Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Jin Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Jin Huang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Benevolent Bias in Multi-Turn Human-Agent Dialogue

Bias in human-agent interaction can manifest not only through hostile language but also as benevolent bias, whereby unequal treatment hides behind a warm, positive tone. To make it detectable, we operationalise benevolent bias along two dimensions, tone and treatment, yielding three classes: neutral support, overt bias, and benevolent bias. Building on these definitions, we construct BENEVDIAL, a class-balanced corpus of 362,880 multi-turn support dialogues spanning user and agent demographics, roles, and generators, to support controlled evaluation. We then test two detector families on it: off-the-shelf safety detectors and prompted large language model (LLM) judges. Our results reveal a detection gap: off-the-shelf detectors reliably flag overt bias yet largely miss benevolent bias, while LLM judges catch more under more explicit detection criteria but increasingly misclassify neutral support as benevolent bias, and demographic context amplifies the false alarms. These findings suggest that fair monitoring of human-agent dialogue must look beyond surface cues to whether the agent's treatment is disparate.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

StARS: Socially Appropriate Robot Actions via a Recommender System-Driven Approach

Social appropriateness in human-robot interaction (HRI) is not universal: different people can judge the same robot action differently in the same situation. To capture this inter-subject variability, we reformulate socially appropriate action generation as a preference modelling problem inspired by recommender systems, treating annotators as users, contexts/scenes as items, and appropriateness scores over a set of candidate robot actions as targets. We propose StARS, a novel model-agnostic framework that integrates collaborative filtering with learnable scene representations to generate user-specific appropriateness scores over candidate robot actions. StARS is model-agnostic: it can be integrated with various scene encoders and backbones, enabling personalisation without redesigning the underlying model. We evaluate StARS on two socially aware robotics datasets, MannersDB+ and SocNav1, and analyse robustness under sparse preference feedback. Across datasets and backbones, StARS consistently improves performance and agreement with annotators, supporting personalised action selection aligned with user norms. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Cambridge-AFAR/StARS.git.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Aligning Clinical Needs and AI Capabilities: A Survey on LLMs for Medical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as important tools in healthcare, showing growing potential for clinical reasoning and patient care. This survey examines recent progress in medical LLMs, focusing on reasoning applications and requirements. We present a dual-view approach that connects clinical practice with computational methods. On the clinical side, we establish a five-level competency scheme following Miller's Pyramid, progressing from knowledge recall to dynamic case management. On the computational side, we link deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning patterns to common medical goals and tasks. We also introduce a benchmark dataset spanning five levels of medical reasoning capability and report results on 18 state-of-the-art models, revealing that medical specialist models excel in diagnosis-centric tasks while general models lead in decision support and dialogue. We conclude by discussing current progress and open challenges, including data limitations, hallucination, and grounding issues, and outline directions toward safer, more reliable, and workflow-ready systems.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Toward Personalized Social Robots for Child Well-being: Data Requirement Principles from a Recommender-System Perspective

Social robots are increasingly deployed in clinical settings to support the well-being of children, where effective support must be personalized to each child. Personalization, choosing the robot action best suited to each child, can be framed as a recommendation problem, and a recently proposed recommender-system framework for social robots offers a principled approach through user profiling, ranking, and responsible computing. Instantiating it, however, is blocked not by the model but by the data, which is hard to gather. A child's state shifts within and across visits, so no fixed description of the user holds. Within a session, the few signals of whether the robot's actions helped are weak and indirect. Across sessions, children are rarely seen more than once, and anonymization breaks the identity needed to link visits. Because care cannot be randomized, existing data is observational, biased toward whatever was already done. Each is a familiar recommender-system problem, and we propose four data principles in response: an integrated profile, effectiveness signals, linkable coverage, and an exposure record logged at collection time. We identify which of these principles each capability requires, and frame them as concrete guidelines for data collection.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

