AI ethics on Sunday, 28 June 2026

But concerns persist about the power and governance of software agents.

The education nonprofit drops its combined acronym for a unified brand.

Thomas Ahle wants Normal Computing to be the Lovable for chip design: type your intent, and a swarm of agents carries it from design through optimisation, formalisation and verification to tape-out. To get there, his team at wrote their own open-source Verilog simulator, 580,000 lines in 43 days, because commercial EDA verifiers run about $10,000 per core and there are no decent open-source compilers to build on. That sets up the question Tim keeps pressing: if an agent can produce a chip design

One of the most popular posts in this blog’s history was Common Knowledge and Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, based on a lecture that I gave to high-school students 11 years ago. One of the impacts of that post, I’m proud to say, is that (according to Steven Pinker) it helped to inspire Steve’s excellent recent popular […]

Plus: The frontier is already agentic; unlocking innovation; new drugs, food apps without food & Chinese AI job market++

The European Social Charter is a treaty of the Council of Europe that guarantees fundamental social and economic rights. It complements the European Convention on Human Rights, which refers to civil ...

Enhanced transparency and exchange of information to put an end to bank secrecy and fight tax evasion and avoidance ...

Rare events govern the safety profile of modern AI systems, yet their probabilities are extremely difficult to estimate: direct Monte Carlo requires prohibitive sample budgets. Subset Simulation (SS) addresses this by decomposing a rare-event probability into moderate conditional probabilities over nested intermediate events. However, classical SS requires a handcrafted scalar performance function whose sublevel sets define those events, demanding detailed knowledge of the failure geometry and l

We aim to discover diverse, generalizable perturbations of LLM internals that can surface hidden behavioral modes. Such perturbations could help reshape model behavior and systematically evaluate potential risks. We introduce Causal Perturbative Elicitation (CPE), an unsupervised method for discovering interpretable low-rank adapters (LoRAs) that can elicit these latent behaviors. CPE decomposes the computations of a deep transformer slice using a heuristic tensor-decomposition-based algorithm.

Vision-language foundation models have shown strong potential in medical image analysis. Although foundation models for ultrasound imaging have recently emerged, the domain remains particularly challenging due to severe speckle noise, acquisition variability, and subtle anatomical boundaries, leading to high inter-observer variability. Existing CLIP-based models rely primarily on global image-text alignment, limiting their sensitivity to clinically decisive local structures. We propose SonoCLIP,

Modern LLM deployments routinely compress models and raise sampling temperature to reduce cost, latency, or repetition, yet safety evaluations usually treat these choices as fixed implementation details. This leaves a practical uncertainty: does a model that is safe at FP16 and greedy decoding remain safe after it is quantized and sampled stochastically, or do the two deployment knobs amplify one another? We study this question with a factorial evaluation of 9 instruction-tuned models from six f

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) reveals brain metabolism and is clinically central to neurodegenerative disease assessment, yet existing 3D brain foundation models treat PET as generic volumetric data, missing the structured regional metabolic information that distinguishes it from structural neuroimaging. To address these limitations, we propose ReMAP-PET, a framework that moves beyond visual encoding by supervising a partially-tuned MedicalNet 3D ResNet-50 with brain regional standardized u

Role-semantic assignments provide priors over how heterogeneous agents may coordinate, but cooperative MARL systems instead settle on conventions through decentralized, non-stationary learning, with no guarantee that the resulting structure matches those priors. We study this translation gap between theory-informed role expectations and learned coordination structure through a diagnostic combining a role-routing matrix, formation sensitivity ($Δ_{\max}$), and gradient/occlusion attribution acros

Consumer depth sensors such as the LiDAR scanner on recent iPhones provide metric range, but their useful range is short and their returns are sparse. We present DH-Active, a lightweight, training-free geometry back-end that treats the sensor as a metric ruler rather than the sole source of depth. Near-field returns anchor the metric relative pose of two views through PnP; visually trackable samples without a valid depth return are then triangulated under that pose. A parallax/reprojection gate

Symmetry provides a quantum neural network structure, but on its own it does not keep the network trainable once noise is present. We ask which physical quantity decides whether the gradients of an equivariant circuit survive decoherence, and we answer with a compact training law. Working with U(1)-equivariant brickwork circuits that conserve a charge, we find that two distinct effects govern a trainable gradient. Causality fixes where the gradient can live, confining it to the backward light co

Confidence is an estimate of the probability that a chosen answer is correct. Verbal confidence reports are widely used as uncertainty measures in large language models, but whether they are best understood as estimates of correctness is unclear. We test this with a two-stage abstention paradigm from the neuroscience of perceptual decision making: a model first answers and reports its confidence, then decides whether to commit it to a user or abstain. Across four non-reasoning models, prompt fra

Vision-language dataset distillation (VLDD) compresses a large image-text paired dataset into a small set of synthetic pairs that can efficiently train contrastive vision-language models under strict data and compute budgets. Most existing methods match expert trajectories or cross-modal statistics, yet still enforce full-dimensional alignment in a Euclidean embedding space. This is often overly restrictive due to rank-deficient image--text correlation, with shared semantics concentrated in a lo

