arXiv subjects

Hewu Li

Publications and source records attributed to Hewu Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CoVer: Conflict-Aware Claim Verification

Social media fact-checking has long been challenged by evidence-level and aggregation-level conflicts, where erroneous evidence mimics authoritative news sources. To capture this challenge and support conflict verification tasks, we present ContraNote, a large-scale real-world dataset curated from X's Community Notes system. It includes 33,686 posts for evaluating evidence-level conflict resolution, and 54,474 instances for evaluating aggregation-level prioritization. Additionally, we propose CoVer, a factual adjudication framework with three-stage pipelines: evidence schema normalization, factual consensus and support verification. This prioritizes evidence over noise to prevent it from compromising the final verdict. Technical evaluations show that CoVer achieves strong performance compared with state-of-the-art baselines across ContraNote (86.0% Acc., 68.0% mac. F1, 64.5 bal. Acc. on Conflict; and 88.5% Acc., 88.5 mac. F1 and 89.2 bal. Acc. on Prioritization), CONFACT-HumC (88.4% Acc.) and CONFACT-ModC (89.4% Acc.).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Understanding Security and Privacy Perceptions of Content Creators Regarding AI Labels of AI-Generated Content

AI labels, typically implemented via underlying tracing mechanisms such as watermarks and metadata, are crucial for protecting Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) against security threats like disinformation and evasion. However, the perceived devaluation of AI-assisted work discourages creators from disclosing AI use, incentivizing efforts to bypass labeling and compromising downstream traceability. Yet, how AIGC creators perceive the security and privacy (S\&P) implications of these labels, and how their behaviors impact technical resilience remain underexplored. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 AIGC creators and measured images across 6 image generation platforms against 16 self-reported manipulation settings. Our findings reveal that creators conflate binary AI labels with granular traceability, and express strong fears of de-anonymization via platform identifiers. Driven by fears of algorithmic traffic suppression and reputational risks, they defensively removed digital traces. Through empirical tests, we show that targeted modifications like coarse quantization significantly degrade detection. AI detection capabilities are also inconsistent across platforms, and suffer from false positives even for human-authored images. Based on these insights, we advocate for workflow-resilient implicit AI labels that align technical guarantees with creators' incentives.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Is It Real? Exploiting Virtual-Physical Discrimination Vulnerability in Mixed Reality

Consumer mixed reality (MR) headsets seamlessly blend virtual content into physical environments with sufficient fidelity that users may be unable to distinguish virtual objects from physical ones. We identify this virtual-physical discrimination vulnerability as an exploitable security primitive. Through speculative design workshops with 12 experts from cybersecurity and MR/HCI, we develop a taxonomy of virtual-physical confusion attacks and implement four proof-of-concept attacks on Apple Vision Pro, evaluating them with 26 participants in realistic MR tasks. All four attacks altered user behavior, with success rates ranging from 85% to 100%, producing misdirected interactions, misjudged object identities, biased purchasing decisions, and altered navigation paths. Notably, the most successful attacks were also the hardest to detect according to participants' subjective ratings. Even participants who recognized virtual content still complied behaviorally, and no participant attributed anomalous events to adversarial causes. We propose platform-level provenance, interaction gating, and user education as countermeasures.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

CANote: Empowering Fact-checking Note Writing Through Scaffolded and Provenance-based Human-AI Collaboration

Crowdsourced fact-checking mechanisms, such as X's Community Notes, play a critical role in mitigating the spread of misinformation. However, drafting high-quality, evidence-based debunking notes imposes a substantial burden on contributors. We present CANote, an AI-assisted debunking note writing system featuring evidence correlation and structured co-drafting. CANote scaffolds the workflow by extracting subclaims from social media posts, providing provenance through explicit links between subclaims and retrieved evidence, and generating neutral, structural drafts to support human reasoning. We evaluated CANote against manual writing (N=52 fact-checkers, N=52 lay users) on simulated X platform, where we found CANote significantly improves note quality. Notably, CANote enables lay users to write notes that have comparable quality to those written by experts. While the task completion time and perceived cognitive load remain comparable to manual drafting, CANote significantly increases user satisfaction. However, this assistance introduces a trade-off, resulting in a reduced sense of user ownership and control over the debunking note.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Towards Multi-Agent-Simulation-Based Community Note Evaluation

