TraceMind: Predicting User Information Uptake from Low-Cost Interaction Traces during Human-LLM Content Co-Generation

Abstract

In human-LLM content co-generation, AI-generated information can enter final artifacts without being adequately processed by users, creating risks when artifacts are shared or acted upon. We study whether recognition-level uptake of atomic information units can be assessed in open-ended co-generation and predicted from low-cost interaction traces. We collected data from 62 participants across three tasks. For each final draft, we extracted atomic information units and generated post-task recognition questions, yielding 1187 unit-level uptake labels. We present TraceMind, which tracks units across Chat and Draft histories, aligns interaction traces with changing on-screen layouts, and models spatial, temporal, and workflow-informed evidence. TraceMind outperformed all learned baselines across AUROC, AUPRC-non, balanced accuracy, and macro-F1. We found that uptake unfolds throughout interaction, with sustained active engagement providing informative evidence beyond isolated signals. Our work shifts human-LLM co-generation from content adoption toward what users actually take up, motivating uptake-aware systems grounded in low-cost interaction traces.