Natural Language Camera Movement Understanding

Understanding camera movement in natural language is critical for training and evaluating video generation models, among other applications. However, we demonstrate that existing vision-language models (VLMs) fail this task in surprising ways, frequently confusing translation with rotation, left with right, and object movement with camera movement. To address these limitations, we establish natural language camera movement understanding as a standalone research task. We introduce a two-level cinematographic taxonomy and an extensive, atomic benchmark featuring both real and synthetic videos. Furthermore, we curate a large-scale, multi-source training set enhanced by targeted camera movement augmentation. Our fine-tuned VLM-8B outperforms Gemini 3.1 Pro by 10% and 11% on our benchmark's real and synthetic videos, respectively. Despite these gains, a significant gap remains relative to human performance, underscoring the need to promote and facilitate future research on natural language camera movement understanding.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Optimizing CUDA like a Human: Micro-Profiling Tools as Expert Surrogates for LLM-Based GPU Kernel Optimization

We present KernelPro, a closed-loop multi-agent system that automatically generates, profiles, and iteratively optimizes GPU kernel code by integrating large language model (LLM) code generation with hardware profiler feedback and pluggable bottleneck detection tools. KernelPro introduces four contributions: (1) a semantic feedback operator that encodes expert heuristics as pluggable micro-profiling tools, transforming raw hardware metrics into actionable natural language guidance; (2) a two-stage tool invocation architecture where roofline-based bottleneck classification filters which specialized analysis tools execute, combining kernel-level (ncu), instruction-level (SASS), and system-level (nsys) profiling; (3) a domain-adapted MCTS with progressive widening, asymmetric branching, log-reward calibration, dead-end pruning, and search memory for cross-iteration learning; and (4) direct CuTe source-level code generation via autonomous code search over the CUTLASS/CuTe codebase. On KernelBench, KernelPro achieves geometric mean speedups of 2.42x/4.69x/5.30x on Levels 1/2/3, establishing state-of-the-art performance across all difficulty levels. On VeOmni's expert-optimized MoE training kernels, KernelPro achieves 1.23x over hand-tuned Triton by generating a from-scratch raw-CUDA+CuTe Hopper WGMMA kernel. Ablation studies demonstrate that each design component independently and significantly improves optimization quality: micro-profiling tools (p < 0.0001 vs raw metrics), MCTS search (26% higher geometric mean vs greedy, p = 0.004), and proactive tool orchestration (23% improvement, p = 0.035). Finally, KernelPro is the first CUDA kernel coding agent to optimize energy efficiency beyond the speed-only focus of prior systems, demonstrating an 11.6% measured energy reduction at matched speed.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks

Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics. While these models show promise in individual tasks such as survey response prediction and human-subject experiment simulation, there remains no systematic understanding of how well they perform across diverse behavioral science tasks, contexts, and populations. We introduce BehaviorBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates foundation models along four core capabilities: (1) behavior prediction and simulation, (2) strategic decision-making, (3) subject-trait inference, and (4) behavioral knowledge application. Crucially, BehaviorBench evaluates model outputs at both the individual and distributional levels, capturing not only per-subject accuracy but also population-level alignment, an essential requirement for behavioral validity. Leveraging the tasks in BehaviorBench, we further develop Be.FM-1.5, extending the Be.FM family of behavioral foundation models fine-tuned on behavioral data. Our results reveal a considerable gap: proprietary general-purpose models excel at individual-level prediction and knowledge-intensive tasks, whereas behavioral foundation models, fine-tuned on behavioral data, achieve substantially stronger distributional alignment. Notably, Be.FM-1.5 leads on distributional metrics and remains competitive on individual-level metrics, suggesting that proper behavioral adaptation can close the gap. Our results highlight the importance of distributional evaluation, establish BehaviorBench as a foundation for developing and assessing behaviorally aligned AI systems, and demonstrate Be.FM-1.5's potential for a broad range of behavioral science studies. Our BehaviorBench and Be.FM-1.5 models can be accessed via https://umich-foreseer.github.io/behaviorbench/.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

CRAB: Codebook Rebalancing for Bias Mitigation in Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation (GeneRec) has introduced a new paradigm that represents items as discrete semantic tokens and predicts items in a generative manner. Despite its strong performance across multiple recommendation tasks, existing GeneRec approaches still suffer from severe popularity bias and may even exacerbate it. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis to uncover the root causes of this phenomenon, yielding two core insights: 1) imbalanced tokenization inherits and can further amplify popularity bias from historical item interactions; 2) current training procedures disproportionately favor popular tokens while neglecting semantic relationships among tokens, thereby intensifying popularity bias. Building on these insights, we propose CRAB, a post-hoc debiasing strategy for GeneRec that alleviates popularity bias by mitigating frequency imbalance among semantic tokens. Specifically, given a well-trained model, we first rebalance the codebook by splitting over-popular tokens while preserving their hierarchical semantic structure. Based on the adjusted codebook, we further introduce a tree-structured regularizer to enhance semantic consistency, encouraging more informative representations for unpopular tokens during training. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CRAB significantly improves recommendation performance by effectively alleviating popularity bias.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

