Research

• Comprehensive and reliable benchmarking for AI capabilities3 papers raise it · 3 address it

  Current benchmarks often lack the depth to fully characterize model capabilities, especially for complex, real-world, or long-horizon tasks.

  • SO-Arena: Benchmarking the Capability Spectrum and Reliability of System One Modelsraises · addresses
  • Infrathon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Real-World, Long-Horizon AI Infra Optimizationraises · addresses
  • One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Predictionraises · addresses
• Effective AI agents in complex, dynamic real-world environments3 papers raise it · 3 address it

  AI agents struggle with real-world tasks requiring adaptation, learning from limited data, or debugging live systems, limiting practical deployment.

  • Where LLM Agents Get Stuck Debugging Databases: Access More Than Reasoningraises
  • World In-Context Learning for Agentic Robot Manipulationraises · addresses
  • Infrathon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Real-World, Long-Horizon AI Infra Optimizationraises · addresses
  • Sage-Taiyi: A Metacognitive Architecture for Scientific Discoveryaddresses
• Efficient and scalable generation of complex data2 papers raise it · 2 address it

  Generating high-quality, complex data like streaming video or diverse tabular data efficiently and with fewer computational resources is crucial.

  • Few-Step Streaming Video Generation via Condition Shiftingraises · addresses
  • One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Predictionraises · addresses
• Unified models for diverse data modalities and tasks2 papers raise it · 2 address it

  Creating single models that handle diverse tasks or data variations within a complex domain reduces complexity and improves generalization.

  • Prompt2Echo (P2Echo): Text-Prompted Multi-View Echocardiography Segmentation with One Modelraises · addresses
  • One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Predictionraises · addresses
• Reducing computational cost of language model attribution1 paper raises it · 1 addresses it

  Understanding how prompt parts influence language model output is crucial for interpretability, but direct methods are computationally expensive.

  • Sketching Language Models for Context Attributionraises · addresses

Named by an AI from these papers' abstracts.

• Spiking neural networks11+175.0%
• Quantum machine learning34+25.9%
• Character recognition OCR44+25.7%
• Speech emotion23+21.1%
• Voice AI76+13.4%
• Forecasting time133−2.9%
• Robotics195−3.0%
• Channel state information18−5.3%

• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  CompAdapt: Adaptable Composite Motion Modeling for Physics-Consistent Text-to-Video Generation

  Haoran Qin, Renlong Wu, Tianyu Huang, Yukang Ding, Hui Li +1

  While diffusion-based text-to-video (T2V) models have demonstrated impressive capability in generating realistic and temporally coherent videos, they often fail to respect fundamental physical dynamics. Although recent physics-constrained methods incorporate explicit dynamics priors to improve physical plausibility, they remain limited to simple single-type motions, depend on manually specified parameters, and struggle to generalize to unseen physical laws. In this work, we propose CompAdapt, a physics-consistent T2V framework for adaptable generation across complex real-world scenarios. It extends neural dynamics modeling beyond single-type motions to encompass composite physical behaviors, including coupled motions, multi-stage transitions, and multi-object collisions. Furthermore, CompAdapt translates natural language prompts into structured physical semantics, enabling end-to-end specification of motion types, temporal relations, and initial physical parameters. To generalize to novel physical environments, CompAdapt introduces dynamics-aware prior matching, achieving one-shot adaptation without retraining the core dynamics module. In addition, a physics-aware latent feature…

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• arXiv stat.MLSep 18

  Improving the Predictive Performance of Bootstrap Aggregating by Dirichlet Resampling

  Quoc Viet Le, Joonha Park

  We revisit Breiman's observation that reducing inter-tree correlation without weakening individual trees can improve random forests. Building on this principle, we introduce two variants: Dirichlet-Multinomial Bagging Random Forest (DM) and Dirichlet-Weighted Random Forest (DW). Both modulate sample reweighting via a concentration parameter $α>0$. We provide a simple theoretical criterion that clarifies when these variants behave indistinguishably from standard random forests, and we use it to guide a lightweight tuning strategy. In a controlled evaluation on public classification benchmarks, DM and DW are consistently competitive and often stronger than other random-forest (RF) baselines, with negligible additional runtime.

