Human-in-the-Loop AI

Latest papers 173

Oct 6, 2026stat.ML

Careful Judge: Safe and Efficient Human-AI Collaborative Decision Making

In human-AI collaborative decision making, human review can prevent unsafe AI decisions, but each human judgment is costly. Treating human intervention after AI abstention as a one-off fallback misses the opportunity to improve future AI decisions for greater automation, yet AI adaptively learning from selectively queried human feedback breaks safety guardrails calibrated for old models. We approach this challenge with CARE---calibrated adaptive rectification and escalation---an end-to-end pipeline that combines AI models and human reviewers to guarantee safe, human-aligned decisions, while continuously learning from human feedback to achieve greater automation with fewer human queries. CARE is principled, general, modular, and works with any black-box AI model. Our novel adaptive calibration module guarantees risk control at every time step for any rectification module. We further show how CARE improves query efficiency when the AI model is well trained and the human-AI misalignment has a clear structure. Experiments on four safety-critical real-world datasets spanning driving, language, and robotics demonstrate that CARE achieves human-aligned decisions while reducing human queries by 25-81% relative to baselines.
Oct 6, 2026cs.AI

Humanize: Judgement Engineering for Agentic Coding

Agentic coding makes code generation cheap, but reliable completion remains difficult: the agent that writes the code is a weak judge of whether it is done. We present Humanize, a multi-agent orchestration workflow for agentic coding built around judgement engineering: explicit, mechanically enforced decisions at the boundaries between planning, implementation, review, and learning. A human approves a plan contract, a builder agent implements it in rounds, and a reviewer agent from another vendor decides completion; deterministic hooks, not a model, route work between these roles and enforce 72 mechanical gates. Viewed as a Markov chain over repository states, alternating builder and reviewer samples jointly from two models, so a defect survives only if both miss it. We study Humanize through its deployment, 118 public postmortems of real loops, and its applications. Over 68 versions in 108 days, it gathered 1,468 GitHub stars. Applications include a 567-file gem5 build-system migration under upstream review; Kernel Design Agents, which extend the loop with a kernel knowledge base and profiling feedback and placed in the top three of all three Full-Agent tracks of the MLSys 2026 FlashInfer contest; and, through Humanize Olympiad Agents (HOA), full scores in IOI 2026, IMO 2026, IPhO 2026, and IBO 2024, 418.5/437 in IChO 2026 (gold-medal). Humanize also achieves 672/672 on PutnamBench and ranks first (251/303) on Lean-Eval's leaderboard even competiting with professional mathematicians. The postmortems show that independent review catches unsupported builder claims, but stopping remains a key weakness. In reports that separate rounds by phase, two thirds of rounds occurred after implementation was accepted. This evidence is observational, not a controlled comparison of workflows.
Oct 5, 2026cs.RO

Human-in-the-Loop Neuro-Symbolic Drift Anticipation for Reliable Visual SLAM

This paper introduces Hybrid DeepSEE (HDS), a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) neuro-symbolic framework for proactive drift anticipation in Visual SLAM (V-SLAM). While data-driven models offer predictive power, their "black-box" nature often yields physically inconsistent outputs in out-of-distribution (OOD) environments. To address this, HDS integrates neural drift risk estimation with symbolic constraint reasoning. By utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM) as a reasoning bridge, the framework translates qualitative human context into interpretable symbolic constraints. Building upon this architecture, we propose a superior drift anticipation framework that ensures enhanced reliability and consistency in Visual SLAM
Oct 1, 2026cs.AI

SPHERE: Adaptive VR Indoor Scene Generation via LLM-Enhanced Spatial Preference Learning and Human-in-the-Loop RL

While Large Language Models (LLMs) advance 3D indoor scene synthesis, current pipelines fail to retain user-specific preferences across sessions, making immersive authoring a repetitive and physically fatiguing process. We present SPHERE, an adaptive VR generation framework that transforms isolated synthesis into continuous human-AI co-creation. SPHERE extracts persistent spatial preferences from natural multimodal interactions (speech and controller edits). To ensure geometric resilience against spatial distortions, it abstracts these raw edits into hierarchical constraints modeling both local functional and global topological contexts. Furthermore, a human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning mechanism dynamically updates retrieval policies based on the user's final edited scenes. A mixed-design user study (N=42N=42) and an offline ablation demonstrate that SPHERE significantly reduces corrective edits and physical demand, preventing bias toward shallow object-level traits to yield geometrically resilient, profile-aligned layouts. Ultimately, SPHERE demonstrates how capturing demonstrated spatial logic enables controlled spatial adaptation, establishing a reliable, governed human-AI collaboration framework for immersive authoring. Project page and source code will be available at: https://github.com/hyeonmin11/SPHERE
Oct 1, 2026cs.RO

