Papers

Production planning in the manufacturing industry often relies on the use of optimization models, but defining an appropriate objective function can be a challenge. In practice, planners must balance competing goals, manage uncertainty, and account for qualitative business preferences that are difficult to quantify. As a result, many optimization models fail to match expert behavior, limiting trust and adoption. In this work, we propose a data-driven inverse optimization framework to infer the objective function implicitly captured in expert planners' decisions. We formulate the production planning problem as a mixed-integer linear program, where the unknown objective function is represented as a weighted sum of hypothesized cost terms. A suboptimality-loss-based inverse optimization method is then applied to learn the objective weights from historical production plans. The proposed approach is applied to a real industrial case provided by Dow, where the inferred weights reveal that avoiding inventory shortages and maintaining consistent cycle lengths dominate the planners' decision-making. Time- and product-dependent extensions further improve predictive accuracy and uncover evolving priorities. Expert interviews confirm the practical validity of these insights. Overall, this study shows that inverse optimization can transform tacit human expertise into interpretable models, enabling more accurate and trusted decision-support tools for complex industrial systems.

Musical interaction with AI is often organised as a response loop: a human performs, the system interprets that action, and the system answers, accompanies, or schedules a musical event. Unconducted vocal ensembles pose a different problem. Singers act simultaneously and continuously affect one another; neither timing nor pitch is fixed by a conductor, metronome, accompaniment, score, or tuning source. Collective organisation emerges from many-to-many reciprocal adjustment. This paper frames such ensembles as coupled dynamic systems and proposes a research architecture for vocal agents that enter, rather than merely track, their collective states. Some target repertoires are metrical, while others exhibit non-isochronous temporal contours that cannot be reduced to a beat grid; we treat the latter as a hard case for a general framework. The architecture connects multichannel capture in the field to dialect- and singing-aware representation, collective-state inference, vocal generation, and in-situ evaluation. The resulting agenda asks not only whether an artificial singer can synchronise, but how its presence reorganises human coordination, leadership, style, and musical transmission.

In today's fast-paced world, delivering information efficiently and unobtrusively is essential. While ambient and glanceable visualizations provide real-time data, they can increase cognitive load and disrupt primary tasks. We investigate incidental visualizations, a novel concept in information visualization designed to present contextually relevant information briefly and spontaneously, with minimal user interaction. Augmented Reality offers an ideal medium for this integration, embedding visualizations directly within the user's environment. Through controlled user studies on logic-based game tasks (Sudoku and Connect 4), this work compares ambient, periodic, and incidental visualization patterns in terms of comprehension accuracy, performance, and disruption. Results indicate that IVs deliver information as effectively as ambient displays while minimizing disruption, highlighting their potential for adaptive, context-aware information delivery in AR environments.

Trait-induced merge trees (TIMTs) provide a robust topology-based method for selecting and browsing feature level sets in multivariate data by analyzing the distance field induced by a user-specified trait in attribute space. Existing TIMT computations typically sample this distance field at mesh vertices and assume piecewise-linear interpolation, although the Euclidean distance-to-trait function is generally not piecewise linear on the original mesh. As a result, the resulting merge tree may miss zero-valued features and may perturb the locations and values of minima and merge events. We study the exact computation of TIMTs for piecewise-linear bivariate fields, focusing first on point traits. We show that the restricted sublevel sets inside each tetrahedron are convex and therefore have trivial local merge-tree structure, implying that global topological changes arise only through gluing across simplex boundaries. Based on this observation, we construct a weighted graph whose merge tree is isomorphic to the exact merge tree of the induced distance field. We further relate TIMTs to Jacobi sets, showing how nonzero edge events of the TIMT are localized by the singular structure of the underlying bivariate map. We establish a theoretical upper bound on the error of the vertex-sampled linear interpolation, expressed in terms of the maximum length of projected mesh edges in the range. We discuss extensions to line, line-segment, and finite point-set traits, and implement the method robustly using CGAL and VTK, demonstrating results on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Most CubeSats, small and low-cost satellites roughly the size of a shoebox, do not survive as long as they were designed to: a study of 178 missions found that only 48-65% remain operational after two years, against a designed lifetime of 2-5 years. The deeper issue is that a CubeSat in low Earth orbit (LEO) is physically unreachable from the ground for roughly 85 minutes out of every 96-minute orbit, so faults that start during that window go unnoticed until the next contact pass, by which point recovery may no longer be possible. We propose PHOENIX (Predictive Health On-orbit Edge Neural Intelligence eXtension) to give the satellite its own fault reasoning capability. A fine-tuned Small Language Model (SLM) compact enough to run on embedded hardware is deployed onboard the CubeSat, running on the flight-proven Aethero NxN-ECM computer, monitoring all sensor readings continuously, and resolving recurring faults using a memory system that stores past repairs so the same inference does not need to run twice. Once per orbit it sends a short structured health report to the ground instead of a raw data dump; six specialized AI agents on the ground read that report and generate validated satellite commands within the 5-10 minute contact window. A generative diffusion model (DDPM) creates synthetic training data because real fault examples make up only 0.57-1.80% of the dataset. We report preliminary results on the ESA Anomaly Detection Benchmark (14 years, 76 channels, 118 labeled faults).

