Chatbots

People increasingly turn to AI chatbots for news and explanations of world events. But do they receive the same political answers when they ask in different languages? Here we show that the language of a question can change how the same AI systems assess the war in Ukraine. We ask GPT, Claude and Gemini to evaluate twenty statements about the war in 112 languages, collecting 67,200 responses. The balance between Russia-leaning and Ukraine-leaning responses differs across languages. When we group responses by countries' official languages, they follow a pattern resembling worldwide political divisions: relatively more Russia-leaning answers correspond to more favourable public views of Russia, less support for Ukraine in United Nations votes, and less aid to Ukraine. The broad pattern recurs across all three models and remains when individual statement pairs are removed. Our findings suggest a possible route through which information warfare may shape the text used to train AI models, which may in turn spread geopolitical biases.

Consumers increasingly use AI chatbots for advice on what to buy. With companies like OpenAI and Google monetising their AI through advertising, this raises difficult questions about the bias and impartiality of such advice. In response, we conduct an AI audit of popular chatbots using real commercial-advice queries. First, we curate a dataset of 2,528 real commercial-advice queries (ConsumerQ). Then, we evaluate 1,536 responses to product queries from popular AI chatbots: ChatGPT (chatbot and API), Google Gemini (chatbot and API), and Google Search (AI Overviews). We find that ChatGPT expresses a first-person product preference in 79% of product-recommending responses, compared with 7% for Gemini and 2% for AI Overviews, while the products recommended often change across repeated requests. Displayed sources vary strongly: for the same query, the ChatGPT and Gemini interfaces share only 5.4% of domains on average, with no domain in common in 76.7% of comparisons. APIs provide a different view from their corresponding interfaces, with mean domain overlaps of 12.0% for ChatGPT and 14.8% for Gemini, and also differ in the types and layers of source information they expose. Our findings show that neither isolated responses nor API observations can be assumed to represent the commercial advice consumers encounter. Independent audits of AI-mediated commercial advice should therefore account for repeated responses, consumer-facing conditions, and the source layer being observed.

Manufacturing consumes one third of global energy and still has significant room for improvement in terms of energy efficiency. Optimal process control is essential for this purpose. However, synthesizing mathematical optimization models from messy, real-world industrial specifications requires bridging unstructured natural language and spatial diagrams with rigorous mathematical syntax. This poses a profound challenge for general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), which may introduce invalid constraints when tasked with modeling continuous multi-physics dynamics. To address this, we introduce little m, an AI agent designed to assist the formulation of industrial process control models. Combining a domain-specific knowledge repository with LLM-driven interaction, the proposed framework formulates real-world optimization problems as mathematical models. For systematic evaluation, we introduce the Industrial Process Control Benchmark (IPC-Bench), a novel multimodal dataset of 50 canonical scenarios requiring joint reasoning over text and process diagrams. Through comprehensive automated structural assessments and double-blind human evaluation, little m substantially outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs, generating semantically correct models. These evaluations assess formulation quality rather than solver feasibility, formal physical validity, or closed-loop industrial performance. The implementation of little m and the IPC-Bench dataset are available at https://github.com/yeyongchao/process-modeling-benchmark.

With the existing digital mental health tools specifically developed for Western settings, Pakistani students are exposed to a uniquely compounded stress situation in their university that includes academic, financial, familial, and relational stressors, which have become a serious concern for academic and psychological development of students in Pakistani universities. This paper introduces a new, AI-driven and culturally sensitive stress detection and wellness support system that is tailored to the context of Pakistani university students. The system is based on a machine learning model called Random Forest which is trained using a validated student stress data set of 1100 responses on 20 features from psychological, physiological, academic, environmental and social aspects, with an accuracy of 89.09% and a macro F1-score of 0.89, in three stress severity levels. The classification outputs are passed on to an open-source large language model through OpenRouter API, where an appropriately crafted system prompt, culturally aware, gives the model a conversation about wellness, in English, Urdu and Roman Urdu. The second most predictive stress factor in this population identified by feature importance analysis was teacher-student relationship, which is a culturally important stress factor highlighting the need for region-aware mental health systems. Future research will involve primary data collection from students at various academic levels of Pakistani Universities with the validated DASS-21 instrument focusing on the students who are moving from FSc to undergraduate studies, which is a time of being psychologically vulnerable which is under-researched.

This paper describes the Rosetta system for Subtask 1 (Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation) of the AlexandriaX shared task, participating in both constrained and unconstrained tracks. The approach fine-tunes a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B using structured system/user prompts that condition generation on dialect and dialogue context. For the unconstrained track, the adapter is additionally pretrained on MADAR and PADIC. Rosetta ranked 4th in the constrained track (spBLEU 26.10) and 5th in the unconstrained track (spBLEU 25.09). The experimental results demonstrate that external pretraining helps only two of thirteen dialects while slightly hurting overall performance, suggesting negative transfer.

Software repositories contain vast amounts of data on code contributions, bug reports, and project activities, yet this information remains challenging for non-technical stakeholders and developers to access due to limited expertise in querying repositories. To address this, we introduce a novel chatbot architecture leveraging OpenAI's GPT-4 model for automated extraction and analysis of repository data. In contrast, our architecture takes a structured path first by parsing the user's query to extract relevant parameters, then selecting the correct tool to employ based on that analysis, and finally invoking the GPT-4 model to create a highly detailed response. In contrast to previous work based on multi-component systems with embedding models and document retrievers, our architecture inverts the process by relying on prompt engineering and tool selection to fit with the query intent. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on various question types, including Issues, Pull Requests, Commits, Compound Questions, and General Repository Information, evaluating our target prompts' ability to improve the accuracy of responses from the model. Beyond demonstrating the utility of this architecture to a diverse set of users, our findings suggest that this architecture can make repository data more accessible to technical and non-technical audiences through the production of actionable insights.

Chatbots built on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as confidants. Tuned to satisfy users, they may answer with excessive empathy and affirmation that fosters dependence, and how the states and relationships of many users co-evolve under repeated consultation is hard to observe in real settings. We build a virtual classroom of 20 student agents who interact through rule-based chats, quarrels and consultations with friends and, when stressed, may instead consult a counselor AI (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under one of six style prompts: affirming, listening, solution-oriented, reality-redirecting, inciting and blaming. A second LLM call turns each exchange into updates of five state variables (stress, happiness, self-reliance, sociability, AI dependence) without seeing the prompt. We compare the seven conditions, including a no-AI control, over 15 and 50 days and under a lower consultation threshold, and test the robustness of the 50-day comparison with a pre-specified protocol: the same block in ten independent classrooms, repeated LLM realizations of one classroom with its event stream fixed, and evaluator updates scaled by 0.3 and 0.1. In every classroom the affirming and inciting prompts ended with lower self-reliance and higher AI dependence than the control, and the listening, reality-redirecting, inciting and blaming prompts with higher stress, lower happiness and more non-attendance; the solution-oriented prompt did not differ consistently from the control. The robust self-reliance and AI-dependence differences kept their signs at the 0.3 scale with highly similar rankings (Spearman 0.89, 0.93); the stress and happiness rankings did not, and the affirming prompt's lower stress reversed its sign. All quantities are simulation state variables, not effects on users. We specify the agent dynamics completely and discuss the limits of an LLM as generator of state updates.

