arXiv subjects

Baihan Lin

Publications and source records attributed to Baihan Lin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

PRISMA-LLM: An Empirical Reporting Framework for AI-Assisted Systematic Reviews

Large language models (LLMs) and AI-enabled software increasingly participate in systematic-review decisions, yet the information needed to audit these workflows is reported inconsistently. We analyze SciLitBench, a corpus of 888 review-automation papers with 14,726 annotations, to characterize changes in methods, review-stage use, evaluation and reported limitations. Automation has shifted toward LLM- and software-facing workflows, including stages that can alter the evidence base. Since 2023, 38.0% of software/product papers reported no evaluation, compared with 9.3% of LLM papers. Reporting coverage increased with LLM workflow complexity, yet 52% of positive-only LLM evaluations still reported an unmet reliability or performance requirement. From these patterns, we introduce PRISMA-LLM, an empirically grounded framework separating implementation disclosure from consequence-sensitive evaluation and limitation reporting.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

SciLitBench: Benchmark and Design Principles for LLM-Powered Systematic Literature Reviews

Systematic reviews require sustained human judgment across thousands of records, yet existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically examine review stages in isolation. We introduce SciLitBench, a multi-stage benchmark spanning title and abstract screening, full-text screening, and schema-guided data extraction, with 42,981 retrieved records, 1,012 full texts, and annotations for 888 included papers. Across 22 open-weight LLMs from six model families, explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria improve title and abstract screening $F_2$ by 28.8\%, while researcher-authored rationales improve full-text screening by 15\%. Data extraction reveals a different reliability regime: performance declines from 0.97 accuracy for publication year to 0.37 Jaccard overlap for computational approach, while the strongest models recover only 30\% of annotated evaluation evidence and 25\% of limitations. SciLitBench identifies a practical boundary between high-recall screening and evidence-complete extraction and provides a reproducible resource for evaluating LLM-assisted evidence synthesis.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Distilling Bayesian Belief States into Language Models for Auditable Negotiation

Negotiation agents must infer what their counterpart values, update those beliefs over dialogue turns, and choose actions under uncertainty. End-to-end large language models (LLMs) can imitate negotiation dialogue, but their opponent beliefs are usually implicit and difficult to inspect. We propose BOND (Bayesian Opponent-belief Negotiation Distillation), a framework for auditable negotiation. BOND consists of an LLM-based Bayesian teacher that scores dialogue contexts against the six possible opponent priority orderings, updates a posterior over those orderings, and uses the posterior for menu-based decision making, as well as a smaller 8B student language model that emits both negotiation actions and normalized posterior beliefs as tagged text. In the CaSiNo negotiation dataset, BOND outperforms the state-of-the-art and achieves mean Brier score 0.085 over opponent-priority posteriors. The distilled student preserves much of this belief signal, achieving Brier 0.114, below the uniform six-ordering reference of 5/36, approximately 0.139. Compared with a 70B structured-CoT baseline, the significantly smaller 8B student model yields substantially better elicited posterior calibration. We further showcase auditability through posterior trajectories, belief-versus-policy error decomposition, and posterior-prefix interventions. These diagnostics reveal that distillation preserves a scoreable belief report more strongly than causal belief-conditioned control, making weak belief-action coupling visible, not hidden.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Directional Confusions Reveal Divergent Inductive Biases Through Rate-Distortion Geometry in Human and Machine Vision

To humans, a robin seems more like a bird than a bird seems like a robin, but does this asymmetry also hold for machine vision? Humans and modern vision models can match each other in accuracy while making systematically different kinds of errors, differing not in how often they fail, but in who gets mistaken for whom. We show these directional confusions reveal distinct inductive biases invisible to accuracy alone. Using matched human and deep neural network responses on a natural-image categorization task under 12 perturbation types, we quantify asymmetry in confusion matrices and link its organization to the geometry of the information--error trade-off - how efficiently, and how gracefully, a system generalizes under distortion. We find that humans exhibit broad but weak asymmetries across many class pairs, whereas deep vision models show sparser, stronger directional collapses into a few dominant categories. Robustness training reduces overall asymmetry magnitude but fails to recover this human-like distributed structure. Generative simulations further show that these two asymmetry organizations shift the trade-off geometry in opposite directions even at matched accuracy, explaining why the same scalar asymmetry score can reflect fundamentally different generalization strategies. Together, these results establish directional confusion structure as a sensitive, interpretable signature of inductive bias that accuracy-based evaluation cannot recover.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

