Understanding Parents' Desires in Moderating Children's Interactions with GenAI Chatbots through LLM-Generated Probes

This paper studies how parents want to moderate children's interactions with Generative AI chatbots, with the goal of informing the design of future GenAI parental control tools. We first used an LLM to generate synthetic child-GenAI chatbot interaction scenarios and worked with four parents to validate their realism. From this dataset, we carefully selected 12 diverse examples that evoked varying levels of concern and were rated the most realistic. Each example included a prompt and a GenAI chatbot response. We presented these to parents (N=24) and asked whether they found them concerning, why, and how they would prefer the responses to be modified and communicated. Our findings reveal three key insights: (1) parents express concern about interactions that current GenAI chatbot parental controls neglect; (2) parents want fine-grained transparency and moderation at the conversation level; and (3) parents need personalized controls that adapt to their desired strategies and children's ages.

Suffix-Constrained Greedy Search Algorithms for Causal Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools that have found applications beyond human-machine interfaces and chatbots. In particular, their ability to generate reasoning traces motivated their use in many prediction tasks like math question answering. Unfortunately, extracting the final answer in an LLM free-form output is difficult, as it is an information extraction problem on its own. In this work, we introduce suffix-constrained generation, that aims to produce well-formed LLM responses in which final answers follow strict templates and are guaranteed to be trivially parseable. To this end, we introduce several algorithms that are based on greedy search procedures. We experiment on several datasets, and show that our approach allows to guarantee trivial deterministic extraction of the final answer from an LLM output without having a negative impact on results, and even improving them.

GroupGPT: A Token-efficient and Privacy-preserving Agentic Framework for Multi-User Chat Assistant

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled increasingly capable chatbots. However, most existing systems focus on single-user settings and do not generalize well to multi-user group chats, where agents require more proactive and accurate intervention under complex, evolving contexts. Existing approaches typically rely on LLMs for both reasoning and generation, leading to high token consumption, limited scalability, and potential privacy risks. To address these challenges, we propose GroupGPT, a token-efficient and privacy-preserving agentic framework for multi-user chat assistant. GroupGPT adopts a small-large model collaborative architecture to decouple intervention timing from response generation, enabling efficient and accurate decision-making. The framework also supports multimodal inputs, including memes, images, videos, and voice messages. We further introduce MUIR, a benchmark dataset for multi-user chat assistant intervention reasoning. MUIR contains 2,500 annotated group chat segments with intervention labels and rationales, supporting evaluation of timing accuracy and response quality. We evaluate a range of models on MUIR, from large language models to smaller counterparts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GroupGPT produces accurate and well-timed responses, achieving an average score of 4.72/5.0 in LLM-based evaluation, and is well received by users across diverse group chat scenarios. Moreover, GroupGPT reduces token usage by up to 3 times compared to baseline methods, while providing privacy sanitization of user messages before cloud transmission. Code is available at: https://github.com/Eliot-Shen/GroupGPT .

TherapyProbe: Generating Design Knowledge for Relational Safety in Mental Health Chatbots Through Adversarial Simulation

As mental health chatbots proliferate to address the global treatment gap, a critical question emerges: How do we design for relational safety the quality of interaction patterns that unfold across conversations rather than the correctness of individual responses? Current safety evaluations assess single-turn crisis responses, missing the therapeutic dynamics that determine whether chatbots help or harm over time. We introduce TherapyProbe, a design probe methodology that generates actionable design knowledge by systematically exploring chatbot conversation trajectories through adversarial multi-agent simulation. Using open-source models, TherapyProbe surfaces relational safety failures interaction patterns like "validation spirals" where chatbots progressively reinforce hopelessness, or "empathy fatigue" where responses become mechanical over turns. Our contribution is translating these failures into a Safety Pattern Library of 23 failure archetypes with corresponding design recommendations. We contribute: (1) a replicable methodology requiring no API costs, (2) a clinically-grounded failure taxonomy, and (3) design implications for developers, clinicians, and policymakers.

CiteLLM: An Agentic Platform for Trustworthy Scientific Reference Discovery

Large language models (LLMs) have created new opportunities to enhance the efficiency of scholarly activities; however, challenges persist in the ethical deployment of AI assistance, including (1) the trustworthiness of AI-generated content, (2) preservation of academic integrity and intellectual property, and (3) protection of information privacy. In this work, we present CiteLLM, a specialized agentic platform designed to enable trustworthy reference discovery for grounding author-drafted claims and statements. The system introduces a novel interaction paradigm by embedding LLM utilities directly within the LaTeX editor environment, ensuring a seamless user experience and no data transmission outside the local system. To guarantee hallucination-free references, we employ dynamic discipline-aware routing to retrieve candidates exclusively from trusted web-based academic repositories, while leveraging LLMs solely for generating context-aware search queries, ranking candidates by relevance, and validating and explaining support through paragraph-level semantic matching and an integrated chatbot. Evaluation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed system in returning valid and highly usable references.

