arXiv subjects

Haewoon Kwak

Publications and source records attributed to Haewoon Kwak.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

When AI Becomes Routine: A Decade of Public AI Mediation in Korean Go Commentary

When AI systems surpass elite human performance and settle into everyday expert practice, the question that follows is how machine judgment is made publicly intelligible and attributable. We study Korean Go commentary on YouTube, where AI systems such as KataGo became standard analytic tools after AlphaGo. Our corpus spans a decade (2016--2025) and approximately $1{,}900$ hours of footage across institutional broadcasters and creator-led channels, in four phases of AI availability. We document a widening asymmetry between visual and verbal AI presence: AI winrate graphs are visible for about $98\%$ of late-period institutional broadcast time, yet AI-salient talk accounts for only $2.63\%$ of sentences. What recedes is the source label, not the metric: winrate and point-gap talk persists while ``AI'' itself goes unsaid. We read this recession as the communicative signature of domestication. Our strongest evidence is a compositional shift in verbal mediation: explicit naming gives way to interface rendering, and creator-led commentary leans further toward it than institutional commentary. We develop a typology distinguishing source-foregrounding from source-receding mediation, and argue that the two preserve different hooks of contestability: discursive anchors through which audiences can recognize and question the machine source. The stakes of that difference rise in domains where AI is less reliable than in Go.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Leadership as Coordination Control: Behavioral Signatures and the Recovery-Advantage Boundary in Multi-Agent LLM Teams

Team science holds that leadership is contingent: it helps only under specific conditions, and capable, autonomous teams may need none at all. We ask the analogous question for multi-agent LLM teams: under what measurable conditions does process-level coordination control add value, and do those conditions match what team science predicts? We use behavioral signatures (majority lock-in, exploration, recovery from an incorrect round-0 consensus) and per-action ablations, clean because each controller is an explicit action set, not a monolithic prompt. We operationalize three classical leadership styles (transactional, transformational, situational) as controllers over a shared action vocabulary (explore, revise, accept, synthesize). A matched controller with the same actions but an arbitrary rule recovers no better than majority voting, so the theory-derived rule, not the vocabulary, does the work. Across four task regimes and three open-weight model families, no controller dominates by accuracy, as the contingency view predicts: transactional control matches a shared round-0 vote on all 12 (model, regime) combinations to within 1.3pp, and gains appear only on the one combination where the round-0 majority is unreliable (llama-4-scout social; situational +8pp over flat). A recovery-advantage account, tested with four boundary probes, says a controller beats plain interaction only where the round-0 majority is unreliable, the task is recoverable, and undirected interaction does not already repair it. These regions map onto contingency theory (leadership substitutes, path-goal redundancy, the situational readiness gap), so a largely null accuracy result is what the theory predicts, not a failure of the controllers. We read process-level coordination control as a contingency to be measured and theory-mapped, not a leaderboard to be topped.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

PluRule: A Benchmark for Moderating Pluralistic Communities on Social Media

Social media are shifting towards pluralism -- community-governed platforms where groups define their own norms. What violates rules in one community may be perfectly acceptable in another. Can AI models help moderate such pluralistic communities? We formalize the task as a multiple-choice problem, mirroring how human moderators operate in the real world: given a comment and its surrounding context, identify which specific rule, if any, is violated. We introduce PluRule, a multimodal, multilingual benchmark for detecting 13,371 rule violations across 1,989 Reddit communities spanning 2,885 rules in 9 languages. Using this benchmark, we show that state-of-the-art vision-language models struggle significantly: even GPT-5.2 with high reasoning performs only slightly better than a trivial baseline. We also find that bigger models and increased context provide marginal gains, and universal rules like civility and self-promotion are easier to detect. Our results show that moderation of pluralistic communities on social media is a fundamental challenge for language models. Our code and benchmark are publicly available.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

CogBias: Measuring and Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making contexts. While prior work has shown that LLMs exhibit cognitive biases behaviorally, whether these biases correspond to identifiable internal representations and can be mitigated through targeted intervention remains an open question. We define LLM cognitive bias as systematic, reproducible deviations from correct answers in tasks with computable ground-truth baselines, and introduce LLM CogBias, a benchmark organized around four families of cognitive biases: Judgment, Information Processing, Social, and Response. We evaluate three LLMs and find that cognitive biases emerge systematically across all four families, with magnitudes and debiasing responses that are strongly family-dependent: prompt-level debiasing substantially reduces Response biases but backfires for Judgment biases. Using linear probes under a contrastive design, we show that these biases are encoded as linearly separable directions in model activation space. Finally, we apply activation steering to modulate biased behavior, achieving 26--32\% reduction in bias score (fraction of biased responses) while preserving downstream capability on 25 benchmarks (Llama: negligible degradation; Qwen: up to $-$19.0pp for Judgment biases). Despite near-orthogonal bias representations across models (mean cosine similarity 0.01), steering reduces bias at similar rates across architectures ($r(246)$=.621, $p$<.001), suggesting shared functional organization.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