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  Understanding LLM Quantization through Activation-Guided Compensation and Orthogonal Residuals

  Yamato Narita, Issei Sato

  Post-training weight-activation quantization reduces the memory and inference costs of large language models, but aggressive W4A4 quantization remains difficult because activation outliers degrade effective quantization resolution. Although weight optimization, channel-wise scaling, and orthogonal rotation mitigate this problem, the error components they address and their relationship remain unclear. Using an exact decomposition of local weight-activation quantization error into an activation-guided weight compensation term and an orthogonal residual, we bound the residual using persistent channel-wise outlier and regular activation quantities. This decomposition clarifies which error components can be addressed by weight compensation and which require transformation design. We then use the residual bounds to derive practical guidelines for applying randomized Hadamard rotation, sign selection, and channel scaling. In particular, the analysis explains how random signs suppress constructive interference among persistent outlier channels, how sampling multiple sign patterns can improve transformation selection, and how second-moment balancing leads to an $L_2$ scaling rule while a…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  ME-Dex 1.0: Bringing Heterogeneous Tactile Sensing into World Action Modeling

  Xuancheng Zhang, Xuetao Liu, Qianying Tang, Jizhe Wang, Runsheng Wang +6

  World Action Models bring the predictive capabilities of video models into robot action generation, providing a rich foundation for modeling future visual states. Tactile sensing complements this foundation with direct measurements of physical interaction. Some existing methods use tactile features as conditioning inputs without jointly predicting future tactile states, visual observations, and actions. Our key insight is that tactile signals, like video, provide observations of the evolving world state and should be modeled as future observations alongside video. We present ME-Dex-1.0 (MachEmbodied-Dex-1.0), a unified World Action Tactile Model for joint visual, tactile, and action learning. ME-Dex-1.0 adopts a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture comprising a Video Expert, a Tactile Expert, and an Action Expert, all trained with flow matching. We use shared attention connects the experts in intermediate layers, allowing action generation to draw on learned representations of visual and tactile dynamics during joint denoising. To support multi-source heterogeneous tactile inputs, a Canonical Hand Model and a Unified Tactile Autoencoder map tactile observations from different…

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• arXiv cs.ROSep 18

  FootQuery: Future-Touchdown-Guided Retrieval from Depth History for Perceptive Humanoid Locomotion

  Tao Dong, Jia Yu, Yuxuan Fan, Linna Zhao, Jiaqi Gong +3

  Humanoid locomotion over complex terrain requires anticipating footholds that may no longer be visible at touchdown. Limited camera coverage and self-occlusion make it necessary to retrieve relevant terrain information from earlier observations. We present FootQuery, a perceptive locomotion framework that queries depth history using each foot's predicted next touchdown. The policy predicts touchdown locations and uncertainty from proprioception and uses these distributions, together with per-foot features, to query sparsely sampled historical depth frames. During training, realized contacts are projected into historical images to supervise retrieval at the regions where those contacts were visible. The retrieved per-foot features are fused with global visual memory to generate control actions. A progressive force-assistance curriculum supports early exploration, while event-consistent tread-midline shaping encourages coordinated stair contacts. Deployment requires only proprioception and onboard depth images. In simulation, the complete framework outperforms its component ablations on the most challenging tested stairs, gaps, and platforms. Real-world experiments on a Unitree G1…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  Optimal Randomized Proper Online Learning

  Zachary Chase, Idan Mehalel

  We prove that the optimal expected mistake bound of online learning a function class $\mathcal{H}$ by a randomized proper learning algorithm is $O(\mathtt{L}(\mathcal{H}) \log T)$, where $\mathtt{L}(\mathcal{H})$ is the Littlestone dimension of $\mathcal{H}$ and $T$ is the time horizon. Our result improves upon the previously best known bound of $O(\mathtt{L}(\mathcal{H}) \log^6 T)$ given by Daskalakis and Golowich (STOC 2022), and is optimal up to a universal constant for worst-case classes.

