No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) aims to quantify how humans perceive visual distortions of digital images without access to their undistorted references. NR-IQA models are extensively studied in computational vision, and are widely used for performance evaluation and perceptual optimization of man-made vision systems. Here we make one of the first attempts to examine the perceptual robustness of NR-IQA models. Under a Lagrangian formulation, we identify insightful connections of the proposed perceptual attack to previous beautiful ideas in computer vision and machine learning. We test one knowledge-driven and three data-driven NR-IQA methods under four full-reference IQA models (as approximations to human perception of just-noticeable differences). Through carefully designed psychophysical experiments, we find that all four NR-IQA models are vulnerable to the proposed perceptual attack. More interestingly, we observe that the generated counterexamples are not transferable, manifesting themselves as distinct design flows of respective NR-IQA methods.

Clinical ultrasound acquisition is highly operator-dependent, where rapid probe motion and brightness fluctuations often lead to reconstruction errors that reduce trust and clinical utility. We present UltrasODM, a dual-stream framework that assists sonographers during acquisition through calibrated per-frame uncertainty, saliency-based diagnostics, and actionable prompts. UltrasODM integrates (i) a contrastive ranking module that groups frames by motion similarity, (ii) an optical-flow stream fused with Dual-Mamba temporal modules for robust 6-DoF pose estimation, and (iii) a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) layer combining Bayesian uncertainty, clinician-calibrated thresholds, and saliency maps highlighting regions of low confidence. When uncertainty exceeds the threshold, the system issues unobtrusive alerts suggesting corrective actions such as re-scanning highlighted regions or slowing the sweep. Evaluated on a clinical freehand ultrasound dataset, UltrasODM reduces drift by 15.2%, distance error by 12.1%, and Hausdorff distance by 10.1% relative to UltrasOM, while producing per-frame uncertainty and saliency outputs. By emphasizing transparency and clinician feedback, UltrasODM improves reconstruction reliability and supports safer, more trustworthy clinical workflows. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AnandMayank/UltrasODM.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly large language models (LLMs), has brought significant advancements to the field of education. Among various applications, automatic short answer grading (ASAG), which focuses on evaluating open-ended textual responses, has seen remarkable progress with the introduction of LLMs. These models not only enhance grading performance compared to traditional ASAG approaches but also move beyond simple comparisons with predefined "golden" answers, enabling more sophisticated grading scenarios, such as rubric-based evaluation. However, existing LLM-powered methods still face challenges in achieving human-level grading performance in rubric-based assessments due to their reliance on fully automated approaches. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs in ASAG tasks by leveraging their interactive capabilities through a human-in-the-loop (HITL) approach. Our proposed framework, GradeHITL, utilizes the generative properties of LLMs to pose questions to human experts, incorporating their insights to refine grading rubrics dynamically. This adaptive process significantly improves grading accuracy, outperforming existing methods and bringing ASAG closer to human-level evaluation.

Democratic processes increasingly aim to integrate large-scale voting with face-to-face deliberation, addressing the challenge of reconciling individual preferences with collective decision-making. This work introduces new methods that use algorithms and computational tools to bridge online voting with face-to-face deliberation, tested in two real-world scenarios: Kultur Komitee 2024 (KK24) and vTaiwan. These case studies highlight the practical applications and impacts of the proposed methods. We present three key contributions: (1) Radial Clustering for Preference Based Subgroups, which enables both in-depth and broad discussions in deliberative settings by computing homogeneous and heterogeneous group compositions with balanced and adjustable group sizes; (2) Human-in-the-loop MES, a practical method that enhances the Method of Equal Shares (MES) algorithm with real-time digital feedback. This builds algorithmic trust by giving participants full control over how much decision-making is delegated to the voting aggregation algorithm as compared to deliberation; and (3) the ReadTheRoom deliberation method, which uses opinion space mapping to identify agreement and divergence, along with spectrum-based preference visualisation to track opinion shifts during deliberation. This approach enhances transparency by clarifying collective sentiment and fosters collaboration by encouraging participants to engage constructively with differing perspectives. By introducing these actionable frameworks, this research extends in-person deliberation with scalable digital methods that address the complexities of modern decision-making in participatory processes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal AI agents in complex tasks but still face challenges in open decision-making problems within complex scenarios. To address this, we use the language logic game ``Who is Undercover?'' (WIU) as an experimental platform to propose the Multi-Perspective Team Tactic (MPTT) framework. MPTT aims to cultivate LLMs' human-like language expression logic, multi-dimensional thinking, and self-perception in complex scenarios. By alternating speaking and voting sessions, integrating techniques like self-perspective, identity-determination, self-reflection, self-summary and multi-round find-teammates, LLM agents make rational decisions through strategic concealment and communication, fostering human-like trust. Preliminary results show that MPTT, combined with WIU, leverages LLMs' cognitive capabilities to create a decision-making framework that can simulate real society. This framework aids minority groups in communication and expression, promoting fairness and diversity in decision-making. Additionally, our Human-in-the-loop experiments demonstrate that LLMs can learn and align with human behaviors through interactive, indicating their potential for active participation in societal decision-making.