Target acquisition is often modeled separately for desktop, mobile, and other interaction modalities. We present Thermodynamic HCI, a framework that splits interaction into thermal equilibrium and non-equilibrium regimes. The theory generalizes across interaction modalities by representing agent-target interaction using kinetic and potential energies. We derive the movement time of Fitts' law and the speed-accuracy tradeoff observed in Schmidt's law from the principles of thermal physics. Furthermore, we develop theorems that describe how target properties, such as the color of a button, affect user accuracy. The target acquisition model, derived from the theory, when evaluated on desktop and mobile website prefetching experiments, achieved an accuracy of 98% for both cursor and touchscreen based interaction. For every clicked link, it produced a fetch:click ratio of 1.37 for desktop and 1.75 for mobile.

Data-rich documents pair narrative text with quantitative claims, and authors routinely qualify those claims with linguistic uncertainty markers such as "nearly," "approximately," or "at least." Automated text-to-chart systems discard these markers, producing visualizations that appear definitive even when the source text expresses hedged or incomplete knowledge. Readers may then over-interpret precision and misjudge author intent. We present UncertaintyVis, a system that preserves linguistic uncertainty during automated chart generation. A formative corpus analysis of 211 uncertainty expressions across 12 documents and 8 domains yielded a four-category taxonomy: Surface Form Normalization, Precision Boundaries, Inferential Derivation, and Non-Inferable Gaps. We mapped each category to chart-specific visual encodings that signal uncertainty without disturbing the spatial integrity readers rely on, and implemented an end-to-end pipeline pairing large language model text analysis with uncertainty-aware rendering. In a two-part study with 12 participants, readers matched charts to source text with 85% accuracy and text to charts with 76%. Uncertainty-aware visualizations trended toward lower cognitive demand (effect sizes 0.460 and 0.769 for mental demand and effort), and 75% of participants preferred them to plain text, describing explicit uncertainty encodings as a basis for verifying data claims. Encoding effectiveness varied by chart type: bar and pie encodings performed consistently, while line chart encodings require redesign.

Edge Artificial Intelligence (Edge AI) enables the deployment of AI models directly on local edge devices, while such deployments are subject to strict resource constraints, particularly in clinical applications requiring local and timely inference. In such contexts, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can serve as a human-AI interface intended to support healthcare professionals' and patients' understanding of model predictions and informed decision-making. To fulfill this role, XAI method selection for TinyML deployments can be formulated as a human-centered multi-objective design problem that jointly considers qualitative stakeholder preferences, explanation quality, and proxy-based deployment cost. We propose a framework that integrates a large language model (LLM)-guided design interface that maps qualitative stakeholder preferences to candidate XAI methods, followed by deterministic feasibility filtering and Pareto-based optimization. The framework exposes trade-offs among explanation fidelity, stability, and proxy-based deployment cost while characterizing their implications for explanation quality and estimated deployment feasibility. A proof-of-concept evaluation on a skin lesion classification task illustrates how the framework systematically compares candidate XAI methods and identifies Pareto-efficient trade-offs. The present evaluation covers the computational selection stages, while physical MCU deployment and empirical human-expert validation remain outside the scope of this study.

