Related papers: Mitigating Unhelpfulness in Emotional Support Conv…
Model fairness (a.k.a., bias) has become one of the most critical problems in a wide range of AI applications. An unfair model in autonomous driving may cause a traffic accident if corner cases (e.g., extreme weather) cannot be fairly…
AI systems and technologies that can interact with humans in real time face a communication dilemma: when to offer assistance and how frequently. Overly frequent or contextually redundant assistance can cause users to disengage, undermining…
In emotionally supportive conversations, well-intended positivity can sometimes misfire, leading to responses that feel dismissive, minimizing, or unrealistically optimistic. We examine this phenomenon of incongruent positivity as…
Computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) manages to facilitate second-language (L2) learners to practice pronunciation skills by offering timely and instructive feedback. To examine pronunciation proficiency from multiple facets,…
AI companion chatbots are increasingly used for emotional support, with prior work in the domain predominantly documenting their mixed psychosocial impacts, including both increased emotional expression and heightened loneliness. However,…
Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant…
This paper investigates how collaborative AI systems can enhance user agency in identifying and evaluating misinformation on social media platforms. Traditional methods, such as personal judgment or basic fact-checking, often fall short…
In many real world contexts, successful human-AI collaboration requires humans to productively integrate complementary sources of information into AI-informed decisions. However, in practice human decision-makers often lack understanding of…
As reliance on AI systems for decision-making grows, it becomes critical to ensure that human users can appropriately balance trust in AI suggestions with their own judgment, especially in high-stakes domains like healthcare. However, human…
Many cognitive approaches to well-being, such as recognizing and reframing unhelpful thoughts, have received considerable empirical support over the past decades, yet still lack truly widespread adoption in self-help format. A barrier to…
Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained…
Mutual misunderstanding in contemporary society does not arise merely because people hold different opinions or values. Even under the same observations, different subjects may form different inferential targets, state representations,…
Emotions are an integral part of human cognition and they guide not only our understanding of the world but also our actions within it. As such, whether we soothe or flame an emotion is not inconsequential. Recent work in conversational AI…
Language Models (LMs) have shown impressive performance in various natural language tasks. However, when it comes to natural language reasoning, LMs still face challenges such as hallucination, generating incorrect intermediate reasoning…
Multimodal models play a key role in empathy detection, but their performance can suffer when modalities provide conflicting cues. To understand these failures, we examine cases where unimodal and multimodal predictions diverge. Using…
AI-based writing assistants are ubiquitous, yet little is known about how users' mental models shape their use. We examine two types of mental models -- functional or related to what the system does, and structural or related to how the…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
In the contemporary landscape of social media, an alarming number of users express negative emotions, some of which manifest as strong suicidal intentions. This situation underscores a profound need for trained psychological counselors who…
With the rapid development of AI-based decision aids, different forms of AI assistance have been increasingly integrated into the human decision making processes. To best support humans in decision making, it is essential to quantitatively…
Intelligent tutoring systems have long enabled automated immediate feedback on student work when it is presented in a tightly structured format and when problems are very constrained, but reliably assessing free-form mathematical reasoning…