arXiv:2601.10824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social robots hold promise for reducing job interview anxiety, yet designing agents that provide both psychological safety and instructional guidance remains challenging. Through a three-phase iterative design study (N = 8), we empirically mapped this tension. Phase I revealed a “Safety-Guidance Gap”: while a Person-Centered Therapy (PCT) robot established safety (d = 3.27), users felt insufficiently coached. Phase II identified a “Scaffolding Paradox”: rigid feedback caused cognitive overload, while delayed feedback lacked specificity. […]

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We are entering a strange era of technology where the creators of our most advanced machines are no longer entirely sure what is happening inside them. Recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei admitted that while they don’t know if their AI models are conscious, they are “open to the idea.” Anthropic has even noticed internal activations within their models that mimic human anxiety, prompting them to implement “Model Welfare Assessments.” When the engineers building the future start worrying about […]

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Providing extensive context via prompting is vital for leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, lengthy contexts significantly increase inference latency, as the computational cost of self-attention grows quadratically with sequence length. To mitigate this issue, context compression-particularly soft prompt compressio-has emerged as a widely studied solution, which converts long contexts into shorter memory embeddings via a trained compressor. Existing methods typically compress the entire context indiscriminately into a set of memory tokens, requiring the compressor […]

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arXiv:2602.09207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making problems. Recent diffusion-based policies further improve RL by modeling complex, high-dimensional action distributions. However, existing diffusion policies primarily rely on statistical associations and fail to explicitly account for causal relationships among states, actions, and rewards, limiting their ability to identify which action components truly cause high returns. In this paper, we propose Causality-guided Diffusion Policy (CausalGDP), a unified framework […]

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arXiv:2602.23577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Suicide remains a pressing global public health concern. While social media platforms offer opportunities for early risk detection through online conversation trees, existing approaches face two major limitations: (1) They rely on predefined rules (e.g., quotes or relies) to log conversations that capture only a narrow spectrum of user interactions, and (2) They overlook hidden influences such as user conformity and suicide copycat behavior, which can significantly affect suicidal expression and propagation in […]

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This paper introduces a new framework for recovering causal graphs from observational data, leveraging the observation that the distribution of an effect, conditioned on its causes, remains invariant to changes in the prior distribution of those causes. This insight enables a direct test for potential causal relationships by checking the variance of their corresponding effect-cause conditional distributions across multiple downsampled subsets of the data. These subsets are selected to reflect different prior cause distributions, while preserving the effect-cause […]

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I’m looking for some opinions on the use of weight decay in RealNVP-style normalizing flows. My concern is that blindly applying standard weight decay (L2 on parameters) may be actively harmful in this setting. In RealNVP, each coupling layer is explicitly structured so that small weights push the transformation toward the identity map. With weight decay, we’re therefore not just regularizing capacity, we are actually biasing the model towards doing nothing. In flows, the identity transform is a […]

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[Updated on 2020-06-17: Add “exploration via disagreement” in the “Forward Dynamics” section. Exploitation versus exploration is a critical topic in Reinforcement Learning. We’d like the RL agent to find the best solution as fast as possible. However, in the meantime, committing to solutions too quickly without enough exploration sounds pretty bad, as it could lead to local minima or total failure. Modern RL algorithms that optimize for the best returns can achieve good exploitation quite efficiently, while exploration […]

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