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AI chatbots are increasingly designed to exhibit human-like traits such as empathy. However, how users perceive the empathy of these chatbots, and how this affects users&#39; feelings about the conversation with them, has not been thoroughly examined. This study examines how the identity and perceived empathy of a chatbot affect human perceptions of the overall conversation quality. We analyzed 154 conversations from two datasets and found that, although GPT-based chatbots were rated significantly higher in overall conversational quality, they were perceived by users as having lower empathy compared to human counterparts. Ratings of empathy from GPT-4o annotation align with human assessments, demonstrating a consistent perception of lower empathy in chatbots. However, off-the-shelf empathy models trained human-human conversations found no differences in perceived empathy in language between chatbots and humans. Our research emphasizes the importance of perceived empathy in influencing overall conversation quality. Managing perceived empathy in human-AI interactions is complex; creating chatbots that are perceived as high-conversational quality involves more than simply using empathetic language.

AAAI 2025

The Illusion of Empathy: How AI Chatbots Shape Conversation Perception

human computer interaction

AI chatbots are increasingly designed to exhibit human-like traits such as empathy. However, how users perceive the empathy of these chatbots, and how this affects users' feelings about the conversation with them, has not been thoroughly examined. This study examines how the identity and perceived empathy of a chatbot affect human perceptions of the overall conversation quality. We analyzed 154 conversations from two datasets and found that, although GPT-based chatbots were rated significantly higher in overall conversational quality, they were perceived by users as having lower empathy compared to human counterparts. Ratings of empathy from GPT-4o annotation align with human assessments, demonstrating a consistent perception of lower empathy in chatbots. However, off-the-shelf empathy models trained human-human conversations found no differences in perceived empathy in language between chatbots and humans. Our research emphasizes the importance of perceived empathy in influencing overall conversation quality. Managing perceived empathy in human-AI interactions is complex; creating chatbots that are perceived as high-conversational quality involves more than simply using empathetic language.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Image forgery localization (IFL) is a crucial technique for preventing tampered image misuse and protecting social safety. However, due to the rapid development of image tampering technologies, extracting more comprehensive and accurate forgery clues remains an urgent challenge. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel information-theoretic IFL framework named SUMI-IFL that imposes sufficiency-view and minimality-view constraints on forgery feature representation. First, grounded in the theoretical analysis of mutual information, the sufficiency-view constraint is enforced on the feature extraction network to ensure that the latent forgery feature contains comprehensive forgery clues. Considering that forgery clues obtained from a single aspect alone may be incomplete, we construct the latent forgery feature by integrating several orthogonal individual image features. Second, based on the information bottleneck, the minimality-view constraint is imposed on the feature reasoning network to achieve an accurate and concise forgery feature representation that counters the interference of task-unrelated features. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of SUMI-IFL to existing state-of-the-art methods, not only on in-dataset comparisons but also on cross-dataset comparisons.

SUMI-IFL: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Image Forgery Localization with Sufficiency and Minimality Constraints

In many RL applications, ensuring an agent's actions adhere to constraints is crucial for safety.
Most previous methods in Action-Constrained Reinforcement Learning (ACRL) employ a projection layer after the policy network to correct the action. However projection-based methods suffer from issues like the zero gradient problem and higher runtime due to the usage of optimization solvers.
Recently methods were proposed to train generative models to learn a differentiable mapping between latent variables and feasible actions to address this issue.
However, generative models require training using samples from the constrained action space, which itself is challenging. To address such limitations, first, we define a target distribution for feasible actions based on constraint violation signals, and train normalizing flows by minimizing the KL divergence between an approximated distribution over feasible actions and the target. This eliminates the need to generate feasible action samples, greatly simplifying the flow model learning. Second, 
we integrate the learned flow model with existing deep RL methods, which restrict it to exploring only the feasible action space. Third, we extend our approach beyond ACRL to handle state-wise constraints by learning the constraint violation signal from the environment.
Empirically, our approach has significantly fewer constraint violations while achieving similar or better quality in several control tasks than previous best methods.