Action-chunking visuomotor policies learn from demonstrations and improve temporal consistency by predicting short action sequences rather than single-step commands. Yet perception errors and execution drift can move the robot outside the demonstration distribution, while the policy continues to produce smooth action chunks that are inconsistent with the observed state. We present AutoIntervene, an online framework that selectively transfers control between an action-chunking policy and an operator during deployment. AutoIntervene evaluates proposed chunks against a visual-action support memory built from successful task executions, combining visual similarity with consistency between proposed and reference actions. Phase-local support governs policy-to-operator transfer within the current task phase, whereas global support governs the return to policy control after operator recovery. We calibrate separate switching thresholds for the two directions from empirical quantiles of evaluation-level scores on held-out expert demonstrations, avoiding direct manual tuning of score cutoffs. Intervention segments retained from successful rollouts target learner-induced states and provide corrective supervision for subsequent policy updates. Experiments on real-world bimanual manipulation tasks show higher post-adaptation task success and lower operator-control time than manual intervention. Videos and additional results are available at https://aus.bot/research/autointervene/.

Wireless sensing has emerged as a promising approach for tracking and identification using commodity Internet of Things devices. However, the features derived from a single wireless modality are often fragile to variations in environmental layouts and walking trajectories. Furthermore, most existing studies are based on datasets collected in specific scenarios with limited trajectory diversity and sensing modalities, preventing a robust evaluation of system generalization. \textcolor{blue}{To address this gap, we introduce XGait, a multi-modality wireless sensing dataset that synchronously captures human walking using Wi-Fi and acoustic transceivers across three indoor scenarios, with vision-based measurements serving as ground truth. Specifically, XGait contains more than 22K walking samples from 27 participants, covering diverse directions and trajectories to support both indoor tracking and identity recognition. To bridge the heterogeneity of wireless sensing modalities, we propose a unified Doppler spectrogram representation that maps Wi-Fi and acoustic signals into a shared time–frequency space, along with a standardized benchmark pipeline for pre-processing, temporal alignment, and feature construction, enabling reproducible evaluation and systematic cross-modal analysis. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Wi-Fi and acoustic sensing exhibit complementary strengths, particularly under complex trajectories and challenging propagation conditions, thereby paving the way for novel research in the field of multi-modality wireless sensing.} The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/warrior-087/XGait.

Augmented/mixed reality (AR/MR) wearable glasses now permit information interaction anywhere, but visual displays can be inappropriate when real-world awareness is essential. We propose Switched Reading, a novel interaction framework for reading text in AR/MR that supports switching between visual and auditory modalities as needed. Specifically, we explore two key interaction techniques within this framework: (1) gaze-based voice playback and (2) a correspondence-aware transition effect. We implemented them on an MR headset through a parameter-tuning user test. Next, we conducted a user study (N=16) to investigate the impact of the two techniques on reading performance and overall user experience with simulated modality switching in virtual reality. The results show that the condition combining both techniques was the most preferred among four conditions. Moreover, we found that the gaze-based voice playback reduced gaze offsets when switching modalities and improved reading speed over the baseline condition using scroll position. Finally, we implemented a Switched Reading application for reading while walking and collected user feedback, yielding further design implications for practical use.

Social collaboration can support people's reflection and is a crucial component of creativity. Creative technologies have been designed to support more collaborative ways of working, including using AI to simulate social partners. As human-AI creative collaborations increase, further investigation is needed into how different social interactions influence creative reflection and at which stage a social intervention is crucial to improve creative outcomes. Considering that non-verbal communication is the bedrock of human cognition and influence, non-verbal social dynamics should be examined in detail in the age of AI-companionship. For example, during social interaction, the social facilitation effect describes how the mere presence or observation of others influences how a person behaves and feels in the context. Whether changes in technology-mediated social environments influence how people reflect on their creative work needs further exploration, as does whether social AI-companionship elicits similar effects as humans. This paper discusses how theoretical mechanisms relating to social facilitation could influence creative practice and reflection, proposing ways of further testing these effects.