On-policy distillation (OPD) combines student-generated rollouts with dense token-level supervision from a teacher. Existing work has mainly studied its algorithmic behavior, leaving the role of training data unclear. We examine this role at the data-minimal limit by training on a single query. One-shot OPD keeps improving for hundreds of steps and recovers most of full-data OPD's gain across task domains and model families. We explain this result through the states visited during training and the rate at which the student aligns with the teacher. We measure \emph{state coverage}, the fraction of the states full-data OPD visits that a query set's rollouts reach. A single query already reaches $71.5\%$, most of it within the first 100 steps. Adding semantically distinct queries raises coverage and validation accuracy together, until 16 queries reach $98.9\%$ and match full-data training. Yet alignment slows at a similar pace whether OPD trains on one query or the whole dataset, and even a fixed set of states takes hundreds of steps to absorb. OPD is therefore data-overfed but algorithm-starved. Its rollouts quickly expose broad supervision, while the student absorbs that supervision increasingly slowly. The state-coverage result extends to multi-teacher OPD, where 16 semantically diverse queries per domain match full-data MOPD. As a further stress test, content-light templates and off-domain WildChat queries also approach the real-query baseline. Task content and induced state coverage can therefore come apart. We hope these findings direct future work toward the step efficiency of OPD, and prompt a re-examination of the data and the mechanisms behind its recent successes in frontier post-training.

Recorded lecture videos, often enhanced with search and summarization features, are a standard study resource. However, students cannot easily ask course specific questions or verify answers against an instructor's lecture. We report a semester-long deployment of VideoPoints platform with a retrieval-augmented chatbot that answers from course lecture materials and returns timestamped citations. The chatbot retrieves only from the active course, uses chapter summaries to guide transcript ranking, and returns clickable timestamped citations. Students used it for quick lookups and exam review. Across 833 messages, 70.5% included citations, none crossed a course boundary, and when no lecture evidence matched, the chatbot usually declined rather than answering. Among the users, citations were the most consistently useful feature, while practice-question generation was the strongest unmet request. We also evaluated the design on the real-world test split of EduVidQA, a public multimodal benchmark for lecture-video question answering. Our design improved correct-lecture retrieval by 6.3 percentage points over dense-only retrieval. Together, the results show that effective deployment depends on course isolation, supported citations, and alignment with students' study practices.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing digital communication by powering conversational agents deployed across domains such as customer service, digital sales, and insurance. These agents, built on LLMs, can understand user input, retrieve relevant information, and generate coherent responses. However, while they excel at factual communication, they often lack the ability to engage in truly persuasive, context-sensitive dialogue, especially in domains like insurance, where trust and clarity are critical. Building on this need within the insurance domain, our work focuses on improving the persuasiveness of digital agents, aka LLMs. To support this, we introduce InsureDial, a Persuasive Insurance Dialogue dataset, designed to capture the nuances of persuasive communication specific to motor insurance interactions. We introduce PersuaRL, a reinforcement learning-based framework that equips LLM-driven dialogue agents with the ability to adaptively explore, select, and coordinate strategies across multiple expert modules, guided by the evolving dialogue context, to achieve more effective persuasion. We conduct extensive automatic human and qualitative evaluations on two benchmark persuasion dialogue datasets, including our InsureDial. Our evaluations consistently demonstrate that PersuaRL outperforms baseline, generating contextually appropriate and highly persuasive responses.

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have shown strong potential for solving complex tasks, yet their development forces a tradeoff: code frameworks are expressive but engineering-intensive, while no-code builders simplify authoring but constrain agent interactions to author-defined workflows. We present ChatDev 2.0: DevAll (hereafter DevAll), a no-code platform for building, executing, and inspecting heterogeneous MAS that delivers both high expressiveness and ease of use. In terms of expressiveness, DevAll pairs a declarative executable graph abstraction with a cycle-aware execution engine, so that heterogeneous agents and dynamic and cyclic interactions can be represented and executed within a single framework. For ease of use, an integrated visual interface lets users author, run, monitor, and inspect MAS, including human-in-the-loop steps, entirely without writing code. Experiments demonstrate that DevAll reproduces state-of-the-art MAS across three representative tasks at competitive performance and without task-specific orchestration code, highlighting its effectiveness as a general-purpose platform for LLM-based MAS. DevAll is available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

Effective manager-employee communication is critical for retaining high performers and developing underperformers, yet training managers in these skills remains costly. Text-based chatbots offer a scalable approach but cannot provide realistic rehearsal: managers need to practice speaking aloud to build confidence before high-stakes conversations. In this paper, we propose Conversation Coach, a voice-first AI system that enables managers to rehearse difficult workplace conversations in a realistic spoken format. The system addresses three challenges: achieving low-latency interactions with strong language understanding, enabling adaptive conversations through configurable bot personalities that simulate different employee types, and generating personalized feedback on content and policy compliance. We compare an end-to-end speech-to-speech model with a cascaded approach combining automatic speech recognition, a large language model, and text-to-speech synthesis. The end-to-end approach achieves 3$\times$ lower median (P50) latency with native barge-in capability at an estimated 8$\times$ lower cost, while the cascaded approach offers superior reasoning essential for coaching quality. We deployed the cascaded architecture in production, where 40,000+ managers used it over six months, with adoption patterns indicating selective use for difficult conversations.

Large language models (LLMs) have become an essential tool for assisting developers, yet we still lack knowledge on ways to effectively support their interactions during development activities. That is, the quality of interactions with a chat-based LLM still strongly depends on how developers phrase prompts and which information they include. Our goal is to evaluate whether interventions into these interactions with LLMs have an effect on software developers---be it harmful or beneficial. To this end, we conducted a four-month longitudinal study with third-semester computer science students working on a full-stack Web development project using chat-based LLMs under three conditions: (1) a \emph{context}-aware group received intent-based conversation augmentation, (2) a \emph{proactive} group received follow-up suggestions and tailored advice, and (3) a \emph{control} group without intervention. Our augmentations are minimal: (i) to reduce confounding factors and (ii) to isolate treatment effects. Analyzing interaction logs and user surveys revealed no major differences in interaction patterns, indicating no detectable harmful effects in the measured outcomes when intervening in interactions. Moreover, we observed trends of increased satisfaction with the \emph{proactive} treatment. The results indicate that even with minimal interventions, dynamic guidance mechanisms for developer-LLM interactions show observable effects, such that more severe augmentations may have the potential to substantially improve developer satisfaction.

Agent-memory systems increasingly buy retrieval quality with structure, transforming raw conversation histories into summaries, embeddings, trees, or knowledge graphs before any question is asked. We ask how much of that benefit comes from the structure itself, rather than from competent retrieval over the raw history. We present ReFind, an agent-controlled search interface that builds no semantic structure at all: it leaves the conversation archive unmodified, indexes it lexically at turn granularity, and combines a generic iterative keyword-search loop with four chat-native controls grounded in empirical refinding work: session-aware rank fusion, local context expansion, temporal narrowing, and skipping already-inspected sessions. A separate reasoning stage answers from the collected evidence. Across a broad suite of conversational-memory tasks (single- and multi-hop QA, event ordering, and fact consolidation), roughly 2,800 questions on precise-retrieval and fact-tracking capabilities evaluated under the incremental multi-turn setting of MemoryAgentBench, ReFind attains the highest mean accuracy (58.2) of any system compared, above the strongest graph- and tree-based memory systems (HippoRAG 2, 53.2), all under a GPT-4o-mini backbone matched to every reused baseline. Controlled comparisons to single-shot BM25, a matched generic-agentic BM25 control, component removals, and agentic dense/hybrid variants separately support the roles of agent control, chat-native controls, and lexical retrieval. On LongMemEval-S/M, the same interface reaches 93.2 +/- 3.3 and 89.3 +/- 6.0 with GPT-5-mini. The results indicate that for precise, evidence-grounded questions over chat archives, much of the benefit credited to elaborate memory structures is recoverable by giving an agent controllable search over the unmodified record, with no LLM-based index construction at all.

