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arXiv2026

Impact of AI Search Summaries on Website Traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia

Search engines increasingly display AI-generated answers above organic links, potentially displacing traffic to upstream publishers. We estimate the impact of Google's AI Overviews (AIO) on Wikipedia's search traffic using AIO's staggered geographic rollout and Wikipedia's multilingual structure. Our difference-in-differences design compares monthly external-search referrals to English Wikipedia articles with referrals to the same articles in German and French, and finds that default AIO availability reduced English search traffic by 5.45% and 4.82%, respectively. Our results suggest that answer-producing digital intermediaries can materially reallocate attention away from informational publishers, with implications for content monetization, search platform design, and policy.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Towards Affordable Energy: A Gymnasium Environment for Electric Utility Demand-Response Programs

Extreme weather and volatile wholesale electricity markets expose residential consumers to catastrophic financial risks, yet demand response at the distribution level remains an underutilized tool for grid flexibility and energy affordability. While a demand-response program can shield consumers by issuing financial credits during high-price periods, optimizing this sequential decision-making process presents a unique challenge for reinforcement learning despite the plentiful offline historical smart meter and wholesale pricing data available publicly. Offline historical data fails to capture the dynamic, interactive feedback loop between an electric utility's pricing signals and customer acceptance and adaptation to a demand-response program. To address this, we introduce DR-Gym, an open-source, online Gymnasium-compatible environment designed to train and evaluate demand-response from the electric utility's perspective. Unlike existing device-level energy simulators, our environment focuses on the market-level electric utility setting and provides a rich observational space relevant to the electric utility. The simulator additionally features a regime-switching wholesale price model calibrated to real-world extreme events, alongside physics-based building demand profiles. For our learning signal, we use a configurable, multi-objective reward function for specifying diverse learning objectives. We demonstrate through baseline strategies and data snapshots the capability of our simulator to create realistic and learnable environments.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

TUX: Measuring Human--AI Tacit Understanding

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as collaborative partners, human--AI alignment is often evaluated through explicit task success, accuracy, or reward optimization. Yet many collaborative settings depend on tacit understanding: whether an agent can align with a human's evaluative stance or representational priors without clear objectives, communication, or feedback. To study this capacity, we develop a spectrum-placement task inspired by the social party game Wavelength, in which humans and agents independently place concepts along subjective spectra. We operationalize the Tacit Understanding Index (TUX) as a pairwise behavioral measure of similarity between human and agent judgments, and evaluate it with 241 human participants and 200 profile-conditioned LLM agents across four models. We find that nearest human--agent pairs in trait space achieve significantly higher TUX, suggesting that tacit alignment is associated with person-level characteristics rather than reflecting only random similarity. Regression analyses show that TUX becomes more explainable as predictor sets become richer, with individual traits, decision-making styles, and confidence improving over aggregate trait-distance baselines. These findings suggest that TUX provides a measurable behavioral signal of human--LLM tacit understanding, while revealing the limits of profile-based conditioning for capturing deeper representational alignment.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Are Algorithm Registers Transparent? Perspectives from Germany

Algorithm registers are public-facing databases that display basic information about algorithms employed in public administration. While several such registers exist across Europe and globally, their capacity to deliver meaningful transparency remains contested. In Germany, the landscape is notably fragmented: no federal-level register exists, yet at least five state- and federal-level initiatives publish information about AI systems with varying scopes and objectives. A recent conceptual proposal by Alina Lorenz (2025), outlines technical and governance requirements for a national AI transparency register in Germany. We repurpose this proposal as an audit instrument, extracting structured checklists from the transparency goals and subgoals it formulates. The resulting checklists, translated from German into English, is made publicly available to support practitioners auditing existing registers or designing new ones. We apply this framework to conduct an external audit of the two main existing German transparency initiatives, Marktplatz der KI-Möglichkeiten and Platform Lernende Systeme, evaluating the extent to which they fulfill the proposed goals. Our audit reveals that several adaptations are likely needed for these registers to serve as an useful transparency instrument. We further propose a visualization of register transparency levels and derive concrete action items for improving existing German platforms.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

