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A Taxonomy of Mental Health and Technology Needs for Alzheimer's and Dementia Caregivers

arXiv:2606.19247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Family members caring for individuals with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (AD/ADRD) provide the foundation of long-term care worldwide. In 2023, more than 11 million U.S. family and friends contributed 18 billion hours of unpaid care, often at the cost of their own physical and mental health. These informal caregivers – also referred as the "invisible second patients" – experience elevated rates of mental health problems. Yet research commonly reduces their complex psychosocial experiences to a single construct of caregiver burden, obscuring which specific needs are unmet or effectively supported. At the same time, digital and AI-enabled technologies are rapidly expanding, from smartphone apps and videoconferencing to sensor platforms and AI chatbots. However, the absence of shared frameworks across medicine, psychology, and technology research limits cumulative progress. This study introduces a Caregiver Mental Health and Technology Taxonomy that systematically links AD/ADRD caregiver needs with corresponding classes of technology-based interventions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary literature review and two qualitative studies with caregivers, the taxonomy identifies mismatches between caregiver priorities and existing technological support, highlights under-served domains such as relational strain and compassion fatigue, and proposes design directions for adaptive, responsive systems. The framework offers a shared vocabulary to guide clinicians, researchers, and technology designers in developing more person-centered and clinically grounded innovation in dementia care.

Logical error estimation from syndrome data of surface-code experiments

arXiv:2606.11496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decoders for quantum error correction (QEC) experiments rely on detector error models (DEMs), which encode, for each error, its probability and the detectors and logical observables it flips. Here we show that estimating DEM event probabilities from experimental syndromes is feasible, avoids independent device benchmarking, and produces useful decoder priors for estimating and reducing decoded logical error probabilities. We evaluate our methods using open-source data from surface-code memory experiments performed on Google's Willow chip, and we carry out analogous surface-code experiments on IBM's \texttt{ibm\_miami} processor. Despite the different physical error scales of the Google and IBM devices, in both cases our estimated DEMs improve logical error probabilities relative to baseline device-informed DEMs, typically at the $5\%-10\%$ level and with larger gains in some IBM cases, without additional calibration circuits, decoder fine-tuning, or supervised fitting to logical outcomes.

R2BC: Multi-Agent Imitation Learning from Single-Agent Demonstrations

arXiv:2510.18085v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) is a natural way for humans to teach robots, particularly when high-quality demonstrations are easy to obtain. While IL has been widely applied to single-robot settings, relatively few studies have addressed the extension of these methods to multi-agent systems, especially in settings where a single human must provide demonstrations to a team of collaborating robots. In this paper, we introduce and study Round-Robin Behavior Cloning (R2BC), a method that enables a single human operator to effectively train multi-robot systems through sequential, single-agent demonstrations. Our approach allows the human to teleoperate one agent at a time and incrementally teach multi-agent behavior to the entire system, without requiring demonstrations in the joint multi-agent action space. We show that R2BC methods match, and in some cases surpass, the performance of an oracle behavior cloning approach trained on privileged synchronized demonstrations across four multi-agent simulated tasks. Finally, we deploy R2BC on two physical robot tasks trained using real human demonstrations.

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.