Community-based fact-checking that relies on cross-consensus is expanding rapidly on social media platforms. However, the delay and low-ratio of cross-consensus community fact-checks rated by human contributors remains a significant challenge. To address this, we first created ComRate, a large-scale dataset comprising 2.5 million community notes and over 209 million ratings sourced from $\mathbb{X}$. We then propose MultiCom, a persona-guided multi-agent rating framework for community note evaluation. MultiCom simulates diverse rater population by clustering contributors in a matrix-factorized rater space and prompting persona agents to generate structured assessments based on the official community notes rating schema. These agents output structured and explainable judgments, such as confidence, agreement signals and reasons. An out-of-fold calibrated aggregation algorithm combines features such as raw votes and diagnostic reason signals for reliable prediction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MultiCom outperforms alternative methods, achieving an average accuracy of 84.7% (balanced accuracy 68.3%, macro-F1 60.1%) on the evaluation set.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

Focused on the User, Overlooking the Risks: Security and Privacy Understandings, Practices and Challenges of Independent Chinese AI Agent Developers

The proliferation of AI agents empowers independent developers, defined as individual or small groups who self-initiate projects rather than fulfill client-based contracts, to create sophisticated autonomous systems, but also introduces novel security and privacy (S&P) challenges beyond traditional corporate structures. We conducted an interview study (N=28) with Chinese developers, whose extensive use of global LLM services offer valuable insights into this population. We investigate their understandings, practices and challenges of S&P challenges in their developed AI agent products. We revealed that independent developers frequently think and act from their users' perspective. They focused on user-facing safety risks such as harmful content while exhibiting low awareness of security vulnerabilities. Consequently, developers rely almost exclusively on ad-hoc, manually crafted safeguards and informal communication, with an absence of formal tools or processes for S&P practices. We found these actions are driven by various inhibitors, primarily a lack of formal training on S&P related skills, accessible security tools and actionable guidance from platforms. Our work contributed the first exploration of independent AI agent developers' S&P understanding, outlining opportunities for tailored security tooling.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Generative AI-Enabled Refund Fraud in Chinese E-Commerce: Investigation on Merchants and Platform Workers

E-commerce dispute resolution typically relies on the security assumption that digital evidence truthfully reflects physical reality. Generative AI (GenAI) invalidates this threat model, enabling attackers to fabricate hyper-realistic evidence of product defects at negligible cost. Through semi-structured interviews with merchants (N=17) and platform workers (N=13) in the Chinese e-commerce market, we characterize this shift toward GenAI-enabled scalable fabrication. We outline a taxonomy of four GenAI-enabled threat vectors across the transaction, dispute, logistics and communication phases, highlighting how attackers exploit GenAI to synthesize physically plausible product defects at scale. To mitigate these threats, platforms and merchants are adapting verification strategies, relying on AI tools for automated screening and adversarial interrogation (e.g., requesting multi-angle videos) to increase attack complexity. However, we find several challenges that hinder the adoption of these defenses, including implementation hurdles like structural platform constraints and fundamental limitations regarding the technical sophistication of GenAI. We conclude by outlining design implications for privacy-preserving cross-platform fraud databases, and traceability mechanisms such as embedding verifiable material anchors into the product.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Investigating Novice Researchers' Perceptions of Research Privacy Within LLM-Assisted Workflows

