Human-AI Collaboration

Artificial intelligence has made remarkable strides in recent years, achieving superhuman performance across a wide range of tasks. Yet despite these advances, most cooperative AI systems remain rigidly obedient, designed to follow human instructions without question and conform to user expectations, even when doing so may be counterproductive or unsafe. This paper argues for expanding the agency of AI teammates to include intelligent disobedience, empowering them to make meaningful and autonomous contributions within human-AI teams. It introduces a scale of AI agency levels and uses representative examples to highlight the importance and growing necessity of treating AI autonomy as an independent research focus in cooperative settings. The paper then explores how intelligent disobedience manifests across different autonomy levels and concludes by proposing initial boundaries and considerations for studying disobedience as a core capability of artificial agents.

Mental health is a growing global concern, prompting interest in AI-driven solutions to expand access to psychosocial support. Peer support, grounded in lived experience, offers a valuable complement to professional care. However, variability in training, effectiveness, and definitions raises concerns about quality, consistency, and safety. Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to enhance peer support interactions, particularly in real-time, text-based interactions. We present and evaluate an AI-supported system with an LLM-simulated distressed client (SimClient), context-sensitive LLM-generated suggestions (Suggestions), and real-time emotion visualisations. 2 mixed-methods studies with 12 peer supporters and 6 mental health professionals (i.e., experts) examined the system's effectiveness and implications for practice. Both groups recognised its potential to enhance training and improve interaction quality. However, we found a key tension emerged: while peer supporters engaged meaningfully, experts consistently flagged critical issues in peer supporter responses, such as missed distress cues and premature advice-giving. This misalignment highlights potential limitations in current peer support training, especially in emotionally charged contexts where safety and fidelity to best practices are essential. Our findings underscore the need for standardised, psychologically grounded training, especially as peer support scales globally. They also demonstrate how LLM-supported systems can scaffold this development--if designed with care and guided by expert oversight. This work contributes to emerging conversations on responsible AI integration in mental health and the evolving role of LLMs in augmenting peer-delivered care.

The goal of the current study is to introduce a triadic human-AI collaboration framework that could be applied in transportation systems such as automated vehicles, micromobility systems, and vehicle teleoperation. Previous standards, such as SAE Levels of Automation, have focused on defining automation levels based on who controls the vehicle. However, it is still not clear how human users and AI should collaborate in real time, especially in dynamic driving contexts where roles can shift frequently. To fill this gap, this study proposed a triadic human-AI collaboration framework with three AI roles: Advisor, Co-Pilot, and Guardian. These roles can dynamically adapt to human needs based on real-time data, such as mental states and environmental conditions. The Advisor AI offers informational support without direct intervention. The Co-Pilot AI provides partial intervention when needed, with the goal of sharing control with humans. The Guardian AI performs emergency overrides if necessary. The use cases for these AI roles in micromobility devices, such as e-scooters, are presented to demonstrate how these roles can influence user preferences and trust. Overall, the study takes a first step toward a universal role-based collaborative framework for AI standardization and explores how AI technologies can be embedded in future transportation systems while considering human interactions.

Professional users need tools to help them gain actionable insights from large multimedia collections. Foundation models and AI agents have rapidly changed the playing field, and improving their accuracy, trustworthiness, and reasoning capabilities are active topics in the computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia communities. Most current research focuses on benchmark driven algorithmic improvements. The multimedia community is the place to go beyond algorithms and consider complete multimedia analytics systems that support professional users in their complex tasks and achieve a true teaming of humans and AI. Supporting users with machine learning and visualizations has been studied for decades in the visual analytics field. In this paper, we propose a framework to bring multimedia and visual analytics together and indicate how it could impact current and new multimedia analytics solutions. Additional information can be found at https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/m.worring/analytics-model.html

