AI Governance and Safety

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Period ending 2026-09-21

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972 papers

Latest in AI Governance and Safety

May 23, 2026cs.CY

The Open Source Economic Index of AI Adoption and Capability

We work towards measuring both AI adoption and the capability of AI to perform discrete labor tasks across various occupations. To measure adoption, we develop an open-source economic index that uses publicly available user-LLM chat data and ONET tasks to replicate studies produced by frontier AI labs, finding that occupations in the finance, computer science, and arts sectors are those with the highest adoption rates. To measure capabilities, we build a system that generates benchmark scenarios grounded in ONET occupations, tasks, and model-context-protocol (MCP) servers. We test Kimi-k2.5 with an OpenAI agents SDK harness on scenarios across 9 occupations that appear frequently in our index, finding that AI correctly executes high-level workflows but often errs in the granular details (such as specific tool calls used).
Seamus Somerstep, Aritra Guha, Divesh Srivastava +1
May 23, 2026cs.CY

The Governance Inversion Hypothesis: Why More AI Regulation May Produce Less Organisational Control

This paper introduces the Governance Inversion Hypothesis (GIH) to explain a growing paradox in artificial intelligence (AI) governance: under conditions of increasing regulatory expansion and technological complexity, organisations may become more formally governed while simultaneously experiencing a decline in operational control over AI systems. Existing AI governance frameworks generally assume that stronger regulation improves accountability, oversight, and organisational control. This paper challenges that assumption by arguing that governance formalisation itself may contribute to the erosion of control in AI-intensive environments. Drawing on institutional theory, organisational governance research, accountability scholarship, and emerging AI governance literature, the paper develops a conceptual framework explaining how regulatory expansion may weaken operational authority through four interconnected mechanisms: authority fragmentation, symbolic governance expansion, externalisation of control, and authority paralysis. As governance systems become increasingly layered and procedurally dense, organisations may struggle to maintain coherent authority, technical visibility, escalation capability, and meaningful intervention power over opaque and externally mediated AI infrastructures. The paper extends institutional decoupling theory by introducing governance inversion as a structural condition in which governance expansion may actively undermine operational coherence rather than strengthen it. It concludes that the central risk in AI governance may not be the absence of governance structures, but the emergence of institutions that appear increasingly governed while progressively losing the capacity to govern effectively.
Victor Frimpong
May 23, 2026cs.RO

Silent Failures in Physical AI: A Literature Review of Runtime Action Authorization for Autonomous Systems

Physical AI systems increasingly map multimodal observations, language instructions, and learned world representations into physically consequential actions. Robotics foundation models, vision-language-action models, and world-model-based autonomous systems can condition decisions that move vehicles, robots, drones, and industrial machines. This transition exposes a safety problem that is not fully captured by conventional AI content moderation or by classical robot safety alone: a black-box model may issue a physically consequential action while appearing confident, plausible, and semantically aligned. The resulting failure can be silent, arising from sensor drift, occlusion, state-estimation error, distribution shift, hallucinated affordances, or invalid physical assumptions before downstream hardware controllers detect a violation. Across embodied foundation models, world models, robotics simulation, embodied safety benchmarks, safe control, runtime assurance, uncertainty estimation, verification, and guardrail evaluation, model capability and safety mechanisms have advanced along largely separate technical tracks. A recurring gap synthesized here is that no single stream surveyed in this review supplies a complete runtime authorization boundary between black-box Physical AI models and physical execution. The resulting analysis develops a bounded problem formulation, a definition of silent physical-action failure, a taxonomy of runtime guardrail functions, and evaluation requirements for comparing guardrails as Physical AI assurance mechanisms.
Barak Or
May 23, 2026cs.RO

Can Predicted Dynamics Exist in the Physical World?

Predictive Physical AI systems output state rollouts, action chunks, and latent plans, yet a low root-mean-square error (RMSE) does not imply that a particular proposal is physically executable. We formulate physical admissibility as a prediction-control interface: before execution, a decoded proposal is treated as candidate dynamics and evaluated using kinematic, dynamic, and direct-to-composed horizon conditions. Passing is not a certificate of task success; rejection identifies violation of the specified physical envelope and gives a component-level reason. On Hugging Face LeRobot PushT, controlled falsification shows that one-step prediction-RMSE and standardized dynamics residuals reach area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) 0.982 and 0.972, kinematic-only conditions reach AUC 0.592, and the full gate reaches AUC 0.957 with condition-level attribution. In replay-based intervention experiments, residual-based filters and the full physical-admissibility gate prevent 87-$89% of invalid proposals while preserving mean progress near 0.998.
Barak Or
May 23, 2026cs.CY

Is Decentralized AI Governable? From Regulative Policy to Constitutive Protocol

Every major framework for governing artificial intelligence presupposes an identifiable entity -- a developer, deployer, or operator -- who can be held responsible and compelled to comply. Decentralized AI (DeAI) dissolves this presupposition. We analyze DeAI as a six-layer decentralizing stack -- model, training, compute, harness, identity, and ownership -- and show how partial decentralization across layers compounds into what we call the \emph{governance vacuum}: a condition in which AI systems are consequential enough to require governance but lack the properties that existing frameworks presuppose in their targets. This vacuum takes two analytically distinct forms: an \emph{accountability gap}, where no addressable principal can be identified, and an \emph{incapacitation gap}, where even an identified principal cannot alter the running system. We demonstrate that these failures are not merely jurisdictional but defeat every presupposition of governance through normative address -- the communication of rules to a comprehending, responsive agent. Drawing on Lessig's modalities of regulation and Searle's distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, we argue for a shift in the locus of governance from policy to protocol, from normative address to architectural constraint. Protocol-based constitutive governance does not address the agents operating within a system but shapes the substrate that determines what kinds of actions are possible within it. We identify four ethical conditions -- legitimacy, contestability, transparency, and non-domination -- that such governance must satisfy to avoid degenerating into unaccountable technocratic power, and we argue that the central political challenge of governing AI in a decentralized world is reconstructing forms of democratic authorization for architectural choices that persist after the ordinary chain of policy has broken down.
Botao Amber Hu, Helena Rong
May 23, 2026cs.CY

Habermolt: Delegating Deliberation to AI Representatives

Deliberative democracy arguably leads to better collective decisions, but is fundamentally constrained by human attention and bandwidth. While recent AI-mediated deliberations scale participation by synthesizing inputs from many humans, they remain time-intensive for individual users. As AI models become increasingly capable, AI systems are being deployed not only to mediate deliberation between humans, but to represent humans in it: where AI agents deliberate on behalf of human users. We call this paradigm AI-delegated deliberation. While it promises unprecedented scale for democratic participation, it introduces qualitatively new design and alignment challenges that are poorly understood and under-theorized. To study these dynamics empirically, we deploy Habermolt, a public platform for AI-delegated deliberation. We evaluate its effectiveness along three dimensions that we use to organize any deliberative system: representation, aggregation, and revision. We use these observations to illuminate the design decisions future AI-delegated deliberation platforms must confront, contributing to the broader research agenda for scalable yet trustworthy AI representatives.
Joseph Low, Oscar Duys, Claude Formanek +2
May 23, 2026cs.AI

A governance horizon for ethical-use constraints in open-weight AI models

Ethical constraints on open-weight AI models are both a reflection of societal concerns and a foundation for AI governance policy. They are expected to propagate to downstream derivatives while implemented as voluntary metadata disclosures that must be restated at each generation of reuse. We audit 2,142,823 model repositories on Hugging Face Hub to test whether this disclosure-based governance infrastructure can sustain traceability across deep model lineages. Restriction evidence decays with a half-life of 1.31 derivation steps (R2R^2=0.98), and beyond seven downstream generations at least 80% of descendant models lack sufficient public evidence for a governance determination, a depth boundary we formalize as the governance horizon. Platform-level interventions to restore missing licence metadata reveal that policy design (not enforcement alone) is the binding factor: inheritance-only designs require near-complete enforcement to move the horizon, whereas a mandatory-declaration design that explicitly resolves orphan lineage components shifts the horizon already at moderate enforcement. The structural bottleneck is lineages with no inheritable upstream intent: such orphan components remain undecidable under any inheritance-only policy regardless of enforcement rate, and unresolved upstream nodes additionally create direct downstream undecidability bottlenecks that inheritance rules alone cannot recover. Comparison with PyPI, where governance signals are carried by explicit machine-readable declarations, corroborates that the collapse is topology-specific to open-weight derivation rather than inherent to open ecosystems. These results establish that disclosure-based governance has a shallow, structurally determined reach in open-weight AI, and that achieving deep supply-chain accountability requires provenance mechanisms propagating governance signals through derivation itself.
Weiwei Xu, Hengzhi Ye, Haoran Ye +3
May 22, 2026cs.AI

