Can Consumer Chatbots Reason? A Student-Led Field Experiment Embedded in an "AI-for-All" Undergraduate Course

Claims about whether large language model (LLM) chatbots "reason" are typically debated using curated benchmarks and laboratory-style evaluation protocols. This paper offers a complementary perspective: a student-led field experiment embedded as a midterm project in UNIV 182 (AI4All) at George Mason University, a Mason Core course designed for undergraduates across disciplines with no expected prior STEM exposure. Student teams designed their own reasoning tasks, ran them on widely used consumer chatbots representative of current capabilities, and evaluated both (i) answer correctness and (ii) the validity of the chatbot's stated reasoning (for example, cases where an answer is correct but the explanation is not, or vice versa). Across eight teams that reported standardized scores, students contributed 80 original reasoning prompts spanning six categories: pattern completion, transformation rules, spatial/visual reasoning, quantitative reasoning, relational/logic reasoning, and analogical reasoning. These prompts yielded 320 model responses plus follow-up explanations. Aggregating team-level results, OpenAI GPT-5 and Claude 4.5 achieved the highest mean answer accuracy (86.2% and 83.8%), followed by Grok 4 (82.5%) and Perplexity (73.1%); explanation validity showed a similar ordering (81.2%, 80.0%, 77.5%, 66.2%). Qualitatively, teams converged on a consistent error signature: strong performance on short, structured math and pattern items but reduced reliability on spatial/visual reasoning and multi-step transformations, with frequent "sound right but reason wrong" explanations. The assignment's primary contribution is pedagogical: it operationalizes AI literacy as experimental practice (prompt design, measurement, rater disagreement, and interpretability/grounding) while producing a reusable, student-generated corpus of reasoning probes grounded in authentic end-user interaction.

Authors Should Label Their Own Documents

Third-party annotation is the status quo for labeling text, but egocentric information such as sentiment and belief can at best only be approximated by a third-person proxy. 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 20,000 users to deploy an author labeling annotation system. 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 with author-labeled data to improve performance. We train our model to minimize the prediction error on questions generated for a set of predetermined subjective beliefs using author-labeled responses. Our model achieves a 537% improvement 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 https://academic.echollm.io.

Adversarial Training for Failure-Sensitive User Simulation in Mental Health Dialogue Optimization

Realistic user simulation is crucial for training and evaluating task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, yet creating simulators that accurately replicate human behavior remains challenging. A key property of effective simulators is their ability to expose failure modes of the systems they evaluate. We present an adversarial training framework that iteratively improves user simulator realism through a competitive dynamic between a generator (user simulator) and a discriminator. Applied to mental health support chatbots, our approach demonstrates that fine-tuned simulators dramatically outperform zero-shot base models at surfacing system issues, and adversarial training further enhances diversity, distributional alignment, and predictive validity. The resulting simulator achieves a strong correlation between simulated and real failure occurrence rates across diverse chatbot configurations while maintaining low distributional divergence of failure modes. Discriminator accuracy decreases drastically after three adversarial iterations, suggesting improved realism. These results provide evidence that adversarial training is a promising approach for creating realistic user simulators in mental health support TOD domains, enabling rapid, reliable, and cost-effective system evaluation before deployment.

Evaluating the Challenges of LLMs in Real-world Medical Follow-up: A Comparative Study and An Optimized Framework

When applied directly in an end-to-end manner to medical follow-up tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from uncontrolled dialog flow and inaccurate information extraction due to the complexity of follow-up forms. To address this limitation, we designed and compared two follow-up chatbot systems: an end-to-end LLM-based system (control group) and a modular pipeline with structured process control (experimental group). Experimental results show that while the end-to-end approach frequently fails on lengthy and complex forms, our modular method-built on task decomposition, semantic clustering, and flow management-substantially improves dialog stability and extraction accuracy. Moreover, it reduces the number of dialogue turns by 46.73% and lowers token consumption by 80% to 87.5%. These findings highlight the necessity of integrating external control mechanisms when deploying LLMs in high-stakes medical follow-up scenarios.

