Gestures are an integral part of non-verbal communication, with meanings that vary across cultures, and misinterpretations that can have serious social and diplomatic consequences. As AI systems become more integrated into global applications, ensuring they do not inadvertently perpetuate cultural offenses is critical. To this end, we introduce Multi-Cultural Set of Inappropriate Gestures and Nonverbal Signs (MC-SIGNS), a dataset of 288 gesture-country pairs annotated for offensiveness, cultural significance, and contextual factors across 25 gestures and 85 countries. Through systematic evaluation using MC-SIGNS, we uncover critical limitations: text-to-image (T2I) systems exhibit strong US-centric biases, performing better at detecting offensive gestures in US contexts than in non-US ones; large language models (LLMs) tend to over-flag gestures as offensive; and vision-language models (VLMs) default to US-based interpretations when responding to universal concepts like wishing someone luck, frequently suggesting culturally inappropriate gestures. These findings highlight the urgent need for culturally-aware AI safety mechanisms to ensure equitable global deployment of AI technologies.

Evacuation decision prediction is critical for efficient and effective wildfire response by helping emergency management anticipate traffic congestion and bottlenecks, allocate resources, and minimize negative impacts. Traditional statistical methods for evacuation decision prediction fail to capture the complex and diverse behavioral logic of different individuals. In this work, for the first time, we introduce FLARE, short for facilitating LLM for advanced reasoning on wildfire evacuation decision prediction, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework that integrates behavioral theories and models to streamline the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and subsequently integrate with memory-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) module to provide accurate evacuation decision prediction and understanding. Our proposed method addresses the limitations of using existing LLMs for evacuation behavioral predictions, such as limited survey data, mismatching with behavioral theory, conflicting individual preferences, implicit and complex mental states, and intractable mental state-behavior mapping. Experiments on three post-wildfire survey datasets show an average of 20.47% performance improvement over traditional theory-informed behavioral models, with strong cross-event generalizability. Our complete code is publicly available at https://github.com/SusuXu-s-Lab/FLARE

We introduced PRISMATIC, the first multimodal structural priming dataset, and proposed a reference-free evaluation metric that assesses priming effects without predefined target sentences. Using this metric, we constructed and tested models with different multimodal encoding architectures (dual encoder and fusion encoder) to investigate their structural preservation capabilities. Our findings show that models with both encoding methods demonstrate comparable syntactic priming effects. However, only fusion-encoded models exhibit robust positive correlations between priming effects and visual similarity, suggesting a cognitive process more aligned with human psycholinguistic patterns. This work provides new insights into evaluating and understanding how syntactic information is processed in multimodal language models.

The coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have opened up new opportunities for automatic statistical analysis in machine learning and data science. However, before their widespread adoption, it is crucial to assess the accuracy of code generated by LLMs. A major challenge in this evaluation lies in the absence of a benchmark dataset for statistical code (e.g., SAS and R). To fill in this gap, this paper introduces StatLLM, an open-source dataset for evaluating the performance of LLMs in statistical analysis. The StatLLM dataset comprises three key components: statistical analysis tasks, LLM-generated SAS code, and human evaluation scores. The first component includes statistical analysis tasks spanning a variety of analyses and datasets, providing problem descriptions, dataset details, and human-verified SAS code. The second component features SAS code generated by ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, and Llama 3.1 for those tasks. The third component contains evaluation scores from human experts in assessing the correctness, effectiveness, readability, executability, and output accuracy of the LLM-generated code. We also illustrate the unique potential of the established benchmark dataset for (1) evaluating and enhancing natural language processing metrics, (2) assessing and improving LLM performance in statistical coding, and (3) developing and testing of next-generation statistical software - advancements that are crucial for data science and machine learning research.