LLM-based Listwise Reranking under the Effect of Positional Bias

LLM-based listwise passage reranking has attracted attention for its effectiveness in ranking candidate passages. However, these models suffer from positional bias, where passages positioned towards the end of the input are less likely to be moved to top positions in the ranking. We hypothesize that there are two primary sources of positional bias: (1) architectural bias inherent in LLMs and (2) the imbalanced positioning of relevant documents. To address this, we propose DebiasFirst, a method that integrates positional calibration and position-aware data augmentation during fine-tuning. Positional calibration uses inverse propensity scoring to adjust for positional bias by re-weighting the contributions of different positions in the loss function when training. Position-aware augmentation augments training data to ensure that each passage appears equally across varied positions in the input list. This approach markedly enhances both effectiveness and robustness to the original ranking across diverse first-stage retrievers, reducing the dependence of NDCG@10 performance on the position of relevant documents. DebiasFirst also complements the inference-stage debiasing methods, offering a practical solution for mitigating positional bias in reranking.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

DSevolve: Enabling Real-Time Adaptive Scheduling on Dynamic Flexible Job Shop with LLM-Evolved Heuristic Portfolios

In dynamic flexible job shops, order arrivals, machine breakdowns, and processing-time deviations continually reshape the scheduling state and the priority trade-offs behind dispatching decisions. Dispatching rules are well suited to this setting because they are fast, interpretable, and easy to deploy, and recent LLM-assisted automatic heuristic design further expands their expressiveness by evolving composite priority functions. The key challenge is to make these evolved rule behaviors state-adaptive without losing the rapid response needed for online rescheduling. This paper proposes a dynamic self-evolutionary framework DSevolve, which separates offline rule-library construction from online state-conditioned rule selection. Offline, an LLM-guided quality-diversity search combines multi-persona seeding, a MAP-Elites behavioral archive, and behavior-guided variation to evolve a library of complementary rules rather than a single elite, and event-level simulation then trains a neural selector to rank the rules by state. Online, after each rescheduling event, a neural selector maps a 22-dimensional state fingerprint to rule scores and dispatches the top-ranked rule within about a second, meeting the response-time requirement after each disruption. Experiments on dynamic instances derived from standard flexible job shop benchmarks show that DSevolve achieves lower mean makespan than individual LLM-evolved rules, classical dispatching rules, and learning-based baselines under a one-active-rule deployment protocol. Trained only on small instances, the selector transfers zero-shot to substantially larger dynamic shops. These results show that state-conditioned selection preserves the speed and interpretability of dispatching rules while improving adaptability.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

D3MAS: Decompose, Deduce, and Distribute for Enhanced Knowledge Sharing in Multi-Agent Systems

Multi-agent systems powered by large language models exhibit strong capabilities in collaborative problem-solving. However, these systems suffer from substantial knowledge redundancy. Agents duplicate efforts in retrieval and reasoning processes. This inefficiency stems from a deeper issue: current architectures lack mechanisms to ensure agents share minimal sufficient information at each operational stage. Empirical analysis reveals an average knowledge duplication rate of 47.3\% across agent communications. We propose D3MAS (Decompose, Deduce, and Distribute), a hierarchical coordination framework addressing redundancy through structural design rather than explicit optimization. The framework organizes collaboration across three coordinated layers. Task decomposition filters irrelevant sub-problems early. Collaborative reasoning captures complementary inference paths across agents. Distributed memory provides access to non-redundant knowledge. These layers coordinate through structured message passing in a unified heterogeneous graph. This cross-layer alignment ensures information remains aligned with actual task needs. Experiments on four challenging datasets show that D3MAS consistently improves reasoning accuracy by 8.7\% to 15.6\% and reduces knowledge redundancy by 46\% on average.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2026

HyperAgent: Leveraging Hypergraphs for Topology Optimization in Multi-Agent Communication