PeReGrINE: Evaluating Personalized Review Fidelity with User Item Graph Context

We introduce PeReGrINE, a benchmark and evaluation framework for personalized review generation grounded in graph-structured user--item evidence. PeReGrINE restructures Amazon Reviews 2023 into a temporally consistent bipartite graph, where each target review is conditioned on bounded evidence from user history, item context, and neighborhood interactions under explicit temporal cutoffs. To represent persistent user preferences without conditioning directly on sparse raw histories, we compute a User Style Parameter that summarizes each user's linguistic and affective tendencies over prior reviews. This setup supports controlled comparison of four graph-derived retrieval settings: product-only, user-only, neighbor-only, and combined evidence. Beyond standard generation metrics, we introduce Dissonance Analysis, a macro-level evaluation framework that measures deviation from expected user style and product-level consensus. We also study visual evidence as an auxiliary context source and find that it can improve textual quality in some settings, while graph-derived evidence remains the main driver of personalization and consistency. Across product categories, PeReGrINE offers a reproducible way to study how evidence composition affects review fidelity, personalization, and grounding in retrieval-conditioned language models.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Same Compression Principle, Different Geometry: Rate-Distortion Signatures Dissociate Biological and Artificial Visual Systems

Efficient coding theory predicts that biological perceptual systems compress sensory input optimally under resource constraints, with the systematic structure of errors reflecting the geometry of that compression. Here we operationalize this principle using rate-distortion theory (RDT) to characterize how any system - biological or artificial - trades representational fidelity for informational efficiency. Treating stimulus-response behavior as an effective communication channel, we infer rate-distortion (RD) frontiers directly from confusion matrices and summarize each system with three geometric signatures: slope (beta), curvature (kappa), and area under the RD curve (AUC), capturing the marginal cost, abruptness, and overall efficiency of the accuracy-compression trade-off respectively. Applying this framework to human psychophysical data and 18 deep vision models across 12 families of controlled image perturbations at graded severities, we find that both biological and artificial systems follow a common lossy-compression principle but occupy systematically different regions of RD space. Humans exhibit smooth, flexible trade-offs characteristic of near-optimal efficient coding, while deep networks operate in steeper, more brittle regimes even at matched accuracy, with geometry dissociable from performance across training regimes. Critically, behavioral RD signatures track internal representational geometry, evidenced by the behaviorally inferred compression structure correlating with internal representational dissimilarity across all models. These results establish RD geometry as a compact diagnostic of perceptual compression strategy that recovers mechanistically interpretable structure in internal representations from behavioral input alone and extends naturally to the direct characterization of compression geometry in neural population activity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Perceptual Reality Transformer: Neural Architectures for Simulating Neurological Perception Conditions

Neurological conditions affecting visual perception create profound experiential divides between affected individuals and their caregivers, families, and medical professionals. We present the Perceptual Reality Transformer, a comprehensive framework employing six distinct neural architectures to simulate eight neurological perception conditions with scientifically-grounded visual transformations. Our system learns mappings from natural images to condition-specific perceptual states, enabling others to experience approximations of simultanagnosia, prosopagnosia, ADHD attention deficits, visual agnosia, depression-related changes, anxiety tunnel vision, and Alzheimer's memory effects. Through systematic evaluation across ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets, we demonstrate that Vision Transformer architectures achieve optimal performance, outperforming traditional CNN and generative approaches. Our work establishes the first systematic benchmark for neurological perception simulation, contributes novel condition-specific perturbation functions grounded in clinical literature, and provides quantitative metrics for evaluating simulation fidelity. The framework has immediate applications in medical education, empathy training, and assistive technology development, while advancing our fundamental understanding of how neural networks can model atypical human perception.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2025

