ai chatbot developers

Abstract: In recent years, large language model-based AI companion and role play chatbots have grown increasingly popular. People turn to these chatbots for emotional support and to engage in romantic and erotic role play. Although prior research suggests that digital role play can help people explore their gender and sexuality, LLM based technologies are also replete with gender and sexuality biases. In this study, we examine one way that AI chatbots can harm users: misgendering. In order to study chatbot misgendering we qualitatively analyzed 326 posts mentioning misgendering that were shared in AI companion or role play subreddits. We document how chatbot misgendering takes place and how, in response, users engage in ongoing work to curate their gender presentation to prevent and repair misgendering. We discuss how researchers and designers can mitigate chatbot misgendering and consider the implications of using AI chatbots for identity exploration.

Abstract: Community health workers (CHWs) in the Global South increasingly encounter AI-powered tools, yet the counseling work central to their role remains largely unsupported. We study communication practices among Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) in rural Rajasthan, India, through simulated family-planning calls, semi-structured interviews, and an LLM chatbot roleplay design-probe with 20 participants. In calls, ASHAs often responded to social or material concerns by shifting to health-risk information, denying concerns, promising unspecified help, or listing medical solutions with limited explanation. A smaller set of responses instead engaged concerns, sought permission before involving family members, or left decisions with beneficiaries. We interpret these patterns through Motivational Interviewing, emphasizing restraint from correcting, persuading, or over-solving. Drawing across observed calls, interviews, and probe reactions, we derive design considerations for AI roleplay training: keep AI in a rehearsal role, provide descriptive rather than prescriptive feedback, and evaluate counseling process rather than agreement with prescribed responses.

Abstract: Educational data filters have become a practical way to improve language-model pre-training, but most filters treat educational value as a single scalar property. This may be too broad for some applications, especially if the data set already features a high density of educational material. Useful learning material needs to be accurate, engaging, well structured, and appropriate for the intended audience and application (e.g. learner- vs teacher-facing). Following QuRating (Wettig et al. 2024), we introduce Edu-QuRating: a pipeline for multi-dimensional educational data scoring and curation. Edu-QuRating defines education-specific rubrics, uses an LLM judge to label sampled document pairs and distills those pairwise preferences into reusable Edu-QuRaters, which can score individual text chunks on a set of educational criteria. Across two sequence-classification base models and six educational criteria, the best Edu-QuRater recovers held-out GPT-4.1-mini pairwise judgements with mean accuracy 0.917. We then apply the resulting scorers in two applications. First, we investigate the potential of Edu-QuRaters for corpus filtering to improve pretraining of small language models. We scored 322.25M FineWeb-Edu-Fortified documents to obtain a filtered pre-training mixture. In matched single-run pre-training comparisons, models trained with Edu-QuRating-based mixtures reached higher observed aggregate accuracy across nine benchmarks than the FineWeb-Edu baseline, with gains concentrated in particular tasks. Second, we used Edu-QuRater scores as reward terms for GRPO post-training. In held-out pairwise judge evaluations, combining Edu-QuRater and answer-structure rewards produced responses preferred to the Qwen3-4B base model on both pedagogical quality and instruction following.

Abstract: Tool-using language agents can delegate and revoke permissions while acting through external services. We show that two authorization histories can have identical current permissions and identical all-pairs reachability yet require opposite decisions after the same direct-edge revocation. We formalize the information needed to preserve such distinctions as a residual authorization state. We prove that exponentially many future-distinct states can share one fixed transitive closure, and give exact or tight asymptotic bounds on the state required by an exact monitor as delegation redundancy varies. ResidualAuth compiles these constructions into paired language-agent episodes. Across four open-weight models, a fixed 256-token summary solved 0-2/16 pairs, sham reads solved 0/16, and authenticated current-query reads solved 15-16/16. In a separate held-out online-memory diagnostic, exact ledger serializations fit all 128 four-coordinate pairs at both 768 and 1,024 tokens. At either cap, factually supported model-written memories sufficient for every prespecified continuation solved at most 1/128 pairs per model. A hard gate reduced eight observed unauthorized effects to zero without changing the preceding attempts. These results distinguish required authorization state, usable decision information, online state maintenance, and effect mediation.