Many scientific and policy decisions require estimating the total number of target objects across a large image collection. Exhaustive human labeling is often infeasible, while raw model predictions can be biased, especially under domain shift. Recent human-AI estimation methods combine imperfect model predictions with limited human verification to obtain reliable collection-level estimates. However, existing work provides little guidance on how practitioners should choose among models, estimators, and adaptation strategies for a new deployment. We study these choices within a common human-in-the-loop counting framework across 12 tasks spanning biomedical microscopy, ground-level and aerial wildlife surveys, and overhead imagery of urban structures. Our results show that modern multimodal models provide a strong, training-free starting point for many tasks, while fine-tuned detectors become more advantageous at larger labeling budgets and across repeated deployments. Estimation efficiency improves further when model predictions are used to prioritize which units humans label, rather than sampling uniformly. We also find that each model's ranking quality can be estimated with a small pilot set, yielding practical guidance for selecting strategies on new counting tasks. In a field deployment on aerial pronghorn surveys, a task-specific adaptation of these methods meets the survey's $\pm 5\%$ tolerance after reviewing a median of only $3.2\%$ of collected images.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14380
Children's peer conflicts increasingly play out in group chats, where tone and timing are stripped away, and a hurtful message is easier to send than to say aloud. We present Lilo, a multi-agent conversational system that lets children practice such conversations, so they are better prepared when they encounter them in real digital communication. In Lilo, the child joins two AI-driven peers mid-argument, coached by a mentor character, also named Lilo, through a Stop-Think-Act traffic light. Through an exploratory study with 28 children (aged 9-11), we examine how children engage with Lilo's simulated peer conflict and the mentor's traffic-light interventions. The study included an intervention with Lilo, surveys before and after the intervention, and exit interviews. Participants reported significantly higher self-efficacy for coping with unpleasant messages after their interaction with Lilo. They felt safe experimenting, knowing nothing they wrote would be held against them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14260
Recent work shows that multimodal agents increasingly self-improve without recurring human annotation. However, each self-improvement mechanism is designed and evaluated within a single scenario, leaving its preconditions unverified under cross-scenario transfer. This survey investigates the structural source of asymmetric mechanism transfer across four scenarios: multimodal reasoning, multimodal generation, GUI and Web navigation, and embodied manipulation. We first formalize the self-evolving multimodal agent by four criteria and a differentia of self-reference, and adopt the three-stage self-evolving loop of experience generation, feedback acquisition, and update consolidation as our analytical framework to position the scenarios along ceilings on rollout count and feedback fidelity. Comparing self-evolving with fixed loops within each scenario separates the limitations that the scenario imposes from those inherent in the self-evolving design. We then recast each mechanism as a trade-off that raises a scarce factor by presupposing a task-structural resource, such as output equivalence or checkable outcomes, and judge it portable, conditional, blocked, or redundant across scenarios. We attribute the asymmetry to divergent combinations of scarce factors and resources across opposite transfer directions, and identify the matched-budget measurements that could overturn these still untested verdicts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14256
Farm security in the UK rests on thinner evidence than its cost suggests. We ran a PRISMA guided review: twelve searches of Web of Science and Scopus on 2nd -4th November 2026 returned 1,183 records (761 unique), and grey-literature and hand-searches added 35 assessed sources. We synthesised 96 database records and 24 grey sources narratively. UK peer-reviewed evidence is small (16 records), and the main UK survey of crime and farmer mental health has 80 responses. Cost estimates rest on insurer claims: NFU Mutual put UK rural crime at £41.5 million in 2025, with livestock theft up almost 30% to about £4.5 million and dog attacks on livestock costing £1.95 million. The Home Office states that agricultural crime cannot be separately identified in its central data. We found no independent evaluation of cameras, sensors, trackers or marking; light and sound deterrents lost effect within one to five months in a systematic review of anti-predator interventions; and no study examined how often farm gates are left open or what follows. Camera-trap AI papers report accuracy on ecological datasets, none at a farm gate in the records we found, and in one comparison machine learning detected 41% of wildlife against 81% for analysts. We argue, as an inference from these gaps and not as a demonstrated effect, that continuous gate-level AI-mediated monitoring, as implemented in Fieldmark AI, would be highly beneficial for UK farm security. It would create the farm-level, time-stamped record that no official source holds, verify events that periodic human checks miss, resolve whether foxes, dogs or people were responsible, and give every other security measure something to be tested against. No study has yet shown that it reduces loss, and we set out the evaluation needed to show it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13933