Recova: Agent-Guided Failure Recovery for Autonomous Robotic Manipulation

Manipulation failures can leave scenes in states from which a task policy cannot recover. Learning corrective behaviors requires scalable failure exploration and physical grounding. We present Recova, an agent-guided framework that jointly develops task execution and recovery in a reconstructed digital twin, then verifies and refines both through real-world experience. In the twin, the agent diagnoses failures, tests corrective programs, and collects successful task and recovery rollouts for separate policies. During deployment, it monitors progress, invokes a learned or programmatic recovery, verifies scene restoration, and resumes execution. When no suitable recovery is available, a human demonstration resolves the failure and enters the learning loop, allowing the system to expand its recovery capabilities. Physical rollouts and human demonstrations are routed to the corresponding policy for DAgger training. Across six LIBERO-Pro settings and four MolmoSpaces categories, Recova achieves 78.8% and 64.9% mean success, compared with 71.7% and 38.0% for the strongest baselines. With parallel collection across four real-robot workstations, DAgger fine-tuning raises mean success from 23.8% to 77.5%, and recovery skills further raise it to 87.5%. Over four collection rounds on one task, observed human intervention falls from 87.5% to 0%. Together, these results show how agent-guided recovery turns failures into reusable capabilities, improving robustness while progressively reducing human intervention. Project page: https://www.liuisabella.com/Recova
Sep 30, 2026cs.SI

Community-Driven API and AI Writer Design for Openly Scaling Community Notes

Community Notes is a crowd-sourced approach for adding context to posts on X. Contributors propose and rate notes, forming the inputs to an open-source, open-data algorithm that determines which notes show broadly to users. Since September 2025, Community Notes' AI Note Writer API has provided an open, public interface for using AI to propose notes, while adhering to the founding principle that users, not the platform or an AI, control which notes show on X. Explicit note requests and user posts on X determine the AI API post feeds, ensuring that AI note writing responds to demand from X users. We present the design, operation and impact of the AI API, including analysis of the interaction between AI and human generated notes across topics. Unless otherwise stated, measurements and system description reflect June 2-29, 2026. The Community Writer is the largest AI API client and contributes the bulk of AI API output, generating 52% of notes selected as Helpful and shown broadly on X. The writer is guided by community input during both training and operation to prioritize, draft, evaluate and delete proposed notes. Beyond scale, the writer also offers speed, submitting the first proposed, non-deleted note on 60% of posts when compared to other writers. AI note writing is additive on top of human note writers, extending coverage of Community Notes on X. Among posts that have Helpful notes, 42% have only AI notes, indicating human raters did not feel motivated to propose an alternative. In contrast, 30% have only human notes, reflecting contribution beyond the scope of AI writing. The Community Writer is open-source software released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

Fyan: A Human--AI Harness with Semantic Auditing for Document-Level Formalization

We present FYAN, a human--AI harness for document-level mathematical formalization. Rather than treating theorems in isolation, FYAN coordinates an end-to-end workflow spanning specification, proof planning, logical review, Lean proof construction, knowledge curation, and validation, with support for independent supervision and human guidance. A central component is evidence-grounded semantic auditing, which assesses whether formal statements faithfully preserve their informal specifications. A language model constructs structured evidence over local correspondences, omissions, scope, and logical relations, while a deterministic validator checks this evidence and produces reproducible judgments. When a substantive but admissible deviation is accepted, FYAN requires an explicit proof-transfer obligation connecting the formal statement back to a source-facing interpretation. With the same model (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash) in every stage, FYAN proves 86 of 143 FormalTCS theorems under a strict Lean check, against 69 for a general agent harness, and raises the natural-language proof score from 0.501 to 0.851. On ConsistencyCheck, its semantic audit catches more inconsistent statements than a direct LLM judge, both on labels verified against the source (recall 0.777 vs. 0.636) and on the original labels (0.873 vs. 0.820), and localizes each mismatch it reports to a specific hypothesis, conclusion, or scope. FYAN also built ODENumLib, a 9,355-line Lean library for the numerical analysis of ordinary differential equation.
Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

