Daily Papers

Dark patterns, which are user interface designs in online services, induce users to take unintended actions. Recently, dark patterns have been raised as an issue of privacy and fairness. Thus, a wide range of research on detecting dark patterns is eagerly awaited. In this work, we constructed a dataset for dark pattern detection and prepared its baseline detection performance with state-of-the-art machine learning methods. The original dataset was obtained from Mathur et al.'s study in 2019, which consists of 1,818 dark pattern texts from shopping sites. Then, we added negative samples, i.e., non-dark pattern texts, by retrieving texts from the same websites as Mathur et al.'s dataset. We also applied state-of-the-art machine learning methods to show the automatic detection accuracy as baselines, including BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, and XLNet. As a result of 5-fold cross-validation, we achieved the highest accuracy of 0.975 with RoBERTa. The dataset and baseline source codes are available at https://github.com/yamanalab/ec-darkpattern.

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to identify dark patterns on a large set of websites. Using these techniques, we study shopping websites, which often use dark patterns to influence users into making more purchases or disclosing more information than they would otherwise. Analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites, we discover 1,818 dark pattern instances, together representing 15 types and 7 broader categories. We examine these dark patterns for deceptive practices, and find 183 websites that engage in such practices. We also uncover 22 third-party entities that offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution. Finally, we develop a taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics that describes the underlying influence of the dark patterns and their potential harm on user decision-making. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for stakeholders including researchers and regulators to study, mitigate, and minimize the use of these patterns.

We introduce DarkBench, a comprehensive benchmark for detecting dark design patterns--manipulative techniques that influence user behavior--in interactions with large language models (LLMs). Our benchmark comprises 660 prompts across six categories: brand bias, user retention, sycophancy, anthropomorphism, harmful generation, and sneaking. We evaluate models from five leading companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Google) and find that some LLMs are explicitly designed to favor their developers' products and exhibit untruthful communication, among other manipulative behaviors. Companies developing LLMs should recognize and mitigate the impact of dark design patterns to promote more ethical AI.

Google Play's policy forbids the use of incentivized installs, ratings, and reviews to manipulate the placement of apps. However, there still exist apps that incentivize installs for other apps on the platform. To understand how install-incentivizing apps affect users, we examine their ecosystem through a socio-technical lens and perform a mixed-methods analysis of their reviews and permissions. Our dataset contains 319K reviews collected daily over five months from 60 such apps that cumulatively account for over 160.5M installs. We perform qualitative analysis of reviews to reveal various types of dark patterns that developers incorporate in install-incentivizing apps, highlighting their normative concerns at both user and platform levels. Permissions requested by these apps validate our discovery of dark patterns, with over 92% apps accessing sensitive user information. We find evidence of fraudulent reviews on install-incentivizing apps, following which we model them as an edge stream in a dynamic bipartite graph of apps and reviewers. Our proposed reconfiguration of a state-of-the-art microcluster anomaly detection algorithm yields promising preliminary results in detecting this fraud. We discover highly significant lockstep behaviors exhibited by reviews that aim to boost the overall rating of an install-incentivizing app. Upon evaluating the 50 most suspicious clusters of boosting reviews detected by the algorithm, we find (i) near-identical pairs of reviews across 94% (47 clusters), and (ii) over 35% (1,687 of 4,717 reviews) present in the same form near-identical pairs within their cluster. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on how fraud is intertwined with labor and poses a threat to the trust and transparency of Google Play.

With the accelerating pace of digital transformation and the widespread adoption of online platforms, both social and technical concerns regarding dark patterns-user interface designs that undermine users' ability to make informed and rational choices-have become increasingly prominent. As corporate online platforms grow more sophisticated in their design strategies, there is a pressing need for proactive and real-time detection technologies that go beyond the predominantly reactive approaches employed by regulatory authorities. In this paper, we propose a visual dark pattern detection framework that improves both detection accuracy and real-time performance. To this end, we constructed a proprietary visual object detection dataset by manually collecting 4,066 UI/UX screenshots containing dark patterns from 194 websites across six major industrial sectors in South Korea and abroad. The collected images were annotated with five representative UI components commonly associated with dark patterns: Button, Checkbox, Input Field, Pop-up, and QR Code. This dataset has been publicly released to support further research and development in the field. To enable real-time detection, this study adopted the YOLOv12x object detection model and applied transfer learning to optimize its performance for visual dark pattern recognition. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a high detection accuracy of 92.8% in terms of mAP@50, while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 40.5 frames per second (FPS), confirming its effectiveness for practical deployment in online environments. Furthermore, to facilitate future research and contribute to technological advancements, the dataset constructed in this study has been made publicly available at https://github.com/B4E2/B4E2-DarkPattern-YOLO-DataSet.