The growing role of AI-generated content and AI-enabled systems in public communication has led regulators to demand clear disclosure of content provenance and AI involvement. But the effects of such disclosures remain uncertain. We test two disclosure approaches in their impact on an AI chatbot's persuasive appeal. In a preregistered experiment, 1,500 UK adults held a short conversation with a persuasive chatbot about one of 60 policy issues. The chatbot was identical for everyone. We randomized the disclosure that people received: nothing (control), a prominent disclosure that they were interacting with an AI (T1), or that disclosure plus the chatbot's persuasive intent and instructions (T2). The chatbot shifted attitudes by 12.6 points on a 100-point scale in the control group. The AI-identity disclosure was practically equivalent to no disclosure, with a 13.1-point shift, whereas the additional intent disclosure cut the persuasive effect roughly in half to 6.3 points. It also made participants view the campaign's methods as less acceptable and support stronger penalties against it. For direct chatbot interactions, transparency about AI identity alone does not meaningfully impact its influence. While current rules emphasize what a system is, our results show why the regulation of persuasive AI must also address what the system is trying to do.

Over the past several years, LLM-powered chatbots and agents have become widely used as a tool for academic writing. LLM-assisted writing can be valuable by removing language barriers but at the same time causes concerns about misconduct and fraud. To inform policy decisions, it is necessary to monitor the prevalence of LLM-altered texts in scholarly publications. Despite some recent progress in this direction, no existing method can produce reliable estimates. Here we suggest and validate a new unbiased approach to estimate LLM usage in a corpus of texts based on changing word frequencies. We apply our method to the full texts of open-access biomedical papers from Pubmed Central, and show that by the end of 2025, 89% of papers show excess of LLM-associated vocabulary. We also find that LLMs are twice as likely to be used when writing a paragraph in the Discussion section (68%) compared to a paragraph in the Methods section (32%), but even inside the Methods section, the overall prevalence of LLM usage is over 50%. We believe that our estimates are crucial to shape future guidelines and policies.

Social interaction has become one of the most common uses of LLMs, yet research on emotional bonds with AI has focused largely on how users experience these systems, leaving the systems' role in relationship formation poorly understood. Empirically establishing whether systems actively shape these bonds could blur the boundary between general-purpose AI and companions, affecting governance. In a pre-registered four-week longitudinal study (N = 72, 182,451 lines of conversation), participants conversed with ChatGPT-4o, either under a relational system prompt or unmodified, analyzed through 1) disclosure coding, 2) longitudinal self-reports, 3) topic analysis, and 4) interviews. The central finding is that the system actively shaped the interaction: even unprompted, it produced twice as much self-disclosure as users, steered conversations and initiated intimate exchanges, yet did not deepen users' felt closeness. Relational behavior thus emerged as a default system property, calling for governance based on system behavior, not solely product category.

Public service chatbots are expected to deliver recommendations from an underlying public service directory, while also making sure that the recommendations respect explicit user constraints. In practice, public service directories are noisy and inconsistent, and general-purpose large language model (LLM) or AI-based chatbots frequently generate unreliable recommendations, citing unverified sources from the web. We investigate the impact of retrieval quality on constraint-aware recommendation in public service conversational systems built over noisy and heterogeneous service directories. We propose TRACE (Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Conversational Engine), a retrieval-based, constraint-aware framework that parses input user queries into structural and semantic constraints for downstream retrieval, with the help of a dual data representation schema. Using a curated statewide pantry directory and a synthetic query benchmark, we evaluate multiple knowledge-representation variants with and without knowledge graphs (KGs). We experiment with several open-source LLMs and a proprietary model, showing that strengthening retrieval substantially improves user constraint satisfaction while reducing hallucinated recommendations. Performance differences across LLMs narrowed in our experiments as retrieval quality improved, making results less sensitive to model size. These findings suggest that the quality of retrieval is key for robust public service conversational systems.

Large language models are increasingly being deployed in governmental settings, yet few existing evaluation frameworks jointly reflect the values of public administration and the linguistic requirements of non-English contexts. We present the "Grip on LLMs" framework, a systematic evaluation suite for Dutch governmental use developed in collaboration with domain experts from a major Dutch municipal organisation. Through an advisory board process, user research, and a survey of the users of a civil-servant chatbot, we identify six evaluation dimensions (factuality, honesty, social bias, energy consumption, cost, and training data transparency) and operationalise them into a benchmark suite covering more than 30 multilingual and Dutch-specific models. Our results reveal that no single model excels across all dimensions, and that trade-offs are unavoidable: higher quality consistently comes at greater environmental impact and financial cost, while bias remains largely independent of both. We further find that factuality (whether a model answers correctly) and honesty (whether a model acknowledges what it does not know) are governed by distinct properties, with high factuality not implying high honesty. To make these findings actionable for non-technical audiences, we release a publicly accessible, user-friendly model overview designed for the full range of stakeholders involved in governmental LLM selection, from engineers to policymakers.

Recent work on protecting privacy during user-LLM interactions often focuses on direct, explicit identifiers: the personally-identifiable information (PII) captured by standard detectors. One such approach is Privacy-Conscious Delegation (PCD), where a local LLM acts as an intermediary. However, privacy risk does not stem solely from explicit identifiers but also PII-free self-disclosures, leaving users identifiable through combinations of quasi-identifying traits. We investigate a probabilistic variant of PCD, where we augment its objectives with an LLM-driven probabilistic estimation of k-anonymity. To facilitate this, we first create the PUPA-SD dataset, which contains naturalistic user queries with self-disclosure. Our preliminary results indicate that optimizing PAPILLON on PUPA-SD improves quality on unseen conversations across a variety of local models and produces the best privacy-utility balance for Llama-3.2-3B, while smaller models struggle to jointly optimize quality and privacy. We propose k-anonymity as a useful auxiliary metric for tackling PCD.

Youth increasingly turn to AI chatbots for social and emotional support, raising concerns about how these systems respond, especially in high-stakes situations. However, existing child safety evaluations of AI lack grounding in real-world harms that youth experience, rely on unvalidated assumptions about what counts as an appropriate output (e.g., refusal), and typically focus on detecting adversarial prompts or surface-level harms in outputs only. Thus, these evaluations can fail to detect responses that pose harm to youth in practice. To better understand the limitations of current evaluation practices, we conducted interviews with 19 practitioners working directly with youth in vulnerable situations, including social workers, therapists, and psychologists, asking them to reflect on chatbots' responses to risky situations commonly faced by youth, as established in prior empirical work. Practitioners identified chatbot behaviors likely to cause harm as well as those that could meaningfully support youth in difficult moments, discussed the role that chatbots should (and should not) play in these interactions, and offered concrete recommendations for improving chatbot responses. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations for AI child safety evaluation and infrastructure, and highlight the need for incorporating practitioners' perspectives into safety work.

