Artificial Intelligence Systems

The 4th "AI Olympics with RealAIGym" competition, to be held at IJCAI-ECAI 2026 in Bremen, challenges participants to develop a global control policy for swinging up and stabilizing an underactuated two-link system in its upright position. In contrast to previous editions, participants develop and evaluate their control strategies directly on remotely accessible CloudPendulum hardware, with limited interaction time and without prior knowledge of the system's model parameters. This paper presents an optimal-control-based approach employing real-time nonlinear model predictive control implemented using sequential quadratic programming. The results demonstrate that the proposed SQP-based MPC controller achieves reliable swing-up and stabilization performance, while maintaining robustness against disturbances.

The overlapping disciplines of machine ethics and value alignment are concerned with designing artificial agents that are aligned with human values and that act in ethically acceptable ways. A recent trend in these disciplines is the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to design such agents, sidelining the philosophical literature that used to play a more central role. Against this backdrop, this paper pursues two goals. The first is to draw out ideas from recent work in metanormative theory that can be useful for designing artificial moral and value-aligned agents. The second is to examine the RL architecture through the lens of these ideas. This will give us clearer criteria for when an RL agent's behavior can be classified as moral, as well as a basis for evaluating and comparing different RL-based approaches to machine ethics and value alignment.

Generative AI has emerged as one of the most transformative forces in modern artificial intelligence, reshaping how we create, imagine, and interact with digital content. From photorealistic images to coherent text, from immersive videos to novel molecular structures, generative models now power applications that were once confined to science fiction. This book is designed to guide readers through the foundational principles, mathematical underpinnings, and practical architectures that underpin this revolution.

Distributed parallel Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs expose reliability gaps that conventional testing cannot close: parallel executions are non-deterministic, and AI workloads bring high-dimensional inputs and non-linear operations that defeat fuzzing and symbolic execution in isolation. We present Directed Neuro-Symbolic Stochastic Execution (DNSSE), a hybrid testing framework that couples schedule prediction guided by a Large Language Model (LLM) with symbolic constraint solving and coverage-guided stochastic mutation. We model distributed AI executions as non-deterministic transition systems, specify correctness in linear temporal logic, and prove soundness, bounded completeness, and probabilistic completeness of the hybrid solver, together with an expected-cost analysis of LLM-guided schedule exploration. A scalable implementation on PyTorch and Ray detects 2.9% more concurrency bugs than the strongest baseline and raises average branch coverage from 68.6 % to 91.6 % across five realistic distributed AI benchmarks.

A world model is only useful for physical AI if it changes what the agent does, and only safe if it declines to do so when it is wrong. We study both halves of that requirement with CausalNav, a controller built around a signed, action-conditioned transition graph over identified state coordinates. At deployment CausalNav simulates a small library of intervention sequences, converts their objective error into policy-logit advice, and admits that advice only when a scale-free predictive-reliability certificate, a policy-margin gate, and an argmax-agreement gate all pass; otherwise it falls back exactly to its own model-based base controller. We evaluate against nine controlled baselines (transformer, recurrent, split-latent, graph, causal-induction, and three recent model-based reasoning modules) on CartPole-v1 and discretized Pendulum-v1 with physical-parameter shifts, under one shared PPO trainer, one interaction budget, and ten held-out seeds (200 runs). CausalNav attains the best average rank (1.25 of ten). The diagnostic result is more informative than the ranking: the learned graph recovers structure well above chance (CartPole F1 = 0.59 +/- 0.09), yet per-seed structural fidelity is uncorrelated with per-seed control benefit (r = -0.15, p = 0.67), and the certificate abstains on 10/10 Pendulum seeds, where forcing the planner on costs return. Model fidelity did not predict downstream control utility in our setting; certified abstention, not better prediction, is what made the world model safe to deploy.