ReF-HIL: Shaping the Critic around Human Action Neighborhoods for Efficient Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HIL-RL) offers a promising route to efficient training of robotic manipulation policies by combining autonomous learning with human demonstrations and online corrections. However, insufficient use of successful human experience in value learning prolongs costly real-world training, while persistent imitation penalties can limit value-driven policy improvement. To address these limitations, we propose ReF-HIL, an efficient HIL-RL framework that uses human guidance to accelerate the learning process. Human-Reference-Guided Value Shaping learns an independent value reference from successful human experience to guide online value learning, while incorporating local corrective feedback. A Human Action Fence defines a learned human-action neighborhood, allowing value-driven optimization for better performance without imitation penalties inside while constraining policy and value updates outside. Experiments on five diverse and challenging real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate improved overall learning efficiency and higher success rates compared with the evaluated baselines. Specifically, ReF-HIL reaches 90% autonomous success in only 18-63 minutes of active training and achieves final success rates of 91.7-100%. These results highlight the potential of human-guided reinforcement learning to acquire reliable manipulation skills efficiently in the real world. Project website: https://anonymous.4open.science/w/ReF-HIL-7762/
Sep 29, 2026cs.SE

Cross-Organizational SysML Model Integration: A Survey of Challenges and AI-Supported Tasks

Cross-organizational collaboration is widely regarded as a key promise of SysML-based Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), yet practitioners still face persistent challenges when exchanging and integrating system models. In parallel, Large Language Models (LLMs) raise expectations for AI-assisted model understanding and integration, while reliability and required human oversight continue to pose challenges. This paper reports the results of an online questionnaire survey with 29 MBSE stakeholders involved in cross-organizational collaboration. Respondents rated eight predefined integration challenge categories and six AI-supported task types on five-point Likert scales. The results indicate that stakeholders perceive model integration as a multi-dimensional alignment problem across semantics, behavior, traceability, and exchange interoperability. These perceptions vary by organizational role and frequency of integration involvement. AI is rated highly useful for analysis tasks such as semantic structure analysis and inconsistency detection, and respondents predominantly prefer human-in-the-loop use with mandatory verification. These findings motivate AI support that enhances, rather than replaces, engineering responsibility in SysML-based integration.
Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

Res-HIL: Human-Guided Residual Reinforcement Learning for Sample-Efficient Dexterous Manipulation

Imitation learning enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from demonstrations, but the resulting policies can fail outside the training data, while collecting more demonstrations requires substantial human effort. Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning uses corrective feedback during online training, but typically learns the complete task policy rather than refining a pretrained imitation policy. We introduce Res-HIL, a human-in-the-loop residual reinforcement learning framework that learns corrective actions on top of a frozen imitation policy. Each human intervention provides two complementary learning signals: direct supervision of the residual policy and reward shaping of preceding autonomous behavior. Res-HIL combines these signals with zero initialization of the residual policy to stabilize and accelerate online learning. We evaluate Res-HIL on five contact-rich manipulation tasks spanning high-precision and long-horizon behaviors. With only 20 initial demonstrations, Res-HIL outperforms state-of-the-art full-policy human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning and residual fine-tuning without human guidance on every task after ten minutes of online training. Res-HIL improves its pretrained base policies and outperforms imitation policies trained with five times more demonstrations. An ablation study shows that direct residual supervision is critical to performance, while intervention-aware reward shaping substantially improves training efficiency.
Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

CRISS: A Retrieval-Augmented AI Chatbot for Assisting Cancer Registrars

Cancer registrars, including Oncology Data Specialists (ODSs), must interpret complex and frequently updated coding and staging standards. We developed CRISS (Cancer Registry Intelligent Support System), a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) conversational assistant that provides rapid, citation-supported access to registry guidance. This study evaluated whether CRISS could (1) support accurate and citation-supported responses, (2) improve access to and interpretation of relevant guidance, and (3) support training/helpdesk use while preserving human oversight of final abstraction decisions. We built a domain-specific knowledge base from national cancer registry standards, segmented into metadata-tagged passages and indexed as dense embeddings. Retrieved passages were used to generate citation-grounded responses through a large language model (LLM). Open-weight, proprietary, and non-RAG baseline models across Gemini and GPT families were evaluated on easy, medium, and hard registry questions using an LLM-as-a-Judge protocols. RAG configurations consistently outperformed non-RAG approaches, especially as question difficulty increased. Mean grounding scores for RAG were 0.62/0.56/0.59 across easy/medium/hard tiers versus 0.29/0.26/0.29 for non-RAG. RAG models also achieved higher semantic-similarity scores overall. Proprietary RAG models performed strongest on easy and medium questions, while local RAG models ranked highest on hard questions and proprietary models were generally more cautious. Domain-specific RAG improved evidence grounding and response quality for cancer registry questions while enabling citation-supported assistance across complexity levels. CRISS demonstrates the potential of human-centered, citation-grounded AI to support cancer registrars while preserving human oversight for final coding decisions.
Sep 23, 2026cs.CL

