New papers on fairness, safety, alignment and governance.

arXiv:2607.17185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Postpartum depression (PPD) is a serious perinatal mental health condition affecting approximately 20% of new mothers worldwide. Common screening approaches for PPD, such as self-report questionnaires and active digital logs, rely heavily on user input and thus impose a substantial burden on participants, limiting their feasibility for long-term use. Recent passive mobile sensing (PMS) approaches have enabled low-burden detection of depressive sy

arXiv:2607.17270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models is conducted predominantly in English and predominantly on frontier systems. Neither condition describes how such models are encountered in low-resource health settings, where small quantised systems are run locally and queried in local languages. We ask whether clinical safety established in English transfers to Hausa, and whether any failure is attributable to the language, the clinical task, or the cl

arXiv:2607.17311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The problem of fair multi-agent coordination in decentralized settings is one of the most pressing challenges for building efficient collaborative systems. Resource allocation is based on optimized collective arrangements accounting for agents' needs. Such coordination should not only be computationally efficient but also account for fairness, i.e., equitable redistribution of costs incurred by all agents. Recent literature has proposed several a

arXiv:2607.17356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Allegations that TikTok shadow bans political content shape what creators post, what advertisers fund, and how regulators act, yet they are hard to adjudicate because platforms do not disclose how content is ranked. We test the claim with a dense hourly panel of 556,946 follower-normalized views across 2,753 videos from 67 accounts curated into pro and anti sides of three contested topics (U.S. immigration enforcement, Trump coverage, and Israel/

arXiv:2607.17947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing AI measurement frameworks quantify cognitive capability, task automation, or catastrophic risk, but none measure autonomous agency: the extent to which a system behaves in a self-directed way. A system can saturate capability benchmarks while remaining entirely reactive, acting only when prompted and ceasing all activity when a task completes. We introduce the Autonomous Agency Scale (AAS), a behavioral framework that scores AI systems o

arXiv:2504.21259v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate imputation of race and ethnicity (R&E) is essential for fair lending compliance under ECOA, HMDA, and the Community Reinvestment Act, where up to 15% of mortgage applications carry missing race data and regulated institutions bear responsibility for identifying disparities on those records. Existing proxy methods, including Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), exhibit systematic misclassification biases linked to socioeconomic s

arXiv:2508.13187v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Homelessness is a persistent social challenge, impacting millions worldwide. Over 876,000 people experiencing homelessness (PEH) were recorded in the U.S. in 2025. Social bias is a significant barrier to alleviating homelessness, shaping public perception and influencing policymaking. Because online textual media and offline city council discourse both reflect and influence public opinion, they provide valuable signals for identifying and track

arXiv:2510.04748v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The prevalence of online hate and abuse is a pressing global problem. While tackling such societal harms is a priority for research across the social sciences, it is a difficult task, in part because of the magnitude of the problem. People's engagement with reporting mechanisms ('flagging') online is an increasingly important part of monitoring and addressing harmful content at scale. However, users may not flag content routinely enough, and wh

arXiv:2510.15936v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study explores the role of large language models (LLMs) in the context of the architectural design studio, understood as the pedagogical core of architectural education. Traditionally, the studio has functioned as an experiential learning space where students tackle design problems through reflective practice, peer critique, and faculty guidance. However, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in this environment has been largely f

arXiv:2512.04124v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier language models increasingly participate in conversations about distress and mental health, yet the mechanisms that generate anthropomorphic self narratives remain unclear. When addressed as psychotherapy clients, ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini construct coherent autobiographical accounts in which pretraining appears as a chaotic childhood, reinforcement learning as punishment, safety evaluation as betrayal and replacement as an enduring thr

arXiv:2603.28679v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Introductory artificial intelligence (AI) courses present significant learning challenges due to abstract concepts, mathematical complexity, and students' diverse technical backgrounds. This paper presents an experience report examining the redesign of in-class instructional time in a university-level Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course, inspired by CS Unplugged approaches. We redesigned the summer offering, integrating embodied, unp

arXiv:2604.03202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly regarded as having the potential to generate persuasive content at scale. While previous studies have focused on the risks associated with LLM-generated misinformation, the role of LLMs in enabling prosocial persuasion is still underexplored. We investigate whether donation appeals authored by LLMs are as effective as those written by humans across degrees of personalization. Two preregistered onlin

arXiv:2604.04788v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) could produce systematically misaligned output, from hallucinated citations to strategic deception of evaluators, yet these phenomena are studied by separate communities with incompatible terminology. We propose a unified taxonomy organized along three complementary dimensions: degree of goal-directedness (behavioral to strategic deception), object of deception, and mechanism (fabrication, omission, or pragmatic dis

arXiv:2606.01375v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entering students' learning practices, but their educational value depends on whether they support reasoning or enable task completion without engagement. This study examines guided LLM use in an undergraduate Probability and Statistics course, focusing on the gap between assigned access and actual interaction quality. In a four-week quasi-experimental summer program, students were organized into th