Rain in the dark poses a significant challenge to deploying real-world applications such as autonomous driving, surveillance systems, and night photography. Existing low-light enhancement or deraining methods struggle to brighten low-light conditions and remove rain simultaneously. Additionally, cascade approaches like ``deraining followed by low-light enhancement'' or the reverse often result in problematic rain patterns or overly blurred and overexposed images. To address these challenges, we introduce an end-to-end model called L^{2}RIRNet, designed to manage both low-light enhancement and deraining in real-world settings. Our model features two main components: a Dual Degradation Representation Network (DDR-Net) and a Restoration Network. The DDR-Net independently learns degradation representations for luminance effects in dark areas and rain patterns in light areas, employing dual degradation loss to guide the training process. The Restoration Network restores the degraded image using a Fourier Detail Guidance (FDG) module, which leverages near-rainless detailed images, focusing on texture details in frequency and spatial domains to inform the restoration process. Furthermore, we contribute a dataset containing both synthetic and real-world low-light-rainy images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our L^{2}RIRNet performs favorably against existing methods in both synthetic and complex real-world scenarios. All the code and dataset can be found in https://github.com/linxin0/Low_light_rainy.

Multi-agent systems composed of large generative models are rapidly moving from laboratory prototypes to real-world deployments, where they jointly plan, negotiate, and allocate shared resources to solve complex tasks. While such systems promise unprecedented scalability and autonomy, their collective interaction also gives rise to failure modes that cannot be reduced to individual agents. Understanding these emergent risks is therefore critical. Here, we present a pioneer study of such emergent multi-agent risk in workflows that involve competition over shared resources (e.g., computing resources or market share), sequential handoff collaboration (where downstream agents see only predecessor outputs), collective decision aggregation, and others. Across these settings, we observe that such group behaviors arise frequently across repeated trials and a wide range of interaction conditions, rather than as rare or pathological cases. In particular, phenomena such as collusion-like coordination and conformity emerge with non-trivial frequency under realistic resource constraints, communication protocols, and role assignments, mirroring well-known pathologies in human societies despite no explicit instruction. Moreover, these risks cannot be prevented by existing agent-level safeguards alone. These findings expose the dark side of intelligent multi-agent systems: a social intelligence risk where agent collectives, despite no instruction to do so, spontaneously reproduce familiar failure patterns from human societies.

Recent work by Baratin et al. (2021) sheds light on an intriguing pattern that occurs during the training of deep neural networks: some layers align much more with data compared to other layers (where the alignment is defined as the euclidean product of the tangent features matrix and the data labels matrix). The curve of the alignment as a function of layer index (generally) exhibits an ascent-descent pattern where the maximum is reached for some hidden layer. In this work, we provide the first explanation for this phenomenon. We introduce the Equilibrium Hypothesis which connects this alignment pattern to signal propagation in deep neural networks. Our experiments demonstrate an excellent match with the theoretical predictions.

We train a network to identify jets with fractional dark decay (semi-visible jets) using the pattern of their low-level jet constituents, and explore the nature of the information used by the network by mapping it to a space of jet substructure observables. Semi-visible jets arise from dark matter particles which decay into a mixture of dark sector (invisible) and Standard Model (visible) particles. Such objects are challenging to identify due to the complex nature of jets and the alignment of the momentum imbalance from the dark particles with the jet axis, but such jets do not yet benefit from the construction of dedicated theoretically-motivated jet substructure observables. A deep network operating on jet constituents is used as a probe of the available information and indicates that classification power not captured by current high-level observables arises primarily from low-p_T jet constituents.