AI ethics on Tuesday, 23 June 2026

During the AI and Society Forum, leading MIT researchers examined critical questions about AI’s influence on employment and democracy.

The Claude in Slack app is dead, long live Claude in Slack

Digital surveillance does much more than steal data. It inflicts deep human wounds; it stops people from safely developing and expressing their identities, breeds trauma that can last for generations, and fractures the human mind.

Jailbreak attacks reveal a persistent weakness in aligned Large Language Models: carefully crafted prompts can elicit policy-violating responses despite safety training. While most defenses operate at the prompt or output level, it remains unclear how harmful intent is encoded within the model's internal representations. We investigate this question by analyzing token-level predictive entropy trajectories across layers of a frozen LLM using the logit lens. We find that static aggregate statistic

Early identification of speech sound errors in children is often limited by access to specialists, motivating lightweight screening tools that can operate outside the clinic. We present a screening pipeline for Polish-speaking children focused on sibilant substitutions, coupling a wav2vec2-based CTC token recognizer with alignment-based error typing and a template-grounded caregiver assistant for screening, not diagnosis. On a held-out test set of 10 unseen children comprising 559 utterances, th

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been extended from single-domain training to multi-domain reasoning suites spanning mathematics, programming, and science. However, the training curriculum (how often each domain is sampled) is typically fixed or hand-tuned, even though reasoning skills transfer unevenly across domains. Existing learnability-based curricula adapt to where the policy is currently improving, but are blind to whether a gradient step on the selected domain be

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) embed governing equations in their loss function, enabling mesh-free solutions to partial differential equations. Low training loss is treated as evidence that the learned solution is physically correct. This paper shows that assumption breaks down when encoded physics are incorrect. By perturbing PDE parameters before training, a setting we describe as physics parameter poisoning or parameter misspecification, we produce models that train to low loss but

Volume and quality of datasets are crucial for deep learning model training, yet they are often constrained by availability and data acquisition costs. Synthetic data augmentation can extend existing datasets with realistic images, and the quality of these images is generally assessed through fidelity metrics such as FID, KID, IS, LPIPS and SSIM that measure structural or distributional similarity. However, such metrics, including the widely used FID, focus on visual fidelity without reflecting

Aviation software certification has operationalised three structural requirements for governed software systems since 1992: structured governance linkage between governing specifications and operational evidence, context-bounded validity that triggers revalidation when operational context changes, and an objective evidence architecture that defines what proof means and what makes it sufficient. These requirements appear in DO-178C and DO-330 and are enforced through FAA and EASA certification. N

Autonomous AI systems are transitioning from advisory to autonomous roles for medication prescriptions. Recent United States bill H.R. 238 and Utah's prescription-renewal pilot both authorize AI to prescribe medications in an agentic capacity. While some regulatory guidelines suggest aggregate model performance metrics for clearance, they do not require i) calibrated per-prediction confidence for action-gated thresholds, ii) differentiated communication of uncertainty arising from model ignoranc

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), from a deployment perspective, it is challenging and expensive to train agents from scratch for each new environment or task. In this work, we propose GCT-MARL, a transfer learning framework that builds on the multi-view graph contrastive backbone of MAIL and augments it with a per-view, adaptively weighted alignment loss and a two-phase training protocol specifically designed for transfer across populations of varying sizes and compositi

Black-box LLMs (accessible only via API) are vulnerable to distillation attacks, in which an attacker queries the model and trains a student on its outputs. A recent line of work proposes output perturbation defenses that modify the teacher's output to reduce student performance while preserving utility for legitimate users. As a relatively new family of approaches, output perturbation defenses lack a shared threat model, making it difficult to compare them, reason about composing them with othe

Accurate lesion segmentation in PET/CT is critical for oncology, yet remains challenging because physiologic tracer uptake and artifacts can mimic malignant signal. We present RADIANT-PET, a reasoning-augmented framework that couples a high-sensitivity voxel-level segmentation model with lesion-level large language model (LLM) adjudication. Candidate uptake regions are generated with a deliberately permissive segmentation stage, then converted into structured textual descriptions that summarize

