Exoskeletons open up a unique interaction space that seamlessly integrates users' body movements with robotic actuation. Despite its potential, human-exoskeleton interaction remains an underexplored area in HCI, largely due to the lack of accessible prototyping tools that enable designers to easily develop exoskeleton designs and customized interactive behaviors. We present ExoKit, a do-it-yourself toolkit for rapid prototyping of low-fidelity, functional exoskeletons targeted at novice roboticists. ExoKit includes modular hardware components for sensing and actuating shoulder and elbow joints, which are easy to fabricate and (re)configure for customized functionality and wearability. To simplify the programming of interactive behaviors, we propose functional abstractions that encapsulate high-level human-exoskeleton interactions. These can be readily accessed either through ExoKit's command-line or graphical user interface, a Processing library, or microcontroller firmware, each targeted at different experience levels. Findings from implemented application cases and two usage studies demonstrate the versatility and accessibility of ExoKit for early-stage interaction design.

Link prediction (LP) is an important problem in network science and machine learning research. The state-of-the-art LP methods are usually evaluated in a uniform setup, ignoring several factors associated with the data and application specific needs. We identify a number of such factors, such as, network-type, problem-type, geodesic distance between the end nodes and its distribution over the classes, nature and applicability of LP methods, class imbalance and its impact on early retrieval, evaluation metric, etc., and present an experimental setup which allows us to evaluate LP methods in a rigorous and controlled manner. We perform extensive experiments with a variety of LP methods over real network datasets in this controlled setup, and gather valuable insights on the interactions of these factors with the performance of LP through an array of carefully designed hypotheses. Following the insights, we provide recommendations to be followed as best practice for evaluating LP methods.

Despite progress in Arabic large language models, such as Jais and AceGPT, their evaluation on commonsense reasoning has largely relied on machine-translated datasets, which lack cultural depth and may introduce Anglocentric biases. Commonsense reasoning is shaped by geographical and cultural contexts, and existing English datasets fail to capture the diversity of the Arab world. To address this, we introduce \datasetname, a commonsense reasoning dataset in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), covering cultures of 13 countries across the Gulf, Levant, North Africa, and the Nile Valley. The dataset was built from scratch by engaging native speakers to write and validate culturally relevant questions for their respective countries. \datasetname spans 12 daily life domains with 54 fine-grained subtopics, reflecting various aspects of social norms, traditions, and everyday experiences. Zero-shot evaluations show that open-weight language models with up to 32B parameters struggle to comprehend diverse Arab cultures, with performance varying across regions. These findings highlight the need for more culturally aware models and datasets tailored to the Arabic-speaking world.

Despite having a population of twenty million, Kazakhstan's culture and language remain underrepresented in the field of natural language processing. Although large language models (LLMs) continue to advance worldwide, progress in Kazakh language has been limited, as seen in the scarcity of dedicated models and benchmark evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce KazMMLU, the first MMLU-style dataset specifically designed for Kazakh language. KazMMLU comprises 23,000 questions that cover various educational levels, including STEM, humanities, and social sciences, sourced from authentic educational materials and manually validated by native speakers and educators. The dataset includes 10,969 Kazakh questions and 12,031 Russian questions, reflecting Kazakhstan's bilingual education system and rich local context. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art multilingual models (Llama-3.1, Qwen-2.5, GPT-4, and DeepSeek V3) demonstrates substantial room for improvement, as even the best-performing models struggle to achieve competitive performance in Kazakh and Russian. These findings underscore significant performance gaps compared to high-resource languages. We hope that our dataset will enable further research and development of Kazakh-centric LLMs. Data and code will be made available upon acceptance.

The recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized industries such as finance, marketing, and customer service by enabling sophisticated natural language processing tasks. However, the broad adoption of LLMs brings significant challenges, particularly in the form of social biases that can be embedded within their outputs. Biases related to gender, age, and other sensitive attributes can lead to unfair treatment, raising ethical concerns and risking both company reputation and customer trust. This study examined bias in finance-related marketing slogans generated by LLMs (i.e., ChatGPT) by prompting tailored ads targeting five demographic categories: gender, marital status, age, income level, and education level. A total of 1,700 slogans were generated for 17 unique demographic groups, and key terms were categorized into four thematic groups: empowerment, financial, benefits and features, and personalization. Bias was systematically assessed using relative bias calculations and statistically tested with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test against general slogans generated for any individual. Results revealed that marketing slogans are not neutral; rather, they emphasize different themes based on demographic factors. Women, younger individuals, low-income earners, and those with lower education levels receive more distinct messaging compared to older, higher-income, and highly educated individuals. This underscores the need to consider demographic-based biases in AI-generated marketing strategies and their broader societal implications. The findings of this study provide a roadmap for developing more equitable AI systems, highlighting the need for ongoing bias detection and mitigation efforts in LLMs.

