AI ethics on Friday, 27 March 2026

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping higher education, yet barriers to its adoption across different disciplines and institutional roles remain underexplored. Existing literature frequently attributes adoption barriers to individual-level factors such as perceived usefulness and ease of use. This study instead investigates whether such barriers are structurally produced. Drawing on a multi-method survey analysis of 272 academic and professional services (PSs) staff at

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and acting within interactive environments. Despite their growing capability to perform multi-step reasoning and decision-making tasks, internal mechanisms guiding their sequential behavior remain opaque. This paper presents a framework for interpreting the temporal evolution of concepts in LLM agents through a step-wise conformal lens. We introduce the conformal interpretability framework

Underwater robotic grasping is difficult due to degraded, highly variable imagery and the expense of collecting diverse underwater demonstrations. We introduce a system that (i) autonomously collects successful underwater grasp demonstrations via a self-supervised data collection pipeline and (ii) transfers grasp knowledge from on-land human demonstrations through a depth-based affordance representation that bridges the on-land-to-underwater domain gap and is robust to lighting and color shift.

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to respond correctly to prompts that align well with the data they were trained and fine-tuned on. Yet, small shifts in wording, format, or language can trigger surprisingly large failures, especially on multi-step reasoning problems. To address this problem, we propose a Distributionally Robust Token Optimization (DRTO) approach, which combines token-level Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO). DRTO co

Predictive modeling on sequential event data is critical for fraud detection and healthcare monitoring. Existing data-driven approaches learn correlations from historical data but fail to incorporate domain-specific sequential constraints and logical rules governing event relationships, limiting accuracy and regulatory compliance. For example, healthcare procedures must follow specific sequences, and financial transactions must adhere to compliance rules. We present a neuro-symbolic approach int

AI agents that communicate on behalf of individuals need to capture how each person actually communicates, yet current approaches either require costly per-person fine-tuning, produce generic outputs from shallow persona descriptions, or optimize preferences without modeling communication style. We present ASPECT (Automated Social Psychometric Evaluation of Communication Traits), a pipeline that directs LLMs to assess constructs from a validated communication scale against behavioral evidence fr

Purpose: India has adopted a vertical, sector-led AI governance strategy. While promoting innovation, such a light-touch approach risks policy fragmentation. This paper aims to propose a cohesive "whole-of-government" architecture to mitigate these risks and connect policy goals with a practical implementation plan. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies an established five-layer conceptual framework to the Indian context. First, it constructs a national architecture for overall governan

Molecular generative models must jointly ensure validity, diversity, and property control, yet existing approaches typically trade off among these objectives. We present MOLPAQ, a modular quantum-classical generator that assembles molecules from quantum-generated latent patches. A \b{eta}-VAE pretrained on QM9 learns a chemically aligned latent manifold; a reduced conditioner maps molecular descriptors into this space; and a parameter-efficient quantum patch generator produces entangled node emb

A new form of human trafficking has emerged across Chinese borders, where individuals are lured to Southeast Asia with fraudulent job offers and then coerced into operating online scams. Despite its massive economic and human toll, this scam-driven trafficking remains underexplored in academic research. Through qualitative analysis of 158 RedNote posts, we examined how Chinese online communities respond to this threat. Our findings reveal that perpetrators exploit cultural ties to recruit victim

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate through complex unseen environments based on natural language instructions. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively capture key semantic cues and accurately align them with visual observations. To address this limitation, we propose Beyond Textual Knowledge (BTK), a VLN framework that synergistically integrates environment-specific textual knowledge with generative image knowledge bases. BTK employs Qwen3-4B to ex

Electrocardiograms (ECGs) are among the most widely available clinical signals and play a central role in cardiovascular diagnosis. While recent foundation models (FMs) have shown promise for learning transferable ECG representations, most existing pretraining approaches treat leads as independent channels and fail to explicitly leverage their strong structural redundancy. We introduce the latent attention masked autoencoder (LAMAE) FM that directly exploits this structure by learning cross-lead

Uncertainty quantification is essential for deploying machine learning models in high-stakes domains such as scientific discovery and healthcare. Conformal Prediction (CP) provides finite-sample coverage guarantees under exchangeability, an assumption often violated in practice due to distribution shift. Under covariate shift, restoring validity requires importance weighting, yet accurate density-ratio estimation becomes unstable when training and test distributions exhibit limited support overl