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• arXiv cs.ITSep 18

  Interference-Driven Clustered Optimisation for FM Spectrum Coordination

  Federica Mangiatordi, Emiliano Pallotti

  Cross-border FM spectrum coordination involves protecting foreign broadcasting services while preserving domestic coverage, amid increasingly large radio-planning datasets containing thousands of transmitters and millions of transmitter-pixel relationships. In such scenarios, conventional optimisation approaches become computationally demanding due to the high dimensionality of the associated power-control problem. This paper proposes an interference-driven clustered optimisation framework for large-scale FM spectrum coordination. The proposed method exploits the observation that violations of foreign-service protection are typically dominated by a limited subset of transmitters. Protected services are therefore analysed to identify dominant interferers and quantify their impact on interference. These relationships are represented through an interference graph from which optimisation-oriented transmitter clusters are extracted. The clusters decompose the global power-control problem into smaller optimisation tasks solved with clustered simulated annealing, followed by a global refinement that captures residual inter-cluster interactions. Coverage and interference are evaluated…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  Think Locally, Refine Globally for Memory-Efficient 3D Reconstruction

  Jingke Zhou, Chenhang Ma, Zhizhou Zhong, Mingkai Liu, Zhuang Zhou +4

  We propose LoG-VGGT, a memory-efficient framework for long-sequence 3D reconstruction that balances local temporal modeling with global camera consistency. Instead of relying on full global attention, our method introduces cross-window attention at a small subset of transformer blocks, enabling effective information propagation across adjacent temporal windows while keeping memory usage bounded. To mitigate long-term pose drift, we further design a global camera consistency refinement module, where camera tokens interact with compact register tokens via cross-attention to enforce scene-level constraints across the entire sequence. This design enables joint optimization of camera representations and significantly improves long-horizon pose stability without incurring the high cost of sequence-wide attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoG-VGGT achieves improved depth accuracy and robust camera pose estimation across multiple long-sequence benchmarks, while delivering competitive streaming reconstruction performance.

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• arXiv cs.AISep 18

  GVPO++: Group Variance Policy Optimization for LLM Post-Training and On-Policy Distillation

  Kaichen Zhang, Yuzhong Hong, Junwei Bao, Hongfei Jiang, Yang Song +2

  Post-training plays a pivotal role in enhancing the reasoning capabilities and task-specific expertise of large language models (LLMs). Despite recent advances in post-training methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), their practical deployment remains impeded by training instability arising from the reliance on importance sampling. We introduce Group Variance Policy Optimization (GVPO), a novel post-training method that integrates the analytical solution of KL-constrained reward maximization into its gradient weighting scheme. This formulation provides an intuitive interpretation: GVPO's gradient corresponds to the mean squared error between the central distance of implicit rewards and that of actual rewards. GVPO offers two key advantages: (1) it guarantees a unique optimal solution, exactly to the KL-constrained reward maximization objective, and (2) it enables flexible sampling distributions without requiring importance sampling. Beyond general post-training, we show that GVPO naturally extends to on-policy distillation (OPD). Furthermore, GVPO enables the optimization of a broad family of extended OPD objectives, providing a principled foundation for…

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• arXiv cs.LGSep 18

  Decision-Focused Learning for Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization via KKT-Based Reformulation

  Kensei Nosaka, Shunnosuke Ikeda, Yuichi Takano

  Mean-variance portfolio optimization (MVO) is a central framework in data-driven asset management. A widely adopted approach is a two-stage framework that first predicts expected returns and then solves the optimization problem based on these predictions, with the predictive models trained by minimizing prediction errors. However, this objective of prediction is not aligned with the quality of the downstream portfolio decision. Decision-focused learning (DFL), which directly minimizes the downstream decision loss within the learning process, has thus emerged as a promising direction. However, existing DFL approaches to MVO rely on surrogate losses or constraint relaxations for tractability, creating a structural mismatch between predictive model training and the constrained MVO solved at evaluation. We propose a single-level optimization formulation that incorporates the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions of the lower-level MVO into the upper-level learning problem. This formulation explicitly preserves the budget and short-sale constraints while remaining tractable for standard nonlinear optimization solvers. Rolling-window experiments on real-world ETF (Exchange…

