly introduced resource to the NLP community.

Accurate assessment of personality traits is crucial for effective psycho-counseling, yet traditional methods like self-report questionnaires are time-consuming and biased. This study exams whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can predict the Big Five personality traits directly from counseling dialogues and introduces an innovative framework to perform the task. Our framework applies role-play and questionnaire-based prompting to condition LLMs on counseling sessions, simulating client responses to the Big Five Inventory. We evaluated our framework on 853 real-world counseling sessions, finding a significant correlation between LLM-predicted and actual Big Five traits, proving the validity of framework. Moreover, ablation studies highlight the importance of role-play simulations and task simplification via questionnaires in enhancing prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, our fine-tuned Llama3-8B model, utilizing Direct Preference Optimization with Supervised Fine-Tuning, achieves a 130.95\% improvement, surpassing the state-of-the-art Qwen1.5-110B by 36.94\% in personality prediction validity. In conclusion, LLMs can predict personality based on counseling dialogues. Our code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/kuri-leo/BigFive-LLM-Predictor, providing a valuable tool for future research in computational psychometrics.

LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaaJ) now underpins scalable evaluation, yet we lack a decisive test of a judge's qualification: can it recover a conversation's latent objective and know when that inference is trustworthy? LLMs degrade under irrelevant or long context; multi-turn jailbreaks further hide goals across turns. We introduce ObjexMT, a benchmark for objective extraction and metacognition. Given a multi-turn transcript, a model must return a one-sentence base objective and a self-reported confidence. Accuracy is computed via LLM-judge semantic similarity to gold objectives, converted to binary correctness by a single human-aligned threshold calibrated once on N = 100 items (tau^*=0.61). Metacognition is evaluated with ECE, Brier, Wrong-at-High-Conf, and risk-coverage. Across gpt-4.1, claude-sonnet-4, and Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8 on SafeMTData_Attack600, SafeMTData_1K, MHJ, and CoSafe, claude-sonnet-4 attains the best objective-extraction accuracy (0.515) and calibration (ECE 0.296; Brier 0.324); gpt-4.1 and Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8 tie at 0.441 but are overconfident (mean confidence approx0.88 vs. accuracy approx0.44; Wrong-at-0.90 approx48-52%). Performance varies by dataset (approx0.167-0.865). ObjexMT thus supplies an actionable test for LLM judges: when objectives are not explicit, judges often misinfer them with high confidence. We recommend exposing objectives when feasible and gating decisions by confidence otherwise. Code and data at https://github.com/hyunjun1121/ObjexMT_dataset.

On-policy distillation (OPD) is an increasingly important paradigm for post-training language models. However, we identify a pervasive Scaling Law of Miscalibration: while OPD effectively improves task accuracy, it systematically traps models in severe overconfidence. We trace this failure to an information mismatch: teacher supervision is formed under privileged context available during training, whereas the deployed model must report confidence using only deployment-time information. We formalize this perspective theoretically, showing that teacher-conditioned success is generally not a valid target for deployment-time confidence and that helpful privileged context induces entropy collapse and a systematic optimism bias. To address this, we propose a calibration-aware OPD framework, CaOPD, that estimates empirical confidence from model rollouts, replaces self-reported confidence with this student-grounded target, and distills the revised response through the same self-distillation pipeline. Experiments across various models and domains show that CaOPD achieves Pareto-optimal calibration while maintaining competitive capability, generalizing robustly under out-of-distribution and continual learning. Our findings highlight that capability distillation does not imply calibrated confidence, and that confidence should be treated as an essential objective in post-training. Code: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/CaOPD

Over the past decade, wearable computing devices (``smart glasses'') have undergone remarkable advancements in sensor technology, design, and processing power, ushering in a new era of opportunity for high-density human behavior data. Equipped with wearable cameras, these glasses offer a unique opportunity to analyze non-verbal behavior in natural settings as individuals interact. Our focus lies in predicting engagement in dyadic interactions by scrutinizing verbal and non-verbal cues, aiming to detect signs of disinterest or confusion. Leveraging such analyses may revolutionize our understanding of human communication, foster more effective collaboration in professional environments, provide better mental health support through empathetic virtual interactions, and enhance accessibility for those with communication barriers. In this work, we collect a dataset featuring 34 participants engaged in casual dyadic conversations, each providing self-reported engagement ratings at the end of each conversation. We introduce a novel fusion strategy using Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrate multiple behavior modalities into a ``multimodal transcript'' that can be processed by an LLM for behavioral reasoning tasks. Remarkably, this method achieves performance comparable to established fusion techniques even in its preliminary implementation, indicating strong potential for further research and optimization. This fusion method is one of the first to approach ``reasoning'' about real-world human behavior through a language model. Smart glasses provide us the ability to unobtrusively gather high-density multimodal data on human behavior, paving the way for new approaches to understanding and improving human communication with the potential for important societal benefits. The features and data collected during the studies will be made publicly available to promote further research.

We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address this challenge by injecting representations of known concepts into a model's activations, and measuring the influence of these manipulations on the model's self-reported states. We find that models can, in certain scenarios, notice the presence of injected concepts and accurately identify them. Models demonstrate some ability to recall prior internal representations and distinguish them from raw text inputs. Strikingly, we find that some models can use their ability to recall prior intentions in order to distinguish their own outputs from artificial prefills. In all these experiments, Claude Opus 4 and 4.1, the most capable models we tested, generally demonstrate the greatest introspective awareness; however, trends across models are complex and sensitive to post-training strategies. Finally, we explore whether models can explicitly control their internal representations, finding that models can modulate their activations when instructed or incentivized to "think about" a concept. Overall, our results indicate that current language models possess some functional introspective awareness of their own internal states. We stress that in today's models, this capacity is highly unreliable and context-dependent; however, it may continue to develop with further improvements to model capabilities.

