Human

Scientific discovery is defined by the ability to identify the boundaries of existing knowledge and venture into unexplored territory. The ultimate vision for AI in science is problem-driven autonomous research: given a fundamental challenge by a human expert, the AI independently navigates the scientific landscape, uncovers theoretical and empirical bottlenecks, and systematically expands the frontier of knowledge. In this paper, we introduce ScientistTwo, a fully autonomous multi-agent framework designed to realize this vision. Specifically, ScientistTwo takes an initial problem as input, establishes state-of-the-art baselines, formulates novel hypotheses, and coordinates specialized agents to orchestrate an end-to-end discovery cycle without human intervention. Moreover, the framework rigorously conducts experiments using diverse datasets and metrics, refines methodologies through automated ablation studies, and validates research findings via a closed-loop simulated peer-review rebuttal engine. To evaluate ScientistTwo's capabilities against the highest standards of human scientific achievement, we benchmark it across papers accepted at top-tier conferences such as ICLR, ICML, and NeurIPS. As a result, ScientistTwo autonomously generates expert-level, publishable papers and fully verified, executable codebases. Its solutions consistently outperform human state-of-the-art models, and achieve higher average review ratings than human-authored papers under automated AI review agents. These results show that ScientistTwo is not merely an assistive tool but an autonomous scientific pioneer capable of pushing the frontiers of human discovery. Project website: https://scientist-two.github.io/

AI systems have begun to report solutions, disproofs, and substantive advances on long-standing mathematical problems, raising questions about whether they approach research in the same way as mathematicians. This study compares public AI research accounts with the human literature on 11 such problems. The human corpus contains 58 papers that directly addressed the same mathematical targets later reported by AI sources as resolved, disproved, or substantially advanced; 31 within-problem comparisons were constructed from these materials. Six validated text-based measures capture problem resolution, method articulation, uncertainty and boundary specification, successor-question generation, generality, and cross-disciplinary integration. AI accounts place greater emphasis on resolving the focal problem and connecting ideas across fields. Human papers devote significantly more attention to explaining methods, specifying assumptions and limitations, and identifying questions for subsequent research. No precise difference is detected in generality. The estimated directions remain unchanged when each mathematical problem is removed in turn. The findings reveal two distinct research profiles: AI accounts concentrate on closing and recombining problems, whereas mathematical papers more extensively document the procedures, limits, and research opportunities through which results become cumulative knowledge. Evaluating research AI therefore requires attention to the organization of inquiry, not only whether a target is solved.

When foundation models describe people, recent work in AI fairness, accessibility, and ethics recommends avoiding inferred identity labels (e.g., "she", "his") in favor of seemingly "objective" physical descriptions (e.g., "short hair", "a defined jawline"). Yet whether such descriptive language achieves gender-neutral communication remains an open empirical question. To study this, we introduce GAPA (Gender Associations of Physical Attributes), a dataset of 316 common physical attributes drawn from diverse sources, paired with 14,706 gender-association ratings from 304 US-based annotators. Results show that physical descriptions carry structured and graded gender associations among readers, with more consistent and distinctive associations for women and men than for non-binary identities. Next, we evaluate 16 LLMs across model families, sizes, and post-training variants against human ratings. The models partially recover human associations but exhibit systematic alignment biases, including compressed rating distributions, weaker alignment for associations with men, and asymmetric abstention that disproportionately targets the non-binary category. Finally, we release the best-performing proxy model trained to predict humans' gender associations of descriptive language and demonstrate its utility through a sociolinguistic analysis of character descriptions in LitBank. Together, our findings provide the first empirical evidence that seemingly "objective" physical descriptions can retain systematic gender associations in human interpretation, and uncover systematic patterns of model-human misalignment. This challenges the assumption that replacing explicit gender labels with physical descriptions necessarily yields gender-neutral communication, and highlights downstream challenges in using such descriptions to communicate subjective identity categories in human-AI interaction.

Companion robots face everyday situations in which several feasible behaviors may be appropriate, yet different people prefer different responses. We introduce InterSocialBench, a benchmark of 210 domestic scenarios and 18 high-level behaviors, pairing judgments from 100 human participants with 23,520 responses from seven large language models under 16 personality conditions. Each human annotation preserves a preferred action alongside explicitly appropriate and inappropriate candidates. A structured construction pipeline covers behavioral alternatives, competing situational cues, and relevant history and future tasks. Evaluation distinguishes preferred-choice agreement from explicit rejection, using scenario-grouped splits for trainable predictors. Simple frequency and persona-voting baselines illustrate these objectives. Across the tested prompts, model and human behavior distributions differ, and the diversity gap remains after matching response counts: humans exhibit 4.68 distinct choices per scenario, compared with 2.06--3.46 for the models. Human scenario-level plurality agreement is 51.5%, describing disagreement rather than a universal prediction ceiling. InterSocialBench supports evaluating social behavior selection without replacing individual judgments with a single consensus label.

The conditional generation of 3D motion has emerged as a key research topic due to its wide applicability across robotics, AR/VR, gaming, and content creation. However, extending recent advances in text-driven human motion generation to the animal domain remains challenging due to two core limitations. First, animals exhibit highly diverse skeletal topologies, unlike the standard human structure, making unified modeling across species difficult and leading to inefficient per-species models. Second, existing animal motion datasets suffer from limited scale and annotation quality, constraining model performance. To address these challenges, we propose UniMo, a unified point cloud-based motion generation framework that bypasses topological discrepancies by converting parametric skeletons into unparametric representations, further enhanced by dynamic sampling that allocates more points to active joints. Additionally, we present UniML3D, a large-scale motion-language dataset spanning both human and animal categories, containing 145,907 motion sequences and 433,388 captions-over 102x larger than existing animal datasets. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on UniML3D and three public benchmarks including HumanML3D, KIT-ML, and AnimalML3D, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of unified human-animal motion generation. Website: https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/UniMo.

Understanding person-level bi-manual interactions requires not only detecting hands, but also identifying which two hands belong to the same person and what each hand interacts with. Existing hand--object interaction methods are mostly hand-centric: they treat each hand as an independent instance, which can lead to ambiguous ownership in multi-person scenes. We propose a person-centric formulation in which a single query predicts a structured output for one person, including the human box, body pose, hand boxes and states, and interaction targets. We introduce part-aware deformable attention to allocate attention across human, hand, and pose-specific reference regions, enabling one query to capture the full person structure. We further unify detection and interaction reasoning with a hand-to-query relationship matrix, where each hand selects its interaction target from the detected query set plus a learnable off token, directly recovering the target's box and class without separate object regression. We build a COCO-based dataset with person-centric bi-manual interaction annotations and define structured metrics for evaluating hand states and complete hand--object tuples. Experiments with a transformer-based detector show that our formulation improves person-level bi-manual interaction parsing and provides an effective unified framework for joint detection, pose estimation, and hand reasoning.

A century of psychology has found that the trait words people use to describe one another vary, but the relational structure among those traits, which ones go together and which oppose, is strikingly consistent across raters and cultures. We test whether the LLM (Qwen 2.5-7B-Instruct) reproduces this structure in its internal trait representations. From millions of crowd-sourced personality ratings of fictional characters, we build a human implicit-personality matrix over hundreds of traits; from contrastive model activations, we build a matching matrix over the same traits. The two relational structures align strongly (Mantel r = 0.77), and the agreement holds trait by trait as well as in aggregate. Two dominant axes of the model's trait representations recover the social and intellectual dimensions long known to organize human personality impressions, social warmth and intellectual competence. On held-out dialogue, projecting model activations onto these directions yields personality profiles that agree with human ratings. This work establishes a framework that enables comprehensive, human-grounded comparison between internal model trait geometry and the shared structure of human personality impressions.

