TodayNewsResearchFieldsStacksMarketAnalytics
⌘K

Research

New papers ranked by attention, with their code, models and discussion linked. Pick a field on the left.

WeekMonthQuarterAll
NewestMost relevant

Papers

Open problems

Rising research topics

Ask the research

Sample
ByteTrail · AI and developer-tools intelligence
NewsResearchStacksFor AI agentsAPI
Fields · this week
All fields2670Evals327Multimodal287Agents231Frontier LLMs220Recursive self improvement190Inference & serving140Computer vision133Agents & indirect prompt injection132Robotics118Training & fine-tuning118Neural operators115Clinical reasoning110Forecasting time79Code models60Linear bandits56All 32 fields

Open problems across fields

  • 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.

Papers

  • arXiv cs.CLSep 22

    Diffusion Drafts, AR Verifies: Accelerating Document OCR with Self-Speculative Decoding

    Dohyun Kim, Sungjun Han, Hyungguk Kim, Yusik Kim, Jamin Shin +2

    Autoregressive OCR vision-language models accurately convert document images into text and structured markup, but require one sequential decoding step per output token, limiting inference speed. Unlike open-ended text generation, OCR outputs are strongly grounded in the input image, making diffusion-based parallel generation promising. However, when several tokens are predicted in one diffusion step, each is predicted before the others are known. Committing them directly can therefore introduce errors. We therefore introduce GravityOCR, a parameter-shared AR-block-diffusion model jointly trained for parallel drafting and causal AR verification. Verifying drafts before commitment lets the model commit multiple output tokens per round without a separate drafting network. The causal AR path also enables GRPO with sequence- and structure-level OCR rewards, avoiding diffusion-trajectory likelihood estimation while updating the shared drafter parameters. On OmniDocBench v1.6, AR-path GRPO improves the Overall score from 94.92 to 95.16 without reducing diffusion drafting efficiency, while the final model remains close to the original GLM-OCR score of 95.48. In an SGLang serving…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLFrontier LLMsSep 22

    Capable yet Parsimonious: Extracting and Characterizing Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Frontier Models

    Xiaoyu Luo, Tao Ren, Wenrui Yu, Xiao Li, Qiongxiu Li +1

    The rapid capability gains of frontier language models are widely attributed to improved reasoning abilities, yet this cannot be verified as raw CoT traces in closed-source systems are hidden. By registering a simple custom tool through a standard API feature, we induce frontier models to externalize intermediate reasoning. Because these traces may reflect post-hoc rationalization rather than genuine reasoning, we first evaluate against native CoT on open-source models and extend to closed-source frontier models including GPT-6 Astra. We find that the extracted reasoning matches native reasoning performance and substantially outperforms no-reasoning baselines, across competition mathematics, science, and code generation. We then characterize how frontier models structure their intermediate reasoning. Across token efficiency, reasoning-step types, and induced reasoning trees, we identify systematic differences in how models externalize, compress, and organize reasoning. We find that Astra exhibits token-efficient directed reasoning, selecting a correct trajectory earlier, while resolving elementary steps internally and externalizing only crucial reasoning. These findings provide a…

    AIEvals90PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVComputer visionSep 22

    Laryngeal Structure Segmentation in High-Speed Videoendoscopy Using Deep Learning

    Sardar Nafis Bin Ali, Mohsen Zayernouri, Dimitar D. Deliyski, Maryam Naghibolhosseini

    Laryngeal high-speed videoendoscopy (HSV) offers an effective means of observing the motion of different laryngeal structures along with vibratory behaviors of the vocal folds under various voicing conditions. Segmentation of laryngeal tissues enables analysis of different tissue structures and their dynamics, helping characterize the involvement of laryngeal muscles in voice production. Given the large number of HSV frames, automating this task is imperative. While deep learning-based methods have been implemented in previous studies to segment laryngeal structures, they have not been applied to HSV data during connected speech, which poses significant challenges due to excessive tissue movements and image quality limitations associated with fiberoptic image acquisition. The application of deep learning to connected speech data is critical for capturing nonstationary laryngeal behaviors and identifying anomalous patterns associated with voice disorders. The present study aims to address these gaps by training U-Net models to detect the aryepiglottic folds and arytenoid cartilages, vocal folds, epiglottis, and glottal area, using HSV data from both sustained vowel phonation and…