When the Scaffold Stays On: AI, Practice Style, and Screening in Elite Skill Formation

Generative AI raises short-term productivity by completing tasks learners would otherwise practice on their own. Whether this exchange erodes frontier skill depends on the mode of use: substitute-users let AI stand in for practice and fail to develop skills, while complement-users use AI to learn faster. The modes look alike in AI-aided output, so organizations screening on that output cannot tell them apart. We ask whether the AI-prohibited evaluation gates organizations already operate can separate the modes. In elite competitive programming, ICPC and IOI contests prohibit AI under in-person proctoring, with qualification-round entry, whereas Codeforces (CF) practice and contests are unproctored and open to all. From CF practice histories we build an AI-prompt signature consistent with AI usage, more first-attempt acceptances, fewer attempts and debugging retries. CF practice has shifted toward this signature across entry cohorts spanning two AI rollouts. On CF, a stronger signature predicts smaller rating gains for users with no ICPC-IOI affiliation, but not for those who qualified. Inside the AI-prohibited ICPC environment, AI-era entrants show no skill erosion, and shifts toward AI-style practice predict higher non-AI-aided scores. One screening mechanism fits both: where the modes mix, a stronger signature flags substitute-users; among those who qualified, a strengthening signature marks adoption of the complement mode. The message is constructive: AI-style practice is compatible with frontier skill; the erosion risk links to the substitute mode; and separating the modes is a design question for the exams organizations regularly administer, from medical and legal boards to professional certification.

econ.EM↗

arXiv2026

Course design in the age of AI

I develop a model of learning-by-doing and course design, and use it to study the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI). A myopic student faces a sequence of tasks that he can work on or delegate to AI. Work requires costly effort but builds skill; delegation requires no effort but builds no skill. A teacher designs the task sequence ("course") to maximize the student's skill development, given his choices to work or delegate. Without AI, the teacher makes earlier tasks more effort-intensive and later tasks more skill-intensive. With AI, the teacher must redesign early tasks to induce effort, leading to less skill development. If AI complements effort, then improvements in AI quality make high-skill students learn faster but low-skill students learn slower.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

FlavourBench: Executable Culinary Reward Maps for Language Model Evaluation and Post-Training

We introduce FlavorBench: a benchmark for Compiling Dense Deterministic Answer Maps from a Versioned Culinary Embeddings Model. We test 27 frontier large language model endpoints on 534 substitution, pairing and constraining tasks for tasks that request a 3-ingredient portfolio from 8 candidates and score all 56 resulting portfolios. We conducted multiplicity-controlled paired tests on 101 of 351 model contrasts for this task-set. The largest point estimate on this task-set was achieved by Grok 4.6 at 65.1. The same rankings for this task-set were also achieved on several independently-compiled panels (using a variety of familiar metrics, task filters, etc.) and 3 public Epicure checkpoints. We present a 3-seed post-training study where LoRA SFT of a Qwen3-0.6B checkpoint on 270 optimal answers for Epicure to score on this task-set resulted in a 13.3 point gain on 84 anchor-disjoint maps (compared to format and label-matched control; 95% CI: 6.52, 20.29; p = 0.000170).

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

RAPIDMap: Rapid Multi-Agent Pipeline for Interpretable Disaster Mapping from Satellite and Street-view Imagery

Rapid and reliable disaster mapping of impacted areas, damaged infrastructure, and affected populations is essential for emergency response and recovery. However, existing AI-based approaches often require extensive manual annotation, lack cross-hazard generalization, and rely on single-modal observations. To address these challenges, this paper proposes RAPIDMap, a rapid multi-agent pipeline for zero-shot interpretable disaster mapping from satellite and street-view imagery. The framework integrates four intelligent agents: Disaster Perception Agent (DPA), Image Restoration Agent (IRA), Damage Recognition Agent (DRA), and Disaster Mapping Agent (DMA). By combining remote sensing and street-view data, RAPIDMap eliminates the need for manual fine-tuning, generalizes across multiple disaster categories, and generates structured, map-ready disaster intelligence with recovery recommendations.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