Leveraging Constraint Violation Signals for Action Constrained Reinforcement Learning

Recently, diffusion models have emerged as promising newcomers in the field of generative models, shining brightly in image generation. However, when employed for object removal tasks, they still encounter issues such as generating random artifacts and the incapacity to repaint foreground object areas with appropriate content after removal. To tackle these problems, we propose Attentive Eraser, a tuning-free method to empower pre-trained diffusion models for stable and effective object removal. Firstly, in light of the observation that the self-attention maps influence the structure and shape details of the generated images, we propose Attention Activation and Suppression (ASS), which re-engineers the self-attention mechanism within the pre-trained diffusion models based on the given mask, thereby prioritizing the background over the foreground object during the reverse generation process. Moreover, we introduce Self-Attention Redirection Guidance (SARG), which utilizes the self-attention redirected by ASS to guide the generation process, effectively removing foreground objects within the mask while simultaneously generating content that is both plausible and coherent. Experiments demonstrate the stability and effectiveness of Attentive Eraser in object removal across a variety of pre-trained diffusion models, outperforming even training-based methods. Furthermore, Attentive Eraser can be implemented in various diffusion model architectures and checkpoints, enabling excellent scalability.

Attentive Eraser: Unleashing Diffusion Model’s Object Removal Potential via Self-Attention Redirection Guidance

Screen-shooting robust watermarking is an effective means of preventing screen content leakage, as it can trace the leaked source through the watermark extraction thereby providing an effective deterrent. However, current screen-shooting resilient watermarking schemes are limited to scenarios where the watermarked image is fully captured, technically because they need the contours of the image to synchronize the watermarked area. While in practical applications, it's common for only a portion of the image to be captured. In this scenario, none of the previous schemes can be applied. To address this problem, we propose the RoPaSS: a robust watermarking scheme for partial screen-shooting, which effectively constructs symmetric characteristics on the embedding watermark to handle the re-synchronization issue. Specifically, RoPaSS consists of a watermark encoder, a decoder, and three estimators, which are trained in two stages. In the first training stage, RoPaSS integrates the flipping operation into the watermark encoder and decoder training to increase the redundancy of watermark messages and artificially guide the generation of symmetric watermarks. In the second stage, aiming to resynchronize the partially captured watermarked image, estimators utilize the watermark symmetry as an additional reference to estimate the restoration parameters of homography transformation. Experiments have demonstrated the excellent performance of RoPaSS in partial screen-shooting traceability, with extraction accuracy of above 93% in frontal shooting and above 86% in 30° shooting even if only 50% of the image content is captured.

RoPaSS: Robust Watermarking for Partial Screen-Shooting Scenarios

The rapid spread of information in the digital age highlights the critical need for effective fact-checking tools, particularly for languages with limited resources, such as Vietnamese. In response to this challenge, we introduce ViFactCheck, the first publicly available benchmark dataset designed specifically for Vietnamese fact-checking across multiple online news domains. This dataset contains 7,232 human-annotated pairs of claim-evidence combinations sourced from reputable Vietnamese online news, covering 12 diverse topics. It has been subjected to a meticulous annotation process to ensure high quality and reliability, achieving a Fleiss Kappa inter-annotator agreement score of 0.83. Our evaluation leverages state-of-the-art pre-trained and large language models, employing fine-tuning and prompting techniques to assess performance. Notably, the Gemma model demonstrated superior effectiveness, with an impressive macro F1 score of 89.90%, thereby establishing a new standard for fact-checking benchmarks. This result highlights the robust capabilities of Gemma in accurately identifying and verifying facts in Vietnamese. To further promote advances in fact-checking technology and improve the reliability of digital media, we have made the ViFactCheck dataset, model checkpoints, fact-checking pipelines, and source code freely available on GitHub. This initiative aims to inspire further research and enhance the accuracy of information in low-resource languages.

ViFactCheck: A New Benchmark Dataset and Methods for Multi-Domain News Fact-Checking In Vietnamese

With the rise of social media and Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), check-in data across platforms has become crucial for User Identity Linkage (UIL). These data not only reveal users' spatio-temporal information but also provide insights into their behavior patterns and interests. However, cross-platform identity linkage faces challenges like poor data quality, high sparsity, and noise interference, which hinder existing methods from extracting cross-platform user information. To address these issues, we propose a Correlation-Attention Masked Transformer for User Identity Link age Network (MT-Link), a transformer-based framework to enhance model performance by learning spatio-temporal co-occurrence patterns of cross-platform users. Our model effectively captures spatio-temporal co-occurrence in cross-platform user check-in sequences. It employs a correlation attention mechanism to detect the spatio-temporal co-occurrence between user check-in sequences. Guided by attention weight maps, the model focuses on co-occurrence points while filtering out noise, ultimately improving classification performance. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 12.92%-17.76% and 5.80%-8.38% improvements in terms of Macro-F1 and Area Under Curve (AUC). The source code of our method is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/model-EDDA.