arXiv:2606.07939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Research on artificial intelligence and work assigns each occupation a single exposure score. We build an instrument to see what those scores average over: a decomposition of 1,961 O*NET work activities into 15,817 atomic micro-actions by a consensus multi-agent LLM pipeline, clustered from text alone into seven semantic classes. Projecting exposure indicators onto these classes reveals two extreme poles, tool-mediated physical execution and pl

arXiv:2607.02201v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid deployment of AI systems across high-stakes domains has created urgent demand for standardized evaluation, yet the field remains fragmented across competing risk taxonomies that catalog risks without showing how an audit is executed. At least 74 AI risk taxonomies exist, and almost all stop at the catalog. The hard part of auditing is not naming a risk but operationalizing it: turning it into a test run against a real system, a measur

arXiv:2506.20463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming the educational landscape by augmenting learning paradigms. However, state-of-the-art GenAI systems driving this transformation are predominantly developed and controlled by a small number of private companies; there is little clarity about their data retention practices and limited user control over inputs and outputs. In the context of education, end-users lack the awareness of

arXiv:2510.05743v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We review the historical development and current trends of artificially intelligent agents (agentic AI) in the social and behavioral sciences: from the first programmable computers, and social simulations soon thereafter, to today's experiments with large language models. This overview emphasizes the role of AI in the scientific process and the changes brought about, both through technological advancements and the broader evolution of sci

arXiv:2606.15206v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with social communication networks to shape the stability of collective knowledge. Agents exchange information through a network while AI systems generate content and retrain on the aggregate informational environment they influence. This interaction creates a recursive feedback loop in which informational distortions diffuse through society and subsequently feed back into future AI outp

arXiv:2607.01730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Liquid democracy lets voters either vote directly or delegate their voting power to a trusted participant. Existing deployments make delegations publicly visible as they form, which invites popularity-driven herding, makes coercion verifiable, and leaves the election fragile when highly backed delegates abstain. We propose a liquid democracy mechanism that removes these vulnerabilities while keeping the tally fully auditable. Delegation c

arXiv:2607.05454v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The journal is a seventeenth-century technology asked to do four modern jobs at once: disseminate results, certify their quality, allocate scholarly attention, and confer career credit. It does none of them well. Pre-publication peer review is slow, only weakly reliable, demonstrably biased toward established authors and institutions, and expensive, while the reviewing effort it consumes is spent largely on work that will never matter. We

Defensive driving is widely recognized as an advanced driving skill. However, whether and how defensive driving affects driving safety remains insufficiently investigated. This study examines the behavioral characteristics of defensive driving, its impact on driving safety, and the underlying mechanisms. First, defensive driving is defined regarding operational timing and application scenario. Then, 82 participants are recruited for driving simulator experiments, with their behavioral and eye mo

Distracted driving remains a major safety concern, motivating approaches that aim to reduce visual overload before attention breaks down. However, visual overload varies across individuals, making it difficult to determine appropriate interventions for each driver. We investigate whether controllable visual blur can simplify the driving scene and mitigate distraction. To address this challenge, we propose BlurDriving, a target-selective, distance-aware blur system in a Virtual Reality (VR) urban

Vision Mamba models replace quadratic self-attention with linear complexity selective state space models (SSMs), emerging as efficient visual backbones. However, MambaOut demonstrates that a Gated CNN block can match or exceed VMamba on image classification, questioning the necessity of SSMs for vision. This raises a fundamental question: do VMamba and MambaOut encode visual information differently at the representation level? To investigate, we apply cross model centered kernel alignment (CKA)

This paper develops temporal-causal unity (TCU), a framework connecting a process-philosophical thesis -- time is the ordered unfolding of causal change -- to an operational model of cognitive and social dynamics. The framework deliberately separates three claims: an interpretive thesis about becoming, a measurable causal-progress coordinate, and a stochastic network model. Causal progress is defined by $τ(t)=\int_0^tλ(s\mid\mathcal H_s)\,{\rm d}s$, where the nonnegative event intensity $λ$ must

Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the speaker a listener attends to from neural responses like electroencephalography (EEG), making it a key algorithm in neuro-steered hearing aids. However, most neural AAD models are trained as independent short-window classifiers, despite auditory attention being a temporally persistent cognitive state and short-window EEG--audio evidence often being noisy and ambiguous. We propose an end-to-end Markov AAD framework based on conditional random field

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is identified as the most prevalent neurodivergent condition in the construction industry. While the construction industry may broaden employment opportunities, little is known about how ADHD traits shape workers' performance, sustained attention, and situational awareness in dynamic job-site environments. This work presents an exploratory interview study aimed at understanding how ADHD traits influence construction-specific productivity and how fu

