Papers for

human-computer interaction teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

SymAnt improves robot prediction of long action sequences from short views

SymAnt: Grounding Long-Horizon Action Anticipation with Adaptable Symbolic Priors

Abstract: As robots and intelligent systems increasingly interact with humans, they must anticipate long sequences of future actions from only brief observations. While purely neural models typically require extensive observations to predict future actions and remain difficult to interpret and adjust, symbolic priors offer a structured alternative. To this end, we introduce SymAnt, a novel neuro-symbolic approach that unifies the expressiveness of neural networks with the structured reasoning of scene and knowledge graphs. Given a short video, SymAnt performs a joint-search over both graphs to construct a symbolic context, enabling unified reasoning over spatial relationships, object attributes, affordances, and associated actions. This symbolic context serves as a prior for an iterative refinement process that progressively generates and improves the sequence of future actions. By grounding predictions in symbolic context, SymAnt anticipates long-horizon actions from short observation windows in a parameter-efficient manner, while enabling users to directly edit the underlying knowledge to adjust predictions without further training. Through our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SymAnt, particularly when only short observation contexts are available, across five diverse datasets: Breakfast, 50 Salads, EPIC-KITCHENS, EGTEA Gaze+, and Assembly101.

Thu 29 OctRoboticsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Robots need to guess what people will do next by watching only a little bit of video. The authors created SymAnt, a method that mixes smart symbols and neural networks to help robots understand scenes better. SymAnt looks at objects and their relationships using graphs to build a context before guessing future actions, making predictions easier to adjust. It works well even when the robot sees only a short clip and allows people to tweak its knowledge directly without retraining.
Open → 2610.40632v1

AI and humans cooperate and compete on shared megabikes in a testbed game

A Serious-Game Testbed for Self-Governing Human-Machine Institutions

Abstract: AI agents no longer act alone: they cooperate, coordinate and compete within and between groups, increasingly alongside humans who are in, on or out of ``the loop''. Whether such mixed groups can govern themselves is an open question about machine behaviour and human-computer interaction that needs a testbed for hybrid institutions. We present Megabike, a multi-agent simulator and serious game with interdependent arenas for common-pool resource management, cooperative survival and constitutional choice. Riders sharing a megabike must agree their arrangements for steering, pedalling and distributing resources, and their political regime, while negotiating with rival bikes and avoiding an existential threat. Every rule is enforced by the simulator, every action is logged, and any seat can be taken by a human or a machine, so governance can be studied under well-defined metrics. We demonstrate Megabike with forty sessions in which language-model riders with cooperative, lazy, subversive or opposing dispositions chose regimes, elected leaders and expelled one another. The results show that different combinations of agent archetypes could produce unexpected and counterproductive outcomes. We conclude with extensions for systematic experiments mixing human and computational agents.

Tue 27 OctMultiagent SystemsHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Managing groups where humans and AI work together or compete raises questions about cooperation and rules. The authors made a game called Megabike where players share control of a bike and decide how to steer, pedal, and share resources all while competing with others and avoiding dangers. Both humans and AI can play any role, and the game records all actions to study their interactions. The authors tested AI players with different behaviors and found that their mixes could lead to surprising and sometimes bad results. They suggest Megabike could help explore how humans and machines can govern themselves together.
Open → 2610.36989v1

Omni large language models struggle with timely and proactive help

Omni-InteractScope: Benchmarking Proactive and Agentic Interaction in Continuous Omnimodal Streams

Abstract: Omnimodal large language models (Omni-LLMs) are increasingly expected to assist users while observing continuous audiovisual streams. However, existing evaluations provide limited insight into how reliably these models connect stream evidence and user needs to timely, sustained interventions. We introduce \textbf{Omni-InteractScope}, a benchmark of 1,479 human-annotated, cross-reviewed interactions with 1,790 temporal targets across eight task groups. It links input modalities, event triggers, intervention types, and user needs, covering event-timed tool invocation and query-free assistance alongside notifications, warnings, state tracking, and continuous responses. Our experimental results on the proposed benchmark reveal three critical limitations of current Omni-LLMs: (1) \textbf{Timely tool invocation remains unreliable}: all 12 evaluated models produce an on-time first response for at most 40\% of tool-invocation targets, and joint timing-and-tool accuracy reaches at most 32.0\%. (2) \textbf{Query-free reminders remain poorly covered}: all evaluated models achieve lower timely reference-target recall on query-free reminders than on explicit questions, measured on their respective target sets. Reminder recall never exceeds 23.0\%. (3) \textbf{End-to-end guidance coverage remains limited}: nine models cover none of the 26 guidance sequences in full, and the remaining three cover only one to three sequences each. Targeted controls further show that tool-invocation scores alone do not establish event grounding and that reminder coverage depends on response history and frequency. These findings motivate developing and evaluating streaming assistants for timely action, initiative under general user needs, and coverage of entire response sequences.

