AI ethics on Friday, 13 March 2026

Large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) operate under strict context window and key-value (KV) cache constraints, fundamentally limiting their ability to reason coherently over long interaction horizons. Existing approaches -- extended context windows, retrieval-augmented generation, summarization, or static documentation -- treat memory as static storage and fail to preserve decision-relevant state under long-running, multi-session tasks. We introduce StatePlane, a model-a

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess moral or ethical statements, yet their judgments may reflect social and linguistic biases. This work presents a controlled, sentence-level study of how grammatical person, number, and gender markers influence LLM moral classifications of fairness. Starting from 550 balanced base sentences from the ETHICS dataset, we generated 26 counterfactual variants per item, systematically varying pronouns and demographic markers to yield 14,850 se

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death. Cardiac phenotypes (CPs), e.g., ejection fraction, are the gold standard for assessing cardiac health, but they are derived from cine cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR), which is costly and requires high spatio-temporal resolution. Every magnetic resonance (MR) examination begins with rapid and coarse localizers for scan planning, which are discarded thereafter. Despite non-diagnostic image quality and lack of temporal information, lo

The reversal curse describes a failure of autoregressive language models to retrieve a fact in reverse order (e.g., training on ``$A > B$'' but failing on ``$B < A$''). Recent work shows that objectives with bidirectional supervision (e.g., bidirectional attention or masking-based reconstruction for decoder-only models) can mitigate the reversal curse. We extend this evaluation to include a vanilla masked language modeling (MLM) objective and compare it to decoder-only masking-based training acr

LLM applications are AI systems whose nondeterministic outputs and evolving model behavior make traditional testing insufficient for release governance. We present an automated self-testing framework that introduces quality gates with evidence-based release decisions (PROMOTE/HOLD/ROLLBACK) across five empirically grounded dimensions: task success rate, research context preservation, P95 latency, safety pass rate, and evidence coverage. We evaluate the framework through a longitudinal case study

AI development has a fiction dependency problem: models are built on massive corpora of modern fiction and desperately need more of it, yet they struggle to generate it. I term this the AI-Fiction Paradox and it is particularly startling because in machine learning, training data typically determines output quality. This paper offers a theoretically precise account of why fiction resists AI generation by identifying three distinct challenges for current architectures. First, fiction depends on w

This paper develops a measure-theoretic framework establishing when and how a possibilistic representation of incomplete knowledge contracts into a probabilistic representation of intrinsic stochastic variability. Epistemic uncertainty is encoded by a possibility distribution and its dual necessity measure, defining a credal set bounding all probability measures consistent with current evidence. As evidence accumulates, the credal set contracts. The epistemic collapse condition marks the transit

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate persuasive influence strategies that shift cooperative behavior in multi-agent populations, but a critical question remains: does the resulting cooperation reflect genuine prosocial alignment, or does it mask erosion of agent autonomy, epistemic integrity, and distributional fairness? We introduce Constitutional Multi-Agent Governance (CMAG), a two-stage framework that interposes between an LLM policy compiler and a networked agent population, combining

As corporate responsibility increasingly incorporates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, ESG reporting is becoming a legal requirement in many regions and a key channel for documenting sustainability practices and assessing firms' long-term and ethical performance. However, the length and complexity of ESG disclosures make them difficult to interpret and automate the analysis reliably. To support scalable and trustworthy analysis, this paper introduces ESG-Bench, a benchmark d

We introduce CRYSTAL (Clear Reasoning via Yielded Steps, Traceability, and Logic), a diagnostic benchmark with 6,372 instances that evaluates multimodal reasoning through verifiable intermediate steps. We propose two complementary metrics: Match F1, which scores step-level precision and recall via semantic similarity matching, and Ordered Match F1, which further penalizes disordered reasoning chains. References are constructed through a Delphi-inspired pipeline in which four independent MLLMs ge

Fairness in machine learning is predominantly evaluated through outcome-oriented metrics, such as Demographic parity, which measure whether predictions are statistically consistent across protected groups. However, these metrics cannot detect whether a model uses systematically different reasoning for different demographic groups, which violates procedural fairness principles. This problem is compounded by intersectionality, where models may appear fair on individual attributes (e.g., race) whil

Providing timely and individualised feedback on handwritten student work is highly beneficial for learning but difficult to achieve at scale. This challenge has become more pressing as generative AI undermines the reliability of take-home assessments, shifting emphasis toward supervised, in-class evaluation. We present a scalable, end-to-end workflow for LLM-assisted grading of short, pen-and-paper assessments. The workflow spans (1) constructing solution keys, (2) developing detailed rubric-sty