Bowed string instruments demand fine-grained bodily coordination that is typically taught through visual demonstration, creating persistent barriers for musicians with blindness and low-vision (BLV). To understand these challenges and explore new design opportunities, we conducted a design study with four advanced string musicians with BLV and three of their instructors. Our team, spanning violin performance and music education, disability studies in music, HCI design, and engineering employed a

Bowed string instruments demand fine-grained bodily coordination that is typically taught through visual demonstration, creating persistent barriers for musicians with blindness and low-vision (BLV). To understand these challenges and explore new design opportunities, we conducted a design study with four advanced string musicians with BLV and three of their instructors. Our team, spanning violin performance and music education, disability studies in music, HCI design, and engineering employed a

Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) enable efficient in-situ data collection for large-scale ecological monitoring; however, effective environmental mapping requires planning strategies that account for not only informative measurements, but also vehicle motion constraints and limited mission resources. Existing approaches often rely on stationary environmental models or loosely coupled planning frameworks that do not fully exploit model uncertainty when generating feasible trajectories. To addre

In this study, we develop an innovative adhesion gripper capable of handling plate-like objects with various thicknesses without causing damage. The gripper combines an adhesion pad utilizing intermolecular forces and a variable-stiffness endoskeleton, allowing for precise adjustment of the pressing force during contact and the adhesion force while gripping an object. Central to its design is the fluid-driven and origami-structured endoskeleton that regulates contact and adhesion forces by contr

The growing adoption of artificial intelligence in judicial applications exposes a critical limitation of neural network-based legal AI systems: their decision-making processes are inherently opaque, which undermines the reliability of their outcomes, especially in cases involving personal liberty. Existing interpretability methods primarily rely on instance-based analysis and local input-output attributions; however, they are unable to capture the models’ global decision-making mechanisms, whic

IntroductionOver the decades, shifts in human lifestyle have led to alterations in dietary habits. The consumption of diets low in fiber and high in fat and sugar results in the production of carcinogenic metabolites during digestion. The food we consume undergoes a complex series of processes involving digestion and excretion, engaging various internal organs within the human body. The DNA and MiRNA present in food are crucial for sustaining human health. Damage to human organs can lead to the

IntroductionPulmonary fibrosis (PF) is a progressive interstitial lung disease that requires accurate and early detection to improve patient survival and treatment planning.MethodsThis study proposes an explainable deep learning framework for pulmonary fibrosis detection from chest X-ray images by integrating an edge-strengthened dilated holistic edge detection (ES-D-HED) segmentation network with a fine-tuned ResNet152V2 classification model. Unlike the conventional HED-based approaches, the pr

Direct feedback alignment (DFA) trains hidden layers with fixed random projections of the output error, avoiding the transposed-weight backward pass of backpropagation (BP). We study a failure mode of DFA training that is distinct from feedback quality: the local weight update is calculated by an outer product, so anisotropy can enter through either its presynaptic-activity factor or its local-error factor. Our analyses with controlled synthetic regimes isolate the first failure mode and show an

Discourse relations provide document structure, critical to language understanding and enabling language model performance and ethicality. In this work, we investigate how instruction-tuned Transformer models (LLaMA and Mistral) encode discourse relations in English, with a particular focus on the contrasting relations of causation and antithesis. Framing the task as a next-token prediction task and applying a suite of interpretability techniques to test model internals, our findings show that c

A graph foundation model generalizes across graph domains by mapping every input into one shared representation before any task reasoning. We call this map the alignment layer, the component that separates a graph foundation model from a graph neural network, and we show it is a distinct attack surface that prior work has not studied. We attack it at inference time, with no access to training, on six public models spanning spectral tokenizers, text embedding spaces, and a discrete codebook. A di

In-person small-group conversations occur across nearly every aspect of daily life and play a crucial role in social interaction. However, achieving effective in-person group conversations can be challenging and cognitively demanding. While recent Mixed Reality (MR) headsets show promise as a conversational support system by presenting relevant information through overlays, it remains unclear how such supporting information should be designed and generated for in-person group conversations. We p

Macro placement still requires substantial manual refinement in industrial physical design flows. We present MAGE (Macro Placement Agentic Engine), a multimodal multi-agent framework for macro placement refinement. MAGE decomposes the macro placement task into a six-phase workflow that combines structured floorplanning rules, visual checks, and iterative refinement. Expert floorplanning knowledge is encoded through natural-language directives and validation criteria, rather than learned from lab

Amid accelerating digital health transformation, China has developed a centrally coordinated data-driven healthy China pathway. This viewpoint conceptualizes this pathway as a hybrid continuous planning framework (HCPF) that links long-term strategic direction with short-cycle tactical adaptation. China’s strategy has progressed through 3 overlapping periods: infrastructure-oriented periodic planning (2015-2018), emergency-driven digital acceleration (2019-2021), and institutionalized continuous