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 confirmation bias


Martingale Score: An Unsupervised Metric for Bayesian Rationality in LLMReasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent advances in reasoning techniques have substantially improved the performance of large language models (LLMs), raising expectations for their ability to provide accurate, truthful, and reliable information. However, emerging evidence suggests that iterative reasoning may foster belief entrenchment, rather than enhancing truth-seeking behavior. In this study, we propose a systematic evaluation framework for belief entrenchment in LLM reasoning by leveraging the Martingale property from Bayesian statistics. This property implies that, under rational belief updating, the expected value of future beliefs should remain equal to the current belief, i.e., belief updates cannot be predicted from solely the current belief. We propose the unsupervised, regression-based Martingale Score to measure violations of this property, signaling a deviation from the Bayesian ability of updating on new evidence. In open-ended problem domains, including event forecasting, value-laden questions, and academic paper review, we found such violations to be widespread across models, reasoning paradigms, problem domains, and system prompts, where the future beliefs are consistently predictable from the model's current belief, a phenomenon which we term belief entrenchment. Through comprehensive experiments, we identify the models (e.g., GPT-4o), reasoning techniques (e.g., chain of thought), and domains (e.g., forecasting) more prone to belief entrenchment. Finally, we validate the Martingale Score by showing that it predicts ground-truth accuracy on problem domains where ground truth labels are available. This indicates that, while designed as an unsupervised metric that operates even in domains without access to ground truth, the Martingale Score is a useful proxy of the truth-seeking ability of the LLM reasoning process.


Robust Neural Rendering in the Wild with Asymmetric Dual 3DGaussian Splatting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing methods typically rely on heuristic strategies to handle the low-quality training data, which often struggle to produce stable and consistent reconstructions, frequently resulting in visual artifacts. In this work, we propose AsymGS, a novel framework that leverages the stochastic nature of these artifacts: they tend to vary across different training runs due to minor randomness. Specifically, our method trains two 3DGaussian Splatting (3DGS) models in parallel, enforcing a consistency constraint that encourages convergence on reliable scene geometry while suppressing inconsistent artifacts. To prevent the two models from collapsing into similar failure modes due to confirmation bias, we introduce a divergent masking strategy that applies two complementary masks: a multi-cue adaptive mask and a self-supervised soft mask, which leads to an asymmetric training process of the two models, reducing shared error modes. In addition, to improve the efficiency of model training, we introduce a lightweight variant called Dynamic EMAProxy, which replaces one of the two models with a dynamically updated Exponential Moving Average (EMA) proxy, and employs an alternating masking strategy to preserve divergence. Extensive experiments on challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches while achieving high efficiency.




SimClinician: A Multimodal Simulation Testbed for Reliable Psychologist AI Collaboration in Mental Health Diagnosis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI based mental health diagnosis is often judged by benchmark accuracy, yet in practice its value depends on how psychologists respond whether they accept, adjust, or reject AI suggestions. Mental health makes this especially challenging: decisions are continuous and shaped by cues in tone, pauses, word choice, and nonverbal behaviors of patients. Current research rarely examines how AI diagnosis interface design influences these choices, leaving little basis for reliable testing before live studies. We present SimClinician, an interactive simulation platform, to transform patient data into psychologist AI collaborative diagnosis. Contributions include: (1) a dashboard integrating audio, text, and gaze-expression patterns; (2) an avatar module rendering de-identified dynamics for analysis; (3) a decision layer that maps AI outputs to multimodal evidence, letting psychologists review AI reasoning, and enter a diagnosis. Tested on the E-DAIC corpus (276 clinical interviews, expanded to 480,000 simulations), SimClinician shows that a confirmation step raises acceptance by 23%, keeping escalations below 9%, and maintaining smooth interaction flow.


Biased by Design: Leveraging AI Biases to Enhance Critical Thinking of News Readers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper explores the design of a propaganda detection tool using Large Language Models (LLMs). Acknowledging the inherent biases in AI models, especially in political contexts, we investigate how these biases might be leveraged to enhance critical think ing in news consumption. Countering the typical view of AI biases as detrimental, our research proposes strategies of user choice and personalization in response to a user's political stance, applying psychological concepts of confirmation bias and cogniti ve dissonance.


CATCHFed: Efficient Unlabeled Data Utilization for Semi-Supervised Federated Learning in Limited Labels Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Federated learning is a promising paradigm that utilizes distributed client resources while preserving data privacy. Most existing FL approaches assume clients possess labeled data, however, in real-world scenarios, client-side labels are often unavailable. Semi-supervised Federated learning, where only the server holds labeled data, addresses this issue. However, it experiences significant performance degradation as the number of labeled data decreases. To tackle this problem, we propose \textit{CATCHFed}, which introduces client-aware adaptive thresholds considering class difficulty, hybrid thresholds to enhance pseudo-label quality, and utilizes unpseudo-labeled data for consistency regularization. Extensive experiments across various datasets and configurations demonstrate that CATCHFed effectively leverages unlabeled client data, achieving superior performance even in extremely limited-label settings.


ST-ProC: A Graph-Prototypical Framework for Robust Semi-Supervised Travel Mode Identification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Travel mode identification (TMI) from GPS trajectories is critical for urban intelligence, but is hampered by the high cost of annotation, leading to severe label scarcity. Prevailing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are ill-suited for this task, as they suffer from catastrophic confirmation bias and ignore the intrinsic data manifold. We propose ST-ProC, a novel graph-prototypical multi-objective SSL framework to address these limitations. Our framework synergizes a graph-prototypical core with foundational SSL Support. The core exploits the data manifold via graph regularization, prototypical anchoring, and a novel, margin-aware pseudo-labeling strategy to actively reject noise. This core is supported and stabilized by foundational contrastive and teacher-student consistency losses, ensuring high-quality representations and robust optimization. ST-ProC outperforms all baselines by a significant margin, demonstrating its efficacy in real-world sparse-label settings, with a performance boost of 21.5% over state-of-the-art methods like FixMatch.


A Tutorial on Cognitive Biases in Agentic AI-Driven 6G Autonomous Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The path to higher network autonomy in 6G lies beyond the mere optimization of key performance indicators (KPIs). While KPIs have enabled automation gains under TM Forum Levels 1--3, they remain numerical abstractions that act only as proxies for the real essence of communication networks: seamless connectivity, fairness, adaptability, and resilience. True autonomy requires perceiving and reasoning over the network environment as it is. Such progress can be achieved through \emph{agentic AI}, where large language model (LLM)-powered agents perceive multimodal telemetry, reason with memory, negotiate across domains, and act via APIs to achieve multi-objective goals. However, deploying such agents introduces the challenge of cognitive biases inherited from human design, which can distort reasoning, negotiation, tool use, and actuation. Between neuroscience and AI, this paper provides a tutorial on a selection of well-known biases, including their taxonomy, definition, mathematical formulation, emergence in telecom systems and the commonly impacted agentic components. The tutorial also presents various mitigation strategies tailored to each type of bias. The article finally provides two practical use-cases, which tackle the emergence, impact and mitigation gain of some famous biases in 6G inter-slice and cross-domain management. In particular, anchor randomization, temporal decay and inflection bonus techniques are introduced to specifically address anchoring, temporal and confirmation biases. This avoids that agents stick to the initial high resource allocation proposal or decisions that are recent and/or confirming a prior hypothesis. By grounding decisions in a richer and fairer set of past experiences, the quality and bravery of the agentic agreements in the second use-case, for instance, are leading to $\times 5$ lower latency and around $40\%$ higher energy saving.