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Kemu Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Kemu Xu.

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Delegation Rights: Property, Agency, and Investment Incentives in the Age of AI Agents

AI agents increasingly operate inside digital accounts by exercising privileges that users already hold, raising a new control question: whether an existing account entitlement must be exercised manually or may be exercised through a user-authorized automated proxy. We define \emph{delegation rights} as the revocable, identity-preserving, scope-limited, and mode-specific authority of an account holder to authorize such proxy execution. We develop a three-party incomplete-contracts model with a User, an AI Agent provider, and a Platform. The contested object is not platform ownership, account transferability, data portability, or unrestricted API access, but residual control over the mode of account execution. Under Platform Control, the platform can protect infrastructure, identity systems, privacy boundaries, and third parties, but its discretionary veto weakens the User--Agent coalition's disagreement payoff and depresses relationship-specific investment. Under User Control, hold-up is reduced, but security, privacy, congestion, and third-party risks may remain insufficiently internalized. We then analyze \emph{Certified Delegation}, under which access protection is conditional on verifiable authorization, revocability, auditability, rate-limit compliance, data minimization, and risk mitigation. Certification is therefore not merely a technical safety screen; it is a conditional allocation of residual control. Illustrative mechanism simulations show how this regime can reduce deadweight loss by restoring delegation incentives while bounding residual risk.

econ.EM

The Perceptual Cost of Passthrough: How Video See-Through HMDs Degrade Human Visual Perception of Acuity, Contrast, and Color

Video see-through (VST) technology aims to seamlessly blend the virtual and physical worlds by reconstructing reality through cameras. However, while manufacturers promise high perceptual fidelity, it remains unclear how closely recent commercial VST systems preserve basic visual functions across environmental conditions. In this work, we present an end-to-end perceptual benchmark for three popular VST headsets: Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest 3, and Meta Quest Pro. Using adapted psychophysical measures, we evaluated participants' visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, and color vision under both normal and low-light conditions, with naked-eye vision as the reference. Our results show measurable gaps between VST and naked-eye performance, especially for visual acuity and contrast sensitivity in low-light environments. By mapping these perceptual gaps across devices, visual functions, and lighting levels, this work provides a practical benchmark for current commercial VST capabilities and highlights where experience design or device optimization may need to compensate for perceptual loss.

cs.HC

Emergent Hierarchical Structure in Large Language Models: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Multi-Scale Representation

Why do language models from different architecture families respond so differently to the same perturbation? We argue that the answer is not scale, but \emph{how architecture shapes information compression}. Analyzing eight Transformer models (7B--70B parameters) from the Llama and Qwen families, we show that every model spontaneously develops discrete functional boundaries dividing its layers into Local, Intermediate, and Global processing segments -- yet boundary locations and per-segment brittleness are determined overwhelmingly by architecture family rather than model size or training configuration. We formalize this regularity as the \textbf{Multi-Scale Probabilistic Generation Theory} (MSPGT), which models an autoregressive Transformer as a Hierarchical Variational Information Bottleneck system and derives a tiered set of falsifiable predictions. Three predictions are strongly confirmed: all eight models exhibit two prominent phase-transition boundaries (P1.1); Llama boundary positions are stable across a $10{\times}$ parameter range ($\mathrm{CV}{=}0.067$--$0.095$) while Qwen positions vary widely ($\mathrm{CV}{=}0.465$--$0.726$), precisely matching our strong- and weak-dominance conditions; and cross-architecture local-segment brittleness spans \textbf{three orders of magnitude} ($493{\times}$ ratio) -- a gap that architecture family alone predicts and that dwarfs any within-family or scale-driven variation.

cs.CL