VIGIL: An Extensible System for Real-Time Detection and Mitigation of Cognitive Bias Triggers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kang, Bo, Noels, Sander, De Bie, Tijl
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Kang, Bo
Noels, Sander
De Bie, Tijl
author_facet Kang, Bo
Noels, Sander
De Bie, Tijl
contents The rise of generative AI is posing increasing risks to online information integrity and civic discourse. Most concretely, such risks can materialise in the form of mis- and disinformation. As a mitigation, media-literacy and transparency tools have been developed to address factuality of information and the reliability and ideological leaning of information sources. However, a subtler but possibly no less harmful threat to civic discourse is to use of persuasion or manipulation by exploiting human cognitive biases and related cognitive limitations. To the best of our knowledge, no tools exist to directly detect and mitigate the presence of triggers of such cognitive biases in online information. We present VIGIL (VIrtual GuardIan angeL), the first browser extension for real-time cognitive bias trigger detection and mitigation, providing in-situ scroll-synced detection, LLM-powered reformulation with full reversibility, and privacy-tiered inference from fully offline to cloud. VIGIL is built to be extensible with third-party plugins, with several plugins that are rigorously validated against NLP benchmarks are already included. It is open-sourced at https://github.com/aida-ugent/vigil.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03261
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VIGIL: An Extensible System for Real-Time Detection and Mitigation of Cognitive Bias Triggers
Kang, Bo
Noels, Sander
De Bie, Tijl
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
The rise of generative AI is posing increasing risks to online information integrity and civic discourse. Most concretely, such risks can materialise in the form of mis- and disinformation. As a mitigation, media-literacy and transparency tools have been developed to address factuality of information and the reliability and ideological leaning of information sources. However, a subtler but possibly no less harmful threat to civic discourse is to use of persuasion or manipulation by exploiting human cognitive biases and related cognitive limitations. To the best of our knowledge, no tools exist to directly detect and mitigate the presence of triggers of such cognitive biases in online information. We present VIGIL (VIrtual GuardIan angeL), the first browser extension for real-time cognitive bias trigger detection and mitigation, providing in-situ scroll-synced detection, LLM-powered reformulation with full reversibility, and privacy-tiered inference from fully offline to cloud. VIGIL is built to be extensible with third-party plugins, with several plugins that are rigorously validated against NLP benchmarks are already included. It is open-sourced at https://github.com/aida-ugent/vigil.
title VIGIL: An Extensible System for Real-Time Detection and Mitigation of Cognitive Bias Triggers
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03261