February 2026

arXiv:2602.18455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Search engines increasingly display LLM-generated answers shown above organic links, shifting search from link lists to answer-first summaries. Publishers contend these summaries substitute for source pages and cannibalize traffic, while platforms argue they are complementary by directing users through included links. We estimate the causal impact of Google’s AI Overview (AIO) on Wikipedia traffic by leveraging the feature’s staggered geographic rollout and Wikipedia’s multilingual structure. Using a difference-in-differences design, we compare English Wikipedia […]

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arXiv:2602.18454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid growth of AI-driven mental health mobile apps has raised concerns about their ethical considerations and user trust. This study proposed a natural language processing (NLP)-based framework to evaluate ethical aspects from user-generated reviews from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. After gathering and cleaning the data, topic modeling was applied to identify latent themes in the context of ethics using topic words and then map them to well-recognized existing […]

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arXiv:2602.18453v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The replication crisis, the failure of scientific claims to be validated by further research, is one of the most pressing issues for empirical research. This is partly an incentive problem: replication is costly and less well rewarded than original research. Large language models (LLMs) have accelerated scientific production by streamlining writing, coding, and reviewing, yet this acceleration risks outpacing verification. To address this, we present an LLM-based system that replicates statistical analyses from […]

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arXiv:2602.18452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Respiratory diseases are a leading cause of death globally, highlighting the urgent need for early and accessible screening methods. While some lung auscultation analysis has been automated and machine learning audio based models are able to predict respiratory pathologies, there remains a critical gap: the lack of intelligent systems that can interact in real-time consultations using natural language. Unlike other clinical domains, such as electronic health records, radiological images, and biosignals, where numerous […]

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arXiv:2602.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contemporary science education reforms such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) demand assessments to understand students’ ability to use science knowledge to solve problems and design solutions. To elicit such higher-order ability, educators need performance-based assessments, which are challenging to develop. One solution that has been broadly adopted is Evidence-Centered Design (ECD), which emphasizes interconnected models of the learner, evidence, and tasks. Although ECD provides a framework to safeguard assessment validity, its […]

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arXiv:2602.18450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent language systems can exhibit a failure mode where a shared dominant context progressively absorbs individual semantics, yielding near-uniform behavior across agents. We study this effect under the name Asymptotic Semantic Collapse in Hierarchical Optimization. In a closed linguistic setting with a Dominant Anchor Node whose semantic state has effectively infinite inertia, we show that repeated interactions with Peripheral Agent Nodes drive an asymptotic alignment that minimizes a global loss. We model semantic […]

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arXiv:2602.18449v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries, model responses, and optional feedback, our method enables flexible, span-level prompt updates without requiring gradient access or modifying the downstream language model. Across diverse benchmarks (e.g., $tau$-bench, SST-2, SST-5), DLM-optimized prompts consistently improve the performance of a frozen target LLM (e.g., GPT-4o-mini). We […]

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arXiv:2602.18448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Administrative phone tasks drain roughly 1 trillion USD annually from U.S. healthcare, with over 500 million insurance-benefit verification calls manually handled in 2024. We introduce INSURE-Dial, to our knowledge the first public benchmark for developing and assessing compliance-aware voice agents for phase-aware call auditing with span-based compliance verification. The corpus includes 50 de-identified, AI-initiated calls with live insurance representatives (mean 71 turns/call) and 1,000 synthetically generated calls that mirror the same workflow. All […]

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arXiv:2602.18447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought reasoning significantly improves the performance of large language models on complex tasks, but incurs high inference latency due to long generation traces. Step-level speculative reasoning aims to mitigate this cost, yet existing approaches face a long-standing trade-off among accuracy, inference speed, and resource efficiency. We propose ConfSpec, a confidence-gated cascaded verification framework that resolves this trade-off. Our key insight is an asymmetry between generation and verification: while generating a correct reasoning step […]

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arXiv:2602.18446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Users increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for Deep Research, using them to synthesize diverse sources into structured reports that support understanding and action. In this context, the practical reliability of such reports hinges on logical quality: whether the report’s claims and arguments are explicitly supported and can be trusted as a basis for downstream use, rather than merely appearing fluent or informative. However, current evaluation frameworks largely overlook this requirement. To […]

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