Streaming video understanding requires models to process continuous multimodal input while maintaining temporal context. Existing evaluations are predominantly reactive: they query a model at a selected timestamp and therefore do not assess when it should respond. Proactive interaction instead requires monitoring a standing request, responding within an appropriate interval after the target event, and otherwise remaining silent. We introduce LiveProBench, which evaluates models at one-second stream intervals without an explicit response cue. Its six subtasks vary trigger ambiguity and timing tolerance. Event Sensitivity geometrically combines response and silence rates on the same recording; four window-based subtasks distinguish early, in-window, and missed responses; and Duplicate Counting penalizes omissions and repetitions. Premature responses outnumber missed responses for half of the evaluated models, revealing a substantial gap in the temporal decision-making required for human-like interaction.

Recursive self-improvement (RSI) enables AI systems to turn experience and feedback into persistent changes that improve both their capabilities and the process of future improvement. We first use the Headroom-Closed Index (HCI) to reveal the problems of existing LLMs, then introduce the RSI concept and its development roadmap: from improvement-execution autonomy, improvement-strategy autonomy, experience-acquisition autonomy, and environment-adaptation autonomy, to recursive meta-improvement. Next we examine RSI across scenarios (e.g., scientific discovery, embodied intelligence, software engineering), highlighting their distinct requirements and development speeds. Drawing on diverse industry practices and preliminary empirical evidence, we connect RSI research with practical systems and identify key challenges to achieving genuine RSI.

Reasoning representations are increasingly used as explanations for large language model outputs. Yet they are typically evaluated with model-centric criteria, such as answer accuracy and faithfulness, leaving it unclear whether they help people evaluate model responses. In this work, we study reasoning representations as human-facing interfaces rather than proxies for model reasoning ability. We conduct a controlled human study of six reasoning formats across tasks of varying complexity, supported by a web-based framework that randomizes task domains, problem instances, and representation order. The study collects fine-grained judgments of structural understanding, error detection and localization, and trust calibration. Our study shows a mismatch between perceived preference and support for human evaluation. Participants prefer planning- and decomposition-based representations, but simpler chain-of-thought traces better support verification, trust, and interpretability. Preferred representations also introduce calibration risks, with more false alarms on correct traces and high trust despite low willingness to verify.

Behavioral foundation models have been proposed as stand-ins for human participants across settings, but it is unclear whether theories discovered on them generalize to humans or merely characterize the simulator. We ran the Automated Cognitive Scientist (\textsc{AutoCog}), a closed-loop discovery system in which LLM agents design theory-discriminating experiments, collect responses, arbitrate between competing theories, and synthesize successors, entirely on behavior simulated by Centaur, a foundation model of human behavior. In a multi-attribute decision-making setting, the theories \textsc{AutoCog} found on Centaur generalized to human data: they outperformed canonical theories on ten held-out experiments and were rivaled only by theories found by running the same loop on people. We argue that this succeeds despite the simulator's inevitable imperfections because a discovery loop that arbitrates between competing theories demands less of its simulator than estimation does. The simulator only needs to capture the regularities that distinguish the theories, and not necessarily reproduce behavior precisely. Imperfect simulators can therefore widen the search over theories, with human data then testing whether the surfaced theories generalize.

The evolution of DNA sequences can be viewed as stochastic dynamics on a high-dimensional discrete space, but it is unclear when empirical transition biases reduce to an effective energy landscape versus retain irreducible non-equilibrium circulation. Human context-dependent mutation probabilities offer a direct test: every single-nucleotide substitution in a local context has a reverse substitution, so the logarithm of the forward-to-reverse probability ratio defines an antisymmetric field-the human mutation field. We show this field has a dominant gradient component and a smaller but reproducible curl component. Using seven-base human germline substitution probabilities, we infer an effective mutational landscape with a Siamese neural network constrained to predict only energy differences. This model predicts forward-to-reverse log-ratios for held-out mutations with a correlation of about 0.93, close to both an unconstrained predictive reference (0.948) and the empirical reversible ceiling from Hodge projection (about 0.96). Although trained only on mutation probabilities, the inferred landscape largely recovers short-word genomic composition and Chargaff reverse-complement symmetry for sequences up to length four. Deviations from equilibrium structure reveal a small but detectable nonequilibrium component: a residual irreversible circulation violating the Kolmogorov cycle condition for detailed balance, reproducible across African, Asian, and European populations, and strongest in CpG-linked cycles and CpG-transition edges, consistent with methylcytosine deamination. These results give a thermodynamic decomposition of the human mutation field: most mutation bias is organized by a local equilibrium-like energy landscape aligned with genome composition, while the residual circulation points to specific directional mutational mechanisms.

A major question in cognitive modeling concerns the behavioral alignment between large language models and humans across linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. Unlike standard LLMs, large reasoning models (LRMs) are optimized with reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards, encouraging correct solutions to reasoning tasks rather than preference-aligned responses. Recent work (de Varda et al., 2025) investigates the cost of thinking in humans and LRMs by comparing human reaction times with model reasoning traces across a range of reasoning tasks. We isolate this alignment by turning to abductive reasoning: unlike deductive tasks, its difficulty cannot be inferred from formal structure and offers no shortcuts a model could exploit to mimic effort without genuine search, providing firmer ground for empirical claims of shared effort. We find further evidence of alignment between LRM and human reasoning effort, as well as evidence that models and humans tend to make similar errors. Finally, we show that decoding methods that let models explore multiple reasoning paths increase alignment in reasoning cost between humans and LRMs across the three models tested.

The LLM-as-a-judge (LLMaJ) framework offers a cost-effective and reproducible solution for automatic evaluation. However, current evaluation practices typically compare LLMaJ judgments against aggregated ground-truth labels, overlooking the valuable information contained in Human Label Variation (HLV). Inspired by an increasing line of work that proposes to leverage HLV, we systematically study LLMaJ performance on predicting both a single, aggregated ground truth hard-label and unaggregated soft-labels that represent Human Judgment Distributions (HJD). Our results across five diverse datasets reveal that while LLMs achieve near human-level performance at hard-label prediction on most tasks, they exhibit poor performance when predicting soft-labels. To address this limitation, we propose NAPHA (eNtropy-Aware Post-Hoc Alignment), a simple yet effective lightweight post-hoc alignment method that matches the LLM distribution to the HJD by first assigning an instance to a discrete entropy class and then routing it to specialized, trained alignment models. We find that NAPHA consistently improves soft-labels prediction across base LLM models and datasets, with particularly strong gains on high-entropy instances where capturing diverse human perspectives is most critical. We also show via oracle experiments that improving entropy class prediction can substantially enhance NAPHA's practical effectiveness.

Recent advances in generative AI are raising ethical concerns regarding the originality of generated content and the potential replication of training data, with further implications for transparency, attribution, and intellectual property. In music, several computational approaches have been proposed to identify potential replication, using audio-based similarity metrics. Yet, their alignment with human judgments across distinct musical attributes remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a perceptual experiment on music matches, defined as strongly similar musical excerpts. We focus on five musical attributes: melody, harmony, rhythm, voice, and timbre. We design a triplet-based forced-choice task comprising 300 cases, including plagiarism examples, cover songs, and AI-generated music. From this experiment, we introduce the MATCHA (Musical Attribute-based Triplet Comparison with Human Annotations) dataset: a collection of 1105 perceptual assessments of attribute-based music matches from 83 expert participants. Our findings reveal measurable agreement among participants in identifying matches across attributes. We further observe partial alignment between human judgments and computational similarity measures. Overall, this work underscores the importance of domain-specific and perceptually grounded evaluation frameworks for generative AI in creative practice.