Thematic analysis (TA) is a widely used qualitative approach for uncovering latent meanings in unstructured text data. TA provides valuable insights in healthcare but is resource-intensive. Large Language Models (LLMs) have been introduced to perform TA, yet their applications in high-stakes healthcare settings, particularly for qualitative clinical interview analysis, remain limited. Here, we propose TAMA: A Human-AI Collaborative Thematic Analysis framework using Multi-Agent LLMs for clinical interviews. We leverage the scalability and coherence of multi-agent systems through structured conversations between agents and coordinate the expertise of cardiac experts in TA. Using interview transcripts from parents of children with Anomalous Aortic Origin of a Coronary Artery (AAOCA), a rare congenital heart disease, we demonstrate that TAMA outperforms single-agent LLM TA approaches, achieving higher thematic hit rate, coverage, and distinctiveness. TAMA demonstrates strong potential for automated TA in clinical settings by leveraging multi-agent LLM systems with human-in-the-loop integration by enhancing quality while significantly reducing manual workload. The full implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Charlie-Yi-SJ/TAMA.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed to aid professional judgment, yet its implications for the development of human expertise remain unclear. We examine how the availability of AI assistance during training and task execution shapes novices' individual and collective judgment in the context of cancer diagnosis. Across two field experiments at a large teaching hospital, 576 medical novices learned to diagnose lung cancer from CT scans. Study 1 used a 2 * 2 factorial design that randomized AI assistance during training, task execution, both, or neither. Novices who received AI assistance during training achieved higher diagnostic accuracy in both AI-assisted and unaided task execution, with a larger improvement in the former. However, training-phase assistance was associated with more common errors than task-execution-phase assistance, suggesting that while the trainer effect improves individual accuracy, it limits the benefits of aggregating judgments. Study 2 shows that AI assistance during earlier task execution improved subsequent unaided performance and reduced common errors in the unaided phase of task execution, thus revealing a surprisingly beneficial "tool-as-trainer" effect. These findings suggest that, contingent on the right deployment strategy, AI assistance can support individual expertise development and improve collective judgment by reducing common errors across individuals.

Generative AI, particularly Language Models (LMs), has the potential to transform real-world domains with societal impact, particularly where access to experts is limited. For example, in education, training novice educators with expert guidance is important for effectiveness but expensive, creating significant barriers to improving education quality at scale. This challenge disproportionately harms students from under-served communities, who stand to gain the most from high-quality education. We introduce Tutor CoPilot, a novel Human-AI approach that leverages a model of expert thinking to provide expert-like guidance to tutors as they tutor. This study is the first randomized controlled trial of a Human-AI system in live tutoring, involving 900 tutors and 1,800 K-12 students from historically under-served communities. Following a preregistered analysis plan, we find that students working with tutors that have access to Tutor CoPilot are 4 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to master topics (p<0.01). Notably, students of lower-rated tutors experienced the greatest benefit, improving mastery by 9 p.p. We find that Tutor CoPilot costs only $20 per-tutor annually. We analyze 550,000+ messages using classifiers to identify pedagogical strategies, and find that tutors with access to Tutor CoPilot are more likely to use high-quality strategies to foster student understanding (e.g., asking guiding questions) and less likely to give away the answer to the student. Tutor interviews highlight how Tutor CoPilot's guidance helps tutors to respond to student needs, though they flag issues in Tutor CoPilot, such as generating suggestions that are not grade-level appropriate. Altogether, our study of Tutor CoPilot demonstrates how Human-AI systems can scale expertise in real-world domains, bridge gaps in skills and create a future where high-quality education is accessible to all students.

This paper bridges the gap in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research by comparatively assessing the effects of interpretability and outcome feedback on user trust and collaborative performance with AI. Through novel pre-registered experiments (N=1,511 total participants) using an interactive prediction task, we analyzed how interpretability and outcome feedback influence users' task performance and trust in AI. The results counter the widespread belief that interpretability drives trust, showing that interpretability led to no robust improvements in trust and that outcome feedback had a significantly greater and more reliable effect. However, both factors had modest effects on participants' task performance. These findings suggest that (1) interpretability may be less effective at increasing trust than factors like outcome feedback, and (2) augmenting human performance via AI systems may not be a simple matter of increasing trust in AI, as increased trust is not always associated with equally sizable performance improvements. Our exploratory analyses further delve into the mechanisms underlying this trust-performance paradox. These findings present an opportunity for research to focus not only on methods for generating interpretations but also on techniques that ensure interpretations impact trust and performance in practice.