Recent advances in large language model-powered multi-agent systems have demonstrated remarkable collective intelligence through effective communication. However, existing approaches face two primary challenges: (i) \textit{Ineffective group collaboration modeling}, as they rely on pairwise edge representations in graph structures, limiting their ability to capture relationships among multiple agents; and (ii) \textit{Limited task-adaptiveness in communication topology design}, leading to excessive communication cost for simple tasks and insufficient coordination for complex scenarios. These issues restrict the scalability and practical deployment of adaptive collaboration frameworks. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{HyperAgent}, a hypergraph-based framework that optimizes communication topologies and effectively captures group collaboration patterns using direct hyperedge representations. Unlike edge-based approaches, HyperAgent uses hyperedges to link multiple agents within the same subtask and employs hypergraph convolutional layers to achieve one-step information aggregation in collaboration groups. Additionally, it incorporates a variational autoencoder framework with sparsity regularization to dynamically adjust hypergraph topologies based on task complexity. Experiments highlight the superiority of HyperAgent in both performance and efficiency. For instance, on GSM8K, HyperAgent achieves 95.07\% accuracy while reducing token consumption by 25.33\%, demonstrating the potential of hypergraph-based optimization for multi-agent communication.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

Analytical Covariance Propagation for DVL-Aided Loosely Coupled SINS Under Attitude Uncertainty

In loosely coupled strapdown inertial navigation system/Doppler velocity log (SINS/DVL) integration, the body-frame DVL velocity is projected into the navigation frame using the SINS-computed attitude. Attitude uncertainty consequently affects both the projected velocity observation and its associated measurement covariance. This paper develops an analytical covariance propagation (ACP) method that treats these two effects consistently. The attitude-error-aware observation model represents perturbations in the projected DVL velocity, whereas the covariance construction propagates the body-frame DVL covariance at the matrix level and adds a closed-form term derived from the predicted attitude-error covariance, rather than directly rotating component-wise standard deviations. Simulation and a controlled surface-water field experiment compare ACP with conventional SINS/DVL and adaptive-covariance benchmarks. For the evaluated data sets and parameterizations, ACP yields the lowest position-error metrics among the compared methods. Relative to the variational Bayesian adaptive Kalman filter (VBAKF) in the field experiment, ACP reduces the northward, eastward, and downward position root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) by 48.5%, 55.0%, and 74.8%, respectively. Beyond DVL aiding, ACP provides a transferable covariance-construction principle for attitude-dependent vector-measurement fusion and a physically interpretable alternative to heuristic frame-dependent covariance assignment.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Reimagining Social Robots as Recommender Systems: Foundations, Framework, and Applications

Personalization in social robots refers to the ability of the robot to meet the needs and/or preferences of an individual user. Existing approaches typically rely on large language models (LLMs) to generate context-aware responses based on user metadata and historical interactions or on adaptive methods such as reinforcement learning (RL) to learn from users' immediate reactions in real time. However, these approaches fall short of comprehensively capturing user preferences-including long-term, short-term, and fine-grained aspects-, and of using them to rank and select actions, proactively personalize interactions, and ensure ethically responsible adaptations. To address the limitations, we propose drawing on recommender systems (RSs), which specialize in modeling user preferences and providing personalized recommendations. To ensure the integration of RS techniques is well-grounded and seamless throughout the social robot pipeline, we (i) align the paradigms underlying social robots and RSs, (ii) identify key techniques that can enhance personalization in social robots, and (iii) design them as modular, plug-and-play components. This work not only establishes a framework for integrating RS techniques into social robots but also opens a pathway for deep collaboration between the RS and HRI communities, accelerating innovation in both fields.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

The Unfairness of Multifactorial Bias in Recommendation

Popularity bias and positivity bias are two prominent sources of bias in recommender systems. Both arise from input data, propagate through recommendation models, and lead to unfair or suboptimal outcomes. Popularity bias occurs when a small subset of items receives most interactions, while positivity bias stems from the over-representation of high rating values. Although each bias has been studied independently, their combined effect, to which we refer to as multifactorial bias, remains underexplored. In this work, we examine how multifactorial bias influences item-side fairness, focusing on exposure bias, which reflects the unequal visibility of items in recommendation outputs. Through simulation studies, we find that positivity bias is disproportionately concentrated on popular items, further amplifying their over-exposure. Motivated by this insight, we adapt a percentile-based rating transformation as a pre-processing strategy to mitigate multifactorial bias. Experiments using six recommendation algorithms across four public datasets show that this approach improves exposure fairness with negligible accuracy loss. We also demonstrate that integrating this pre-processing step into post-processing fairness pipelines enhances their effectiveness and efficiency, enabling comparable or better fairness with reduced computational cost. These findings highlight the importance of addressing multifactorial bias and demonstrate the practical value of simple, data-driven pre-processing methods for improving fairness in recommender systems.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Does Motion Intensity Impair Cognition in HCI? The Critical Role of Physical Motion-Visual Target Directional Congruency