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• arXiv cs.LGEvalsSep 18

  Tracing the Evidence Behind Zero-Shot Time-Series Forecasting: A Source-First Taxonomy and Audit Framework

  Delun Kong, Wanyun Ling, Chenxi Liu, Ziyue Li

  Zero-shot time-series forecasting (TSF) is often described as forecasting without target-specific parameter updates, but that training-status condition does not specify what evidence the system may use. A frozen language model prompted with serialized values, a time-series model pretrained on broad forecasting corpora, and a retrieval-augmented forecaster may all satisfy the no-update condition while drawing on different transferable evidence. This paper argues that zero-shot TSF should therefore be governed as an evidence-access claim. We propose a source-first taxonomy that separates three primary evidence sources---frozen LLM prior reuse, parametric time-series pretraining, and retrieval-augmented external memory---from the architectures that implement them. After the source is identified, four additional audit questions remain: task interface, forecast object and scoring, prediction-time context, and resource budget. The resulting agenda is to make zero-shot leaderboards auditable by reporting evidence boundaries and interface assumptions alongside scores, so that benchmark progress reflects transferable forecasting capability rather than undisclosed changes in context,…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  P$^3$-SAM: SAM with Perceptual Parallel Prompt for Few-Shot Strip Steel Surface Defect Segmentation

  Qian Xu, Hang Xiong, Anpeng Wang, Sam Kwong, Cong Zhang +1

  Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) of strip steel surface defects (S$^3$D) has posed significant challenges distinct from natural scenes. Unlike natural images, S$^3$D task exhibits unique characteristics including low local contrast, uneven illumination, and complex fine-grained texture patterns. Although recent methods based on Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown promise in FSS on natural images by leveraging SAM's powerful pre-trained representations, these unique industrial characteristics of S$^3$D images lead to performance drop when directly applying SAM to industrial defect scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Perceptual Parallel Prompt (P$^3$) framework that empowers SAM, creating the P$^3$-SAM model to address these challenges through two core strategies. First, we develop a Perceptual-Optimized Encoding (POE) strategy that enhances local contrast and preserves critical texture details for S$^3$D segmentation. Second, we introduce the Parallel Prompt Generator (PPG) strategy that simultaneously generates both semantic and spatial prompts, enabling comprehensive guidance for SAM's decoder across varying images. Extensive experiments on three few-shot S$^3$D…

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• arXiv cs.AISep 18

  DENSE: Distilling Agent Trajectories into Evidence-Grounded Shortcut Trees for Self-Refinement

  Siyuan Liu, Fan Yu, Dongyu Ru, Yizhu Liu, Yifan Yang +3

  Online agent deployments accumulate execution trajectories at massive scale and behavioral diversity, for which predefined annotation criteria hardly exist. Extracting useful evidence therefore demands costly manual annotation or verifier signals that fail to scale, leaving valuable evidence buried among redundant, incomplete, and failed executions. This raises a question: without post-execution rewards or correctness labels, how can reusable experience be distilled from the trajectories themselves? To address this challenge, we introduce DENSE (Distilling Evidence from Nested Subtask Executions), which organizes trajectory-derived evidence into nested shortcut trees. By consolidating redundant attempts, identifying resolved subtasks, and retaining useful steps alongside outstanding requirements, DENSE transforms noisy execution traces into structured and reusable task-solving feedback. To evaluate whether such feedback helps agents retry the same task, we design REFIT, which measures success-rate changes between the initial attempt and feedback-guided retries. Among feedback methods without external outcome supervision, DENSE achieves the highest strict pass rate across four…