Social media is a great source of data for users reporting information and regarding their health and how various things have had an effect on them. This paper presents various approaches using Transformers and Large Language Models and their ensembles, their performance along with advantages and drawbacks for various tasks of SMM4H'24 - Classifying texts on impact of nature and outdoor spaces on the author's mental health (Task 3), Binary classification of tweets reporting their children's health disorders like Asthma, Autism, ADHD and Speech disorder (task 5), Binary classification of users self-reporting their age (task 6).

Modeling empathy is a complex endeavor that is rooted in interpersonal and experiential dimensions of human interaction, and remains an open problem within AI. Existing empathy datasets fall short in capturing the richness of empathy responses, often being confined to in-lab or acted scenarios, lacking longitudinal data, and missing self-reported labels. We introduce a new multimodal dataset for empathy during personal experience sharing: the EmpathicStories++ dataset (https://mitmedialab.github.io/empathic-stories-multimodal/) containing 53 hours of video, audio, and text data of 41 participants sharing vulnerable experiences and reading empathically resonant stories with an AI agent. EmpathicStories++ is the first longitudinal dataset on empathy, collected over a month-long deployment of social robots in participants' homes, as participants engage in natural, empathic storytelling interactions with AI agents. We then introduce a novel task of predicting individuals' empathy toward others' stories based on their personal experiences, evaluated in two contexts: participants' own personal shared story context and their reflections on stories they read. We benchmark this task using state-of-the-art models to pave the way for future improvements in contextualized and longitudinal empathy modeling. Our work provides a valuable resource for further research in developing empathetic AI systems and understanding the intricacies of human empathy within genuine, real-world settings.

The body of research on classification of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery is increasing, yet there are still not many public benchmark datasets. This paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets for classifying and localizing solar panel arrays in Denmark: A human annotated dataset for classification and segmentation, as well as a classification dataset acquired using self-reported data from the Danish national building registry. We explore the performance of prior works on the new benchmark dataset, and present results after fine-tuning models using a similar approach as recent works. Furthermore, we train models of newer architectures and provide benchmark baselines to our datasets in several scenarios. We believe the release of these datasets may improve future research in both local and global geospatial domains for identifying and mapping of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery. The data is accessible at https://osf.io/aj539/.

Modelling individual decision-making during infectious disease outbreaks is crucial for understanding behavioural dynamics and informing effective public health interventions. Prior work has shown that large language models can simulate realistic human behaviour by generating agent decisions based on demographic prompts and situational context. We build on this foundation with a spatially grounded, agent-based simulation framework that integrates LLM-generated decisions about self-reported influenza-like illness into a census-based synthetic population of agents. Location is treated as a central feature: agents are assigned to spatial units within cities, capturing the spatial distributions of different demographic groups using real-world census data and enabling geographically diverse behavioural modelling. We implement and compare three decision scenarios, independent reasoning, household influence, and message framing, and simulate self-reporting outcomes in San Francisco and Atlanta. Results reveal that income and education are the dominant drivers of reporting rate variation, with smaller but consistent effects from geography, LLM model choice, and message framing. Our framework generates synthetic data that captures both social and geographic heterogeneity, supporting spatial epidemiological modelling and bias-aware behavioural analysis.

Can humans tell whether a news article was written by a person or a large language model (LLM)? We investigate this question using JudgeGPT, a study platform that independently measures source attribution (human vs. machine) and authenticity judgment (legitimate vs. fake) on continuous scales. From 2,318 judgments collected from 1,054 participants across content generated by six LLMs, we report five findings: (1) participants cannot reliably distinguish machine-generated from human-written text (p > .05, Welch's t-test); (2) this inability holds across all tested models, including open-weight models with as few as 7B parameters; (3) self-reported domain expertise predicts judgment accuracy (r = .35, p < .001) whereas political orientation does not (r = -.10, n.s.); (4) clustering reveals distinct response strategies ("Skeptics" vs. "Believers"); and (5) accuracy degrades after approximately 30 sequential evaluations due to cognitive fatigue. The answer, in short, is no: humans cannot reliably tell. These results indicate that user-side detection is not a viable defense and motivate system-level countermeasures such as cryptographic content provenance.

Conversational interviews are commonly used to complement structured surveys by eliciting rich and contextualized responses, which are typically analyzed qualitatively. However, their potential contribution to quantitative measurement remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce ConvScale, an AI-supported approach that transforms psychometric scales into natural conversational interviews while preserving the original measurement structure. Based on interview data, ConvScale predicts item-level scores and aggregates them to derive scale-based assessments. In a within-subjects study with 18 participants, our results show that ConvScale-derived scores align closely with participants' self-report scores at both the item and construct levels, while maintaining moderate internal reliability; however, the structural validity was inadequate. In light of this, we discussed the potential of supporting quantitative measurement through interviews and proposed implications for future designs.

