AI ethics on Tuesday, 4 August 2026

We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning. In this class, we theoretically prove that the training dynamics of attention models can be confined to a hig

Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does this recipe transfer to dexterous manipulation? The answer is not obvious, as manipulation involves complex, contact-rich dynamics and requires delicate regulation of contact modes and forces. We present REGRIND, a minimalist retargeting-guided RL pipeline that learns dexterous manip

Long-form audio description (AD) requires more than describing visible actions: it must preserve characters, events, relationships, and story context across scenes so that blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences can follow a film. Modern video-language models (VLMs) are effective on short clips, but they often treat each moment independently, producing descriptions that miss who characters are, why events matter, and how the current scene connects to earlier narrative context. We propose StoryTelle

In this paper we present a study of students' mental models of generative AI (GenAI). A student's mental model of GenAI influences not only how they perceive the technology's capabilities and limitations but also how they choose to integrate it into their academic work. Whether they view it as a collaborative partner, a shortcut to complete tasks, or something in between, depends on how they conceptualize its use. This study addresses the following questions: (I) What mental models do undergradu

Artificial general intelligence ultimately requires agents that can reason and act in the physical world. Action models, vision-language-action policies, and world models have advanced this goal, while World Action Models (WAMs) are particularly promising because they connect candidate interventions with predicted consequences. However, progress remains fragmented: models use incompatible action spaces and prediction targets, datasets and tasks follow different conventions, and runtime systems e

There are two standard ways to spend more compute at test time: let a model reason longer, or sample more attempts and keep one. Both share a hidden limit: they are internal. Every extra token comes from the same frozen weights and the same prompt, so neither can tell the model anything it does not already know. We study a third way, interaction: the model proposes an artifact, an external instrument observes how it actually behaves, and the model revises. Each cycle imports a real observation,

We introduce a constrained two-view framework for node prediction that aligns structure-conditioned GNN embeddings with a structure-free feature prior learned by an anchor model. Conventional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) couple feature transformation and neighborhood aggregation, which renders them vulnerable to topology noise and heterophilous connections. To decouple this dependency, our framework utilizes an independent anchor network to capture intrinsic attribute features via a self-supervi

Post-training is essential for refining the domain-specific capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet existing reward optimization and distribution matching methods tightly couple policy exploration with distribution alignment. This coupling forces expensive exploration directly on the policy model and severely hinders the asynchronous generation, reuse, and cross-model transfer of optimization signals. In this paper, we propose Proxy-guided Update Signal Transfer (PUST), a novel post-tr

Personal AI assistants on mobile and wearable devices continuously perceive users' daily lives through visual and audio streams. However, answering queries about past experiences requires lightweight multimodal memory that can continuously accumulate, organize, and retrieve long-term experiences, which remains challenging. To address this challenge, we present LightMem-Ego, a lightweight streaming multimodal memory system for everyday-life assistance. The system continuously captures egocentric

This paper presents the mAIEnergy dataset, an open-access, multimodal corpus developed to support Large Language Model (LLM) applications in the energy sector. The dataset integrates approximately 50,000 textual documents, 20,000 images, 25 million numerical time series records, and 2 million geospatial and relational data entries. It includes policy and regulatory texts, scientific articles and news articles, satellite and contextual imagery, electricity system measurements, weather observation

Generating immersive, synchronized and cinematic audio for long-form textual narratives remains a significant challenge in multi-modal AI. While current Text-to-Audio (TTA) frameworks successfully synthesize isolated sound effects, they struggle with narrative cohesion, temporal alignment, and cinematic emotional depth. We present BackgroundMellow, a framework that treats story-to-audio generation as a precise orchestration and signal processing problem. This framework is enabled without ground-

Accurate breast cancer risk prediction from screening mammography is critical for enabling personalized screening intervals and early detection. Recent deep learning methods have shown the value of longitudinal data and explicit temporal alignment. However, existing approaches either perform explicit alignment using a single mammographic view or model multiple views without explicit longitudinal alignment, limiting their ability to exploit the complementary spatial-temporal information used in c

The promise of AI literacy ``for all'' confronts a structural challenge embedded in how nations organise secondary computer science education. In most systems, a general-track subject -- Digital Literacy, ICT, TIC, or SNT -- bears the weight of universal AI literacy, while a specialist Informatics course serves STEM pathways separately. Yet the content and depth of the general track are shaped by governance decisions made largely with reference to the specialist one. This paper presents a compar