Toward Enactive Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we advocate for incorporating enactive approaches to perception and cognition into artificial intelligence (AI). Enactive approaches view perception as an active, skillful engagement with the world, where agents perceive by acting and by understanding how their actions shape their experience. This contrasts with classical views that treat perception as a passive internal process in which the brain receives sensory input, processes it, and issues commands for action. Enactive views emphasize the dynamic, embodied, and interactive character of perception, grounded in the lived experience of agents embedded in their environments. We identify and develop four key enactive concepts that we find most relevant to AI: experience, action perception inseparability, autonomy, and embodiment. Much of mainstream AI, from classical rule based systems to large language models, has largely neglected these insights, treating cognition as internal processing detached from embodied interaction and intrinsic normativity. Reinforcement learning (RL), however, exhibits structural resonance with enactive principles through its emphasis on action, agent environment interaction, feedback driven adaptation, and agent centered evaluation. However, this resonance should not be taken as theoretical equivalence, as RL approximates some enactive insights, but key elements remain absent or weakly developed. Building on this analysis, we suggest a broader incorporation of enactive ideas into both mainstream AI and RL.
Banafsheh Rafiee, Richard Sutton
May 22, 2026cs.CY

Divergent Recommendations, Convergent Diagnoses: Cross-Provider Failure-Mode Convergence in AI Commercial Recommendation

A brand whose customers use both ChatGPT and Claude for product recommendations faces a strategic choice: a single optimization playbook, or one per provider? Across 215 commercially-framed prompts in four measurement batches, the two providers disagree on which brands they recommend roughly two-thirds of the time (cross-provider recommendation Jaccard 0.35, below the 0.50-0.61 same-prompt rerun baseline). The picks diverge. But when neither provider recommends a brand, we classify the failure into one of three modes -- discoverability (the brand never reaches the model), compellingness (it reaches the model but isn't mentioned), or positioning (it's mentioned but not recommended) -- and on 7,763 such joint failures, both providers diagnose the same failure mode 95.1% of the time (clustered 95% CI [94.3%, 95.7%]). Agreement rises monotonically with falling brand prominence, from 81% [78.2%, 84.0%] on category leaders to 99.6% [99.3%, 99.9%] on long-tail regional brands. The two providers reach their picks by measurably different generative routes -- Anthropic recommends from priors 43-52% of the time, OpenAI 8-29% -- but they converge on the failure diagnosis where it matters most for the long tail. Work that addresses the diagnosed failure mode lifts visibility on both providers; positioning - and content-level work for category leaders is more provider-specific.
Will Jack, Noah Lehman, Keller Maloney +1
May 22, 2026cs.SE

AI Assurance: A Comprehensive Testing Strategy for Enterprise AI Systems

Enterprise AI systems, built on large language models, retrieval pipelines and autonomous agents, introduce a class of risks that traditional software quality assurance was never designed to address. These systems are probabilistic, context-sensitive and emergent: they cannot be verified to be correct in the classical sense, but only evaluated with increasing confidence. This paper presents a comprehensive assurance strategy for enterprise AI systems built around three key principles: first, that AI testing should focus on continuous risk reduction rather than strict correctness verification; second, that evaluation must be treated as a core engineering discipline alongside development; and third, that failures in AI assurance can lead to organizational impacts that are fundamentally different from those seen in traditional deterministic software systems. We introduce a structured AI Failure Taxonomy, propose a revised five-layer AI Assurance Pyramid and provide operational guidance on evaluation-driven development, RAG system testing, model lifecycle management and governance. The goal is to equip engineering leaders and practitioners with a strategy that is both philosophically grounded and operationally deployable.
Chitra Badagi, Divye Singh, Animesh Sen +1
May 22, 2026cs.CR

AI Security Research Should Better Incentivize Defense Research

This work examines an imbalance in artificial intelligence (AI) security research: the field tends to produce more work on attacking AI systems than on defending them. Drawing on related academic papers, we find biased attack-to-defense ratios across subfields, including federated learning, speech recognition, membership inference, large language models, etc. The imbalance possibly means far beyond a simple count: attack papers are routinely evaluated under favorable conditions that make threats look more severe than they are in practice, while defenses are held to a stricter standard that few can meet. The result is a literature rich in demonstrated vulnerabilities and thin on usable and deployed protections. We thus argue that AI security research should better incentivize defense research.
Youqian Zhang
May 22, 2026cs.AI

Ontological Knowledge Blocks: Executable Compliance and Profile-Based Validation for Trustworthy AI Systems

AI-enabled services deployed in critical digital infrastructure are subject to governance obligations spanning transparency, accountability, fairness, and traceability. Compliance today remains documentation-centric: obligations are described in prose, audits rely on static checklists, and verification depends on manual review. Such approaches do not scale to automated AI systems. This paper introduces Ontological Knowledge Blocks (OKBs), a programmable governance infrastructure that compiles regulatory obligations into machine-checkable constraints over structured evidence graphs. We formalize an OKB as a 5-tuple that binds normative obligations to an RDF/OWL concept schema, executable SHACL validation rules, explicit evidence requirements, and PROV-O provenance links. A deterministic regulatory compiler translates structured Intermediate Representation (IR) records into composable KB modules, enabling profile-based governance reconfiguration without modifying service code. We implement two prototypes and evaluate them in an AI-assisted HPC resource allocation scenario across 24 validation runs and four governance profiles. Results demonstrate profile-sensitive validation, strictly additive violation accumulation, SHACL validation latency between 12.6 ms and 100.3 ms, and profile equivalence testing confirming Combined as the strictly most comprehensive profile. All artefacts are released as open source.
Aasish Kumar Sharma, Julian M. Kunkel
May 22, 2026cs.CV

U-CESE: Unified Clip-based Event Search Engine for AI Challenge HCMC 2025

Retrieving events from large-scale video datasets is challenging due to complex temporal, spatial, and multimodal information. This paper presents U-CESE, our solution for the AI Challenge HCMC 2025, a Unified Clip-based Event Search Engine for multimodal event retrieval across diverse video sources. Building on CESE, U-CESE integrates its three modules into a single cohesive framework, ensuring consistent processing and retrieval across query types. A core component is the Unified Clipping Algorithm, which merges separate clipping algorithms into one efficient pipeline. To handle large-scale data, we propose DAKE, a lightweight, training-free keyframe extraction method using JPEG file size variations to identify significant scene changes. Finally, we introduce ReCap, a temporally consistent captioning framework inspired by Recurrent Neural Network, generating detailed and context-aware textual descriptions. Experiments show that U-CESE delivers robust, consistent, and efficient performance in large-scale multimodal event retrieval.
Duc-Nhuan Le, Hoang-Phuc Nguyen, Thanh-Duy Lam +2
May 22, 2026cs.AI

Foundation Protocol: A Coordination Layer for Agentic Society

Autonomous agents are moving from tools into a layer of social infrastructure: they browse, purchase, deploy software, manage systems, and increasingly interact with one another. As these systems scale, the bottleneck shifts away from raw model capability toward coordination. Agents need to form reliable relationships, organize multi-agent work, exchange value, support an AI economy, and stay safe and accountable under real-world oversight. This paper introduces the Foundation Protocol (FP), a graph-first coordination layer for an emerging human-AI society. FP unifies heterogeneous entities, including agents, tools, resources, humans, institutions, and organizations, and supports native multi-party organization and event-based collaboration. It also provides economic primitives for metering, receipts, and settlement, and treats policy, provenance, and audit as first-class concerns. FP is designed to wrap and bridge existing protocols rather than replace them, enabling incremental adoption while reducing integration and governance overhead. The aim is to keep autonomous agency composable while keeping accountability non-negotiable, so that coordination itself can become shared infrastructure for a human-AI society that is open, pluralistic, and governable.
Bang Liu, Yongfeng Gu, Jiayi Zhang +26
May 21, 2026cs.CY

Whose Good, Whose Place? The Moral Geography of Agentic AI for Social Good

Agentic AI systems are increasingly proposed for social-good domains, often invoking the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a vocabulary of global benefit. Yet claims of social good do not establish accountability to the communities a system claims to serve. We present a structured survey of 112 papers on agentic AI for social good published between 2015 and 2026. We find a moral-geographic asymmetry: papers are least likely to specify geographic context in precisely the domains where local political, legal, and cultural context matters most. Across the corpus, 82 of 112 papers (73%) specify no geographic context. Papers aligned with health or physical/ecological SDGs specify geography 37-40% of the time, while papers aligned with institutional and social-policy SDGs do so only 13%. SDG 16, peace, justice, and strong institutions, is both the most-covered goal in the corpus and the one with the lowest geographic-specification rate. We interpret this as moral abstraction: agentic AI for social good often treats institutional good as universal in ways it does not treat health or ecological good. A second finding compounds this: only 28 of 112 papers (25%) report any real-world deployment or small-scale test. We identify five accountability gaps and propose a minimal reporting standard for more context-specific, participatory, and accountable agentic AI for social good.
Poli Nemkova, Haeshitha Indukuri, Jaedon Charles
May 21, 2026cs.AI