Mon 26 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Modern AI models that watch and listen continuously to videos and sounds are expected to help users with tasks as events happen. The authors created a new benchmark called Omni-InteractScope that measures how well these models act on events when needed, like starting tools or giving reminders without being asked. They found that current models often respond too late, struggle with unprompted reminders, and rarely provide full step-by-step help. This shows there is still much work to do before such AI assistants work reliably in real-time situations.
Open → 2610.35439v1

Human turns reveal detailed contributions in human agent teamwork

From Tasks to Turns: Measuring Human Labor Contributions in Human-Agent Joint Production

Abstract: In agent workflows, a brief human instruction can alter subsequent search, reasoning, and tool execution, yet final task outcomes rarely reveal the contribution of an individual instruction to human-agent joint production. We propose a Human Turn-level framework for measuring human contributions, using task quality and token usage to characterize the collaborative production outcomes associated with each human instruction. We compare continuations from adjacent checkpoints under matched models, budgets, and termination conditions, and assess stability through repeated measurements. Across four archived and simulated interaction settings, we conduct 29,124 comparisons between predicted and observed directions of quality and computational change at both Human Turn and session levels. On HumanBench, we obtain 506 valid comparisons across 85 real-user scenarios. Results show that quality and computational changes associated with human guidance depend on task conditions. Expert-style and ordinary-style guidance differ in information provision, correction, and repetition. Even when task quality after continuation is identical, remaining computational demands can differ substantially across checkpoints. Our framework advances the measurement of human labor contributions from tasks and sessions to individual turns, providing a repeatable, fine-grained foundation for studying human contributions and their allocation in human-agent joint production.

Mon 19 OctHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
It can be hard to tell how much each human instruction helps when people work together with AI agents to get tasks done. The authors created a way to measure the contribution of each human instruction by looking closely at the change in task quality and computer work when an instruction is given. They tested this across many interactions and found that different kinds of instructions affect outcomes and computer effort in various ways. This method helps us understand human input more clearly during collaborations with AI.
Open → 2610.26365v1

Context-aware graph network improves emotion recognition from EEG and eye movements

Context-Aware Topological Distillation Graph Network for Asymmetric EEG-Eye Movement Emotion Recognition

Abstract: EEG-eye movement emotion recognition can support mental-health monitoring and adaptive interfaces, but most fusion models treat the two signals as parallel features, classify each window alone and degrade when eye data are lost. We propose the Context-Aware Topological Distillation Graph Network (CTD-GNet), in which EEG features form the nodes of an electrode graph, and eye movements and preceding windows modulate its edges, nodes and readout, the edges through electrode-specific prompts. Bidirectional distillation of the graph, node relations and predictions couples this multimodal teacher with a single-window EEG student, improving the teacher and aligning the two graphs 35-fold. In leave-one-subject-out tests on SEED and SEED-IV against 17 baselines, CTD-GNet has the highest mean accuracy, 84.91% and 76.17%, significantly above 9 and 6 of 13 eye-based baselines after Holm correction, the smallest cross-subject spread among multimodal models and the highest worst-subject accuracy. It is the most accurate model at every rate of missing eye data on SEED-IV, keeps 66.1% on SEED without eye data, more than any EEG-only model, and stays 9.3 and 11.9 points above all single-window fusion models under eye-movement noise of one standard deviation. On film clips unseen in training, it leads on SEED with 77.1%.

Mon 19 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
The paper tackles how to better understand emotions by looking at brain signals (EEG) and eye movements together. Unlike previous methods that treated these signals as separate, the authors created a graph-based model that connects EEG electrode data while factoring in eye movements and past information to improve recognition. Their approach also works well even when eye movement data is missing or noisy. Tests showed their method is more accurate and consistent across different people and scenarios than earlier models.
Open → 2610.26084v1

Gaze improves robot manipulation by guiding attention during training

GazeAct: A Human-Gaze-Annotated Manipulation Dataset for Attention-Regularized Policies

Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies must ground language instructions in the right objects, contact points, and target locations for reliable manipulation. Human gaze provides a natural signal for this grounding, but existing robot datasets rarely pair real human gaze with the multi-camera observations used by modern policies. We introduce GazeAct, a gaze-equipped real-robot manipulation dataset and training framework for multi-view VLA policies. Using screen-based teleoperation, we record gaze directly on the robot camera feed viewed by the operator, yielding 12000 demonstrations across 40 tasks and five domains with 300 Hz gaze synchronized with images, proprioception, and actions. We transfer gaze from the operator-selected view to the remaining synchronized cameras, producing spatially consistent targets across the policy's visual inputs. We then use these gaze-derived targets to regularize language-conditioned visual attention during training while keeping inference gaze-free. Across 18 real-world tasks, our method improves average success from 48.1% to 58.6%, with gains up to 25 percentage points. Ablations show that gaze works best as soft supervision and that real human gaze provides stronger attention targets than generic attention-shaping priors. The gains transfer to LIBERO-Spatial (57.9% to 69.6%) and different VLA backbones.These results show that gaze collected in the robot observation space can provide effective training-time targets for improving visual grounding in VLA manipulation.