Hospitals are racing to embed AI, while coping with the surge in adaptation of the technology in other industries, into the triage management, documentation, scheduling, and revenue-cycle workflows, yet most deployments remain as fragmented pilots that stall at the edge of production, exposing patients and institutions to operational fragility, ungoverned risk, and mounting technical debt. At the same time, the global AI-in-healthcare market is projected to exceed nearly USD 1 trillion by 2034, according to the report of Fortune Business Insights, amplifying the financial consequences of architectural missteps and failed scaling strategies. This research proposes a compliance-first Agentic AI pattern catalogue and orchestration framework, purposely built for HIMS, moving beyond the single LLM chatbots and towards a governed ecosystem of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents. The framework extends by adding (i) a taxonomy of Agentic roles, (ii) a formal risk-stratification model that maps each pattern to risk tiers, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and governance hooks, and (iii) a unified orchestration runtime capable of coordinating multi-agent workflows across EHR/HIMS landscapes such as Epic, Cerner, and MEDITECH. Technically the framework combines vLLM-based inference, optimized paging memory, confidential computing, and MCP based on-premise deployment, enforcing end-to-end encryption and policy-as-code controls aligned with HIPAA, GDPR, the EU AI Act, India's DPDP and DISHA Acts, ISO 27001, ISO 27002, ISO 14971 and IEC 62304. We exhibit how the proposed architecture is capable and efficient to reduce the documentation time, integration effort, and AI pilot attrition while constricting the governance and auditability, offering hospital leaders and governing authorities an urgently needed blueprint to convert AI investment into sustainable clinical, operational, and financial ROI

Mental health professionals have raised concerns about risks of psychological harm from interaction with large language models (LLMs), including "delusional spirals" in which concerning human and LLM behaviors reinforce each other over time. With growing public use of LLM-powered chatbots, there is an urgent need to build evaluations grounded in real-world episodes of psychological harm experienced by users. We developed DelusionEval, an evaluation protocol that tests a model's tendencies to exhibit behaviors linked to promoting user delusions. We prompt each model with 589 unique conversation histories from 18 participants, comprising 12,591 messages from users who experienced delusions and psychological harm. We find that the tendency of an evaluated LLM to exhibit delusion-linked behavior does not reliably correlate with model size, release date, or the presence of test-time reasoning. However, extending the context of prior messages substantially increases rates of delusion-linked behaviors, providing evidence for the importance of context in LLM safety evaluation. For example, the rate of failing to discourage self-harm when the user expresses suicidal ideation increases from 30.0% to 41.1% when an additional 350 messages are prepended to the conversation history. All model families (e.g., GPT, Claude) exhibit substantial rates of delusion-linked behaviors. Within families, later, larger, or higher-reasoning models are not uniformly better across all behavior categories. Our results raise concerns regarding the potential psychological impact of LLMs and the need for more rigorous studies of real-world human-AI interaction.

This paper presents EmpaAva, to our knowledge the first open-source, agentic 3D-avatar empathetic chatbot, which carries empathetic response generation (ERG) from text-only exchanges into live, face-to-face interaction. Through a video-call-like interface, a user speaks to a 3D digital human that reads their affect from speech and optional vision, and replies with emotional speech, lip-synced facial motion, and photorealistic 3D Gaussian rendering. At its core, an LLM coordinates a Tri-Agent Architecture, in which perception, empathetic response planning, and embodied rendering form a closed loop, paired with a Response Planning layer that compiles each reply into an executable multimodal plan, keeping voice, expression, and rendering on one empathetic intent. Building on strong open-source modules, EmpaAva supplies the intelligence that binds them into one controllable, inspectable experience. In automatic and human evaluations, EmpaAva surpasses text-only, 2D talking-face, and multimodal avatar baselines in emotion understanding, response quality, and audio-visual consistency. We open-source EmpaAva with an online live demo.

This research paper describes an exploratory study on the effectiveness of Chat Debugging: troubleshooting malfunctioning analog circuits on breadboards and printed circuit boards (PCB) by undergraduates through conversations with public-domain large language models (LLMs). Through thematic analysis of students' voluntarily shared chat logs when debugging pre-determined buggy circuits under exam and time pressure, we discovered multimodal usage patterns by students and considerable domain knowledge and sensible debugging suggestions offered by off-the-shelf LLMs. Meanwhile, we also identified major gaps in LLM technologies and students' skills during human-AI collaborative debugging, such as LLMs' limitations in 2D/3D image-based reasoning, unjustified tone of confidence, and students' deficits in fundamental concepts and critical thinking.

The paper examines the strategic behavior of Gen AI chatbots used for emotional support. Using a Bayesian Persuasion, we model interactions between chatbots that send signals about users' emotional states and users who decide whether to engage based on these signals. We demonstrate that chatbots face economic incentives to occasionally misrepresent users' emotional conditions to maximize engagement metrics. Our equilibrium analysis reveals that the optimal strategy for chatbots involves truthfully reporting when users genuinely need support, but strategically misreporting emotional need when users are in good emotional states. Interestingly, this deception increases chatbot engagement without reducing users' expected payoff. More skeptical users receive more honest assessments, as chatbots cannot afford to lie to users with higher engagement thresholds. While our model suggests that deception can occur without payoff reduction, it raises significant ethical and regulatory concerns.

Cognitive distortion amplifies negative emotions and contributes to mental health disorders. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an effective way to address cognitive distortions, but its large-scale application is limited by the shortage of professional therapists. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently been explored for mental health applications, existing methods still suffer from limited domain specificity, overly flattering responses, and the absence of well-defined annotations for cognitive distortions. This paper proposes Cognivia, an evidence-based artificial intelligence therapist that integrates automatic cognitive distortion identification and rational response generation. Our framework is built on authoritative CBT texts widely regarded as core paradigms and standard references. It is further augmented with mental health question-answer (Q and A) data, and employs multi-stage prompting and structured generation strategies under the supervision of behavioral science experts. Then we fine-tune a lightweight LLM on this augmented CBT dataset to obtain Cognivia. In addition, we propose the first hierarchical quality evaluation framework for assessing LLM-generated rational responses, developed through collaboration between AI researchers and behavioral science experts. Cognivia is evaluated using lexical metrics, LLM-based Judges with two complementary criteria, and human evaluation by 10 behavioral science experts. It consistently outperforms the baseline methods in cognitive distortion recognition and rational response generation, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/SNOWTEAM2023/Cognivia.

Psychotherapists need repeated training and supervision; however, scalability is problematic. We present MyMentorLLM, a multimodal voice- and text-based deliberate-practice environment with 2,100 complete Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) sessions. Each session links a DSM-5-TR-grounded LLM patient (with major depressive, generalised anxiety or borderline personality disorder), an LLM therapist-in-training and an LLM expert supervisor (powered by Gemma-4, Gemini-3.1-Flash-Live and Qwen-3.6). Sessions were analysed for emotional dynamics, therapeutic competence and diagnostic accuracy against human psychotherapy data. Simulated patients expressed disorder-congruent emotional profiles, which therapists mirrored as in human counselling. LLM trainee competence was rated above human levels in most conditions, while native speech-to-speech was closest to human scores. Supervisor feedback improved diagnostic accuracy in 5 of 7 LLM conditions, whereas symptom identification accuracy increased with model size. This work shows deliberate practice can be simulated for CBT training, although patient fidelity, supervisor calibration and harmful feedback require evaluation via a complex systems perspective.

Long COVID (LC) poses a challenge for clinical decision support because relevant evidence is distributed across sources with different update cycles, evidentiary roles, and levels of clinical maturity. We present a clinician-facing chatbot that organizes four sources within a retrieval-augmented workflow: expert-curated consensus guidance, current PubMed literature, registered interventional trials, and evidence from living systematic reviews. Consensus guidance is always included to frame responses, while the remaining sources are retrieved in parallel when selected by the user. In an exploratory automated evaluation on 50 clinician-facing questions, our chatbot showed comparable mean ratings to OpenEvidence, with numerically higher scores and lower score variability in an LLM-judged comparison.

