AI ethics on Thursday, 2 April 2026

Safety alignment has become a critical step to ensure LLMs refuse harmful requests while providing helpful and harmless responses. However, despite the ubiquity of safety alignment for deployed frontier models, two separate lines of recent work--jailbreak-tuning (JT) and weight orthogonalization (WO)--have shown that safety guardrails may be largely disabled, resulting in LLMs which comply with harmful requests they would normally refuse. In spite of far-reaching safety implications, analysis ha

Autonomous AI agents operating in dynamic environments face a persistent challenge: acquiring new capabilities without erasing prior knowledge. We present Adaptive Memory Crystallization (AMC), a memory architecture for progressive experience consolidation in continual reinforcement learning. AMC is conceptually inspired by the qualitative structure of synaptic tagging and capture (STC) theory, the idea that memories transition through discrete stability phases, but makes no claim to model the u

Automatic violence detection from video is challenging because violent interactions may be distant, occluded, or only partially visible. Audio can provide complementary evidence for violent events that are difficult to recognize from visual information alone. However, audio itself may be absent, dubbed, or dominated by environmental noise, making the central challenge not whether to incorporate audio but how to adapt reliance on it according to the visual scene. We introduce \emph{AViS-Mamba}, a

The preservation of intangible cultural heritage is a critical challenge as collective memory fades over time. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for generating engaging narratives, their propensity for factual inaccuracies or "hallucinations" makes them unreliable for heritage applications where veracity is a central requirement. To address this, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic architecture grounded in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) that establishes a transparent "plan-retrie

The recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers new opportunities to generate user preference data to warm-start bandits. Recent studies on contextual bandits with LLM initialization (CBLI) have shown that these synthetic priors can significantly lower early regret. However, these findings assume that LLM-generated choices are reasonably aligned with actual user preferences. In this paper, we systematically examine how LLM-generated preferences perform when random and label-flippin

Perception plays a central role in connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), underpinning not only conventional modular driving stacks, but also cooperative perception systems and recent end-to-end driving models. While deep learning has greatly improved perception performance, its statistical nature makes perfect predictions difficult to attain. Meanwhile, standard training objectives and evaluation benchmarks treat all perception errors equally, even though only a subset is safety-critical. In

Fairness-aware recommender systems often mitigate bias by increasing exposure to under-represented or long-tail content, commonly through mechanisms that promote novelty and diversity. In practice, the strength of such interventions is typically controlled using global hyperparameters, fixed regularization weights, heuristic caps, or offline tuning strategies. These approaches implicitly assume that a single level of exploration is appropriate across users, contexts, and stages of interaction. I

Malware family classification remains a challenging task in automated malware analysis, particularly in real-world settings characterized by obfuscation, packing, and rapidly evolving threats. Existing machine learning and deep learning approaches typically depend on labeled datasets, handcrafted features, supervised training, or dynamic analysis, which limits their scalability and effectiveness in open-world scenarios. This paper presents a zero-label malware family classification framework bas

The scarcity of labeled satellite imagery remains a fundamental bottleneck for deep-learning (DL)-based wildfire monitoring systems. This paper investigates whether a diffusion-based foundation model for Earth Observation (EO), EarthSynth, can synthesize realistic post-wildfire Sentinel-2 RGB imagery conditioned on existing burn masks, without task-specific retraining. Using burn masks derived from the CalFireSeg-50 dataset (Martin et al., 2025), we design and evaluate six controlled experimenta

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) introduce interpretability to black-box deep learning models by predicting labels through human-understandable concepts. However, unlike humans, who identify objects at different levels of abstraction using both general and specific features, existing CBMs operate at a single semantic level in both concept and label space. We propose HIL-CBM, a Hierarchical Interpretable Label-Free Concept Bottleneck Model that extends CBMs into a hierarchical framework to enhanc

Cinematic camera control relies on a tight feedback loop between director and cinematographer, where camera motion and framing are continuously reviewed and refined. Recent generative camera systems can produce diverse, text-conditioned trajectories, but they lack this "director in the loop" and have no explicit supervision of whether a shot is visually desirable. This results in in-distribution camera motion but poor framing, off-screen characters, and undesirable visual aesthetics. In this pap