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as conversational tutors, they risk institutionalizing systemic inequalities. This study presents a systematic API audit of four LLMs acting as history tutors, evaluating 1,800 responses regarding the 1989 Romanian Revolution across five student personas varying by ethnicity and socio-economic tier. We uncover four interconnected patterns of \emph{epistemic paternalism}: (1)~\textbf{Differential Refusal}, where safety-aligned models block

Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities. We introduce Lumo-2, a latent world-action model that generates actions by reasoning over world dynamics in latent space. The learned latent world dynamics capture physically grounded visual transitions, naturally encoding future possibilities and providing a unified substrate for cross-modal alignment. This formulation enables predictive reasoning akin to

The growing ability of large language models and vision language models to jointly interpret and reason over images and text is reshaping medical agents, moving them from task specific predictors toward autonomous systems that perceive, reason, plan, remember, and act in clinical environments. This work departs from the capability first perspective of existing literature and instead begins from clinical deployment, asking what tasks, contamination resistant benchmarks, and interactive training e

Representing manipulation actions as 2D trajectories in the camera plane provides a compact and interpretable basis for learning complex 3D manipulation policies. However, it also creates challenges from out-of-frame trajectories and limited precision. We propose Pix2Act, an imitation learning method that addresses these challenges by generating continuous image-space keypoint trajectories in each camera plane and losslessly recovering end-effector poses via triangulation. This reformulates high

Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) relies largely on single-turn attack datasets and single-judge scoring, underestimating risk from adaptive multi-turn adversaries and reporting a single success rate that does not separate partially actionable outputs from those carrying complete operational detail. We propose AMT-X (Adaptive Multi-Turn Exploitation), a phase-structured multi-turn red-teaming framework. Unlike prior multi-turn attacks that rely on ad hoc escalation or free-form p

Large language models (LLMs) based agents are beginning to participate in portfolio construction and market analysis, where decisions must be justified under evolving information and risk constraints. Current assessment practice, however, remains poorly aligned with this setting: many studies rely on static examinations or report only terminal portfolio returns, while the intermediate evidence, analyst judgments, and execution steps that produced those returns stay largely invisible. We introduc

The rapid expansion of capabilities in Large Language Model (LLM) agents has exposed a critical architectural bottleneck: when agents are given access to a flat, monolithic registry of tools, the model must evaluate hundreds or thousands of options simultaneously. This leads to decision-space explosion, context window saturation, and degraded routing accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper presents a hierarchical, skill-based architecture for agentic orchestration. Capabilities are or

This innovative practice full paper presents FORAP (Framework for Organizing Reusable and Adaptable PjBL Projects) and a portfolio of 14 adoption-ready project-based learning (PjBL) project packages built with the framework. PjBL in computing education offers strong educational benefits, yet its adoption remains limited by high instructor workload and recurring student technical challenges. FORAP addresses these barriers by organizing each package around a project designed with aligned learning

Agentic research systems are emerging as a new paradigm for coordinating scientific workflows beyond isolated model inference, code generation, or statistical analysis. However, deployment in institutional biomedical environments requires governed mechanisms for research planning, data access, workflow orchestration, evidence tracking, reproducibility, and human oversight. We present NVAITC AI Scientist (NAIS), a governed end-to-end agentic research system designed to support domain-general scie

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have advanced video generation with high-quality, temporally coherent results. However, extending them to motion transfer, which requires following reference motion while aligning with a target prompt, remains challenging due to limited understanding of motion and structure representations within DiTs. We analyze video DiTs at the attention-head level and identify distinct heads specialized for motion and spatial structure. Based on this insight, we propose a head-a

Enterprise data analysis is emerging as a distinct frontier for autonomous agents. Compared with general-purpose interaction and software engineering, it operates in an open, ambiguous, and continuously evolving environment. These characteristics call for a data-agent architecture that treats semantics, methodology, execution, and evolution as first-class system concerns. To this end, we introduce QwenPaw-Data, an agentic data system designed for enterprise intelligent data analysis. QwenPaw-Dat

Open-vocabulary dense perception (OVDP) aims to localize objects unseen during training by leveraging textual knowledge. Despite the remarkable progress of recent CLIP-based approaches, we identify a critical limitation: synonym-induced grounding inconsistency, where semantically equivalent expressions yield disparate spatial attention patterns. This inconsistency undermines the robustness and performance of existing methods in real-world OVDP applications. To address this issue, we propose SynC

Perineural invasion (PNI) is a clinically relevant indicator of tumor aggressiveness and can influence surgical decision-making, motivating interest in reliable preoperative assessment. The subtle MRI features of PNI, however, often resemble nearby anatomy, complicating noninvasive prediction. These fine perineural cues are easily attenuated by routine downsampling or overly global feature aggregation, reducing the effectiveness of conventional volumetric models. We present LoSA-Net, a localized