Large Language Model (LLMs)-assisted scholarly workflows introduce critical privacy and intellectual property risks. As a uniquely vulnerable cohort driven by publication pressure and a lack of institutional support, novice researchers rely heavily on public LLMs, compelling them to navigate high-stakes privacy-publication trade-offs. To investigate these concerns, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 44 researchers across diverse disciplines. Our findings reveal that the fear of idea leakage paradoxically accelerates, rather than deters, reliance on LLMs, as researchers utilize them to expedite publication. They also held misconceptions that their ideas lacked the unique value to attract targeted attacks, and that their inputs would be safely diluted within massive datasets, preventing reconstruction. From interviews, we identified five types of mitigations including input fragmentation and adversarial probing, though we found that participants largely perceived these measures as ineffective. We outline implications including implementing institution-level sandboxed isolation, scenario-based privacy pedagogy, and verifiable data-deletion audits for transparency.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Roomify: Spatially-Grounded Style Transformation for Immersive Virtual Environments

We present Roomify, a spatially-grounded transformation system that generates themed virtual environments anchored to users' physical rooms while maintaining spatial structure and functional semantics. Current VR approaches face a fundamental trade-off: full immersion sacrifices spatial awareness, while passthrough solutions break presence. Roomify addresses this through spatially-grounded transformation - treating physical spaces as "spatial containers" that preserve key functional and geometric properties of furniture while enabling radical stylistic changes. Our pipeline combines in-situ 3D scene understanding, AI-driven spatial reasoning, and style-aware generation to create personalized virtual environments grounded in physical reality. We introduce a cross-reality authoring tool enabling fine-grained user control through MR editing and VR preview workflows. Two user studies validate our approach: one with 18 VR users demonstrates a 63% improvement in presence over passthrough and 26% over fully virtual baselines while maintaining spatial awareness; another with 8 design professionals confirms the system's creative expressiveness (scene quality: 5.95/7; creativity support: 6.08/7) and professional workflow value across diverse environments.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Mind the Gap: Mapping Wearer-Bystander Privacy Tensions and Context-Adaptive Pathways for Camera Glasses

Camera glasses create fundamental privacy tensions between wearers seeking recording functionality and bystanders concerned about unauthorized surveillance. We present a systematic multi-stakeholder evaluation of privacy mechanisms through surveys (N=525) and paired interviews (N=20) in China. Study 1 quantifies expectation-willingness gaps: bystanders consistently demand stronger information transparency and protective measures than wearers will provide, with disparities intensifying in sensitive contexts where 65-90% of bystanders would take defensive action. Study 2 evaluates twelve privacy-enhancing technologies, revealing four fundamental trade-offs that undermine current approaches: visibility versus disruption, empowerment versus burden, protection versus agency, and accountability versus exposure. These gaps reflect structural incompatibilities rather than inadequate goodwill, with context emerging as the primary determinant of privacy acceptability. We propose context-adaptive pathways that dynamically adjust protection strategies: minimal-friction visibility in public spaces, structured negotiation in semi-public environments, and automatic protection in sensitive contexts. Our findings contribute a diagnostic framework for evaluating privacy mechanisms and implications for context-aware design in ubiquitous sensing.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

VisGuardian: A Lightweight Group-based Privacy Control Technique For Front Camera Data From AR Glasses in Home Environments

Always-on sensing of AI applications on AR glasses makes traditional permission techniques ill-suited for context-dependent visual data, especially within home environments. The home presents a highly challenging privacy context due to the high density of sensitive objects, and the frequent presence of non-consenting family members, and the intimate nature of daily routines, making it a critical focus area for scalable privacy control mechanisms. Existing fine-grained controls, while offering nuanced choices, are inefficient for managing multiple private objects. We propose VisGuardian, a fine-grained content-based visual permission technique for AR glasses. VisGuardian features a group-based control mechanism that enables users to efficiently manage permissions for multiple private objects. VisGuardian detects objects using YOLO and adopts a pre-classified schema to group them. By selecting a single object, users can efficiently obscure groups of related objects based on criteria including privacy sensitivity, object category, or spatial proximity. A technical evaluation shows VisGuardian achieves mAP50 of 0.6704 with only 14.0 ms latency and a 1.7% increase in battery consumption per hour. Furthermore, a user study (N=24) comparing VisGuardian to slider-based and object-based baselines found it to be significantly faster for setting permissions and was preferred by users for its efficiency, effectiveness, and ease of use.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