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet scalable training is often hindered by the rapid collapse of policy entropy, which leads to premature convergence and performance saturation. This paper provides a comparative theoretical analysis of two entropy control strategies: traditional entropy regularization and the recently proposed covariance-based mechanism. We establish a unified framework for entropy dynamics under soft

We study the geometric structure of layer updates in deep language models. Rather than analyzing what information is encoded in intermediate representations, we ask how representations change from one layer to the next. We show that layerwise updates admit a decomposition into a dominant tokenwise component and a residual that is not captured by restricted tokenwise function classes. Across multiple architectures, including Transformers and state-space models, we find that the full layer update

Behavioral simulation is increasingly used to anticipate responses to interventions. Large language models (LLMs) enable researchers to specify population characteristics and intervention context in natural language, but it remains unclear to what extent LLMs can use these inputs to infer intervention effects. We evaluated three LLMs on 11 climate-psychology interventions using a dataset of 59,508 participants from 62 countries, and replicated the main analysis in two additional datasets (12 and

Recent multimodal large language models have achieved strong performance in unified text and image understanding and generation, yet extending such native capability to 3D remains challenging due to limited data. Compared to abundant 2D imagery, high-quality 3D assets are scarce, making 3D synthesis under-constrained. Existing methods often rely on indirect pipelines that edit in 2D and lift results into 3D via optimization, sacrificing geometric consistency. We present Omni123, a 3D-native foun

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for post-training large language models. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is widely adopted, its coarse credit assignment uniformly penalizes failed rollouts, lacking the token-level focus needed to efficiently address specific deviations. Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO) addresses this by providing denser, more targeted logit-level supervision that facilitates rapid early improvement,

Long-horizon conversational agents require persistent memory for coherent reasoning, yet uncontrolled accumulation causes temporal decay and false memory propagation. Benchmarks such as LOCOMO and LOCCO report performance degradation from 0.455 to 0.05 across stages, while MultiWOZ shows 78.2% accuracy with 6.8% false memory rate under persistent retention. This work introduces an adaptive budgeted forgetting framework that regulates memory through relevanceguided scoring and bounded optimizatio

Agentic AI shifts the investor's role from analytical execution to oversight. We present an agentic strategic asset allocation pipeline in which approximately 50 specialized agents produce capital market assumptions, construct portfolios using over 20 competing methods, and critique and vote on each other's output. A researcher agent proposes new portfolio construction methods not yet represented, and a meta-agent compares past forecasts against realized returns and rewrites agent code and promp

Regulatory documents encode legally binding obligations that LLM-based systems must respect. Yet converting dense, hierarchically structured legal text into machine-readable rules remains a costly, expert-intensive process. We present De Jure, a fully automated, domain-agnostic pipeline for extracting structured regulatory rules from raw documents, requiring no human annotation, domain-specific prompting, or annotated gold data. De Jure operates through four sequential stages: normalization of s

Generative AI (GAI) reveals an irreducible human core at the center of data science: advances in GAI should sharpen, rather than diminish, the focus on human reasoning in data science education. GAI can now execute many routine data science workflows, including cleaning, summarizing, visualizing, modeling, and drafting reports. Yet the competencies that matter most remain irreducibly human: problem formulation, measurement and design, causal identification, statistical and computational reasonin

Video recommender systems are among the most popular and impactful applications of AI, shaping content consumption and influencing culture for billions of users. Traditional single-model recommenders, which optimize static engagement metrics, are increasingly limited in addressing the dynamic requirements of modern platforms. In response, multi-agent architectures are redefining how video recommender systems serve, learn, and adapt to both users and datasets. These agent-based systems coordinate

Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have demonstrated significant potential in knowledge-intensive tasks; however, they remain vulnerable to performance degradation when presented with irrelevant or noisy retrieved contexts. Existing approaches to enhance robustness typically operate via coarse-grained parameter updates at the layer or module level, often overlooking the inherent neuron-level sparsity of Large Language Models (LLMs). To address this limitation, we propose Neuro-RIT (Neur