Human-computer interaction (HCI) increasingly occurs in motion-rich environments. The ability to accurately and rapidly respond to directional visual cues is critical in these contexts. How whole-body motion and individual differences affect human perception and reaction to these directional cues is therefore a key, yet an underexplored question for HCI. This study used a 6-DOF motion platform to measure task performance on a visual direction judgment task. We analyzed performance by decomposing the complex motion into two distinct components: a task-irrelevant lateral interference component and a task-aligned directional congruency component. Results indicate that increased motion intensity lengthened reaction times. This effect was primarily driven by the lateral interference component, and this detrimental impact was disproportionately amplified for individuals with high motion sickness susceptibility. Conversely, directional congruency, where motion direction matched the visual cue, improved performance for all participants. These findings suggest that motion's impact on cognition is not monolithic, and that system design for mobile HCI can be informed by strategies that actively shape motion, such as minimizing lateral interference while maximizing directional congruency.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2026

Your Reasoning Benchmark May Not Test Reasoning: Revealing Perception Bottleneck in Abstract Reasoning Benchmarks

Reasoning benchmarks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) and ARC-AGI are widely used to assess progress in artificial intelligence and are often interpreted as probes of core, so-called ``fluid'' reasoning abilities. Despite their apparent simplicity for humans, these tasks remain challenging for frontier vision-language models (VLMs), a gap commonly attributed to deficiencies in machine reasoning. We challenge this interpretation and hypothesize that the gap arises primarily from limitations in visual perception rather than from shortcomings in inductive reasoning. To verify this hypothesis, we introduce a two-stage experimental pipeline that explicitly separates perception and reasoning. In the perception stage, each image is independently converted into a natural-language description, while in the reasoning stage a model induces and applies rules using these descriptions. This design prevents leakage of cross-image inductive signals and isolates reasoning from perception bottlenecks. Across three ARC-style datasets, Mini-ARC, ACRE, and Bongard-LOGO, we show that the perception capability is the dominant factor underlying the observed performance gap by comparing the two-stage pipeline with against standard end-to-end one-stage evaluation. Manual inspection of reasoning traces in the VLM outputs further reveals that approximately 80 percent of model failures stem from perception errors. Together, these results demonstrate that ARC-style benchmarks conflate perceptual and reasoning challenges and that observed performance gaps may overstate deficiencies in machine reasoning. Our findings underscore the need for evaluation protocols that disentangle perception from reasoning when assessing progress in machine intelligence.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

ReaSeq: Unleashing World Knowledge via Reasoning for Sequential Modeling

Industrial recommender systems face two fundamental limitations under the log-driven paradigm: (1) knowledge poverty in ID-based item representations that causes brittle interest modeling under data sparsity, and (2) systemic blindness to beyond-log user interests that constrains model performance within platform boundaries. These limitations stem from an over-reliance on shallow interaction statistics and close-looped feedback while neglecting the rich world knowledge about product semantics and cross-domain behavioral patterns that Large Language Models have learned from vast corpora. To address these challenges, we introduce ReaSeq, a reasoning-enhanced framework that leverages world knowledge in Large Language Models to address both limitations through explicit and implicit reasoning. Specifically, ReaSeq employs explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning via multi-agent collaboration to distill structured product knowledge into semantically enriched item representations, and latent reasoning via Diffusion Large Language Models to infer plausible beyond-log behaviors. Deployed on Taobao's ranking system serving hundreds of millions of users, ReaSeq achieves substantial gains: >6.0% in IPV and CTR, >2.9% in Orders, and >2.5% in GMV, validating the effectiveness of world-knowledge-enhanced reasoning over purely log-driven approaches.

cs.IR↗