Designing autonomous agents that effectively assist human teams hinges on understanding team dynamics, often without task specific knowledge. We present TRIBE, a domain independent approach that reveals team behavioral dynamics invisible to traditional performance metrics. We show that communication patterns can categorize teams into performance predictive behavioral tribes, as early as 10% into the task, enabling timely interventions. We test TRIBE on four diverse datasets and demonstrate that communication patterns predict team performance while the prediction strength varies by the degree a task structure allows for behavioral freedom. Our temporal analysis reveals that AI agents significantly alter team behavioral trajectories while human advisors align with natural dynamics, and that teams maintain behavioral flexibility throughout collaboration. Further, we compare TRIBE to Llama and optimize the pipeline, achieving significant speedup with performance improvement.

Nighttime environments are increasingly used in virtual urban studies, yet darkness alone does not fully recreate the subjective sense of being at night. Prior work suggests that this experience depends not only on the absence of daylight, but also on lighting structure, low-light perception, human activity, soundscape, and self-related states. However, no existing tool directly assesses this scene-dependent subjective experience. This work introduces nocturnity as the feeling of being at night elicited by a scene and proposes a theory-driven framework structured into three subscales: perceptual, activity, and inner-state nocturnity. Based on this framework, we develop a first candidate questionnaire for virtual urban environments. Developed through a literature-informed process and reviewed by two urban lighting experts, the scale comprises 42 Likert-type items, including three diagnostic subscales and complementary global and time-related items. This work provides a first operational basis for comparing virtual urban scenes according to their perceived nocturnity and supports future empirical validation.

Researchers who seek to build social robot applications on foundation models are faced with a difficult question: how should we pick a model? Public leaderboards offer little guidance: the demands of real-time, embodied social interaction lie largely outside their focus. And direct evaluation is impractical at scale: each embodied study requires scarce participant, robot, and experimenter time. In this paper, we identify five evaluation dimensions for foundation models in social robots: (i) conversational competence, (ii) user safety, (iii) embodied character, (iv) target scene effectiveness, and (v) audience appropriateness. To make model selection cheaper and better informed, we propose a three-tiered evaluation funnel paradigm that first filters with general metrics, then extends to simulated interactions, and terminates in more expensive, robot-specific evaluation. We map all five dimensions across all three tiers, chart where applicable evaluation methods exist and are missing, and close with a call to action: let's build the evaluation framework together as a community.

Dashboards are widely used interfaces for data analysis, combining multiple visualizations, text, and interactive controls within a single view. While dashboard authors often structure layouts to suggest a logical consumption flow, users may interpret and navigate dashboards differently depending on the interplay between design features, analytical goals, and personal preferences. In this work, we investigate how people make sense of dashboards by examining their reading orders, i.e., the sequences in which users engage with dashboard components. We conduct a mixed-methods study with 18 dashboard authors and 16 end-users, capturing how participants design for and reason through these component transitions. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses of participant-generated flows, we outline a set of factors that influence dashboard reading order, including layout, visual saliency, semantics, functional roles, interaction, and user context. We also identify emergent reading patterns and analyze them through aggregate and variability measures, revealing where users converge and diverge in their interpretations. Finally, we discuss implications and opportunities for computational approaches that aim to automatically model, guide, or serialize dashboard consumption.

Data-driven journalism and policy reports frequently rely on statements grounded in statistical evidence, referred to as data claims. Verifying such a claim requires connecting it to the underlying structured dataset. However, existing systems typically isolate automated fact-checking from manual data exploration, leaving it unclear how readers coordinate AI assistance with manual inspection of the evidence in practice. We present FYI, a browser extension that embeds fact-checking in the reading environment, and use it as a design probe to study how people detect, verify, and determine the validity of data claims against the underlying dataset. FYI provides four complementary tools spanning the spectrum from full automation to manual data exploration. In an exploratory study (N=22), participants used FYI to fact-check claims in a data-driven article. We find that participants adopted three distinct workflow archetypes—AI-first with manual confirmation, manual-first with AI supplement, and parallel co-review—with visualization serving as the primary mechanism for auditing AI conclusions. Trust in AI shifted dynamically, growing when multiple tools converged and eroding when AI outputs were inconsistent. These findings suggest that fact-checking systems should treat AI as a starting point that human verification complements rather than a definitive authority, elevate visualization as a core verification capability, and support flexible, user-driven workflows. We release FYI as open-source software for further research at https://github.com/DataVisards/FYI.