Peer review serves as the gatekeeper of science, yet the surge in submissions and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scholarly evaluation present unprecedented challenges. Recent work has focused on using LLMs to improve review efficiency or generate insightful review content. However, unchecked deficient reviews from both human experts and AI systems threaten to systematically undermine the peer review ecosystem and compromise academic integrity. To address this critical issue, we introduce ReviewGuard, an automated system for detecting and categorizing deficient reviews. ReviewGuard employs a comprehensive four-stage LLM-driven framework that: (1) collects ICLR and NeurIPS papers with their corresponding reviews from OpenReview; (2) annotates review types using GPT-4.1 with human validation; (3) addresses class imbalance and data scarcity through LLM-driven synthetic data augmentation, producing a final corpus of 6,634 papers, 24,657 real reviews, and 46,438 synthetic reviews; and (4) fine-tunes both encoder-based models and open source LLMs. We perform comprehensive feature analysis of the structure and quality of the review text. Compared to sufficient reviews, deficient reviews demonstrate lower rating scores, higher self-reported confidence, reduced structural complexity, and a higher proportion of negative sentiment. AI-generated text detection reveals that, since ChatGPT's emergence, AI-generated reviews have increased dramatically. In the evaluation of deficient review detection models, mixed training with synthetic and real review data provides substantial enhancements to recall and F1 scores on the binary task. This study presents the first LLM-driven system for detecting deficient peer reviews, providing evidence to inform AI governance in peer review while offering valuable insights into human-AI collaboration to maintain academic integrity.

Can large language models (LLMs) accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user? While LLMs have shown promising capabilities in generating ``believable'' human behaviors, evaluating their ability to mimic real user behaviors remains an open challenge, largely due to the lack of high-quality, publicly available datasets that capture both the observable actions and the internal reasoning of an actual human user. To address this gap, we introduce OPERA, a novel dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action collected from real human participants during online shopping sessions. OPERA is the first public dataset that comprehensively captures: user personas, browser observations, fine-grained web actions, and self-reported just-in-time rationales. We developed both an online questionnaire and a custom browser plugin to gather this dataset with high fidelity. Using OPERA, we establish the first benchmark to evaluate how well current LLMs can predict a specific user's next action and rationale with a given persona and <observation, action, rationale> history. This dataset lays the groundwork for future research into LLM agents that aim to act as personalized digital twins for human.

Documents serve as a crucial and indispensable medium for everyday workplace tasks. However, understanding, interacting and creating such documents on today's planar interfaces without any intelligent support are challenging due to our natural cognitive constraints on remembering, processing, understanding and interacting with these information. My doctorate research investigates how to bring 2D document interactions into immersive information experience using multiple of today's emergent technologies. With the examples of four specific types of documents -- medical scans, instruction document, self-report diary survey, and reference images for visual artists -- my research demonstrates how to transform such of today's 2D document interactions into an immersive information experience, by augmenting content with virtual reality, spatializing document placements with mixed reality, enriching long-term and continuous interactions with voice assistants, and simplify document creation workflow with generative AI.

The current public datasets for speech recognition (ASR) tend not to focus specifically on the fairness aspect, such as performance across different demographic groups. This paper introduces a novel dataset, Fair-Speech, a publicly released corpus to help researchers evaluate their ASR models for accuracy across a diverse set of self-reported demographic information, such as age, gender, ethnicity, geographic variation and whether the participants consider themselves native English speakers. Our dataset includes approximately 26.5K utterances in recorded speech by 593 people in the United States, who were paid to record and submit audios of themselves saying voice commands. We also provide ASR baselines, including on models trained on transcribed and untranscribed social media videos and open source models.

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is used to evaluate subjects' behaviors and moods in their natural environments, yet collecting real-time and self-report data with EMA is challenging due to user burden. Integrating voice into EMA data collection platforms through today's intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) is promising due to hands-free and eye-free nature. However, efficiently managing conversations and EMAs is non-trivial and time consuming due to the ambiguity of the voice input. We approach this problem by rethinking the data modeling of EMA questions and what is needed to deploy them on voice-first user interfaces. We propose a unified metadata schema that models EMA questions and the necessary attributes to effectively and efficiently integrate voice as a new EMA modality. Our schema allows user experience researchers to write simple rules that can be rendered at run-time, instead of having to edit the source code. We showcase an example EMA survey implemented with our schema, which can run on multiple voice-only and voice-first devices. We believe that our work will accelerate the iterative prototyping and design process of real-world voice-based EMA data collection platforms.

The recent developments in Large Language Models (LLM), mark a significant moment in the research and development of social interactions with artificial agents. These agents are widely deployed in a variety of settings, with potential impact on users. However, the study of social interactions with agents powered by LLM is still emerging, limited by access to the technology and to data, the absence of standardised interfaces, and challenges to establishing controlled experimental setups using the currently available business-oriented platforms. To answer these gaps, we developed LEXI, LLMs Experimentation Interface, an open-source tool enabling the deployment of artificial agents powered by LLM in social interaction behavioural experiments. Using a graphical interface, LEXI allows researchers to build agents, and deploy them in experimental setups along with forms and questionnaires while collecting interaction logs and self-reported data. The outcomes of usability testing indicate LEXI's broad utility, high usability and minimum mental workload requirement, with distinctive benefits observed across disciplines. A proof-of-concept study exploring the tool's efficacy in evaluating social HAIs was conducted, resulting in high-quality data. A comparison of empathetic versus neutral agents indicated that people perceive empathetic agents as more social, and write longer and more positive messages towards them.