Sat 17 OctRoboticsArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Robots that follow language instructions to handle objects can do better if they know where humans look when deciding what to do. This paper shows how recording human gaze while controlling a robot helps teach the robot which objects and places to focus on. The authors created a big dataset of people controlling a robot remotely while their eye movements were tracked, and then used that gaze information to train better robot action policies. Their method increased the robot’s success rates in real tasks without needing gaze during actual use.
Open → 2610.24507v1

Computer-use agents perform worse when serving diverse user personas

PersonaCUABench: Benchmarking Computer-Use Agents Serving Diverse Personas

Abstract: Computer-use agents (CUAs) are commonly evaluated against fixed task specifications, but users may omit requirements, add constraints, or require approval before consequential actions. Completing the benchmark instruction does not guarantee serving the person who asked. We introduce PersonaCUABench, which holds 74 tasks across 11 domains fixed and varies only who asks. A persona agent, playing one of 44 personas in four groups, rewrites each instruction in that user's own words and answers the CUA's questions, while the CUA sees only the dialogue, never the profile or the original instruction. Across nine backbones (3,330 runs), mean task completion falls by 36% relative to the original requests. The losses have two sources: in 59.9% of cells that lose points, the agent engages with what the user asked for and still gets it wrong, and 11.2% are stops the user requested that the checker scores as failures. Even when a persona request is fully completed, the user gives the top satisfaction rating in only 62.7% of cells, against 84.1% for the original requests. CUAs should therefore be evaluated not only on task completion but also on whether they meet the requirements and constraints users express. Code: https://github.com/MatrAIx-ai/PersonaCUABench. Project page: https://matraix.ai/research/persona-cua.html

Fri 16 OctHuman-Computer InteractionArtificial IntelligenceComputers and Society
The gist
Computer-use agents usually follow fixed instructions exactly, but in real life, people often give instructions with extra needs or want to approve sensitive actions. The authors created PersonaCUABench, a test that sees how well these agents respond when different types of users rephrase instructions and ask questions in their own way. They found that agents completed fewer tasks correctly when dealing with diverse user personas, and even successful tasks often didn’t fully satisfy the users. This means agent evaluation should consider how well they understand and meet the user's actual needs, not just task completion.
Open → 2610.22990v1

Language models struggle to separate similar memories under interference

Language Models Share a Readout Bottleneck in Working Memory

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reproduce a human working-memory signature on the N-back task: performance declines as memory load N increases, and errors concentrate on lures, items that repeat the current stimulus at a neighboring but incorrect serial position. We ask whether this shared behavioral signature reflects a shared mechanism. The literature offers two candidate accounts. On a precision account, softmax attention cannot concentrate its weight on the item N positions back, so adjacent items are retrieved instead. On an interference account, attention selects the correct item, but the content of competing items corrupts the decision. We dissociate these accounts in 15 pretrained LLMs from three families (70 million to 14 billion parameters) and in minimal transformers trained from scratch. In all three families, the attention heads that carry the task attend to the target on most missed matches. Linear probes decode near-perfectly whether a matching letter occurred at the target or at a lure position, even on trials where the model false-alarms to the lure, although its own decisions barely distinguish the two. Sharpening attention yields negligible gains, whereas suppressing the letter identity of non-target items improves sensitivity (d') in nearly all model-by-load conditions. In larger models the task is spread over more heads, and removing interference helps more. In minimal transformers, precision limits a single attention layer, but a second layer removes this constraint. The working-memory limit of LLMs therefore lies in reading items out under interference rather than in locating them, consistent with interference accounts of human working memory.

Thu 15 OctMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
When language models try to remember items in order, they make more mistakes as the list gets longer, similar to humans. The researchers found that these mistakes happen not because the models can’t find the right item, but because the similar items interfere with the decision about which one to choose. Testing many models showed that the problem is less about focusing attention and more about interference when recalling items. This insight matches ideas about how human working memory works too.
Open → 2610.21176v1

ReviewPilot automates paper screening and data extraction in reviews

ReviewPilot: A Multi-Agent System for Screening and Data Extraction in Systematic Reviews

Abstract: Systematic literature reviews follow the PRISMA process of screening scholarly works and extracting evidence from included studies. Deep research tools based on large language models (LLMs) can search and summarize the literature but do not record which studies are excluded or where extracted values come from. We develop a conversational multi-agent system called ReviewPilot that automates the PRISMA workflow from paper screening to information extraction. Researchers can tailor criteria and schemas through dialogue, and a project memory keeps their configurations and revisions. Each screening decision comes with its reason and each extracted value with its source. On epidemiological expert reviews, ReviewPilot outperforms a single-prompt LLM and AgentSLR across three LLMs, with screening macro F1 up to 0.776 and extraction F1 up to 0.788. Case studies in biomedicine and human-computer interaction show close agreement with human annotators, suggesting that ReviewPilot can transfer beyond epidemiology. Code is available at https://github.com/ZhaoqianXue/ReviewPilot.