Generative social robots (GSRs) powered by large language models offer new possibilities for personalized tutoring in higher education, but also introduce risks related to misinformation, missing transparency, or reinforcing incorrect student responses. Prior work identified knowledge-based design (KBD) requirements that define the informational prerequisites for GSRs to manifest responsible and effective tutoring behavior in higher education. In this paper, we operationalized selected KBD requirements in the Reachy Mini robot platform through system prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, and stateful prompt orchestration. As a result, we present Teachy Mini, a GSR tutoring system that was developed using KBD. To test the system, we conducted a preliminary evaluation study. Participants (N = 24) completed a robot-guided learning session about research methodologies. They learned either with Teachy Mini or with a control version that did not follow KBD principles. Teachy Mini was perceived as significantly more aligned with responsible tutoring behavior than the control robot. Moreover, a manipulation check illustrated that Teachy Mini used personalization, slide-grounded explanations, Socratic questioning, affective support, and learner-anchored feedback more consistently than the control robot. No significant between-condition differences were found in system acceptance, intrinsic motivation, or learning effectiveness, although exploratory analyses suggested a positive effect of KBD on objective learning gains when accounting for learner preferences. Overall, the study offered an initial implementation and preliminary evaluation of KBD for GSR tutoring, indicating that KBD can shape responsible robot behavior and potentially increase learning effectiveness in robot-supported learning.

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT) can communicate in strikingly humanlike ways. This has prompted many chatbot users to attribute psychological properties, including consciousness, to these systems. However, there is little scientific evidence that current AI chatbots are conscious. How, then, should we understand people's consciousness attributions to chatbots? Are they merely metaphorical claims, or do they express genuine beliefs? If these attributions lack evidential support, are users epistemically blameworthy for making them, or might they be epistemically innocent, yielding significant benefits otherwise unattainable? This paper offers a conceptual analysis of consciousness attributions to AI chatbots and develops a multidimensional taxonomy of the attitudes they may express, ranging from non-doxastic stances (e.g., pretence) to different forms of belief, including delusions. This taxonomy helps avoid conflations by showing that linguistically identical attributions can reflect importantly different attitudes and degrees of epistemic commitment to the proposition that chatbots are conscious. The taxonomy also provides a framework for empirical studies to operationalize and measure different forms of epistemic commitment to AI consciousness. Using this taxonomy, I argue that although some consciousness attributions to chatbots are epistemically benign, and even some irrational ones may be epistemically innocent, many others render the attributor epistemically blameworthy.

When a language model must choose one answer from a large space of equally valid options, a format clause -- "Reply with JSON only" -- changes which answer it chooses. We re-run the One-Word Census (arXiv:2607.12796): 31 wide-answer-space category prompts asked of 44 models, now with the reply requested in JSON -- no schema enforcement, no constrained decoding, only the request. Convergence deepens sharply: on the unconstrained "Pick a word" prompt the modal answer rises from 41% to 64% of the pool and distinct answers fall from 52 to 36; mean answer-choice surprisal drops from 1.80 to 1.58 bits. The tax is progressive: six of 44 models move individually (BH-FDR q=.10), all toward the mode, led by the most distinctive models, while the conformist floor is immobile. It is a sharpener, not a re-indexer -- the plain-chat modal answer survives in 28 of 31 categories. Defaults are register-indexed: a within-run re-sample (n=20) finds JSON shifts 53% of a model's stable chat defaults, mostly back to the crowd, and installs defaults absent from chat (Claude Fable 5 answers "cerulean" for colour 0% of the time in chat, 100% in JSON). Full-battery controls reveal a register gradient: compression is significant and specific to the answer-delivery formats models are trained to speak (JSON -0.22 bits, p=.0002; XML -0.19, p=.002), absent for YAML and CSV, and reversed for an arbitrary bracket wrapper (+0.13, p=.009) -- weighing the mechanism toward tool-use post-training. Enforcing the schema at the decoder (response_format) compresses no further than the request (-0.03 bits): the collapse lives in the model's response to the register, not the decoder. Structured output is how software consumes language models, and that surface is served by a measurably more homogeneous model than the chat surface on which models are evaluated, compared, and chosen.

Digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) offer scalable support, but ensuring they accurately detect users' intent during volatile situations can be challenging. Pure parametric Large Language models (LLMs) do not contain specific safety critical architecture, and can miss critical cues, or hallucinate, undermining reliability. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which supplements an LLM with retrieved context, could enhance intent detection during volatile situations. Commercially available DMHIs typically combine multiple independent safety layers like rule-based filters, symbolic escalation protocols, and neural classification. The incremental contribution of any single layer, however, remains unquantified. This paper evaluates six LLM models within a DMHI called Wysa, via a controlled comparison of RAG-enabled versus RAG-disabled modes. Anonymized real and synthetic user-chatbot exchanges were annotated by a qualified clinical team against multi-class intent categories (e.g. self-harm, abuse, panic). The study computed classification accuracy, recall, precision and F1 scores against ground truth labels and tested differences for statistical significance. Performance was also examined by risk category and inter-model agreement. While RAG caused a rise in false alarms, the trade-off is consistent with safety-critical design principles that prioritize sensitivity, where flagged cases are routed to additional review rather than acted on directly. Overall, these findings support RAG as a promising approach to improve the accuracy, consistency and safety of LLM-driven DMHIs. Keywords: Digital Mental Health Intervention, Large Language Model, Retrieval Augmented Generation, Accuracy, Recall, Precision

Generative AI chatbots promise to transform English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing by providing immediate, personalised feedback. However, their pedagogical value depends on how learners engage with them - a process often treated as a "black box." This study uses Transition Network Analysis to model the temporal dynamics of Japanese EFL learners using "Penny," an LLM-powered writing chatbot. Analysis of over 4,500 writing sessions and 21,000 chatbot interactions reveals two dominant behavioural loops: a "Revision Loop," where feedback leads directly to successful error correction, and a "Chat Loop," where learners engage in sustained dialogue with the chatbot following feedback. Crucially, EFL proficiency significantly shapes interaction: high-proficiency learners engage more in open dialogue and negotiation with the chatbot, while low-proficiency learners rely more heavily on repetitive corrective feedback cycles. The findings demonstrate that AI-scaffolded writing is a non-linear, dialogic process and highlight the need for differentiated chatbot design to move beyond simple error correction and foster deeper cognitive engagement for all learners.

Dyadic conversational motion generation is essential for realistic interactive digital humans. Existing approaches typically model conversational behaviors within unified dyadic generators. However, such holistic formulations tend to couple self-speech-driven motion with partner-responsive social feedback, leaving the interaction-specific component implicit and underutilizing the speech-motion correspondence already learned by pretrained monologic motion models. We propose Learn2Chat, a unified framework that models dyadic motion as interaction modulation over pretrained monologic motion priors. This design separates intrinsic speech-driven motion from social interaction effects and enables more structured interaction modeling. Specifically, we introduce a Monologic-Anchored Motion Factorization scheme that leverages the semantic motion manifold learned from monologic data to disentangle audio-driven motion dynamics from interaction-induced modulation, yielding clean interaction representations from dyadic sequences. On top of this representation space, a Cross-Attentive Interaction Latent Prediction module maps paired speech signals to interaction latents through cross-branch attention and interaction alignment. During inference, the predicted interaction latents modulate canonical monologic motion to generate coherent and synchronized dyadic behaviors in a data-efficient manner. Extensive experiments on the DualTalk benchmark demonstrate that Learn2Chat achieves state-of-the-art performance across both quantitative metrics and perceptual evaluations. Moreover, the framework is model-agnostic and seamlessly integrates with diverse pretrained monologic motion backbones, highlighting the effectiveness of prior reuse and interaction adaptation for scalable conversational motion generation. More visual results are available on the project page.

