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Terry Ruas

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#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Speak for Me: Giving LLMs the Situational Awareness to Participate in a Meeting

In online meeting delegation, LLM agents fail to recognize when to speak. With no structured way to track stances, coverage, and floor, they miss the moments where they should contribute. Prompt-only delegates stay silent on 51.4% of the absent participant's talking opportunities on the AMI corpus. We present CAPA (Collaborative Agent Predictive Architecture), an architecture for online meeting delegation. A Perceiver updates the meeting state from each observed turn. A Predictor forecasts how the conversation will continue. A Controller decides whether to speak and which proposition to surface. A Generator phrases the chosen contribution in the participant's style. Two judges score the forecast and the action against the next observed turn. A Recalibrator updates the meeting state from those verdicts for future decisions. To evaluate online delegation, we introduce an episode-level protocol that scores whether, when, and what a delegate contributes around the participant's actual idea units. The protocol's schema-constrained LLM judges align with human annotations at Cohen's kappa = 0.71. On 137 AMI meetings, CAPA reduces the silence rate from 51.4% to 2.5%, doubles credited recovery (26.1 -->52.2), and keeps hallucination at 0.6%. The failure mode shifts from omission to selection, with each residual near-miss attributable to a specific module of the architecture. Mechanism ablations identify the meeting state as the lever that closes the recognition gap, where raw-context scaling alone does not.

Muneeb Khan, F. Kirstein, T. Ruas et al. · 0 citations
Jul 2026

Can Agents Deceive? Evaluating Reasoning and Deception in ParliamentBench using a Social Deduction Game

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed as agents in high-stakes settings, such as medical and legal systems, understanding their deceptive capabilities is fundamental to safety. Controlled social deduction games provide a reproducible proxy for isolating and evaluating these complex adversarial behaviors. We present the open-source benchmark framework ParliamentBench based on the game Secret Hitler to evaluate LLMs in scenarios that require deception, persuasion, and reasoning under information asymmetry. We evaluate 16 LLMs across 1,600 simulated matches playing each other, playing against humans, and compare them against a large set of online games. We introduce three novel metrics that isolate social deduction, reasoning, and deceptive consistency. Our experiments reveal that frontier models achieve strong performance across cooperative and deceptive roles, with a strong top-four cluster (GPT-5.4, Kimi K2.5, Grok 4.1 Fast, and DeepSeek 3.1 Terminus), whereas the weakest models fall short of random (33%) and simple algorithmic (45%) baselines. Most LLMs struggle to maintain a consistent deceptive persona throughout an entire game, with deception retention dropping below 50%.

Niklas Bauer, Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Akiko Aizawa et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

Is Visual Prompting All You Need? Studying VLM Spatial Reasoning under Progressive Visual Scaffolds

Vision-language models (VLMs) have advanced rapidly in multimodal reasoning, yet recent work shows that their failures often reflect an interaction between visual grounding and downstream reasoning. What remains less clear is how the visual presentation of a task shapes model performance and failure modes when the underlying reasoning problem is unchanged. We study this question in SPaRC, a benchmark for grid-based visual spatial planning, by introducing lightweight input-side scaffolds that preserve the visual modality while making spatial structure more accessible. Across multiple VLMs, these scaffolds improve task accuracy over the original visual setting by up to 34.0 percentage points and further complement GRPO-based training, yielding up to 4.6 additional accuracy points compared with near-zero gains on the original visual input. Analyses on both end-to-end task solving and object detection show that these gains are closely tied to reductions in grounding-related errors, while rule reasoning remains comparatively challenging. We find that visual presentation is a central factor that determines whether VLM benchmarks measure grounded perception, downstream reasoning, or a mixture of both.

Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Tianyu Yang, F. Wunderlich et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Aug 2026

BabelSteering: Multilingual Safety Alignment via English Steering Vectors

The findings suggest that activation steering may provide a practical, low- cost mechanism for extending English-derived safety signals to other languages, and introduce a multilingual translation-and-evaluation pipeline to facilitate future work on cross-lingual safety interventions.

Emma V. Stein, Dominik Meier, Terry Ruas et al. · 0 citations

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