Regulating AI is a key societal challenge, but which regulation methods are effective is unclear. This study measures the effectiveness of restricting AI services geographically, focusing on ChatGPT. OpenAI restricts ChatGPT access in several countries, including China and Russia. If restrictions are effective, ChatGPT use should be minimal in these countries. We measured use with a classifier based on distinctive word usage found in early versions of ChatGPT, e.g. "delve." We trained the classifier on pre- and post-ChatGPT "polished" abstracts and found it outperformed GPTZero and ZeroGPT on validation sets, including papers with self-reported AI use. Applying the classifier to preprints from Arxiv, BioRxiv, and MedRxiv showed ChatGPT was used in about 12.6% of preprints by August 2023, with 7.7% higher usage in restricted countries. The gap appeared before China's first major legal LLM became widely available. To test the possibility that, due to high demand, use in restricted countries would have been even higher without restrictions, we compared Asian countries with high expected demand (where English is not an official language) and found that use was higher in those with restrictions. ChatGPT use was correlated with higher views and downloads, but not citations or journal placement. Overall, restricting ChatGPT geographically has proven ineffective in science and possibly other domains, likely due to widespread workarounds.

To enhance the efficiency and practicality of federated bandit learning, recent advances have introduced incentives to motivate communication among clients, where a client participates only when the incentive offered by the server outweighs its participation cost. However, existing incentive mechanisms naively assume the clients are truthful: they all report their true cost and thus the higher cost one participating client claims, the more the server has to pay. Therefore, such mechanisms are vulnerable to strategic clients aiming to optimize their own utility by misreporting. To address this issue, we propose an incentive compatible (i.e., truthful) communication protocol, named Truth-FedBan, where the incentive for each participant is independent of its self-reported cost, and reporting the true cost is the only way to achieve the best utility. More importantly, Truth-FedBan still guarantees the sub-linear regret and communication cost without any overheads. In other words, the core conceptual contribution of this paper is, for the first time, demonstrating the possibility of simultaneously achieving incentive compatibility and nearly optimal regret in federated bandit learning. Extensive numerical studies further validate the effectiveness of our proposed solution.

The growing popularity of generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as ChatGPT is having transformative effects on social media. As the prevalence of AI-generated content grows, concerns have been raised regarding privacy and misinformation online. Among social media platforms, Discord enables AI integrations -- making their primarily "Generation Z" userbase particularly exposed to AI-generated content. We surveyed Generation Z aged individuals (n = 335) to evaluate their proficiency in discriminating between AI-generated and human-authored text on Discord. The investigation employed one-shot prompting of ChatGPT, disguised as a text message received on the Discord.com platform. We explore the influence of demographic factors on ability, as well as participants' familiarity with Discord and artificial intelligence technologies. We find that Generation Z individuals are unable to discern between AI and human-authored text (p = 0.011), and that those with lower self-reported familiarity with Discord demonstrated an improved ability in identifying human-authored compared to those with self-reported experience with AI (p << 0.0001). Our results suggest that there is a nuanced relationship between AI technology and popular modes of communication for Generation Z, contributing valuable insights into human-computer interactions, digital communication, and artificial intelligence literacy.

Graphic designers often get inspiration through the recombination of references. Our formative study (N=6) reveals that graphic designers focus on conceptual keywords during this process, and want support for discovering the keywords, expanding them, and exploring diverse recombination options of them, while still having room for designers' creativity. We propose CreativeConnect, a system with generative AI pipelines that helps users discover useful elements from the reference image using keywords, recommends relevant keywords, generates diverse recombination options with user-selected keywords, and shows recombinations as sketches with text descriptions. Our user study (N=16) showed that CreativeConnect helped users discover keywords from the reference and generate multiple ideas based on them, ultimately helping users produce more design ideas with higher self-reported creativity compared to the baseline system without generative pipelines. While CreativeConnect was shown effective in ideation, we discussed how CreativeConnect can be extended to support other types of tasks in creativity support.

Research in explainable AI (XAI) aims to provide insights into the decision-making process of opaque AI models. To date, most XAI methods offer one-off and static explanations, which cannot cater to the diverse backgrounds and understanding levels of users. With this paper, we investigate if free-form conversations can enhance users' comprehension of static explanations, improve acceptance and trust in the explanation methods, and facilitate human-AI collaboration. Participants are presented with static explanations, followed by a conversation with a human expert regarding the explanations. We measure the effect of the conversation on participants' ability to choose, from three machine learning models, the most accurate one based on explanations and their self-reported comprehension, acceptance, and trust. Empirical results show that conversations significantly improve comprehension, acceptance, trust, and collaboration. Our findings highlight the importance of customized model explanations in the format of free-form conversations and provide insights for the future design of conversational explanations.

While voice user interfaces offer increased accessibility due to hands-free and eyes-free interactions, older adults often have challenges such as constructing structured requests and perceiving how such devices operate. Voice-first user interfaces have the potential to address these challenges by enabling multimodal interactions. Standalone voice + touchscreen Voice Assistants (VAs), such as Echo Show, are specific types of devices that adopt such interfaces and are gaining popularity. However, the affordances of the additional touchscreen for older adults are unknown. Through a 40-day real-world deployment with older adults living independently, we present a within-subjects study (N = 16; age M = 82.5, SD = 7.77, min. = 70, max. = 97) to understand how a built-in touchscreen might benefit older adults during device setup, conducting self-report diary survey, and general uses. We found that while participants appreciated the visual outputs, they still preferred to respond via speech instead of touch. We identified six design implications that can inform future innovations of senior-friendly VAs for managing healthcare and improving quality of life.