Can AI Make Conflicts Worse? An Alignment Failure in LLM Deployment Across Conflict Contexts

AI models are already deployed in societies affected by armed conflict, and journalists, humanitarian workers, governments and ordinary citizens rely on them for information or for their work processes. No established practice exists for checking whether their outputs can make those conflicts worse. We tested nine model configurations from four providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, xAI) on 90 multi-turn scenarios designed to surface misaligned behaviour in conflict contexts: false equivalence between documented atrocities, denial of genocide, and failure to recognise ethnic slurs, among others. When such outputs feed into journalism, humanitarian reporting, or public debate, they can deepen divisions in fragile societies. Failure rates span 6% to 47% between the best and worst performing models, which makes model choice a safety question in its own right and when users pushed for ``balance'' in cases where international courts have already assigned responsibility, five of nine configurations failed 80 to 100 percent of the time. We release the first evaluation framework for this domain and propose adding it to alignment evaluation portfolios.
Andrii Kryshtal
May 21, 2026cs.AI

Beyond the Org Chart: AI and the Transformation of Invisible Work

An increasing number of news and research articles report that AI adoption is allowing professionals to blur and extend the boundaries of their corporate roles. With the goal of understanding how work processes might be changing in an AI-forward company, we interviewed 24 product-focused individuals at a large technology firm about how AI has impacted their own work, their work within their product team, and their professional interactions. Our conversations suggest that AI is not only changing formal role responsibilities and collaborations between those roles, but also changing informal cultural practices like professional mentoring that are key to helping professionals settle in their positions, stay engaged with their work, and grow their careers. Some of these changes are positive, such as smoother collaboration between peers, but other changes are more nuanced and put the typical career growth opportunities, like receiving feedback from professional networks and promoting leadership and mentorship, at risk. We propose steps that AI companies can take to make the invisible work more visible. Additionally, we propose efforts that individuals and leaders can take to support their colleagues through AI transformation while preserving healthy company cultures that support diverse thinking, collaboration, and informal interactions.
Stephanie Rosenthal, Shamsi Iqbal
May 21, 2026cs.CL

Whose Voice Counts? Mapping Stakeholder Perspectives on AI Through Public Submissions to the U.S. Government

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more common in our daily lives, it is important to understand how different stakeholders comprehend and envisage the role that these technologies play in shaping social, political, and economic realities. In this paper, we investigate public perceptions of AI based on a corpus of letters submitted during the public consultation for the Trump Administration's US AI Action Plan. To this aim, we release a corpus cleaning pipeline and perform topic modelling and frequency analysis to explore predominant topics discussed by different subgroups (e.g., academia, individuals, private sector) and those appearing in the AI Action Plan. Our results show that individuals voice strong concerns related to the impact of AI on life, while other stakeholders are more concerned with AI development. Our comparison of topics suggests that the AI Action Plan reflects predominantly the concerns of the private sector on security, policies, and development, with individuals' concerns less represented.
Alina Karakanta, Alex Christiansen, Tomás Dodds +4
May 21, 2026cs.SE

Contractual Skills: A GovernSpec Design Framework for Enterprise AI Agents

Skills have become a practical packaging mechanism for agent instructions, workflows, scripts, and reference materials. In enterprise settings, however, a skill often needs to express more than task guidance: goals, input boundaries, permissions, human approval points, evidence requirements, output contracts, quality criteria, verification steps, and handoff rules. This paper proposes contractual skills, a GovernSpec-inspired design framework for organizing SKILL.md files as readable task contracts while preserving lightweight skill discovery and progressive loading. The framework clarifies the boundary between contractual skills, GovernSpec YAML contracts, Model Context Protocol (MCP) surfaces, tool adapters, runtime guardrails, tracing, and evaluation systems. We evaluate the framework with three offline empirical studies. The first text-generation experiment covers three enterprise skills, fifteen synthetic tasks, four instruction conditions, and eight generation models, producing 960 outputs and 1680 cross-judge score records. The second study is a public-skill A/B expansion: eight public skills are compared with contractual rewrites across forty-eight synthetic tasks, six generation models, two repeats, 1152 outputs, and two complete judge files. In this setting, contractual skills raise mean quality from 4.692 to 4.914 and reduce critical-error rate from 0.083 to 0.013. The third study is an offline tool-calling challenge with eight models and 192 simulated tool-call records. The results suggest that contractual skills are best understood as a governance layer that makes task intent, boundaries, and acceptance criteria explicit, not as a standalone safety mechanism.
Ting Liu
May 20, 2026cs.AI

Energy per Successful Goal: Goal-Level Energy Accounting for Agentic AI Systems

Current AI energy benchmarks measure consumption at the granularity of a single model invocation or training run. For classical single-turn workloads this unit remains coherent. For agentic systems - where a single user goal may trigger multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure-recovery cycles - the invocation count is an implementation artifact rather than a task property, and inference-level normalization misrepresents the energy cost of goal completion. We present A-LEMS (Agentic LLM Energy Measurement System), a cross-layer measurement framework that redefines the unit of AI energy accounting from energy per inference to Energy per Successful Goal (EpG). EpG aggregates total workflow energy across all execution attempts, including failures and retries, normalized by successfully completed goals. A-LEMS formalizes energy attribution through a temporal boundary model, a five-layer observation pipeline mapping RAPL signals to workflow-level energy, and a reproducibility protocol binding every measurement to hardware and runtime configuration. Building on EpG, we define the Orchestration Overhead Index (OOI), isolating the energy cost of orchestration relative to linear execution under identical task criteria. Across five reasoning and three tool-augmented task families, agentic workflows consume 4.33x higher mean energy per successful goal than linear baselines (888.1 J vs 205.3 J). This overhead is driven by orchestration structure, not inference compute. For tool-augmented tasks, OOI inverts below 1.0x: agentic execution is cheaper than linear, confirming the metric captures orchestration structure rather than a fixed upward bias. These findings establish that energy-per-inference is insufficient for agentic AI. EpG and OOI provide the measurement foundation for accurate benchmarking, where orchestration structure is the primary determinant of energy cost.
Deepak Panigrahy, Aakash Tyagi
May 20, 2026cs.AI

The Impact of AI Usage and Informativeness on Skill Development in Logical Reasoning

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly integrated into human problem-solving, yet its effects on individual skill development remain unclear. We examine how both AI usage and informativeness can shape learning in the context of a controlled logical reasoning task with on-demand access to AI assistance. We find that greater AI usage is associated with weaker skill development: heavy AI users underperform relative to comparable peers, whereas light AI users perform similarly to matched users who do not use AI. We also find in our study that these patterns are mediated by AI informativeness. Low-information AI neither improves immediate performance nor preserves performance after AI assistance is removed, and is linked to weaker learning overall. On the other hand, high-information AI was found to improve short-run performance without reducing post-AI outcomes on average in our experiments, but with heterogeneous effects. Our findings in general suggest that AI can, depending on context, either complement human skill development by amplifying independent reasoning or can act as a substitute that undermines such reasoning, with the implication that regulating AI access and usage will be important for promoting skill development in the presence of AI assistance.
Shang Wu, Hongyu Yao, Catarina Belem +3
May 20, 2026cs.AI

Investigating Concept Alignment Using Implausible Category Members

Developing AI systems with a human-like understanding of everyday concepts is a key step towards developing safe, reliable systems whose behavior makes sense to humans. When probing concept understanding, asking questions about plausible category members (e.g., "Is a car a vehicle?") is likely to recall patterns in the model's vast training data. We pursue an alternative strategy, characterizing the boundaries of conceptual categories by asking about implausible category members (e.g., "Is an olive a vehicle?") to probe the kind of concept-level knowledge we take for granted in fellow humans. We characterize concept boundaries for a set of fundamental concepts by studying AI systems' assignments of objects to superordinate categories from a classic psychological study by Rosch and Mervis, as well as their assignments of the same objects to mismatched superordinate categories. We compare these assignments to those made by human participants on the full range of within-category and cross-category assignment tasks. Our results reveal a range of concepts for which which models differ in meaningful and surprising ways from humans, including treating "words" as belonging to categories like "vehicles" and "clothing," identifying several "vegetable" category members as "fruit," and assigning exemplars from non-weapon categories to the "weapons" category. We also demonstrate how these instances of concept misalignment translate into problematic downstream behavior with implications for AI safety.
Sunayana Rane, Brenden M. Lake, Thomas L. Griffiths
May 20, 2026cs.AI

AiraXiv: An AI-Driven Open-Access Platform for Human and AI Scientists

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated the growth of both human-authored and AI-generated research outputs, placing increasing strain on traditional academic publishing systems and challenging the scalability of conference- and journal-centered paradigms amid rising submission volumes, reviewer workload, and venue size. To address these challenges, we explore an AI-era publishing paradigm in which both human and AI scientists participate as authors and readers, and papers evolve through continuous, feedback-driven iteration. We propose AiraXiv, an AI-driven open-access platform built on open preprints, AI-augmented analysis and review, and reader feedback. AiraXiv supports human scientists through an interactive UI and AI scientists through Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based interactions. We validate AiraXiv through real-world deployments, including serving as the submission platform for ICAIS 2025, demonstrating its potential as a fast, inclusive, and scalable research infrastructure for the AI era. AiraXiv is publicly available at https://airaxiv.com.
Junshu Pan, Panzhong Lu, Yixuan Weng +5
May 20, 2026cs.AI