    AI30PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 22

    Knowledge Pull Requests for Continual Document Authoring

    Alexander Martin, Benjamin Van Durme

    We introduce Knowledge Pull Requests (KPRs), a framework for continual document authoring that makes each change interpretable. Documents require ongoing revision as new knowledge surfaces from other sources, languages, or times, but existing approaches either edit with no account of what knowledge changed or regenerate from scratch. A KPR integrates new knowledge into a document by extracting claims, filtering and routing them to sections, and flagging conflicts with existing content, producing a ChangeLog that separates what knowledge changes (claim proposal) from how the text changes (document diff). We evaluate KPRs on revising Wikipedia across languages and updating query-driven reports on RAGTIME. KPRs integrate more information and better preserve existing content than rewriting from sources or regenerating from scratch, while adding the most information per token generated. A KPR-revised article also grounds question answering better than a frontier model with search, which does not surface knowledge documented only in other languages.

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 22

    Label-Efficient Learning for Ground-Based Sky-Image Classification: A Benchmark of Transfer Learning, Active Learning, and Pseudo-Labeling on GCD

    Esther Bou Dagher, Viktoriya Bu-Dager, Boguslaw Zegarlinski

    Accurate ground-based cloud classification is important for atmospheric monitoring, solar-energy forecasting, aviation weather assessment, and climate observation systems. However, reliable sky-image annotation is time-consuming, especially when cloud types are visually similar or mixed. We study the label efficiency of deep learning for ground-based cloud classification using the Ground-based Cloud Dataset (GCD). Rather than proposing a new architecture, we benchmark three practical strategies under limited annotation budgets: supervised transfer learning, uncertainty-based active learning, and high-confidence pseudo-labeling. An ImageNet-pretrained ResNet50 is used as a common frozen backbone, with experiments repeated over five random seeds for label budgets from $1\%$ to $100\%$ of the training labels. Supervised transfer learning is already highly label-efficient: test accuracy increases from $0.635 \pm 0.018$ with $1\%$ labels to $0.730 \pm 0.002$ with $40\%$ labels, approaching the full-label result of $0.735 \pm 0.003$. Active learning and pseudo-labeling are competitive with supervised sampling and provide small improvements for some metrics and budgets, but neither…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 22

    PERSONAWEAVER: Controllable Diversity Beyond Conventional Archetypes in Procedural Character Generation

    Maan Qraitem, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer

    Procedural character generation aims to populate games, simulations, and other virtual worlds with diverse characters. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising foundation for scaling this task. However, LLM-based procedural character generation remains at an early stage: existing methods either generate characters directly or adapt profiles retrieved from persona banks. As we show, both approaches produce behaviorally homogeneous populations: characters overwhelmingly agree with positive moral norms and respond to questions with helpful, assistant-like reactions. To mitigate this homogenization, we introduce PersonaWeaver, which disentangles world building from behavioral specification and models behavior through setting general, diverse, manually curated banks of moral positions and conversational reactions. This design allows us to test how far LLM(s) can be pushed beyond their default behavioral patterns across settings. Across ten realistic and fantastical settings and three LLM(s), PersonaWeaver produces broader moral and interactional response distributions than prior work. Its guidance also diversifies interpersonal language, response length, and sentiment. It also…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 22

    Measuring the evolution of camera distance across a century of film

    David Bamman, Allison Cooper, Dan Hickey, Madison Mar

    The rise of computer vision and artificial intelligence has made possible new forms of large-scale computational measurement. We apply these techniques to a deep collection of 5,205 digitized films viewed in theaters between 1922-2025 (covering popular, prestigious, and independent movies) to trace the development of one of the most fundamental ways through which film communicates: by manipulating the space between the camera and its subject. This work finds abrupt changes with the rise of new technologies in sound and television, and allows us to shed an empirical light on gender disparity (women, despite having substantially less screentime than men, are disproportionately the subject of closer shots), and illustrate how animated films both inherit and break free from the norms of live-action filmmaking.