Recovering governing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) from data is a central challenge in modeling dynamical systems across scientific domains. Existing approaches cast discovery as a static inference problem over fixed datasets, assuming that the observed trajectories are sufficiently informative. However, dynamical systems evolve over large state spaces, and limited data can make multiple equations observationally indistinguishable, leading to identifiability gaps and the recovery of inc

General-purpose models often struggle to reliably identify and understand real-world multimodal risks, largely due to the inherent multimodal adversarial nature of content and AI safety. We present Yuvion VL, a family of multimodal large language models purpose-built for content and AI safety, with both instruction-tuned and reasoning-oriented variants. Yuvion VL addresses this gap by treating safety as an inherently adversarial and multimodal problem and designing the entire pipeline around adv

Today's reasoning models use thinking tokens to attain stronger performance on benchmarks than their instruction-tuned counterparts. It is also generally believed that this more "deliberative" mode should improve alignment and safety, by providing the model a safe space to consider whether its planned answer to a request violates its safety principles. We present evidence that this intuition is not always correct. Across frontier open-weight reasoning models spanning GPT-OSS, Qwen, Olmo, and Phi

Sparse voxel representation has emerged as a scalable foundation for image-to-3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) generation, yet current methods struggle to preserve high-frequency visual details of input images due to two structural bottlenecks. First, they adopt discriminative 2D features optimized for semantic abstraction to construct sparse voxel latents, which suppress reconstructive cues and induce a representation bottleneck. Second, in the generation stage, standard diffusion transformers lack

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm in natural language processing. This study explores the impact of diverse pre-training objectives on the performance of encoder-decoder pre-trained language models across generation and question answering tasks, with a focus on commonsense knowledge retrieval and completion. We highlight the benefits of incorporating multiple objectives during both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. We introduce the Match Task to Objective (MTO) framewor

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evalua

Machine unlearning (MU) is commonly judged by output forgetting, such as low forget-set accuracy or reduced logit-level membership inference. But if output-level success can coexist with retraining-inconsistent residuals in representation space, what kind of forgetting are current evaluations actually certifying? We study this question through retraining-consistent representation forgetting, using the retrained model (i.e., trained from scratch without the forget data) as an operational referenc

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for autonomous driving scene understanding, yet existing methods still face a fundamental trade-off between temporal reasoning and spatial precision. Models that rely on single-frame or low-resolution inputs often miss small, distant, or partially occluded hazards, while language-centric driving models frequently provide limited grounded evidence for their explanations. To address this gap, we propose UniDrive, a unified

Generative models, particularly diffusion and score-based approaches, have recently achieved strong performance in speech enhancement, but their iterative sampling process limits real-time deployment. Flow Matching offers an efficient alternative by transporting noisy speech toward clean speech through an ordinary differential equation with few function evaluations. In this work, we propose a skip-free encoder-decoder backbone for flow-matching speech enhancement, guided by Latent Representation

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence. We present a human-grounded evaluation framework that quantifies alignment between SAE latents and human-annotated concepts, without requiring user studies, and validate this matching through targeted attribute perturbations. To enable this i

Training safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems is inherently challenging, with no guarantee of avoiding unwanted behaviors. The most effective defenses against this are (i) transparency through explainability and (ii) alignment via human feedback. While both show promising results, no publicly available framework currently combines them. To address this, we introduce Themis, an XAI-enabled testing and evaluation framework for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. Themis supports over 20

Competency Questions (CQs) are the central component of CQ-verification, an established process in which an ontology is evaluated against a set of natural language questions to determine whether the intended purpose of the ontology has been properly modelled. However, CQ-verification is often time-consuming and error-prone, as it requires careful interpretation of linguistic nuances and precise alignment with formal ontology constructs. Ambiguities and complexity in CQs can further complicate th

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched st

While the validity of LLMs' use in the legal context remains subject to ethical and legal debate, legal professionals are already experimenting with personal LLMs, if only for translation and reformulation. However, even such a seemingly innocuous use can introduce biases through case processing speed if LLM assistants selectively refuse assistance on certain topics. To better anticipate such biases, we investigate several modern small LLMs that are most likely to be used as on-device assistants