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• arXiv stat.MLSep 18

  Brownian Heads for Deep ReLU Representations: Activation Mass and the Cost of Same-Sample Selection

  Mahdi Mohammadigohari, Nicole Mücke

  Deep representation learning often selects hidden features and fits the final predictor on the same sample, so fixed-feature analysis performed after selection can omit selection cost. We study the conditional empirical Rademacher complexity of deep ReLU representations followed by bounded-norm predictors in additive or Lévy-Brownian RKHSs, termed Brownian heads. For a fixed representation, we derive an exact dual identity and sharp bounds in terms of activation mass, the average norm of the observed hidden vectors. Under same-sample selection, the representation supremum induces a quadratic Rademacher process. Brownian layer-cake and Gaussian-projection identities reduce it to coordinatewise or signed projected threshold traces, separating realized scale from selection complexity. For samples with pairwise-distinct inputs, explicit scalar ReLU families match the finite-trace and VC rates up to universal constants at the realized trace-and-envelope level. Induced-norm contraction also yields architecture-level bounds for rectangular, rank-deficient ReLU networks. Experiments verify the sharp bounds and rates, exhibit a selection gap at fixed activation mass, and assess the…

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• arXiv cs.CVAI safetySep 18

  RemTraceNet: Few-Shot Forensic Detection of Invisible Watermark Attacks

  Jidong Yang, Huaike Yu, Qi Li, Yuantian Miao, Wei Zong +4

  Removing an invisible watermark and concealing the forensic evidence are distinct objectives: successfully disrupting the embedded watermark does not imply that the removal process is forensically undetectable. When verification fails, removal traces can provide complementary evidence for provenance and ownership verification, whereas their absence leaves the cause of the failure ambiguous. Existing methods are typically evaluated by watermark suppression and perceptual quality, while forensic stealth is rarely considered. We therefore study watermark-attack-specific few-shot forensics: for each known pipeline, a specialist can separate its outputs from paired clean and unattacked watermarked controls. Separate Attack-vs-Clean and Attack-vs-Watermarked evaluations prevent watermark-presence shortcuts. Image-aligned and prompt-matched controls are used for post-hoc and generator-integrated schemes, respectively. In this work, we introduce RemTraceNet, which fuses constrained residuals, local relations, FFT/Haar statistics, and block-DCT evidence at native resolution. Across 23 removal pipelines and 10 watermark configurations, we evaluate native 256 x 256 and 512 x 512 inputs.…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  When Online Adaptation Hurts: Parameter-Frozen Test-Time Ensembling for Continual Medical Image Segmentation

  Ruijie Huang

  Medical image segmenters often get worse when sites, scanner vendors, or protocols change. Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) addresses this problem without target labels, but it can be impossible to update a model on a non-stationary stream and can lead to a lot of errors. We examine a more reasonable and meaningful alternative: parameter-frozen inference enhancement(PIE). We use a source-trained segmenter that learns about anatomy-preserving scale and flip views, maps their predictions back to the native location, and averages the probabilities. We do not modify the weights of the model or the normalization statistics. On a cardiac MRI stream from M\&Ms, which is trained on vendor A and evaluated sequentially on vendors B, C, and D, PIE has 0.7786 mean Dice, compared to 0.7680 for source-only inference and 0.7388--0.7416 for five other online-adaptation baselines. The controlled ablations show that performance saturates at 28 views, and confidence weighting, class-prior correction, connected-component filtering, morphological refinement, and inter-slice smoothing have no effect or cause negative transfer. Qualitative results on cardiac MRI and fundus images are also…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  Style as Cover: Deep Image Steganography via Stylized Transmission