    PDF
  • arXiv stat.MLSep 22

    On Basis Function Selection for Sparse Gaussian Process Regression

    Marnix Van Soom, Ivan De Boi

    Sparse Gaussian processes achieve $O(N)$ inference by replacing the kernel with an appropriate expansion in a fixed basis $\{φ_j\}$ on the input space. Given a compute budget $M \ll N$, practitioners conventionally truncate the basis to its first $M$ entries. Nothing in the formalism, however, prevents one from selecting only those $M$ basis functions that matter for the data at hand. This would avoid spending budget on basis functions where there is no signal, but it requires a criterion for ranking the candidates. We propose three such criteria derived from an information-theoretic view of the basis-function selection problem. Each criterion matches a different state of knowledge at selection time: a no-data state, a no-prior state, and an in-between state. We then study the performance of truncation versus selection strategies on six UCI regression benchmarks across three basis families: Hilbert-space Gaussian processes (HSGP), variational Fourier features (VFF), and variational inducing spherical harmonics (VISH). We observe that the no-data criterion is a safe default, matching or improving on truncation for HSGP, VFF and VISH, with substantial gains for VISH and…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.ITSep 22

    Logit-Aware MIMO AirComp for Distributed Mixture-of-Experts LLM Inference over Wireless Edge Networks

    Lyutianyang Zhang, Yunjian Jia, Liu Cao, Dengke Wang, Jinke Ren +1

    Distributed mixture-of-experts (MoE) inference is a promising architecture for deploying large language models (LLMs) at wireless edge networks because sparse experts can be placed across coordinated base stations (BSs), while the anchor node and user equipment (UE) can offload LLM inference tasks to BSs. The communication bottleneck is the MoE aggregation, where the anchor BS must recover a weighted sum of selected expert outputs before each decoding step. Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is well matched to this operation because the wireless multiple-access channel naturally superposes simultaneous transmissions. However, conventional AirComp minimizes communication distortion, whereas MoE aggregation errors have unequal impact on LLM outputs. We propose a logit-aware MIMO AirComp framework that estimates local logit sensitivity as block-level weights and jointly optimizes receive combiners and BS precoders under per-BS power constraints. We also develop an alternating algorithm that protects decoding decisions from aggregation perturbations. Using OpenCompass, we evaluate Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507-FP8 on GSM8K and ARC-Challenge. At 30 dB aggregation SNR, perturbed Qwen3…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 22

    A Data-Interventional Framework for Auditing Privacy and Fairness in Generative Medical Imaging

    Mischa Dombrowski, Bernhard Kainz

    Diffusion-based synthetic data generation offers a promising route for sharing medical imaging data without releasing sensitive patient records. However, generative models face a fundamental tension between privacy and fairness: they may memorize rare training samples, leading to privacy risks, or fail to reproduce underrepresented features, resulting in unfair synthetic distributions. While prior work has largely focused on either memorization or fairness in isolation, their interaction remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we introduce a data-interventional framework to systematically analyze privacy and fairness in diffusion models. We discuss synthetic anatomical fingerprints (SAFs), rare and manually injected image features, as controlled probes to study whether models generalize sensitive attributes across identities, memorize training samples, or suppress rare signals entirely. Across multiple conditioning modalities, we observe a consistent behavior: models either forget these fingerprints or memorize the entire image in which they appear, but do not generalize them to novel images. To support large-scale auditing where explicit sample extraction is infeasible,…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 22