With the rise of AI-generated content (AIGC) and advanced techniques for 3D human representation, the task of generating 3D dance movements has become an exciting area of research. Despite significant advancements, current methods often fail to provide comprehensive and distinct control over various multimodal inputs from users, such as music or specific descriptions of desired movements. As a result, the generated motions may be statistically plausible and technically correct, but they often lack depth, expressiveness, and alignment with the user's creative vision. To address this issue, we present CustomDance, a coarse-to-fine interactive system designed for customized 3D dance generation. Inspired by the workflows of expert choreographers, CustomDance introduces a novel paradigm to AI-assisted choreography through three interconnected stages. First, a multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) analyzes the music and a high-level text prompt to identify key temporal anchors and creative cues for the piece. Next, for each anchor, a multimodal retriever suggests high-quality motion clips from a dance library based on local music and text, empowering the user with concrete and predictable options. Finally, a custom music-conditioned diffusion in-painter seamlessly connects the selected phrases, allowing for iterative, user-guided refinement of the final composition, supported by visualizations of motion dynamics. Our evaluations demonstrate that CustomDance not only highlights the significant creative utility and empowering potential of our AI-assisted choreography paradigm, but also outperforms competitive baselines across quantitative and qualitative comparisons. Project page: https://github.com/XulongT/CustomDance

Delegating a web task involves more than asking a question; it requires transferring a policy: what to verify, how to handle uncertainty, which preferences matter, and when to stop. Yet, current live-web agents are evaluated solely on the final answer, ignoring the policy constraints that define the delegation. A plausible final answer can conceal violations of that policy. Our full live audit reveals this critical gap: a strong controller completes 99.2% of tasks but honors all policy constraints in only 38.8% of cases. Finishing does not imply fidelity. WebRider bridges this gap by formalizing the delegated policy as an intent contract—an operational record of goals, constraints, evidence obligations, answer form, and task-local persona controls that must hold even as web pages change. WebRider employs a hierarchical architecture: a top-layer controller maintains the contract, a middle layer realizes intentions as guarded executable actions, and a tool layer executes these actions via browser, search, and maps tools. Our benchmark, RiderBench, evaluates this design on 4,096 live-web contracts across 42 public websites, auditing both the internal contract state and the visible user experience to determine if a rollout preserved its policy and if the steps were persona-consistent. The guarded middle interface also serves as a high-quality training signal; an 8B action-policy model trained through this interface outperforms executable-only baselines under a fixed controller. By making the browsing path a first-class object, WebRider enables a system that is auditable, human-judgeable, and learnable without conflating action realization with final-answer decisions. Dataset URL: hf.co/datasets/WebRider/WebRider.

Children with congenital heart disease (CHD) and their families often navigate educational, emotional, and communication challenges regarding care management outside clinical settings. However, many pediatric health intervention studies rely on caregiver-mediated feedback or structured evaluations, limiting visibility into children's direct experiences during everyday use. We present a one-week at-home deployment study of Octo, a hybrid physical-digital educational tool designed to support children's health literacy and reduce parental educational burden. Extending participatory design approaches into deployment, the study embedded child-friendly reflection activities, drawing-based feedback, and emotional tracking into family routines. We conducted the deployment with 13 families of children diagnosed with CHD. Preliminary findings suggest that children gained understanding across Octo's physical and digital components, expressed emotional attachment and confidence through play, and engaged in collaborative family communication about their condition. These findings will guide future refinement of Octo and inform future clinical deployment across care settings.