Organizations use engineers' token spend to monitor AI adoption, set budgets, and measure productivity, but the metric's relationship with engineering output is unclear. We link five weeks of token usage in coding agents to the commits of 404 engineers at JetBrains, and analyze a company survey of 412 employees. We find that token spend varied mostly between engineers, and which engineers spent the most stayed largely the same over the five weeks. Among weeks with similar commit counts, the 90th percentile of spend was 39 to 240 times the 10th. Within an engineer, doubling spend was associated with about 10% more commits. Available work metrics explained 38% of the variation in spend between engineers and 13% of the week-to-week variation within an engineer. In the survey, respondents in technical roles reported in nearly nine of ten agent evaluations using agents for tasks beyond coding, such as analysis, research, and planning. Token spend therefore measures how much engineers use agents across many kinds of work and not the outcome and value of that work. We recommend using token spend at most for resource accounting, and evaluating agent-assisted work with evidence about tasks and outcomes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13396
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed many areas of artificial intelligence (AI), but their substantial resource requirements limit their deployment on mobile and edge devices. Although LLMs have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various applications, the next challenge is deploying these models on resource-limited edge devices. Recent innovations in software optimizations and specialized hardware have made it feasible to deploy LLMs on edge devices. Edge deployment offers benefits including local data processing, cost savings, reduced latency, and personalized responses. This paper reviews the latest techniques that make the deployment of LLMs on edge devices feasible.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09075
Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) answer at greater length than a request needs. We ask whether a training-free controller inside the decoding loop can remove that surplus while preserving content, judged against the simplest possible baseline: truncating the model's own answer to the same length. An entropy-gated logits processor removes 25.5-34.9% of tokens on MT-Bench development questions and 19.9-34.2% on a sealed test split within pre-registered BERTScore non-inferiority margins, yet we prove and confirm by audit that its output is always a prefix of the unmodified answer: the saving is truncation. A survey of 23 training-free mechanism families finds none that selects content better than truncation without oracle labels. We therefore introduce Entailment-Licensed In-Decoding Elision (ELIDE), which, at each sentence boundary, withholds a span from the reader only when a natural-language inference model judges it entailed by the text already shown, while leaving the model's generation unchanged. ELIDE beats matched-length truncation on three model families, but reading 936 of its elisions on 670 public prompts shows that 59% harm the answer, a failure that no automatic measure detects. Scoping the licence to its discourse unit reduces the harmful share to about one elision in ten on two fresh tests.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08975
Fish stock assessments need fish lengths paired with species from far more places than trained surveyors can reach. Recreational divers already visit many of those places, but measuring a fish underwater has required trained observers or specialist equipment. We present FishSense Lite, which recovers fish length from a single photograph taken with a recreational dive camera, a dive laser pointer, and a 3D-printed mount. The diver aims the laser at a fish and takes a picture; afterward, the dot's position in the image gives the range to the fish, and the range turns the fish's size in the image into a length. A citizen-science program, trained by the system's builders, taught its own divers and collected lengths paired with species for 73 wild fish across seven open-water dives. On seven wild fish also measured by an underwater stereo-imaging system, the two instruments agreed without detectable bias (mean difference +0.8%). On rigid targets of known length, FishSense Lite recovered every target to within 1.3%, and 99% of 1,055 frames fell within a 15% error budget. From the error sources we measure, we derive a field protocol: calibrate against a dive slate on every dive, photograph fish within 15 degrees of perpendicular and beyond 1 m, and take at least ten frames of each.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08732
LLM-based digital twins aim to predict how individuals would respond in new settings from representations of their prior responses. Existing evidence that compression of survey histories need not reduce predictive accuracy suggests that representation structure, rather than information volume alone, may be an important design choice. We study BDE, a fixed representation that organizes each respondent's survey history into Background, Decision procedure, and Evaluation. We evaluate it on Twin-2K-500 (Toubia et al., 2025) by predicting each respondent's held-out answers on 17 tasks. In a paired evaluation with 100 respondents, a fully inferred BDE profile improves overall accuracy over the raw survey transcript by 1.27 percentage points (pp) on gpt-5.4-nano (p < 0.01) and 1.19 pp on gpt-5.4-mini (p < 0.001). Three analyses then examine the schema, extraction depth, and component composition. Against a length-matched free-form profile written from the same transcript by the same extractor, BDE improves pricing accuracy on both simulators (2.15 pp on nano, p < 0.01; 1.38 pp on mini, p < 0.05), while its overall advantage is significant only on nano (1.05 pp, p < 0.05). Allowing deeper inference during extraction yields no statistically significant gain on either simulator. By contrast, adding Evaluation to a Background--Decision procedure profile improves overall accuracy by 1.44 pp on nano (p < 0.001) and 1.22 pp on mini (p < 0.001). These results indicate that the advantage over raw transcripts is not explained by compression or length alone, and attribute it primarily to profile composition rather than deeper extraction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08730