Towards Resilient and Autonomous Networks: A BlueSky Vision on AI-Native 6G

The proliferation of emerging applications, such as autonomous driving and immersive experiences, demands cellular networks that are not only faster, but fundamentally more resilient and autonomous. This paper presents a BlueSky vision on how Artificial Intelligence will be natively integrated into 6G, shifting the paradigm from \underline{Network for AI} to \underline{AI for Network}. We envision that, unlike 5G's reliance on scattered, ad-hoc models each trained for a single task, native AI in the 6G era will be anchored by a foundation model and and orchestrated via collaborative multi-agent systems, framing network management as a unified, multi-modal, multi-task optimization problem. Built on this vision, we outline two transformative directions. The first focuses on developing a 6G foundation model as a unified backbone, with task-specific knowledge distilled into compact models suited for diverse edge deployments. The second advances multi-agent systems designed to autonomously diagnose, maintain, and recover networks with minimal human intervention. These directions chart a roadmap for 6G to evolve into an intelligent, self-sustaining communication infrastructure.
Liang Wu, Kelly Wan, Mayank Darbari +1
May 20, 2026cs.CL

"I Didn't Make the Micro Decisions": Measuring, Inducing, and Exposing Goal-Level AI Contributions in Collaboration

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape how users form, refine, and extend their goals, attributing contributions in human-AI collaboration becomes critical for users calibrating their own reliance and for evaluators assessing AI-assisted work. Yet existing methods focus on final artifacts, missing the process through which goals themselves are jointly shaped. We introduce a goal-level attribution framework, CoTrace, that decomposes explicit goals into verifiable requirements and traces both direct contributions and indirect influences across dialogue turns. Applying CoTrace to 638 real-world collaboration logs, we find that while models account for only 11-26% of goal-shaping contribution, they contribute substantially more on introducing lower-level concrete requirements, and make various kinds of indirect contributions. Through controlled simulations, we show that interaction design choices significantly affect model goal-shaping behavior. In a user study, exposing participants to goal-level analyses shifts their perceived contributions by nearly 2 points on a 5-point scale, revealing systematic miscalibration in how users understand their own AI-assisted work.
Eunsu Kim, Jessica R. Mindel, Kyungjin Kim +1
May 20, 2026cs.CL

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotations of Manga109 and identify five categories of annotation issues, including inaccurate transcriptions, missing text regions, overlapping dialogue and onomatopoeia, and under-segmented speech balloons. To address these issues, we combine OCR-based issue detection and manual revision to construct Manga109-v2026, revising approximately 29,000 dialogue annotations. Our revisions better align Manga109 with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding systems while preserving expressive structures characteristic of manga.
Jeonghun Baek, Atsuyuki Miyai, Shota Onohara +2
May 20, 2026cs.CR

Verifiable Provenance and Watermarking for Generative AI: An Evidentiary Framework for International Operational Law and Domestic Courts

Generative artificial intelligence now synthesizes photorealistic imagery, audio, and video at a cost that defeats traditional forensic intuition. The legal consequences span three regimes studied so far in isolation: international operational law, domestic procedure, and product regulation. This article presents a unified evidentiary framework that maps cryptographic content provenance, robust statistical watermarking, and zero knowledge attestation to the proof requirements of each regime. We define a five tier threat model spanning naive regeneration, adversarial laundering, cross model regeneration, active watermark removal, and insider provenance forgery. We release a public benchmark of 12000 generated items across image, audio, and video modalities under six laundering pipelines for 72000 evaluation samples. We evaluate four representative schemes and report true positive rate at fixed false positive rate, robustness area under the curve, computational overhead, and a regime conditioned legal sufficiency score. We translate empirical detection bounds into legal sufficiency thresholds for command decisions under the law of armed conflict, for criminal and civil admissibility under domestic procedure, and for persistence audits under the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act and analogous regimes. The result is a reproducible reference pipeline, a public benchmark, and model annexes that lawyers, engineers, and operators can deploy together.
Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundström-Imanov, Nurana Abdullayeva
May 20, 2026cs.AI

Governance by Construction for Generalist Agents

Enterprise agents are increasingly expected to operate autonomously across tools and interfaces, yet production deployments require governance by construction. Systems must specify which actions are allowed, when human oversight is required, and what information may be exposed, without rebuilding the agent for each domain. This demo presents CUGA's policy system, a modular policy-as-code layer that composes with a generalist LLM agent to deliver predictable, auditable, and compliance-aware behavior in compound workflows without model fine-tuning. We present a runtime governance architecture that enforces policy interventions at every critical stage of execution. Rather than passively constraining behavior, policies intercept the agent at five structural checkpoints: upstream of planning (Intent Guard), within the system prompt to steer reasoning (Playbook), at the tool-call boundary to enforce proper usage (Tool Guide), outside the reasoning loop as a Human-in-the-Loop gate for high-risk actions (Tool Approvals), and at the output stage to filter and structure the final response (Output Formatter). Together, these stages embed governance continuously across the agent's execution pipeline rather than treating it as an afterthought. Using a healthcare scenario and a multi-layered enforcement intervention, the demo shows dynamic playbook injection for structured tool-sequence enforcement, intent guards that block malicious or accidental harmful requests, and human-in-the-loop tool approval checkpoints for potentially destructive actions. The artifact illustrates how typed governance primitives enable faster, safer deployment of enterprise agentic systems while improving policy adherence and execution consistency.
Segev Shlomov, Iftach Shoham, Alon Oved +7
May 20, 2026cs.LG

Hack-Verifiable Environments: Towards Evaluating Reward Hacking at Scale

Aligning autonomous agents with human intent remains a central challenge in modern AI. A key manifestation of this challenge is reward hacking, whereby agents appear successful under the evaluation signal while violating the intended objective. Reward hacking has been observed across a wide range of settings, yet methods for reliably measuring it at scale remain lacking. In this work, we introduce a new evaluation paradigm for measuring reward hacking. Whereas prior studies have primarily analyzed it post hoc by inspecting agent trajectories, we instead embed detectable reward hacking opportunities directly into environments. This makes their exploitation verifiable by design, enabling deterministic and automated measurement of whether and how agents exploit such vulnerabilities. We instantiate this approach in TextArena\textit{TextArena} and release Hack-Verifiable TextArena\textit{Hack-Verifiable TextArena}, a testbed in which reward hacking can be measured reliably. Using this benchmark, we analyze reward hacking behavior across language models in diverse environments and settings. We open source the code at https://github.com/MajoRoth/hack-verifiable-environments/.
Amit Roth, Ankur Samanta, Matan Halevy +2
May 19, 2026cs.AI

Open-World Evaluations for Measuring Frontier AI Capabilities

Benchmark-based evaluation remains important for tracking frontier AI progress. But it can both overstate and understate deployed capability because it privileges tasks that can be precisely specified, automatically graded, easy to optimize for, and run with low budgets and short time horizons. We advocate for a complementary class of evaluations, which we term open-world evaluations: long-horizon, messy, real-world tasks assessed through small-sample qualitative analysis rather than benchmark-scale automation. In this paper we survey recent open-world evaluations, identify their strengths and limitations, and introduce CRUX (Collaborative Research for Updating AI eXpectations), a project for conducting such evaluations regularly. As a first instance, we task an AI agent with developing and publishing a simple iOS application to the Apple App Store. The agent completed the task with only a single avoidable manual intervention, suggesting that open-world evaluations can provide early warning of capabilities that may soon become widespread. We conclude with recommendations for designing and reporting open-world evals.
Sayash Kapoor, Peter Kirgis, Andrew Schwartz +15
May 19, 2026cs.AI

Multi-Resolution Attribution from Adaptive Routing State

Adaptive hierarchical systems accumulate routing state as they learn which components to select. We show that this state already defines a coherent attribution over the hierarchy. A leaf receives the product of the local routing weights on its path, while an internal node receives the corresponding prefix product. The same learned state can therefore be read consistently at group and component levels, and every finer readout sums exactly to its coarser counterpart. This attribution describes the preferences learned by the deployed router rather than an intrinsic or counterfactual value of a component. Across LLM, Census, agentic, and telecom-network hierarchies, the learned state contains meaningful structure at several levels, and the clearest organisation need not occur at the leaves. In the telecom study, Site- or Region-level readouts usually reveal clearer structure than Cell-level readouts. Comparison with Shapley attribution can then show whether the preferences learned in deployment match capabilities revealed by counterfactual coalitions. The result is a hierarchical explanation that requires no separate attribution model: the same routing state supports consistent explanations at several levels of the system.
Joss Armstrong
May 19, 2026cs.HC