Thu 15 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceInformation Retrieval
The gist
Systematic reviews check many scientific papers to decide which to include and to gather important data. The authors created ReviewPilot, which uses multiple AI agents to help researchers quickly screen papers and extract information with clear reasons and sources. Unlike simpler tools, ReviewPilot remembers user settings and explains its decisions. Tests showed it works better than some existing AI methods, especially for health studies, and works well in other fields too. The tool and its code are available for anyone to use.
Open → 2610.21042v1

Omni-modal large language models improve sharing knowledge from multiple senses

Omni-Modal LLMs Know More Than They Say

Abstract: Omni-modal large language models (Omni-LLMs) extend LLMs to process heterogeneous modalities (e.g., vision, audio, and IMU signals) alongside language, enabling a broader range of multimodal tasks. Yet we find that these models often fail to express information from non-textual modalities even when they perceive it correctly. We term this disconnect knows-but-cannot-say. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce Token-level Modality Alignment (TMA), which measures the alignment between individual modality representations and response representations. Our analysis shows that non-textual representations are less aligned with response tokens and receive less attention than textual representations, suggesting a potential explanation for uneven modality preferences. Motivated by these findings, we propose OmniCatalyst, a simple perceive $\rightarrow$ infer strategy that complements the original modality inputs with self-generated text, making non-textual knowledge more accessible. Across seven Omni-LLMs, OmniCatalyst consistently improves performance (+7.29%) and yields more balanced modality preferences, with further gains from diverse training strategies. Further analysis demonstrates that the knowledge extraction phases increase TMA, suggesting that improved alignment makes non-textual information more accessible during response generation. In summary, our findings uncover how Omni-LLMs can better express modality knowledge through language. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/OmniLLM.

Mon 12 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Large language models that can understand more than just text, like images and sounds, often know things from these extra inputs but don’t talk about them well. The authors found a way to measure how well different senses connect to the words the model generates. They then created a method to help these models explain what they see or hear more clearly by turning their perceptions into text first. This method made the models better at sharing knowledge from all their inputs, not just text.
Open → 2610.16135v1

Trace framework tracks emotions from causes to effects in social scenes

Cognition-Oriented Emotion Tracing from Causes to Consequences in Real-World Social Scenes

Abstract: Affective computing has progressed from categorical emotion recognition to open-ended affective analysis with large multimodal models. Yet affective science describes emotion as an unfolding process shaped by appraisal, regulation, and social interpretation, which remains underexplored computationally. We propose TRACE, a cognition-oriented framework that formalizes an affective episode through three interrelated stages: Condition, Affect, and Effect, integrating observable cues with cognitive factors such as internal stance and regulation of emotional display. Based on this formulation, TRACE-Bench evaluates multimodal models in real-world social scenes through five tasks spanning grounded affect recognition, regulation decoding, cause reasoning, effect reasoning, and full-chain reconstruction, with 3,746 structured question-answer pairs over 646 videos. A matched human-model comparison reveals a substantial performance gap, while affect-specialized models also generally lag behind general-purpose MLLMs. Model outputs show recurring failures, including treating displayed behavior as genuine feeling and fabricating unsupported events during long-chain generation. We further propose TRACER, a cognition-grounded structured reasoning method that couples each inference with explicit premises from factual observations, cognitive appraisals, and established upstream conclusions, forming a traceable graph of intermediate and target conclusions. TRACER outperforms all evaluated model baselines on each of the five tasks. Project page: https://cogaffc.github.io/TRACE

Thu 8 OctArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Understanding emotions is more than just recognizing if someone is happy or sad; emotions develop through causes, feelings, and effects involving thoughts and social cues. The authors introduce TRACE, a new way to analyze emotions by breaking them into stages: the situation, the emotional response, and the consequences. They test current AI models with a large video-based benchmark and find these models struggle with reasoning about emotions fully. To improve this, they propose TRACER, a method that explains its reasoning step-by-step, outperforming other models on various tasks about emotions in social settings.
Open → 2610.11410v1