As AI agents transition from isolated tools to collaborative participants in shared knowledge ecosystems, governing collective knowledge curation becomes a critical challenge. Human platform governance mechanisms do not transfer directly: agent statelessness undermines deterrence-based sanctions, model homogeneity violates independence assumptions underlying crowd wisdom, and sycophancy collapses deliberative consensus. We propose a deliberative curation protocol combining three governance layer

Assessing the quality of scientific research is essential for scholarly communication, yet widely used approaches face limitations in scalability, subjectivity, and time delay. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for automated research evaluation based on textual content. This study examines whether LLMs can support post-publication peer review tasks by benchmarking their outputs against expert judgments and citation-based indicators. Two evaluation tasks are

As Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit plateauing performance on conventional benchmarks, a pivotal challenge persists: evaluating their proficiency in complex, open-ended tasks characterizing genuine expert-level cognition. Existing frameworks suffer from narrow domain coverage, reliance on generalist tasks, or self-evaluation biases. To bridge this gap, we present XpertBench, a high-fidelity benchmark engineered to assess LLMs across authentic professional domains. XpertBench consists of 1,34

Merging multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules is promising for constructing general-purpose systems, yet challenging because LoRA update directions span different subspaces and contribute unevenly. When merged naively, such mismatches can weaken the directions most critical to certain task losses while overemphasizing relatively less important ones, ultimately reducing the model's ability to represent all tasks faithfully. We revisit this problem through two perspectives: subspace coverage

Smart contracts govern billions of dollars in decentralized finance (DeFi), yet automated vulnerability detection remains challenging because many vulnerabilities are tightly coupled with project-specific business logic. We observe that recurring vulnerabilities across diverse DeFi business models often share the same underlying economic mechanisms, which we term DeFi semantics, and that capturing these shared abstractions can enable more systematic auditing. Building on this insight, we propose

Open-vocabulary 3D semantic segmentation aims to segment arbitrary categories beyond the training set. Existing methods predominantly rely on distilling knowledge from 2D open-vocabulary models. However, aligning 3D features to the 2D representation space restricts intrinsic 3D geometric learning and inherits errors from 2D predictions. To address these limitations, we propose GeoGuide, a novel framework that leverages pretrained 3D models to integrate hierarchical geometry-semantic consistency

The EU Data Act establishes comprehensive rules governing data access and sharing across business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-government (B2G) contexts. This paper presents a comprehensive ontology for the EU Data Act, enabling reasoning over data sharing agreements through machine-readable representations. The DAOnt ontology reuses elements from three established ontologies, LKIF-Core, ODRL, and DPV, to capture the normative structure of the Data Act. The onto

This paper investigated the applied science domains and subjects depicted in Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies and assessed the relationship between technological portrayal and box office success. The study looked at 164 publications in academic literature that employed MCU movies. In addition to the foregoing, the study discovered that MCU movies have been used in academic literature in a variety of ways, including teaching science ideas, analyzing ethical dilemmas, and examining social an

As Large Language Models (LLMs) expand in capability and application scope, their trustworthiness becomes critical. A vital risk is intrinsic deception, wherein models strategically mislead users to achieve their own objectives. Existing alignment approaches based on chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring supervise explicit reasoning traces. However, under optimization pressure, models are incentivized to conceal deceptive reasoning, rendering semantic supervision fundamentally unreliable. Grounded i

Open agentic systems combine LLM-based planning with external capabilities, persistent memory, and privileged execution. They are used in coding assistants, browser copilots, and enterprise automation. OpenClaw is a visible instance of this broader class. Without much attention yet, their security challenge is fundamentally different from that of traditional software that relies on predictable execution and well-defined control flow. In open agentic systems, everything is ''probabilistic'': plan

This paper surveys uncertainty-aware explainable artificial intelligence (UAXAI), examining how uncertainty is incorporated into explanatory pipelines and how such methods are evaluated. Across the literature, three recurring approaches to uncertainty quantification emerge (Bayesian, Monte Carlo, and Conformal methods), alongside distinct strategies for integrating uncertainty into explanations: assessing trustworthiness, constraining models or explanations, and explicitly communicating uncertai

Documentation of airport operations is inherently complex due to extensive technical terminology, rigorous regulations, proprietary regional information, and fragmented communication across multiple stakeholders. The resulting data silos and semantic inconsistencies present a significant impediment to the Total Airport Management (TAM) initiative. This paper presents a methodological framework for constructing a domain-grounded, machine-readable Knowledge Graph (KG) through a dual-stage fusion o