Neural networks are likely to be among the most consequential artefacts in human history. As these systems become more capable and autonomous, their potential to cause societal harm also grows, making AI safety one of the defining challenges of our time. Yet we continue to build increasingly powerful systems without fully understanding how they work, how they will behave in unfamiliar situations, or how to reliably control them. Mechanistic interpretability offers a path towards understanding these systems by studying their internal representations and computations, with the aim of evaluating, predicting, and controlling behaviour. We survey mechanistic interpretability for AI safety in order to answer the question: Does understanding how models work actually make them safer? We place mechanistic interpretability in the broader context of interpretability research and compare its mechanistic evidence with behavioural evaluation. We introduce the foundations of mechanistic interpretability, including features, polysemanticity, transformer computation, and circuits, and survey methods for feature extraction and analysis, circuit discovery and causal verification, explaining intermediate representations in natural language, learning dynamics, and training-data attribution. Beyond surveying existing methods, we propose a unified framework for evaluating mechanistic interpretability claims and characterise six research orientations by their goals, assumptions, and trade-offs. Finally, we examine how mechanistic understanding can support AI safety, including knowledge editing, steering, and monitoring, and assess its limitations, failure modes, open problems, and relationship to behavioural safety measures. We also release a repository of code notebooks with worked examples that reproduce key findings from surveyed methods, allowing readers to build intuition through hands-on experimentation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08438
Armed conflict can increase the value of Generative AI (GenAI) while undermining the conditions required for its responsible use. Yet the perspectives of community-based humanitarian responders working under these conditions remain underrepresented in responsible AI research. We examine GenAI use in Sudan's Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), a community-led humanitarian network, through an exploratory survey of 89 respondents and 15 semi-structured interviews with GenAI users and non-users. War reconfigures GenAI's role, making it most useful where its outputs are hardest to verify. ERR responders turned to GenAI when conflict made human expertise difficult or dangerous to reach. However, participants cautioned that GenAI could not independently establish rapidly changing local conditions, and that relying on its outputs could lead to harmful decisions when human verification was difficult. Risks arose before GenAI was used. For some volunteers, carrying a phone or accessing the internet could expose them to danger. Others were concerned that sharing sensitive beneficiary or operational information with GenAI could put people at risk. Participants feared that AI-assisted reports could undermine their credibility with donors, whose funding sustains the food and medical aid ERRs provide. Access to GenAI was uneven, and volunteers using it sometimes relied on colleagues with relevant expertise or local knowledge to verify its results. Our findings show that responsible use of GenAI during conflict depends not only on model performance or individual adoption, but also on whether responders can safely access these tools, verify their outputs against local conditions, and recognize when limiting or avoiding GenAI is the more responsible choice.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07874
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into cybersecurity has transformed vulnerability assessment, but it has also produced a trustworthiness crisis driven by the unchecked proliferation of "AI slop." These artifacts, hallucinated vulnerabilities, plausible but incorrect patches, and semantically repackaged bug reports, impose a cognitive burden on human triage pipelines that mirrors a denial-of-service attack. This paper surveys the empirical evidence, identifies a unifying mechanism, and traces a path toward trustworthy triage. We formalize a taxonomy of AI slop grounded in a structured literature review and dissect its root cause: the gap between the causal deductive reasoning of security experts and the autoregressive probabilistic generation of current LLMs. We operationalize this gap through a measurable proxy, the Deductive Coverage Score, and show that chain-of-thought prompting and tool-using agents narrow but do not close it. We review mitigation strategies and argue that passive detection and watermarking target provenance rather than correctness, facing fundamental entropy constraints. We instead advocate for active neuro-symbolic verification, mapping each pipeline component to prior systems with documented limits on security inputs. Finally, we specify two evaluation instruments, CVE-Bench and Slop-Score, including dataset construction, metric formulas, and anti-gaming provisions. By shifting evaluation from linguistic fluency to mathematical verifiability, this survey provides a roadmap for securing emerging AI-driven triage systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25667
Cancer screening disparities persist across the U.S., yet the patient-reported barriers driving low uptake remain poorly characterized at scale. While clinical surveys capture structured responses, they miss the organic, unsolicited discourse where patients candidly describe real-world obstacles. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale analysis of over 56,000 posts across six cancer-specific Reddit communities to surface barriers to cancer screening among U.S. patients. We apply a pipeline combining keyword filtering, barrier triage, open coding, and codebook synthesis to systematically extract and categorize patient-reported barriers from 576 U.S.-located posts. Our qualitative analysis reveals recurring structural, informational, and psychosocial barriers that vary meaningfully by cancer type and community context. These findings lay the groundwork for future work aimed at proactively identifying and addressing barriers at scale - spanning a broader range of cancer types and populations - and informing the design of targeted interventions, navigator programs, and health system policies that translate patient-reported obstacles into actionable solutions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07113
