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Suicidal Thoughts and Behaviors Among Chinese Adolescents in Relation to Negative Life Events, Internet Addiction, and Sexual Abuse: Cross-Sectional Study

Background: Increasing suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB) among adolescents raise social concerns and have a well-recognized association with sexual abuse (SA). However, research regarding the mechanisms explaining the association between SA and STB remains limited. Objective: This study aims to examine the chained mediating effects of negative life events (NLE) and internet addiction (IA) between SA and STB among adolescents in China. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the Science Database of the People Mental Health survey conducted between March 2013 and December 2022 by the National Population Health Data Center of the National Research Institute for Family Planning. Through stratified sampling, 20,893 adolescents were recruited from 16 Chinese provinces. After excluding samples with missing relevant variables, 10,664 (55.89%; aged 16-17.9 y; n=5826, 54.63% women) adolescents were included in the final analysis. STB was the outcome variable, with NLE and IA as mediators, all assessed via a questionnaire that was uniformly administered by trained investigators in school settings. The Pearson Ο‡ test was used to analyze the association between SA and STB. Using a combination of multiple linear regression and bootstrap testing, the study constructed a chain mediation model to explore how SA influences STB in adolescents through NLE and IA. Results: The scores for SA, NLE, IA, and STB were 1.330 (SD 1.714), 51.960 (SD 23.822), 34.88 (SD 13.852), and 0.690 (SD 1.396), respectively. Multiple linear regression analysis indicated SA was associated with NLE (Ξ²=2.382, 95% CI 2.112‐2.653;

Online library learning in human visual puzzle solving

arXiv:2603.23244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When learning a novel complex task, people often form efficient reusable abstractions that simplify future work, despite uncertainty about the future. We study this process in a visual puzzle task where participants define and reuse helpers -- intermediate constructions that capture repeating structure. In an online experiment, participants solved puzzles of increasing difficulty. Early on, they created many helpers, favouring completeness over efficiency. With experience, helper use became more selective and efficient, reflecting sensitivity to reuse and cost. Access to helpers enabled participants to solve puzzles that were otherwise difficult or impossible. Computational modelling shows that human decision times and number of operations used to complete a puzzle increase with search space estimated by a program induction model with library learning. In contrast, raw program length predicts failure but not effort. Together, these results point to online library learning as a core mechanism in human problem solving, allowing people to flexibly build, refine, and reuse abstractions as task demands grow.

Causal Direct Preference Optimization for Distributionally Robust Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2603.22335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) guides large language models (LLMs) to generate recommendations aligned with user historical behavior distributions by minimizing preference alignment loss. However, our systematic empirical research and theoretical analysis reveal that DPO tends to amplify spurious correlations caused by environmental confounders during the alignment process, significantly undermining the generalization capability of LLM-based generative recommendation methods in out of distribution (OOD) scenarios. To mitigate this issue, we propose CausalDPO, an extension of DPO that incorporates a causal invariance learning mechanism. This method introduces a backdoor adjustment strategy during the preference alignment phase to eliminate interference from environmental confounders, explicitly models the latent environmental distribution using a soft clustering approach, and enhances robust consistency across diverse environments through invariance constraints. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that CausalDPO can effectively capture users stable preference structures across multiple environments, thereby improving the OOD generalization performance of LLM-based recommendation models. We conduct extensive experiments under four representative distribution shift settings to validate the effectiveness of CausalDPO, achieving an average performance improvement of 17.17% across four evaluation metrics.
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