Geochemical anomaly detection plays a critical role in mineral exploration as deviations from regional geochemical baselines may indicate mineralization. Existing studies suffer from two key limitations: (1) single region scenarios which limit model generalizability; (2) proprietary datasets, which makes result reproduction unattainable. In this work, we introduce \textbf{GeoChemAD}, an open-source benchmark dataset compiled from government-led geological surveys, covering multiple regions, samp

Cost-per-click (CPC) in paid search is an auction-generated outcome shaped by a competitive landscape that is only partially observable from any single advertiser's history. From 1.66 billion Google Ads log records for a concentrated car-rental market (2021-2023), we construct a weekly panel of 1,811 keyword series over 127 weeks (218,924 keyword-week observations) and build competition-aware proxies from keyword text, CPC trajectories, and geographic market structure. The design combines (i) se

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems are rapidly emerging as the dominant architecture for enterprise AI automation, yet production deployments exhibit failure rates between 41% and 86.7%, with nearly 79% of failures originating from specification and coordination issues rather than model capability limitations. This paper identifies Semantic Intent Divergence--the phenomenon whereby cooperating LLM agents develop inconsistent interpretations of shared objectives due to siloed context

In autonomous driving, multi-agent collaborative perception enhances sensing capabilities by enabling agents to share perceptual data. A key challenge lies in handling {\em heterogeneous} features from agents equipped with different sensing modalities or model architectures, which complicates data fusion. Existing approaches often require retraining encoders or designing interpreter modules for pairwise feature alignment, but these solutions are not scalable in practice. To address this, we prop

The rapid adoption of agentic AI in enterprise business operations--autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning, and executing multi-step workflows--has created an urgent governance crisis. Organizations face uncontrolled agent sprawl: the proliferation of redundant, ungoverned, and conflicting AI agents across business functions. Industry surveys report that only 21% of enterprises have mature governance models for autonomous agents, while 40% of agentic AI projects are projected to fail

We explore the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by comparing the way they gather data with the way humans build knowledge. Here we examine how scientific knowledge is made and compare it with LLMs. The argument is structured by reference to two figures, one representing scientific knowledge and the other LLMs. In a 2014 study, scientists explain how they choose to ignore a 'fringe science' paper in the domain of gravitational wave physics: the decisions are made largely as a result o

The Consolidation of Labor Laws (CLT) serves as the primary legal framework governing labor relations in Brazil, ensuring essential protections for workers. However, its complexity creates challenges for Human Resources (HR) professionals in navigating regulations and ensuring compliance. Traditional methods for addressing labor law inquiries often lead to inefficiencies, delays, and inconsistencies. To enhance the accuracy and efficiency of legal question-answering (Q&A), a multi-agent system p

We present a fairness-aware framework for multi-class lung disease diagnosis from chest CT volumes, developed for the Fair Disease Diagnosis Challenge at the PHAROS-AIF-MIH Workshop (CVPR 2026). The challenge requires classifying CT scans into four categories -- Healthy, COVID-19, Adenocarcinoma, and Squamous Cell Carcinoma -- with performance measured as the average of per-gender macro F1 scores, explicitly penalizing gender-inequitable predictions. Our approach addresses two core difficulties:

Enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) remains a core challenge in natural language processing. The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm dominates practical applications for its single-round efficiency, yet its reasoning chains often exhibit logical gaps. While multi-round paradigms like Graph-of-Thoughts (GoT), Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), and Atom of Thought (AoT) achieve strong performance and reveal effective reasoning structures, their high cost limits practical use. To ad

Neuro-symbolic reasoning increasingly demands frameworks that unite the formal rigor of logic with the interpretability of large language models (LLMs). We introduce an end to end explainability by construction pipeline integrating the Automated Theorem Generator Delta1 based on the full triangular standard contradiction (FTSC) with LLMs. Delta1 deterministically constructs minimal unsatisfiable clause sets and complete theorems in polynomial time, ensuring both soundness and minimality by const

Real-time understanding of continuous video streams is essential for interactive assistants and multimodal agents operating in dynamic environments. However, most existing video reasoning approaches follow a batch paradigm that defers reasoning until the full video context is observed, resulting in high latency and growing computational cost that are incompatible with streaming scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ThinkStream, a framework for streaming video reasoning based on a Watch--Think--

Modeling the complex interactions among functional subnetworks is crucial for the diagnosis of mental disorders and the identification of functional pathways. However, learning the interactions of the underlying subnetworks remains a significant challenge for existing Transformer-based methods due to the limited number of training samples. To address these challenges, we propose KD-Brain, a Prior-Informed Graph Learning framework for explicitly encoding prior knowledge to guide the learning proc