Effective feedback is essential for fostering students' success in scientific inquiry. With advancements in artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for delivering instant and adaptive feedback. However, this feedback often lacks the pedagogical validation provided by real-world practitioners. To address this limitation, our study evaluates and compares the feedback quality of LLM agents with that of human teachers and science education experts on student-written experimentation protocols. Four blinded raters, all professionals in scientific inquiry and science education, evaluated the feedback texts generated by 1) the LLM agent, 2) the teachers and 3) the science education experts using a five-point Likert scale based on six criteria of effective feedback: Feed Up, Feed Back, Feed Forward, Constructive Tone, Linguistic Clarity, and Technical Terminology. Our results indicate that LLM-generated feedback shows no significant difference to that of teachers and experts in overall quality. However, the LLM agent's performance lags in the Feed Back dimension, which involves identifying and explaining errors within the student's work context. Qualitative analysis highlighted the LLM agent's limitations in contextual understanding and in the clear communication of specific errors. Our findings suggest that combining LLM-generated feedback with human expertise can enhance educational practices by leveraging the efficiency of LLMs and the nuanced understanding of educators.

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of LLM test-time scaling. However, existing approaches to incentivize LLMs' deep thinking abilities generally require large-scale data or significant training efforts. Meanwhile, it remains unclear how to improve the thinking abilities of less powerful base models. In this work, we introduce S$^2$R, an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. Specifically, we first initialize LLMs with iterative self-verification and self-correction behaviors through supervised fine-tuning on carefully curated data. The self-verification and self-correction skills are then further strengthened by both outcome-level and process-level reinforcement learning, with minimized resource requirements, enabling the model to adaptively refine its reasoning process during inference. Our results demonstrate that, with only 3.1k self-verifying and self-correcting behavior initialization samples, Qwen2.5-math-7B achieves an accuracy improvement from 51.0\% to 81.6\%, outperforming models trained on an equivalent amount of long-CoT distilled data. Extensive experiments and analysis based on three base models across both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks validate the effectiveness of S$^2$R. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/NineAbyss/S2R.

While large models pre-trained on high-quality data exhibit excellent performance across various reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning (e.g. GSM8k, MultiArith), specializing smaller models to excel at mathematical reasoning remains a challenging problem. Common approaches to address this challenge include knowledge distillation, where smaller student models learn from large pre-trained teacher models, and data augmentation, such as rephrasing questions. Despite these efforts, smaller models struggle with arithmetic computations, leading to errors in mathematical reasoning. In this work, we focus on leveraging a programmatically generated arithmetic dataset to enhance the reasoning capabilities of smaller models. We investigate two key approaches to incorporate this dataset -- (1) intermediate fine-tuning, where a model is fine-tuned on the arithmetic dataset before being trained on a reasoning dataset, and (2) integrating the arithmetic dataset into the instruction-tuning mixture, allowing the model to learn arithmetic skills alongside general instruction-following abilities. Our experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that incorporating an arithmetic dataset, whether through targeted fine-tuning or within the instruction-tuning mixture, enhances the models' arithmetic capabilities, which in turn improves their mathematical reasoning performance.

Creating personalized and adaptable conversational AI remains a key challenge. This paper introduces a Continuous Learning Conversational AI (CLCA) approach, implemented using A2C reinforcement learning, to move beyond static Large Language Models (LLMs). We use simulated sales dialogues, generated by LLMs, to train an A2C agent. This agent learns to optimize conversation strategies for personalization, focusing on engagement and delivering value. Our system architecture integrates reinforcement learning with LLMs for both data creation and response selection. This method offers a practical way to build personalized AI companions that evolve through continuous learning, advancing beyond traditional static LLM techniques.

Warning: This paper contains potentially offensive and harmful text. Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently extended their powerful reasoning capabilities to safety checks--using chain-of-thought reasoning to decide whether a request should be answered. While this new approach offers a promising route for balancing model utility and safety, its robustness remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Malicious-Educator, a benchmark that disguises extremely dangerous or malicious requests beneath seemingly legitimate educational prompts. Our experiments reveal severe security flaws in popular commercial-grade LRMs, including OpenAI o1/o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. For instance, although OpenAI's o1 model initially maintains a high refusal rate of about 98%, subsequent model updates significantly compromise its safety; and attackers can easily extract criminal strategies from DeepSeek-R1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking without any additional tricks. To further highlight these vulnerabilities, we propose Hijacking Chain-of-Thought (H-CoT), a universal and transferable attack method that leverages the model's own displayed intermediate reasoning to jailbreak its safety reasoning mechanism. Under H-CoT, refusal rates sharply decline--dropping from 98% to below 2%--and, in some instances, even transform initially cautious tones into ones that are willing to provide harmful content. We hope these findings underscore the urgent need for more robust safety mechanisms to preserve the benefits of advanced reasoning capabilities without compromising ethical standards.