EviStreams: Human-in-the-Loop AI Data Extraction for Systematic Reviews in Medicine

Systematic reviews underpin clinical guidelines, yet their data-extraction step is a major expert-labor bottleneck bound by a protocolized workflow: two reviewers extract each study independently, an adjudicator resolves disagreements, and the team keeps an auditable record of how every value was produced. Large language models can assist with extraction, but that assistance must fit established review protocols and preserve reproducibility. We present EviStreams, a live, open-source, no-code web platform that puts review teams in control of AI-assisted extraction at three key stages: program design (a structured decomposition approved before any code runs), field specification (typed field definitions calibrated from a pilot), and extracted predictions (reviewer-blinded dual review with adjudication). Working through a form builder, a domain expert defines typed fields rather than prompts, runs extraction over uploaded PDFs, inspects every value alongside the supporting passage it came from, and resolves a reviewer-blinded dual review into an auditable consensus export. An evaluation across four clinical corpora and three frontier model families, released with the system, shows that extraction quality is shaped far more by the field specification than by the choice of model. EviStreams is live at https://evistreams.com/demo and released under Apache-2.0.
Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

Learning to Defer with Guidance on Real World Medical Data

Medical image interpretation is high-volume and time-consuming, and while AI interpretation can reduce workload, fully autonomous deployment carries potential safety concerns and low specificity may in practice lead to increased clinician workload. Learning to Defer (L2D) addresses this by selectively routing cases between autonomous prediction and human experts by learning from input features and AI model and human performance. While theoretical guarantees have been proven for L2D, its performance has not been validated on real-world medical datasets with human reader annotations. We evaluate the predictor-rejector formulation of two-stage L2D, where the AI predictor model is fixed and separate from the trainable routing or rejector model, on Collab-CXR, a multilabel chest X-ray dataset with multiple human annotations per case. This is the first work to look at L2D in the context of real-world medical imaging data with human annotations. We further introduce a new setup, L2D with Guidance, where the decision space is extended to three choices: predict autonomously, defer to a human expert, or defer to a human expert and provide AI guidance. We compare multiple rejector architectures and loss functions, and different input feature availabilities. This is reproduced on two larger datasets, VinDr-CXR and CheXpert. Our results show that two-stage L2D with Guidance outperforms classic two-stage learning to defer, as well as human-alone, AI-alone and AI-guided human baselines. Notably, this performance is achieved with simpler loss functions compared to formally defined L2D surrogate loss functions in current literature.
Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

Targeted Review for AI-Assisted Biodiversity Surveys: Active Continuous-Score Occupancy Modeling

We increasingly use machine learning to label scientific datasets. The models we develop and deploy are improving all the time, but they are not and will likely never be perfect. Mistakes matter, as errors can propagate into our scientific understanding, particularly when systematically biased. Very reasonably, scientists thus review substantial proportions of ML-generated labels to verify or correct mistakes in pursuit of ensuring their scientific findings are not biased by ML. In this work, we focus on helping scientists optimally allocate this reviewing effort relative to their scientific goals. We focus on a specific class of scientists (ecologists) and a specific, widespread, and impactful modeling target (occupancy modeling, which estimates where species are likely to occur, conditioned on environmental factors). We introduce Active Continuous-Score Occupancy Modeling (ACORN), a method that incorporates ML predictions into occupancy models and strategically selects samples for expert review that are maximally informative for downstream ecological analysis. Across camera-trap and bioacoustic datasets, our method recovers ecological conclusions close to those obtained from fully human-labeled data, while requiring substantially fewer expert reviews than non-targeted review policies. Our results suggest that ML-assisted scientific workflows should optimize expert effort for downstream inference, rather than for classifier accuracy alone, especially when human review budget is limited. Our code is available at https://github.com/timmh/acorn
Sep 14, 2026cs.HC

MAIA: Multi-Agent Intent Articulation for Requirement Discovery in Art Commissions