SynSym: A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for Psychiatric Symptom Identification

Psychiatric symptom identification on social media aims to infer fine-grained mental health symptoms from user-generated posts, allowing a detailed understanding of users' mental states. However, the construction of large-scale symptom-level datasets remains challenging due to the resource-intensive nature of expert labeling and the lack of standardized annotation guidelines, which in turn limits the generalizability of models to identify diverse symptom expressions from user-generated text. To address these issues, we propose SynSym, a synthetic data generation framework for constructing generalizable datasets for symptom identification. Leveraging large language models (LLMs), SynSym constructs high-quality training samples by (1) expanding each symptom into sub-concepts to enhance the diversity of generated expressions, (2) producing synthetic expressions that reflect psychiatric symptoms in diverse linguistic styles, and (3) composing realistic multi-symptom expressions, informed by clinical co-occurrence patterns. We validate SynSym on three benchmark datasets covering different styles of depressive symptom expression. Experimental results demonstrate that models trained solely on the synthetic data generated by SynSym perform comparably to those trained on real data, and benefit further from additional fine-tuning with real data. These findings underscore the potential of synthetic data as an alternative resource to real-world annotations in psychiatric symptom modeling, and SynSym serves as a practical framework for generating clinically relevant and realistic symptom expressions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Understanding Moral Reasoning Trajectories in Large Language Models: Toward Probing-Based Explainability

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly participate in morally sensitive decision-making, yet how they organize ethical frameworks across reasoning steps remains underexplored. We introduce \textit{moral reasoning trajectories}, sequences of ethical framework invocations across intermediate reasoning steps, and analyze their dynamics across six models and three benchmarks. We find that moral reasoning involves systematic multi-framework deliberation: 55.4--57.7\% of consecutive steps involve framework switches, and only 16.4--17.8\% of trajectories remain framework-consistent. Unstable trajectories remain 1.29$\times$ more susceptible to persuasive attacks ($p=0.015$). At the representation level, linear probes localize framework-specific encoding to model-specific layers (layer 63/81 for Llama-3.3-70B; layer 17/81 for Qwen2.5-72B), achieving 13.8--22.6\% lower KL divergence than the training-set prior baseline. Lightweight activation steering modulates framework integration patterns (6.7--8.9\% drift reduction) and amplifies the stability--accuracy relationship. We further propose a Moral Representation Consistency (MRC) metric that correlates strongly ($r=0.715$, $p<0.0001$) with LLM coherence ratings, whose underlying framework attributions are validated by human annotators (mean cosine similarity $= 0.859$).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

LLMs Can Infer Political Alignment from Online Conversations

Due to the correlational structure in our traits such as identities, cultures, and political attitudes, seemingly innocuous preferences like following a band or using a specific slang can reveal private traits. This possibility, especially when combined with massive, public social data and advanced computational methods, poses a fundamental privacy risk. As our data exposure online and the rapid advancement of AI are increasing the risk of misuse, it is critical to understand the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to exploit such potential. Here, using online discussions on DebateOrg and Reddit, we show that LLMs can reliably infer hidden political alignment, significantly outperforming traditional machine learning models. Prediction accuracy further improves as we aggregate multiple text-level inferences into a user-level prediction, and as we use more politics-adjacent domains. We demonstrate that LLMs leverage words that are highly predictive of political alignment while not being explicitly political. Our findings underscore the capacity and risks of LLMs for exploiting socio-cultural correlates.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Vulnerability of LLMs' Stated Beliefs? LLMs Belief Resistance Check Through Strategic Persuasive Conversation Interventions

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in various question-answering tasks. However, recent studies showcase that LLMs are susceptible to persuasion and could adopt counterfactual beliefs. We present a systematic evaluation of LLM susceptibility to persuasion under the \emph{Source--Message--Channel--Receiver} (SMCR) communication framework. Across six mainstream Large Language Models (LLMs) and three domains (factual knowledge, medical QA, and social bias), we analyze how different persuasive strategies influence stated belief stability over multiple interaction turns. We further examine whether verbalized confidence prompting (i.e., eliciting self-reported confidence scores) affects resistance to persuasion. Results show that the smallest model (Llama 3.2-3B) exhibits extreme compliance, with 82.5\% of belief changes occurring at the first persuasive turn (average end turn of 1.1--1.4). Contrary to expectations, verbalized confidence prompting \emph{increases} vulnerability by accelerating belief erosion rather than enhancing robustness. Finally, an exploratory study of adversarial fine-tuning reveals highly model-dependent effectiveness: GPT-4o-mini achieves near-complete robustness (98.6\%), and Mistral~7B improves substantially (35.7\% $\rightarrow$ 79.3\%), but Llama models remain highly susceptible ($<$14\% RQ1) even when fine-tuned on their own failure cases. Together, these findings highlight substantial model-dependent limits of current robustness interventions and offer guidance for developing more trustworthy LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