No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) aims to quantify how humans perceive visual distortions of digital images without access to their undistorted references. NR-IQA models are extensively studied in computational vision, and are widely used for performance evaluation and perceptual optimization of man-made vision systems. Here we make one of the first attempts to examine the perceptual robustness of NR-IQA models. Under a Lagrangian formulation, we identify insightful connections of the proposed perceptual attack to previous beautiful ideas in computer vision and machine learning. We test one knowledge-driven and three data-driven NR-IQA methods under four full-reference IQA models (as approximations to human perception of just-noticeable differences).

This paper introduces HuLP, a Human-in-the-Loop for Prognosis model designed to enhance the reliability and interpretability of prognostic models in clinical contexts, especially when faced with the complexities of missing covariates and outcomes. HuLP offers an innovative approach that enables human expert intervention, empowering clinicians to interact with and correct models' predictions, thus fostering collaboration between humans and AI models to produce more accurate prognosis. Additionally, HuLP addresses the challenges of missing data by utilizing neural networks and providing a tailored methodology that effectively handles missing data. Traditional methods often struggle to capture the nuanced variations within patient populations, leading to compromised prognostic predictions. HuLP imputes missing covariates based on imaging features, aligning more closely with clinician workflows and enhancing reliability. We conduct our experiments on two real-world, publicly available medical datasets to demonstrate the superiority and competitiveness of HuLP.

The exponential growth of astronomical datasets provides an unprecedented opportunity for humans to gain insight into the Universe. However, effectively analyzing this vast amount of data poses a significant challenge. Astronomers are turning to deep learning techniques to address this, but the methods are limited by their specific training sets, leading to considerable duplicate workloads too. Hence, as an example to present how to overcome the issue, we built a framework for general analysis of galaxy images, based on a large vision model (LVM) plus downstream tasks (DST), including galaxy morphological classification, image restoration, object detection, parameter extraction, and more. Considering the low signal-to-noise ratio of galaxy images and the imbalanced distribution of galaxy categories, we have incorporated a Human-in-the-loop (HITL) module into our large vision model, which leverages human knowledge to enhance the reliability and interpretability of processing galaxy images interactively. The proposed framework exhibits notable few-shot learning capabilities and versatile adaptability to all the abovementioned tasks on galaxy images in the DESI legacy imaging surveys. Expressly, for object detection, trained by 1000 data points, our DST upon the LVM achieves an accuracy of 96.7%, while ResNet50 plus Mask R-CNN gives an accuracy of 93.1%; for morphology classification, to obtain AUC ~0.9, LVM plus DST and HITL only requests 1/50 training sets compared to ResNet18. Expectedly, multimodal data can be integrated similarly, which opens up possibilities for conducting joint analyses with datasets spanning diverse domains in the era of multi-message astronomy.

Business documents come in a variety of structures, formats and information needs which makes information extraction a challenging task. Due to these variations, having a document generic model which can work well across all types of documents and for all the use cases seems far-fetched. For document-specific models, we would need customized document-specific labels. We introduce DoSA (Document Specific Automated Annotations), which helps annotators in generating initial annotations automatically using our novel bootstrap approach by leveraging document generic datasets and models. These initial annotations can further be reviewed by a human for correctness. An initial document-specific model can be trained and its inference can be used as feedback for generating more automated annotations. These automated annotations can be reviewed by human-in-the-loop for the correctness and a new improved model can be trained using the current model as pre-trained model before going for the next iteration. In this paper, our scope is limited to Form like documents due to limited availability of generic annotated datasets, but this idea can be extended to a variety of other documents as more datasets are built. An open-source ready-to-use implementation is made available on GitHub https://github.com/neeleshkshukla/DoSA.

Human-in-the-loop (HiL) reinforcement learning is gaining traction in domains with large action and state spaces, and sparse rewards by allowing the agent to take advice from HiL. Beyond advice accommodation, a sequential decision-making agent must be able to express the extent to which it was able to utilize the human advice. Subsequently, the agent should provide a means for the HiL to inspect parts of advice that it had to reject in favor of the overall environment objective. We introduce the problem of Advice-Conformance Verification which requires reinforcement learning (RL) agents to provide assurances to the human in the loop regarding how much of their advice is being conformed to. We then propose a Tree-based lingua-franca to support this communication, called a Preference Tree. We study two cases of good and bad advice scenarios in MuJoCo's Humanoid environment. Through our experiments, we show that our method can provide an interpretable means of solving the Advice-Conformance Verification problem by conveying whether or not the agent is using the human's advice. Finally, we present a human-user study with 20 participants that validates our method.