Word Clouds as Common Voices: LLM-Assisted Visualization of Participant-Weighted Themes in Qualitative Interviews

Word clouds are a common way to summarize qualitative interviews, yet traditional frequency-based methods often fail in conversational contexts: they surface filler words, ignore paraphrase, and fragment semantically related ideas. This limits their usefulness in early-stage analysis, when researchers need fast, interpretable overviews of what participant actually said. We introduce ThemeClouds, an open-source visualization tool that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate thematic, participant-weighted word clouds from dialogue transcripts. The system prompts an LLM to identify concept-level themes across a corpus and then counts how many unique participants mention each topic, yielding a visualization grounded in breadth of mention rather than raw term frequency. Researchers can customize prompts and visualization parameters, providing transparency and control. Using interviews from a user study comparing five recording-device configurations (31 participants; 155 transcripts, Whisper ASR), our approach surfaces more actionable device concerns than frequency clouds and topic-modeling baselines (e.g., LDA, BERTopic). We discuss design trade-offs for integrating LLM assistance into qualitative workflows, implications for interpretability and researcher agency, and opportunities for interactive analyses such as per-condition contrasts (``diff clouds'').

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Conversational DNA: A New Visual Language for Understanding Dialogue Structure in Human and AI

What if the patterns hidden within dialogue reveal more about communication than the words themselves? We introduce Conversational DNA, a novel visual language that treats any dialogue -- whether between humans, between human and AI, or among groups -- as a living system with interpretable structure that can be visualized, compared, and understood. Unlike traditional conversation analysis that reduces rich interaction to statistical summaries, our approach reveals the temporal architecture of dialogue through biological metaphors. Linguistic complexity flows through strand thickness, emotional trajectories cascade through color gradients, conversational relevance forms through connecting elements, and topic coherence maintains structural integrity through helical patterns. Through exploratory analysis of therapeutic conversations and historically significant human-AI dialogues, we demonstrate how this visualization approach reveals interaction patterns that traditional methods miss. Our work contributes a new creative framework for understanding communication that bridges data visualization, human-computer interaction, and the fundamental question of what makes dialogue meaningful in an age where humans increasingly converse with artificial minds.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

SoftStep: Learning Sparse Similarity Powers Deep Neighbor-Based Regression

Neighbor-based methods are a natural alternative to linear prediction for tabular data when relationships between inputs and targets exhibit complexity such as nonlinearity, periodicity, or heteroscedasticity. Yet in deep learning on unstructured data, nonparametric neighbor-based approaches are rarely implemented in lieu of simple linear heads. This is primarily due to the ability of systems equipped with linear regression heads to co-learn internal representations along with the linear head's parameters. To unlock the full potential of neighbor-based methods in neural networks we introduce SoftStep, a parametric module that learns sparse instance-wise similarity measures directly from data. When integrated with existing neighbor-based methods, SoftStep enables regression models that consistently outperform linear heads across diverse architectures, domains, and training scenarios. We focus on regression tasks, where we show theoretically that neighbor-based prediction with a mean squared error objective constitutes a metric learning algorithm that induces well-structured embedding spaces. We then demonstrate analytically and empirically that this representational structure translates into superior performance when combined with the sparse, instance-wise similarity measures introduced by SoftStep. Beyond regression, SoftStep is a general method for learning instance-wise similarity in deep neural networks, with broad applicability to attention mechanisms, metric learning, representational alignment, and related paradigms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

The Gradient of Health Data Privacy

In the era of digital health and artificial intelligence, the management of patient data privacy has become increasingly complex, with significant implications for global health equity and patient trust. This paper introduces a novel "privacy gradient" approach to health data governance, offering a more nuanced and adaptive framework than traditional binary privacy models. Our multidimensional concept considers factors such as data sensitivity, stakeholder relationships, purpose of use, and temporal aspects, allowing for context-sensitive privacy protections. Through policy analyses, ethical considerations, and case studies spanning adolescent health, integrated care, and genomic research, we demonstrate how this approach can address critical privacy challenges in diverse healthcare settings worldwide. The privacy gradient model has the potential to enhance patient engagement, improve care coordination, and accelerate medical research while safeguarding individual privacy rights. We provide policy recommendations for implementing this approach, considering its impact on healthcare systems, research infrastructures, and global health initiatives. This work aims to inform policymakers, healthcare leaders, and digital health innovators, contributing to a more equitable, trustworthy, and effective global health data ecosystem in the digital age.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Topological Representational Similarity Analysis in Brains and Beyond