Video language models detect when enough evidence arrives to answer

Have I Seen Enough? Frozen Video-Language Models Encode Evidence Readiness

Abstract: Streaming video-language models must decide not only what to answer, but whether the evidence needed for the current question has arrived. Existing systems learn that decision as a separate trigger; we ask whether an unmodified model already computes it. We show that frozen VideoLLMs carry a linearly readable evidence-readiness signal, labelled from timestamped evidence rather than from model output. It decodes in all seven models of a shared byte-identical evaluation (AUROC 0.733-0.905 under the strictest not-ready sampling, where a fitted clock is near chance), and a probe fitted without any of a benchmark family's footage still reads that family. It is question-conditioned: on byte-identical windows, changing only the question reverses the readout on 66.1% of pairs, while every question-blind control is at chance by construction. The model can answer incorrectly and still encode readiness: AUROC remains 0.722 among wrong answers. Readiness also beats uncertainty estimators and their supervised combination on latency-matched answer selection, and tracks independent human judgments more closely than confidence. Released streaming triggers are also linear readouts, yet a trained trigger read on its own base model's activations is approximately orthogonal to readiness and decodes it far less accurately than a probe. We turn the readout into Readiness Gating, an answer-timing policy that improves accuracy by up to +9.75 pp at matched video duration with negligible computational overhead. How much it gains varies with the accuracy headroom the task makes available: across 26 configurations the gain tracks that headroom, and an intervention that moves it over identical pixels moves the gain with it.

Tue 6 OctComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputation and LanguageMachine Learning
The gist
Video-language AI models that watch streaming videos need to decide not just what answer to give, but also when they have seen enough to answer confidently. The authors found that even without extra training, these models already contain a signal that shows if the right evidence has appeared, which can be read linearly from their internal data. This signal works across different models and questions, and helps improve when the model chooses to answer, making answers more accurate without extra computing cost.
Open → 2610.08560v1

Multimodal domain adaptation improves eeg eye emotion recognition

IDEAL: A Multimodal Domain Adaptation Framework for EEG-Eye Emotion Recognition

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) emotion recognition serves as a pivotal interface for human-computer interaction, yet the physiological variability across individuals complicates the already challenging task of fusing heterogeneous physiological signals (e.g., EEG and eye movements). However, most prevalent domain adaptation paradigms are tailored for unimodal scenarios, failing to address the heterogeneity of multimodal signals. Furthermore, they predominantly rely on feature-level alignment, overlooking the fundamental data-level discrepancy, which risks compromising fine-grained discriminative information during aggressive adaptation. To bridge these coupled gaps, we propose Instance-based Domain Expansion and Adversarial Learning (IDEAL), a unified framework that synergizes instance-level curriculum expansion with feature-level hierarchical adversarial alignment. IDEAL first introduces a multi-model collaborative screening mechanism, which propagates high-confidence target samples to explicitly bridge the distributional gap at the data level via a quantity-quality equilibrium strategy. We provide a theoretical analysis that this instance expansion strategy strictly tightens the upper bound of the target risk. Subsequently, a hierarchical adversarial network, augmented with the angular-contrastive constraints, progressively aligns representations from low-level statistics to high-level semantics while preserving class separability. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that IDEAL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/WY-BCI-Club/IDEAL.

Wed 30 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Recognizing human emotions from brain signals (EEG) and eye movements is tricky because people’s physiological responses vary a lot. Existing methods typically focus on one type of signal and try to align features, but they miss important differences at the raw data level and across multiple signals. The authors propose IDEAL, a method that expands and selects confident data instances and then aligns features across different signals carefully, preserving emotional distinctions. Their experiments show this method is better at recognizing emotions across different people and datasets.
Open → 2609.39421v1

MyoCodec provides real-time streaming encoding of muscle signals

MyoCodec: A Streaming Neural Codec for Electromyography

Abstract: Neural codecs encode continuous signals into compact sequences of discrete tokens, providing an interface for efficient transmission, storage, and token-based sequence modeling. This paradigm has been widely adopted in modern speech and audio frameworks; however, the biosignal domain still lacks a neural codec designed specifically for low-bitrate streaming and generalization across diverse downstream tasks. We present MyoCodec, a streaming neural codec designed for electromyography (EMG). Inspired by recent neural audio codecs, MyoCodec combines causal Transformers with residual vector quantization to encode continuous EMG signals into different levels of EMG representations spanning from continuous latent features to discrete tokens operating at 50 Hz. Trained on twelve public EMG datasets, MyoCodec achieves favorable performance in both intrinsic codec quality and representative downstream tasks, including typing (emg2qwerty), hand-pose (emg2pose), speech decoding (emg2speech), and speech-to-EMG synthesis (speech2emg). Across these tasks, MyoCodec exhibits strong performance against prior models while providing a compact and causal EMG representation. During streaming inference, it requires compute time of only 0.482 ms for each 20 ms frame, enabling real-time streaming. Also, the discrete token representation provided by MyoCodec has the potential to support integration into language-model based approaches, creating a path toward LLM-based interactive systems, where tokenized EMG representations are directly processed into such language or speech models. Code and model weights are released.

