arXiv subjects

Yibo Meng

Publications and source records attributed to Yibo Meng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Where Does the Human End? Creative Agency with Generative AI across Five Years of Chinese Digital Painting

As generative AI enters creative work, practitioners must decide where AI assistance ends and human authorship begins. Human-agent interaction (HAI) research has examined AI as a tool, collaborator, consultant, and competitor. The longitudinal problem is how these roles are revised as systems become more capable, public, and economically embedded. We report a five-year interview study with 17 Chinese digital painters, based on annual semi-structured interviews from 2021 to 2025. Participants described recurring but non-uniform patterns of protective resistance, pragmatic task delegation, and, for some, reflective agency repartitioning. Early resistance protected observation, originality, signature, and ownership from AI. Later delegation placed AI in bounded tasks such as references, backgrounds, rough sketches, and client-facing drafts. By 2025, some participants built hybrid workflows around human-only zones, while others described fatigue, precarity, or difficulty locating a remaining human role. Peer norms, emotional climates, and production pressures shaped which delegations felt useful, acceptable, or exhausting. Copyright, authorship, and creative labor remained recurring limits on what participants were willing to delegate. We frame these accounts as longitudinal agency partitioning, the situated work of deciding which stages, responsibilities, values, and claims remain human in creative human-agent interaction. We discuss design implications for revisable agency-boundary controls, provenance scaffolds, and community-facing authorship norms.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Using Grounded Theory for Agent Behavior Analysis at Scale

Understanding agent behavior requires methods that scale to thousands of trajectories and surface new patterns in long, often unfamiliar tasks where pre-built classifiers fall short. We propose to bring grounded theory into agent trajectory analysis: a six-decade-old qualitative method from the social sciences, with a principled saturation criterion and an auditable trail from data to theory. We propose AutoTraceGT (Automated Trace analysis through Grounded Theory), the first multi-agent pipeline that automates grounded theory on agent trajectories. It iteratively performs open, axial, and theoretical coding until saturation, producing a behavioral taxonomy tailored to each task. Across six trajectory corpora, AutoTraceGT produces codebooks that recover 73-91 percent of the failure modes in human-annotated taxonomies and surface additional patterns that those taxonomies miss. The emergent theoretical narrative aligns with prior expert accounts. Used as a deductive feature space, the codebook outperforms zero-shot and few-shot LLM baselines on downstream failure prediction. These results suggest Grounded Theory offers a scalable analytic tool for ML researchers and agent developers studying what agents actually do.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Balancing Safety and Autonomy: Accessibility-Oriented Interventions in Generative AI for Cognitive Impairment

Generative AI systems are increasingly used by older adults with cognitive impairment for everyday tasks such as information seeking, health management, and communication. While these systems provide flexible, language-based support, their open-ended outputs introduce risks of over-reliance, misinterpretation, and inappropriate decision-making. Prior work has focused on usability and adoption, with limited attention to how system design shapes users' participation in decision-making and the distribution of agency in care contexts. We present a qualitative study of 45 individuals with cognitive impairment and their caregivers. We identify five accessibility-oriented mechanisms: AI Capability Constraint, Human Oversight Embedding, Cognitive Engagement Maintenance, Human-AI Relationship Regulation, and Risk Transparency and Control, through which systems structure interaction. These mechanisms both support and constrain users by redistributing decision-making across users and caregivers. We show that their effects vary by impairment level: while protective mechanisms support users with severe impairment, they can restrict autonomy for those with mild impairment. As impairment progresses, tensions become less visible as user participation diminishes. Our findings highlight the need for dynamic designs that balance safety and autonomy in AI-supported care.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Wearing Trust: How Older Adults Calibrate Reliance on Health Wearables Through Bodily Experience and Everyday Use

Older adults increasingly use health wearables, yet often cannot inspect the properties that matter for reliance. Through 31 semi-structured interviews in China, we examined how participants judged whether wearable outputs were reliable enough for everyday use. Participants relied on brand and price, visible interface activity, lived interaction experience, and comparison with bodily sensation. These cues supported conditional trust, but did not reveal sensor validity, data continuity, or failure conditions. We describe this mismatch as an observability gap and outline design directions for showing signal quality, reliability by context, human-system fit, and alert provenance.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Living Inside the Black Box: Behavioral Probing and Adaptation in Mandatory Wearable Sensing