Multi-agent LLM environments require robust mechanisms for shared knowledge management. This paper formalizes the fleet-memory problem and identifies four foundational failure modes: unauthorized leakage, stale propagation, contradiction persistence, and provenance collapse. To address these, we define explicit systems-level primitives: scoped retrieval, temporal supersession, provenance tracking, and policy-governed memory propagation. These primitives are implemented in MemClaw, a production m

Scam phone calls exploit vulnerable communities worldwide, yet research on detection has focused almost exclusively on English and other high-resource languages. In low-resource settings such as Turkish, detection is especially difficult, as annotated data is scarce and technological defenses remain limited. This research investigates how large language models (LLMs) can support scam detection in Turkish by introducing the first public multi-modal dataset of 100 aligned audio-transcript pairs of

Due to the wide use of graph-structured data in different fields of industry and science, the development of Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) has recently attracted a lot of attention. While many different types of models are called GFMs, particular interest has been paid to GFMs designed for node property prediction tasks, which is one of the most popular settings in Graph ML with lots of real-world applications from fraud detection in financial and social networks to recommendation systems for e

Modern coding agents pair LLM generators with various tools, including cheap diagnostics and expensive verifiers. The tool-use decisions are typically governed by orchestrators that often use fixed rules and ignore uncertainty. We formulate orchestration as cost-sensitive sequential hypothesis testing: a Bayesian controller maintains a belief over candidate correctness and dynamically decides whether to gather more evidence, refine the candidate, verify it, or stop. Across six generators and nin

We introduce a large-scale, open-source dataset of pre-generated adversarial attacks for vision-language models (VLMs). The dataset is designed to be diverse, representative, and practical, extending existing benchmarks by covering 10 high-level categories and 55 subcategories of harmful intents. Our primary goal is to make adversarial data accessible to the research community, given the computational cost and complexity of generating large numbers of attacks. The dataset comprises 47 524 advers

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into decision-support roles in business and policy contexts. While prior benchmark studies have primarily evaluated LLMs' causal reasoning capabilities, a more fundamental epistemic dimension has been overlooked: Causal Caution, defined as the propensity to refrain from causal judgment when empirical evidence is insufficient. This study examines the systematic suppression of Causal Caution that occurs when LLMs shift from academic to pract

Tailoring stroke rehabilitation requires assessing how movements are organized, not merely if they succeed. Currently, this assessment is a rate-limiting bottleneck. Instruments like the Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) compress rich behavioral observations into single ordinal endpoints, discarding the movement-quality details that distinguish recovery from compensation. Automated alternatives typically chase accuracy on noisy, single-observer labels to output opaque scores - a technology-centric

A central aspiration of mechanistic interpretability is controllability: if we know where a behavior is represented in a model's activations, we should be able to modify it. This rests on a hidden premise -- that the direction which detects a behavior and the direction which controls it are the same, or close. We test this geometrically: what is the angle between the direction that best detects a behavior and the one that best causes it? If detection implies control the cosine is near 1; otherwi

Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success. Existing methods typically elicit confidence only once: either before thinking or after answering. We argue that confidence in reasoning models is state-dependent: before thinking, confidence should estimate the chance of the model correctly solving the prompt, while after thinking it should predict whether the realized answer is likely to be correct. This di

While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing." **Unintentionally bad** contexts can happen without malicious jailbreaking intents: For example, a user asks the model to justify an incorrect math theorem or fails to correct the model's buggy code. Specifically, we investigate ``pigeonholing" in two scenarios: (1) when the user suggests a solution, a

Fine-tuned encoders deployed across heterogeneous NLP tasks face three compounding problems: mismatched inductive biases, class-imbalance corruption of feature statistics, and no mechanism to condition attention on external lexical knowledge. We introduce \textbf{\surgellm}, a unified transformer framework that addresses each with a dedicated lightweight module: a \emph{surgical feature gate} (learned per-dimension sigmoid over curated lexical indicators and \texttt{[CLS]}; provably degenerates