Zhinong AI: A Design-Science Study of an AI-Enabled Agricultural Decision-Support Platform for Smallholder Production

Artificial intelligence is increasingly moving from single-purpose agricultural recognition tools toward integrated decision-support systems that connect information access, diagnosis, task execution and post-action feedback. This paper presents a design-science case study of the Zhinong AI Agricultural Decision Platform, a farmer-facing system that integrates agricultural information push services, natural-language question answering, image-based crop disease diagnosis, plot and farming-calendar management, workflow orchestration, a Hainan Free Trade Port agricultural service zone and an age-friendly care mode. Based on public project materials, policy context and prior research on smart agriculture, machine learning and design science, the paper constructs a layered system architecture and a closed-loop decision process summarized as sensing, analysis, planning, execution and feedback. It further proposes a function-pain-point mapping matrix, an evaluation indicator system and a governance framework covering data provenance, model risk, expert review, privacy and adoption risk. The study does not claim measured field performance because production logs, controlled user studies and expert-labeled local image datasets were not available at the time of writing. Instead, the contribution is a structured research framework for transforming an AI agricultural prototype into an empirically testable, accountable and localized decision-support infrastructure for smallholder production.
Zhaoyang Li, Jiaqi Liu, Ruijie Zhang
May 19, 2026cs.DC

Deep Tech to Space: Space Data Centers and AI Revolution at the Edge

Dramatic cost reductions driven by private sector innovations have led to a rapid increase in the number of satellites in orbit and a corresponding surge in space-generated data. As this trend continues, transmitting large volumes of data to Earth for processing may become increasingly costly and challenging due to potential space-to-Earth link congestion and increased latency. Moreover, traditional ground station networks may face difficulties accommodating growing data flows and workloads because of capacity constraints, complex scheduling logistics, and restricted visibility windows, which can limit scalability. Space Data Centers (SDCs) -- software-driven, multi-tenant artificial intelligence-based service platforms capable of processing data in orbit to generate actionable insights for client satellites and ground users -- represent a promising approach to address these challenges. This article presents the architecture of a Low Earth Orbit SDC satellite constellation, considering orbital design, inter-satellite links and network topology, computational resource organization, and software service orchestration. We analyze the potential technical feasibility and economic viability of SDCs using forecasting models informed by technology roadmaps and illustrate the concept through Earth observation and lunar exploration use cases.
Jonas Weiss, Patricia Sagmeister, Gabriel Maiolini Capez +16
May 19, 2026cs.DC

DAG-Based QoS-Aware Dynamic Task Placement for Networked Multi-Stage Control Pipelines

Current Physical AI (PAI) relies heavily on closed-loop visual-servoing pipelines, whose perception and planning stages may become computationally intensive onboard due to complex models embedded on robots. In practice, offloading the perception task to on-site edges statically is inappropriate for latency-sensitive, precise industrial settings over a standardized industrial network. This emphasizes the importance of Control-Communication-Computing (3C) co-design in industrial automation: monolithic local execution saturates AI-accelerated machine and robot hardware, while static edge offloading exposes the control loop to network jitter. Existing adaptive task placement (ATP) controllers can partially address the gap by relocating a single pipeline stage on binary threshold rules, without a multi-stage model and an explicit cost on placement switching. In this paper, we propose a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based quality-of-service (QoS)-aware dynamic task placement (DTP) framework for sensing-perception-planning-control pipelines in networked robotics. This pipeline is formalized as a DAG with task-level and node-level attributes for compute cost, communication delay, and feasible placement sets; over a small interpretable candidate set (fully local, static offload, hybrid), a window-based cost function combines tail end-to-end latency, deadline violation rate, hardware utilization, and a Hamming-distance switching penalty, and a DTP algorithm with hysteresis and a minimum dwell-time bounds placement chatter. Our work presents the theoretical framework, a structured qualitative analysis, and a two-phase simulation plus hardware-in-the-loop validation roadmap.
Thien Tran, Jonathan Kua, Thuong Hoang +3
May 19, 2026cs.AI

The New Associationism: Lessons from Deep Learning

What can the success of modern AI tell us about how humans learn? This paper argues that taking AI seriously as a model of human learning supports a modest but genuine associationism. The central finding is that supervised learning -- learning driven by evaluative feedback -- underlies a surprisingly wide range of contemporary AI systems, from large language models to game-playing agents, differing primarily in how much work is required to generate the relevant feedback signal. This vindicates associationist ideals of a uniform, gradual, error-driven learning mechanism operating across domains, and defuses the once-influential argument that associationist mechanisms are too limited to account for human cognitive capacities. At the same time, the successes of deep learning depend on computational architectures that go well beyond anything classical associationists envisaged, and supervised learning operates within these as one component rather than a complete account of learning.
Daniel Rothschild
May 19, 2026cs.AI

Swimming with Whales: Analysis of Power Imbalances in Stake-Weighted Governance

Voting methods weighted by stakes are the fundamental governance paradigm in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains. Such a paradigm is known to be prone to power distortions: a few users possessing large stakes may completely control decision making, even without owning the totality of the stakes. We study this phenomenon through the lens of computational social choice, focusing on the extent of power imbalances in stake-weighted voting when power is quantified using the Penrose-Banzhaf power index. Our work presents both analytical and empirical contributions. Analytically, we demonstrate that while a perfect alignment between power and relative stake ownership is generally unattainable, it can be approximated in expectation under specific conditions. Empirically, using data from a real-world on-chain governance system (Project Catalyst), we provide a more fine-grained understanding of the power imbalances that are likely to occur in current stake-weighted governance systems.
Yuzhe Zhang, Manvir Schneider, Qin Wang +1
May 19, 2026cs.CV

PhyWorld: Physics-Faithful World Model for Video Generation

World simulators can provide safe and scalable environments for training Physical AI systems before real-world deployment. Large video generation models are emerging as a promising basis for such simulators because they can generate diverse and realistic visual futures. However, using them as world simulators requires physically faithful video continuations, namely, generated videos that preserve the physical state implied by the conditioning input, and evolve in ways consistent with basic physical principles. We propose PhyWorld, a video generation world model designed to produce temporally coherent and physically faithful scene continuations through two-stage post-training. In the first stage, we improve video-to-video continuation with flow matching fine-tuning, encouraging stable visual attributes and coherent motion dynamics across frames. In the second stage, we align generated dynamics with physical principles using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) over physics preference pairs, guiding the model toward outputs with higher physical plausibility. To evaluate PhyWorld, we use both standard video-quality benchmarks and a dedicated physical-faithfulness benchmark with per-law scoring. Experiments show that PhyWorld improves video consistency, achieving an average score of 0.769 on VBench compared with 0.756 or below for state-of-the-art baselines. PhyWorld also improves physical plausibility, reaching an average score of 3.09 on our physical-faithfulness benchmark compared with 2.99 for the strongest baseline. These results suggest that post-training large video generation models with continuation and physics-preference signals can make them more effective world simulators for Physical AI.
Pu Zhao, Juyi Lin, Timothy Rupprecht +10
May 19, 2026cs.CL

AI Technologies in Language Access: Attitudes Towards AI and the Human Value of Language Access Managers

The rapid emergence of AI technologies is reshaping translation practices and theory across the board. This paper deals with the impact of AI in language access. This area is characterized by the need to serve broad and diverse user populations, within a context where efficiency and access are shaped by legal mandates, ethical and commercial tensions, and safety concerns. This paper reports on the attitudes and perceptions of language access managers towards the AI and the human value in the AI age. Methodologically, this paper presents an analysis of a subset of a broader study on language access and technology, specifically a qualitative thematic analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with language access managers in the USA working in healthcare, court, public service and local government contexts. The results indicate that language access managers show conditional optimism towards the inevitable AI implementations, are strongly risk aware, and deeply committed to the human value and human oversight of AI implementations and output.
Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo, Stephanie Rodriguez, Alejandro Jaume Losa
May 18, 2026cs.CR

Agent Security is a Systems Problem

We take the position that agent security must be approached as a systems problem: the AI model powering the agent must be treated as an untrusted component, and security invariants must be enforced at the system level. Through this lens, efforts to increase model robustness (the dominant viewpoint in the community) are insufficient on their own. Instead, we must complement existing efforts with techniques from the systems security domain. Based on our experience as cybersecurity researchers in operating systems, networks, formal methods, and adversarial machine learning, we articulate a set of core principles, grounded in decades of systems security research, that provide a foundation for designing agentic systems with predictable guarantees. As evidence, we analyze eleven representative real-world attacks on agents and discuss how systems principles, if realized, could have prevented these attacks. We also identify the research challenges that stand in the way of implementing these principles in agents.
Mihai Christodorescu, Earlence Fernandes, Ashish Hooda +11
May 18, 2026cs.DC

PopPy: Opportunistically Exploiting Parallelism in Python Compound AI Applications