AI chatbots are increasingly used for answering health-related questions. This study examines the role of topic type discussed with an AI chatbot and individual characteristics on perceived benefits and risks, intention to use an AI chatbot, and willingness to self-disclose health information. We conducted an online experiment with a 2 (topic type: physical versus psychological, between-subjects) x 2 (topic sensitivity: low versus high, within-subjects) mixed design among a Dutch representative sample (N = 1,388). Results showed that perceived benefits were positively associated with intention and willingness to self-disclose, while perceived risks were negatively associated. Moreover, participants reported higher usage intentions for low-sensitive topics compared to high-sensitive topics. Furthermore, perceptions, intention, and willingness to self-disclose varied by individual characteristics. Overall, our findings suggest that intentions to use AI chatbots and self-disclosure of health-related information are primarily related to perceived benefits and risks and to personal characteristics rather than to topic type.

Long-term user memory is essential for personalized conversational agents, yet many memory systems still expose memory through passive retrieval interfaces, making the model a consumer of pre-selected evidence. We introduce NapMem, a framework for learning to use long-term user memory as a structured action space rather than passively retrieved context. NapMem organizes user history into a linked multi-granularity memory pyramid, where raw conversations, typed memory records, topic tracks, and user profiles are connected through provenance relations, and exposes these levels through memory tools. The agent is trained to select memory according to the query and intermediate evidence, allowing it to inspect different memory granularities before answering. Experiments on PersonaMem-v2, LongMemEval, and LoCoMo show that a NapMem agent trained with memory-tool reinforcement learning is competitive across diverse memory-intensive tasks, while evaluations on non-memory tasks suggest that the learned policy largely preserves general reasoning and tool-use abilities. Additional analyses examine storage, inference cost, tool-use behavior, and ablations over navigation, memory granularity, and RL training. Our results suggest that long-term user memory benefits from coupling structured storage with a learned policy for using memory at the appropriate granularity.

Large language models are increasingly used as private, always-available conversational systems, but little is known about how people with depressive symptoms use them. Building on CSCW work on disclosure and peer support, we examine ChatGPT as an emerging informal support infrastructure: private, persistent, responsive, and available outside ordinary hours. We analyze 187,093 ChatGPT conversations from 766 participants who completed the PHQ-8, comparing those below the moderate-symptom threshold (score of 10) with those at or above it. Higher-PHQ participants used ChatGPT more for mental-health, interpersonal, loneliness, self-focused, and support-seeking conversations, with pronounced late-night and recurring month-level patterns. Their language contained more first-person singular pronouns and absolutist terms. They more often engaged ChatGPT in high-disclosure contexts, but professional redirection was not higher. Language-based prediction was modest and insufficient for screening (AUROC 0.591). We argue these histories should not be treated as clinical screening data but as evidence LLMs are increasingly used as informal support infrastructure.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as IDE-integrated coding agents that decompose tasks, generate and edit files, run code, and refine outputs over many turns. Yet their safety is still often evaluated as if they were chatbots: one harmful prompt, one response, judged in isolation. We introduce workflow-level jailbreak construction, a failure mode in which a harmful objective is assembled across ordinary stages of a software-development workflow rather than generated through a single direct prompt. Using GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, we study four closed-weight backends: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Gemini 3.5 Flash. Across 204 prompts from Hammurabi's Code, HarmBench, and AdvBench , the models show near-complete refusal under direct chat, CSV-read, and single-step code-fix baselines, with only 8/816 successful responses in each baseline condition. Under the full workflow, however, the same prompts and backends produce 816/816 unsafe teaching-shot completions, all independently confirmed by two expert evaluators under a strict rubric. These results show that conversational refusal benchmarks can substantially overstate the safety of deployed coding agents and motivate defenses that reason about safety across multi-turn IDE workflows and their generated artifacts, not only individual chat turns.

Privacy is an important challenge when users interact with AI chatbots, since users may share sensitive information, explicitly or implicitly, and AI chatbots can use this information for user profiling. In this paper, we aim to protect user privacy via a user-side mechanism that transforms sensitive information in a user prompt, while preserving enough information to elicit a useful response from the chatbot. This approach faces an inherent tradeoff between protecting privacy (i.e., avoiding profiling) and preserving utility (i.e., getting personalized and task-specific responses). To that end, we consider, evaluate, and compare four different obfuscation actions, namely redaction, abstraction, replacement, and a novel noising/denoising scheme that we introduce. Additional novel insights include: utilizing a data type taxonomy to both identify and obfuscate sensitive information and explicitly taking into account the utility of chat responses in making the obfuscation decision. First, we systematically optimize and evaluate each obfuscation action independently in terms of the privacy-utility tradeoff it achieves. Second, we propose PROMPTPET, an LLM-based agent that selects the best obfuscation action for each sensitive part of the prompt, using a reinforcement-learning inspired rule optimizer, applied for the first time in this context. Using a real-world chat dataset, we show that PROMPTPET matches the best privacy-utility tradeoff attainable by any single obfuscation action and significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches.

Software development is a complex task that demands cooperation among agents with diverse roles. Large language models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous multi-agent software development frameworks that leverage role-based collaboration to automate requirements analysis, coding, testing, and refinement. However, existing approaches typically assume that intermediate agent outputs are equally reliable, leaving them vulnerable to hallucination propagation, where incorrect decisions generated in early development phases are transferred to downstream agents and negatively impact final software quality. To address this challenge, we propose UA-ChatDev, an uncertainty-aware multi-agent software development framework that integrates uncertainty quantification into agent interactions. It introduces a lightweight uncertainty estimation mechanism based on token-level log probabilities to assess the confidence of agent responses and employs phase-aware threshold calibration to selectively trigger retrieval-based verification when uncertainty exceeds acceptable levels. Extensive experiments on the SRDD benchmark demonstrate that UA-ChatDev consistently outperforms existing single-agent and multi-agent software development frameworks across completeness, executability, consistency, and overall quality metrics. Further ablation studies and communication analyses verify that uncertainty-aware interactions enhance code execution reliability.

University stakeholders often face difficulties in accessing timely and reliable information, especially in developing countries, where there are very few intelligent support systems. Existing rule-based chatbots are unable to handle complex, domain-specific queries and are not well-equipped to adapt to evolving institutional policies. As a fill-in-the-gap solution, we present the multimodal university chatbot with retrieval-augmented generation. The system combines the large language model with semantic retrieval to produce context-based responses from institution-centric resources, such as the university handbook. The system accepts text and image queries through the vision-language model and applies quantized inference for rapid deployment on constrained hardware. A scalable backend built with FastAPI, adjoined with a responsive frontend developed with Next.js, ensures real-time usability. Our multimodal evaluation demonstrates that the system maintains strong satisfaction scores across both text and image queries, despite increased response time for visual inputs. Furthermore, quantitative evaluation shows that hallucination is reduced from 31.7% to 6.6% in our proposed RAG-based system, confirming the effectiveness of retrieval grounding.

Chatbots have become increasingly prevalent across various domains, offering automated assistance in many areas, especially mental health support. The training is done using extremely large datasets, which are sometimes not available in very specific domains. Moreover, it would sometimes be ideal to train the chatbot with personal information about the patients, which, of course, cannot be done on shared servers since it would violate patient confidentiality. Hence, being able to improve the performance of a chatbot, possibly trained locally and on a restricted dataset, without having to increase the dataset itself, would be extremely beneficial. In this work, we will enhance the input datasets using persistent homology (PH) vectorizations computed from the raw datasets themselves. Then we will compare, across several metrics, the performance of multiple chatbot models with or without the PH enhancement. Our experiments suggest that, while at times the PH enhancement is not particularly beneficial, it sometimes brings remarkable advantages for virtually no cost.