Understanding how the brain represents and processes information is crucial for advancing neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) has been instrumental in characterizing neural representations, but traditional RSA relies solely on geometric properties, overlooking crucial topological information. This thesis introduces Topological RSA (tRSA), a novel framework combining geometric and topological properties of neural representations. tRSA applies nonlinear monotonic transforms to representational dissimilarities, emphasizing local topology while retaining intermediate-scale geometry. The resulting geo-topological matrices enable model comparisons robust to noise and individual idiosyncrasies. This thesis introduces several key methodological advances: (1) Topological RSA (tRSA) for identifying computational signatures and testing topological hypotheses; (2) Adaptive Geo-Topological Dependence Measure (AGTDM) for detecting complex multivariate relationships; (3) Procrustes-aligned Multidimensional Scaling (pMDS) for revealing neural computation stages; (4) Temporal Topological Data Analysis (tTDA) for uncovering developmental trajectories; and (5) Single-cell Topological Simplicial Analysis (scTSA) for characterizing cell population complexity. Through analyses of neural recordings, biological data, and neural network simulations, this thesis demonstrates the power and versatility of these methods in understanding brains, computational models, and complex biological systems. They not only offer robust approaches for adjudicating among competing models but also reveal novel theoretical insights into the nature of neural computation. This work lays the foundation for future investigations at the intersection of topology, neuroscience, and time series analysis, paving the way for more nuanced understanding of brain function and dysfunction.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2024

Conversational Topic Recommendation in Counseling and Psychotherapy with Decision Transformer and Large Language Models

Given the increasing demand for mental health assistance, artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), may be valuable for integration into automated clinical support systems. In this work, we leverage a decision transformer architecture for topic recommendation in counseling conversations between patients and mental health professionals. The architecture is utilized for offline reinforcement learning, and we extract states (dialogue turn embeddings), actions (conversation topics), and rewards (scores measuring the alignment between patient and therapist) from previous turns within a conversation to train a decision transformer model. We demonstrate an improvement over baseline reinforcement learning methods, and propose a novel system of utilizing our model's output as synthetic labels for fine-tuning a large language model for the same task. Although our implementation based on LLaMA-2 7B has mixed results, future work can undoubtedly build on the design.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

The Machine Can't Replace the Human Heart

What is the true heart of mental healthcare -- innovation or humanity? Can virtual therapy ever replicate the profound human bonds where healing arises? As artificial intelligence and immersive technologies promise expanded access, safeguards must ensure technologies remain supplementary tools guided by providers' wisdom. Implementation requires nuance balancing efficiency and empathy. If conscious of ethical risks, perhaps AI could restore humanity by automating tasks, giving providers more time to listen. Yet no algorithm can replicate the seat of dignity within. We must ask ourselves: What future has people at its core? One where AI thoughtfully plays a collaborative role? Or where pursuit of progress leaves vulnerability behind? This commentary argues for a balanced approach thoughtfully integrating technology while retaining care's irreplaceable human essence, at the heart of this profoundly human profession. Ultimately, by nurturing innovation and humanity together, perhaps we reach new heights of empathy previously unimaginable.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

COMPASS: Computational Mapping of Patient-Therapist Alliance Strategies with Language Modeling

