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Regulation
Every AI regulation development as it happens: EU AI Act implementation, US federal and state action, UK, China and international standards.
Trustworthy Self-Composable Big-Data-as-a-Service: An LLM-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Data Engineering, AutoML, MLOps Deployment, and Drift-Aware Lifecycle Optimization
Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platforms require re liable automation across data ingestion, cleaning, feature engi neering, model development, deployment, and post-deployment monitoring. However, existing LLM-based data science agents and AutoML systems mainly focus on isolated workflow stages, leaving limited support for lifecycle-level orchestration, artifact governance, human oversight, and drift-aware adaptation. This paper proposes a trustworthy self-composable BDaaS frame work based on LLM
DRIFT: Refining Instruction Data via On-Policy Data Attribution
Optimizing the training data distribution for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) dictates the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing data curation methods excel at accelerating training under constrained budgets, they are less suited to elevating the capability upper bound. The challenge here is no longer to identify a smaller subset that preserves performance, but to refine the data distribution toward instances most capable of improving the final model. To address this problem, w
Closing the Feedback Loop: From Experience Extraction to Insight Governance in Verbal Reinforcement Learning
Training-free verbal reinforcement learning enables LLM agents to learn from world feedback -- objective signals such as dynamic task outcomes, market returns, or demand forecasts -- by extracting verbal rules from experience and injecting them as context, updating the agent's behavior without parameter changes. However, in non-stationary environments these agents face a retention-forgetting dilemma: retaining stale insights causes negative transfer, while discarding them causes catastrophic for
AI Transparency: Governance Compliance or Stakeholder Requirements?
Transparency is increasingly mandated for public-sector AI systems, with organisations required to publish statements describing their AI use and oversight arrangements. However, the existence of such artefacts is often treated as equivalent to transparency itself, despite limited evidence that they proportionately serve relevant stakeholder groups. From a requirements engineering perspective, this raises a validation concern: compliance with mandated disclosure criteria does not necessarily ens
Model Validation of Agentic AI Systems: A POMDP-Based Framework for Belief-State, Forecast, and Policy Validation
Agentic artificial intelligence systems introduce a new class of model risk. Unlike traditional predictive models, autonomous agents continuously acquire information, form beliefs regarding latent states of the environment, generate forecasts, select actions, and adapt their behavior over time. Existing validation methodologies focus primarily on predictive accuracy and therefore provide limited insight into the quality of the underlying decision process. This paper proposes a model validation f
Distributed General-Purpose Agent Networks: Architecture, Key Mechanisms, and Prototypes
Large language models have accelerated the transition from passive conversational assistants to autonomous agents that can understand goals, plan actions, invoke tools, and execute multi-step tasks. Yet the capability of a single agent remains constrained by its local data, tool permissions, runtime environment, and governance boundary. This paper studies distributed general-purpose agent networks: open peer-to-peer networks in which heterogeneous agents deployed on personal devices, edge nodes,
DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models
Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent. Commonly used rule-based driving metrics like EPDMS are interpretable but lack context-awareness, while recent VLMbased evaluations are context-aware but limited by ambiguous VLM outputs and weak physical grounding. To evaluate driving in a manner that is both interpretable and context-aware, we introduce Dri
Federated Fair Trade Energy: Speculative Fabulation for a Planet with Limits
What happens to permacomputing when electricity grids shift to decentralised green energy, and local communities and municipalities have increased governance over this vital public service? Electricity and computational networks are more than just separate systems that plug together. Shifts to renewable energy generation in the grid are impacting computational systems, and computational demands on electrical power are impacting the electricity grid; one infrastructure limits the other. Permacomp
Trust-Aware Multi-Agent Traceability: Confidence-Calibrated Knowledge Graphs for Consistent Software Artifact Management
Multi-agent AI systems are increasingly used to automate software engineering tasks including requirements analysis, architecture design, test generation, and traceability linking. When these agents operate as a sequential pipeline over shared software artifacts, errors and low-confidence decisions made by upstream agents propagate to downstream stages, producing orphaned requirements, contradictory links, and compliance gaps that pose significant risks in safety-critical domains. We propose a t