We use a duoethnographic approach to study how wearable-integrated LLM chatbots can assist with personalized stress management, addressing the growing need for immediacy and tailored interventions. Two researchers interacted with custom chatbots over 22 days, responding to wearable-detected physiological prompts, recording stressor phrases, and using them to seek tailored interventions from their LLM-powered chatbots. They recorded their experiences in autoethnographic diaries and analyzed them during weekly discussions, focusing on the relevance, clarity, and impact of chatbot-generated interventions. Results showed that even though most events triggered by the wearable were meaningful, only one in five warranted an intervention. It also showed that interventions tailored with brief event descriptions were more effective than generic ones. By examining the intersection of wearables and LLM, this research contributes to developing more effective, user-centric mental health tools for real-time stress relief and behavior change.

Legal services rely heavily on text processing. While large language models (LLMs) show promise, their application in legal contexts demands higher accuracy, repeatability, and transparency. Logic programs, by encoding legal concepts as structured rules and facts, offer reliable automation, but require sophisticated text extraction. We propose a neuro-symbolic approach that integrates LLMs' natural language understanding with logic-based reasoning to address these limitations. As a legal document case study, we applied neuro-symbolic AI to coverage-related queries in insurance contracts using both closed and open-source LLMs. While LLMs have improved in legal reasoning, they still lack the accuracy and consistency required for complex contract analysis. In our analysis, we tested three methodologies to evaluate whether a specific claim is covered under a contract: a vanilla LLM, an unguided approach that leverages LLMs to encode both the contract and the claim, and a guided approach that uses a framework for the LLM to encode the contract. We demonstrated the promising capabilities of LLM + Logic in the guided approach.

AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to support their children's learning. We designed a card-based kit, SET, to systematically capture scenarios that have different extents of parental involvement. We developed a prototype interface, PAiREd, with a learning companion robot to deliver LLM-generated educational content that can be reviewed and revised by parents. Parents can flexibly adjust their involvement in the activity by determining what they want the robot to help with. We conducted an in-home field study involving 20 families with children aged 3-5. Our work contributes to an empirical understanding of the level of support parents with different expectations may need from AI and robots and a prototype that demonstrates an innovative interaction paradigm for flexibly including parents in supporting their children.

Synthetic data has the potential to improve the performance, training efficiency, and privacy of real training examples. Nevertheless, existing approaches for synthetic text generation are mostly heuristics and cannot generate human-readable text without compromising the privacy of real data or provide performance guarantees for training Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we propose the first theoretically rigorous approach for generating synthetic human-readable text that guarantees the convergence and performance of LLMs during fine-tuning on a target task. To do so, we leverage Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) that iteratively optimizes the embeddings of synthetic examples to match the gradient of the target training or validation data, and maps them to a sequence of text tokens with low perplexity. In doing so, the generated synthetic text can guarantee convergence of the model to a close neighborhood of the solution obtained by fine-tuning on real data. Experiments on various classification tasks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Large-language models are capable of completing a variety of tasks, but remain unpredictable and intractable. Representation engineering seeks to resolve this problem through a new approach utilizing samples of contrasting inputs to detect and edit high-level representations of concepts such as honesty, harmfulness or power-seeking. We formalize the goals and methods of representation engineering to present a cohesive picture of work in this emerging discipline. We compare it with alternative approaches, such as mechanistic interpretability, prompt-engineering and fine-tuning. We outline risks such as performance decrease, compute time increases and steerability issues. We present a clear agenda for future research to build predictable, dynamic, safe and personalizable LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks but remain prone to hallucinations. Detecting hallucinations is essential for safety-critical applications, and recent methods leverage attention map properties to this end, though their effectiveness remains limited. In this work, we investigate the spectral features of attention maps by interpreting them as adjacency matrices of graph structures. We propose the $\text{LapEigvals}$ method, which utilises the top-$k$ eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix derived from the attention maps as an input to hallucination detection probes. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art hallucination detection performance among attention-based methods. Extensive ablation studies further highlight the robustness and generalisation of $\text{LapEigvals}$, paving the way for future advancements in the hallucination detection domain.