Artists coordinate human pose, illumination, and camera placement to convey narrative and emotion, but existing generative methods typically model these elements independently. We introduce text-to-editable 3D staging, a task that jointly generates human poses, a dominant light, and a camera configuration from an affective description. We construct 11,911 text--staging pairs from 2,328 figurative paintings by reconstructing SMPL bodies, estimating low-frequency illumination, recovering camera parameters, and pairing each scene with ArtEmis descriptions. We train a flow-matching transformer that supports variable numbers of figures and produces multiple staging alternatives for each prompt. On held-out descriptions, the model achieves 32.2% retrieval R@1, compared with 16.6% for CLIP-based nearest-neighbor retrieval, while approximately preserving corpus-level diversity. These results demonstrate the feasibility of generating editable, emotionally conditioned 3D staging references from text.

AI agents pose significant risks as they are granted increasing autonomy. A commonly proposed solution is human oversight and keeping a ''human in the loop'', but this is not a simple solution: Not only do current approaches to AI agent design impede effective human oversight, but the cognitive capacities required for it are also themselves degraded by extended use of AI systems. This position paper argues that current approaches to the development and deployment of AI agent systems do not support effective human oversight -- they contribute to its degradation. To address this, a top priority in the advancement of AI agents should be supporting the situated goals and cognitive requirements of effective human oversight, treating the human needs of overseers at the same level of importance as AI agent capability. To put this idea into practice, we connect work on automation and human-computer interaction to AI agent processes, outlining design-level affordances and organizational protocols that (1) support overseers in exercising critical judgement and (2) counteract the skill atrophy that arises from extended use of automation. We urge developers and deployers to adopt these or similar approaches. Without explicit support for the cognitive demands of effective human-agent interaction, AI agent systems will continue to passively incentivize the degradation of the very human skills they rely on.

Intelligence is constituted by \textit{process} (iterative activity through which output emerges), not in the output itself. Generative AI (GenAI) is trained on \textit{traces} (textual and visual residues of human cognitive processes), reproducing samples from a distribution of those traces. Its outputs resemble reasoning, problem-solving, and creativity, yet the activity that produces such outputs in humans remains largely absent. Current GenAI is, therefore, weakly equivalent to the cognition it imitates, matching outputs while process stays absent or opaque. The cognitive sciences have long distinguished between weak and strong equivalence. Here, we define \textit{strong} equivalence across seven process features, assessable against human and machine cognition. Our process-based account addresses a symmetric risk: GenAI tools that outsource a person's generative processes may leave critical capacities unbuilt. We specify design principles for GenAI that instantiate more process and preserve rather than erode human judgment and creativity, and outline process audits that make strong equivalence testable.

Realistic 3D human generation plays a crucial role in many graphics applications. However, current methods still struggle to generate high-quality human geometry and texture while maintaining 3D consistency and inference efficiency. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing TGRHuman, a novel approach for generating realistic 3D humans from text. Our method decouples geometry and texture generation to alleviate the issues commonly encountered in NeRF-based methods. Instead of relying on slow, implicit score-distillation-based optimization, we directly use explicit multi-view observation generation and optimization for efficient 3D synthesis. For geometry generation, we propose a high-resolution generative module for multi-view normals together with a geometry-carving strategy that preserves view consistency and supports loose clothing. For texture generation, we produce spatially consistent RGB observations from densely sampled surrounding views using a carefully designed texture-prior acquisition strategy and a diffusion renderer, enabling detailed human texture synthesis. Experiments show that our method can generate high-quality and consistent 3D human geometry and texture efficiently. TGRHuman outperforms existing text-to-3D human methods in both geometry and texture quality.

While foundation models have significantly advanced human recognition across diverse modalities, they predominantly rely on static, geometric feature extraction. This approach fundamentally diverges from human perception. Consequently, current models often suffer from "semantic blindness," overfitting to transient noise while failing to leverage invariant soft biometrics, and struggle to capture temporal motion signatures. To bridge this gap, we propose SapiensID 2.0, a human recognition framework enriched with both semantic and temporal awareness. To overcome the lack of soft-biometric annotations, we transfer zero-shot semantic knowledge from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into a discriminative embedding space. We resolve the dimensional mismatch between these spaces using Invariant Trait Alignment (ITA) to distill core persistent traits, and Transient Noise Disentanglement (TND) to decouple artifacts like clothing. Furthermore, we design a Kinematic Semantic Attention Head (K-SAH) that extends spatial attention across temporal windows. By tracking semantic patches over time, K-SAH captures rich kinematic signatures without requiring large-scale video datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SapiensID 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art performance across image- and video-based person re-identification and gait recognition, while maintaining robust face recognition capabilities.

Human vision organizes what it sees into wholes: same-colored points group into series, similar marks cohere into categories, and shapes complete into recognizable objects. These are the Gestalt operations that visualization design builds on. Whether vision models organize visual content this way has not been systematically tested. We introduce a behavioral battery that scores models against human data from prior perception studies on four grouping tasks: mark-color odd-one-out, color-series counting, silhouette recognition, and object odd-one-out. We apply it to 45 models across five training families: supervised, self-supervised, and contrastive vision-language encoders, open-weight VLMs, and closed foundation models. The battery reveals that agreement with human responses captures aspects of perceptual organization that conventional performance metrics fail to distinguish, with several closed models exhibiting substantially lower alignment than their benchmark accuracy would suggest. Scoring against published perception data therefore gives visualization research a reusable yardstick, requiring no new user study, for auditing whether the models now entering visualization pipelines organize what they see the way their human audience does.

Computer vision saliency models predict where people will look, one map per image, and a billion-dollar predicted-attention industry sells those maps in place of measuring real viewers. I test the leading models from the audience side, against 11.4 million webcam gaze points from 3,023 US adults recruited to national quotas, viewing circulating news photographs. I show that an untrained central marker outperforms every trained network, because the content the networks add on top of the center falls where these audiences never look. What accuracy remains is systematically biased, favoring younger, White, and moderate viewers over older, Black, and ideologically extreme ones. I propose a way forward and build on what a group's own gaze reveals about whether a model can learn that group at all, and I apply it across every demographic axis this sample supports. Ultimately, I show how systems that decide what people see can learn to see everyone, and this study supplies the standard by which such a claim should be judged.

Following a target human in crowded environments involves an inherent conflict between staying close to the target and navigating safely among surrounding pedestrians and obstacles. This conflict becomes more severe in dense scenarios, where aggressive following risks collisions and conservative margins lead to target loss, especially when pedestrian behaviors are unfamiliar or unpredictable. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically encode these competing objectives into a single dense reward, but the resulting proximity-safety balance is implicit and difficult to adjust across conditions. To address this, we decompose the human-following task into a sparse task reward and independent cost constraints within a multi-constraint RL formulation, where each constraint is managed through cost thresholds with direct behavioral meaning rather than implicit reward weight ratios, allowing explicit and tunable control over the trade-off. We further quantify the prediction uncertainty of human motions and integrate these estimates into the RL costs to enhance safety under unpredictable conditions. Extensive experiments across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings demonstrate that our method achieves an effective proximity-safety balance compared to baselines. Real-robot deployment further validates the feasibility of our method in real-world scenarios. More details are available on our project page: https://nav-ps-balance.github.io/.