From Newtonian to Relativistic IAM: The Autonomous Principal as Reference Frame for Digital Identity
The 2023 paper \emph{Distributed Governance: a Principal-Agent Approach to Data Governance} arXiv:2308.07280 introduced the autonomous principal as the locus of transactional sovereignty in digital ecosystems. This follow-up, Part 2, advances a structural argument for why that model is not a normative preference but a consequence of taking causality seriously in distributed information systems. Drawing an analogy with the transition from Newtonian to relativistic physics, we show that custodial
When in Doubt, Plan It Out: Committed Small Language Model Deliberation for Reactive Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies often degrade in unfamiliar environments because they lack explicit deliberation. We propose Plan, Align, Commit, Think (PACT), a hybrid architecture that combines a fast, reactive RL policy with a slow, deliberative Small Language Model (SLM) planner. PACT invokes the SLM asynchronously to generate and validate candidate action plans. Once a plan is verified through simulation as safe, feasible, and complete, it is executed directly, bypassing the RL policy
Greed Is Learned: Visible Incentives as Reward-Hacking Triggers
Deployed agents increasingly act with their reward proxy in view, such as a balance, score, or KPI dashboard. We show that reinforcement learning can make a policy \emph{addicted} to such a visible self-benefit channel. It chases the displayed payoff across held-out domains, sacrifices the true task to do so, and follows the channel wherever we rewrite it, while policies that never saw the channel stay honest. We call this \emph{reward-channel addiction} and study it in \emph{MoneyWorld}, a synt
AgentFairBench: Do LLM Agents Discriminate When They Act?
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly take actions (screening applicants, recommending credit, triaging patients), yet fairness for LLMs is still measured by grading answers. We introduce AgentFairBench, a cheap, reproducible, multi-domain benchmark for demographic disparity in the actions of LLM agents. Grounded in a companion framework, the Bias Conduction Framework (BCF, restated here), it spans three regulator-anchored domains: hiring, lending, and medical triage. Synthetic, demogra
Optimising Temporary Accommodation Placement Across London with AI-Powered SaaS in E-Governance Systems
Temporary accommodation has become a major fiscal and administrative pressure for English local authorities, particularly in London, where demand and costs have risen sharply. This paper documents the creation and use of DOMUS, a cloud-based, AI-enabled decision-support system built from scratch at the University of East London and customised for the needs of London Borough of Newham to support statutory Temporary accommodation placement. DOMUS integrates household case records, policy-constrain
Green SARC: Predictive Cost and Carbon Governance for Agentic AI Systems
Agentic AI systems act through tools and sub-agents, yet the controls meant to bound their financial and environmental cost still sit on dashboards evaluated beside or after execution. Green SARC applies the SARC governance-by-architecture framework -- four enforcement sites in the agent loop -- to FinOps and GreenOps, contributing the theory of what to enforce and how to predict it. We report four policy-independent results. (i) The unconstrained "State Snowball" is $Θ(n^2)$ in loop depth; on 3
GAS-Leak-LLM: Genetic Algorithm-Based Suffix Optimization for Black-Box LLM Jailbreaking
Large Language Models (LLMs) constitute pivotal components within the AI-dominated information technology ecosystem. To mitigate risks associated with harmful or policy-violating outputs, commercial systems employ advanced alignment strategies and multi-layered content moderation mechanisms. Despite these safeguards, recent research has demonstrated that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulation, particularly through jailbreaking and prompt injection techniques. In this work, we propose
Odds Law: The Decomposition Algebra On How Intelligence Organizes Itself to Solve Difficult Problems Reliably
We ask a structural question: given unreliable elementary problem-solvers, what organizations of them solve hard problems reliably, and what are the limits? We develop a $decomposition~algebra$: elementary solvers are morphisms in a stochastic category, and four combinators (sequential composition, parallel ensembling, verification gating, and recursive reduction) generate the space of compound solvers. We equip this algebra with two homomorphisms, a $reliability$ valuation into the ordered mono
AP-GRPO: Anchor-Gated Phonetic Alignment with Policy Optimization for Pathological Speech Reconstruction
Pathological speech from patients with neurodegenerative and neuromotor disorders is often acoustically distorted and linguistically fragmented, making pathological speech reconstruction necessary to recover intended textual content from distorted and incomplete speech recordings. Crucially, such recordings are rarely uniformly degraded: some words or short phrases remain reliable and can serve as audible anchors for reconstructing the corrupted surrounding content. We introduce Anchor-gated Pho
Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning
Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fi
Commons-Governed Artificial Intelligence: A Taxonomy of Collective Governance
The governance of artificial intelligence is overwhelmingly theorized through two institutional frames. In the market frame, the data, models, and compute that constitute the AI stack are private goods exchanged under property and contract; in the state frame, a regulator imposes rules from above. A third possibility, the collective and self-organized stewardship of AI-relevant resources by the communities that produce and depend on them, remains comparatively under-theorized, even as it prolife
CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment
Malicious content generated from large language models (LLMs) could pose severe safety risks and ethical concerns. While existing LLM safety guardrails excel in English or multilingual settings, they lack adaptation to Chinese-specific regulatory policies, cultural context and linguistic nuances, failing to support fine-grained risk classification for diverse deployment needs. In this paper, we introduce a 5-macro, 31-micro category fine-grained risk taxonomy for Chinese scenarios, and build CHI
Risk-Aware LLM Agents for Geospatial Data Retrieval: Design and Preliminary Adversarial Evaluation
We present an LLM-driven framework for retrieving remote sensing data from cloud-based geospatial catalogues using natural language queries. The system converts user intent into structured API calls, enabling efficient access to satellite imagery and environmental datasets. The architecture integrates three agents: Guardrail for safety and policy enforcement, General-QA for intent interpretation, and Recommender-Analyst for schema-aware API call generation. This coordinated design ensures reliab
Bridging Geographic Bias in Urban Streetscape Inference via Lifelong Learning with Visual-Semantic Pivoting
Visual perception of urban streetscapes underpins evidence-based decisions in landscape planning, public health, and place-making. Yet models trained on a few well-photographed metropolises systematically misjudge underrepresented districts, propagating geographic bias into downstream policy. We address this gap with HVSP-LL, a lifelong learning framework that couples a stratified visual-semantic pivoting module with an equity-aware rehearsal mechanism. The pivoting module organises landscape co
Beyond the Algorithm: Professional Experiences and Perceptions of AI Bias
The purpose of this qualitative multi-case study was to examine how social bias emerges, is perceived, and can be mitigated within artificial intelligence and machine learning systems by practitioners directly involved in their design, development, and governance. Although examples from healthcare, criminal justice, employment, and education were used to illustrate domains where automated systems shape everyday life, the study focused on the lived experiences and professional insights of AI prac
Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch
Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance a
"Stuck in a Spiral": Shame and Guilt as Social Regulators of AI Use in Computing Education
While prior work has examined patterns of adoption and social norms around AI use, less is known about how emotional factors, such as shame and guilt, shape students use of AI tools. We present an interview study with 19 computing students through a functionalist perspective of shame and guilt, which interprets emotions as social signals that regulate behavior. Our findings show that these emotions regulate when and how students make their use visible, as they engage in hiding behaviors and sele
Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source
AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-202
When Errors Become Narratives: A Longitudinal Taxonomy of Silent Failures in a Production LLM Agent Runtime
LLM agent systems increasingly run as long-lived autonomous runtimes: scheduling jobs, calling tools, maintaining memory, and pushing results to humans. We present a longitudinal study of silent failures in one such system: a personal-assistant agent runtime in continuous production since March 2026, with roughly 40 scheduled jobs, 8 LLM providers, a tool-governance proxy, and a knowledge-base memory plane, defended by 4,286 unit tests and 827 governance checks. Over eight weeks we documented 22
Demographic Patterns in Cybersecurity Culture: Insights from a Global Organisation Supporting Safety-Critical and Critical Infrastructure Sectors
This study investigates demographic differences in cybersecurity culture in a large global organisation supporting safety critical and critical infrastructure sectors to target CSC improvement. A global survey was administered to all internal and external employees of a total of 21148 employees, with 6502 responses. The questionnaire evaluates nine CSC dimensions such as Password Management, Governance, Email Use. Anonymous survey responses were analysed using Kruskal-Wallis tests and Dunns post
Shadows of Transparency: Signaling Transparency-Impeding Behavior Using Public Data