Machine unlearning (MU) addresses privacy risks in pretrained models. The main goal of MU is to remove the influence of designated data while preserving the utility of retained knowledge. Achieving this goal requires preserving semantic relations among retained instances, which existing studies often overlook. We observe that without such preservation, models suffer from progressive structural collapse, undermining both the deletion-retention balance. In this work, we propose a novel structure-f

Federated Domain Generalization for Person Re-Identification (FedDG-ReID) learns domain-invariant representations from decentralized data. While Vision Transformer (ViT) is widely adopted, its global attention often fails to distinguish pedestrians from high similarity backgrounds or diverse viewpoints -- a challenge amplified by cross-client distribution shifts in FedDG-ReID. To address this, we propose Federated Body Distribution Aware Visual Prompt (FedBPrompt), introducing learnable visual p

Research on developmentally plausible language models has largely focused on English, leaving open questions about multilingual settings. We present a systematic study of compact language models by extending BabyBERTa to English-French scenarios under strictly size-matched data conditions, covering monolingual, bilingual, and cross-lingual settings. Our design contrasts two types of training corpora: (i) child-directed speech (about 2.5M tokens), following BabyBERTa and related work, and (ii) mu

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into business process management tools promises to democratize Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) modeling for non-experts. While automated frameworks assess syntactic and semantic quality, they miss human factors like trust, usability, and professional alignment. We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation of our proposed solution, an LLM-powered BPMN copilot, with five process modeling experts using focus groups and standardized questionnaires. Our

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard technique for post-training diffusion-based image synthesis models, as it enables learning from reward signals to explicitly improve desirable aspects such as image quality and prompt alignment. In this paper, we propose an online RL variant that reduces the variance in the model updates by sampling paired trajectories and pulling the flow velocity in the direction of the more favorable image. Unlike existing methods that treat each sampling step

Instructional Design (ID) often faces challenges in incorporating research-based knowledge and pedagogical best practices. Although educational researchers and government agencies emphasize grounding ID in evidence, integrating research findings into everyday design workflows is often complex, as it requires considering multiple context-specific demands and constraints. To address this persistent gap, this paper explores how research in the learning sciences (LS) can be systematically integrated

In recent years, learning-based underwater image enhancement (UIE) techniques have rapidly evolved. However, distribution shifts between high-quality enhanced outputs and natural images can hinder semantic cue extraction for downstream vision tasks, thereby limiting the adaptability of existing enhancement models. To address this challenge, this work proposes a new learning mechanism that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to empower UIE models with semantic-sensitive capabilities. To be co

In-context learning (ICL) converts static encoders into task-conditioned reasoners, enabling adaptation to new data from just a few examples without updating pretrained parameters. This capability is essential for graph foundation models (GFMs) to approach LLM-level generality. Yet current GFMs struggle with cross-domain alignment, typically relying on modality-specific encoders that fail when graphs are pre-vectorized or raw data is inaccessible. In this paper, we introduce Modality-Free Graph

Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks largely consist of problems formalized in MathLib, so current ATP training and evaluation are heavily biased toward MathLib's definitional framework. However, frontier mathematics is often exploratory and prototype-heavy, relying on bespoke constructions that deviate from standard libraries. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of current ATP systems when applied to a novel definitional framework, specifically examining the performance gap between s

The rapid advancement and impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have given rise to the field of prompt engineering, the practice of crafting inputs to guide LLMs toward high-quality, task-relevant outputs. A critical challenge facing the field is the lack of standardised prompt documentation and evaluation practices. Prompts can be long, complex and difficult to evaluate on subjective tasks. To address this challenge, we propose the use of prompt cards, structured summaries of

Visual stimuli reconstruction from EEG remains challenging due to fidelity loss and representation shift. We propose CognitionCapturerPro, an enhanced framework that integrates EEG with multi-modal priors (images, text, depth, and edges) via collaborative training. Our core contributions include an uncertainty-weighted similarity scoring mechanism to quantify modality-specific fidelity and a fusion encoder for integrating shared representations. By employing a simplified alignment module and a p

Point cloud registration (PCR) is a fundamental task in 3D vision and provides essential support for applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and environmental modeling. Despite its widespread use, existing methods often fail when facing real-world challenges like heavy noise, significant occlusions, and large-scale transformations. These limitations frequently result in compromised registration accuracy and insufficient robustness in complex environments. In this paper, we propose IGA

Developing autonomous agents for web-based tasks is a core challenge in AI. While Large Language Model (LLM) agents can interpret complex user requests, they often operate as black boxes, making it difficult to diagnose why they fail or how they plan. This paper addresses this gap by formally treating web tasks as sequential decision-making processes. We introduce a taxonomy that maps modern agent architectures to traditional planning paradigms: Step-by-Step agents to Breadth-First Search (BFS),