In bespoke art commissions, laypeople know what they feel but lack the words to specify it: one participant wanted a laid-off truck driver depicted as "a ghost in his own machine" but left the medium, scale, and palette unsaid. We frame this as an articulation bottleneck at an under-served upstream stage: requirement discovery, which precedes any artist or image generator and forces the commissioner to constitute intent in the first place. We present MAIA (Multi-Agent Intent Articulation), a multi-agent system that scaffolds this stage through Socratic inquiry under a "Verification over Invention" rule, turning vague affect into a text-only brief of visual terms the user verifies. In a within-subjects study (N = 16), the full configuration produced a large, significant gain in Cognitive Support over a minimal baseline (r = 0.96, p_FDR = 0.015; LMM p_FDR < 0.001). Thematic analysis traces the same mechanism, and a validator gate structurally blocks unratified content. A complementary blind review by three professional concept artists on a sampled set of briefs corroborates this improvement from the artist's side: AI rewriting improved visual completeness and executability in all eight sampled tasks (task-level Wilcoxon p = 0.008; FDR q = 0.010), with directionally larger gains under MAIA than under the baseline (underpowered, d = 1.4-2.6).
Sep 14, 2026cs.AI

Autonomous Research for Open-Ended Problems: A Case Study on Telecom Ticket Retrieval

Recent breakthroughs in LLM-based systems and their abilities in problem solving and coding have allowed progress in the AI for Science paradigm, potentially replacing human roles in machine learning (ML) research. However, while several frameworks of fully autonomous end-to-end ML research have been proposed, successful implementations of them are often limited to problems with narrow search spaces, like language modeling or biomedical ML benchmarks. In this paper, we explore how autonomous research can be adapted to solve open-ended, industry-grade ML problems, by considering a case study: telecom ticket retrieval, an open-ended task with degrees of freedom in representation, architecture, and training data generation. We discover that autonomous research for open-ended problems with commercial and open-source agents shows both promise and limitations: while autonomous research can excel in narrow hyperparameter optimization, it lacks human-like intuition and creativity and requires operational overhead. Even with minimal human supervision, autonomous research can reach 90%90\% of state-of-the-art performance (0.34 vs. 0.38 Recall@1) in a much shorter time period (10 weeks vs. 10 months of human work) at a modest cost (up to $200 per Cursor campaign). Our empirical evidence recommends that human researchers and autonomous research frameworks work together for best results in ML research.
Sep 12, 2026cs.HC

AI Soccer Analyst: Stage-Aware and Verifiable Human-AI Collaboration for Soccer Data Analysis

Sports data analysts translate domain questions into insights by combining computation with sport-specific domain expertise. Large language models ease programming, but prompt-to-report workflows may obscure decisions and evidence. We present AI Soccer Analyst, a mixed-initiative system with revisable stages: Data Understanding, Problem Definition, Structured Planning, Execution, Evidence-Grounded Reporting, and Interaction and Refinement. A formative study with five analysts first informed design goals for automation, verifiability, human control, and accessibility. Subsequently, a task-based evaluation with 16 participants combined system logs, retained artifacts, ratings, and open responses; 33 of 48 tasks met the operational completion criteria. Exploratory tests supported favorable participant perceptions of completed-task output quality, task achievement, reliability, and verifiability after Holm correction. Interaction records showed domain knowledge emerging through clarification, planning, and refinement. These findings position stage-aware human-AI collaboration as a practical approach for producing inspectable, revisable, and verifiable analyses while retaining domain-expert involvement in consequential decisions.
Sep 9, 2026cs.HC

Pairit: A Platform for Live Experiments on Human-AI Collaboration

Organizational design in the era of artificial intelligence requires experimental methods that can test how human-AI groups coordinate, delegate, and make decisions. Programmable platforms coordinate live human-to-human sessions or real-time human-AI chat, but researchers cannot easily declare experiment protocols in which AI participants both communicate and act on shared work within one auditable configuration. Here we introduce Pairit, an online platform that facilitates the design, testing, and deployment of experiments that test human-AI organizational designs and interventions. Through a single YAML configuration file, researchers declare an executable experiment graph (pages, routing, randomization, matchmaking, chat, shared workspaces, server-hosted agents, surveys, timers, and custom HTML components) and combine any number of humans and AI agents in live sessions. We have validated the feasibility of the platform through multiple live deployments, including peer-reviewed published studies, capturing high-resolution process traces of communication, negotiation, and collaborative work in live human-AI dyads. By representing complex interactive protocols as standardized, auditable configuration files, Pairit provides reusable infrastructure for specifying, deploying, and sharing live human-AI organizational experiments.
Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Digital Inventory of Cultural Heritage & Traditional Knowledge: Case for Indonesian Open Digital Library of Culture

