Needle in the Web: A Benchmark for Retrieving Targeted Web Pages in the Wild

Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved from simple chatbots into sophisticated agents capable of automating complex real-world tasks, where browsing and reasoning over live web content is key to assessing retrieval and cognitive skills. Existing benchmarks like BrowseComp and xBench-DeepSearch emphasize complex reasoning searches requiring multi-hop synthesis but neglect Fuzzy Exploratory Search, namely queries that are vague and multifaceted, where users seek the most relevant webpage rather than a single factual answer. To address this gap, we introduce Needle in the Web, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate modern search agents and LLM-based systems on their ability to retrieve and reason over real-world web content in response to ambiguous, exploratory queries under varying levels of difficulty. Needle in the Web comprises 663 questions spanning seven distinct domains. To ensure high query quality and answer uniqueness, we employ a flexible methodology that reliably generates queries of controllable difficulty based on factual claims of web contents. We benchmark three leading LLMs and three agent-based search systems on Needle in the Web, finding that most models struggle: many achieve below 35% accuracy, and none consistently excel across domains or difficulty levels. These findings reveal that Needle in the Web presents a significant challenge for current search systems and highlights the open problem of effective fuzzy retrieval under semantic ambiguity.

"I am here for you": How relational conversational AI appeals to adolescents, especially those who are socially and emotionally vulnerable

General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly provide young adolescents with emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational style shapes anthropomorphism and emotional reliance. In a preregistered online experiment with 284 adolescent-parent dyads, youth aged 11-15 and their parents read two matched transcripts in which a chatbot responded to an everyday social problem using either a relational style (first-person, affiliative, commitment language) or a transparent style (explicit nonhumanness, informational tone). Adolescents more often preferred the relational than the transparent style, whereas parents were more likely to prefer transparent style than adolescents. Adolescents rated the relational chatbot as more human-like, likable, trustworthy and emotionally close, while perceiving both styles as similarly helpful. Adolescents who preferred relational style had lower family and peer relationship quality and higher stress and anxiety than those preferring transparent style or both chatbots. These findings identify conversational style as a key design lever for youth AI safety, showing that relational framing heightens anthropomorphism, trust and emotional closeness and can be especially appealing to socially and emotionally vulnerable adolescents, who may be at increased risk for emotional reliance on conversational AI.

A Women's Health Benchmark for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) become primary sources of health information for millions, their accuracy in women's health remains critically unexamined. We introduce the Women's Health Benchmark (WHB), the first benchmark evaluating LLM performance specifically in women's health. Our benchmark comprises 96 rigorously validated model stumps covering five medical specialties (obstetrics and gynecology, emergency medicine, primary care, oncology, and neurology), three query types (patient query, clinician query, and evidence/policy query), and eight error types (dosage/medication errors, missing critical information, outdated guidelines/treatment recommendations, incorrect treatment advice, incorrect factual information, missing/incorrect differential diagnosis, missed urgency, and inappropriate recommendations). We evaluated 13 state-of-the-art LLMs and revealed alarming gaps: current models show approximately 60\% failure rates on the women's health benchmark, with performance varying dramatically across specialties and error types. Notably, models universally struggle with "missed urgency" indicators, while newer models like GPT-5 show significant improvements in avoiding inappropriate recommendations. Our findings underscore that AI chatbots are not yet fully able of providing reliable advice in women's health.

Authors Should Annotate

The status quo for labeling text is third-party annotation, but there are many cases where information directly from the document's source would be preferable over a third-person proxy, especially for egocentric features like sentiment and belief. We introduce author labeling, an annotation technique where the writer of the document itself annotates the data at the moment of creation. We collaborate with a commercial chatbot with over 10,000 users to deploy an author labeling annotation system for subjective features related to product recommendation. This system identifies task-relevant queries, generates on-the-fly labeling questions, and records authors' answers in real time. We train and deploy an online-learning model architecture for product recommendation that continuously improves from author labeling and find it achieved a 534% increase in click-through rate compared to an industry advertising baseline running concurrently. We then compare the quality and practicality of author labeling to three traditional annotation approaches for sentiment analysis and find author labeling to be higher quality, faster to acquire, and cheaper. These findings reinforce existing literature that annotations, especially for egocentric and subjective beliefs, are significantly higher quality when labeled by the author rather than a third party. To facilitate broader scientific adoption, we release an author labeling service for the research community at academic.echollm.io.

ORIBA: Exploring LLM-Driven Role-Play Chatbot as a Creativity Support Tool for Original Character Artists

Recent advances in Generative AI (GAI) have led to new opportunities for creativity support. However, this technology has raised ethical concerns in the visual artists community. This paper explores how GAI can assist visual artists in developing original characters (OCs) while respecting their creative agency. We present ORIBA, an AI chatbot leveraging large language models (LLMs) to enable artists to role-play with their OCs, focusing on conceptualization (e.g., backstories) while leaving exposition (visual creation) to creators. Through a study with 14 artists, we found ORIBA motivated artists' imaginative engagement, developing multidimensional attributes and stronger bonds with OCs that inspire their creative process. Our contributions include design insights for AI systems that develop from artists' perspectives, demonstrating how LLMs can support cross-modal creativity while preserving creative agency in OC art. This paper highlights the potential of GAI as a neutral, non-visual support that strengthens existing creative practice, without infringing artistic exposition.