Correlation-Attention Masked Temporal Transformer for User Identity Linkage Using Heterogeneous Mobility Data

The autoregressive decoding paradigm endows large language models (LLMs) with superior language generation capabilities; however, its step-by-step decoding process inherently limits decoding speed. To mitigate these constraints, the prevalent “draft and validation” strategy enables parallel validation of candidate drafts, allowing LLMs to decode multiple tokens simultaneously during one model forward propagation. 
However, existing methodologies for obtaining drafts often incur additional overhead in communication or training process, or statistical biases from the corpus.
To this end, we propose and innovative draft generation and maintenance approach that leverages the capabilities of LLM itself. Specifically, we extend the autoregressive decoding method to a multi-branch drafting procedure, which can efficiently generate draft sequences without any additional models or training process, while preserving the quality of the generated content by maintaining LLM parameters. 
Experiments across various open-source benchmarks show that our method generates 2.0 to 3.2 tokens per forward step and achieves around 2 times improvement of end-to-end throughput compared to the autoregressive decoding strategy. Our code will be available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Self-Draft-B434.

Multi-Branch Self-Drafting for LLM Inference Acceleration

Event-based semantic segmentation (ESS) has attracted much attention recently, as event cameras can solve problems such as under/over-exposure or motion blur that are usually difficult for RGB cameras to handle. However, event data are noisy and extremely sparse, resulting in difficulties for the learning model to locate and extract reliable cues from their sparse representations for downstream tasks, especially when performing pixel-level tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework ESEG to alleviate the above dilemma. Given that event signals relate closely to moving edges, instead of proposing complex learning structures to expect them to recognize those reliable edge regions behind event signals on their own, we introduce the explicit edge-semantic supervision as a reference to force the ESS model to globally optimize semantics considering the high confidence of event data in edge regions. In addition, we propose a fusion module named Density-Aware Dynamic-Window Cross Attention Fusion (D\textsuperscript{2}CAF), in which the density perception, cross-attention, and dynamic window masking mechanisms are jointly imposed to optimize edge-dense feature fusion considering the characteristics of event cameras. Experimental results on DSEC and DDD17 datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the ESEG and its core designs. The code and generated semantic edge labels will be released upon acceptance.

ESEG: Event-Based Segmentation Boosted by Explicit Edge-Semantic Guidance

In this paper, we propose an efficient, fast, and versatile distillation method to accelerate the generation of pre-trained diffusion models. The method reaches state-of-the-art performances in terms of FID and CLIP-Score for few steps image generation on the COCO2014 and COCO2017 datasets, while requiring only several GPU hours of training and fewer trainable parameters than existing methods. In addition to its efficiency, the versatility of the method is also exposed across several tasks such as *text-to-image*, *inpainting*, *face-swapping*, *super-resolution* and using different backbones such as UNet-based denoisers (SD1.5,  SDXL), DiT (Pixart-$\alpha$) and MMDiT (SD3), as well as adapters. In all cases, the method allowed to reduce drastically the number of sampling steps while maintaining very high-quality image generation.

Flash Diffusion: Accelerating Any Conditional Diffusion Model for Few Steps Image Generation

Symbolic regression (SR) has emerged as a pivotal technique for uncovering the intrinsic information within data and enhancing the interpretability of AI models. However, current state-of-the-art (sota) SR methods struggle to perform correct recovery of symbolic expressions from high-noise data. To address this issue, we introduce a novel noise-resilient SR (NRSR) method capable of recovering expressions from high-noise data. Our method leverages a novel reinforcement learning (RL) approach in conjunction with a designed noise-resilient gating module (NGM) to learn symbolic selection policies. The gating module can dynamically filter the meaningless information from high-noise data, thereby demonstrating a high noise-resilient capability for the SR process. And we also design a mixed path entropy (MPE) bonus term in the RL process to increase the exploration capabilities of the policy. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms several popular baselines on benchmarks with high-noise data. Furthermore, our method also can achieve sota performance on benchmarks with clean data, showcasing its robustness and efficacy in SR tasks.

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