Xiaoshan Huang

Renkai Ma, Ben Zefeng Zhang, Chen Chen et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT have emerged as cognitive scaffolding for autistic users, yet the tension between their utility and risk remains under-articulated. Through an inductive thematic analysis of 3,984 social media posts by self-identified autistic users, we apply a technology affordance lens to examine this duality. We found that while users leveraged ChatGPT to offload executive dysfunction, regulate emotions, translate neurotypical communication, and validate their autistic identity, these affordances coexist with risks to their well-being: reinforcing delusional thinking, erasing authentic identity through automated masking, and triggering conflicts with the autistic sense of justice. As part of our preliminary work, this poster identifies trade-offs in autistic users' interactions with ChatGPT and concludes by outlining our future work on developing neuro-inclusive technologies that address these tensions through beneficial friction, bidirectional translation, and the delineation of emotional validation from reality.

Xiaoshan Huang, Conrad Borchers, Jiayi Zhang et al.

Effective collaboration requires teams to manage complex cognitive and emotional states through Socially Shared Regulation of Learning (SSRL). Physiological synchrony (i.e., longitudinal alignment in physiological signals) can indicate these states, but is hard to interpret on its own. We investigate the physiological and conversational dynamics of four medical dyads diagnosing a virtual patient case using an intelligent tutoring system. Semantic shifts in dialogue were correlated with transient physiological synchrony peaks. We also coded utterance segments for SSRL and derived cosine similarity using sentence embeddings. The results showed that activating prior knowledge featured significantly lower semantic similarity than simpler task execution. High physiological synchrony was associated with lower semantic similarity, suggesting that such moments involve exploratory and varied language use. Qualitative analysis triangulated these synchrony peaks as ``pivotal moments'': successful teams synchronized during shared discovery, while unsuccessful teams peaked during shared uncertainty. This research advances human-centered AI by demonstrating how biological signals can be fused with dialogues to understand critical moments in problem solving.

Lingyao Li, Haolun Wu, Zhenkun Li et al.

High-dimensional decision-making tasks, such as business partner selection, involve evaluating large candidate pools with heterogeneous numerical, categorical, and textual features. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong in-context reasoning capabilities, single-agent or debate-style systems often struggle with scalability and consistency in such settings. We propose PartnerMAS, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that decomposes evaluation into three layers: a Planner Agent that designs strategies, Specialized Agents that perform role-specific assessments, and a Supervisor Agent that integrates their outputs. To support systematic evaluation, we also introduce a curated benchmark dataset of venture capital co-investments, featuring diverse firm attributes and ground-truth syndicates. Across 140 cases, PartnerMAS consistently outperforms single-agent and debate-based multi-agent baselines, achieving up to 10--15\% higher match rates. Analysis of agent reasoning shows that planners are most responsive to domain-informed prompts, specialists produce complementary feature coverage, and supervisors play an important role in aggregation. Our findings demonstrate that structured collaboration among LLM agents can generate more robust outcomes than scaling individual models, highlighting PartnerMAS as a promising framework for high-dimensional decision-making in data-rich domains.

Damiano Brigo, Xiaoshan Huang, Andrea Pallavicini et al.

Deep learning is a powerful tool whose applications in quantitative finance are growing every day. Yet, artificial neural networks behave as black boxes and this hinders validation and accountability processes. Being able to interpret the inner functioning and the input-output relationship of these networks has become key for the acceptance of such tools. In this paper we focus on the calibration process of a stochastic volatility model, a subject recently tackled by deep learning algorithms. We analyze the Heston model in particular, as this model's properties are well known, resulting in an ideal benchmark case. We investigate the capability of local strategies and global strategies coming from cooperative game theory to explain the trained neural networks, and we find that global strategies such as Shapley values can be effectively used in practice. Our analysis also highlights that Shapley values may help choose the network architecture, as we find that fully-connected neural networks perform better than convolutional neural networks in predicting and interpreting the Heston model prices to parameters relationship.