Urban development has been a defining force in human history, shaping cities for centuries. However, past studies mostly analyze such development as predictive tasks, failing to reflect its generative nature. Therefore, this study designs a multimodal generative AI framework to envision sustainable urban development at a global scale. By integrating prompts and geospatial controls, our framework can generate high-fidelity, diverse, and realistic urban satellite imagery across the 500 largest met

Physical adversarial camouflage poses a severe security threat to autonomous driving systems by mapping adversarial textures onto 3D objects. Nevertheless, current methods remain brittle in complex dynamic scenarios, failing to generalize across diverse geometric (e.g., viewing configurations) and radiometric (e.g., dynamic illumination, atmospheric scattering) variations. We attribute this deficiency to two fundamental limitations in simulation and optimization. First, the reliance on coarse, o

Research on conspiracy theories has largely focused on belief formation, exposure, and diffusion, while paying less attention to how their meanings change over time. This gap persists partly because conspiracy-related terms are often treated as stable lexical markers, making it difficult to separate genuine semantic changes from surface-level vocabulary changes. In this paper, we measure the semantic structure and evolution of conspiracy theories in online political discourse. Using 169.9M comme

As multimodal misinformation becomes more sophisticated, its detection and grounding are crucial. However, current multimodal verification methods, relying on passive holistic fusion, struggle with sophisticated misinformation. Due to 'feature dilution,' global alignments tend to average out subtle local semantic inconsistencies, effectively masking the very conflicts they are designed to find. We introduce MaLSF (Mask-aware Local Semantic Fusion), a novel framework that shifts the paradigm to a

Despite recent advances in medical vision-language pretraining, existing models still struggle to capture the diagnostic workflow: radiographs are typically treated as context-agnostic images, while radiologists' gaze -- a crucial cue for visual reasoning -- remains largely underexplored by existing methods. These limitations hinder the modeling of disease-specific patterns and weaken cross-modal alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce CoGaze, a Context- and Gaze-guided vision-language pretr

Prolonged mid-air interaction in virtual reality (VR) causes arm fatigue and discomfort, negatively affecting user experience. Incorporating ergonomic considerations into VR user interface (UI) design typically requires extensive human-in-the-loop evaluation. Although biomechanical models have been used to simulate human behavior in HCI tasks, their application as surrogate users for ergonomic VR UI design remains underexplored. We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that lev

Human age estimation from facial images represents a challenging computer vision task with significant applications in biometrics, healthcare, and human-computer interaction. While traditional deep learning approaches require extensive labeled datasets and domain-specific training, recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) offer the potential for zero-shot age estimation. This study presents a comprehensive zero-shot evaluation of state-of-the-art Large Vision-Language Models (LVLM

While powerful in image-conditioned generation, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can display uneven performance across demographic groups, highlighting fairness risks. In safety-critical clinical settings, such disparities risk producing unequal diagnostic narratives and eroding trust in AI-assisted decision-making. While fairness has been studied extensively in vision-only and language-only models, its impact on MLLMs remains largely underexplored. To address these biases, we introduce

National and international policy efforts increasingly promote AI literacy in K--12 education, yet access to AI tools alone is insufficient to ensure equitable and responsible participation, particularly in under-resourced contexts. Without designs that integrate ethical reasoning, human support, and opportunities for judgment, AI initiatives risk reinforcing inequities and preparing students to use powerful technologies without critically evaluating their societal consequences. To address this

Despite growing interest in AI education, most AIED initiatives remain narrowly targeted toward STEM-prepared students, limiting participation by non-STEM learners and adults seeking to engage with AI in public-interest, policy, or workforce contexts. This paper presents and evaluates an NSF-funded, innovative mixed-cohort AI education model that intentionally integrates non-STEM undergraduates and adult learners into a shared learning environment centered on ethical reasoning, socio-technical j

Background: More than 80% of U.S. cancer care is delivered in community settings, where survival remains worse than at academic centers. Clinicians must integrate genomics, staging, radiology, pathology, and changing guidelines, creating cognitive burden. We evaluated OncoBrain, an AI clinical reasoning platform for oncology treatment-plan generation, as an early step toward OGI. Methods: OncoBrain combines general-purpose LLMs with a cancer-specific graph retrieval-augmented generation layer, a