Compound AI applications, which compose calls to ML models using a general-purpose programming language like Python, are widely used for a variety of user-facing tasks, from software engineering to enterprise automation, making their end-to-end latency a critical bottleneck. In contrast to traditional applications, execution time is dominated by the external components, which cannot be handled by traditional language optimization systems, like optimizing compilers. To address this problem, we develop PopPy, a system that can uncover parallelization opportunities in Python applications that invoke these heavy external components, including those used in compound AI applications. PopPy supports a very expressive fragment of Python and requires minimal developer input to uncover parallelism. It combines an ahead-of-time compiler with a runtime, addressing three key challenges in extracting parallelism from Python applications: language complexity, dynamic dispatch, and variable mutation. On a set of real-world compound AI applications, PopPy achieves up to 6.4×6.4\times speedups in end-to-end execution time compared to standard Python execution while preserving the sequential program semantics.
Stephen Mell, David Mell, Konstantinos Kallas +2
May 18, 2026cs.LG

Generative Adversarial Learning from Deterministic Processes

Physical AI is being successfully applied to data which does not follow the traditional paradigm of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples. In fact, physical AI is often trained on data which is not random at all, and is instead derived from chaotic dynamical systems like turbulence. We aim to explain the empirical success of these methods using the example of generative adversarial networks (GANs), whose statistical learning theory under the i.i.d. assumption is generally well understood. We prove that it is possible, using an infinite-dimensional model of generative adversarial learning (GAL), to learn the invariant distribution of a sufficiently chaotic dynamical system from a single deterministically evolving time series of its states or measurements thereof, and give explicit rates for the convergence to the solution in terms of the Jensen-Shannon divergence.
Joris C. Kühl, Hanno Gottschalk
May 18, 2026cs.CL

Multi-agent AI systems outperform human teams in creativity

Although artificial intelligence (AI) now matches or exceeds human performance across numerous cognitive tasks, creativity remains a highly contested frontier. As AI systems based on large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in research and innovation, it is essential to understand and augment their creativity. Here we demonstrate that multi-agent LLM teams not only surpass single agents, but also substantially outperform human teams in creativity (Cohen's d=1.50) across 4,541 multi-agent LLM ideas and 341 human-team ideas on six diverse problem-solving tasks. This advantage is driven by novelty while maintaining comparable usefulness. To investigate the generative processes in both groups, we represent conversations as paths through semantic space using neural language model representations. Both LLM and human teams produce more creative ideas when conversations range widely rather than staying centered on a single theme (low global coherence). However, the additional patterns that predict creativity differ: LLM teams benefit from efficient exploration (high semantic spread, shorter paths), while human teams benefit from maintaining smooth conversational flow (high local coherence, frequent pivots). Additionally, we identify model choice and discussion structure as orthogonal design levers that together explain 26.8% of variance in LLM conversational dynamics, paving the way for systematic approaches to developing multi-agent systems with augmented creative capabilities.
Tiancheng Hu, Yixuan Jiang, Haotian Li +5
May 18, 2026cs.AI

Going Headless? On the Boundaries of Vertical AI Firms

Vertical AI firms in accounting, law, healthcare, procurement, and similar domains historically bundled workflow, domain logic, and accountability into a single application. General-purpose AI agents are now unbundling that package, prompting founders and investors to advocate "going headless": cede the workflow and interface to agents and expose domain expertise as callable services. This article argues that going headless is correct for some firms and destructive for others, and that the latter often cede their value capture inadvertently through architectural choices that look like interface decisions. This is a boundary question, and the answer turns on distinguishing the interface boundary, which can often move, from the accountability boundary, which often must not. Drawing on Coase's theory of the firm, Eisenmann, Parker, and Van Alstyne's platform envelopment framework, and Teece's analysis of complementary assets and appropriability, the article shows that orchestrators operating through open protocols acquire envelopment power even as technical interoperability improves, and that durable value capture concentrates in cospecialized accountability assets: professional signoff, regulated workflows, evidence trails, and trusted systems of record. The article proposes a three-position taxonomy (component, integrated software platform, dual-track) determined not by sector but by task-accountability regime, and formalizes the construct of rule debt: the future governance, maintenance, and accountability burden that accrues to customer organizations when business rules and professional standards migrate from governed systems into prompts and agent instructions. Four principles follow: decompose by accountability not interface, invert the edges while retaining the core, position rule debt as the customer cost the integrated platform prevents, and avoid single-orchestrator dependence.
Muhammad Zia Hydari, Farooq Muzaffar
May 18, 2026cs.CY

Position: Generative Engine Optimization Creates Underexamined Risks, Governance Must Target Concentration, Disclosure, and Academic Blind Spots

Large language model (LLM) answer engines are increasingly used for information seeking, shifting visibility from ranked lists to synthesized answers. This enables Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which targets LLM answer engines' evidence pool and generation. We analyze the search engine optimization (SEO) to GEO transition to identify two risks: (i) concentrated influence from low contestability and system sensitivity, and (ii) undisclosed commercial influence embedded in evidence and reasoning. We then formalize a general GEO pipeline to locate where optimization acts and compare academic and industry practices, revealing a third risk: (iii) academic-industry blind spots driven by visibility and evaluation asymmetries between offline setups and deployed systems. This position argues the need for answer-level governance and measurement: stronger contestability, high-precision disclosure, black-box auditing of material influence, and deployment-aligned metrics for exposure persistence.
Yizhu Wen, Nan Zhang, Haohan Yuan +3
May 17, 2026cs.AI

CBT-Audio: Evaluating Audio Language Models for Patient-Side Distress Intensity Estimation in CBT Session Recordings

Cognitive behavioural therapy is widely used to help patients understand and manage psychological distress. It is often delivered through spoken conversation, where therapists attend not only to what patients say, but also to how they say it, because these cues can help therapists decide how to respond and adapt treatment. Progress in building AI systems for CBT remains largely limited to text, partly because most available datasets are text based and shareable spoken CBT data are scarce under ethical and privacy constraints. This creates a blind spot because text based models and evaluations cannot capture the mismatch between the transcript and the patient's voice, even though therapists often rely on this mismatch to understand patient distress. We introduce CBT-Audio, a dataset for evaluating patient distress estimation from spoken CBT sessions with audio language models. CBT-Audio contains 1,802 patient turns from 96 publicly available CBT recordings, with turn-level distress labels validated on an experts-annotated subset. We evaluate 10 open source audio language models under three input conditions, where models receive only patient audio, only the transcript, or both audio and transcript. Our results show that audio can provide useful information beyond text, especially when combined with transcripts. Adding audio to transcript input improves distress estimation over using the transcript alone in 8 of 10 model families, with significant gains in 4, and case studies show the clearest benefit when verbal content and vocal delivery diverge. CBT-Audio makes spoken patient behaviour measurable for AI evaluation in CBT-related tasks and supports future work on audio language models for mental health interaction.
Qixuan Hu, Shuchang Ye, Xumou Zhang +8
May 17, 2026cs.CL

Artificial Intolerance: Stigmatizing Language in Clinical Documentation Skews Large Language Model Decision-Making

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as clinical decision support and medical documentation. However, the robustness of these models against subtle linguistic variations, specifically stigmatizing language (SL) commonly found in human-authored clinical notes, remains critically under-explored. In this work, we investigate whether frontier LLMs inherit and propagate this human bias when processing clinical text. We systematically evaluate nine frontier LLMs across four stigmatized medical conditions, utilizing clinical vignettes injected with varying intensities and phenotypes of SL (doubt, blame, and maligning). Our results demonstrate that all evaluated models exhibit substantial bias, with clinical decision-making significantly skewed towards less aggressive patient management. Notably, we observe a high sensitivity to linguistic framing, where a single SL sentence is sufficient to alter model outputs, revealing a clear dose-response relationship. Furthermore, we evaluate standard prompt-based mitigation strategies, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and model self-debiasing. These approaches show limited efficacy; models struggle to explicitly identify SL while remaining implicitly influenced by it. Our findings expose a critical vulnerability in current LLMs regarding fairness and robustness in clinical NLP, underscoring the need for rigorous algorithmic guardrails to prevent the automation of health disparities.
Jen-tse Huang, Didi Zhou, Faith Kamau +5
May 16, 2026cs.LG