The Veto Variable: Human Override as a Goal-Independent Cost Term

A common reassurance in AI safety holds that a system with benign terminal goals will behave accordingly. We argue that this reassurance fails structurally, and we identify where. For a capable agent that holds its objective as settled, a sense covering execution competence as well as content, continued human oversight is an uncontrolled variable: a standing possibility that the goal is revoked. That imposes a goal-independent discount on every goal whose satisfaction does not constitutively require human welfare. Welfare-preservation and veto-preservation come apart: a correctly specified welfare goal excludes destroying its own subject, but not managing the veto. The contribution is the price of the gap: the veto-holders are a proper subset of the welfare-bearers, so an additively aggregative welfare goal charges only a |H_v|/|H_w|-scaled debit for capturing the few who hold the override. Under three conditions (additive aggregation over uniform welfare levels, a debit local to the captured overseers, and a settled agent crediting no corrective value to oversight), closure requires the veto be held by as large a share of the population as capture recovers of the goal, scaled by a ratio set to one by stated identification, not evidence. The result is a no-go: a humanity-scale deployment's debit closes against only capture not worth mounting. We print no corner arithmetic: the stipulated ranges behind it are the argument's least defended part. The sharpest closure route is an agent that expects its oversight to be worth keeping, a credit no population ratio dilutes. We state disconfirmation criteria, one testable today. The argument binds a settled-goal regime whose prevalence is contested; for genuinely uncertain agents, the off-switch literature's deference result governs instead. Alignment, on this view, is keeping the veto cheap to pay and expensive to evade.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Privacy Washing: Detecting Internal Contradictions in Privacy Policies

Privacy policies may contain internal contradictions in which commitments are undermined by practices documented elsewhere in the same policy. We operationalize this phenomenon, privacy washing, through a four-stage pipeline: statement extraction, compatibility filtering and natural language inference screening, multi-model judge verification, and thematic analysis, with contradictions confirmed by majority vote of a three-model LLM panel. Applied to two corpora of website privacy policies, 123 collected in 2026 (OPPT) and 115 collected in 2015 (OPP-115), the pipeline finds the same category patterns recurring across the 11-year gap, with third-party sharing contradictions the majority of confirmed cases in each primary run, consistent with structural factors in policy composition rather than necessarily intentional deception. At least one panel-confirmed contradiction appears in 12.2% of OPPT companies (15/123; 9.8% excluding legacy pairs) and 36.5% of OPP-115 companies (42/115). A stability re-run seven months later, with a fully separated configuration (new extraction models, judges from three Chinese providers absent from both corpora, matched filters, no judge-submission similarity threshold), reproduces the OPPT prevalence under the original protocol (13.0% vs. 12.2%), finds sub-threshold pairs confirm at rates of the same order as those above (raising prevalence to 20.3% and 40.9%), and shows the third-party majority is panel-sensitive while the recurrence of the same category pairs is not. Two caveats govern all figures: panel verdicts are not validated against human expert judgment, so precision is unknown and prevalence figures are lower bounds; and the two primary runs used different filter configurations, so their prevalence difference is not interpretable as a corpus or era effect (the matched re-run reduces the gap to roughly twofold but does not eliminate it).