XChoice: Explainable Evaluation of AI-Human Alignment in LLM-based Constrained Choice Decision Making

We present XChoice, an explainable framework for evaluating AI-human alignment in constrained decision making. Moving beyond outcome agreement such as accuracy and F1 score, XChoice fits a mechanism-based decision model to human data and LLM-generated decisions, recovering interpretable parameters that capture the relative importance of decision factors, constraint sensitivity, and implied trade-offs. Alignment is assessed by comparing these parameter vectors across models, options, and subgroups. We demonstrate XChoice on Americans' daily time allocation using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) as human ground truth, revealing heterogeneous alignment across models and activities and salient misalignment concentrated in Black and married groups. We further validate robustness of XChoice via an invariance analysis and evaluate targeted mitigation with a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) intervention. Overall, XChoice provides mechanism-based metrics that diagnose misalignment and support informed improvements beyond surface outcome matching.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

What Helps Language Models Predict Human Beliefs: Demographics or Prior Stances?

Beliefs shape how people reason, communicate, and behave. Rather than existing in isolation, they exhibit a rich correlational structure--some connected through logical dependencies, others through indirect associations or social processes. As usage of large language models (LLMs) becomes more ubiquitous in our society, LLMs' ability to understand and reason through human beliefs has many implications from privacy issues to personalized persuasion and the potential for stereotyping. Yet how LLMs capture this interrelated landscape of beliefs remains unclear. For instance, when predicting someone's beliefs, what information affects the prediction most--who they are (demographics), what else they believe (prior stances), or a combination of both? We address these questions using data from an online debate platform, evaluating the ability of off-the-shelf open-weight LLMs to predict individuals' stance under four conditions: no context, demographics only, prior beliefs only, and both combined. We find that both types of information improve predictions over a blind baseline, with their combination yielding the best performance in most cases. However, the relative value of each varies substantially across belief domains. These findings reveal how current LLMs leverage different types of social information when reasoning about human beliefs, highlighting both their capabilities and limitations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Can Lessons From Human Teams Be Applied to Multi-Agent Systems? The Role of Structure, Diversity, and Interaction Dynamics

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) with Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents are gaining attention, yet fewer studies explore their team dynamics. Inspired by human team science, we propose a multi-agent framework to examine core aspects of team science: structure, diversity, and interaction dynamics. We evaluate team performance across four tasks: CommonsenseQA, StrategyQA, Social IQa, and Latent Implicit Hate, spanning commonsense and social reasoning. Our results show that flat teams tend to perform better than hierarchical ones, while diversity has a nuanced impact. Interviews suggest agents are overconfident about their team performance, yet post-task reflections reveal both appreciation for collaboration and challenges in integration, including limited conversational coordination.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Gendered Cultural Discourse in Japan across the Prewar-Postwar Transition: Evidence from Historical Word Embeddings

We quantify the evolution of gender stereotypes in Japan from 1900 to 1998, covering the prewar-postwar transition, using a series of yearly word embeddings trained on historical text corpora. We define the gender stereotype value to measure the strength of a word's gender association by computing the difference in cosine similarity of the word to female- versus male-related attribute words. We examine trajectories of gender stereotype across three traditionally gendered domains: Home, Work, and Politics. To provide a more granular analysis and strengthen the robustness of our findings in the Work domain, we also examine changes in gender stereotypes across 18 occupations and calculate their correlations with gender participation statistics. Our results reveal domain-specific patterns. In the Home domain, female stereotype values remain stable over time, showing no statistically significant changes. In contrast, the Work and Politics domains exhibit significant trend reversals in female stereotype values around 1945, shifting from negative prewar trends to positive postwar trends, indicating increasing female associations in public domains over time. These findings show that trends in gendered cultural discourse shifted unevenly around 1945: the observed changes in the Work and Politics domains are temporally aligned with postwar institutional transformations, including reforms under the U.S.-led Allied Occupation, while the Home domain shows more limited change. Furthermore, female stereotype values for occupations show a moderately positive correlation (r=0.364) with the proportion of women in each occupation, indicating that word-embedding-based measures of gender stereotype mirrored demographic shifts to a meaningful extent.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Somatic in the East, Psychological in the West?: Investigating Clinically-Grounded Cross-Cultural Depression Symptom Expression in LLMs

