AgentHands: Generating interactive hand gestures for spatially grounded agent conversations in XR
Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization
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Related papers
Constitutional Midtraining: Content Presence Drives Alignment Gains
Post-training alignment is often shallow, eroding under fine-tuning. It remains untested as to whether constitutional midtraining interventions can produce durable alignment when cleanly isolated from post-training. We build a 394M-token constitutional corpus from Anthropic's Constitution and apply constitutional midtraining at 120B scale, where principled, values-based content is inserted into midtraining. A 2x2 design (curriculum ordering x deliberative reasoning) was used to produce four constitutionally midtrained conditions, plus a control, which were evaluated on self-generated and established benchmarks including alignment under pressure, value conflict resolution, blackmail, and emergent misalignment. All models were evaluated across three stages: post-midtraining, post-SFT, and post-benign fine-tuning. Constitutionally midtrained models outperformed the control on alignment generalization and durability, notably on blackmail: SFT instilled a blackmail propensity in all models, but constitutional midtraining blunted it, with the advantage surviving benign fine-tuning (-17.5pp). This durability did not extend to settings that required active resistance to in-context pressure or conflict, where the advantage attenuates after SFT. The presence of constitutional content at midtraining also mattered more than its structure, and constitutional midtraining incurred no capability cost, on average, at any stage (MMLU, ARC-Easy, piqa, GSM8K). A modest amount of constitutional content at midtraining could therefore yield broad, persistent alignment gains, offering a cheap, complementary addition to SFT-centered pipelines. Code, data, and models are available.
EgoCITE: Context-Augmented Indexing and Time-Aware Retrieval for Long-Horizon Egocentric Memory
This work introduces EgoCITE (Egocentric Context-augmented Indexing and Time-aware Evidence retrieval), a long-horizon agentic memory framework for egocentric QA that improves accuracy over agentic memory baselines by at least 4.4--14.2% while achieving 36$\times$ lower cost than long-context LLM agents.
A Multimodal Dataset of Student Oral Presentations with Sensors and Evaluation Data
Oral presentation skills are a critical component of higher education, yet comprehensive datasets capturing real-world student performance across multiple modalities remain scarce. To address this gap, we present SOPHIAS (Student Oral Presentation monitoring for Holistic Insights & Analytics using Sensors), a 12-hour multimodal dataset containing recordings of 50 oral presentations delivered by 65 undergraduate and master's students at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, comprising 46 individual presentations with a mean presentation duration of 9 min 48 s (SD = 33 s) followed by a mean Q&A duration of 6 min 28 s (SD = 3 min 02 s), and 4 group presentations with a mean presentation duration of 14 min 11 s (SD = 1 min 40 s) followed by a mean Q&A duration of 8 min 22 s (SD = 1 min 21 s). SOPHIAS integrates eight timestamped sensor streams from high-definition webcams, ambient and webcam audio, eye-tracking glasses, smartwatch physiological sensors, and clicker, keyboard and mouse interactions. In addition, the dataset includes slides and rubric-based evaluations from teachers, peers, and self-assessments, along with timestamped contextual annotations. The dataset captures presentations conducted in real classroom settings, preserving authentic student behaviors, interactions, and physiological responses. SOPHIAS enables the exploration of relationships between multimodal behavioral and physiological signals and presentation performance, supports the study of peer-assessment and provides a benchmark for developing automated feedback and Multimodal Learning Analytics tools. The dataset is available for research, including both academic and legitimate commercial research and development, under controlled access through Science Data Bank, subject to approval of a Data Usage Agreement (DUA), with code provided through GitHub.
Bernstein-Vazirani Networks: Quantum Machine Learning by Interference
We introduce Bernstein-Vazirani Networks (BVNs), a non-variational quantum machine learning framework that leverages quantum interference for supervised learning, demonstrated on vision and representation learning tasks. In their standard form, BVNs follow the principle of quantum Fourier sampling: labelled data are placed in superposition and interfered in the Fourier basis to extract globally informative features. We then define generalised BVNs that enable interference in problem-adapted bases, yielding more expressive models under the same measurement budget as in the standard setting. BVNs achieve universal function approximation through (over)complete interference bases, while training of BVNs is gradient-free. Experiments on synthetic and real-world classification tasks, as well as implicit image representation, show strong generalisation capabilities and competitive performance with classical and quantum baselines.