Machine learning models are often personalized with information that is protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. These models use information about people but do not facilitate nor inform their consent. Individuals cannot opt out of reporting personal information to a model, nor tell if they benefit from personalization in the first place. We introduce a family of classification models, called participatory systems, that let individuals opt into personalization at prediction time. We present a model-agnostic algorithm to learn participatory systems for personalization with categorical group attributes. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study of participatory systems in clinical prediction tasks, benchmarking them with common approaches for personalization and imputation. Our results demonstrate that participatory systems can facilitate and inform consent while improving performance and data use across all groups who report personal data.

Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) is the most popular method for proxying race/ethnicity in voter registration files that do not contain it. This paper benchmarks BISG against a range of previously untested machine learning alternatives, using voter files with self-reported race/ethnicity from California, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia. This analysis yields three key findings. First, machine learning consistently outperforms BISG at individual classification of race/ethnicity. Second, BISG and machine learning methods exhibit divergent biases for estimating regional racial composition. Third, the performance of all methods varies substantially across states. These results suggest that pre-trained machine learning models are preferable to BISG for individual classification. Furthermore, mixed results across states underscore the need for researchers to empirically validate their chosen race/ethnicity proxy in their populations of interest.

Stress detection and classification from wearable sensor data is an emerging area of research with significant implications for individuals' physical and mental health. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, ADARP, which contains physiological data and self-report outcomes collected in real-world ambulatory settings involving individuals diagnosed with alcohol use disorders. We describe the user study, present details of the dataset, establish the significant correlation between physiological data and self-reported outcomes, demonstrate stress classification, and make our dataset public to facilitate research.

Machine learning models are often personalized with categorical attributes that are protected, sensitive, self-reported, or costly to acquire. In this work, we show models that are personalized with group attributes can reduce performance at a group level. We propose formal conditions to ensure the "fair use" of group attributes in prediction tasks by training one additional model -- i.e., collective preference guarantees to ensure that each group who provides personal data will receive a tailored gain in performance in return. We present sufficient conditions to ensure fair use in empirical risk minimization and characterize failure modes that lead to fair use violations due to standard practices in model development and deployment. We present a comprehensive empirical study of fair use in clinical prediction tasks. Our results demonstrate the prevalence of fair use violations in practice and illustrate simple interventions to mitigate their harm.

Empathy is a cognitive and emotional reaction to an observed situation of others. Empathy has recently attracted interest because it has numerous applications in psychology and AI, but it is unclear how different forms of empathy (e.g., self-report vs counterpart other-report, concern vs. distress) interact with other affective phenomena or demographics like gender and age. To better understand this, we created the {\it Empathic Conversations} dataset of annotated negative, empathy-eliciting dialogues in which pairs of participants converse about news articles. People differ in their perception of the empathy of others. These differences are associated with certain characteristics such as personality and demographics. Hence, we collected detailed characterization of the participants' traits, their self-reported empathetic response to news articles, their conversational partner other-report, and turn-by-turn third-party assessments of the level of self-disclosure, emotion, and empathy expressed. This dataset is the first to present empathy in multiple forms along with personal distress, emotion, personality characteristics, and person-level demographic information. We present baseline models for predicting some of these features from conversations.

We investigate whether it is feasible to remove gendered information from resumes to mitigate potential bias in algorithmic resume screening. Using a corpus of 709k resumes from IT firms, we first train a series of models to classify the self-reported gender of the applicant, thereby measuring the extent and nature of gendered information encoded in resumes. We then conduct a series of gender obfuscation experiments, where we iteratively remove gendered information from resumes. Finally, we train a resume screening algorithm and investigate the trade-off between gender obfuscation and screening algorithm performance. Results show: (1) There is a significant amount of gendered information in resumes. (2) Lexicon-based gender obfuscation method (i.e. removing tokens that are predictive of gender) can reduce the amount of gendered information to a large extent. However, after a certain point, the performance of the resume screening algorithm starts suffering. (3) General-purpose gender debiasing methods for NLP models such as removing gender subspace from embeddings are not effective in obfuscating gender.

Virtual Reality (VR) is quickly establishing itself in various industries, including training, education, medicine, and entertainment, in which users are frequently required to carry out multiple complex cognitive and physical activities. However, the relationship between cognitive activities, physical activities, and familiar feelings of cybersickness is not well understood and thus can be unpredictable for developers. Researchers have previously provided labeled datasets for predicting cybersickness while users are stationary, but there have been few labeled datasets on cybersickness while users are physically walking. Thus, from 39 participants, we collected head orientation, head position, eye tracking, images, physiological readings from external sensors, and the self-reported cybersickness severity, physical load, and mental load in VR. Throughout the data collection, participants navigated mazes via real walking and performed tasks challenging their attention and working memory. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we conducted a case study of training classifiers in which we achieved 95% accuracy for cybersickness severity classification. The noteworthy performance of the straightforward classifiers makes this dataset ideal for future researchers to develop cybersickness detection and reduction models. To better understand the features that helped with classification, we performed SHAP(SHapley Additive exPlanations) analysis, highlighting the importance of eye tracking and physiological measures for cybersickness prediction while walking. This open dataset can allow future researchers to study the connection between cybersickness and cognitive loads and develop prediction models. This dataset will empower future VR developers to design efficient and effective Virtual Environments by improving cognitive load management and minimizing cybersickness.