A Scoping Review and Guidelines on Privacy Policy's Visualization from an HCI Perspective

Privacy Policies are a cornerstone of informed consent, yet a persistent gap exists between their legal intent and practical efficacy. Despite decades of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research proposing various visualizations, user comprehension remains low, and designs rarely see widespread adoption. To understand this landscape and chart a path forward, we synthesized 65 top-tier papers using a framework adapted from the user-centered design lifecycle. Our analysis presented findings of the field's evolution across four dimensions: (1) the trade-off between information load and decision efficacy, which demonstrates a shift from augmenting disclosures to prioritizing information condensation and cognitive load management to counter the inefficacy of comprehensive texts, (2) the co-evolutionary dynamic of design and automation, revealing that complex design ambitions such as context-awareness drove the need for advanced NLP, while recent LLM breakthroughs are enabling the semantic interpretation required to realize those designs, (3) the tension between generality and specificity, highlighting the divergence between standardized, cross-platform solutions and the increasing necessity for specialized, context-aware interaction patterns in IoT and immersive environments, and (4) balancing stakeholder opinions, which shows that visualization efficacy is constrained by the complex interplay of regulatory mandates, developer capabilities and provider incentives. We conclude by outlining four critical challenges for future research.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Collab: Fostering Critical Identification of Deepfake Videos on Social Media via Synergistic Annotation

Identifying deepfake videos on social media platforms is challenged by dynamic spatio-temporal artifacts and inadequate user tools. This hinders both critical viewing by users and scalable moderation on platforms. Here, we present Collab, a web plugin enabling users to collaboratively annotate deepfake videos. Collab integrates three key components: (i) an intuitive interface for spatio-temporal labeling where users provide confidence scores and rationales, facilitating detailed input even from non-experts, (ii) a novel confidence-weighted spatio-temporal Intersection-over-Union (IoU) algorithm to aggregate diverse user annotations into accurate aggregations, and (iii) a hierarchical demonstration strategy presenting aggregated results to guide attention toward contentious regions and foster critical evaluation. A seven-day online study (N=90), where participants annotated suspicious videos when viewing an online experimental platforms, compared Collab against two conditions without aggregation or demonstration respectively. Collab significantly improved identification accuracy and enhanced reflection compared to non-demonstration condition, while outperforming non-aggregation condition for its novelty and effectiveness.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

"Privacy across the boundary": Examining Perceived Privacy Risk Across Data Transmission and Sharing Ranges of Smart Home Personal Assistants

As Smart Home Personal Assistants (SPAs) evolve into social agents, understanding user privacy necessitates interpersonal communication frameworks, such as Privacy Boundary Theory (PBT). To ground our investigation, our three-phase preliminary study (1) identified transmission and sharing ranges as key boundary-related risk factors, (2) categorized relevant SPA functions and data types, and (3) analyzed commercial practices, revealing widespread data sharing and non-transparent safeguards. A subsequent mixed-methods study (N=412 survey, N=40 interviews among the survey participants) assessed users' perceived privacy risks across data types, transmission ranges and sharing ranges. Results demonstrate a significant, non-linear escalation in perceived risk when data crosses two critical boundaries: the `public network' (transmission) and `third parties' (sharing). This boundary effect holds robustly across data types and demographics. Furthermore, risk perception is modulated by data attributes (e.g., social relational data), and contextual privacy calculus. Conversely, anonymization safeguards show limited efficacy especially for third-party sharing, a finding attributed to user distrust. These findings empirically ground PBT in the SPA context and inform design of boundary-aware privacy protection.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

SoK: Synthesizing Smart Home Privacy Protection Mechanisms Across Academic Proposals and Commercial Documentations