Wearable sensing systems in high-stakes institutional contexts translate behavioral data into consequential judgments, yet wearers have little access to how those judgments are made. We present a qualitative study of 24 individuals who experienced mandatory electronic monitoring in China's community corrections system. We show that participants built what we term sensor literacy under constraint, a practical form of risk-oriented knowledge developed through uncertainty, behavioral probing, and adaptation. We identify two orientations across rule domains. Where participants had mapped system behavior, they sometimes regained limited flexibility. Where uncertainty remained costly, they contracted movement and discretionary activity beyond formal rules. Some former wearers described residual habits of calculation after device removal. We discuss design implications for making institutional sensing intelligible to wearers, including sensor uncertainty, usable documentation, and evaluation after device wearing.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Between Knowledge and Care: A Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Generative AI for T2DM Self-Management from Patient and Physician Perspectives

Generative AI is increasingly used for everyday health guidance, yet its clinical appropriateness in chronic disease contexts remains poorly understood. This paper presents a two-part mixed-methods study on \revise{Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM)}, examining how patients and physicians assess AI-generated health information. \revise{Study~1} analyzes 784 \revise{participant reported} patient queries to characterize seven informational need categories and \revise{develops a structured five dimensional physician rating rubric informed by patient query categories and clinician priorities} (\textit{Accuracy, Safety, Clarity, Integrity, Action Orientation}). \revise{Study~2} engages seven physicians scoring responses from four AI models and discussing evaluative reasoning through in-depth interviews. Models perform well on factual explanation and lifestyle guidance but consistently underperform on medication reasoning and emotional support. Two \revise{analytic concepts} emerge \revise{from the data}. The \textit{pre-visit primer} \revise{frames AI as preparation for clinical encounters rather than as a replacement for physicians}. The \textit{fluency illusion} \revise{describes how polished language may convey epistemic authority that the clinical content does not support}. Patients and physicians converged on three shared limitations (role boundaries, emotional inadequacy, personalization gaps) while diverging in evaluative emphasis, \revise{which informed} four design directions, task-aware orchestration, risk-aware fallback, dynamic personalization, and emotionally attuned interaction.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

"Everyone Says Them": Deception Typologies, Probabilistic Trust, and Grassroots Safety Knowledge Among Gay Dating App Users in China

Gay dating applications have become critical platforms for sexual minority men to seek relationships and community, yet they also expose users to deceptive interactions that remain underexplored in HCI and CSCW research. This study examines how gay male users in China experience, identify, and respond to deception on dating applications. Through semi-structured interviews with 22 participants across platforms including Blued, Aloha, Fanka, and Soul, we make three contributions. First, we identify a typology of deceptive practices extending beyond profile misrepresentation to encompass relational, emotional, financial, and commercial forms of deception. Second, we document the layered, probabilistic verification strategies users develop through long-term platform use, showing that trust assessment operates as a multi-signal, provisional process rather than a binary judgment. Third, we demonstrate that risk recognition is a collaborative practice shaped by the circulation of experience, the abstraction of recurrent tactics, and the codification of shared rules within the community.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Reading the Same Data Differently: Interpretive Labor Across System Boundaries in Electronic Monitoring

Electronic monitoring (EM) systems are increasingly used in community corrections to enforce spatial, temporal, and behavioral rules through continuous sensing. While prior work has examined EM as a criminal justice tool or as a mechanism for compliance, less is known about how sensed data become meaningful in everyday practice. This poster examines EM as a dual-sided sensing system in which supervised individuals and authorities reason about the same data stream from different positions. Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 supervised individuals and 12 authorities in China's community corrections system, we show that supervised individuals infer system logic from outcomes with limited visibility into how data are interpreted, while authorities reconstruct behavior from ambiguous traces using contextual knowledge, professional experience, and institutional procedures. We call this structural divergence interpretive misalignment. It emerges from asymmetric access to data, context, and reasoning processes, and it shapes behavior through probing, strategic adaptation, over-compliance, disengagement, and contestation. We contribute a CSCW account of continuous sensing as distributed interpretive work and identify design opportunities for making data-to-decision processes more legible, contestable, and accountable across system sides.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Usability: A UX Case Study on Using "Withdrawal Design" to Challenge Engagement Metrics in Social Robotics

Social robots for children with autism are often evaluated through engagement and interaction quality, assuming the robot acts as a social scaffold. We report a mixed-methods "withdrawal" study that tests a harder question: what changes when the robot is removed. In an 8-week home-based randomized controlled trial (N=40), children either retained a consumer social robot (Qrobot) or had it withdrawn after initial use. Quantitatively, continued access reduced anxiety (SCARED/RCADS), yet was associated with lower parent-reported social motivation and weaker gains in emotion recognition (SMS/RMET) compared to withdrawal. Interviews with guardians contextualized this divergence: removal sometimes prompted children to seek human interaction, while continued use could keep social behavior siloed within the child-robot dyad, despite exceptionally high usability (SUS). We synthesize a UXR point of view: for vulnerable users, "engagement" can mask ecological downsides. Success should be judged not by retention, but by designed separation that bridges back to human relationships.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