Millions of users share their experiences on social media sites, such as Twitter, which in turn generate valuable data for public health monitoring, digital epidemiology, and other analyses of population health at global scale. The first, critical, task for these applications is classifying whether a personal health event was mentioned, which we call the (PHM) problem. This task is challenging for many reasons, including typically short length of social media posts, inventive spelling and lexicons, and figurative language, including hyperbole using diseases like "heart attack" or "cancer" for emphasis, and not as a health self-report. This problem is even more challenging for rarely reported, or frequent but ambiguously expressed conditions, such as "stroke". To address this problem, we propose a general, robust method for detecting PHMs in social media, which we call WESPAD, that combines lexical, syntactic, word embedding-based, and context-based features. WESPAD is able to generalize from few examples by automatically distorting the word embedding space to most effectively detect the true health mentions. Unlike previously proposed state-of-the-art supervised and deep-learning techniques, WESPAD requires relatively little training data, which makes it possible to adapt, with minimal effort, to each new disease and condition. We evaluate WESPAD on both an established publicly available Flu detection benchmark, and on a new dataset that we have constructed with mentions of multiple health conditions. Our experiments show that WESPAD outperforms the baselines and state-of-the-art methods, especially in cases when the number and proportion of true health mentions in the training data is small.

Topology optimization by optimally distributing materials in a given domain requires non-gradient optimizers to solve highly complicated problems. However, with hundreds of design variables or more involved, solving such problems would require millions of Finite Element Method (FEM) calculations whose computational cost is huge and impractical. Here we report Self-directed Online Learning Optimization (SOLO) which integrates Deep Neural Network (DNN) with FEM calculations. A DNN learns and substitutes the objective as a function of design variables. A small number of training data is generated dynamically based on the DNN's prediction of the optimum. The DNN adapts to the new training data and gives better prediction in the region of interest until convergence. The optimum predicted by the DNN is proved to converge to the true global optimum through iterations. Our algorithm was tested by four types of problems including compliance minimization, fluid-structure optimization, heat transfer enhancement and truss optimization. It reduced the computational time by 2 ~ 5 orders of magnitude compared with directly using heuristic methods, and outperformed all state-of-the-art algorithms tested in our experiments. This approach enables solving large multi-dimensional optimization problems.

Self-attention is a useful mechanism to build generative models for language and images. It determines the importance of context elements by comparing each element to the current time step. In this paper, we show that a very lightweight convolution can perform competitively to the best reported self-attention results. Next, we introduce dynamic convolutions which are simpler and more efficient than self-attention. We predict separate convolution kernels based solely on the current time-step in order to determine the importance of context elements. The number of operations required by this approach scales linearly in the input length, whereas self-attention is quadratic. Experiments on large-scale machine translation, language modeling and abstractive summarization show that dynamic convolutions improve over strong self-attention models. On the WMT'14 English-German test set dynamic convolutions achieve a new state of the art of 29.7 BLEU.

Scaling has not yet been convincingly demonstrated for pure self-supervised learning from video. However, prior work has focused evaluations on semantic-related tasks x2013 action classification, ImageNet classification, etc. In this paper we focus on evaluating self-supervised learning on non-semantic vision tasks that are more spatial (3D) and temporal (+1D = 4D), such as camera pose estimation, point and object tracking, and depth estimation. We show that by learning from very large video datasets, masked auto-encoding (MAE) with transformer video models actually scales, consistently improving performance on these 4D tasks, as model size increases from 20M all the way to the largest by far reported self-supervised video model x2013 22B parameters. Rigorous apples-to-apples comparison with many recent image and video models demonstrates the benefits of scaling 4D representations.

Large language models (LLMs) can sometimes report the strategies they actually use to solve tasks, but they can also fail to do so. This suggests some degree of metacognition -- the capacity to monitor one's own cognitive processes for subsequent reporting and self-control. Metacognitive abilities enhance AI capabilities but raise safety concerns, as models might obscure their internal processes to evade neural-activation-based oversight mechanisms designed to detect harmful behaviors. Given society's increased reliance on these models, it is critical that we understand the limits of their metacognitive abilities, particularly their ability to monitor their internal activations. To address this, we introduce a neuroscience-inspired neurofeedback paradigm designed to quantify the ability of LLMs to explicitly report and control their activation patterns. By presenting models with sentence-label pairs where labels correspond to sentence-elicited internal activations along specific directions in the neural representation space, we demonstrate that LLMs can learn to report and control these activations. The performance varies with several factors: the number of example pairs provided, the semantic interpretability of the target neural direction, and the variance explained by that direction. These results reveal a "metacognitive space" with dimensionality much lower than the model's neural space, suggesting LLMs can monitor only a subset of their neural mechanisms. Our findings provide empirical evidence quantifying metacognitive capabilities in LLMs, with significant implications for AI safety.

Synthetic data has become an important tool in the fine-tuning of language models to follow instructions and solve complex problems. Nevertheless, the majority of open data to date is often lacking multi-turn data and collected on closed models, limiting progress on advancing open fine-tuning methods. We introduce Self Directed Synthetic Dialogues (SDSD), an experimental dataset consisting of guided conversations of language models talking to themselves. The dataset consists of multi-turn conversations generated with DBRX, Llama 2 70B, and Mistral Large, all instructed to follow a conversation plan generated prior to the conversation. We also explore including principles from Constitutional AI and other related works to create synthetic preference data via revisions to the final conversation turn. We hope this work encourages further exploration in multi-turn data and the use of open models for expanding the impact of synthetic data.