AI models of equivalent capability can exhibit fundamentally different behavioral patterns, yet no standardized instrument exists to measure these dispositional differences. Existing approaches either borrow human personality dimensions and rely on self-report (which diverges from actual behavior in LLMs) or treat behavioral variation as a defect rather than a trait. We introduce the Model Temperament Index (MTI), a behavior-based profiling system that measures AI agent temperament across four a

AI-native 6G networks promise to transform the telecom industry by enabling dynamic resource allocation, predictive maintenance, and ultra-reliable low-latency communications across all layers, which are essential for applications such as smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and immersive XR. However, the deployment of 6G systems results in severe data scarcity, hindering the training of efficient AI models. Synthetic data generation is extensively used to fill this gap; however, it introduces cha

Rerankers play a pivotal role in refining retrieval results for Retrieval-Augmented Generation. However, current reranking models are typically optimized on static human annotated relevance labels in isolation, decoupled from the downstream generation process. This isolation leads to a fundamental misalignment: documents identified as topically relevant by information retrieval metrics often fail to provide the actual utility required by the LLM for precise answer generation. To bridge this gap,

Autonomous agents are moving beyond simple retrieval tasks to become economic actors that invoke APIs, sequence workflows, and make real-time decisions. As this shift accelerates, API providers need request-level monetization with programmatic spend governance. The HTTP 402 protocol addresses this by treating payment as a first-class protocol event, but most implementations rely on cryptocurrency rails. In many deployment contexts, especially countries with strong real-time fiat systems like UPI

Abnormal head movements (AHMs) manifest across a broad spectrum of neurological disorders; however, the absence of a multi-condition resource integrating kinematic measurements, clinical severity scores, and patient demographics constitutes a persistent barrier to the development of AI-driven diagnostic tools. To address this gap, this study introduces NeuroPose-AHM, a knowledge-based dataset of neurologically induced AHMs constructed through a multi-LLM extraction framework applied to 1,430 pee

The audio research community depends on open generative models as foundational tools for building novel approaches and establishing baselines. In this report, we present Woosh, Sony AI's publicly released sound effect foundation model, detailing its architecture, training process, and an evaluation against other popular open models. Being optimized for sound effects, we provide (1) a high-quality audio encoder/decoder model and (2) a text-audio alignment model for conditioning, together with (3)

Large Language Models increasingly suppress biased outputs when demographic identity is stated explicitly, yet may still exhibit implicit biases when identity is conveyed indirectly. Existing benchmarks use name based proxies to detect implicit biases, which carry weak associations with many social demographics and cannot extend to dimensions like age or socioeconomic status. We introduce ImplicitBBQ, a QA benchmark that evaluates implicit bias through characteristic based cues, culturally assoc

Dyslexic spelling errors exhibit systematic phonological and orthographic patterns that distinguish them from the errors produced by typically developing writers. While this observation has motivated dyslexic-specific spell-checking and assistive writing tools, prior work has focused predominantly on error correction rather than attribution, and has largely neglected the ethical risks. The risk of harmful labelling, covert screening, algorithmic bias, and institutional misuse that automated clas

Clinical prediction from structured electronic health records (EHRs) is challenging due to high dimensionality, heterogeneity, class imbalance, and distribution shift. While tabular in-context learning (TICL) and retrieval-augmented methods perform well on generic benchmarks, their behavior in clinical settings remains unclear. We present a multi-cohort EHR benchmark comparing classical, deep tabular, and TICL models across varying data scale, feature dimensionality, outcome rarity, and cross-co

Computational drug discovery, particularly the complex workflows of drug molecule screening and optimization, requires orchestrating dozens of specialized tools in multi-step workflows, yet current AI agents struggle to maintain robust performance and consistently underperform in these high-complexity scenarios. Here we present MolClaw, an autonomous agent that leads drug molecule evaluation, screening, and optimization. It unifies over 30 specialized domain resources through a three-tier hierar

Quality inspection in smart manufacturing requires identifying intrinsic material and surface properties beyond visible geometry, yet vision-only methods remain vulnerable to occlusion and reflection. We propose VitaTouch, a property-aware vision-tactile-language model for material-property inference and natural-language attribute description. VitaTouch uses modality-specific encoders and a dual Q-Former to extract language-relevant visual and tactile features, which are compressed into prefix t