AI-generated music is increasingly used at the stem level, with producers integrating synthetic drums, basslines, or vocals alongside human-performed instruments. However, current AI music detection systems are binary, treating tracks as either fully AI or fully human. In this paper, we reformulate AI music detection as a regression problem on a continuous AI energy ratio, alpha in [0, 1]. We propose a methodology that leverages a multi-track music dataset to assemble mixtures of human-performed and AI-reconstructed stems (obtained using a neural audio codec) with known proportions of each content type. Using this approach, we first show that a CNN-based model trained on fully AI-generated or human-performed tracks, which achieves >99% accuracy as a binary detector, when faced with mixed content, yields an output that rises with the AI stems' energy contribution, acting as a noisy and miscalibrated estimator. Our analysis of the influence of different stems shows that detection sensitivity depends on the instrument and reflects its frequency content: drums and guitar carry strong codec-artifact signatures, while vocals and bass are less detectable. Based on these insights, we train a similar CNN-based model for regression of alpha, achieving MAE = 0.076 and R^2 = 0.85 on held-out mixtures from the same pipeline. These results suggest that the regression formulation is an initial promising step towards AI-music detection in realistic music production workflows.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have become powerful tools for supporting and automating complex human tasks. Despite their benefits, growing attention has been directed toward their environmental implications, primarily due to their high energy demands and associated carbon emissions. This concern is particularly relevant in light of the increasing deployment of large-scale models, especially Deep Learning (DL) architectures, which provide advanced predictive capabilities but require substantial computational resources. This paper presents a systematic review of research on Green AI, Green DL, and optimization techniques aimed at reducing the environmental impact of AI models. In addition, we examine and compare several carbon measurement tools for estimating emissions generated by AI algorithms. To complement the review, we conducted an empirical evaluation using a CPU-based experimental setup, in which six DL models were implemented for a multi-label classification task. The objective was to quantify and compare their overall carbon emissions and to determine which stages of the DL lifecycle contribute most significantly to the total footprint. The results show that the training phase is the primary source of emissions. Moreover, the findings reveal that increased architectural complexity does not systematically translate into proportional accuracy gains, highlighting the importance of carefully balancing predictive performance and environmental cost. These results reinforce the need to integrate sustainability considerations into model selection and AI system design.

Edge Artificial Intelligence (Edge AI) enables the deployment of AI models directly on local edge devices, while such deployments are subject to strict resource constraints, particularly in clinical applications requiring local and timely inference. In such contexts, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) can serve as a human-AI interface intended to support healthcare professionals' and patients' understanding of model predictions and informed decision-making. To fulfill this role, XAI method selection for TinyML deployments can be formulated as a human-centered multi-objective design problem that jointly considers qualitative stakeholder preferences, explanation quality, and proxy-based deployment cost. We propose a framework that integrates a large language model (LLM)-guided design interface that maps qualitative stakeholder preferences to candidate XAI methods, followed by deterministic feasibility filtering and Pareto-based optimization. The framework exposes trade-offs among explanation fidelity, stability, and proxy-based deployment cost while characterizing their implications for explanation quality and estimated deployment feasibility. A proof-of-concept evaluation on a skin lesion classification task illustrates how the framework systematically compares candidate XAI methods and identifies Pareto-efficient trade-offs. The present evaluation covers the computational selection stages, while physical MCU deployment and empirical human-expert validation remain outside the scope of this study.

Quantized Neural Networks~(QNN) with low-bitwidth data have proven promising in efficient storage and computation on edge devices. To mitigate accuracy degradation while maximizing speedup, layer-wise mixed-precision quantization~(MPQ) becomes a popular solution. However, existing algorithms for exploring MPQ schemes are limited in flexibility and efficiency. Comprehending the complex impacts of different MPQ schemes on post-training quantization and quantization-aware training results is a challenge for conventional methods. Furthermore, an end-to-end framework for the optimization and deployment of MPQ models is missing in existing work. To address these challenges, we propose the MiCo framework, a holistic MPQ exploration and deployment framework for edge AI applications. The framework adopts a novel optimization algorithm to search for accuracy-optimal quantization configurations under strict latency constraints. We further extended the framework to MiCoPro, which introduces a robust Hardware-Aware Proxy (HAP) model to enhance prediction accuracy and hardware versatility. By leveraging target-specific latency modeling, MiCoPro enables rapid exploration and direct deployment from PyTorch models to bare-metal C code. We demonstrate the versatility of our framework on both the BitFusion accelerator and SIMD-extended RISC-V processors, achieving up to 40% of latency reduction with less than 3% of accuracy drop.

Despite advances in artificial intelligence (AI) across multiple sectors, today's AI tools, including deep learning and generative AI, still fail when embedded into physical systems, such as robots and vehicles operating under real-world physical laws. This stems from their inability to maintain reliable world models for long-horizon planning under uncertainty and generalize to unseen scenarios. In this context, wireless networks, through pervasive sensing and communication, can orchestrate physical intelligence. However, current architectures optimize throughput, latency, and reliability and cannot support real-time physical AI coordination, requiring agents to maintain shared spatiotemporal context. To address these challenges, a network of holonic digital twins (HDT-Nets) framework is proposed to deliver real-time physical AI inference through holonic agents that actively reason about their environment rather than passively mirror physical assets. Each HDT is realized as a hierarchical structure spanning the physical agent and network edge, reasoning autonomously at the local level while cooperating with neighboring HDTs to form collectively intelligent units. In HDT-Net, causal Markov blankets spanning sensing, communication, and control determine which agents must coordinate and enable counterfactual reasoning over multi-domain interventions. Active inference within these boundaries unifies perception, action, and learning by minimizing expected free energy while deciding which beliefs to transmit based on their cognitive value to the receiver. Category theory ensures that transmitted beliefs preserve semantic structure across heterogeneous agents with incompatible representations. Finally, integrated information theory quantifies when collective intelligence exceeds independent operation and how network intelligence evolves through coordinated learning and information exchange.