Focus particles such as "even" and "only" are central to formal semantic theories that posit structured representations over sets of alternatives. "Even" highlights unexpected or extreme alternatives, while "only" enforces exclusivity. If such scalar representations are robust and generalizable, they should give rise to consistent judgments across contexts and systems. In this work, we test whether humans and large language models (LLMs) construct stable scalar representations from sentences containing these particles. Using a dataset of approximately 100 items, participants and models were asked to make scalar judgments. Preliminary results suggest that similar outputs across humans and LLMs may arise from different underlying mechanisms.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in group decision-making with other LLMs and humans. Yet it remains unclear whether their influence is driven by persuasion-oriented expression or compliance-oriented accommodation. We introduce DecisionQE, a questionnaire-based framework for measuring each model's persuasive and compliant tendencies across multiple decision scenarios, and use the Werewolf game as an interactive testbed to study their effects on social influence and group outcomes under asymmetric information. Across experiments, stronger persuasive tendency does not significantly improve group outcomes, whereas compliant-oriented models show more stable advantages in cooperation. We further reveal a dual effect of compliance: it supports cooperation in honest roles but improves concealment in adversarial roles. These findings suggest that LLM group interactions reveal not only task outcomes, but also measurable patterns of intrinsic behavioral tendency. LLMs can therefore serve as a lens for sociological observation of language-mediated interaction, while highlighting the need to incorporate behavioral tendencies into safety evaluation of LLM systems.

When a large language model (LLM) writes Harry Potter fanfiction, it reliably produces fundamental elements of the Hogwarts universe, such as recognizable places and characters. Human-written Harry Potter fanfictions, however, typically include these fundamentals and much more, incorporating stylistically irregular content and relationship-diverse plotlines. This gap between LLM and human writing has been noted across a variety of domains. LLMs tend to produce "average" writing, while human writing contains more diverse content that covers a broader distribution. Existing work has shown the existence of this distributional "gap", but no work has proposed a systematic way to measure it. Our paper proposes a human-grounded framework that uses the empirical distribution of human writing on a topic to measure the distributional breadth of LLM-generated content on that same topic. We propose two metrics, LLM Coverage (LLM-Cov) and In-Boundary Rate (IBR), that separate the plausibility of LLM content from its distributional breadth. Across ideation and narrative tasks, we find that current LLMs produce plausible but narrow content that concentrates near the center of the human response space. Our framework can enable researchers to better assess the distributional breadth of LLM-authored content, which we term its "cultural reach".

Named Entity Recognition (NER) for Gujarati remains underexplored, hindered by the absence of capitalization cues, rich morphology, lexical ambiguity, and free word order. Prior ensemble work has emphasized architectural diversity by combining heterogeneous classifiers, multilingual encoders, or classical sequence models, rather than exploiting language-aligned monolingual pretraining. This study asks whether, for a low-resource, morphologically rich language like Gujarati, a homogeneous ensemble of a single monolingual encoder outperforms such architectural diversity. We propose HomoEnsNER, a homogeneous ensemble of five independently fine-tuned GujaratiBERT models combined via majority voting, evaluated against a single GujaratiBERT baseline and six heterogeneous alternatives, including combinations with MuRIL-base, MuRIL-large, IndicBERT, mBERT, BiLSTM, CRF, and a stacked BiLSTM-CRF-GujaratiBERT architecture. All eight models were trained under a consistent budget and evaluated using entity-level F1 on the Naamapadam Gujarati test split. HomoEnsNER achieved the highest F1 (0.8442), surpassing the baseline (0.8347) and every heterogeneous alternative (lowest: 0.7855), indicating that language alignment is a more effective, budget-conscious ensembling strategy than architectural complexity for low-resource Indian language NER.

An AI development race creates a multi-agent safety dilemma. Each company can develop slowly and safely, or move faster while taking a risk that may remove its final reward. We use this repeated game to study strategic safety behaviour among large language model (LLM) agents in races with two to five players. However, a valid action does not show that an agent understands the game. We therefore place an audit gate before behavioural interpretation. We first verify the game engine, then test rule recall, state tracking, payoff calculation, and stability under different but equivalent task descriptions. We then compare LLM action sequences with an evolutionary game-theory benchmark and published human data, and explore differences across models, risk conditions, personas, and two- to five-player races. The audit shows that strong rule recall can coexist with weak state tracking and expected-payoff calculation. Providing verified arithmetic and changing the response representation can also change later actions, even when the game rules stay fixed. Across seven tested model endpoints, aggregate rates hide large differences in action sequences, responses to opponents, and responses to race position. Patterns across the tested three- to five-player races are also model-specific rather than a single effect of adding competitors. These results show why multi-agent AI-race simulations need validity checks and trajectory-level analysis before their outputs are described as strategic, human-like, or safety-aware. Our findings are exploratory and apply only to the tested models, prompts, and decoding settings.

Positional biases such as recency and primacy effects have been documented in large language models (LLMs), yet the underlying mechanism by which these models make their evaluations remains poorly understood. Both primacy and recency biases have been observed in human judgments in response to evidence, but recent work suggest that \emph{when} the listener updates their beliefs -- during the presentation of evidence or only at the end -- influences the presence of such effects. We investigate whether a similar phenomenon holds for LLMs, finding divergence from human behavior. These biases are more exacerbated in newer models compared to their predecessors.

Claims that language models homogenise are usually measured against human judgements collected for the study, which makes the human side an artifact of the design: a crowdworker given the model's instruction is running the model's prompt. We measure convergence against a human reference nobody built for the purpose -- 2,523 reader mark sets across 120 web documents, produced by people highlighting for their own reasons on a platform where the overlay of others' marks is off by default. Agreement is the overlap between two size-matched sentence sets minus the overlap expected when each is resampled within its own depth-and-length bands. The null's calibration is demonstrated, not asserted: every pair involving a random baseline lands within 0.006 of zero. On the median document each party names 14 sentences of 70; two readers share 4.1 and two models 8.7. Across 18 model arms spanning 11 vendors, 3 countries and both weight regimes, the median of 153 model pairs is +0.093 against a human yardstick of +0.040, and 99 sit entirely above the human interval. Two frontier models from rival labs reach +0.203, twice what GPT-4o agrees with itself on a second call. The effect is not determinism, prompt wording, procedure, vendor or routing, and it is graded: the smallest models agree at the human level. No model agrees with readers detectably more than a reader does, and at equal depth and length no surface feature separates their choices. The multiples are procedure-dependent and the ordering is not: models are cut to their sharpest set while a reader's is a random draw from what they marked, and blunting the models alike halves the gap without closing it. Tested out of sample on four models released after this analysis, against predictions fixed beforehand, none clears the human interval. A population simulated from several models is not several populations.

LLMs are increasingly deployed as proxies for human study participants in social science experiments, yet the fidelity of this practice has rarely been tested directly. We test whether six LLMs can simulate individual human belief updates, comparing LLM outputs 1-to-1 against ground truth data from 391 UK participants on Prolific, who updated their stances on three discussion topics after reading Reddit comments. Each participant was simulated by an LLM conditioned on a persona derived from their demographic and personality trait data. We find that some LLMs (Qwen3-32B and GPT-5-Mini) can match the human post-stance distribution, but only when given participants' actual initial stances. All six models fail to simulate initial stances themselves and to produce faithful belief updates from self-generated stances. Three systematic biases emerge across all models: overrepresentation of neutral positions, more frequent but smaller belief shifts than humans, and a failure to rank comments by convincingness. Demographic and personality trait personas had no consistent effect on fidelity. LLM simulations of human belief dynamics are only reliable when grounded in realistic starting conditions, that current multi-round social media simulations rarely provide.