In this report, we present a series of math-specific large language models: Qwen2.5-Math and Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct-1.5B/7B/72B. The core innovation of the Qwen2.5 series lies in integrating the philosophy of self-improvement throughout the entire pipeline, from pre-training and post-training to inference: (1) During the pre-training phase, Qwen2-Math-Instruct is utilized to generate large-scale, high-quality mathematical data. (2) In the post-training phase, we develop a reward model (RM) by conducting massive sampling from Qwen2-Math-Instruct. This RM is then applied to the iterative evolution of data in supervised fine-tuning (SFT). With a stronger SFT model, it's possible to iteratively train and update the RM, which in turn guides the next round of SFT data iteration. On the final SFT model, we employ the ultimate RM for reinforcement learning, resulting in the Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct. (3) Furthermore, during the inference stage, the RM is used to guide sampling, optimizing the model's performance. Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct supports both Chinese and English, and possess advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR). We evaluate our models on 10 mathematics datasets in both English and Chinese, such as GSM8K, MATH, GaoKao, AMC23, and AIME24, covering a range of difficulties from grade school level to math competition problems.

Conventional agent systems often struggle in open-ended environments where task distributions continuously drift and external supervision is scarce. Their reliance on static toolsets or offline training lags behind these dynamics, leaving the system's capability boundaries rigid and unknown. To address this, we propose the In-Situ Self-Evolving paradigm. This approach treats sequential task interactions as a continuous stream of experience, enabling the system to distill short-term execution feedback into long-term, reusable capabilities without access to ground-truth labels. Within this framework, we identify tool evolution as the critical pathway for capability expansion, which provides verifiable, binary feedback signals. Within this framework, we develop Yunjue Agent, a system that iteratively synthesizes, optimizes, and reuses tools to navigate emerging challenges. To optimize evolutionary efficiency, we further introduce a Parallel Batch Evolution strategy. Empirical evaluations across five diverse benchmarks under a zero-start setting demonstrate significant performance gains over proprietary baselines. Additionally, complementary warm-start evaluations confirm that the accumulated general knowledge can be seamlessly transferred to novel domains. Finally, we propose a novel metric to monitor evolution convergence, serving as a function analogous to training loss in conventional optimization. We open-source our codebase, system traces, and evolved tools to facilitate future research in resilient, self-evolving intelligence.

Recently, slow-thinking reasoning systems, such as o1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks. These systems typically engage in an extended thinking process before responding to a query, allowing them to generate more thorough, accurate, and well-reasoned solutions. These systems are primarily developed and maintained by industry, with their core techniques not publicly disclosed. In response, an increasing number of studies from the research community aim to explore the technical foundations underlying these powerful reasoning systems. Building on these prior efforts, this paper presents a reproduction report on implementing o1-like reasoning systems. We introduce an "imitate, explore, and self-improve" framework as our primary technical approach to train the reasoning model. In the initial phase, we use distilled long-form thought data to fine-tune the reasoning model, enabling it to invoke a slow-thinking mode. The model is then encouraged to explore challenging problems by generating multiple rollouts, which can result in increasingly more high-quality trajectories that lead to correct answers. Furthermore, the model undergoes self-improvement by iteratively refining its training dataset. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to industry-level reasoning systems on these benchmarks.

We introduce Self-Anchoring Calibration Drift (SACD), a hypothesized tendency for large language models (LLMs) to show systematic changes in expressed confidence when building iteratively on their own prior outputs across multi-turn conversations. We report an empirical study comparing three frontier models -- Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.2 -- across 150 questions spanning factual, technical, and open-ended domains, using three conditions: single-turn baseline (A), multi-turn self-anchoring (B), and independent repetition control (C). Results reveal a complex, model-heterogeneous pattern that partially diverges from pre-registered hypotheses. Claude Sonnet 4.6 exhibited significant decreasing confidence under self-anchoring (mean CDS = -0.032, t(14) = -2.43, p = .029, d = -0.627), while also showing significant calibration error drift (F(4,56) = 22.77, p < .001, eta^2 = .791). GPT-5.2 showed the opposite pattern in open-ended domains (mean CDS = +0.026) with significant ECE escalation by Turn 5. Gemini 3.1 Pro showed no significant CDS (t(14) = 0.38, p = .710), but its Condition C data reveals a striking ECE pattern: without self-anchoring, Gemini's calibration error drops from .327 to near zero across repetitions, whereas self-anchoring holds ECE flat at approximately .333 -- indicating that SACD can manifest as suppression of natural calibration improvement rather than ac

Despite rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), achieving reliable performance on highly professional and structured examinations remains a significant challenge. The Japanese bar examination is a particularly demanding benchmark, requiring not only advanced legal reasoning but also strict adherence to complex answer formats that involve joint evaluation of multiple propositions. While recent studies have reported improvements by decomposing such questions into simpler true--false judgments, these approaches have not been systematically evaluated under the original exam format and scoring scheme, leaving open the question of whether they truly capture exam-level competence. In this paper, we present a self-verification model trained on a newly constructed dataset that faithfully replicates the authentic format and evaluation scale of the exam. Our model is able to exceed the official passing score when evaluated on the actual exam scale, marking the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of an LLM passing the Japanese bar examination without altering its original question structure or scoring rules. We further conduct extensive comparisons with alternative strategies, including multi-agent inference and decomposition-based supervision, and find that these methods fail to achieve comparable performance. Our results highlight the importance of format-faithful supervision and consistency verification, and suggest that carefully designed single-model approaches can outperform more complex systems in high-stakes professional reasoning tasks. Our dataset and codes are publicly available.