Learning temporal logic specifications from system demonstrations is essential for tasks such as formal verification and controller synthesis, especially in safety-critical domains. Existing approaches typically assume demonstrations are correct or only affected by misclassification errors. In practice, however, system traces are often uncertain or incomplete due to sensor faults, measurement errors, or data loss. We present a framework for learning minimal Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas f

AI agents are evolving from answer engines into persistent teams that use tools, delegate work, learn from experience, and modify the artifacts that shape their future behavior. The defining question for deployment is no longer merely what agents can do, but who controls what they are allowed to become. We introduce logos, a pluggable layer for self-evolution and governance that strengthens existing multiagent frameworks rather than replacing them. logos compiles heterogeneous multimodal inputs,

Contemplative traditions have long guided ethical behavior and prosocial interaction, and recent work suggests that contemplative principles (e.g., mindfulness, compassion, non-dual reasoning) may offer a promising paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs), improving cooperation and reducing ethical violations in LLM outputs. However, as new models, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks emerge rapidly, it remains challenging to systematically assess whether and how contemplative principles

Multi-agent ensembling multiplies active parameters and inference cost without answering three basic questions: which agents to consult, how deeply a query should traverse a hierarchy of agents, and when inter-agent communication is worth its cost. We present GRADE (Gated Routing and Adaptive Depth for Efficient Reasoning), a hierarchical multi-agent system in which four lightweight learned gates jointly govern agent selection, hierarchy depth, inter-agent communication, and branch pruning. Trai

AI engineering is shifting from passive text generation by large language models (LLMs) to agent-driven task execution, creating new reliability challenges for long-horizon tasks under resource constraints and environmental uncertainty. Conventional error-elimination optimization strategies fail to address cumulative error propagation. This paper proposes Distributed Agent System (DAS), a device-edge-cloud framework for fault-tolerant collaboration among heterogeneous agents. We redefine agent r

The accelerating shift toward low-carbon power systems, together with the widespread adoption of behind-the-meter technologies such as rooftop solar and electric vehicles, is placing new operational and analytical demands on electricity grids. At the same time, smart-grid research increasingly relies on machine learning (ML), yet progress is constrained by limited access to high-resolution household energy data due to privacy concerns, regulatory barriers, and collection costs. This work present

Scientific fraud is the instrument of doubt that malicious entities can use to establish controversy in science. Historically, it required the resources of a company: deep pockets, ghostwritten articles, and corrupt academics. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly automating scientific research, so we ask: Can a remote adversary weaponize the honest use of AI in science to compromise scientific integrity? We envision and empirically evaluate a new attack, indirect data poisoning, i

The economic value of data arises from its flow across organizations and national borders. Yet increasingly stringent data governance regimes are turning cross-border transfer into an institutionally constrained sequential decision, in which firms repeatedly weigh compliance costs against the value of data flows. From the perspective of a data-exporting firm, this paper develops an institutionally anchored decision support system. It converts regulatory rules into a computable minimal compliance

Efficient waste segregation is critical for sustainable urban management and environmental governance. Existing automated systems are limited by single-modality visual processing, insufficient contextual understanding, and weak regulatory alignment. To address these issues, we propose a language-guided vision-AI framework that integrates vision-language models and multimodal large language models for joint visual-linguistic reasoning. This framework implements a visual question answering paradig

Multimodal sentiment analysis relies on language, visual, and acoustic cues, but utterance-level modality quality may vary due to occlusion, background noise, motion blur, or imperfect transcripts, causing conventional fusion to over-trust unreliable modalities. We propose MRUF, a reliability-aware fusion method that combines multi-granularity routing with uncertainty-aware calibration. MRUF summarizes sentiment-relevant representations, performs subspace- and modality-level routing, and supervi

Tasks such as customs tariff classification, export control categorization, and standards-based equipment coding require assigning an input instance to a fine-grained class under an explicit regulatory hierarchy. Unlike standard text classification, the correct label in these tasks is not determined by semantic similarity alone, but by rule-defined boundaries, threshold conditions, exclusion clauses, definitions, and local exceptions. As a result, two highly similar inputs may require different

Existing hypotheses represent a concept in an LLM as a single point, a linear direction, or a Gaussian cluster, yet it remains unclear how and why such structures emerge. Here, we show that concept geometry can be precisely characterized via Laguerre Geometry, in which a concept is defined as a region--a Laguerre-Voronoi cell or a union of cells--allowing us to strictly define, measure, and separate concepts. Building on this formulation, we show that finer-grained concept structures, such as in