Despite advances in multimodal AI, current vision-based assistants often remain inefficient in collaborative tasks. We identify two key gulfs: a communication gulf, where users must translate rich parallel intentions into verbal commands due to the channel mismatch , and an understanding gulf, where AI struggles to interpret subtle embodied cues. To address these, we propose Eye2Eye, a framework that leverages first-person perspective as a channel for human-AI cognitive alignment. It integrates

Computational antibody design has seen rapid methodological progress, with dozens of deep generative methods proposed in the past three years, yet the field lacks a standardized benchmark for fair comparison and model development. These methods are evaluated on different SAbDab snapshots, non-overlapping test sets, and incompatible metrics, and the literature fragments the design problem into numerous sub-tasks with no common definition. We introduce CHIMERA-Bench: (CDR Modeling with Epitope-gui

Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods have demonstrated the feasibility of self-driving scene reconstruction and novel view synthesis. However, most existing methods either rely solely on cameras or use LiDAR only for Gaussian initialization or depth supervision, while the rich scene information contained in point clouds, such as reflectance, and the complementarity between LiDAR and RGB have not been fully exploited, leading to degradation in challenging self-driving scenes, such as those

Human presence has traditionally been constrained by the limits of physical embodiment, allowing individuals to exist in only one place at a time. This article introduces Multi-Existence Identity (MEI)- a socio-technical framework that replicates cognitive, behavioral, and emotional attributes into AI-enabled embodiments capable of acting across digital and physical contexts in parallel. MEI advances beyond digital twins, telepresence, and multipresence avatars by embedding cognitive fidelity, a

Multimodal recommendation is commonly framed as a feature fusion problem, where textual and visual signals are combined to better model user preference. However, the effectiveness of multimodal recommendation may depend not only on how modalities are fused, but also on whether item content is represented in a semantic space aligned with preference matching. This issue is particularly important because raw visual features often preserve appearance similarity, while user decisions are typically dr

Existing AI moral evaluation frameworks test for the production of correct-sounding ethical responses rather than the presence of genuine moral reasoning capacity. This paper introduces a novel probe methodology using literary narrative - specifically, unresolvable moral scenarios drawn from a published science fiction series - as stimulus material structurally resistant to surface performance. We present results from a 24-condition cross-system study spanning 13 distinct systems across two seri

Visual design is an essential application of state-of-the-art multi-modal AI systems. Improving these systems requires high-quality vision-language data at scale. Despite the abundance of internet image and text data, knowledge-rich and well-aligned image-text pairs are rare. In this paper, we present a scalable diagram generation pipeline built with our agent, Feynman. To create diagrams, Feynman first enumerates domain-specific knowledge components (''ideas'') and performs code planning based

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used approach to align large-scale AI systems with human values. However, RLHF typically assumes a single, universal reward, which overlooks diverse preferences and limits personalization. Variational Preference Learning (VPL) seeks to address this by introducing user-specific latent variables. Despite its promise, we found that VPL suffers from posterior collapse. While this phenomenon is well known in VAEs, it has not previously bee

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a high-resolution seismic imaging method that estimates subsurface velocity by matching simulated and recorded waveforms. However, FWI is highly nonlinear, prone to cycle skipping, and sensitive to noise, particularly when low frequencies are missing or the initial model is poor, leading to failures under imperfect acquisition. Diffusion-regularized FWI introduces generative priors to encourage geologically realistic models, but these priors typically require cos

The rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is driving unprecedented growth in global computational demand, placing increasing pressure on electricity systems. This study introduces an AI-energy coupling framework that combines large language models (LLMs)-based analysis of corporate, policy, and media data with quantitative energy-system modeling to forecast the electricity footprint of AI-driven data centers from 2025 to 2030. Results show that the new AI infrastructure is highly

Embedded quantum machine learning (EQML) seeks to bring quantum machine learning (QML) capabilities to resource-constrained edge platforms such as IoT nodes, wearables, drones, and cyber-physical controllers. In 2026, EQML is technically feasible only in limited and highly experimental forms: (i) hybrid workflows where an embedded device performs sensing and classical processing while offloading a narrowly scoped quantum subroutine to a remote quantum processing unit (QPU) or nearby quantum appl

Background: Artificial intelligence is emerging as a promising tool in surgical oncology, with growing evidence suggesting potential applications in diagnostic support, intraoperative guidance, and perioperative risk assessment. In gastric cancer surgery, emerging applications range from AI-assisted endoscopic detection to data-driven perioperative risk prediction, while some technological developments, particularly in robotic autonomy, derive from broader surgical or experimental models that ma