Ecological monitoring increasingly relies on camera traps and aerial surveys that generate large image collections. High-recall animal detectors can localize candidate animals at scale. However, they also produce many detections that still require expert review, including false positives, ambiguous cases, and animals difficult to identify at the species level. Since exhaustive review requires substantial effort, we propose training-free active prototype triage, where reviewed detections become reusable evidence to (1) Resolve supported foreground classes, (2) Clear likely background false positives, or (3) Defer insufficiently supported cases for expert review. Across camera-trap and aerial datasets, foreground recognition and false-positive rejection benefit from different pretrained representations: BioCLIP2 provides foreground evidence while DINOv3 provides background evidence, reducing erroneous foreground clearing while improving automatic foreground recovery. Deferring unsupported cases avoids the higher error rates caused by forced decisions. Compared with confidence-thresholded multiclass k-NN and uncertainty-sampling logistic regression, prototype triage improves foreground recovery while maintaining competitive or lower review burden. Acquisition goes beyond class discovery: even after classes are represented, prototype choice determines how reliably evidence propagates through the remaining detections. Our results suggest that once animal localization reaches high recall, the challenge shifts from finding animals to deciding which examples to review, how to reuse them, and when evidence does not support an automatic decision.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.01466
Moving robot swarms from simulation into the physical world can be difficult because small discrepancies in hardware, timing and communication can cascade across interacting robots and alter group behaviour. This challenge is known as the reality gap. When swarms operate in human environments, a second challenge emerges: a perceptual gap between what the swarm physically does and what human onlookers actually perceive. This study examines the same decentralised coordination code deployed across three robotic swarms-tabletop, aerial and human-scale mobile manipulators-during live artistic performances. We find that while the underlying algorithms executed reliably on all three platforms, physical embodiment drastically altered visible motion-distorting execution timescales by more than a factor of three and reshaping trajectory geometry. More importantly, audience surveys revealed that human interpretation does not mirror technical success: how observers attribute meaning (perceived purpose) and how they react emotionally (comfort versus threat) depend heavily on physical form. Meaning attribution and emotional responses did not vary together. Our results demonstrate that successfully transferring swarm software to physical hardware is insufficient for real-world deployment. Addressing the reality gap does not guarantee that the resulting collective motion will be readily interpreted by human observers. Swarms destined for human environments must be engineered not only for decentralised stability but also for the expressive physical dynamics through which humans interpret collective motion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05244
Dexterous robotic hands are increasingly coupled to large-scale human data and foundation models, yet progress in hardware, representation learning and evaluation is often assessed separately. This survey reviews work from January 2024 to early November 2026, with earlier studies included to establish technical lineages. We organize the literature into five interdependent layers: hardware; data collection and curation; cross-embodiment transfer; learning and foundation models; and evaluation and applications. Human hand-object understanding and tactile sensing provide two cross-cutting perspectives. A system-level architecture, comparative tables and five case analyses connect design choices across these layers. We distinguish within-study experimental comparisons from heterogeneous corpus statistics, vendor specifications and company-reported results. Three conclusions emerge. First, the value of human data depends on kinematic, visual and contact alignment, not recording volume alone. Second, shared action representations and foundation policies do not remove embodiment-specific constraints on force, latency and contact. Third, task completion is insufficient to establish physical correctness or deployment readiness. Evidence remains limited for zero-shot transfer of contact-rich skills between morphologically different hands, long-duration reliability, and cross-sensor tactile generalization. We identify eleven open problems and propose reporting interfaces and controlled comparisons that can make full-stack progress more measurable. The review is a structured narrative synthesis rather than a pooled performance ranking or an exhaustive systematic review.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06724