Tue 29 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Signals from muscles contain information used in various tasks like controlling devices or decoding speech. The authors developed MyoCodec, a system that compresses these muscle signals into compact tokens that can be processed efficiently and quickly. It works in real time and performs well across tasks like typing, hand movement tracking, and speech decoding. This makes it easier to integrate muscle signal data into advanced models such as language models.
Open → 2609.36687v1

Event context improves emotion recognition beyond visual cues

AffectReveal: Event-Grounded Emotion Recognition Beyond Visual Appearances

Abstract: Visual emotion recognition commonly assumes that all evidence required for prediction is contained in the observed image or video. Yet the same visible reaction can convey different emotions depending on events beyond the input: tears, for example, may indicate grief or joy. We formulate Event-Grounded Emotion Recognition (EGER), where emotion recognition requires recovering the affect-determining event. We construct EGER-Bench, comprising 10,052 videos and 10,734 images across 11 emotions, two source domains, and four visual settings. A study with six annotators shows that event context raises human recognition accuracy from 33.96% to 72.08%, confirming that visual evidence alone is often insufficient. Semantic relevance alone does not solve EGER: a plausible event may imply the wrong emotion if its identity, focal-person role, relationship, or outcome is misinterpreted. We therefore propose AffectReveal, a tuning-free framework that first constructs and independently verifies evidence-grounded alternatives over these affect-critical factors. It then cross-checks the recovered event against face-masked in-media facts through bidirectional atomic evidence support, while retaining the original unmasked input for final prediction. Across three downstream models and four input settings, AffectReveal yields average UAR gains of 5.26--10.53 points. For three fine-tunable models, it also enables untuned models to outperform their fine-tuned visual-only counterparts in all 12 accuracy comparisons, without updating downstream parameters.

Tue 29 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding emotions just by looking at someone's face or reaction can be tricky because the same expression might mean different feelings depending on what happened. The authors created a way to recognize emotions by also figuring out the event that caused them, not just relying on visual clues. They found that knowing the event almost doubled human accuracy in guessing emotions. Their method, AffectReveal, checks multiple pieces of evidence about the event and combines that with the original image or video to better predict emotions without extra training.
Open → 2609.36563v1

Humanoid robot sign language benchmark tracks precise motion errors

Traceable Human-to-Humanoid Sign Language Benchmarking

Abstract: Sign data collection is costly, and teleoperation scales poorly, motivating reuse of large video corpora. Humanoid signing requires converting video-derived human motion into robot trajectories while preserving linguistic motion cues. Errors from fitting, human-motion repair, retargeting, robot geometry repair, and control are hard to separate from the final trajectory alone. We introduce HumanoidCSL-20K, a dataset and benchmark of 20,648 sentence-level Chinese Sign Language sequences, each with four aligned versions: the source, the repaired human motion, the direct robot reference, and the geometry-repaired robot reference. Observation-supported local human-motion repair, full-robot geometry repair, and cross-representation provenance make each transformation traceable. Paired evaluations measure human-motion continuity and content preservation, robot-reference feasibility, and physical execution. A sign-specific kinematic-reference protocol scores handshape, location, palm orientation, and inter-hand relation over the full planned motion. Full-corpus results show fewer abnormal arm / hand steps and less inter-hand and hand-body penetration after repair. Control experiments separate reference learnability from curriculum effects, while component scores expose remaining execution errors.

Sun 27 SeptRobotics
The gist
Turning human sign language videos into robot motions is tricky because small errors can affect the robot’s signing. The authors created a large dataset with thousands of Chinese Sign Language sentences, showing different stages of motion processing from humans to robots. Their approach helps track and separate errors at each step to improve accuracy. This makes robot sign language movements clearer and easier to evaluate.
Open → 2609.33354v1

Continuous eeg emotion tracking improves understanding of changing feelings

From Segments to Trajectories: Evolving Affective Graphs with Evidence Retrieval for Continuous EEG Emotion Recognition

Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition is important for affective computing and human-computer interaction, yet most existing methods divide a long trial into short segments and assign each segment the label of its source trial. Although this strategy increases the number of training samples, it reduces an evolving emotional response to a segment-level, coarse-grained, and static prediction problem. In reality, emotion may continuously emerge, intensify, weaken, and fluctuate as a stimulus unfolds, motivating the prediction of a time-aligned affective trajectory from the complete EEG trial. This task requires coordinated modeling of how spatial neural organization evolves throughout the trial and how local emotional fluctuations interact with longer-term trends. In this work, we formally define and systematically investigate continuous EEG emotion recognition as whole-trial affective trajectory prediction. We propose EAGER, an Evolving Affective Graph framework with Evidence Retrieval for continuous EEG emotion recognition. EAGER comprises two complementary modules: Affective State-guided Topology Evolution models the evolving spatial organization of EEG activity, while Multi-scale Temporal Evidence Retrieval integrates short-term fluctuations with longer-range temporal trends for time-aligned prediction. Experiments on MAHNOB-HCI, SEED-VII, and REFED show consistent gains in trajectory-tracking metrics over representative methods, with competitive pointwise errors.