Prior clinical psychology research shows that Western individuals with depression tend to report psychological symptoms, while Eastern individuals report somatic ones. We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs), which are increasingly used in mental health, reproduce these cultural patterns by prompting them with Western or Eastern personas. Results show that LLMs largely fail to replicate the patterns when prompted in English, though prompting in major Eastern languages (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi) improves alignment in several configurations. Our analysis pinpoints two key reasons for this failure: the models' low sensitivity to cultural personas and a strong, culturally invariant symptom hierarchy that overrides cultural cues. These findings reveal that while prompt language is important, current general-purpose LLMs lack the robust, culture-aware capabilities essential for safe and effective mental health applications.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

A Cross-Cultural Comparison of LLM-based Public Opinion Simulation: Evaluating Chinese and U.S. Models on Diverse Societies

This study evaluates the ability of DeepSeek, an open-source large language model (LLM), to simulate public opinions in comparison to LLMs developed by major tech companies. By comparing DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 with Qwen2.5, GPT-4o, and Llama-3.3 and utilizing survey data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the Zuobiao dataset of China, we assess these models' capacity to predict public opinions on social issues in both China and the United States, highlighting their comparative capabilities between countries. Our findings indicate that DeepSeek-V3 performs best in simulating U.S. opinions on the abortion issue compared to other topics such as climate change, gun control, immigration, and services for same-sex couples, primarily because it more accurately simulates responses when provided with Democratic or liberal personas. For Chinese samples, DeepSeek-V3 performs best in simulating opinions on foreign aid and individualism but shows limitations in modeling views on capitalism, particularly failing to capture the stances of low-income and non-college-educated individuals. It does not exhibit significant differences from other models in simulating opinions on traditionalism and the free market. Further analysis reveals that all LLMs exhibit the tendency to overgeneralize a single perspective within demographic groups, often defaulting to consistent responses within groups. These findings highlight the need to mitigate cultural and demographic biases in LLM-driven public opinion modeling, calling for approaches such as more inclusive training methodologies.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Can we trust the evaluation on ChatGPT?

ChatGPT, the first large language model (LLM) with mass adoption, has demonstrated remarkable performance in numerous natural language tasks. Despite its evident usefulness, evaluating ChatGPT's performance in diverse problem domains remains challenging due to the closed nature of the model and its continuous updates via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We highlight the issue of data contamination in ChatGPT evaluations, with a case study of the task of stance detection. We discuss the challenge of preventing data contamination and ensuring fair model evaluation in the age of closed and continuously trained models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

A semantic embedding space based on large language models for modelling human beliefs

Beliefs form the foundation of human cognition and decision-making, guiding our actions and social connections. A model encapsulating beliefs and their interrelationships is crucial for understanding their influence on our actions. However, research on belief interplay has often been limited to beliefs related to specific issues and relied heavily on surveys. We propose a method to study the nuanced interplay between thousands of beliefs by leveraging an online user debate data and mapping beliefs onto a neural embedding space constructed using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM). This belief space captures the interconnectedness and polarization of diverse beliefs across social issues. Our findings show that positions within this belief space predict new beliefs of individuals and estimate cognitive dissonance based on the distance between existing and new beliefs. This study demonstrates how LLMs, combined with collective online records of human beliefs, can offer insights into the fundamental principles that govern human belief formation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Rematch: Robust and Efficient Matching of Local Knowledge Graphs to Improve Structural and Semantic Similarity

Knowledge graphs play a pivotal role in various applications, such as question-answering and fact-checking. Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) represents text as knowledge graphs. Evaluating the quality of these graphs involves matching them structurally to each other and semantically to the source text. Existing AMR metrics are inefficient and struggle to capture semantic similarity. We also lack a systematic evaluation benchmark for assessing structural similarity between AMR graphs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel AMR similarity metric, rematch, alongside a new evaluation for structural similarity called RARE. Among state-of-the-art metrics, rematch ranks second in structural similarity; and first in semantic similarity by 1--5 percentage points on the STS-B and SICK-R benchmarks. Rematch is also five times faster than the next most efficient metric.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

ChatGPT Rates Natural Language Explanation Quality Like Humans: But on Which Scales?

As AI becomes more integral in our lives, the need for transparency and responsibility grows. While natural language explanations (NLEs) are vital for clarifying the reasoning behind AI decisions, evaluating them through human judgments is complex and resource-intensive due to subjectivity and the need for fine-grained ratings. This study explores the alignment between ChatGPT and human assessments across multiple scales (i.e., binary, ternary, and 7-Likert scale). We sample 300 data instances from three NLE datasets and collect 900 human annotations for both informativeness and clarity scores as the text quality measurement. We further conduct paired comparison experiments under different ranges of subjectivity scores, where the baseline comes from 8,346 human annotations. Our results show that ChatGPT aligns better with humans in more coarse-grained scales. Also, paired comparisons and dynamic prompting (i.e., providing semantically similar examples in the prompt) improve the alignment. This research advances our understanding of large language models' capabilities to assess the text explanation quality in different configurations for responsible AI development.

cs.CL↗