Achieving semantic interoperability across heterogeneous experimental data systems remains a major barrier to data-driven scientific discovery. The Analytical Information Markup Language (AnIML), a flexible XML-based standard for analytical chemistry and biology, is increasingly used in industrial R&D labs for managing and exchanging experimental data. However, the expressivity of the XML schema permits divergent interpretations across stakeholders, introducing inconsistencies that undermine the

General aviation fault diagnosis and efficient maintenance are critical to flight safety; however, deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained edge devices poses dual challenges in computational capacity and interpretability. This paper proposes LiteInception--a lightweight interpretable fault diagnosis framework designed for edge deployment. The framework adopts a two-stage cascaded architecture aligned with standard maintenance workflows: Stage 1 performs high-recall fault detection

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for autonomous driving must integrate diverse textual inputs, including navigation commands, hazard warnings, and traffic state descriptions, yet current systems often present these as disconnected fragments, forcing the model to discover on its own which environmental constraints are relevant to the current maneuver. We introduce Causal Scene Narration (CSN), which restructures VLA text inputs through intent-constraint alignment, quantitative grounding, and s

Audio-visual Navigation refers to an agent utilizing visual and auditory information in complex 3D environments to accomplish target localization and path planning, thereby achieving autonomous navigation. The core challenge of this task lies in the following: how the agent can break free from the dependence on training data and achieve autonomous navigation with good generalization performance when facing changes in environments and sound sources. To address this challenge, we propose an Audio

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) is fundamentally restructuring online content ecologies, necessitating a rigorous examination of its behavioral and distributional implications. Leveraging a comprehensive longitudinal dataset comprising tens of millions of users from a leading Chinese video-sharing platform, this study elucidated the distinct creation and consumption behaviors characterizing AIGC versus Human-Generated Content (HGC). We identified a pre

Model merging aims to integrate multiple expert models into a single model that inherits their complementary strengths without incurring the inference-time cost of ensembling. Recent progress has shown that merging can be highly effective when all source models are \emph{homogeneous}, i.e., derived from the same pretrained backbone and therefore share aligned parameter coordinates or compatible task vectors. Yet this assumption is increasingly unrealistic in open model ecosystems, where useful e

While long-term memory is essential for intelligent agents to maintain consistent historical awareness, the accumulation of extensive interaction data often leads to performance bottlenecks. Naive storage expansion increases retrieval noise and computational latency, overwhelming the reasoning capacity of models deployed on constrained personal devices. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Memory Orchestration (HMO), a framework that organizes interaction history into a three-tiered director

Clinical AI systems routinely train on health data structurally distorted by documentation workflows, billing incentives, and terminology fragmentation. Prior work has characterised the mechanisms of this distortion: the three-forces model of documentary enactment, the reification feedback loop through which AI may amplify coding artefacts, and terminology governance failures that allow semantic drift to accumulate. Yet translating these insights into implementable software architecture remains

Embedding LLM-driven agents into environmental FAIR data management is compelling - they can externalize operational knowledge and scale curation across heterogeneous data and evolving conventions. However, replacing deterministic components with probabilistic workflows changes the failure mode: LLM pipelines may generate plausible but incorrect outputs that pass superficial checks and propagate into irreversible actions such as DOI minting and public release. We introduce EnviSmart, a productio

Existing benchmarks for LLM-based vulnerability detection compress model performance into a single metric, which fails to reflect the distinct priorities of different stakeholders. For example, a CISO may emphasize high recall of critical vulnerabilities, an engineering leader may prioritize minimizing false positives, and an AI officer may balance capability against cost. To address this limitation, we introduce SecLens-R, a multi-stakeholder evaluation framework structured around 35 shared dim

Machine learning, especially physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their neural network variants, has been widely used to solve problems involving partial differential equations (PDEs). The successful deployment of such methods beyond academic research remains limited. For example, PINN methods primarily consider discrete point-to-point fitting and fail to account for the potential properties of real solutions. The adoption of continuous activation functions in these approaches leads to l

Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to physically realizable adversarial attacks remains underexplored. Existing studies reveal vulnerabilities through language perturbations and 2D visual attacks, but these attack surfaces are either less representative of real deployment or limited in physical realism. In contrast, adversarial 3D textures pose a more physically plausible and damaging threat, as they are naturally attac

Multi-agent systems (MAS) tackle complex tasks by distributing expertise, though this often comes at the cost of heavy coordination overhead, context fragmentation, and brittle phase ordering. Distilling a MAS into a single-agent skill can bypass these costs, but this conversion lacks a principled answer for when and what to distill. Instead, the empirical outcome is surprisingly inconsistent: skill lift ranges from a 28% improvement to a 2% degradation across metrics of the exact same task. In

While modern LLMs are aligned to refuse harmful requests, it is essential to understand the underlying mechanistic basis of this refusal behavior for model safety analysis. For example, steering-based jailbreak attacks exploit this by identifying and manipulating sparse, neuron-like refusal features to bypass safety guardrails. Current feature selection methods primarily rely on how strongly features activate on harmful prompts. However, activation strength alone often captures superficial heuri

Automating the translation of Operations Research (OR) problems from natural language to executable models is a critical challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in linear tasks, they suffer from severe performance degradation in real-world nonlinear scenarios due to semantic misalignment between mathematical formulations and solver codes, as well as unstable information extraction. In this study, we introduce NED-Tree, a systematic framework designed to bridge the semant

Open-vocabulary human-object interaction (HOI) detection is a step towards building scalable systems that generalize to unseen interactions in real-world scenarios and support grounded multimodal systems that reason about human-object relationships. However, standard evaluation metrics, such as mean Average Precision (mAP), treat HOI classes as discrete categorical labels and fail to credit semantically valid but lexically different predictions (e.g., "lean on couch" vs. "sit on couch"), limitin

Multimodal tabular-image fusion is an emerging task that has received increasing attention in various domains. However, existing methods may be hindered by gradient conflicts between modalities, misleading the optimization of the unimodal learner. In this paper, we propose a novel Gradient-Aligned Alternating Learning (GAAL) paradigm to address this issue by aligning modality gradients. Specifically, GAAL adopts an alternating unimodal learning and shared classifier to decouple the multimodal gr

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed under diverse numerical precision configurations, including standard floating-point formats (e.g., bfloat16 and float16) and quantized integer formats (e.g., int16 and int8), to meet efficiency and resource constraints. However, minor inconsistencies between LLMs of different precisions are difficult to detect and are often overlooked by existing evaluation methods. In this paper, we present PrecisionDiff, an automated differential testing f

This study examines how a Terms of Service update on X enabling default AI training on user content activated privacy anxiety and reshaped user behavior. Privacy anxiety is conceptualized as a structural outcome of reduced control over data use, particularly among content creators. The study finds that privacy anxiety is activated within creator communities and diffused across user groups through inter- and cross- community interaction. As anxiety escalated, engagement declined and migration int

We present ReFlow, a unified framework for monocular dynamic scene reconstruction that learns 3D motion in a novel self-correction manner from raw video. Existing methods often suffer from incomplete scene initialization for dynamic regions, leading to unstable reconstruction and motion estimation, which often resorts to external dense motion guidance such as pre-computed optical flow to further stabilize and constrain the reconstruction of dynamic components. However, this introduces additional

In agentic systems, human-generated data records anchor the value of AI services. Yet cloud compute pipelines centralize processing on remote servers. Data centralization reduces personal data sovereignty and may potentially degrade the quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, user contributions are diverse in quantity and quality: decentralized records can be biased, noisy, and heterogeneously distributed. To address the data challenge, we study fair token allocation and private data valuation for

Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) studies output variation across generation, reasoning, alignment, and representational analysis, often under the umbrella of "diversity." Yet the terminology remains fragmented, largely because the normative objectives underlying tasks are rarely made explicit. We introduce the Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin framework, which models output variation along a homogeneity-heterogeneity axis, where valuation is determined by the task and its normative objective.