Modern cyber-physical and AI-assisted systems couple human operators, AI decision modules, and automated controllers in a single control loop, so trustworthiness depends on the whole loop, not any one model. Yet no standard benchmark captures time-aligned, multi-layer traces of how drift and failures propagate across these layers, so we cannot diagnose where coordination breaks down, why, or how to recover. This paper targets one facet of that gap: drift, a deviation that can originate in any stack layer and that conventional single-modality monitoring cannot localize to a layer or pin to an onset time. We construct a benchmark by injecting controlled drift into traces derived from ALFRED, a grounded-instruction benchmark for everyday household tasks, yielding 1,918 drifted traces. Each trace is a time-aligned sequence of per-step records across five execution layers (state, observation, decision, rules, control), labeled with the drift type, affected layer, onset time, responsible actor, and causal mechanism, and validated by independent raters with inter-annotator agreement reported. We pair the dataset with a leak-aware protocol that removes a near-perfect onset leak, and a baseline study across classical, recurrent, and attention-based model families. Under this honest protocol, drift is identifiable and attributable well above random and majority baselines across every family (affected layer macro-F1 near 0.70, responsible actor near 0.85, causal mechanism near 0.49), and heavy attention offers no advantage over simpler models on this symbolic benchmark.

Despite advances in 3D ultrasound, most percutaneous cardiac interventions still rely on 2D visualization, limiting depth perception and spatial understanding. To address this challenge, we developed an Extended Reality (XR)-based platform that enables real-time six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) catheter tracking and visualization within a patient-specific 3D heart model. The system combines a custom machine-vision algorithm for 5-DOF catheter tracking with a 3D-printed electromechanical encoder that measures catheter roll, providing complete 6-DOF motion reconstruction. In a proof-of-concept study, 20 novice medical students navigated an intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) catheter to six anatomical targets using either immersive 3D visualization or a conventional 2D cathlab-style view. Participants in the 3D condition completed the task in 54.6 seconds and traveled 1,939 mm on average, compared with 267.5 seconds and 7,854 mm in the 2D condition. Therefore, the XR-based 3D system was more than 5x faster and required ~5x less catheter travel. The 3D mode also improved targeting precision and reduced performance variability. Participants consistently rated immersive visualization higher for accuracy, speed, usability, and clinical value. Kinematic analysis showed smoother depth-axis navigation in 3D, whereas 2D users relied on repeated corrective movements. These findings demonstrate that XR-based visualization can substantially improve procedural training efficiency, precision, and motor control.

Agentic AI promises systems that can act on users' behalf, from filtering content to negotiating prices to selecting services. Whether it will empower users is an open question, and one that depends on more than the technology. We conduct a comparative case analysis of four earlier, more mature domains in which similar forms of agency emerged: browser-based ad blockers, platform recommender systems, financial robo-advisors, and email spam filtering. Across the cases, questions about whose interests agents would serve were resolved through technical arrangements: API choices, protocol governance, industry standards, and default configurations. Beyond their technical form, these were political decisions. We identify this settling of contestable questions in a technical form as depoliticization, a concept from political theory, here at work in technological systems. Its most consequential effect is that individual outcomes and collective contestation capacity can move in opposite directions: spam inbox quality improved substantially while the organized capacity to contest spam governance collapsed. Where intermediary institutions sustained formal channels for challenge, user-aligned agency proved more durable; where proprietary infrastructure and closed standard-setting absorbed contestation, the material basis for user-aligned alternatives was dismantled, and the loss proved hard to reverse. Applying this lens to agentic AI, we find a similar pattern forming: governance is consolidating around the Model Context Protocol and the Agentic AI Foundation, an industry-governed venue already deciding what agents will be able to do. Unlike in the completed trajectories, these decisions have not yet hardened, and remain open to challenge by users and the public.