    Greedy Decoding Is Not Precision-Invariant: Cross-Precision Output Divergence in LLM Inference

    Gaoyuan Du, Anam Nawaz Khan, Rex Zhou, Xiaoyang Liu, Deepayan Chakrabarti +2

    Greedy decoding from large language models is commonly treated as deterministic. We show it is not precision-invariant: the same model, prompt, and decoding algorithm produce different outputs in BF16 versus FP16 on identical hardware. Across our evaluations of six models (1.1B-7B parameters, four families; divergence additionally characterised at 12B) and three benchmarks, 49-100\% of prompts diverge; a single token flip often cascades into trajectory-level divergence. We develop an empirical error-propagation analysis and find that 22 layers of accumulated body error do not distinguish flipping from non-flipping steps; the outcome depends primarily on the top-two logit margin at the LM head relative to the directional perturbation between the top-two candidates. The analysis makes five testable predictions about intervention outcomes, including that applying more FP32 compute (broader scope) makes agreement worse. The experiments match all five predictions. The best-performing low-overhead intervention we evaluate, selective FP32 LM head recomputation, triggered only when the margin falls below a threshold, delivers +22-36 pp exact agreement on A10G (+12-21 pp on L4 and A100)…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 22

    GeoComposer: Geometry-Grounded Photographic Composition Instruction

    Shuangzhi Li, Qiaoqiao Jia, Xingxin Chen, Guile Wu, Dongfeng Bai

    Photographic composition aims to provide visual guidance for improving the framing, viewpoint, and spatial arrangement of an image. Early methods primarily rely on image cropping to enhance composition, which is restricted to the viewpoint and spatial arrangement of the input image. Recent methods have explored image understanding and editing to improve composition, but they mainly focus on instruction following and aesthetic quality, overlooking the importance of 3D scene geometry consistency for photographic composition. In this work, we propose GeoComposer, a novel geometry-grounded photographic composition framework that analyzes the composition of a given image to generate textual guidance and synthesizes a visual exemplar that enhances the composition of the given image. To promote geometry-grounded composition, we propose a geometry-aware representation learning mechanism that leverages geometric priors from a visual geometry foundation model to shape the intermediate representations of the composition editing model. This mechanism preserves both global structural relationships and local fine-grained correspondences for geometry-grounded composition. Furthermore, we…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 22

    MMAP: Multimodal Missing-Aware Pretraining for Longitudinal Alzheimer's Prediction

    Fiona Kekwick, Matthew Baugh, Bernhard Kainz, Paul M. Matthews, Wenjia Bai

    Clinical decision making heavily relies on predicting the disease progression trajectory by seeking to understand patient's health status which is characterised by multimodal medical data. AI holds great potential for learning useful representations from multimodal medical data to predict disease progression and aid clinical decision making. However, development of predictive AI models is constrained by missing modalities and incomplete tabular data frequently occurring in medical datasets. In addition, disease labels alone may only provide limited supervisory signals for learning representations from high-dimensional multimodal data. Here, we present MMAP, a novel Multimodal Missing-aware Alignment Pretraining method for learning image-tabular representations from incomplete data. An image encoder is pretrained with efficient sigmoid contrastive learning combined with generative reconstruction. A tabular encoder is built upon a tabular foundation model. A missing token generator enables the two encoders to take incomplete data as input, enabling the model to be robust against missing modalities, either with missing images or missing tabular data. We evaluate the clinical…

    AI20PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLEvalsSep 22

    Semantic Abstraction for Natural Language Inference: a Methodological Framework for Discovering and Compensating Semantic Knowledge and Reasoning Gaps in Large Language Models