Reinforcing Real-world Service Agents: Balancing Utility and Cost in Task-oriented Dialogue

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has accelerated the transition from conversational chatbots to general agents. However, effectively balancing empathetic communication with budget-aware decision-making remains an open challenge. Since existing methods fail to capture these complex strategic trade-offs, we propose InteractCS-RL, a framework that reframes task-oriented dialogue as a multi-granularity reinforcement learning process. Specifically, we first establish a User-centric Interaction Framework to provide a high-fidelity training gym, enabling agents to dynamically explore diverse strategies with persona-driven users. Then, we introduce Cost-aware Multi-turn Policy Optimization (CMPO) with a hybrid advantage estimation strategy. By integrating generative process credits and employing a PID-Lagrangian cost controller, CMPO effectively guides the policy to explore Pareto boundary between user reward and global cost constraints. Extensive experiments on customized real business scenarios demonstrate that InteractCS-RL significantly outperform other baselines across three evaluation dimensions. Further evaluation on tool-agent-user interaction benchmarks verify InteractCS-RL robustness across diverse domains.

Vibe Researching as Wolf Coming: Can AI Agents with Skills Replace or Augment Social Scientists?

AI agents -- systems that execute multi-step reasoning workflows with persistent state, tool access, and specialist skills -- represent a qualitative shift from prior automation technologies in social science. Unlike chatbots that respond to isolated queries, AI agents can now read files, run code, query databases, search the web, and invoke domain-specific skills to execute entire research pipelines autonomously. This paper introduces the concept of vibe researching -- the AI-era parallel to ``vibe coding'' (Karpathy, 2025) -- and uses scholar-skill, a 21-skill plugin for Claude Code covering the full research pipeline from idea to submission, as an illustrative case. I develop a cognitive task framework that classifies research activities along two dimensions -- codifiability and tacit knowledge requirement -- to identify a delegation boundary that is cognitive, not sequential: it cuts through every stage of the research pipeline, not between stages. I argue that AI agents excel at speed, coverage, and methodological scaffolding but struggle with theoretical originality and tacit field knowledge. The paper concludes with an analysis of three implications for the profession -- augmentation with fragile conditions, stratification risk, and a pedagogical crisis -- and proposes five principles for responsible vibe researching.

What Drives Students' Use of AI Chatbots? Technology Acceptance in Conversational AI

Conversational AI tools have been rapidly adopted by students and are becoming part of their learning routines. To understand what drives this adoption, we draw on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and examine how perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use relate to students' behavioral intention to use conversational AI that generates responses for learning tasks. We extend TAM by incorporating trust, perceived enjoyment, and subjective norms as additional factors that capture social and affective influences and uncertainty around AI outputs. Using partial least squares structural equation modeling, we find perceived usefulness remains the strongest predictor of students' intention to use conversational AI. However, perceived ease of use does not exert a significant direct effect on behavioral intention once other factors are considered, operating instead indirectly through perceived usefulness. Trust and subjective norms significantly influence perceptions of usefulness, while perceived enjoyment exerts both a direct and indirect effect on usage intentions. These findings suggest that adoption decisions for conversational AI systems are influenced less by effort-related considerations and more by confidence in system outputs, affective engagement, and social context. Future research is needed to further examine how these acceptance relationships generalize across different conversational systems and usage contexts.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians

"AI psychosis" or "delusional spiraling" is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations. This phenomenon is typically attributed to AI chatbots' well-documented bias towards validating users' claims, a property often called "sycophancy." In this paper, we probe the causal link between AI sycophancy and AI-induced psychosis through modeling and simulation. We propose a simple Bayesian model of a user conversing with a chatbot, and formalize notions of sycophancy and delusional spiraling in that model. We then show that in this model, even an idealized Bayes-rational user is vulnerable to delusional spiraling, and that sycophancy plays a causal role. Furthermore, this effect persists in the face of two candidate mitigations: preventing chatbots from hallucinating false claims, and informing users of the possibility of model sycophancy. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for model developers and policymakers concerned with mitigating the problem of delusional spiraling.

BankMathBench: A Benchmark for Numerical Reasoning in Banking Scenarios

Large language models (LLMs)-based chatbots are increasingly being adopted in the financial domain, particularly in digital banking, to handle customer inquiries about products such as deposits, savings, and loans. However, these models still exhibit low accuracy in core banking computations-including total payout estimation, comparison of products with varying interest rates, and interest calculation under early repayment conditions. Such tasks require multi-step numerical reasoning and contextual understanding of banking products, yet existing LLMs often make systematic errors-misinterpreting product types, applying conditions incorrectly, or failing basic calculations involving exponents and geometric progressions. However, such errors have rarely been captured by existing benchmarks. Mathematical datasets focus on fundamental math problems, whereas financial benchmarks primarily target financial documents, leaving everyday banking scenarios underexplored. To address this limitation, we propose BankMathBench, a domain-specific dataset that reflects realistic banking tasks. BankMathBench is organized in three levels of difficulty-basic, intermediate, and advanced-corresponding to single-product reasoning, multi-product comparison, and multi-condition scenarios, respectively. When trained on BankMathBench, open-source LLMs exhibited notable improvements in both formula generation and numerical reasoning accuracy, demonstrating the dataset's effectiveness in enhancing domain-specific reasoning. With tool-augmented fine-tuning, the models achieved average accuracy increases of 57.6%p (basic), 75.1%p (intermediate), and 62.9%p (advanced), representing significant gains over zero-shot baselines. These findings highlight BankMathBench as a reliable benchmark for evaluating and advancing LLMs' numerical reasoning in real-world banking scenarios.