Current video world models struggle in multiplayer environments because they entangle world state with view-dependent visual latents, leading to redundant compute, view inconsistencies, and poor scalability. We propose MASS (Multiplayer world models with Authoritative Shared State) to resolve this limitation. Inspired by multiplayer game architectures, MASS disentangles world dynamics and view rendering. A learned Logic Engine advances a global, authoritative typed state from joint actions without any hand-written transition function, acting as the sole recurrent memory and synchronization reference. From this shared state, a learned Rendering Engine generates independent and consistent views for any requested camera on demand. This explicit disentangling allows MASS to achieve superior state accuracy and lower cross-view inconsistency compared to state-of-the-art multi-view baselines on a matched multiplayer Snake benchmark. It advances predicted worlds with 1,024 concurrent players for 10,000 recurrent steps. Our results show that explicit, authoritative state modeling provides a practical foundation for scalable and consistent multi-agent world simulation.

Learning from demonstration (LfD) provides a developmental framework through which robots can develop motor skills by observing and imitating human dynamics, reducing reliance on explicit programming to teach a skill to a robot. The resulting human-like robot motion is recognised as a key factor in building trust and enabling natural collaboration in human-robot interaction. This paper presents a framework for learning human-like robot motion from demonstration, including data collection, probabilistic trajectory learning, and perceptual user evaluation. A dataset of 3,142 handwriting demonstrations was collected from 22 participants across all 52 Latin alphabet character-case combinations via a touchscreen teleoperation interface, capturing planar position, contact force, and timing. Building on the widely used Gaussian Mixture Model and Gaussian Mixture Regression approach for learning from demonstration, the framework is extended in this work by incorporating force and normalised time dimensions to enable richer representation of human dynamics, and adapting it to handle non-continuous, multi-segment trajectories, enabling generalisation across demonstrations. A user study with 21 participants evaluated the perceived human-likeness of the generated trajectories using a continuous scale anchored between robotic and human-like motion, normalised to 0-100 where 50 represents the neutral midpoint. The generated trajectories achieved an overall human-likeness score of 71.50 (SD=22.56), indicating that the majority of trajectories were perceived as more human-like. Participants identified geometric positioning and trajectory sequence as the most influential perceptual factors, and reported positive attitudes toward human-like robot behaviour. The datasets are released as open-source, providing a reproducible benchmark for developing and evaluating human-like robot motion methods.

Intuitive teleoperation interfaces are crucial for the safe and effective operation of robotic manipulators in challenging environments. In the nuclear industry, surface contact tasks such as swab sampling require precise path and force tracking, obstacle avoidance, and sustained operator attention, which conventional joystick interfaces struggle to support effectively. This study designs and evaluates a novel touchscreen teleoperation interface that maps continuous finger movements directly to robotic manipulator motions, provides finer velocity control, and integrates control with visualization, enabling more natural, precise, and intuitive surface interaction than conventional controllers. A comparative user study with 20 participants evaluated task performance and workload using the proposed touchscreen, a conventional joystick, and a single-click autonomous mode. Tasks simulated realistic surface manipulation using a Franka Emika Panda arm, remotely controlled from another country. Kinematic, physiological, and behavioral data were recorded to comprehensively assess task performance, cognitive load, and operator trust across each control condition. Participants completed teleoperation tasks more efficiently and accurately with the touchscreen interface, achieving a 53.5% reduction in completion time (median: 2.50 vs. 5.38 min), higher in-area coverage on the sinusoidal path (90.7% vs. 84.1%), and lower overshoot on both path geometries compared with the joystick. Cognitive load, quantified via NASA-TLX (0-100), decreased from joystick to touchscreen (mean TLX 52 to 43; -9 points, -17.3%) and was lowest under the autonomous one-click mode (31; -21 points vs. joystick, -40.4%; -12 vs. touchscreen, -27.9%). This research presents an easy-to-implement touchscreen interface that improves performance in teleoperated surface tasks while reducing cognitive load.