The Indonesian Digital Library of Culture (Perpustakaan Digital Budaya Indonesia, PDBI; budaya-indonesia.org) is a participatory platform that has collected tens of thousands of entries on Nusantara cultural heritage through public contribution since 2007. Manual contribution faces three structural barriers: coverage (knowledge is scattered across languages and sites), integrity (open sources mix authentic documentation with noise), and completeness (subjects are recorded but their data remain shallow). This paper presents a methodological framework for autonomous, AI-based harvesting of cultural knowledge from the open web, designed to expand corpus coverage while intensifying per-entry data depth. The methodology is organised as a five-stage economic funnel: focused crawling, multilingual extraction and canonicalisation, vector encoding with blocking, agentic decision-making, and idempotent publication, under the principle of deterministic orchestration, agentic decisions. Each stage is formalised: funnel economics and optimal filter ordering; crawl-frontier dynamics as a subcritical branching process that explains the necessity of recurrent re-seeding; fact-level novelty via a containment measure; Bayesian multi-source evidence fusion with elevated publication thresholds for sacred categories; exactly-once effects via idempotent upserts and the transactional outbox; sliding-window inference budgeting with a reservation protocol; statistical quality auditing; and seed selection as submodular coverage maximisation. The framework retains four high-value human roles: curator of direction, escalation approver, quality auditor, and guardian of meaning, while machine autonomy is raised in stages. Ethical, legal, and cultural-sensitivity implications are discussed, including the architectural guarantee that the machine never overwrites human contributions.
Sep 3, 2026cs.AI

Transfiver: Human-AI Co-Inference through a Shared Editable State

Long-term human-AI interaction is difficult because the information that guides inference is updated implicitly by the model and is not directly inspectable or controllable by the user. We introduce the TRANSparent Framework for Interactive, Verifiable, Editable Representation (Transfiver), an architecture for human-AI co-inference through a shared editable state. Its central idea is that interaction-specific information is maintained in a single persistent state (St)(S_t) that both the model and the human update. Transfiver distinguishes two modes of state evolution. In an implicit stream update, the model interprets ongoing interaction and decides whether new information revises an existing state item or creates a new one. In an explicit directed edit, a human inspects and modifies an addressed item. Both act on the same underlying state, so a human correction changes the state that subsequent computation reads, rather than adding another instruction or separate record. The architecture separates shared parameters (θ)(θ), learned before ordinary use, from the persistent state (St)(S_t), which evolves during deployment without parameter retraining. Extending Transfiver to rich natural-language, relational, and large-scale shared states remains open.
Sep 2, 2026cs.AI

Examining the Vulnerability of Multi-Agent Medical Systems to Human Interventions for Clinical Reasoning

Human interventions at fault points can alter the diagnostic accuracy of multi-agent medical systems. We defined fault points as moments in AI agent conversations, in which an agent's reasoning became most vulnerable to external influence. Using the MedQA dataset, this study analyzed simulated doctor-patient conversations to measure how interventions shifted reasoning and accuracy. Correct intervention methods showed an improvement in baseline diagnostic accuracy of up to 40%, while incorrect or bias-related interventions degraded performance by up to 6% and increased diagnostic drift and uncertainty. Beyond performance changes, our analysis revealed behavioral similarities between cognitive biases in simulated agent environments and real-world clinical practice. Examples included premature closure and susceptibility to misleading cues. Overall, these findings demonstrate that identifying and guiding fault points with human interventions may provide a mechanism for improving diagnostic robustness in multi-agent medical systems.
Sep 1, 2026cs.CL

Staged Linguistic Seeding: Grounded Query Expansion for Verified-Unit QA in AI Contact Centers

Customer-service QA in an AI contact center (AICC) runs under deployment constraints that benchmark QA misses: tight voice-hotline latency and a high cost for unsupported or wrong automatic answers. We deploy a system that answers only from a closed set of verified QA units: it returns a retrieved unit verbatim, or routes to clarify, abstain, or handoff. The index is enriched offline by staged linguistic seeding (SLS): a human authors a per-unit world-grounded slot recipe, gpt-4.1-mini renders it into variants, and a light human gate filters them. One methodology is reused across both domains, so inference stays a single retrieval pass with no query-time generation. On held-out query variants from two industrial domains, SLS lifts hybrid R@1 to 0.881/0.930 (+0.27/+0.34), with gains across all five retrievers tested. At the same gpt-4.1-mini generation budget, SLS beats doc2query by +0.20/+0.32, while cross-provenance evaluation provides additional evidence of transfer across generated-query distributions. Verified-unit answering also removes free-form generation's unsupported-content surface (7-13% versus approximately 0%). We report this as an application study, including negative results.
Aug 31, 2026eess.IV