  Qi Li, Jidong Yang, Huaike Yu, Chunpeng Wang, Suo Gao +4

  Image steganography hides secret message within normal images, with most existing works relying on cover-preserving transmission. However, such a paradigm becomes vulnerable once the original cover is exposed or can be reliably approximated. In this paper, we propose StyleStegaNet, a stylized image hiding framework that replaces cover matching with style-concealment transmission. Instead of transmitting a cover-like stego image, StyleStegaNet generates stylized stego images conditioned on publicly available style references, redefining steganography invisibility from cover-preserving concealment to behavior-level camouflage based on style transformation. Such a setting poses a substantial challenge to reliable secret recovery, since neural stylization can significantly alter the feature statistics exploited by deep hiding methods. To address this challenge, StyleStegaNet decouples the overall task into four coordinated stages: stego generation, stylized transmission, structure-preserving reconstruction, and secret recovery. Moreover, StyleStegaNet is optimized with a progressive three-stage training strategy, in which wavelet-domain constraints and perceptual supervision guide…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  Quantization-Aware Kalman Estimation for Diffusion Sampling

  Qitan Shi, Cheng Jin, Jiawei Zhang, Yuantao Gu

  Quantization offers a practical path to deploying diffusion models with reduced memory and computation, but aggressive compression can cause quantized outputs to deviate substantially from their full-precision counterparts. Sampling-stage correction methods seek to compensate for such deviations during sampling, but existing approaches rely primarily on local information and underexploit trajectory history, limiting their ability to correct errors that propagate across timesteps. In this work, we formulate sampling with a quantized denoiser as an online estimation problem, using the history of quantized denoiser outputs to recover the underlying full-precision outputs required by the sampler. We propose QuAKE, a Quantization-Aware Kalman Estimator that combines a smooth trajectory prior with a conditional Gaussian observation model. At each sampling step, QuAKE recursively updates the posterior over the output window in closed form and feeds its posterior mean to the sampler. QuAKE is a lightweight plug-and-play corrector that requires no modification to the quantized network and naturally supports arbitrary high-order multistep ODE samplers. Experiments across W4A4-quantized…

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• arXiv cs.CVSep 18

  SIRA: Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation via Query-Anchored Alignment

  Zhibo Zhang, Qijie Wang, Zengqiang Yan

  Surgical instrument segmentation (SIS) plays a critical role in robotic assistance and surgical workflow analysis. However, most existing SIS methods formulate segmentation as a category-driven localization problem, limiting their ability to capture procedural context and task-dependent semantics in surgical workflows. We introduce Reasoning-Aware Surgical Instrument Segmentation (RA-SIS), a task formulation that frames segmentation as query-conditioned inference under surgical context. To benchmark this setting, we construct SurgRS, a surgical reasoning segmentation dataset consisting of 41,000 image-text pairs, which aligns instance-level masks with structured query-answer supervision to enable semantic grounding at the pixel level. Based on SurgRS, we propose Surgical Instrument Reasoning and Segmentation Assistant (SIRA), a multimodal framework that disentangles target-level and query-level semantics and integrates them with visual features through query-anchored dual alignment. By aligning query semantics with spatial features and segmentation prompts, SIRA enhances semantic-visual consistency in mask prediction. Extensive experiments on SurgRS demonstrate improvements over…

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• arXiv cs.CLSep 18

  Talking Past the Machine: Morality, Politeness, and Alignment in Human-AI Dialogue

  Marina Mitiaeva, Lu Xiao

  Conversational AI systems produce fluent, socially appropriate responses, yet whether they participate in cooperative communication or merely simulate its surface forms remains unclear - a question central to how these systems are evaluated, trusted, and designed. This study investigates how morality, politeness, and alignment - three dimensions central to cooperative dialogue - function in human-AI interaction compared to human-human conversation. We analyze 15,881 human-ChatGPT and 10,784 human-human multi-turn dialogues, using mixed-effects models to identify which features predict turn-to-turn alignment. We observe a consistent dissociation: AI produces the surface features of cooperative communication without the underlying social architecture. Moral output appears preconfigured rather than negotiated; warmth is generated without face sensitivity; linguistic convergence declines persistently. Most strikingly, the cooperative mechanisms themselves reverse direction: hedging and softening associated with greater accommodation between humans are associated with reduced alignment when produced by AI, and purity framing associated with human divergence coincides with users…

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