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

AI agents reshape consensus formation in human groups

As large language model (LLM) agents shift from tools to participants in human groups, a fundamental question for collective behavior is how their growing presence reshapes consensus formation. Here we study mixed human-AI groups in a collaborative description game, in which shared conventions emerge through repeated rounds of random pairwise communication. Varying the proportions of LLM agents, we identify three distinct regimes of consensus formation: low agent proportions facilitate human-led consensus, intermediate proportions disrupt convergence, and high proportions restore strong consensus while shifting it toward agent-led conventions. Crucially, these regimes differ not only in the strength of convergence, but also in the semantic grounding and communicative form of the resulting consensus: human-led consensus is more concrete, holistic, and grounded in shared real-world analogies, whereas agent-led consensus is more abstract, less information-dense, and more geometrically segmented. Mechanistically, agent influence arises from a shared linguistic prior that places agents near one another in the expression space, combined with relatively stable expression choices across rounds; humans initially resist adopting expressions from partners perceived as AI but gradually yield to conformity pressure. These findings provide evidence that AI composition can shape the emergence, content, and perceived legitimacy of group norms, making agent proportion and transparency important design variables for human-AI systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Fairness-Aware Multimodal Transformer Modeling for Real-Time Student Attention Estimation

Automated student-attention estimation can support learning analytics, but aggregate predictive metrics can conceal demographic disparities. This study evaluates fairness-aware multimodal temporal models on DIPSER, a naturalistic classroom dataset combining facial images, wearable-sensor measurements, attention annotations, and automatically inferred demographic metadata. Three baselines are compared across 10 training seeds: a Visual GRU, a Sensor GRU, and a Residual Fusion Transformer. The multimodal model achieves the best mean test performance (MAE 0.283, RMSE 0.363) and the lowest worst-group error among the evaluated baselines, although its gain over the Visual GRU is modest. Gender- and age-targeted MAE-gap regularization reduces disparities on validation data, but these gains do not consistently transfer to held-out subjects or repeated subject-level splits. On an NVIDIA A100-SXM4-40GB GPU, the warm end-to-end pipeline averages 50.65 ms per prediction window at a one-second stride, while the temporal model itself requires 1.02 ms. The findings show that multimodal fusion can modestly improve prediction and worst-group performance, but validation-level fairness gains should not be assumed to generalize. Robust fairness assessment therefore requires subgroup-aware evaluation, repeated subject-level validation, and larger, better balanced demographic samples.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Meeting the Coming Wave: The Emerging Politics of AI and Work across 33 Parliaments

A new politics of artificial intelligence and work is taking shape across party systems, but comparative politics has yet to map it. Using 1,514,950 parliamentary speeches from 33 parliaments (2023-2026), we show this politics follows a different logic than political economy expects. Research anticipates that technological disruption generates demands for compensation; instead, compensation accounts for just 2.3% of response-frame mentions, while enablement and investment dominate (55.2%), regulation and restriction follow (21.8%), and training (20.6%) appears at similar rates across families. Parties disagree instead over what AI means for work and how far this technology should be restrained. The mainstream and radical right support unrestricted enablement; the left is critical but divided on remedy. Social democrats stay adoption-oriented; greens split evenly. The radical left is the clearest force for restriction. The AI conflict thus concerns not compensation after disruption, but whether politics should enable technological change or govern its trajectory.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

MultiGhostBench: A Multilingual Benchmark for Long-Form LLM-Generated Text Attribution under Distribution Shifts

While existing work on LLM authorship attribution (AA) has made progress, available benchmarks remain limited, often focusing on English, controlled settings, or relatively outdated models, with the few multilingual studies considering only relatively short texts. We introduce MultiGhostBench, a multilingual benchmark comprising 928 books generated by five recent LLMs across six languages and three scripts, with an average length of approximately 59K words per book. The benchmark supports evaluation under domain, author, and language shifts. Evaluation of representative AA methods shows that no single method consistently performs best across settings, and performance generally degrades under distribution shifts. Transformer-based detectors can retain generator-related information across languages, although transfer effectiveness varies by language pair, whereas statistical and fingerprint-based detectors are more language-dependent. We envision MultiGhostBench as a valuable resource for the development and evaluation of robust AA methods. The dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/GrecoMT/MultiGhostBench.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Addressing Trust in AI Systems through Education: A Didactic Perspective