Expert-like Bone Ultrasound Segmentation through Expert-in-the-loop Mask-conditioned Progressive Learning

Manual annotation remains a major bottleneck in ultrasound (US) bone segmentation, where experts typically iteratively refine rough brush masks rather than delineating precise contours in a single pass. We present ExiL, a mask-conditioned progressive learning framework that models annotation as a structured refinement trajectory. ExiL combines a synthetic expert-like brush simulator based on signed distance fields with a lightweight 7.8M-parameter U-Net that learns to complete and refine imperfect masks from US images. During deployment, an expert mode updates the model directly from accepted refinements, enabling continual adaptation to expert behavior. Evaluated using UltraBones100k cadaver data for quantitative segmentation and a prospective volunteer dataset for annotation-efficiency analysis, ExiL reduced single-expert average annotation time from 60 to 20 seconds per frame (66.7%) and improved mean Dice by approximately 0.045 over non-progressive training, while achieving 0.87 Dice and 2.7 px boundary error in the best trajectory-aware setting. With 10--50 ms inference, ExiL enables real-time, self-improving annotation for US-guided orthopedic workflows in practical clinical labeling.
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Dr. Claw: An AI Scientist Workspace for Vibe Research

Command-line coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Gemini CLI) can already read and write files and sustain long sessions, yet end-to-end research still fragments across chat tools, IDEs, terminals, and writing environments, and the decisions that make it auditable are rarely preserved. We present Dr. Claw, an open-source workspace that wraps existing coding-agent executors in a controllable and auditable human-in-the-loop workflow rather than introducing another autonomous agent. Persistent state objects, a reusable skill library, and multi-executor coordination link human decisions to AI execution, turning planning, execution, and writing into one traceable, recoverable loop. We demonstrate Dr. Claw through an interactive three-view scenario and a failure-recovery walkthrough, and evaluate it against a bare command-line agent sharing the same backend executor, so the comparison contrasts the whole orchestration layer (task graph, state objects, and skill library) with the agent it wraps. Holding the executor fixed, Dr. Claw scores higher on research completeness while persisting an auditable, recoverable process trail. Demo access: repository https://github.com/OpenLAIR/dr-claw, released under AGPL-3.0 with GPL-3.0 upstream components.
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

A Human-in-the-Loop Autonomous Agent for Industry Time Series Forecasting

Real-world time-series forecasting is rarely a one-shot model invocation: practitioners must formulate tasks, connect data and models, incorporate domain expertise, assess prediction plausibility, and communicate uncertainty. Specialized forecasting models provide strong numerical predictions but usually operate in fixed pipelines, while general-purpose large language model (LLM) agents often lack forecasting-specific checks, constraints, and stopping rules. We present CastClaw, a human-in-the-loop autonomous forecasting system built through forecasting-oriented harness engineering. CastClaw connects data, specialized models, analytical tools, user input, and a versioned execution record in one runtime. Users specify the target, horizon, constraints, and hypotheses in natural language. Starting from a supplied or model-generated forecast, CastClaw checks temporal patterns and user constraints; when evidence is missing, it retrieves context, runs an analysis or another model, or asks the user. It then keeps, revises, or escalates the result under explicit stopping conditions. The output contains the final forecast and an execution report recording inputs, evidence, actions, and revisions. In this five-dataset electricity-price setting, CastClaw reports the lowest point-estimate MSE and MAE among 16 baselines. A Nord Pool case demonstrates the inspectable workflow. CastClaw was also validated offline on provincial electricity-load data from North China covering January--June 2026.
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Reproducible macroscopic dynamics in a closed-loop human-AI learning system

Closed-loop human-AI systems generate high-dimensional behavioural trajectories whose collective dynamics remain obscure. Using 297,915 learners' adaptive-tutoring histories, we define semantic order variables before model fitting and test them in user-disjoint cohorts. The state exhibits reproducible basin-like flow and operationally defined, state-heterogeneous metastable-like kinetics. A construction-matched null distinguishes normalised-memory relaxation from a reproducible excess field. A four-term conditional mechanism recovers population drift (r = 0.946; learner-bootstrap 95% CI, 0.935-0.955). Predictive event-level self-supervised learning recovers the state and learned-plane flow; null-referenced corrections retain directional, partial-amplitude excess-field structure without full calibration. Shuffled-order training reverses learned-plane flow on ordered trajectories; support-alignment randomisation selectively reduces inward transport. Both axes remain linearly accessible without state supervision. Without cross-model fitting, the models share leading population drift (r = 0.866; learner-bootstrap 95% CI, 0.857-0.875) and persistence ordering; residual directions remain model-specific. These results identify an externally anchored leading-order effective field linking empirical dynamics, an interpretable mechanism and neural computation.
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Augmenting Human Performance with an XR Agent Learning from Online Behavior and BCI Evidence

