Hear You in Silence: Designing for Active Listening in Human Interaction with Conversational Agents Using Context-Aware Pacing

In human conversation, empathic dialogue requires nuanced temporal cues indicating whether the conversational partner is paying attention. This type of "active listening" is overlooked in the design of Conversational Agents (CAs), which use the same pacing for one conversation. To model the temporal cues in human conversation, we need CAs that dynamically adjust response pacing according to user input. We qualitatively analyzed ten cases of active listening to distill five context-aware pacing strategies: Reflective Silence, Facilitative Silence, Empathic Silence, Holding Space, and Immediate Response. In a between-subjects study (N=50) with two conversational scenarios (relationship and career-support), the context-aware agent scored higher than static-pacing control on perceived human-likeness, smoothness, and interactivity, supporting deeper self-disclosure and higher engagement. In the career support scenario, the CA yielded higher perceived listening quality and affective trust. This work shows how insights from human conversation like context-aware pacing can empower the design of more empathic human-AI communication.

Breast Ultrasound Tumor Generation via Mask Generator and Text-Guided Network:A Clinically Controllable Framework with Downstream Evaluation

The development of robust deep learning models for breast ultrasound (BUS) image analysis is significantly constrained by the scarcity of expert-annotated data. To address this limitation, we propose a clinically controllable generative framework for synthesizing BUS images. This framework integrates clinical descriptions with structural masks to generate tumors, enabling fine-grained control over tumor characteristics such as morphology, echogencity, and shape. Furthermore, we design a semantic-curvature mask generator, which synthesizes structurally diverse tumor masks guided by clinical priors. During inference, synthetic tumor masks serve as input to the generative framework, producing highly personalized synthetic BUS images with tumors that reflect real-world morphological diversity. Quantitative evaluations on six public BUS datasets demonstrate the significant clinical utility of our synthetic images, showing their effectiveness in enhancing downstream breast cancer diagnosis tasks. Furthermore, visual Turing tests conducted by experienced sonographers confirm the realism of the generated images, indicating the framework's potential to support broader clinical applications.

Deep interval prediction model with gradient descend optimization method for short-term wind power prediction

The application of wind power interval prediction for power systems attempts to give more comprehensive support to dispatchers and operators of the grid. Lower upper bound estimation (LUBE) method is widely applied in interval prediction. However, the existing LUBE approaches are trained by meta-heuristic optimization, which is either time-consuming or show poor effect when the LUBE model is complex. In this paper, a deep interval prediction method is designed in the framework of LUBE and an efficient gradient descend (GD) training approach is proposed to train the LUBE model. In this method, the long short-term memory is selected as a representative to show the modelling approach. The architecture of the proposed model consists of three parts, namely the long short-term memory module, the fully connected layers and the rank ordered module. Two loss functions are specially designed for implementing the GD training method based on the root mean square back propagation algorithm. To verify the performance of the proposed model, conventional LUBE models, as well as popular statistic interval prediction models are compared in numerical experiments. The results show that the proposed approach performs best in terms of effectiveness and efficiency with average 45% promotion in quality of prediction interval and 66% reduction of time consumptions compared to traditional LUBE models.