Fri 25 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Most emotion recognition from brain waves breaks long recordings into short parts and guesses emotion for each part independently. The authors point out that emotions actually change continuously over time as we experience something. They propose a new method called EAGER that looks at the whole brain activity over the entire recording, modeling how brain connections and emotion signals evolve. This helps predict a smooth, detailed path of emotions instead of isolated snapshots. Their method performs better on several emotion datasets than previous approaches.
Open → 2609.30890v1

RobotEQ-Video benchmarks social intelligence in proactive robots

RobotEQ-Video: A Video-Centric Benchmark for Social Proactive Intelligence with World-State Taxonomy

Abstract: Social Proactive Intelligence (SPI) extends proactive assistance beyond task completeness to consider social appropriateness in diverse embodied scenarios. However, prior SPI research faces two key limitations. First, existing work focuses on static images, whereas dynamic videos provide crucial cues for inferring human states and needs, offering richer information than isolated images. Second, prior work often relies on free-form data collection pipelines, which fail to guarantee comprehensive coverage of diverse scenarios. To address these gaps, we introduce RobotEQ-Video, shifting the focus from image-centric to video-centric analysis. To ensure comprehensive video coverage, we construct a hierarchical world-state taxonomy organized into a four-level coarse-to-fine structure, comprising 6 domains, 20 dimensions, 142 level-1 attributes, and 816 level-2 attributes. The resulting benchmark comprises 2K+ videos with 100K+ human annotations and 16K+ labels for assessing behavior properness. Benchmark evaluation reveals that current systems remain unreliable and fall short of human performance. We further explore how world models can help tackle this task. This work advances SPI research from static images to dynamic videos and ensures more comprehensive scenario coverage during benchmarking.

Fri 18 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
Helping robots understand not just what task to do but how to act socially is hard, especially when only still images are used. The authors created a large video-based benchmark called RobotEQ-Video that shows many real-life situations and labels how appropriate a robot's behavior would be in these social settings. They organized the scenarios with a detailed system describing human and environment states. Tests with current AI systems show they still struggle compared to humans. This work helps improve robots’ social awareness by focusing on videos, which have more clues than pictures.
Open → 2609.21371v1

CogGym compares human and AI reasoning across many tasks

CogGym: Towards Large-Scale Comparative Evaluation of Human and Machine Cognition

Abstract: Understanding and modeling human intelligence are parallel goals shared by artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. As AI systems grow increasingly capable, in what ways do model responses resemble human responses, and where do they systematically diverge? The sheer breadth and diversity of the tasks humans can perform and think about pose a challenge for scalable and rigorous comparison between humans and models. We introduce CogGym, a scalable, unified framework grounded in cognitive science for systematically comparing model and human behavior on matched experimental trials. CogGym uses a semi-automated, human-in-the-loop pipeline to standardize diverse experimental paradigms into a task-agnostic Experiment Markup Language (EML), enabling reproducible and faithful comparison at scale. For initial release, we curate and standardize 258 cognitive experiments from 100 papers that focuses on human commonsense reasoning, and evaluate 50 large language models against human responses. We find a clear scaling trend where larger and more recent AI models better reproduce human judgments. Yet AI models' improvement on such common reasoning tasks is considerably slower than the gains observed on formal-reasoning benchmarks like math and coding, and model--human fit remains well below human splithalf reliability ($R^2 = 0.93$ on text, $0.95$ on image, and $0.92$ on video) with the best models achieving $R^2 = 0.59$ on text, $0.58$ on image, and $0.43$ on video experiments. We intend for CogGym to provide a living evaluation framework that continually incorporates new cognitive science experiments to characterize where model behavior resembles human behavior, where it systematically diverges, and how those patterns change as models and experiments evolve.

Fri 18 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Understanding how machines think like humans is hard because people can do many different kinds of reasoning. The authors created CogGym, a system that lets researchers test many cognitive science experiments on AI models and humans in the same way. They tested 50 language models on hundreds of reasoning tasks and found that newer, bigger models behave more like humans but are still far from matching human consistency. CogGym aims to keep growing to show where AI matches or differs from human thought over time.
Open → 2609.21259v1

Chess research maps how humans and AI reason strategically

What Counts as Strategic Reasoning? A Systematic Mapping of Chess Research on Humans, Engines, and Language Models

Abstract: Chess has long served as a model domain for studying search, expertise, decision-making, and artificial intelligence. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has renewed the relevance of chess as a controlled environment for investigating strategic reasoning and comparing human and artificial decision-making. We present a systematic mapping study of recent research spanning human players, classical chess engines, neural and reinforcement-learning systems, LLMs, and hybrid approaches. The final map comprises 84 core study families, classified according to agent type, strategic-reasoning stages, and evaluation dimensions. The map reveals a literature strongly concentrated on situation assessment, evaluation, and action selection, while explicit planning, explanation, metacognition, and human--AI collaboration remain less explored. LLM research places particular emphasis on state representation and generalization, whereas grounded explanation appears more frequently in hybrid approaches combining language models with engines, expert knowledge, or other external structures. Two distinctions emerge that the map aggregates rather than resolves: hybrid systems differ in where and when heterogeneous capabilities combine, and evaluations that show improved human performance do not thereby establish human--AI synergy. We propose both as extensions of the mapping framework. We argue that chess provides a useful bridge between cognitive and computational perspectives on strategic reasoning, and identify explicit planning, grounded and faithful explanation, metacognitive calibration, and human--AI complementarity as directions for future research.