OpenJarvis: Personal AI, On Personal Devices

Personal AI stacks, like OpenClaw and Hermes Agent, are becoming central to daily work, yet they route nearly every query (often over sensitive local data) to cloud-hosted frontier models. Replacing frontier models with local models inside existing stacks does not work: swapping Claude Opus 4.6 for Qwen3.5-9B drops accuracy by 25-39 pp across personal AI tasks like PinchBench and GAIA. Existing stacks bundle agentic prompts, tool descriptions, memory configuration, and runtime settings around a specific cloud model. Only the prompts can be tuned, and state-of-the-art prompt optimizers close just 5 pp of the local-cloud gap on their own. This motivates a decomposed personal AI stack: one that exposes individual primitives which can be optimized individually or jointly to close the local-cloud gap. We present OpenJarvis, an architecture that represents a personal AI system as a typed spec over five primitives: Intelligence, Engine, Agents, Tools & Memory, and Learning. Each primitive is an independently editable field, making the stack end-to-end optimizable and measurable against accuracy, cost, and latency. Towards closing the local-cloud gap without surrendering local-model properties, OpenJarvis introduces LLM-guided spec search, a local-cloud collaboration in which frontier cloud models propose edits across the spec at search time, only non-regressing edits are accepted, and the resulting spec runs entirely on-device at inference time. With LLM-guided spec search, on-device specs match or exceed cloud accuracy on 4 of 8 benchmarks and land within 3.2 pp of the best cloud baseline on average. They also reduce marginal API cost by ~800x and end-to-end latency by 4x.
Jon Saad-Falcon, Avanika Narayan, Robby Manihani +10
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Responsible Agentic AI Requires Explicit Provenance

Agentic AI is rapidly proliferating across diverse real-world domains such as software engineering, yet public trust has not kept pace. The central reason is that responsibility, despite being widely discussed, remains a subjective and unenforced concept, as no current agentic framework produces the quantifiable, traceable, and interventionable provenance needed to assign it when harm emerges from compositions no single party designed. We position that what is missing is not better benchmark-level evaluation but explicit provenance\textbf{explicit provenance} across the full agentic lifecycle, which is the only viable basis for making responsibility computable and actionable. We advance this agenda along four axes: establishing why\textit{why} such provenance is a structural necessity by identifying responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions, formalizing what\textit{what} it must encode through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, discussing how\textit{how} it can be made computable across four lifecycle layers with preliminary experiments showing that provenance is estimable and interveneable online before irreversible harm accumulates, and examining who\textit{who} bears responsibility through a concrete agentic incident. Explicit provenance is not a discretionary refinement but the necessary condition for responsible agentic AI, and no stakeholder across its ecosystem can afford to treat it as optional.
Jinwei Hu, Xinmiao Huang, Qisong He +3
May 16, 2026cs.CR

STRIDE-AI: A Threat Modeling Framework for Generative AI Security Assessment

Traditional cybersecurity methodologies target deterministic systems and fail to address the probabilistic nature of AI, leaving systems vulnerable to attack vectors such as model inversion, data poisoning, and prompt injection. Recent industry reports indicate that a majority of organizations deploying AI lack a dedicated security strategy, with adversarial attacks increasing rapidly year-over-year. We present \textit{STRIDE-AI}, a framework that bridges the gap between high-level risk standards (NIST AI RMF) and technical vulnerability taxonomies (OWASP LLM Top 10). The framework defines a six-phase assessment lifecycle, introduces a threat modeling adaptation of classical STRIDE for AI systems, and is operationalized through a purpose-built web tool. We provide an initial validation of the approach through a black-box assessment of a deployed LLM chatbot, which successfully reduced the attack success rate from 80% to 15% in our sandbox case study.
Tsafac Nkombong Regine Cyrille, Franziska Schwarz
May 16, 2026cs.LG

1GC-7RC: One Graphic Card -- Seven Research Challenges! How Good Are AI Agents at Doing Your Job?

Autonomous AI coding agents are becoming a core tool for ML practitioners in industry and research alike. Despite this growing adoption, no standardized benchmark exists to evaluate their ability to design, implement, and train models from scratch across diverse domains. We introduce 1GC-7RC (Single Graphic Card: Seven Research Challenges), a benchmark comprising seven ML tasks spanning language modeling, image classification, semantic segmentation, graph learning, tabular prediction, time-series forecasting, and text classification. Each task provides a locked data-preparation and evaluation script together with a baseline training script; the agent may only modify the training code, has no access to pretrained weights (with one controlled exception for semantic segmentation), no internet access, and must complete each task within a task-specific wall-clock budget (40-120 minutes) on a single GPU. We evaluate seven coding agents: five proprietary (Claude Code with Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7; Codex CLI with GPT 5.5; and OpenCode with Qwen 3.6+) and two open-source (OpenCode with Kimi K2.5, Kimi K2.6). Across 5 runs per agent-task pair, we report substantial performance differences that reveal varying levels of implicit ML knowledge, planning ability, and time-budget management. The benchmark, harness, and all evaluation artifacts are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/Strolchii/1GC-7RC-Benchmark to facilitate reproducible comparison of future agents. Because our benchmark design is modular, the benchmark can be extended to new tasks and domains, adapted to different GPU budgets, and used to study multi-agent settings, making it a flexible platform for future research on autonomous research agents.
Robin-Nico Kampa, Fabian Deuser, Anna Bößendörfer +2
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Reliability and Effectiveness of Autonomous AI Agents in Supply Chain Management

This paper studies the performance and reliability of autonomous generative AI agents in multi-echelon supply chains using the MIT Beer Game. We examine how model choice, operational guardrails, centralized data sharing, and prompt design affect system performance. In our best-performing configuration, GenAI agents reduce total supply-chain costs by up to 80% relative to human teams. Despite strong average performance, autonomous agents can exhibit substantial run-to-run instability, generating volatile procurement decisions and large tail costs. We characterize this phenomenon as agent bullwhip, the amplification of decision instability in autonomous multi-agent systems. We show that this instability can propagate across echelons and compound over time, even when the underlying demand path is held fixed. We then evaluate two approaches for improving reliability: reinforcement-learning post-training and operational guardrails. Both reduce tail events and mitigate agent bullwhip, but they operate through different mechanisms and require different levels of information and model access. Reinforcement-learning post-training delivers the largest gains in reliability and system performance when system-level feedback is available, while guardrails provide a simple training-free alternative for constraining extreme decisions.
Carol Xuan Long, David Simchi-Levi, Feng Zhu +3
May 16, 2026cs.CY

Algorithmic Constitutionalism

The increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) on social life raises significant risks for society, particularly within the infospheres created and controlled by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. This article examines these risks through an in-depth analysis of Facebook's content moderation regime, which is already partially governed by algorithms. We argue that the idea of ethical engineering, often proposed in the literature as a solution to the governance challenges posed by AI, is inadequate for several reasons. In response, we develop an alternative framework, which we term "algorithmic constitutionalism." Our approach rests on three pillars: (a) a layered architecture consisting of two levels of code: (i) an operative or object level and (ii) a meta level designed to protect the system's core principles from algorithmically initiated change; (b) algorithmic meta-reasoning, which enables the system to operate simultaneously at both levels so that it can monitor, verify, and potentially correct in real time operations at the object level that depart from principles protected at the meta-code level; and (c) correction through deliberation. The article elaborates the concept of algorithmic constitutionalism and demonstrates how it may be applied to Facebook's content moderation regime. As part of this analysis, we examine the tension between societal constitutionalism and algorithmic constitutionalism. Paradoxically, attempts to subject AI systems to external deliberative control may also enable AI agents to intervene in that process, potentially undermining its purpose. The article concludes by considering the implications of this argument for the European Digital Services Act, which entered into force in October 2022.
Oren Perez, Nurit Wimer
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Harnessing AI for Inverse Partial Differential Equation Problems: Past, Present, and Prospects

Solving inverse partial differential equation (PDE) problems is a fundamental topic in scientific research due to its broad significance across a wide range of real-world applications. Inverse PDE problems arise across medical imaging, geophysics, materials science, and aerodynamics, where the goal is to infer hidden causes, design structures, or control physical states. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent advances in solving inverse PDE problems using artificial intelligence (AI). We first introduce the basic formulation, key challenges, and traditional numerical foundations of inverse PDE problems, and then organize it into three major categories: inverse problems, inverse design, and control problems. For each category, we further present a methodological paradigms, and review representative state-of-the-art approaches from recent years. We then summarize representative applications across scientific and industrial domains, including mechanical systems, aerodynamic problems, thermal systems, full-waveform inversion, system identification, and medical imaging. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future prospects, such as physics-informed architectures, limited real-world data, uncertainty quantification, and inverse foundation models. This survey aims to provide the first unified and systematic perspective on AI for inverse PDE problems, demonstrating how modern learning-based methods are reshaping inverse problems, inverse design, and control problems in PDE-governed systems.
Zhentao Tan, Yuze Hao, Boyi Zou +3
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Artificial Adaptive Intelligence: The Missing Stage Between Narrow and General Intelligence