N\"ushuVoice: Reviving the Voice of Endangered N\"ushu with Pitch-Aware Text-to-Speech

N\"ushu is an endangered phonetic script historically used by women in Jiangyong County, southern Hunan, China. While existing computational studies of N\"ushu mainly focus on textual digitization and visual recognition, the acoustic reconstruction of its authentic pronunciation remains largely unexplored. Building a N\"ushu text-to-speech (TTS) system is particularly challenging because available recordings are extremely limited and mostly consist of isolated syllable-level pronunciations rather than natural sentence-level utterances. In this work, we introduce N\"ushuVoice, the first TTS benchmark for N\"ushu. We construct a sentence-level N\"ushu text-to-audio dataset that aligns standardized Unicode N\"ushu text, phonetic transcriptions, standard Chinese translations, and archival recordings. To synthesize speech under this extreme low-resource setting, we propose N\"ushu-PitchVITS, an F0-conditioned VITS framework that leverages N\"ushu's five-level pitch notation as an explicit prosodic inductive bias. Experimental results show that N\"ushu-PitchVITS outperforms strong TTS baselines in spectral fidelity, pitch reconstruction, and human-rated intelligibility. We publicly release the dataset and code at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Nvshu-TTS-2EB6.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

TibetCPR: A Multimodal Tactile Feedback System to Enhance Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation Training in High-Altitude Regions of Tibet

High-quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) requires stable control of compression rhythm and depth, yet most training systems presuppose instructor mediation, repeated practice, and explanatory guidance-assumptions that do not hold in the Tibet Autonomous Region, where instruction is fragmented and learners' linguistic and educational backgrounds are heterogeneous. We present TibetCPR, a low-cost, self-guided CPR training system that pairs depth-driven electrotactile feedback with rhythm-driven visual cues within a Tibetan-language narrative. In a randomised study with 40 lay community members aged 19--56, the experimental group showed progressive minute-by-minute stabilisation of rhythm and depth across a 10-minute intervention, substantially exceeding an unguided-practice control, with gains transferring to an unscaffolded one-minute post-test. Qualitative accounts described the feedback as legible through participants' bodily action, and usability was high (SUS = 84.3). We synthesise three transferable design principles for self-guided embodied training: feedback as a calibration reference, not an immediate corrector; modality temporal granularity matched to behaviour's temporal structure; and autonomous interpretability as a deployment prerequisite, not an after-effect of usability.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Engagement Is Not Transfer: A Withdrawal Study of a Consumer Social Robot with Autistic Children at Home

This study examines whether engagement with social robots translates into improved human-directed social abilities in autistic children. We conducted an 8-week home-based randomized controlled trial with 40 children aged 5--9 using a commercial social robot (Qrobot). Families were assigned to either continued robot access or robot withdrawal. Quantitative measures and caregiver interviews assessed anxiety, social motivation, emotion inference, and empathy. Results showed that continued robot access significantly reduced anxiety, confirming strong affective benefits and high usability. However, children in the withdrawal group demonstrated greater improvements in social motivation, emotion understanding, and empathic behaviors toward caregivers and peers. Qualitative findings revealed a "handoff versus siloing" pattern: withdrawal promoted reorientation toward human social interaction, while continued access concentrated engagement within the child--robot dyad and limited transfer to real-world contexts. We interpret these results as evidence that high engagement does not guarantee social transfer.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

In the Middle, Not on Top: AI-Mediated Communication for Patient-Provider Care Relationships

Relationship-centered care relies on trust and meaningful connection. As AI enters clinical settings, we must ask not just what it can do, but how it should be positioned to support these values. We examine a "middle, not top" approach where AI mediates communication without usurping human judgment. Through studies of CLEAR, an asynchronous messaging system, we show how this configuration addresses real-world constraints like time pressure and uneven health literacy. We find that mediator affordances (e.g., availability, neutrality) redistribute interpretive work and reduce relational friction. Ultimately, we frame AI mediation as relational infrastructure, highlighting critical design tensions around framing power and privacy.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

"Not Just Me and My To-Do List": Understanding Challenges of Task Management for Adults with ADHD and the Need for AI-Augmented Social Scaffolds