Although text-to-motion generation has achieved strong progress in synthesizing realistic single-person motions from language, extending it to text-driven 3D human-human interaction (HHI) remains non-trivial, as HHI requires modeling the underlying \textbf{social structure} that governs phase progression, actor roles, and inter-actor coordination. In this paper, we formulate HHI generation as a social structure modeling and grounding problem: the model must first infer how an interaction unfolds

Crypter-as-a-Service (CraaS) has become a key enabling layer of the contemporary malware economy by providing on-demand evasion capabilities through underground service markets. In this paper, we present a longitudinal characterization of the CraaS ecosystem on exploit.in, a major Russian-language cybercrime forum with a presence on both the clear web and the dark web. From a collection of approximately 1,000,000 posts, we combine keyword filtering, LLM-assisted annotation, and manual validation

Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptuali

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in clinical settings increasingly requires multilingual retrieval against predominantly English evidence corpora. Multilingual medical retrieval demands three capabilities: cross-lingual alignment, concept discrimination, and evidence retrieval. However, existing benchmarks evaluate these only in isolation, leaving the interaction between biomedical expertise and multilingual coverage unmeasured. We introduce MMed-Bench-IR, a benchmark designed to disentangle

Modern AIGC pipelines deliver high-fidelity images and videos but presuppose a well-formed creation instruction, while end users rarely articulate visual details, leaving generators misaligned with user demand. We study personalized content generation, which turns a user's interaction history into an executable instruction for downstream synthesis, and identify two obstacles: behavior must be encoded in a form legible to language reasoning, and the model must acquire instruction-writing skill ab

Pretrained vision models often misclassify inputs that are rotated, scaled, or sheared, even though these affine transformations leave the object class unchanged. Robustness is usually restored either by building equivariance into the architecture or by retraining with augmentation, both of which require changing or retraining the model. Test-time canonicalization instead leaves the classifier untouched. It undoes the transformation of each input, mapping it to a canonical form near the training

Recent end-to-end models for EEG-guided target speech extraction report impressive results, underscoring potential for neuro-steered hearing technologies. However, our analysis reveals that high within-trial performance can be driven by trial-specific EEG structure that acts as shortcuts for target selection, leading to poor generalization on unseen trials. To overcome this gap, we propose TRUST-TSE, a two-stage framework to mitigate shortcut learning. By introducing contrastive pretraining with

Short dramas, with their rapid shot rhythms, dialogue-driven focus shifts, and demanding cinematographic grounding, pose challenges that prompt-level or text-only video generation pipelines struggle to meet. We study plot-to-short-drama generation, where a global plot and local context are transformed into visually grounded multi-shot videos. We propose DramaDirector, a geometry-grounded framework that lets the planner borrow cinematographic geometry from a gallery of real short-drama shots inde

Generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) is reshaping learning in higher education, with particularly pronounced implications for the humanities and social sciences(HSS), where learning outcomes are commonly expressed through written and interpretive forms that align closely with GenAI's capabilities. Yet, systematic evidence on the educational impacts of GenAI on HSS students remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study draws on a large-scale survey of HSS students in China to examine its

Financial time series forecasting presents structural challenges absent from standard benchmarks. Log-returns are non-stationary, exhibit exceptionally low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, and are governed by regime-dependent temporal dependencies. We identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series models in financial settings. A fixed context window is mismatched to the time-varying optimal look-back of non-stationary price processes. We propose the Regime-Aware Variable-context E

Recommender systems often induce filter bubbles and semantic homogenization by monolithically optimizing for immediate user engagement. Standard single-objective models, including traditional Deep Q-Networks, are ill-equipped to navigate the trade-offs between platform retention and critical societal values like information diversity and provider fairness. To address these limitations, we introduce a multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that formalizes recommendation as a semantic mu

Media have made misinformation conversations part of daily life. We looked at nearly four decades’ worth of news stories about misinformation to see exactly what this coverage looked like. We searched five major U.S. daily newspapers for articles containing the misinformation-related terms—disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theory, fake news, and propaganda—then extracted words in proximity to these key terms to identify associative patterns. The post Quantifying the “misinformation beat