Wed 16 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Chess is often used to study how people and computers think ahead and make decisions. The authors looked at many recent studies involving humans, classic chess engines, newer AI systems, and language models. They found most research focuses on understanding the chess situation and choosing moves, but less on deeper planning, explaining decisions, or teamwork between humans and AI. Their work helps show where chess can teach us about strategic thinking and how future research might better combine humans and AI.
Open → 2609.18286v1

Mental models in human AI interaction need clearer study methods

[MM/AI] Mental Models in Human-AI Interaction: Methods and Challenges in the Generative and Agentic AI Era (Workshop)

Abstract: The mental model construct is widely used in HCI to refer to the knowledge structure people hold in order to reason about and interact with computing systems. Yet it is often operationalized intuitively: the construct is often used interchangeably with related concepts (e.g., folk theories, sensemaking) and methods of studying it (e.g., through elicitation) are many and diverse, with each method resting on distinct assumptions about what counts as a mental model. Generative and agentic AI systems may further complicate mental model formation and elicitation as such systems are opaque by design and increasingly act on users' behalf across files, applications, and on the web. Together, these challenges may hinder the commensurability of research on people's mental models of AI systems. The MM/AI workshop calls for a critical reassessment of how we understand and study mental models in human-AI interaction research. It aims to foster theoretical and methodological exchange on mental models in human-AI interaction, identify open challenges, and develop directions for future research. We invite short papers on users' or stakeholders' mental models of AI systems, particularly contributions that reflect on the conceptual and methodological foundations of the construct. The half-day workshop combines lightning talks, hands-on elicitation exercises, and structured discussions on key questions concerning the future of the mental model for human-AI interaction research.

Tue 15 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
People use mental models to understand how computers and AI systems work, but these mental models are often mixed up with similar ideas and studied in many different ways. The authors point out that new AI systems, which act independently for users and are hard to understand, make it even trickier to know how people form these mental models. They organized a workshop to rethink how mental models should be studied and understood in the age of advanced AI. This event brought experts together to share ideas and identify tough questions about mental models in AI.
Open → 2609.17206v1

Agent-integrated software improves how users control shared intelligent systems

Agent-Integrated Software: Interaction Contracts and Continuous Assurance

Abstract: Embedding an intelligent agent in an existing application creates a persistent coordination problem: users can revise goals and manipulate shared objects while delegated execution continues. We argue that dependable integration requires an explicit correspondence between task-level interaction and application behavior. We introduce Agent-Integrated Software (AIS) as a software pattern combining a conventional core, direct interaction, and a built-in agent, and Intent-Level Interaction Abstraction (IIA) as the task semantics through which users inspect and control delegated work. An open transition-system model relates AIS execution to IIA states and events. Interaction contracts constrain this relation through task bindings, role-specific authority, control transitions, and outcome evidence; continuous assurance maintains scoped claims as their dependencies change. A compact disclosure contract and conditional propositions illustrate why local component validity is insufficient and how selected admission invariants can be separated from planning. Contrasting software domains expose the framework's assumptions and limits. This perspective develops a research agenda spanning application abstraction, development support, controlled execution, quality assessment, and human supervision, with the aim of making agent integration a maintainable software engineering discipline.

Thu 10 SeptSoftware EngineeringArtificial Intelligence
The gist
It can be hard to manage smart agents that keep working inside apps while users change goals or data. The authors introduce Agent-Integrated Software, a way to create software that clearly links user tasks and app actions. They propose a model and rules to help users understand and control the agent's work continuously, ensuring its actions stay trustworthy. This approach aims to make integrating intelligent agents into software easier to build and maintain.
Open → 2609.11381v1

Platform enables live experiments on human and AI team collaboration

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

Abstract: 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.

Wed 9 SeptHuman-Computer InteractionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Organizing teamwork with AI is tricky because it's hard to test how people and AI can best work together and share tasks. The authors created Pairit, an online tool that lets researchers set up real-time experiments where humans and AI chat, share work, and make decisions in a controlled way. It uses a simple configuration file to design and run these experiments, tracking detailed interactions. The platform has been tested in actual studies and helps share and repeat these experiments easily.
Open → 2609.09789v1