Large language model (LLM) benchmark evaluations are routinely used to support claims about model safety, reliability, and deployment readiness. Yet most evaluations rely on a single access modality (model APIs), perform a single run per prompt, and report accuracy as the primary outcome metric, without accounting for conditions such as web search that may have effects on model behavior in deployment. We audit these assumptions for one of the most widely-used LLMs, comparing two modalities, ChatGPT's chat UI and OpenAI's API, with and without web search enabled. We use a stratified total sample of 401 prompts from two popular benchmarks, BBQ and SafetyBench, collecting 4,812 total responses across three repeated runs per prompt. Beyond standard performance measures, we evaluate model output dimensions including response consistency, response text similarity, citation grounding, and abstention behavior. For instance, chat UI responses were less accurate than API responses on both benchmarks with search disabled. Enabling web search reduced accuracy by up to 8 percentage points, and even reversed the direction of modality performance trends for one benchmark. Repeated runs of the same prompt produced inconsistent responses in up to 21% of prompts. The two modalities also grounded answers in different citations, and abstention behavior was also inconsistent across both modalities. These results illustrate that, even within a model family, reporting only simple accuracy metrics can obscure important forms of model behavioral variation relevant to AI safety assessments. We argue that AI safety evaluations should systematically account for modality, multi-run consistency, search conditions, and response-level behaviors to better reflect how deployed AI systems behave in practice.

The emergence of conspiracy theories in the wake of major events is a significant societal challenge. Here we test whether conversational dialogues with a large language model (LLM) can reduce belief in immediately unfolding conspiracies. In experiments conducted in the days following the July 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, U.S. adults (Experiment 1: N = 472; Experiment 2: N = 1035) holding conspiratorial views about the crisis event engaged in a multi-turn conversation with an LLM prompted to reduce their conspiracy belief. Compared to control participants who either discussed an irrelevant topic with an LLM or viewed a static fact sheet, participants in the LLM treatment showed significantly reduced conspiracy beliefs in both experiments. We also found evidence of downstream effects of the LLM treatment, observing reduced belief in different conspiracies one to two months later in the wake of subsequent crisis events. These results shed light on the psychology of emerging conspiracies and highlight the potential for scalable, cognitively-focused interventions to counteract misinformation in the immediate aftermath of high-profile societal events.

This paper focuses on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and ASR-mediated voice interfaces that shape access to public services, healthcare, and education. We argue that persistent failures for low-resource, Indigenous, and non-standard language varieties are not only technical errors, but also implicit linguistic policies that reproduce colonial language hierarchies. Drawing on linguistic capital, raciolinguistic ideology, language policy research, and decolonial computing, we show how data, metrics, and model priors determine whose voices become machine-legible. We introduce the Three Harms (3M) taxonomy—Misrecognition, Misalignment, and Mistrust—and a seven-layer situatedness model for linguistic diversity in ASR and ASR-mediated voice interfaces. We then propose a participatory framework and minimum audit protocol for culturally competent ASR, positioning affected communities as co-designers, evaluators, and governance partners.

Virtual reality (VR) and video-passthrough mixed reality (MR-VPT) can be delivered on the same headset, but it is unclear whether these two interaction modalities produce comparable perceptuomotor behavior. Although delivery through the same headset controls many display-level characteristics, VR and MR-VPT differ in both their visual-feedback pipelines and the action-relevant visual information available to guide movement, such as whether the surrounding environment and the user's body are synthetically rendered or preserved through passthrough. This study compared visually guided manual pointing in VR and MR-VPT using the same headset. Forty adults were assigned to either a VR or MR-VPT group and completed a pointing task in the physical, unmediated reality (UR) before and after performing the same task in their assigned XR modality. The analyses revealed numerous important insights. First, groups had comparable baseline performance in UR prior to XR exposure. Second, the two modalities produced opposite initial biases during XR exposure: the VR group undershot the target, whereas the MR-VPT group overshot. Third, although both groups reduced error with continued exposure to XR, there were differences in the patterns of adaptation: the VR group adapted more slowly and exhibited stronger distance-dependent undershooting than the MR-VPT group. Finally, after XR exposure, both groups showed significant undershooting aftereffects with the VR group retaining a persistent residual undershoot, suggesting incomplete de-adaptation. The results suggest that perceptuomotor recalibration is shaped not only by display-level constraints but also by the action-relevant visual information available within the interaction environment. These findings highlight the need to validate perceptuomotor interaction techniques separately in VR and MR-VPT, even when they are implemented on the same hardware.