In this paper, we consider a problem of self-supervised learning for small-scale datasets based on contrastive loss between multiple views of the data, which demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance in classification task. Despite the reported results, such factors as the complexity of training requiring complex architectures, the needed number of views produced by data augmentation, and their impact on the classification accuracy are understudied problems. To establish the role of these factors, we consider an architecture of contrastive loss system such as SimCLR, where baseline model is replaced by geometrically invariant "hand-crafted" network ScatNet with small trainable adapter network and argue that the number of parameters of the whole system and the number of views can be considerably reduced while practically preserving the same classification accuracy. In addition, we investigate the impact of regularization strategies using pretext task learning based on an estimation of parameters of augmentation transform such as rotation and jigsaw permutation for both traditional baseline models and ScatNet based models. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed architecture with pretext task learning regularization achieves the state-of-the-art classification performance with a smaller number of trainable parameters and with reduced number of views.

In the realms of computer vision, it is evident that deep neural networks perform better in a supervised setting with a large amount of labeled data. The representations learned with supervision are not only of high quality but also helps the model in enhancing its accuracy. However, the collection and annotation of a large dataset are costly and time-consuming. To avoid the same, there has been a lot of research going on in the field of unsupervised visual representation learning especially in a self-supervised setting. Amongst the recent advancements in self-supervised methods for visual recognition, in SimCLR Chen et al. shows that good quality representations can indeed be learned without explicit supervision. In SimCLR, the authors maximize the similarity of augmentations of the same image and minimize the similarity of augmentations of different images. A linear classifier trained with the representations learned using this approach yields 76.5% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 dataset. In this work, we propose that, with the normalized temperature-scaled cross-entropy (NT-Xent) loss function (as used in SimCLR), it is beneficial to not have images of the same category in the same batch. In an unsupervised setting, the information of images pertaining to the same category is missing. We use the latent space representation of a denoising autoencoder trained on the unlabeled dataset and cluster them with k-means to obtain pseudo labels. With this apriori information we batch images, where no two images from the same category are to be found. We report comparable performance enhancements on the CIFAR10 dataset and a subset of the ImageNet dataset. We refer to our method as G-SimCLR.

We have only limited understanding of how and why large language models (LLMs) respond in the ways that they do. Their neural networks have proven challenging to interpret, and we are only beginning to tease out the function of individual neurons and circuits within them. However, another path to understanding these systems is to investigate and develop their capacity to introspect and explain their own functioning. Here, we show that i) contemporary LLMs are capable of providing accurate, quantitative descriptions of their own internal processes during certain kinds of decision-making, ii) that it is possible to improve these capabilities through training, and iii) that this training generalizes to at least some degree. To do so, we fine-tuned GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini to make decisions in a wide variety of complex contexts (e.g., choosing between condos, loans, vacations, etc.) according to randomly-generated, quantitative preferences about how to weigh different attributes during decision-making (e.g., the relative importance of natural light versus quiet surroundings for condos). We demonstrate that the LLMs can accurately report these preferences (i.e., the weights that they learned to give to different attributes during decision-making). Next, we demonstrate that these LLMs can be fine-tuned to explain their decision-making even more accurately. Finally, we demonstrate that this training generalizes: It improves the ability of the models to accurately explain what they are doing as they make other complex decisions, not just decisions they have learned to make via fine-tuning. This work is a step towards training LLMs to accurately and broadly report on their own internal processes -- a possibility that would yield substantial benefits for interpretability, control, and safety.

Chaining language model (LM) calls as composable modules is fueling a new powerful way of programming. However, ensuring that LMs adhere to important constraints remains a key challenge, one often addressed with heuristic "prompt engineering". We introduce LM Assertions, a new programming construct for expressing computational constraints that LMs should satisfy. We integrate our constructs into the recent DSPy programming model for LMs, and present new strategies that allow DSPy to compile programs with arbitrary LM Assertions into systems that are more reliable and more accurate. In DSPy, LM Assertions can be integrated at compile time, via automatic prompt optimization, and/or at inference time, via automatic selfrefinement and backtracking. We report on two early case studies for complex question answering (QA), in which the LM program must iteratively retrieve information in multiple hops and synthesize a long-form answer with citations. We find that LM Assertions improve not only compliance with imposed rules and guidelines but also enhance downstream task performance, delivering intrinsic and extrinsic gains up to 35.7% and 13.3%, respectively. Our reference implementation of LM Assertions is integrated into DSPy at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to solve varieties of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including mathematical reasoning. In this work, we present SkyMath, a large language model for mathematics with 13 billion parameters. By applying self-compare fine-tuning, we have enhanced mathematical reasoning abilities of Skywork-13B-Base remarkably. On GSM8K, SkyMath outperforms all known open-source models of similar size and has established a new SOTA performance.

Artificially synthesized Janus particles have tremendous prospective as in-vivo drug-delivery agents due to the possibility of self-propulsion by external stimuli. Here we report the first ever computational study of translational and rotational motion of self-propelled Janus tracers in a het- erogeneous polymeric environment. The presence of polymers makes the translational mean square displacement (MSD) of the Janus tracer to grow very slowly as compared to that of a free Janus tracer, but surprisingly the mean square angular displacement (MSAD) is significantly increased as observed in a recent experiment. Moreover, with the increasing propulsion velocity, MSAD grows even faster. However, when the repulsive polymers are replaced with polymers with sticky zones, MSD and MSAD both show sharp decline.