arXiv subjects

Gaia Molinaro

Publications and source records attributed to Gaia Molinaro.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Goals as a Representational Layer for Human-AI Collaboration

Goals are central to how people, teams, and organizations structure their work. Yet, while generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly operate across a worker's context, information about why a person is pursuing a task, beyond local prompts and interactions, is typically missing. We argue that goals should become an explicit representational layer mediating interactions among people, AI systems, and organizations. Because human goals are hierarchical, partially latent, and dynamically evolving, such a layer must be multidimensional, both grounded in human articulation and inferred from available evidence, and continuously updated. A goal layer could connect immediate requests to broader outcomes, improve the organization and retrieval of relevant context, support reflection and coordination, and provide a foundation for training, aligning, and evaluating AI systems in terms of human-centered outcomes. We highlight these opportunities while identifying open challenges involving goal inference, socio-cognitive frictions, alignment, privacy, and governance.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Towards Human-AI Complementarity for AI Safety

Safely overseeing AI is increasingly challenging for the humans doing it, as they must evaluate longer and more complex outputs with every new model generation. To mitigate this challenge, we could leverage complementarity: where humans and models make different mistakes, combining their judgements could yield an oversight signal stronger than either produces alone. We study this opportunity in realistic, safety-relevant settings, contributing the largest known suite of such tasks (3,957 instances across 8 datasets and 6 domains) as well as a platform and data pipeline for measuring human, AI, and human-AI performance on matched items. We collected 35,613 judgements from 416 human raters, finding a considerable opportunity for a complementarity effect. We also found that with the assistance methods we tested, human raters corrected the AI's errors less often, even when overall human accuracy rose, and the hybridisation methods we tested added little over the better single source on average. While complementarity is an important and feasible engineering target for safe oversight, achieving it remains an open challenge for future work.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Language Model Goal Selection Differs from Humans' in a Self-Directed Learning Task

Whether in agentic workflows, social studies, or chat settings, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being asked to replace humans in choosing which goals to pursue, rather than completing predefined tasks. However, the assumption that LLMs accurately reflect human preferences for goal setting remains largely untested. We assess the validity of LLMs as proxies for human goal selection in a controlled, self-directed learning task borrowed from cognitive science. Across five models (GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Qwen3 32B, and Centaur), we find substantial divergence from human behavior. While people gradually explore and learn to achieve goals with diversity across individuals, most models exploit a single identified solution or show surprisingly low performance, with distinct patterns across models and little variability across instances of the same model. Chain-of-thought reasoning and persona steering provide limited improvements, and our conclusions hold across experimental settings. While they await confirmation in applied settings, these findings highlight the uniqueness of human goal selection and caution against its replacement with current models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Reward function compression facilitates goal-dependent reinforcement learning

Humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes to support reinforcement learning. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly and reduces learning efficiency. We propose that goal-dependent learning initially relies on capacity-limited working memory. With consistent experience, learners create a "compressed" reward function - a simplified goal rule -- that transfers to long-term memory for a more automatic evaluation upon receiving feedback. This automaticity frees working memory resources, thereby boosting learning efficiency. Across six experiments, we demonstrate that learning is impaired by the size of the goal space but improves when this space allows for compression. Additionally, faster reward processing correlates with better learning. Although the algorithmic details remain to be established, our behavioral results and computational models suggest that efficient goal-directed learning relies on compressing complex goal information into a stable reward function. These findings illuminate the cognitive mechanisms of intrinsic motivation and can inform behavioral interventions supporting human goal achievement.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2026

Toward Human-AI Complementarity Across Diverse Tasks

Human-AI complementarity, the idea that combining human and AI judgments can outperform either alone, offers a promising pathway toward robust oversight of advanced AI systems. However, whether human-AI complementarity can be achieved on realistic tasks remains an open question. We investigate this through two approaches: hybridization and two AI assistance methods (top-2 assistance and subtask delegation), evaluated on a multi-domain dataset of 1,886 samples spanning knowledge, factuality, long-context reasoning, and deception detection. We find only modest complementarity gains. Baseline hybridization yields just +0.4 percentage points (pp) over AI alone (69.3\% vs 68.9\%), limited both by a small complementarity region (only 8.9\% of items where AI errs but humans do not) and the inability of confidence-based routing to identify it, since the model's confidence is similarly distributed across correct and incorrect predictions. Applied when AI has low confidence, top-2 assistance increases human accuracy from 28.4\% to 38.3\%, surpassing AI alone (37.7\%) -- but primarily because humans adopt correct AI suggestions, not because they successfully override AI errors. These findings suggest that the primary bottleneck is not human task accuracy per se, but the ability to route decisions to humans when it matters and to design assistance methods that enable humans to catch AI mistakes. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses pinpoint where and why each method succeeds or fails, offering concrete targets for future work. We will release our dataset and code upon request to support progress toward more effective human-AI collaboration for AI oversight.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

When LLMs Play the Telephone Game: Cultural Attractors as Conceptual Tools to Evaluate LLMs in Multi-turn Settings

As large language models (LLMs) start interacting with each other and generating an increasing amount of text online, it becomes crucial to better understand how information is transformed as it passes from one LLM to the next. While significant research has examined individual LLM behaviors, existing studies have largely overlooked the collective behaviors and information distortions arising from iterated LLM interactions. Small biases, negligible at the single output level, risk being amplified in iterated interactions, potentially leading the content to evolve towards attractor states. In a series of telephone game experiments, we apply a transmission chain design borrowed from the human cultural evolution literature: LLM agents iteratively receive, produce, and transmit texts from the previous to the next agent in the chain. By tracking the evolution of text toxicity, positivity, difficulty, and length across transmission chains, we uncover the existence of biases and attractors, and study their dependence on the initial text, the instructions, language model, and model size. For instance, we find that more open-ended instructions lead to stronger attraction effects compared to more constrained tasks. We also find that different text properties display different sensitivity to attraction effects, with toxicity leading to stronger attractors than length. These findings highlight the importance of accounting for multi-step transmission dynamics and represent a first step towards a more comprehensive understanding of LLM cultural dynamics.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2024

ACES: Generating Diverse Programming Puzzles with with Autotelic Generative Models

The ability to invent novel and interesting problems is a remarkable feature of human intelligence that drives innovation, art, and science. We propose a method that aims to automate this process by harnessing the power of state-of-the-art generative models to produce a diversity of challenging yet solvable problems, here in the context of Python programming puzzles. Inspired by the intrinsically motivated literature, Autotelic CodE Search (ACES) jointly optimizes for the diversity and difficulty of generated problems. We represent problems in a space of LLM-generated semantic descriptors describing the programming skills required to solve them (e.g. string manipulation, dynamic programming, etc.) and measure their difficulty empirically as a linearly decreasing function of the success rate of Llama-3-70B, a state-of-the-art LLM problem solver. ACES iteratively prompts a large language model to generate difficult problems achieving a diversity of target semantic descriptors (goal-directed exploration) using previously generated problems as in-context examples. ACES generates problems that are more diverse and more challenging than problems produced by baseline methods and three times more challenging than problems found in existing Python programming benchmarks on average across 11 state-of-the-art code LLMs.

cs.LG↗