Soft plush companions provide a safe and intuitive platform for affective human-robot interaction, but their deformable structure and distributed tactile signals make reliable gesture recognition difficult. This study presents a complete workflow for developing and validating compact affective-touch classifiers for an...
Aleksandrs Vali\v{s}evskis, Aleksandrs Okss, Inese T\=i\c{g}ere et al.· 0 citations
Vision-language models (VLMs) can describe a scene, but can they act well within one? We study whether VLMs can make sound strategic decisions, using soccer as an objective testbed with quantifiably-valued actions. We introduce SportD, a dataset and evaluation consisting of 1421 decision scenarios across professional m...
Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Haotian Xia et al.· 0 citations
Human reasoning is inherently multimodal: when problems become difficult, we rarely think in words alone. We often externalize our reasoning by sketching diagrams or drawing grids to understand the underlying conceptual structure and avoid mistakes. Building on this premise, our research investigates: (a) whether groun...
LLM agents are increasingly cast as autonomous portfolio managers, yet the dominant evaluation idiom, a leaderboard of returns over a fixed window, certifies neither the soundness of an agent's process nor the durability of its edge: one period's return is dominated by the market path, and apparent alpha can dissolve o...
Bo Qu, Mingguang Chen· 0 citations
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Adapting a streaming speech recognition model to a new language requires choosing between two plausible warm starts: a multilingual (ML) encoder or an English-only (EN) encoder. The common intuition is that the multilingual encoder should help most at low data, but it is unclear how long that advantage persists, whethe...
Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is...
Renmin Cheng (The Hong Kong University of Science, Technology), Changhao Chen (The Hong Kong University of Science et al.· 0 citations
Inferring another person's beliefs requires reconstructing their information access history: what they encountered, in what order, from whom, and with what credibility. Existing formal accounts of theory of mind generally treat beliefs as given. We introduce the Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U), a computational-level the...
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in finance, yet most existing work emphasizes trading signals or financial NLP tasks centered on prediction. Institutional fundamental research, by contrast, requires human analysts or AI agents to gather evidence, identify business drivers, compare competing viewpo...
Domain specialization can improve LLM behavior, but often weakens the general capabilities inherited from the original model. Recent Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) pipelines recover model capabilities by supervising student-generated trajectories with teacher feedback, but typically assume teacher-aligned...
Tianlei Chen, Jiao Ou, Ziyuan Liu et al.· 0 citations
Sycophancy is the tendency of language models to agree with users irrespective of correctness. Prior work has extracted sycophancy persona vectors and causally controlled this trait through activation steering (Chen et al., 2025; arXiv:2507.21509). We ask whether existing vectors for general roles, extracted without ta...
Ishaan Kelkar, Vikram Kakaria, Nebras Alam et al.· 0 citations
According to canonical negotiation theory, people's success in a negotiation depends on how well they balance competing demands--empathizing and asserting, demonstrating concern for other and concern for self, being soft on the people and hard on the problem. Yet people struggle to manage these tensions, so researchers...
As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contributes to inference latency and operational cost. Recent studies suggest that many real-world tasks require little to no explicit reasoning, with additional reasoning sometimes...
Richmond Sin Jing Xuan, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Soujanya Poria· 0 citations
With $2.1 million funding from Google.org, the open-source Public Transit Intelligence Hub will unify public transit monitoring, operations, and passenger communication.
Professor Sherry Turkle’s new book, “Artificial Intimacy,” offers a withering critique of chatbots and the antisocial dynamics she believes they encourage.