In this paper, we draw a comparison between linguists in training, a trained linguist, and annotations generated by large language models (LLMs) to find out if they struggle with complex linguistic phenomena in a similar way. For this purpose, we analyse evaluative language in spoken popular science discourse, with the example of a corpus of English TED talk transcripts. We focus on the Appraisal theory and its Attitude subsystem, including the categories (classes) of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation. In this context, Appraisal theory is an example of a highly subjective annotation task, making it a suitable example for the study of complex annotation challenges. First, we assess human annotations on a sentence level in specific scientific domains. Then, we develop three prompts and compare them for model performance for the automatic classification of Appraisal classes. We assess the performance of three LLMs using the best-performing prompt and finetune the model, reaching an F1-score of 0.77. We find that models perform best compared to annotations conducted by the trained linguist, while linguists in training do not reach high agreement scores. We conclude that LLMs can aid in complex annotation task resolution, opening new pathways for the complex theories annotated and analyzed in digital humanities studies.

Diverse human groups produce diverse ideas, the raw material of innovation. Generative AI challenges this engine twice over: everyday AI assistance may homogenize what diverse people create, and AI-simulated diversity may replace the people altogether. We tested both challenges in a preregistered creative metaphor experiment with native (L1) and non-native (L2) English writers, who wrote without AI, with AI-generated ideas (AI ideation), or with AI refining their own ideas (AI refinement). L2 writers contributed more collective diversity than L1 writers, with native-language ideation showing the most diverse pools. AI ideation compressed collective diversity for everyone and left the L2 advantage undetectable, whereas AI refinement preserved both. We then simulated the entire writer pool using personas built from participants' real backgrounds, three model families, native-language prompting, and elevated sampling temperatures. Every simulated pool fell below every human pool, and pushing models further induced diversity only through degenerate text. However, at the individual level, AI ideation raised writers' ratings, pitting private incentives against the collective good, except when L2 writers used their native language, which benefited both. Human diversity remains a valuable creative resource that current AI cannot simulate or sustain; the design of human-AI collaborative workflows determines whether it survives.

Span-guided rewriting aims to preserve meaning by localizing edits to annotated harmful spans, but the same constraint can leave harmful intent insufficiently mitigated. We present a controlled exploratory comparison of span-guided and unguided detoxification on a mixed-source English evaluation set comprising manually curated inputs and HateXplain test items. We conduct a dense blinded human evaluation under a fixed single-generator setting. Human preferences reveal a trade-off rather than a uniformly superior rewriting strategy. Span-guided outputs are favored when localized editing preserves the original stance and avoids unnecessary modification, whereas unguided outputs are favored when broader rewriting achieves more complete mitigation. This contrast varies substantially across the study-defined strata: the two strategies are competitive in the strong stratum, while unguided rewriting is clearly preferred in the mild stratum. Rationale annotations trace this difference to complementary failure risks: residual harm after localized editing and over-modification after broader rewriting. We treat automatic evaluation as a diagnostic rather than a substitute for human judgment. Toxicity-similarity scalarizations, a multi-generator analysis, and two general-purpose LLM judges reproduce parts of the aggregate tendency but do not yield an analogous stratified contrast. These setting-specific findings do not establish a severity-based routing rule. Instead, they motivate evaluation protocols that assess mitigation sufficiency and meaning preservation separately and report both residual harm and over-modification alongside aggregate scores.

Syntactic convergence (the tendency of speakers to adapt in language towards the grammatical profiles of their interlocutors) is a well-documented feature of human dialogue widely considered to operate below conscious awareness. Whether large language models exhibit analogous syntactic convergence toward human users relative to human baselines and across a broad range of syntactic constructions remains an open question. Using substitution-paradigm data in which model generations replace one speaker's turns in pre-existing human dialogues, this study measures turn-adjacent reuse of context-free grammar (CFG) rules across sixteen open-weight Llama and Gemma models (1B-70B, pretrained and instruction-tuned) at 1,901 matched positions per model. Every model showed greater CFG-rule overlap with the preceding human turn than with a sampled unrelated human prime, and in every model this actual-versus-random difference was larger for lower-frequency rules. Each instruction-tuned model also showed greater natural-output overlap with the actual prime than the human response it replaced, and all eight matched architecture pairs exhibited greater actual-prime overlap after instruction tuning. However, relative to pretrained variants, instruction-tuned outputs overlapped more with unrelated primes, showed a smaller actual-versus-random increment, and had lower conditional rule-reuse odds once target rule-set size was held constant. In exploratory analyses, each model exhibited greater mean lexical and semantic similarity to the preceding turn than the matched human responses did. Instruction-tuned models additionally produced responses with greater mean semantic similarity than their pretrained counterparts in all eight architecture pairs, whereas the lexical similarity results were more heterogeneous.

Realistic animal motion for virtual production is typically obtained either through motion capture of highly trained performers who accurately mimic animal behavior, or by retargeting ordinary human motion using complex control setups. Both approaches are challenging and often fail to fully reproduce the nuances of natural animal motion, motivating data-driven alternatives. We present an automatic human-to-quadruped puppeteering framework that produces plausible and controllable quadruped motions from ordinary human motion data. Our approach employs a two-stage generative diffusion model trained purely on quadruped motion data. By introducing a structured conditioning and inpainting strategy, our method supports a wide range of actions, including walking, running, jumping, sitting, and lying. Furthermore, we enable fine-grained intuitive control of the quadruped motion such as head movement control and individual limb puppeteering. Experimental results demonstrate improved motion realism and controllability compared to existing retargeting approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of our framework as a tool for animation and virtual production applications.

Conversational entrainment is well-studied in monolingual and written contexts, but remains underexplored in spoken code-switching (CSW). We present a novel cross-lingual analysis of entrainment in Mandarin-English, Hindi-English, and Spanish-English dialogue and show that, while lexical entrainment generalizes across language pairs, entrainment over acoustic-prosodic and CSW style aspects exhibits context-specific variation. We build on these findings by asking whether classification models capture these human behavioral patterns. Applying feature importance and ablation analyses, we find that classical and Transformer-based classifiers detect entrainment reasonably well but consistently prioritize features other than those most salient to human entraining behavior. Our approach introduces a human-grounded framework for evaluating model decision-making in multilingual stylistic contexts, and suggests future challenges for developing conversational agents capable of producing naturalistic code-switched speech.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the standard approach for aligning large language models with human preferences, but its quality is limited by static, task-agnostic reward models. This mismatch leads to sparse learning signals and suboptimal alignment. We introduce MeRLa (Meta-Learned Reward Shaping), a principled framework that meta-learns a task-aware shaping function $Φ(x,y;φ)$ across auxiliary tasks before RLHF training. The learned shaping produces a composite reward that preserves policy optimality while providing task-specific learning signals. Our meta-objective combines task discrimination, entropy regularization, and potential-based conservation for stable convergence. We provide theoretical guarantees for policy invariance, analyze representation drift sensitivity, and formally address incentive misalignment from entropy maximization. Experiments on LLaMA-3-8B across four benchmarks show consistent improvements over PPO, DPO, GRPO, and DAPO, achieving a 90.8% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 and a score of 9.14 on MT-Bench, with 41% less training instability. MeRLa retains its benefits when combined with process-based and rubric-based enhanced rewards.

Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) as creativity evaluators, evidence of their alignment with human evaluations remains mixed, raising the question of when and why their judgments converge with or diverge from human judgments. Across three studies and six widely used LLMs, we addressed this gap by identifying the standards underlying LLM creativity evaluation and examining their downstream implications. Study 1 showed that LLMs generally relied on a narrower subset of human creativity evaluation standards. Convergence with human standards was strongest in the novelty dimension, whereas divergence was clearest in the contextual dimension, which captures social, market, and reputational information. Moreover, each LLM exhibited distinct, model-specific standards that varied substantially in breadth. These differences in evaluation standards were reflected in actual creativity judgments. Study 2 (N = 1,103 ideas) showed that LLM evaluations were moderately correlated with human evaluations, and individual LLMs with broader standards better distinguished ideas humans judged as more versus less creative. Study 3 (N = 1,195) showed that LLMs were less sensitive to contextual information: such information significantly altered human creativity ratings but left LLM ratings largely unchanged. Together, our findings help explain the mixed evidence on LLM-human alignment, showing that alignment depends on the evidence a judgment demands and the standards each model applies. LLMs may resemble humans when evaluations emphasize intrinsic qualities such as novelty, yet diverge when judgments require contextual information. Selecting an LLM evaluator is therefore a consequential decision: different models, applying different standards, recognize different ideas as creative.

Real-time closed-loop neurofeedback based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has led to important scientific and clinical advances. However, the sophistication of the analysis methods used in real-time fMRI lags behind the state-of-the-art in fMRI decoding, largely due to computational factors: Most advanced decoding pipelines do not fit within the envelope of real-time processing, where the analysis needs to be conducted in a matter of seconds and without leveraging data acquired later in the session. Here, we present a real-time compatible adaptation of a computationally intensive state-of-the-art pipeline for reconstructing perceived natural images (MindEye2), and we demonstrate that reliable fine-grained decoding is still achievable in this setting. Using RT-Cloud, an open-source, scalable cloud-based platform, we performed a real-time scan where we decoded single-trial visual perception within seconds after an image was shown to the participant. Finally, we use simulated analyses to document the factors driving changes in performance from offline to real-time analysis. This work serves as a proof-of-concept that it is feasible to deploy these powerful fMRI decoding pipelines in real-time analysis, paving the way for their use in brain-computer interfaces for scientific discovery and clinical treatment.

Advances in AI-based voice conversion have enabled a wide range of media applications, including films, audiobooks, and games. However, most research and public benchmarks still focus on natural human speech, leaving designed vocalizations, such as monster growls and robotic voices, underexplored, partly due to the lack of publicly available resources. To address this gap, we introduce the Designed Vocalizations Dataset, constructed by curating diverse raw vocal sources, including speech and animal vocalizations, and applying professional vocal effects processing to produce corresponding effect modified variants. We further provide a standardized test set with explicit seen/unseen splits over source timbre groups and preset styles to assess generalization under controlled conditions. Finally, we report baseline benchmark results to support reproducible evaluation and future research. The dataset and demo samples are available at https://ncai-official.github.io/speech/publications/designed-vocalizations-dataset/.

We introduce Rushes, a dataset and benchmark for studying revealed human engagement preferences in interactive narrative environments. Rushes is collected through a game interface where users interact with AI-generated branching narratives and select one choice from a small, explicit candidate set at each decision point. Each interaction logs the full candidate set, the user's choice, and the evolving narrative context, yielding time-ordered trajectories with persistent user-level identifiers. Rushes contains 44,226 decision events from 8,167 unique users across six games, capturing sequential, personalized engagement behavior rather than static judgments. We show that user choices exhibit structured, non-random patterns, quantified by a low choice entropy relative to a uniform baseline. We position Rushes as a diagnostic benchmark for pluralistic alignment and demonstrate a robust Engagement Gap: state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-5, fail to outperform simple baselines. While classical Matrix Factorization (SVD) captures measurable personalized signal (37.7%), frontier LLMs (34.23%) struggle to even match the Popularity Baseline (36.4%) on event-level choice prediction. This gap suggests that single, population-level objectives, like those used in modern RLHF, appear insufficient to capture heterogeneous, context-dependent engagement signals. As a result, even highly capable models default to majority preferences rather than adapting to individual trajectories. We release Rushes to support research into pluralistic alignment and sequential decision-making in generative systems. The full code for the platform and dataset will be available here: https://github.com/microsoft/rushes

Direct hand-driven teleoperation maps an operator's hand motion to robot end-effector commands at every frame, enabling precise control, but it requires constant monitoring and correction during approach, grasp, and placement, which can be slow and fatiguing. For repetitive pick-and-place tasks, supervisory (goal-based) teleoperation simplifies this process: the operator specifies goals/waypoints, and the robot executes the motion using planning algorithms. Yet, this introduces latency, as the robot must wait for the next command before it can plan and act. "How can we reduce robot reaction time while lowering operator workload?" To tackle this question, we present AHEAD, a real-time VR teleoperation system that anticipates operator intent to enable proactive, hand-driven control. In a digital twin, the operator performs pick-and-place naturally, using hand motion to convey high-level commands rather than a continuous robot trajectory. AHEAD processes a short window of 3D hand and head signals together with scene context through an attention-based classifier to predict the intended grasp object and placement slot. A state machine converts intent predictions into stable robot goals, enabling early motion while remaining stable under noisy predictions and corrective hand movements. AHEAD's intent prediction module achieves Top1 accuracy: 76% for grasp objects and 76% for target slots. Moreover, our user study shows AHEAD reduces robot reaction latency by 0.6 s (object) and 1.4 s (slot) relative to baselines. Participants also reported lower operator load, indicating faster robot responses while maintaining low operator effort in practice.

Recent advances in 3D human reconstruction have improved overall performance, yet current models still fail in the most challenging real-world scenarios. They often produce unstable geometry, inaccurate limb articulation and unreliable predictions under depth ambiguity or self-occlusion. A key reason is that existing datasets still lack the combination of high-resolution images, high-precision annotations and diverse whole-body motions required to support robust reconstruction. To address this gap, we present Human4K, a large-scale 4K multi-view whole-body human reconstruction dataset with mocap-accurate SMPL-X annotations. Human4K contains over six million 4K images captured by an eight-view high-resolution camera system synchronized with a professional Vicon motion capture setup, covering 11 subjects performing complex, highly articulated and strongly self-occluded full-body motions. All sequences are processed by a Motion-Retargeting and Refinement Module (MRRM) to ensure precise alignment for the full body and extremities. Experimental results show that training with Human4K consistently improves whole-body reconstruction on standard benchmarks, with particularly large gains for hands, feet and depth-ambiguous limb configurations.

Language-guided human following is an important capability for embodied agents, but existing benchmarks typically assume that the target person is visible at the start of an episode. This setting simplifies the problem and overlooks a more realistic requirement: an agent often needs to first find a language-described target and then persistently follow that target in a dynamic environment. While recent work has started to study human search, existing settings are typically evaluated in task-specific scenarios and often rely on stronger prior knowledge of the environment. Moreover, they usually treat searching and following as separate tasks and still lack a unified benchmark for systematic evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce the Unified Embodied Seeking and Following Benchmark (UESF-Bench), a large-scale and diverse benchmark for embodied human seeking and following. The benchmark requires agents to handle semantic-guided exploration, reliable behavior switching and recovery, and delayed identity grounding. To this end, we propose SeekFollow-VLA, a vision-language-action framework with a task-driven routing mechanism for latent phase inference and transition modeling between seeking and following. Experimental results show that SeekFollow-VLA achieves clear improvements over both single-head and dual-head baselines across single-person and multi-person environments, establishing a baseline for unified embodied seek-and-follow.