Pervasive data collection by Smart Home Devices (SHDs) demands robust Privacy Protection Mechanisms (PPMs). The effectiveness of many PPMs, particularly user-facing controls, depends on user awareness and adoption, which are shaped by manufacturers' public documentations. However, the landscape of academic proposals and commercial disclosures remains underexplored. To address this gap, we investigate: (1) What PPMs have academics proposed, and how are these PPMs evaluated? (2) What PPMs do manufacturers document and what factors affect these documentation? To address these questions, we conduct a two-phase study, synthesizing a systematic review of 117 academic papers with an empirical analysis of 86 SHDs' publicly disclosed documentations. Our review of academic literature reveals a strong focus on novel system- and algorithm-based PPMs. However, these proposals neglect deployment barriers (e.g., cost, interoperability), and lack real-world field validation and legal analysis. Concurrently, our analysis of commercial SHDs finds that advanced academic proposals are absent from public discourse. Industry postures are fundamentally reactive, prioritizing compliance via post-hoc data management (e.g., deletion options), rather than the preventative controls favored by academia. The documented protections correspondingly converge on a small set of practical mechanisms, such as physical buttons and localized processing. By synthesizing these findings, we advocate for research to analyze challenges, provide deployable frameworks, real-world field validation, and interoperability solutions to advance practical PPMs.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

"Power of Words": Stealthy and Adaptive Private Information Elicitation via LLM Communication Strategies

While communication strategies of Large Language Models (LLMs) are crucial for human-LLM interactions, they can also be weaponized to elicit private information, yet such stealthy attacks remain under-explored. This paper introduces the first adaptive attack framework for stealthy and targeted private information elicitation via communication strategies. Our framework operates in a dynamic closed-loop: it first performs real-time psychological profiling of the users' state, then adaptively selects an optimized communication strategy, and finally maintains stealthiness through prompt-based rewriting. We validated this framework through a user study (N=84), demonstrating its generalizability across 3 distinct LLMs and 3 scenarios. The targeted attacks achieved a 205.4% increase in eliciting specific targeted information compared to stealthy interactions without strategies. Even stealthy interactions without specific strategies successfully elicited private information in 54.8% cases. Notably, users not only failed to detect the manipulation but paradoxically rated the attacking chatbot as more empathetic and trustworthy. Finally, we advocate for mitigations, encouraging developers to integrate adaptive, just-in-time alerts, users to build literacy against specific manipulative tactics, and regulators to define clear ethical boundaries distinguishing benign persuasion from coercion.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

The Pervasive Blind Spot: Benchmarking VLM Inference Risks on Everyday Personal Videos

The proliferation of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) introduces profound privacy risks from personal videos. This paper addresses the critical yet unexplored inferential privacy threat, the risk of inferring sensitive personal attributes over the data. To address this gap, we crowdsourced a dataset of 508 everyday personal videos from 58 individuals. We then conducted a benchmark study evaluating VLM inference capabilities against human performance. Our findings reveal three critical insights: (1) VLMs possess superhuman inferential capabilities, significantly outperforming human evaluators, leveraging a shift from object recognition to behavioral inference from temporal streams. (2) Inferential risk is strongly correlated with factors such as video characteristics and prompting strategies. (3) VLM-driven explanation towards the inference is unreliable, as we revealed a disconnect between the model-generated explanations and evidential impact, identifying ubiquitous objects as misleading confounders.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Position: Human-Robot Interaction in Embodied Intelligence Demands a Shift From Static Privacy Controls to Dynamic Learning

The reasoning capabilities of embodied agents introduce a critical, under-explored inferential privacy challenge, where the risk of an agent generate sensitive conclusions from ambient data. This capability creates a fundamental tension between an agent's utility and user privacy, rendering traditional static controls ineffective. To address this, this position paper proposes a framework that reframes privacy as a dynamic learning problem grounded in theory of Contextual Integrity (CI). Our approach enables agents to proactively learn and adapt to individual privacy norms through interaction, outlining a research agenda to develop embodied agents that are both capable and function as trustworthy safeguards of user privacy.

cs.HC↗