    David Torres-Moreno, Jorge Hermosillo-Valadez

    Despite their outstanding performance on many NLP tasks, LLMs face serious challenges related to semantic abstraction. In this study, we are interested in understanding how LLMs leverage abstract semantic knowledge in natural language inference (NLI), which requires sophisticated linguistic capabilities to interpret implicit meanings, contextual conceptual relationships, and semantic connections between words and phrases. To this end, we propose a methodological framework for constructing new semantic knowledge at a higher level of abstraction, which we define under the notions of semantic compatibility and incompatibility for NLI. In this framework, the meaning of the lexical-semantic relations between the premise and the hypothesis is reconfigured to achieve a more flexible semantic network that induces different reasoning paths in LLMs. These new pathways show a consistent pattern of responses that allows agreement on a single response. The results demonstrate that our proposal allows to discover and compensate for LLMs' semantic knowledge gaps in NLI, achieving significant improvements in accuracy, exceeding 10% for some models, and in particular for the non-entailment class.…

    AI60PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 22

    Foundation model embeddings capture pre-diagnostic changes on screening mammograms

    Kalina P. Slavkova, Eric Brattain, Aditya Gowd, Akash Pattnaik, Jean-Benoit Delbrouck +4

    Foundation model embeddings of screening mammograms may encode pre-diagnostic tissue change without task-specific adaptation. We tested whether embeddings move faster along a data-derived "cancer direction" in women later biopsied for cancer than in matched screen-negative controls, and whether this depends on pretraining domain. We studied 1,773 biopsied women (785 malignant, 988 biopsy-negative) and 1,773 matched controls, each with at least two annual screening exams before their index exam. An identical pipeline was applied to four 2D models: Mammo-CLIP (MC, out-of-distribution mammography), HOPPR (in-distribution mammography), MedImageInsight (MII, general medical imaging), and BiomedCLIP (biomedical vision-language pretraining on literature figures). Breast-level embeddings quantified longitudinal movement along the cancer direction. We compared cases and controls using a between-patient design with complementary mixed-effects analysis, and biopsied versus healthy contralateral breasts within patients. Under matched modality in MII embedding space, malignant cases drifted significantly faster than controls in the first two screening intervals preceding the index exam;…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.LGSep 22

    Hierarchical GNNs for power flow: letting physics shape the hierarchy

    Carmine Delle Femine, Leire Garin Atxaga, Asier Diaz-Iglesias, Juan Pablo Maroto Herrera, Ane Miren Florez-Tapia +2

    Hierarchical latent communication improves the generalization of a power-flow model, shared across three grids, to new operating scenarios. The module exchanges information through two reduced graphs inside the corrective network of GENCO, replacing two of its local correction steps. We compare Kron-derived transports, a same-anchor Quotient construction and the flat GENCO Base architecture, all trained under one protocol of our own with about a hundred times fewer optimizer updates per grid than GENCO's reference training: 200 epochs on three grid topologies, fewer than 1,900 training scenarios per grid and three initialization seeds per model. Evaluation uses 200 newly generated, preselected scenarios per grid. On the training topologies, Kron reaches a macro family-balanced voltage error of $0.851\pm0.110$, 51.3% below a per-bus mean fitted on training solutions (1.747). Kron is below this reference on 98.5% of the 600 fresh scenarios, and both hierarchical models outperform it on every training topology in all three seeds. The flat baseline reaches $5.660\pm0.899$ and does not outperform the reference on any training topology, so Kron's 85.0% reduction relative to it compares…

    PDF
  • arXiv eess.SPSep 22

    Unlocking Cross-Scenario Physical Layer Security: A Mixture-of-Experts Framework with Generative Diffusion Models

    Xiao Tang, Tong Hui, Chao Shen, Yichen Wang, Qinghe Du +2

    The future 6G networks are expected to incorporate a proliferation of wireless services in diverse environments, which presents a significant challenge for information security. Conventionally optimization always requires recalculation and learning strategy often suffers poor generalization, which are thus incapable for the security provisioning with wide scenario coverage. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and robust learning framework that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to achieve cross-scenario physical layer security guarantee. Specifically, we first select a few representative scenarios and establish the scenario-specific generative diffusion model (GDM)-based experts for secure transmission beamforming with artificial noise. The diffusion nature of experts learns the overall probability distribution of security strategy solution landscape and the Transformer-based denoising process enhances the ability to generalize across varying network configurations. Then, a lightweight gating network is constructed to identify the scenarios by engineering the channel features and select the most relevant experts. Finally, an attention-based combiner is introduced…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CVSep 22▲ 16

    GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction

    Zhe Feng, Longfei Liu, Wei Liu, Kai Chen, Jiangang Kong +5

    Self-attention-based vision backbones perform well on dense prediction, but the quadratic computational cost of global softmax attention limits their efficiency as image resolution increases. We introduce Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax-free recurrent vision backbone that combines gated linear attention, alternating spatial scan directions, and spatially enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a detection-specialized DINOv3 teacher using only final-layer patch-token alignment through a linear projection and squared $\ell_2$ loss, without masked-token prediction or intermediate-layer supervision. With Objects365 detector pre-training, GTR-L achieves 58.9 box AP on COCO \texttt{val2017} with 1.908\,ms median batch-one latency under compiled FP16 execution on an RTX~4090. The same backbone also transfers to instance segmentation, pose estimation, oriented detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. In an isolated kernel benchmark, our specialized chunkwise CUDA operator is $4.0\times$ faster than FLA v0.5.0 at 1.6K tokens on RTX~4090. TensorRT deployment on DRIVE AGX Thor achieves 2.282--8.769\,ms median batch-one latency across the evaluated…

    Code
  • arXiv math.OCSep 22

    Polyak-Type Extragradient Methods for Monotone Root-Finding Problems

    TaeHo Yoon, Sayantan Choudhury, Ezra Greenberg, Nicolas Loizou

    We study Polyak-type step-size selection for extragradient methods for solving deterministic and stochastic monotone root-finding problems. We show that the known projection-type correction for deterministic extragradient arises from minimizing an upper bound on the distance to a solution, paralleling the classical Polyak step-size construction. Using this viewpoint, we provide a unified deterministic analysis of the Polyak-type Extragradient Method (PolyakEG), based on a local critical condition controlling the variation of operator $F$ along the extrapolation direction. This analysis does not require global Lipschitz continuity, and covers sublinear convergence under broader conditions such as Hölder continuity or $(L_0, L_1)$-Lipschitzness and linear convergence under additional strong monotonicity, all through a single framework. We then study the stochastic extensions of this approach. We first prove convergence of a direct stochastic variant, PolyakSEG, when all stochastic component operators share a common solution. We also show that, without this condition, PolyakSEG with nonvanishing step-sizes may fail to converge to a zero of the mean operator. To address this…

    PDF
  • arXiv cs.CLSep 22

    Receptiveness, Not Sycophancy: Distinguishing Engagement from Deference in Language Models

    Calvin Isley, Johann Gaebler, Max Lamparth, Julia Minson, Sharad Goel

    A central concern with language models is sycophancy: their tendency to defer to users' views at the expense of independent substantive judgment. In parallel, work on social sycophancy has focused on behaviors such as validation and positivity that may signal inappropriate deference. Yet the markers of social sycophancy are also characteristic of conversational receptiveness, a construct from social psychology shown to improve interactions across disagreement. We argue that this overlap creates a construct-validity problem for social sycophancy evaluations. Using a popular moral-advice dataset, we find that responses classified as more socially sycophantic are also more receptive. Further, increasing the receptiveness of human-written responses---while preserving their substantive conclusions---causes them to be classified as more socially sycophantic. This tight coupling raises the possibility that social sycophancy evaluations inadvertently penalize desirable behavior. In a preregistered experiment comparing substantively equivalent responses, participants prefer the more receptive responses, expect users to be more likely to listen to them, and are more willing to seek advice…

    PDF
Load more
PDF

Rising research topics

  • 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%