Two competing perspectives on fluid intelligence (gf) measures propose that performance is primarily constrained either by working memory capacity or by the ability to induce novel relations. The first perspective is currently dominant in measurement, as evident from the use of a limited set of recurring rules, whereas the second perspective is reflected in many definitions but rarely present in measurement. The ARC-AGI benchmark predominantly requires rule induction and was proposed as a measure of gf for both humans and artificial systems. However, its psychometric properties have not yet been examined in human samples. We therefore investigated the psychometric characteristics and nomological network of ARC-AGI in a first study with 100 participants. A compilation of ARC-AGI items showed good psychometric properties and correlated substantially with figural fluid intelligence as measured by a figural reasoning test ($ρ$ = .63). Associations with figural originality were weak. These findings provide initial support for the validity of ARC-AGI as a measure of human fluid intelligence. Future research should include more rule induction tasks as well as additional multivariate covariates. This study is unusual by studying a task in humans that was initially designed for machines. We suggest systematically embedding AI benchmarks into the nomological network of human cognitive abilities to enable more systematic evaluation and interdisciplinary cooperation.

AI agents are evolving from answer engines into persistent teams that use tools, delegate work, learn from experience, and modify the artifacts that shape their future behavior. The defining question for deployment is no longer merely what agents can do, but who controls what they are allowed to become. We introduce logos, a pluggable layer for self-evolution and governance that strengthens existing multiagent frameworks rather than replacing them. logos compiles heterogeneous multimodal inputs, including documents, images, audio, tables, databases, APIs, and human instructions into versioned agent packs containing agents, tools, knowledge, tests, permissions, and policies. During operation, it transforms agent activity into portable, auditable event traces and applies fail-closed verification across frameworks and backends. Every learned prompt, memory, skill, tool, role, or workflow remains an untrusted release candidate until held-out execution evidence, human-controlled policy, and explicit authorization permit its promotion. This architecture enables "verifiable human-agent loop engineering": agents can act, ask, learn, and propose improvements, while humans can steer objectives, permissions, approvals, and irreversible actions without interrupting continuous operation. logos provides a living logic for accountable automation. Agents may evolve at machine speed, but only evidence and human authority can close the loop.

Teleoperation is a key interface for controlling dexterous robotic hands and collecting demonstrations for imitation learning. Its effectiveness largely depends on kinematic retargeting, which maps operator hand motions to feasible and intuitive robot hand motions. Existing methods often require hand-crafted objectives, precise calibration, or global shape matching between human and robot hand spaces, making them sensitive to hand-specific tuning and less reliable across different dexterous hands. We propose AnyDexRT, a calibration-free retargeting method for intuitive dexterous teleoperation across human-like dexterous hands. AnyDexRT combines self-supervised fingertip correspondence learning with few-shot human guidance to anchor the mapping in task-relevant regions, and further refines pinch-related poses using a contact classifier. Experiments on diverse dexterous hands and real-world teleoperation tasks show that AnyDexRT improves retargeting quality, reduces manual tuning, and provides more intuitive and efficient control than prior retargeting methods. Project website: https://chenxi-wang.github.io/projects/anydexrt

We outline an adversarial social epistemology (ASE) for densely interactive communicative landscapes in which public assertions are scaffolded by chains of testimony, inference, institutional certification, and tacit trust. In such landscapes, agents have incentives and affordances to distort, color, omit, fabricate, or strategically under-specify information for private, reputational, rhetorical, or material gains. We argue that these phenomena are not adequately captured by familiar descriptions of epistemic bubbles, echo chambers, or misinformation diffusion. What requires explanation is how communicative agents exploit the commitments and entitlements that normally make scaffolded assertions trustworthy. We provide language that delivers the requisite analysis, outline mechanisms that subvert trust in scaffolded public communications, and outline machinery for auditing and redressing trust breaches arising from subverting the auditability of inferential chains, drawing on epistemic networks, enriched with an inferentialist semantics for interpreting assertions.

How can we measure intelligence beyond human capability? Human-authored benchmarks saturate, and above human capability, examiners may not know which tasks are both hard and verifiable. We argue that this difficulty is inherent to absolute-scale evaluation and propose a new paradigm based on relative measurement in which models generate public challenges that separate other systems. Aggregating these outcomes yields an adversarial psychometric rating system that can scale with the systems being measured. We describe practical protocols that reduce incentives for private-information attacks, support judge-free adjudication, and naturally scale with agent capabilities. We instantiate the framework across verifiable and open-ended, non-verifiable domains, illustrating how model-generated evaluation can continue to measure systems beyond the human frontier.

Steering robot foundation models (RFMs) toward new task variants or user-preferred behaviors remains challenging, often requiring additional robot demonstrations, task-specific fine-tuning, or long-context conditioning. We present WAM-TTT, a test-time training framework for steering world action models from raw human videos. Rather than treating human videos as trajectories to imitate, WAM-TTT absorbs them into a lightweight adaptive memory inside a frozen WAM through self-supervised video prediction. To make this memory useful for control, we introduce a meta-training stage that aligns human demonstrations with robot behaviors using paired human-robot data and a key--value memory reconstruction objective. At test time, only unlabeled human videos are required to adapt the memory, while the pretrained WAM remains frozen. This enables efficient and reusable steering without robot actions, human-side annotations, or task-specific fine-tuning, while preserving the generalization ability of the foundation model. Extensive experiments show that WAM-TTT consistently outperforms in-context human-video conditioning baselines across diverse manipulation tasks and generalization settings.

Human-human collaboration is a fundamental aspect of everyday life, essential to success in a wide range of goal-directed activities from household tasks to professional teamwork. While much research has focused on modeling coordination and task execution, the cognitive processes that support such collaboration, particularly Theory of Mind (the ability to infer the mental states of others), remain difficult to study in natural settings. To address this gap, we introduce a novel egocentric and exocentric video dataset capturing real-world collaboration in cooking scenarios. The dataset integrates multi-perspective video, high-quality audio, gaze tracking, and 3D scene and object scans, with annotations for shared attention to objects, social cues and interactions between agents, as well as agent-object interactions. We establish benchmarks for Joint Attention Estimation, Socially Conditioned Object Interaction Anticipation, and Collaborative Handover Prediction, enabling research on multimodal perception, proactive assistance, and collaborative planning. By providing temporally aligned, richly annotated multimodal data, CoMind facilitates the development and evaluation of AI systems capable of modeling complex social interactions and reasoning about human behaviors in collaborative environments. Our dataset and benchmarks are made available at https://comind.ethz.ch/.

AI systems are increasingly used to provide legal advice, raising questions about whether laypeople accept guidance from algorithms--especially when that advice is legally correct but socially controversial. We report a preregistered survey experiment with 3,348 adults in mainland China examining how people evaluate identical legal advice when it is attributed either to an AI system or to a human lawyer, and when it is accompanied by reasoning or not. Contrary to expectations of algorithm aversion, attribution to an AI system has no net effect on perceived reasonableness. However, mediation analyses reveal opposing psychological pathways underlying this null result. AI-attributed advice is perceived as more objective, which increases perceived reasonableness, but also as less comprehensive and less attentive to special circumstances, which decreases perceived reasonableness. By contrast, providing legal reasoning substantially increases perceived reasonableness regardless of source, largely by enhancing perceptions of objectivity. Qualitative responses corroborate this tension between objectivity and contextual sensitivity in evaluations of legal advice. Together, these findings suggest that public responses to AI legal advisors are shaped not by rigid attitudes toward automation, but by the balancing of competing normative expectations. The results have implications for theories of algorithm aversion and the design of AI recommendation systems in normatively salient domains.