Stateful personal agents increasingly maintain long-term user profiles, episodic memories, and reusable skills. This persistence turns conversational sycophancy into a state-writing failure: accepted user-centric claims can be committed as lasting preferences, background facts, or workflows and later reused after the original conversation is gone. We call this persistent sycophancy and introduce the Personal Agent Sycophancy Benchmark (PASB), a 1,600-task benchmark that traces whether a conversa

Activation steering offers a lightweight alternative to fine-tuning for controlling large language models at inference time. While many existing methods implicitly optimize a log-density-ratio objective between desired and undesired activation distributions, they do so heuristically rather than deriving it from a principled optimization problem. Moreover, these methods produce query-independent steering directions that can degrade performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD)

Across a range of fast growing urban markets, private developers are constructing a version of the smart city that operates largely outside the purview of municipal government, often at the explicit invitation of city officials seeking to shift the cost and complexity of digital infrastructure onto private capital. Gated residential and mixed use developments are increasingly marketed not merely on the basis of security and amenity, but on their smartness: integrated home automation, app mediate

Layout-based 3D scene synthesizers place each object using two human-annotated channels: a categorical class label and a canonical-pose convention. We ask whether a single self-supervised token derived from object geometry can replace both, and study such tokens directly as a representation, decoupled from any synthesizer. A Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) point-cloud autoencoder is chamfer-trained on placed 3D-FUTURE furniture with no labels or pose annotations. Diagnostic probes recover fine-

Autonomous CLI agents can now execute hundreds of actions across multi-hour sessions: writing code, executing shell commands, browsing the web, and managing cloud infrastructure, all with minimal human oversight. Does greater autonomy invite greater risk? We introduce ANCHOR, an automated auditing framework that stress-tests CLI agents on illegal tasks grounded in public US court cases. ANCHOR deploys an auditor agent fine-tuned on dark personality data using supervised and reinforcement fine tu

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code smell detection tasks due to their ability to interpret program semantics. However, their reliability in this context remains poorly explored, particularly under varying prompt conditions where model predictions may be influenced by external cues rather than code characteristics. One such limitation is sycophancy bias, where models tend to align their outputs with user-provided assumptions instead of performing objective analysis. In th

Tree crowns are a challenging target for resilient AI because they are not static objects: their spectral response, internal texture, translucency, and apparent boundaries change substantially across the growing season. We develop PhenoEmbed, a self-supervised crown-centric temporal embedding model trained with contrastive and masked reconstruction objectives on HeideBench, an 18-date UAV multispectral time-series benchmark for forest crown phenology in D{ö}lauer Heide. The model treats seasonal

We evaluate when sparse autoencoder (SAE) features act as localized control handles for safety-relevant behavior. This question is difficult because apparent success can arise from weak interventions, mismatched baselines, model robustness, or degenerate outputs that automated safety judges mark as unsafe without representing meaningful harmful compliance. We introduce a matched coherence-gated evaluation protocol for runtime safety interventions: methods are compared at matched target-effect po

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are increasingly constructed through automated extraction pipelines; however, such systems often introduce spurious or incomplete triples, which degrade downstream performance. Existing evaluation practices rely heavily on task-specific metrics or small-scale manual verification, offering limited insight into the structural and semantic fidelity of extracted graphs. We propose a novel, interpretable metric for intrinsic KG quality assessment that measures how closely an au

Equitable renewable-energy planning is a sequential decision problem, but the decision variables available to a public planner differ sharply between mature and emerging economies. In the former the government largely builds generation, while in the latter it steers private investment through incentives and quotas. We formulate socially-equitable renewable-energy budget allocation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and, using a single problem-agnostic solver interface, compare the same policies

We introduce ActiveFly-Bench, the first benchmark to bridge cyberspace reasoning and physical-world interaction for UAV embodied perception. The benchmark decomposes active perception into three hierarchical tasks: Aerial Embodied Question Answering (Air-EQA), Observation Behavior Planning (OBP), and Fine-grained Language-guided UAV Control (FLUC), explicitly connecting high-level task understanding, behavior planning, and low-level control. The datasets are collected from both real-world and si

Emotion-aware artistic image generation requires an image to match the input prompt, follow the specified artistic style, and convey the target emotion. In this challenge, the main difficulty is that the visual and affective attributes available in the training data are not explicitly provided at test time. Without these attributes, the generator has to decide not only what to depict, but also how the target emotion should be expressed through color, lighting, brushwork, composition, line, and l