The therapeutic working alliance is a critical predictor of psychotherapy success. Traditionally, working alliance assessment relies on questionnaires completed by both therapists and patients. In this paper, we present COMPASS, a novel framework to directly infer the therapeutic working alliance from the natural language used in psychotherapy sessions. Our approach leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to analyze session transcripts and map them to distributed representations. These representations capture the semantic similarities between the dialogues and psychometric instruments, such as the Working Alliance Inventory. Analyzing a dataset of over 950 sessions spanning diverse psychiatric conditions -- including anxiety (N=498), depression (N=377), schizophrenia (N=71), and suicidal tendencies (N=12) -- collected between 1970 and 2012, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in providing fine-grained mapping of patient-therapist alignment trajectories, offering interpretable insights for clinical practice, and identifying emerging patterns related to the condition being treated. By employing various deep learning-based topic modeling techniques in combination with prompting generative language models, we analyze the topical characteristics of different psychiatric conditions and how these topics evolve during each turn of the conversation. This integrated framework enhances the understanding of therapeutic interactions, enables timely feedback for therapists on the quality of therapeutic relationships, and provides clear, actionable insights to improve the effectiveness of psychotherapy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

The Topology and Geometry of Neural Representations

A central question for neuroscience is how to characterize brain representations of perceptual and cognitive content. An ideal characterization should distinguish different functional regions with robustness to noise and idiosyncrasies of individual brains that do not correspond to computational differences. Previous studies have characterized brain representations by their representational geometry, which is defined by the representational dissimilarity matrix (RDM), a summary statistic that abstracts from the roles of individual neurons (or responses channels) and characterizes the discriminability of stimuli. Here we explore a further step of abstraction: from the geometry to the topology of brain representations. We propose topological representational similarity analysis (tRSA), an extension of representational similarity analysis (RSA) that uses a family of geo-topological summary statistics that generalizes the RDM to characterize the topology while de-emphasizing the geometry. We evaluate this new family of statistics in terms of the sensitivity and specificity for model selection using both simulations and fMRI data. In the simulations, the ground truth is a data-generating layer representation in a neural network model and the models are the same and other layers in different model instances (trained from different random seeds). In fMRI, the ground truth is a visual area and the models are the same and other areas measured in different subjects. Results show that topology-sensitive characterizations of population codes are robust to noise and interindividual variability and maintain excellent sensitivity to the unique representational signatures of different neural network layers and brain regions. These methods enable researchers to calibrate comparisons among representations in brains and models to be sensitive to the geometry, the topology, or a combination of both.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2023

Utterance Classification with Logical Neural Network: Explainable AI for Mental Disorder Diagnosis

In response to the global challenge of mental health problems, we proposes a Logical Neural Network (LNN) based Neuro-Symbolic AI method for the diagnosis of mental disorders. Due to the lack of effective therapy coverage for mental disorders, there is a need for an AI solution that can assist therapists with the diagnosis. However, current Neural Network models lack explainability and may not be trusted by therapists. The LNN is a Recurrent Neural Network architecture that combines the learning capabilities of neural networks with the reasoning capabilities of classical logic-based AI. The proposed system uses input predicates from clinical interviews to output a mental disorder class, and different predicate pruning techniques are used to achieve scalability and higher scores. In addition, we provide an insight extraction method to aid therapists with their diagnosis. The proposed system addresses the lack of explainability of current Neural Network models and provides a more trustworthy solution for mental disorder diagnosis.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Towards Healthy AI: Large Language Models Need Therapists Too

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of powerful AI chatbots capable of engaging in natural and human-like conversations. However, these chatbots can be potentially harmful, exhibiting manipulative, gaslighting, and narcissistic behaviors. We define Healthy AI to be safe, trustworthy and ethical. To create healthy AI systems, we present the SafeguardGPT framework that uses psychotherapy to correct for these harmful behaviors in AI chatbots. The framework involves four types of AI agents: a Chatbot, a "User," a "Therapist," and a "Critic." We demonstrate the effectiveness of SafeguardGPT through a working example of simulating a social conversation. Our results show that the framework can improve the quality of conversations between AI chatbots and humans. Although there are still several challenges and directions to be addressed in the future, SafeguardGPT provides a promising approach to improving the alignment between AI chatbots and human values. By incorporating psychotherapy and reinforcement learning techniques, the framework enables AI chatbots to learn and adapt to human preferences and values in a safe and ethical way, contributing to the development of a more human-centric and responsible AI.

cs.AI↗