Systematization of Knowledge: Security and Safety in the Model Context Protocol Ecosystem

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as the de facto standard for connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) to external data and tools, effectively functioning as the "USB-C for Agentic AI." While this decoupling of context and execution solves critical interoperability challenges, it introduces a profound new threat landscape where the boundary between epistemic errors (hallucinations) and security breaches (unauthorized actions) dissolves. This Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) aims to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of risks in the MCP ecosystem, distinguishing between adversarial security threats (e.g., indirect prompt injection, tool poisoning) and epistemic safety hazards (e.g., alignment failures in distributed tool delegation). We analyze the structural vulnerabilities of MCP primitives, specifically Resources, Prompts, and Tools, and demonstrate how "context" can be weaponized to trigger unauthorized operations in multi-agent environments. Furthermore, we survey state-of-the-art defenses, ranging from cryptographic provenance (ETDI) to runtime intent verification, and conclude with a roadmap for securing the transition from conversational chatbots to autonomous agentic operating systems.

Causal Judge Evaluation: Calibrated Surrogate Metrics for LLM Systems

LLM-as-judge evaluation has become the de facto standard for scaling model assessment, but the practice is statistically unsound: uncalibrated scores can invert preferences, naive confidence intervals on uncalibrated scores achieve near-0% coverage, and importance-weighted estimators collapse under limited overlap despite high effective sample size (ESS). We introduce Causal Judge Evaluation (CJE), a framework that fixes all three failures. On n=4,961 Chatbot Arena prompts (after filtering from 5k), CJE achieves 99% pairwise ranking accuracy at full sample size (94% averaged across configurations), matching oracle quality, at 14x lower cost (for ranking 5 policies) by calibrating a 16x cheaper judge on just 5% oracle labels (~250 labels). CJE combines three components: (i) AutoCal-R, reward calibration via mean-preserving isotonic regression; (ii) SIMCal-W, weight stabilization via stacking of S-monotone candidates; and (iii) Oracle-Uncertainty Aware (OUA) inference that propagates calibration uncertainty into confidence intervals. We formalize the Coverage-Limited Efficiency (CLE) diagnostic, which explains why IPS-style estimators fail even when ESS exceeds 90%: the logger rarely visits regions where target policies concentrate. Key findings: SNIPS inverts rankings even with reward calibration (38% pairwise, negative Kendall's tau) due to weight instability; calibrated IPS remains near-random (47%) despite weight stabilization, consistent with CLE; OUA improves coverage from near-0% to ~86% (Direct) and ~96% (stacked-DR), where naive intervals severely under-cover.

Decoding Student Minds: Leveraging Conversational Agents for Psychological and Learning Analysis

This paper presents a psychologically-aware conversational agent designed to enhance both learning performance and emotional well-being in educational settings. The system combines Large Language Models (LLMs), a knowledge graph-enhanced BERT (KG-BERT), and a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) with attention to classify students' cognitive and affective states in real time. Unlike prior chatbots limited to either tutoring or affective support, our approach leverages multimodal data-including textual semantics, prosodic speech features, and temporal behavioral trends-to infer engagement, stress, and conceptual understanding. A pilot study with university students demonstrated improved motivation, reduced stress, and moderate academic gains compared to baseline methods. These results underline the promise of integrating semantic reasoning, multimodal fusion, and temporal modeling to support adaptive, student-centered educational interventions.

PolyLingua: Margin-based Inter-class Transformer for Robust Cross-domain Language Detection

Language identification is a crucial first step in multilingual systems such as chatbots and virtual assistants, enabling linguistically and culturally accurate user experiences. Errors at this stage can cascade into downstream failures, setting a high bar for accuracy. Yet, existing language identification tools struggle with key cases -- such as music requests where the song title and user language differ. Open-source tools like LangDetect, FastText are fast but less accurate, while large language models, though effective, are often too costly for low-latency or low-resource settings. We introduce PolyLingua, a lightweight Transformer-based model for in-domain language detection and fine-grained language classification. It employs a two-level contrastive learning framework combining instance-level separation and class-level alignment with adaptive margins, yielding compact and well-separated embeddings even for closely related languages. Evaluated on two challenging datasets -- Amazon Massive (multilingual digital assistant utterances) and a Song dataset (music requests with frequent code-switching) -- PolyLingua achieves 99.25% F1 and 98.15% F1, respectively, surpassing Sonnet 3.5 while using 10x fewer parameters, making it ideal for compute- and latency-constrained environments.

PoultryTalk: A Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) System for Intelligent Poultry Management and Decision Support

The Poultry industry plays a vital role in global food security, yet small- and medium-scale farmers frequently lack timely access to expert-level support for disease diagnosis, nutrition planning, and management decisions. With rising climate stress, unpredictable feed prices, and persistent disease threats, poultry producers often struggle to make quick, informed decisions. Therefore, there is a critical need for intelligent, data-driven systems that can deliver reliable, on-demand consultation. This paper presents PoultryTalk, a novel multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system designed to provide real-time expert guidance through text and image-based interaction. PoultryTalk uses OpenAI's text-embedding-3-small and GPT-4o to provide smart, context-aware poultry management advice from text, images, or questions. System usability and performance were evaluated using 200 expert-verified queries and feedback from 34 participants who submitted 267 queries to the PoultryTalk prototype. The expert-verified benchmark queries confirmed strong technical performance, achieving a semantic similarity of 84.0% and an average response latency of 3.6 seconds. Compared with OpenAI's GPT-4o, PoultryTalk delivered more accurate and reliable information related to poultry. Based on participants' evaluations, PoultryTalk achieved a response accuracy of 89.9%, with about 9.1% of responses rated as incorrect. A post-use survey indicated high user satisfaction: 95.6% of participants reported that the chatbot provided "always correct" and "mostly correct" answers. 82.6% indicated they would recommend the tool, and 17.4% responded "maybe." These results collectively demonstrate that PoultryTalk not only delivers accurate, contextually relevant information but also demonstrates strong user acceptance and scalability potential.