Related papers: Learning to Represent Human Motives for Goal-direc…
Current theoretical and computational models of dopamine-based reinforcement learning are largely rooted in the classical behaviorist tradition, and envision the organism as a purely reactive recipient of rewards and punishments, with…
Decision-making is a cognitively intensive task that requires synthesizing relevant information from multiple unstructured sources, weighing competing factors, and incorporating subjective user preferences. Existing methods, including large…
We argue that relationships between Web pages are functions of the user's intent. We identify a class of Web tasks - information-gathering - that can be facilitated by a search engine that provides links to pages which are related to the…
Intelligent physical systems as embodied cognitive systems must perform high-level reasoning while concurrently managing an underlying control architecture. The link between cognition and control must manage the problem of converting…
Multimodal large-scale models have significantly advanced the development of web agents, enabling perception and interaction with digital environments akin to human cognition. In this paper, we argue that web agents must first acquire…
Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms,…
Assistive robots have the potential to help people perform everyday tasks. However, these robots first need to learn what it is their user wants them to do. Teaching assistive robots is hard for inexperienced users, elderly users, and users…
With cross-disciplinary academic interests increasing and academic advising resources over capacity, the importance of exploring data-assisted methods to support student decision making has never been higher. We build on the findings and…
Understanding human activities and movements on the Web is not only important for computational social scientists but can also offer valuable guidance for the design of online systems for recommendations, caching, advertising, and…
Readers can have different goals with respect to the text that they are reading. Can these goals be decoded from their eye movements over the text? In this work, we examine for the first time whether it is possible to distinguish between…
The ranking incentives of many authors of Web pages play an important role in the Web dynamics. That is, authors who opt to have their pages highly ranked for queries of interest, often respond to rankings for these queries by manipulating…
People use web search engines to find information before forming opinions, which can lead to practical decisions with different levels of impact. The cognitive effort of search can leave opinionated users vulnerable to cognitive biases,…
Web search is among the most frequent online activities. Whereas traditional information retrieval techniques focus on the information need behind a user query, previous work has shown that user behaviour and interaction can provide…
When designing communicative visualizations, we often focus on goals that seek to convey patterns, relations, or comparisons (cognitive learning objectives). We pay less attention to affective intents--those that seek to influence or…
This research explores how human-defined goals influence the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) through purpose-conditioned cognition. Using financial prediction tasks, we show that revealing the downstream use (e.g., predicting stock…
Explainable AI (XAI) aims to improve user understanding and decisions when using AI models. However, despite innovations in XAI, recent user evaluations reveal that this goal remains elusive. Understanding human cognition can help explain…
Many current applications use recommendations in order to modify the natural user behavior, such as to increase the number of sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the final recommendation objective and the…
Our goals fundamentally shape how we experience the world. For example, when we are hungry, we tend to view objects in our environment according to whether or not they are edible (or tasty). Alternatively, when we are cold, we may view the…
Robotic systems are more present in our society everyday. In human-robot environments, it is crucial that end-users may correctly understand their robotic team-partners, in order to collaboratively complete a task. To increase action…
Web search is among the most ubiquitous online activities, commonly used to acquire new knowledge and to satisfy learning-related objectives through informational search sessions. The importance of learning as an outcome of web search has…