Hita Kambhamettu

Hita Kambhamettu, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Andrew Head et al.

Developing a novel research idea is hard. It must be distinct enough from prior work to claim a contribution while also building on it. This requires iteratively reviewing literature and refining an idea based on what a researcher reads; yet when an idea changes, the literature that matters often changes with it. Most tools offer limited support for this interplay: literature tools help researchers understand a fixed body of work, while ideation tools evaluate ideas against a static, pre-curated set of papers. We introduce literature-initiated pivots, a mechanism where engagement with literature prompts revision to a developing idea, and where that revision changes which literature is relevant. We operationalize this in LitPivot, where researchers concurrently draft and vet an idea. LitPivot dynamically retrieves clusters of papers relevant to a selected part of the idea and proposes literature-informed critiques for how to revise it. A lab study ($n{=}17$) shows researchers produced higher-rated ideas with stronger self-reported understanding of the literature space; an open-ended study ($n{=}5$) reveals how researchers use LitPivot to iteratively evolve their own ideas.

Hita Kambhamettu, Will Crichton, Sean Welleck et al.

LLM-generated explanations can make technical content more accessible, but there is a ceiling on what they can support interactively. Because LLM outputs are static text, they cannot be executed or stepped through. We argue that grounding explanations in a formalized representation enables interactive affordances beyond what static text supports. We instantiate this idea for mathematical proof comprehension with explorable theorems, a system that uses LLMs to translate a theorem and its written proof into Lean, a programming language for machine-checked proofs, and links the written proof with the Lean code. Readers can work through the proof at a step-level granularity, test custom examples or counterexamples, and trace the logical dependencies bridging each step. Each worked-out step is produced by executing the Lean proof on that example and extracting its intermediate state. A user study ($n = 16$) shows potential advantages of this approach: in a proof-reading task, participants who had access to the provided explorability features gave better, more correct, and more detailed answers to comprehension questions, demonstrating a stronger overall understanding of the underlying mathematics.

Hita Kambhamettu, Alyssa Hwang, Philippe Laban et al. · microsoft-research

AI question answering systems increasingly generate responses with attributions to sources. However, the task of verifying the actual content of these attributions is in most cases impractical. In this paper, we present attribution gradients as a solution. Attribution gradients provide integrated, incremental affordances for diving into an attributed passage. A user can decompose a sentence of an answer into its claims. For each claim, the user can view supporting and contradictory excerpts mined from sources. Those excerpts serve as clickable conduits into the source (in our application, scientific papers). When evidence itself contains more citations, the UI unpacks the evidence into excerpts from the cited sources. These features of attribution gradients facilitate concurrent interconnections among answer, claim, excerpt, and context. In a usability study, we observed greater engagement with sources and richer revision in a task where participants revised an attributed AI answer with attribution gradients and a baseline.