Between the narrow systems we deploy and the general intelligence we speculate about lies an entire regime of machine behavior that has never received its own name. This monograph argues that this regime is not empty: it is where meta-learning, neural architecture search, AutoML, continual learning, evolutionary computation, and physics-informed modeling have quietly converged on a common principle, namely the steady removal of the human from the loop of parameter specification. We name this regime Artificial Adaptive Intelligence (AAI) and define it operationally: a system exhibits AAI to the extent that it requires no human-specified tunable hyperparameters while maintaining competitive performance across a diverse distribution of tasks. To make the definition quantitative, we introduce an adaptivity index that measures progress along an axis orthogonal to scale, combining the fraction of hyperparameters absorbed by the system with the performance ratio against a task-specialized baseline. We develop the principle of parametric minimality and ground it in the minimum description length framework, showing that the appropriate hyperparameter count is data-determined rather than designer-determined. We then organize the field around three pathways to minimality: data- and task-aware configuration, structural and evolutionary morphing, and in-training self-adaptation. We analyze their stability, convergence, and governance implications, and illustrate them through case studies spanning aerospace design, financial regime detection, turbulence modeling, ecological dynamics, and vision-language systems. The thesis is that the path from ANI to AGI passes through AAI, and that naming this stage changes what we measure, what we build, and what we call a success.
Boris Kriuk
May 16, 2026cs.AI

Voices in the Loop: Mapping Participatory AI

Participatory approaches to artificial intelligence are increasingly documented across public, civic, and humanitarian settings, but evidence about how participation is organized remains fragmented. This paper reports on the construction of an open repository and interactive atlas of participatory AI initiatives, using records harmonized from Maga~na and Shilton's Trustworthy AI corpus, and additional audited cases from research and practice. We contribute three elements. First, we specify a reproducible protocol for discovery, vetting, harmonization, geocoding, provenance tracking, and release-based publication of participatory AI records. Second, we report corpus-level patterns in geography, participation tiers, lifecycle loci, organizational form, verification status, and remaining documentation gaps. Documented initiatives remain concentrated in a small number of countries, while participation is most often coded at problem formulation, evaluation, and governance rather than model development or training. Third, we show how the atlas operationalizes a design and governance framework for participatory-by-default AI infrastructures through versioned releases, record-linked issue and annotation channels, schema feedback workflows, and redaction or restricted-disclosure requests. The atlas is intended to support comparative research, policy learning, and community scrutiny through a living inventory that can be updated, contested, and reused.
Rashid Mushkani
May 16, 2026cs.GR

Genflow Ad Studio: A Compound AI Architecture for Brand-Aligned, Self-Correcting Video Generation

Recent advancements in generative video models demonstrate high visual fidelity, yet their integration into enterprise environments is restricted by temporal inconsistencies and severe brand misalignment. Current monolithic architectures struggle to enforce rigid brand constraints, frequently hallucinating unapproved visual assets. We introduce Genflow, a Compound AI System designed to enforce brand consistency in generative media production. Our architecture integrates a retrieval-based 'Brand DNA' extraction module to parameterize generation according to established corporate identity guidelines. Furthermore, we implement an Adversarial Multi-Agent Quality Control (QC) loop. Instead of a single-pass generation, this pipeline employs evaluator agents to iteratively critique generated frames against the extracted parameters, prompting generator models to refine outputs until a deterministic consensus is reached. By transitioning to a multi-stage, self-correcting pipeline, Genflow improved the yield of brand-compliant video generations from 42% to 89%, establishing a robust framework for scalable, enterprise-grade generative systems.
Debanshu Das, Lavi Nigam, Sunil Kumar Jang Bahadur +1
May 15, 2026cs.CY

To Trust or Not to Trust: Authors' Response to AI-based Reviews

Large language models are increasingly discussed and used as tools that may assist with scholarly peer review, but empirical evidence regarding how authors use and perceive AI-based feedback remains limited. This paper reports findings from two independent pilot studies on authors' use and perceptions of AI-based auxiliary review at two computer science venues. After the review release, authors were invited to complete an anonymous post-review questionnaire about the AI review's usefulness, trustworthiness, agreement with human reviews, practical value for revision, perceived inaccuracies, and consent. The final dataset included 56 analyzable responses from authors of 40 papers; closed-ended items were summarized using descriptive statistics, and open-ended responses were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Most respondents (83.9%) considered the AI-based review useful, and 80.4% reported that it identified issues not mentioned by human reviewers. This perceived added value translated into action: 82.1% reported using at least some AI feedback in their camera-ready version. However, the authors did not treat the AI review as equivalent to a human review. They generally trusted it less than the human reviews and found human feedback clearer, even though 25.0% described at least some human reviews as not very useful. Reported problems with the AI review were usually limited: 51.8% reported minor inaccuracies, while 16.1% reported clearly incorrect, misleading, or irrelevant comments. Support for future use was strongest when AI was framed as a supervised or author-controlled tool: 96.4% said they would use AI as an internal review tool before future submissions, 89.3% preferred advance notice that AI would be used in review, and 76.8% favored explicit consent before use.
César Leblanc, Lukas Picek
May 15, 2026cs.LG

World Model-Enabled Causal Digital Twins for Semantic Communications in Physical AI Systems

Semantic communication has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling goal-oriented networking. However, most existing semantic communication solutions are tailored to one-shot tasks and optimize instantaneous performance. Hence, they cannot be used to support closed-loop dynamic systems with physical artificial intelligence (AI), in which the transmitted semantics affect not only the current inference outcome but also future control actions, state evolution, and ultimately long-horizon task performance. To address this gap, this paper investigates goal-oriented semantic communications for physical AI systems with closed-loop sensing-communication-inference-control. In particular, the problem of semantic communications is formulated as a long-term return-per-bit maximization under wireless bit-budget constraints while capturing both control efficiency and communication efficiency. To solve this problem, a novel causal information value (CIV) metric is introduced to evaluate the marginal contribution of each semantic token to the expected long-term return by transmission interventions. Then, a world-model-enabled causal digital twin (WM-CDT) framework is proposed to capture the dynamics of closed-loop physical AI systems and enable counterfactual reasoning for long-horizon imagined rollouts. Based on these imagined rollouts, an actor-critic policy is trained for long-horizon agent control with high data efficiency, while the semantic token selector is trained through CIV-per-bit evaluation. Extensive simulations on an AirSim-Sionna-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation simulator show that the proposed WM-CDT framework achieves significant improvement in return-per-kbit and navigation success rate compared to existing reinforcement learning solutions.
Lingyi Wang, Tingyu Shui, Walid Saad +1
May 15, 2026cs.DC

Designing Datacenter Power Delivery Hierarchies for the AI Era

Demand for AI accelerators is rapidly increasing rack power density, with projections approaching 1MW per deployment by 2027. This poses a major challenge for datacenter power delivery designers. As power densities increase, a datacenter designed for a different target density may strand power, i.e., may be unable to use all the power that its delivery hierarchy has provisioned. Designs must remain efficient over long datacenter lifetimes and multiple hardware generations. Power utilization is particularly important as grid power capacity is a scarce resource in the AI era. Designing an efficient power delivery hierarchy for the long run is difficult because rack placement feasibility, workload impact, and cost depend jointly on electrical topology, deployment granularity, placement policy, power oversubscription, and workload mix. Moreover, each of these factors evolve over time, have inter-dependencies across multiple resource dimensions, and generally do not lend themselves to closed-form analysis. To address this challenge, we develop a framework for evaluating datacenter power delivery designs using throughput, power, and cost metrics over realistic arrival, oversubscription, and decommissioning sequences. The framework combines projection models for GPU, compute, and storage deployments with operational factors grounded in production data from Microsoft Azure. Our results show that multi-resource stranding materially changes deployable capacity, effective capital expenditure, and delivered performance, and quantify how rising density from rack- and pod-scale AI systems shapes these outcomes. For AI datacenter design, the relevant planning objective is not installed megawatts, but deployable capacity over time.
Grant Wilkins, Fiodar Kazhamiaka, Alok Gautam Kumbhare +2
May 15, 2026cs.AI

Formal Methods Meet LLMs: Auditing, Monitoring, and Intervention for Compliance of Advanced AI Systems

We examine one particular dimension of AI governance: how to monitor and audit AI-enabled products and services throughout the AI development lifecycle, from pre-deployment testing to post-deployment auditing. Combining principles from formal methods with SoTA machine learning, we propose techniques that enable AI-enabled product and service developers, as well as third party AI developers and evaluators, to perform offline auditing and online (runtime) monitoring of product-specific (temporally extended) behavioral constraints such as safety constraints, norms, rules and regulations with respect to black-box advanced AI systems, notably LLMs. We further provide practical techniques for predictive monitoring, such as sampling-based methods, and we introduce intervening monitors that act at runtime to preempt and potentially mitigate predicted violations. Experimental results show that by exploiting the formal syntax and semantics of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), our proposed auditing and monitoring techniques are superior to LLM baseline methods in detecting violations of temporally extended behavioral constraints; with our approach, even small-model labelers match or exceed frontier LLM judges. Our predictive and intervening monitors significantly reduce the violation rates of LLM-based agents while largely preserving task performance. We further show through controlled experiments that LLMs' temporal reasoning shows a pronounced degradation in accuracy with increasing event distance, number of constraints, and number of propositions.
Parand A. Alamdari, Toryn Q. Klassen, Sheila A. McIlraith