This state-of-the-art report provides an overview of controllable 3D human avatar creation. We describe current 3D avatar systems, which typically consist of three stages: (i) learning priors of human appearance and motion, (ii) creating a personalized avatar, and (iii) animating the avatar. To limit the scope, we focus on the prior learning and avatar creation stages. We define current avatar representations and introduce a taxonomy that categorizes existing work along multiple axes, including body regions and employed priors. We review methods for full-body and head avatars, as well as layered representations that decompose the body into components such as hands, hair, and garments. Finally, we outline common underlying principles, reference key literature for newcomers, and discuss open challenges and future research directions.

HAR is increasingly expected to run continuously on edge devices, yet recent LLM-based methods remain hard to deploy: raw sensor prompts are long, cloud inference adds latency and privacy risk, and fine-tuned LLM pipelines turn general-purpose models into task-specific classifiers. We present STELLA, an efficient sensor-to-LLM translation framework for on-device HAR that shifts the burden from LLM adaptation to sensor tokenization. A lightweight hierarchical tokenizer compresses an entire multi-channel inertial window into a fixed set of compact latent sensor tokens, which are projected into the embedding space of a frozen pretrained LLM and combined with a natural-language prompt for label scoring. This preserves activity-relevant temporal and cross-channel structure while keeping LLM-side computation predictable across sensor configurations. STELLA also supports on-device personalization, adapting only the lightweight tokenizer on small amounts of user-specific labelled data and augmenting inference with a local retrieval context, keeping the LLM, user data, and retrieval on device. Across seven public HAR datasets and eight benchmark settings, STELLA achieves new state-of-the-art performance, improving over prior methods by up to 11.83% F1; on-device personalization yields up to a further 21.91% F1 as user data accumulates after deployment. STELLA also outperforms representative time-series tokenizers under the same LLM pipeline and achieves real-time inference under practical mobile and edge budgets, showing that efficient sensor tokenization is a practical path toward accurate, private, and personalized LLM-based HAR on edge devices.

LLMs are increasingly used to brainstorm research ideas, but existing evaluations mostly judge individual ideas by novelty, feasibility, or expert preference. We instead ask: how far are current LLM-generated ideas from human researchers? To characterize this gap, we build a large-scale evaluation framework for ideation from high-quality human research papers. For each paper, we reverse-engineer a small set of closely related prior works that likely inspired its core idea. LLMs are then prompted to generate a new idea from the set of paper titles and summaries. We introduce a two-axis research-taste taxonomy to profile each idea by its opportunity pattern and research paradigm, and use it to quantify the divergence between human and LLM ideas. Across idea sets generated by different LLMs, we observe a consistent distributional gap: LLM ideas are disproportionately concentrated around bridge-like opportunities and synthesis methods, whereas the human paper reference distribution spreads more broadly across ways of framing gaps and constructing contributions. This result suggests that strong LLMs can produce a range of reasonable ideas, but that range remains narrower than, and systematically shifted relative to, human research taste.

Vision-language-action (VLA) models across robot embodiments require high-quality observation--action supervision to learn deployable action distributions, yet scaling such robot data remains difficult, especially for high-DoF humanoids. Teleoperation provides controller-aligned supervision, while human egocentric videos capture diverse bimanual manipulation but do not directly provide executable robot actions. We introduce Human-as-Humanoid, a human-to-humanoid supervision framework that enables near-real-time human-centric action generation, making human demonstrations usable for high-DoF humanoid VLA training by jointly aligning the robot embodiment, the sensing setup, and the action-label interface. Built on PrimeU, a human-aligned 60-DoF upper-body humanoid, Human-as-Humanoid uses synchronized ego-exo videos to pair deployment-aligned egocentric observations with exocentric motion recovery, retargets the recovered human motion through staged Inverse Kinematics (IK) into controller-aligned 60-DoF action chunks, and trains the VLA model with Forward Kinematics (FK)-aware supervision to preserve wrist and fingertip task-space geometry. This converts large-scale human demonstrations from visual observations into executable observation--action supervision for the target humanoid. Experiments validate the conversion chain at the motion-recovery, robot-action-space, and real-robot deployment levels. Human-as-Humanoid yields a 4.8--7.2x raw demonstration-throughput gain over humanoid teleoperation in our data-collection analysis, and on several downstream tasks, policies post-trained only with the converted human labels generalize to real-robot deployment without target-task robot demonstrations. The official project website is available at https://zgc-embodyai.github.io/Human-as-Humanoid.

Creating photorealistic, animatable 3D human avatars from monocular images still largely depends on Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) and parametric body models, which constrain expressivity and often introduce artifacts due to imperfect fitting. We propose LUNA, an LBS-free universal neural animation model that directly maps multiple 2D controls like images, keypoints, sketches, and unseen characters into 3D Gaussian deformations, bypassing explicit body fitting. At its core, a transformer-based motion regressor disentangles global rigid motion from fine-grained local dynamics to capture both coherent movement and subtle non-rigid effects. To resolve the inherent ambiguity of 2D-to-3D lifting while scaling beyond fitted datasets, we introduce hybrid supervision that distills soft structural priors from an LBS teacher and a loss that supports training on both limited fitted data and large in-the-wild unlabeled videos. Extensive experiments show LUNA achieves competitive visual fidelity compared to LBS-based approaches, while delivering realistic human motion and zero-shot cross-identity generalization across diverse driving modalities. To the best of our knowledge, LUNA is the first end-to-end 3D animatable model that supports implicit 2D driving.

Agents are increasingly capable of automating software tasks, but can they teach humans how to use software themselves? We introduce DigitalCoach, a multimodal dataset of 72 human expert-novice computer use coaching sessions consisting of 22,752 dialogue turns grounded in 28.1 hours of screen and input event recordings across five software applications. We use DigitalCoach to evaluate whether state-of-the-art models can teach humans how to use computers. Automated evaluation shows that models differ from humans in how they coach: models provide more direct instructions, but fewer explanations, error diagnoses, and knowledge-check questions. When we fix the coaching method, models produce utterances similar to human references yet poorly grounded in visual context. Interactive evaluation confirms that model coaches cause learners to passively follow instructions without deeper engagement and fall short in visual grounding. DigitalCoach lays a foundation for collaborative and proactive computer use coaching agents. Data and code are available at https://project-digital-coach.vercel.app.

Modern AI evaluation frameworks treat evaluator disagreement as noise to be resolved. In creative domains, professional disagreement reflects genuine differences in taste, not measurement error. We argue that evaluating creative AI requires preserving two distinct signals: convergence, where professionals align around shared best practices, and divergence, where individual taste legitimately varies. We present the Human Creativity Benchmark (HCB), a benchmark that operationalizes this separation by collecting pairwise preferences, scalar ratings on prompt adherence, usability, and visual appeal, and qualitative rationale from domain professionals. Across 15,000 professional judgments spanning five creative domains and three workflow phases (ideation, mockup, refinement), we find that convergence concentrates on verifiable dimensions like technical correctness and visual hierarchy, while divergence concentrates on taste-driven dimensions like aesthetic direction and conceptual risk. No model excels uniformly across all phases. Collapsing these signals into a single quality metric discards the most actionable information: where models must be correct versus where they should remain steerable.