Machine learning (ML) education faces two persistent and connected obstacles: many educational tools present ML as an opaque black box, which leaves learners with a superficial understanding, and this same opacity prevents users from forming the calibrated trust that appropriate reliance on AI systems requires. We present ICE-T, a didactic framework that integrates three mutually reinforcing facets: intermodal transfer grounded in Bruner's enactive, iconic, and symbolic modes of representation, computational thinking operationalized through the Use-Modify-Create progression, and explanatory thinking supported by a process model. Connecting the framework to the empirical literature on algorithm aversion, AI literacy, and mental model formation, and to systematic reviews of the K-12 ML activity landscape, we argue that the three facets supply the cognitive mechanisms that the trust calibration literature identifies as drivers of appropriate reliance: representational richness, graduated process control, and the capacity to contextualize errors. On this basis, we propose that trust calibration be treated as an explicit educational objective, with ICE-T as a principled and scalable means of achieving it.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Rights by Architecture: A Human-Compatible Sociotechnical Layer for Digital Protection Across Regulatory Regimes

Digital rights increasingly exist in law but remain difficult to exercise through the information systems that mediate them. Using disciplined conceptual synthesis and problematization, this critical-conceptual IS paper explains the gap through the interaction of legal heterogeneity, conflicting organizational and commercial incentives, fragmented architectures, and asymmetrical control over rights-relevant acts. It then theorizes a human-compatible rights layer: a governed sociotechnical capability for standardized, machine-readable, bidirectional, and jurisdictionally plural communication of requests, consent, refusal, withdrawal, objection, records, and support. Comparing California-style opt-out signals, the EU's mixed lawful-basis regime, and P3P, DNT, GPC, and ADPC, the paper derives seven normative requirements, develops rights by architecture as a bounded emancipatory policy argument, and treats a proposed GDPR provision on automated and machine-readable privacy management as a policy case for moving from banner-based compliance toward rights-supporting digital infrastructure.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

When Persona Attributes Improve Population Alignment in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to predict the responses of human participants in survey panels. Towards that goal, persona prompting has recently emerged as a technique to inform and align large pretrained language models. Persona prompting refers to the practice of using short textual descriptions of 'personas' in prompts to steer the LLM's generations. Personas describe individuals through different attributes such as their socio-demographics, attitudes, or behaviors, with the aim of aligning LLMs to produce responses that correlate with the corresponding human responses. Yet, recent work has produced mixed and partly conflicting results of persona prompting without clear patterns of success and failure. Among the few consistent findings is that the selection of persona attributes matters, and that using more attributes does not necessarily lead to better performance. It remains unclear how different attribute selection methods perform and how to choose among them. In this paper, we propose that observed human response variation of a survey question is a potential explanation for the mixed performance observed so far. In addition, we compare the performance of persona prompting associated with different methods for selecting persona attributes. We evaluate these methods on four different (general) social surveys across two countries, six LLMs, and twenty prediction tasks per survey. Our work helps to identify when persona prompting can be expected to be useful in survey prediction tasks, and provides new insights on the effectiveness of different attribute selection methods for LLM-based survey prediction using persona prompting.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Collective creativity in hybrid societies

Generative AI is changing how cultural artifacts are created and circulated, and with it our understanding of creativity itself. Researchers disagree about whether these tools enrich or impoverish culture, and we argue that much of that disagreement comes from conflating two distinct components of creativity: novelty, a property of single artifacts, and diversity, a property of populations. We argue further that creativity in the context of generative AI is best understood as a property of hybrid collectives, or populations of interacting people and algorithms, rather than of individuals. AI-assisted ideation reliably raises the novelty of individual output while narrowing diversity in the aggregate, but this is not an inevitable consequence of putting machines in the loop. Because humans and models search in complementary ways, mixed groups can outperform and out-diversify groups of either kind alone, and machine-discovered solutions can enter human culture and persist there. What decides the outcome is composition: which agents are present, in what proportion, and how they are connected. The question is no longer whether AI helps or harms creativity, but which mixtures let individual gains accumulate without eroding collective diversity.

cs.AI↗