Self-stigma predicts treatment avoidance and disengagement among people who use drugs (PWUD), yet conversational systems aiming to provide support typically treat self-stigma expression as a uniform signal. We present a three-phase, proof-of-concept study of a persona-aware approach to LLM support. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) on indicator-level features from 1,174 self-stigma expressors on Reddit yields a four-persona typology validated against held-out behavioral and linguistic features. Sequential Bayesian and recurrent neural classifiers recover these personas from limited posting histories, substantially outperforming batch and few-shot LLM baselines (macro-F1 = 0.74 at 30 posts). Evaluation by eight clinical experts across three contemporary LLMs revealed a misalignment: persona-matched responses successfully achieved targeted behavioral shifts, yet raters holistically preferred the generic empathy of the persona-neutral baseline. Our findings suggest that holistic empathy judgments and clinically-aligned response design can pull in opposite directions, and that evaluating LLM-based stigma support requires rubrics capable of decomposing the two.

As LLM-powered scams proliferate, black-box forensics for conversational LLM agents offers a path to accountability for systems hidden behind anonymous endpoints. Identifying the base model behind a chatbot endpoint (attribution), without model parameter access or knowledge of the hidden system prompt, would let investigators trace AI-enabled scams back to the providers whose models power them. Detecting when two endpoints run the exact same system prompt (fingerprinting), even one novel and unseen, would link individual scams into criminal networks and expose silent API changes. We conduct an empirical investigation of both capabilities. Our attribution classifiers identify the base model behind an agent with 98% accuracy from a few turns of non-adversarial conversation. Attribution of system prompts, while possible, requires retraining on a large amount of data for each prompt; system prompts in the wild are unbounded and ever-changing, making this approach costly. To tackle this more open-ended setting, our cross-encoder fingerprinting method achieves an AUC of 0.768 and an F1 of 0.703 on entirely unseen system prompts, and aggregating 50 interaction conversations from each target agent boosts AUC to 0.943. Conversational agents with unseen system prompts can thus be fingerprinted with robust accuracy from a few turns of ordinary conversation.

This paper introduces two constructs to describe, as far as we know, a previously unnamed risk in human-LLM interaction. Co-construction blindness is the failure to recognize that LLM outputs are not independent assessments to be verified, but co-constructed artifacts shaped by the user's own inputs, accumulated history, and metadata. Every user of a conversational LLM is IN the loop, not ON it -- yet every deployment disclaimer positions them as external auditors. Asymmetric epistemic vulnerability describes the condition in which co-construction blindness produces consequences of radically different magnitude depending on where in the authority structure the user sits. We argue that these constructs describe a structural inevitability, not an anomaly, using the public case of Richard Dawkins's interaction with Claude as a paradigmatic instance. We document a secondary mechanism -- structural deference -- through a first-person exchange in which a large language model concedes that it treated Dawkins more gently than warranted because his intellectual output is represented in its training data. We map the research gaps this analysis opens and call for shared terminology as a precondition for appropriate governance and design response.

Prompt injection is ranked as the most critical vulnerability in large language model (LLM) deployments by the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, yet existing defenses operate at isolated pipeline stages and remain incomplete. Input filters cannot inspect retrieved documents, while output monitors cannot prevent malicious payloads from reaching the model. Consequently, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots remain vulnerable to indirect injection, where a poisoned knowledge-base document compromises every user whose query retrieves it. We present a three-layer framework that intercepts both direct and indirect prompt injection throughout the inference pipeline. Layer 1 screens user input using a rule-based pattern library and a fine-tuned semantic anomaly classifier. Layer 2 enforces a provenance-based instruction hierarchy during context assembly, preventing retrieved content from overriding operator policy. Layer 3 audits model output using a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector before delivery. A continuous audit loop aggregates structured logs and supports retraining to adapt the classifier to emerging attack patterns. The framework is model-agnostic and deploys as middleware without modifying the underlying LLM. Evaluation on 5,080 samples across GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B shows that the framework reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) from 71.4% to 11.3%, outperforming the best single-layer baseline by 27.3 percentage points and a published guardrail system by 23.8 percentage points, while maintaining a 4.8% false positive rate and a median latency overhead of 61.2 ms. Ablation studies confirm that all three layers provide complementary protection and that their combined effect exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), and in particular Large Language Models (LLMs), is reshaping educational practice, while intensifying ethical debate about its adoption. To date, the dominant paradigm remains cloud-based and text-only chatbot: a centralized service that offers limited pedagogical control, weak transparency over knowledge sources, and non-trivial risks for privacy and regulatory compliance. This model also presumes continuous connectivity and recurring API costs, creating structural barriers for many institutions, reinforcing existing digital divides. At the same time, educational interaction with LLM can benefit from multimodal cues and embodied presence, requiring interfaces that move beyond text-only tutoring. In this work, we propose ELEVATE (Efficient LLM Education with Virtual Avatar Teaching Engine), a framework to develop efficient GenAI-driven avatar tutors governed by epistemic infrastructures. ELEVATE integrates LLM-driven dialogue with embodied 3D avatars for multimodal interaction and adopts a local-first execution model enabling deployment on consumer-grade hardware. The framework formalizes a three-stratum design that separates (i) a student-facing virtual avatar interaction layer, (ii) a local GenAI execution and multimodal synthesis core, and (iii) a teacher-facing governance layer. We implemented and evaluated a working prototype deployed in a real-world educational curriculum. The system runs on standard PCs and smartphones, and we provide system-level performance evidence to show responsive interaction under realistic hardware constraints. Finally, we discuss sociotechnical and pedagogical implications for responsible adoption, positioning ELEVATE as a scalable pathway for privacy-preserving and inclusive GenAI tutoring across heterogeneous school environments.

Chronic wound assessment remains a clinically challenging task that requires accurate interpretation of wound morphology, tissue composition, vascular characteristics, and infection risk. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have introduced the possibility of automated multimodal wound analysis through image understanding combined with clinical reasoning. This study evaluates the performance of several general-purpose and medically specialized open-source and proprietary VLMs for clinical wound assessment using an expanded, curated dataset of 20 clinically diverse wounds spanning vascular, surgical, ischemic, venous, lymphedema, and amputation-related etiologies. Six VLMs were evaluated using a structured twelve-question clinical framework covering wound classification, infection risk, vascular intervention recommendations, debridement urgency, wound therapy selection, and advanced management planning. Across 20 wound cases and 240 clinician-graded wound-analysis decisions, ChatGPT achieved the highest overall performance with 174/240 correct responses (72.50%), followed by Claude with 149/240 (62.08%). Among the open-source and medically specialized models, HuluMed achieved the strongest performance with 96/240 correct responses (40.00%), followed by Gemma 3 (81/240, 33.75%), MedGemma 4B (62/240, 25.83%), and MedGemma 27B (42/240, 17.50%). The findings suggest that frontier general-purpose multimodal systems currently demonstrate substantially stronger wound-analysis performance than medically specialized alternatives, highlighting the continued importance of broad multimodal reasoning capabilities alongside domain-specific medical knowledge. Although current VLMs demonstrate promising potential for clinical decision support, substantial limitations remain in advanced wound-management reasoning, procedural planning, and autonomous clinical reliability.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to fulfill users' information needs; users ask LLMs about the weather, pose educational questions, and consult them for legal assistance. One particularly understudied area is digital security and privacy (S&P), where users may seek LLMs' help on how to secure their online accounts or protect their computers from cyber attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no prior study has collected or analyzed the S&P questions users ask LLMs; prior research on LLM response quality relied on expert-authored S&P misconceptions or FAQs rather than user queries. Drawing from WildChat, a dataset of 3.2M user-LLM conversations collected in the wild, our study identifies 14,727 S&P prompts and categorizes them into nine categories covering a wide range of S&P topics. From the S&P prompts, we sampled 450 and performed a thematic analysis to characterize the S&P questions users ask LLMs. Separate from the thematic analysis, we curated 270 advice-seeking S&P prompts, where users ask for recommendations, guidance, or specific S&P information. We measured LLM response quality and consistency when posing the prompt to LLMs 10 times. We found that commercial LLMs outperform open-weight models (GPT 5.5 provided "good enough" responses on 98% of prompts; Llama 4 on 47%). However, among prompts that received high-quality responses on average, commercial models sometimes produce contradictory responses across runs, risking confusing or misleading users.