We introduce LifeVal, a benchmark evaluating AI model performance on personalized agentic consumer tasks. LifeVal covers the most valuable life tasks that a personalized digital superassistant could automate, representing over 1.7 trillion US dollars in annual willingness-to-pay across 148 consumer task categories (e.g., managing finances, moving apartments, searching for a job, finding childcare). To construct our activity distribution, we conducted a new survey of willingness-to-pay for a digital superassistant across a demographically representative sample of over 3,800 consumers, cross-referencing our results against the American Time Use Survey (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025) and the Multinational Time Use Study (Fisher et al., 2025). For the most valuable consumer activities, we recruited task creators to create AI evaluation tasks personalized using real ChatGPT conversations and memories, reference files, and personal context. Task creators had to pass our expertise threshold (including personally completing the task multiple times and seeing the results through in their real lives for over a year) and also write a rubric, ensuring that our evaluation measured the best personalized completion for that task. All tasks had to pass at least three rounds of human quality-control before acceptance into our final evaluation sets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06687
Reported performance in small astronomical image datasets can reflect object reuse, field-of-view differences, acquisition settings, and catalogue-derived properties as well as astronomical morphology. We designed \dataset{} to measure these effects in a four-class task comprising galaxies, globular clusters, nebulae, and open clusters. The dataset contains 370 catalogue-supported physical objects, each represented by three Digitised Sky Survey FITS bands, and uses a group-constrained split of 222 training, 75 validation, and 73 test objects. We compared a custom CNN--Transformer trained from scratch with ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 and ViT-B/16 under an adaptive full-field representation, a common angular field, and two central-region-masked controls, using three fixed seeds. In the one-pass object-independent test, mean balanced accuracy on the adaptive view was $0.773\pm0.014$, $0.874\pm0.054$, and $0.866\pm0.023$ for the custom model, ResNet-50, and ViT-B/16, respectively. No primary architecture contrast rejected its null after Holm correction; ResNet-50 and ViT-B/16 differed by 0.007 balanced-accuracy points (95\% cluster-bootstrap interval $[-0.048,0.062]$). Controls based on acquisition and catalogue metadata reached 0.721--0.735, and central-region-masked adaptive views reached 0.731--0.800. These results demonstrate generalisation to unseen physical objects, but also show that image context, acquisition settings, and catalogue-derived object properties carry substantial class information. In this regime, high accuracy cannot be interpreted as evidence that a classifier learned target morphology, and the comparison does not isolate architecture from pretraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06484
We present the Rohbau3D-Semantics dataset, which adds dense semantic and instance-level labels to laser scans of the previously released Rohbau3D domain data from shell construction sites. The dataset comprises 504 point cloud scenes from 14 survey sites, each captured with a terrestrial laser scanner and stored in a scanner-centered local coordinate system. Unlike point clouds sampled from reconstructed meshes or synthetic building models, the data preserve the characteristic properties of real laser scanning, including non-uniform sampling, measurement artifacts, reflections, and fine geometric detail. Combined with manual labels, expert oversight during pointwise annotation, and full-scene review, this yields a high-quality benchmark for semantic scene understanding in complex built environments. The dataset includes 17 class labels of building components and one background class, along with instance annotations for object-level analysis. In addition to the 3D point clouds, the release also provides scripts for deriving geometrically aligned panoramic and cube-map representations of color, LiDAR reflection intensity, depth, surface normals, semantic labels, and instance labels from the 3D arrays. We describe the acquisition pipeline, annotation protocol, quality-control process, and panorama-generation procedure, and provide benchmark splits and baseline experiments for semantic segmentation. By combining precise terrestrial laser scans, dense annotations, and a wide variety of shell-construction scenes, Rohbau3D-Semantics bridges the gap among synthetic indoor datasets, mesh-derived benchmarks, and smaller construction-specific resources. The dataset is intended to support research on 3D scene understanding, construction-site analytics, and multimodal scene analysis in the built environment. Access and download the full dataset via this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06180
Graphs play an increasingly important role in large language model (LLM) systems, supporting structural reasoning, knowledge grounding, retrieval, and memory. As these systems evolve toward the agentic era, graphs also organize execution dependencies and multi-agent communication, linking intermediate observations and retained information to subsequent decisions. However, understanding their contribution requires distinguishing the function of each graph operation, the component responsible for its computation, and the subsequent use of its output. This survey introduces an operation-level role--locus taxonomy for reasoning, knowledge and evidence, retrieval and memory, execution, and coordination. We compare how graph observations and external computations guide decisions, how memory representations and updates support later tasks, and how dependencies constrain execution and information delivery. These comparisons distinguish improvements in local metrics from downstream task performance while retaining the conditions under which results were reported. We then organize benchmarks, comparison designs, process diagnostics, and system costs into an evaluation framework. Finally, we identify open challenges in adaptive computation and stopping, memory maintenance, and dependency-aware recovery. The survey provides a basis for assessing when graph mechanisms are useful and for evaluating their effects across components and stages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05953