Conscious Data Contribution via Community-Driven Chain-of-Thought Distillation

The current era of AI development places a heavy emphasis on training large models on increasingly scaled-up datasets. This paradigm has catalyzed entirely new product categories, such as LLM chatbots, while also raising concerns about data privacy and consumer choice. In this paper, we consider questions of data portability and user autonomy in the context of LLMs that "reason" using chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, computing intermediate text artifacts from user input before producing a final output. We first interpret recent data privacy and portability law to argue that these intermediate computations qualify as users' personal data. Then, building on the existing framework of Conscious Data Contribution, we show how communities who receive low utility from an available model can aggregate and distill their shared knowledge into an alternate model better aligned with their goals. We verify this approach empirically and investigate the effects of community diversity, reasoning granularity, and community size on distillation performance.

Attachment Styles and AI Chatbot Interactions Among College Students

The use of large language model (LLM)-based AI chatbots among college students has increased rapidly, yet little is known about how individual psychological attributes shape students' interaction patterns with these technologies. This qualitative study explored how college students with different attachment styles describe their interactions with ChatGPT. Using semi-structured interviews with seven undergraduate students and grounded theory analysis, we identified three main themes: (1) AI as a low-risk emotional space, where participants across attachment styles valued the non-judgmental and low-stakes nature of AI interactions; (2) attachment-congruent patterns of AI engagement, where securely attached students integrated AI as a supplementary tool within their existing support systems, while avoidantly attached students used AI to buffer vulnerability and maintain interpersonal boundaries; and (3) the paradox of AI intimacy, capturing the tension between students' willingness to disclose personal information to AI while simultaneously recognizing its limitations as a relational partner. These findings suggest that attachment orientations play an important role in shaping how students experience and interpret their interactions with AI chatbots, extending attachment theory to the domain of human-AI interaction.

Subjective Question Generation and Answer Evaluation using NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the most revolutionary technologies today. It uses artificial intelligence to understand human text and spoken words. It is used for text summarization, grammar checking, sentiment analysis, and advanced chatbots and has many more potential use cases. Furthermore, it has also made its mark on the education sector. Much research and advancements have already been conducted on objective question generation; however, automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation are still in progress. An automated system to generate subjective questions and evaluate the answers can help teachers assess student work and enhance the student's learning experience by allowing them to self-assess their understanding after reading an article or a chapter of a book. This research aims to improve current NLP models or make a novel one for automated subjective question generation and answer evaluation from text input.

Towards Explainable Conversational AI for Early Diagnosis with Large Language Models

Healthcare systems around the world are grappling with issues like inefficient diagnostics, rising costs, and limited access to specialists. These problems often lead to delays in treatment and poor health outcomes. Most current AI and deep learning diagnostic systems are not very interactive or transparent, making them less effective in real-world, patient-centered environments. This research introduces a diagnostic chatbot powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), using GPT-4o, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and explainable AI techniques. The chatbot engages patients in a dynamic conversation, helping to extract and normalize symptoms while prioritizing potential diagnoses through similarity matching and adaptive questioning. With Chain-of-Thought prompting, the system also offers more transparent reasoning behind its diagnoses. When tested against traditional machine learning models like Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, SVM, Random Forest, and KNN, the LLM-based system delivered impressive results, achieving an accuracy of 90% and Top-3 accuracy of 100%. These findings offer a promising outlook for more transparent, interactive, and clinically relevant AI in healthcare.

ShareChat: A Dataset of Chatbot Conversations in the Wild

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved into distinct platforms with unique interface designs and capabilities, existing public datasets treat models as generic text generators, stripping away the interface context that actively shapes user interaction. To address this limitation, we present ShareChat, a large-scale, cross-platform corpus comprising 142,808 conversations and over 660,000 turns collected from publicly shared URLs across five major platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok. ShareChat distinguishes itself by preserving native platform affordances often lost in standard logs, including reasoning traces, source links, and code artifacts, while spanning 101 languages over the period from April 2023 to October 2025. Furthermore, ShareChat offers substantially longer context windows and greater interaction depth than prior datasets. We demonstrate the dataset's multifaceted utility through three representative analyses: (1) analyzing conversation completeness to measure user intent satisfaction; (2) evaluating source citation behaviors in content generation; and (3) conducting temporal analysis to track evolving usage patterns. This work provides the community with a vital and timely resource for understanding authentic user-LLM chatbot interactions in the wild.

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.