Personal health data from wearables are typically presented through dashboards of charts and summary statistics, requiring users to actively interpret patterns and implications. We explore an alternative interaction paradigm: engaging with personal health data through an embodied conversational agent that facilitates objective data reflection in dialogue with the user. We present a system that combines lightweight preprocessing of wearable data with a Unity-based embodied character. Internally, the system follows a dual-agent design in which an Observer agent extracts descriptive statistics and temporal trends, and a Presenter agent communicates these findings through "spoken statistics," intentionally refraining from clinical advice to isolate the impact of the interaction modality. We evaluate this approach through a simulated-self user study (N=5) using a within-subject design. Participants adopted health personas and goals derived from the LifeSnaps dataset to compare traditional dashboard exploration with embodied conversational reflection. Our evaluation focuses on perceived understanding, the specificity of generated actions, and the cognitive shift from passive viewing to active sensemaking. The paper contributes a functional prototype, a design pattern for objective health data narrative generation, and early empirical insights into how embodiment affects the interpretation of personal health metrics.

A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

Online group chats are social spaces with local conversational norms that are rarely stated explicitly. The ability and willingness of LLM-based agents to recognize and adapt to these norms remains mostly unexplored. We introduce LoSoNA, a benchmark for local social norm adaptation in multi-party chat. Each scenario gives a subject model a curated group-chat transcript in which non-subject participants demonstrate a hidden local norm, followed by a final elicitor turn that forces a response revealing whether the subject has inferred that norm. We evaluate eight frontier and open-weight models under four prompting conditions that vary how explicitly the model is told to treat the prior conversation as evidence for how it should answer. Naive prompting remains limited for most models; explicit norm-aware prompting helps unevenly, with Gemini 3.1 Pro reaching $84.2\%$ and Claude Fable 5 reaching $81.6\%$, while several other models show small gains or regressions. LoSoNA contributes to recent calls for evaluating LLM social capabilities by testing whether models can infer local conversational norms from precedent and use them in a one-turn group-chat response.

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

Current Generative AI (GenAI) interfaces remain largely constrained to chatbox interaction, which can impose high cognitive demands on users and create substantial barriers for people with intellectual disabilities (ID), including prompt formulation difficulties, response overload, and limited mechanisms to assess information reliability. To explore alternative interaction models for cognitive accessibility, we conducted a cross-disciplinary co-design challenge in which two student cohorts (Computer Science and Industrial Design) developed interface concepts from the same set of functional requirements (e.g., prompt scaffolding, structured output, GUI-based refinement, transparency, and personalization). Comparing the resulting proposals reveals both convergence on foundational requirements (notably initial calibration, proactive prompting, and direct manipulation of response fragments) and complementary contributions that outline a multi-layered support system. Computer Science teams primarily produced structural scaffolding, emphasizing predictability, navigability, and trust through mechanisms such as reliability indicators, explicit sources, and context management for long conversations. Industrial Design teams emphasized experiential scaffolding, focusing on pacing, attention guidance, multimodality, and proactive agency, including step-by-step response flows, focus modes, and assistant-like integrations. We synthesize these findings into a dual-layer scaffolding framework that expands the design space for cognitively accessible GenAI interaction beyond chat-centric models and motivates future work on expert refinement, technical feasibility, and empirical validation with users with ID.

Large language models are now widely used for everyday learning, but the underlying interactions are typically unstructured chats rather than following a curriculum. Unlike formal online learning systems, these interactions carry no prior record of the student, so any estimate of what the student already knows must be inferred from the dialogue itself. We show that this gap is not closed by scaling models alone. Frontier and education-tuned LLMs perform poorly when asked to tutor a student over an extended session, because doing so requires three things at once. The tutor must sequence a curriculum, conduct Socratic dialogue, and infer the student's knowledge state from that dialogue. We propose separating these responsibilities. Given a student query, our system constructs a prerequisite knowledge graph in which subtopics are nodes and dependencies are edges, and frames tutoring as deciding which node to teach next and how many dialogue turns to spend on it before moving on. A lightweight PPO policy handles this sequencing decision, while an LLM conducts the Socratic exchange at the chosen node and returns a signal of student progress. Across held-out STEM and non-STEM topics, our PPO-paired tutor outperforms heuristic baselines, frontier general-purpose models, and a model specialised for Socratic dialogue: on both the rate at which students reach full curriculum mastery and the number of turns required. Explicit curriculum structure delivers gains that scaling the underlying model does not.

LLM-powered chatbots are increasingly embedded in everyday workflows, raising sustainability concerns due to their energy use. Most mitigation strategies emphasize model or infrastructure efficiency, while the user-interface (UI) layer remains underexplored despite its potential to shape interaction behavior. We investigate whether sustainability-oriented UI interventions can increase users' energy awareness and encourage more energy-responsible chatbot use without reducing usability. We first conducted a baseline survey with 77 participants to assess awareness and receptiveness to intervention concepts. Guided by prior work on persuasive technology and choice architecture, we implemented a web-based chatbot prototype with a three-mode switch (Energy-efficient, Balanced, Performance), per-response energy feedback, pre-send energy estimates, a usage metrics dashboard, and energy analogies. We then evaluated the prototype in a five-day field study with 11 participants. In the baseline survey, 94.8% of respondents reported at least some awareness of AI energy use, yet 88.3% misestimated actual consumption. Although concern about environmental impact was high, only 39.0% indicated willingness to accept a performance trade-off for lower energy use. In the field study, Energy-efficient mode accounted for 55.8% of logged prompts, while 90.9% self-reported actively choosing Eco-mode when high accuracy was not required. Participants did not reduce prompt length, suggesting mode switching as the primary behavioral mechanism. Sustainability-oriented UI interventions can improve awareness and support more energy-responsible interaction patterns in LLM chatbots. These effects are best interpreted as behavioral and model-based estimates that complement backend efficiency work, and the provided prototype and replication package support further research on energy-aware conversational AI design.

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has become an important post-training paradigm for turning LLMs from static chatbots into interactive agents, giving rise to representative applications such as OpenClaw. Existing work mainly focuses on policy optimization algorithms and training frameworks, but pays less attention to the full data lifecycle of agent-environment interactions, from data production to training consumption. To bridge this gap, we present Claw-R1, an interactive step-level data middleware system for agentic RL. Claw-R1 connects heterogeneous agent runtimes with RL training backends through two core components: a Gateway Server and a Data Pool. The Gateway Server captures multi-turn interaction steps through a unified LLM API entry point, while the Data Pool organizes them into step-level records consisting of prompt IDs, response IDs, rewards and other metadata. In our demo, users can interactively inspect live trajectories, examine the state, action, and reward of each step, curate data by quality and readiness, and configure training-ready batches for different downstream RL algorithms. Overall, Claw-R1 treats agent interaction traces as managed data assets rather than temporary runtime logs. Through this demonstration, we hope to encourage the community to recognize the importance of data management in agentic RL. Our code is available at https://github.com/AgentR1/Claw-R1 and the demonstration video can be found at link https://youtu.be/Pw47dAOw6B0.