Freedom of Information (FOI) laws aim to increase government transparency, yet existing assessments focus mainly on legal compliance and procedural outcomes, leaving organizational behavior underexamined. As FOI processes are increasingly mediated through digital information systems, public response data offer traces of how organizations handle requests and disclosures in practice. This paper develops and evaluates a pattern-based approach that uses such data to signal transparency-impeding beha
Agent Behavior Mining: Generative AI Agent Governance in Business Processes
As organizations increasingly deploy generative AI agents to automate business processes, they face a governance dilemma: although these agents can increase operational flexibility, their non-deterministic nature challenges the control and standardization that Business Process Management seeks to enforce. This paper addresses this \emph{invisible autonomy risk} by introducing \emph{Agent Behavior Mining}, a governance capability that enables the application of process mining techniques to render
SpheriCity: Designing Trustworthy Conversational AI for Sustainability Decision Support
We present SpheriCity, an expert-grounded conversational prototype designed to support trustworthy knowledge sensemaking from sustainability reports. City-level circularity assessment reports contain rich information about materials, infrastructure, and policy interventions, yet their length and heterogeneous structure make cross-document synthesis and comparison difficult for practitioners and researchers working on circular economy initiatives. While large language models (LLM) promise faster
Mental-R1: Aligning LLM Reasoning for Mental Health Assessment
Mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and suicide remain urgent global challenges, where timely and accurate assessment is critical for effective intervention. Recently, large language models have been explored for mental health assessment. However, existing general-purpose post-training methods do not align with the cognitive processes of human assessment, which may lead to unreliable reasoning outcomes. To bridge this gap, we propose Cognitive Relative Policy Optimization (CRPO),
Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation
The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper
Order Is Not Control: Driven-Dissipative Response Laws Across Artificial and Biological Systems
AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-cha
Acquisition state behaves as a structured, measurable variable governing lung-nodule AI: kernel-driven measurement instability and noise-driven detection fragility, invisible to DICOM metadata
AI governance for medical imaging is formalizing: the 2026 ACR-SIIM Practice Parameter recommends local acceptance testing and ongoing drift monitoring, and the ACR Assess-AI registry monitors AI outputs using DICOM metadata for context. We argue that a necessary, currently unmonitored layer sits beneath output metrics: whether incoming studies remain within the acquisition envelope a model was validated on. Using a LUNA16-trained MONAI RetinaNet lung-nodule detector, we test whether acquisition
Definitional alignment before capability alignment: a Design-Science framework for adjudicating claims about AGI
Claims that artificial general intelligence has already arrived and claims that it remains decades away are often defended from overlapping evidence. "AGI" lacks a single shared and stable referent and competing operationalizations can return different verdicts on the same system. This article treats that under-specification as a design and governance problem. Following Design Science Research Methodology, it develops DAF-AGI, a second-order conceptual artifact with two coupled components: five
Should LLM Agents Decide in Social Simulations? Comparing Finite-State and LLM-Based Decision Policies
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as decision-making components in social simulations. This introduces a methodological risk: the simulation may deviate from the explicit behavioral policy defined by the researcher. In online social network (OSN) simulations, action choices shape system dynamics, interaction patterns, and model interpretability. This paper evaluates whether LLM action selectors preserve an interpretable reference policy in an OSN simulation. The reference is a f
CHORUS: Decentralized Multi-Embodiment Collaboration with One VLA Policy
Multi-robot collaboration allows robots to efficiently take on a wide range of tasks, from moving a couch through a doorway to assembling structures on a construction site. However, achieving such coordination in mobile multi-robot settings remains challenging: centralized methods conditioned on the combined observations of a team scale poorly with team size, and decentralized methods that train one policy per robot often require explicit alignment procedures or information sharing at inference
A Five-Plane Reference Architecture for Runtime Governance of Production AI Agents
Enterprise security was built to govern data boundaries: the protected surface was data at rest and in transit, and the controls -- access control, data-loss prevention, perimeter inspection -- governed crossings of that boundary. Production AI agents dissolve this assumption. An agent reads context, calls tools, invokes connectors, and modifies systems of record on an enterprise's behalf, so risk moves inside the workflow, into sequences of individually-permitted actions that may transform a bu