Adults with ADHD often face challenges with task management, not due to a lack of willpower, but because of emotional and relational misalignments between cognitive needs and normative infrastructures. Existing productivity tools, designed for neurotypical users, often assume consistent self-regulation and linear time, overlooking these differences. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with ADHD-identifying adults, exploring their challenges in task management and their coping mechanisms through socially and emotionally scaffolded strategies. Building on these insights, we conducted a follow-up speed dating study with 20 additional ADHD-identifying adults, focusing on 13 speculative design concepts that leverage AI for task support. Our findings reveal that task management among adults with ADHD is relationally and affectively co-constructed, rather than an isolated individual act. Overall, we provide (1) empirical insights into distributed and emotionally scaffolded task management practices, (2) design implications for socially-aware AI systems that support co-regulation and nonlinear attention rhythms, and (3)an analysis of user preferences for different AI design concepts, clarifying which features were most valued and why.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

SphUnc: Hyperspherical Uncertainty Decomposition and Causal Identification via Information Geometry

Reliable decision-making in complex multi-agent systems requires calibrated predictions and interpretable uncertainty. We introduce SphUnc, a unified framework combining hyperspherical representation learning with structural causal modeling. The model maps features to unit hypersphere latents using von Mises-Fisher distributions, decomposing uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components through information-geometric fusion. A structural causal model on spherical latents enables directed influence identification and interventional reasoning via sample-based simulation. Empirical evaluations on social and affective benchmarks demonstrate improved accuracy, better calibration, and interpretable causal signals, establishing a geometric-causal foundation for uncertainty-aware reasoning in multi-agent settings with higher-order interactions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

52-Hz Whale Song: An Embodied VR Experience for Exploring Misunderstanding and Empathy

Experiences of being misunderstood often stem not from a lack of voice, but from mismatches between how individuals express themselves and how others listen. Such communicative mismatches arise across many social settings, including situations involving linguistic and cultural displacement. While prior HCI research has explored empathy through virtual reality, many approaches rely on narrative explanation, positioning users as observers rather than embodied participants. We present 52-Hz Whale Song, an embodied VR experience that explores miscommunication through metaphor and perspective-shifting. Inspired by the real-world "52-Hz whale," whose calls are not responded to by others, the experience uses this phenomenon as an experiential lens on communicative mismatch rather than representing any specific social group. Players progress through a three-act arc that moves from failed communication to agency and ultimately to mediation. A preliminary mixed-methods study (N = 30) suggests increased perspective-taking and reduced self-reported social distance in immigrant-related situations. This work highlights how embodied metaphor and role-shifting can support empathic engagement and offers transferable design insights for empathy-oriented interactive systems.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Misty Forest VR: Turning Real ADHD Attention Patterns into Shared Momentum for Youth Collaboration

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) remains highly stigmatized in many cultural contexts, particularly in China, where ADHD-related behaviors are often moralized rather than understood as neurodevelopmental differences. As a result, challenges of self-perception, social misunderstanding, and collaboration between ADHD and non-ADHD individuals remain largely unaddressed. We present Misty Forest, a VR-based collaborative game that explores ADHD through asymmetric co-play. The system translates empirically grounded ADHD behavioral patterns -- such as fluctuating attention and time blindness -- into complementary roles that require mutual coordination between players. Rather than compensating for deficits, the design treats cognitive differences as a source of interdependence. In a controlled study with mixed ADHD--non-ADHD dyads, Misty Forest led to higher task completion, increased self-acceptance among ADHD participants, improved ADHD knowledge, and greater empathy among non-ADHD players. These findings suggest that neurodiversity-centered interactive design can foster understanding, reciprocity, and inclusive collaboration.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

CityGuard: Graph-Aware Private Descriptors for Bias-Resilient Identity Search Across Urban Cameras

City-scale person re-identification across distributed cameras must handle severe appearance changes from viewpoint, occlusion, and domain shift while complying with data protection rules that prevent sharing raw imagery. We introduce CityGuard, a topology-aware transformer for privacy-preserving identity retrieval in decentralized surveillance. The framework integrates three components. A dispersion-adaptive metric learner adjusts instance-level margins according to feature spread, increasing intra-class compactness. Spatially conditioned attention injects coarse geometry, such as GPS or deployment floor plans, into graph-based self-attention to enable projectively consistent cross-view alignment using only coarse geometric priors without requiring survey-grade calibration. Differentially private embedding maps are coupled with compact approximate indexes to support secure and cost-efficient deployment. Together these designs produce descriptors robust to viewpoint variation, occlusion, and domain shifts, and they enable a tunable balance between privacy and utility under rigorous differential-privacy accounting. Experiments on Market-1501 and additional public benchmarks, complemented by database-scale retrieval studies, show consistent gains in retrieval precision and query throughput over strong baselines, confirming the practicality of the framework for privacy-critical urban identity matching.

cs.CV↗