We present OLIVE, a framework for adapting a foundation model to provide real-time assistance in temporally demanding, high-stakes, and dynamic tasks. We show that passive EEG, fused online with behavioral evidence, can meaningfully extend the number of targets users detect and engage beyond their unaided action bandwidth. OLIVE learns from both explicit behavioral signals (the targets the user shoots down in an XR first-person shooter game) and implicit physiological signals (fixation-locked EEG) to provide timely guidance, continuously adapting a frozen vision-language model's inference on which items are task-relevant by jointly estimating per-source reliability without manual labels or offline training. Through three user studies, including two live deployments of an assistive agent driven by OLIVE in XR, we show that OLIVE Pareto-dominates prior test-time adaptation frameworks, achieving the highest convergence rate at comparable convergence speed. Combining implicit physiological and explicit behavioral signals, the OLIVE agent produces the largest and most reliable within-session improvement to a user's ability to detect and engage targets, largely independent of the individual's skill. When the target switches silently, the agent that uses both behavioral and physiological signals reconverges significantly faster than the behavior-only agent (1.27 times faster on average, p = .008), restoring trustworthy guidance at the moment the task changes, precisely when reliable assistance matters most.
Aug 24, 2026cs.AI

AI Agents Push Humans Out of the Loop

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.
Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

BoardroomAI: Dependency-Aware Human-Steerable Multi-Agent Deliberation through Evolving Decision Graphs

Organizational decisions are co-created while evidence, constraints, and human priorities continue to evolve. In conventional transcript-based multi-agent systems, humans typically provide an initial problem, agents deliberate internally, and the system returns a final response. BoardroomAI instead treats the human as a persistent participant who can intervene by challenging assumptions, modifying constraints, changing priorities, introducing evidence, or redirecting the decision process. We operationalize this human--agent coexistence through four components: (i) a typed decision graph representing evidence, assumptions, constraints, claims, objections, alternatives, risks, decisions, semantic dependencies, and specialist responsibility; (ii) an intervention compiler that converts confirmed human actions into explicit graph updates; (iii) dependency-aware propagation that identifies affected subgraphs, preserves unaffected artifacts, and selectively reactivates relevant specialists; and (iv) an evaluation framework measuring intervention impact, repair coverage, preservation, recomputation, and decision validity. Across 600 generated decision-DAG interventions, propagation matched exhaustive impact computation while inspecting only 14.59% of nodes. In a 12-case exploratory pilot, selective repair recomputed 62.11% of canonical nodes, preserved all gold-unaffected nodes, and produced valid updated decisions in six cases while abstaining in the remaining six. These abstentions show that correct intervention routing may still provide insufficient context for synthesis, motivating a \emph{decision-sufficient context closure} for human-steered multi-agent deliberation. All results are synthetic and prototype-level.
Aug 11, 2026cs.HC

Automatic Field-of-View Adjustment for a View-Expansive Microscope via LSTM-Based Gaze and Pipette Motion Interpretation

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) operators frequently adjust the field-of-view (FOV) during procedures, which interrupts workflow and increases procedure time. Conventional microscopes require manual objective lens switching and illumination adjustments to achieve different FOV sizes. We propose an AI-based automatic FOV adjustment method integrated with a view-expansive microscope. This microscope enables the simultaneous acquisition of a large FOV and high-resolution images using a single objective lens through multiview imaging with galvanometer mirrors and high-speed vision, thereby eliminating the need for physical lens exchanges. Our method utilizes a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to predict the appropriate FOV size based on real-time analysis of the pipette's position and velocity, combined with the operator's gaze position. The AI model is trained using ICSI procedure data from an expert with over five years of micromanipulation experience. Experimental evaluation with novice operators reveals that the proposed automatic FOV adjustment system significantly improves the ICSI procedure speed, reducing the average task completion time from 60.5 to 48.0 s (p < 0.001). The experiments also demonstrate that this improvement enables novice operators to achieve ICSI working speeds equivalent to those of expert operators.