Niva Manchanda

Ratna Kandala, Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir · microsoft-research

Online dating has become the dominant way romantic relationships begin, yet current platforms strip the nonverbal cues: gaze, facial expression, body posture, response timing, that humans rely on to signal comfort, disinterest, and consent, creating a communication gap with disproportionate safety consequences for women. We argue that this gap represents both a technical opportunity and a moral responsibility for the computer vision community, which has developed the affective tools, facial action unit detection, gaze estimation, engagement modeling, and multimodal affect recognition, needed to begin addressing it, yet has largely ignored the dating domain as a research context. We propose a fairness-first research agenda organized around four capability areas: real-time discomfort detection, engagement asymmetry modeling between partners, consent-aware interaction design, and longitudinal interaction summarization, each grounded in established CV methodology and motivated by the social psychology of romantic communication. We argue that responsible pursuit of this agenda requires purpose-built datasets collected under dyadic consent protocols, fairness evaluation disaggregated across race, gender identity, neurotype, and cultural background, and architectural commitments to on-device processing that prevent affective data from becoming platform surveillance infrastructure. This vision paper calls on the WICV community, whose members are uniquely positioned to understand both the technical opportunity and the human stakes, to establish online dating safety as a first-class research domain before commercial deployment outpaces ethical deliberation.

Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir, Ratna Kandala · microsoft-research

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to provide support and advice in personal domains such as romantic relationships, yet little is known about user perceptions of this type of advice. This study investigated how people evaluate advice on LLM-generated romantic relationships. Participants rated advice satisfaction, model reliability, and helpfulness, and completed pre- and post-measures of their general attitudes toward LLMs. Overall, the results showed participants' high satisfaction with LLM-generated advice. Greater satisfaction was, in turn, strongly and positively associated with their perceptions of the models' reliability and helpfulness. Importantly, participants' attitudes toward LLMs improved significantly after exposure to the advice, suggesting that supportive and contextually relevant advice can enhance users' trust and openness toward these AI systems.

Ratna Kandala, Niva Manchanda, Akshata Kishore Moharir et al.

Manipulative communication, such as gaslighting, guilt-tripping, and emotional coercion, is often difficult for individuals to recognize. Existing agentic AI systems lack the structured, longitudinal memory to track these subtle, context-dependent tactics, often failing due to limited context windows and catastrophic forgetting. We introduce EchoGuard, an agentic AI framework that addresses this gap by using a Knowledge Graph (KG) as the agent's core episodic and semantic memory. EchoGuard employs a structured Log-Analyze-Reflect loop: (1) users log interactions, which the agent structures as nodes and edges in a personal, episodic KG (capturing events, emotions, and speakers); (2) the system executes complex graph queries to detect six psychologically-grounded manipulation patterns (stored as a semantic KG); and (3) an LLM generates targeted Socratic prompts grounded by the subgraph of detected patterns, guiding users toward self-discovery. This framework demonstrates how the interplay between agentic architectures and Knowledge Graphs can empower individuals in recognizing manipulative communication while maintaining personal autonomy and safety. We present the theoretical foundation, framework design, a comprehensive evaluation strategy, and a vision to validate this approach.

Ananth Kandala, Ratna Kandala, Akshata Kishore Moharir et al.

Mental health communication in India is linguistically fragmented, culturally diverse, and often underrepresented in clinical NLP. Current health ontologies and mental health resources are dominated by diagnostic frameworks centered on English or Western culture, leaving a gap in representing patient distress expressions in Indian languages. We propose cross-linguistic graphs of patient stress expressions (CL-PDE), a framework for building cross-lingual mental health ontologies through graph-based methods that capture culturally embedded expressions of distress, align them across languages, and link them with clinical terminology. Our approach addresses critical gaps in healthcare communication by grounding AI systems in culturally valid representations, allowing more inclusive and patient-centric NLP tools for mental health care in multilingual contexts.