Arbitrary-Scale Super-Resolution (ASR) reconstructs images at continuous magnification factors. Recent methods accelerate inference by replacing computationally heavy implicit neural decoders with explicit 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS). However, since standard Gaussians are smooth low-pass primitives, modeling edges and fine textures requires multiple overlapping, well-aligned splats, which creates severe bottlenecks during rasterization. To address this, we introduce Resonant Brane Splatting (RBS)

Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists. We evaluate five defense paradigms (no defense, static steering, CAST, AlphaSteer, probe-gated) across seven instruction-tuned models (7-31B) and five attack types (GCG, AutoDAN, DeepInception, prefilling, intent laundering). Our central finding: prompt-time activation defenses are structurally blind to prefilling attacks. AlphaSteer achieves 0% attack success on GCG, AutoDAN, and inte

Novel safety, socio-economic, and ethical harms arising from the deployment of AI-based systems have led to a breadth of work seeking to map, measure, and mitigate against newly found risks. These works have heavily leveraged techniques and terminology from the fields of System Safety Engineering and Cybersecurity, yet they have fallen short in accounting for the limitations and nuances that reduce the efficacy and correct application of adopted methodologies. Furthermore, misuse of terminology

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult reasoning tasks, but it often incurs long natural-language rationales that are poorly aligned with efficient machine reasoning. We propose Communicative Language Symbolism Routing (CLSR), a test-time framework in which multiple LLM agents autonomously invent, evolve, and share compact Language Symbolism Frameworks (LSFs), while a latent-free router adaptively selects and composes these languages per query to optimize the a

Adaptive Financial Transformer (AFT) is proposed for stock return prediction under non-stationary financial markets. The model incorporates a Market Regime Encoder, an Adaptive Gate Network, and an Adaptive Financial Context module to dynamically bias self-attention based on semantic relationships between financial indicators. Unlike conventional Transformer architectures that treat all input features uniformly, the proposed approach groups 95 engineered financial features into 11 semantic categ

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) trains a reasoning model on rollouts sampled from its own policy by matching a privileged teacher that also sees verified reference solutions. Existing OPSD objectives supervise only the output distribution, so privileged context affects training through a token-level divergence without directly supervising the internal computation that produced that distribution. We propose Privileged Hidden Flow (PHF), which additionally distills how a privileged teacher's hi

We identify intervention bias as a previously unquantified failure mode of zero-shot large-language-model (LLM) educational advisory agents: without task-specific training, they recommend action when a hindsight-optimal oracle policy mandates inaction. In a six-arm ablation on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (N=800 students, four temporal cutoffs), at day 56 -- when the oracle designates 70.1% of students as needing no intervention -- zero-shot GPT-4o recommends action for 73%, a

Emotion recognition of song lyrics is a challenging task since lyrics may not necessarily align with the overall emotion of a song. As a result, lyrics annotation remains largely underexplored. Drawing inspiration from research in large language model (LLM) assisted annotation, we examine the alignment between humans and LLMs for annotation of lyrics by creating a new sentence-level dataset of lyrics. Our observations highlight the subjectivity of the task and the inherent challenges. Following

We present AnyBody, a unified whole-body humanoid controller driven by an arbitrary subset of body keypoints chosen at deploy time. Prior physics-based trackers either rely on expensive full-body motion capture and error-prone trajectory retargeting, which bottleneck scalable data collection and policy learning, or decompose upper- and lower-body control into separate hierarchical representations, sacrificing the coordinated whole-body motions that loco-manipulation requires. We close this gap b

International humanitarian law protects civilians from direct attack unless and for such time as they take direct part in hostilities, with the ICRC's 2009 Interpretive Guidance operationalising this rule through a three-criterion cumulative test. This paper argues that AI-mediated civilian cyber operations challenge the direct causation element of this test in a structurally specific way: when a civilian deploys an autonomous multi-agent cyber system of the kind recently demonstrated in offensi

While existing data attribution methods can identify which training examples build specific mechanistic circuits, they cannot explain how training data shapes the high-level behavioral decisions a model learns to make. To bridge this gap, we introduce Symbolic Mechanistic Data Attribution (SMDA), a framework that attributes training pairs to the interpretable symbolic policies governing model behavior. SMDA fits a closed-form Ridge regression over sparse autoencoder (SAE) features to model a tar

Latent reasoning models perform multi-step inference directly in hidden-state space, yet the structure of these latent reasoning trajectories remains poorly understood. We show that contrastive refinement signals between stronger and weaker reasoning trajectories exhibit a highly concentrated low-rank structure, while unconstrained latent updates remain sensitive to paraphrases, checkpoint choice, and trajectory perturbations. These observations suggest that latent reasoning trajectories contain

Event cameras capture sparse brightness changes with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, compensating for the deficiencies of the conventional RGB frames. However, previous multi-modal fusion techniques typically fail to handle the inherent heterogeneity between RGB frames and event streams, thus easily leading to noise amplification or redundant feature integration during cross-modal fusion. In this paper, we propose a Cross-Modal information inTeraction transFormer, coined as CMTF

Software practitioners use online forums to navigate complex and often ambiguous legal privacy requirements, yet little is known about their professional backgrounds, what challenges they face, and how they use and assess the credibility of the advice received, or how they resolve ambiguities in posts. We report the findings of a survey of 223 Reddit users from regulatory-focused subreddits, complemented by a qualitative analysis of 2,248 posts and responses. Our results show that, despite holdi