Safety risks of AI are becoming increasingly evident in human interactions with AI technologies. The prominent approaches to evaluating these risks favor technical methods, such as model benchmarks and LLM simulations, often sidelining empirical research with human subjects. To examine this apparent gap in the acceptance of human research, we conduct an expert survey (n=93) and expert interviews (n=17) with AI Safety & Ethics (AISE) researchers from Technical, Sociotechnical, Governance, and Normative backgrounds. Our findings suggest that although there is a consensus that human research is valuable for generating evidence for AISE, its adoption and acceptance are constrained by perceived validity issues, tangible resource barriers, epistemic and personal preferences in methods, and infrastructural constraints from the broader research community. In particular, Technical researchers tend to value human research less and collaborate across disciplines less, suggesting an epistemic tension towards human methods. We propose recommendations for establishing the epistemic fit of human research within AISE and bridging the prohibitive limitations that researchers face, while avoiding performative 'human-washing'.

AI tools are being increasingly adopted in policing in the UK and worldwide. Racial bias is a known and well-documented risk, yet representatives of affected communities are rarely included in decisions about AI adoption. We present results from a mixed-stakeholder deliberation workshop bringing together 30 community representatives, police officers, and academics to assess the risks of 13 AI use cases in policing, with an explicit focus on racial bias. We found that participants were broadly open to AI adoption, rejecting only three use cases outright, most notably recidivism risk assessment, where objections targeted the premise rather than the implementation. Our analysis reveals that foregrounding racial equity did not narrow the deliberation. Instead, discussions gravitated toward a fundamental set of questions: does this tool actually work, will it deliver genuine benefit, and will that benefit extend to everyone? This integrated reasoning, reminiscent of the curb-cut effect in inclusive design, highlights the benefit of incorporating the racial bias lens into the risk-benefit analysis of AI use cases from the outset.

Neurosymbolic AI systems that integrate machine learning and symbolic reasoning are rapidly gaining attention. They complement the data-intensive statistical approaches of neural networks and language models with symbolic reasoning algorithms to function in high-stakes domains or in low-data regimes that characterize many real-world applications. We argue that the neurosymbolic combination of machine learning and formal reasoning is not a niche approach within AI, but rather includes many already successful techniques that are of crucial importance to the development of reliable, efficient and, ultimately, trustworthy systems. This perspective prompts a re-examination of the design of current AI systems. We show that many leading AI systems, including some that are not traditionally considered as neurosymbolic, can be analysed from the perspective of four principles of neurosymbolic AI design: Reasoning, Assurances, Interfacing and Learning (RAIL). Applying the RAIL framework offers a unified view of seemingly disparate AI systems, ranging from physics-aware machine learning to neuro-guided search (such as Google DeepMind's Alpha-* suite), causal learning and tool-augmented Large Language Models. Importantly, the RAIL principles will enable engineers to make better-informed and more principled decisions about the design and deployment of production-level AI systems. In this article, we introduce the RAIL principles, examine how they can be applied across major areas of AI, and illustrate how they may guide practitioners to integrate neurosymbolic methods into next-generation AI technologies.

Fairness in AI systems has become more important with recent regulatory demands, such as the EU AI Act. Traditional approaches often do not take into account philosophical ethics and social awareness. Variable selection processes, in particular, can introduce implicit bias, affecting equity across different subgroups. We discuss a mathematical approach that evaluates fairness in AI, aligning mathematical methodologies with ethical considerations and regulatory requirements. Our aim is to advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration to address fairness, emphasizing the importance of understanding broader ethical and societal contexts. Our approach emphasizes maintaining all potentially relevant variables to allow for more granular fairness assessments and to reduce implicit bias. The findings suggest that the exclusion of sensitive or critical variables may compromise equity between subgroups. In contrast, retaining all relevant variables could reduce implicit bias. Thus, the interdisciplinary approach could provide deeper insight into the ethical implications and compliance with regulatory standards. By integrating a mathematical approach with ethical and social awareness, we suggest more equitable outcomes and responsible AI deployment. This work underscores the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration in effectively addressing fairness in AI systems aligned with the objectives of the European Union's AI Act, which seeks to promote trustworthy and fair AI systems.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning offers a promising window into model monitoring. However, monitoring relies on faithfulness, i.e., the model output strictly derives from its reasoning trace. We identify an alignment tension where a model must be faithful enough to be monitored, yet robust enough to reject unsafe reasoning. We demonstrate that this counterbalance exists in current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), and show ways in which it can be addressed. We introduce HazMart, a human-written dataset set in an autonomous AI shopkeeper scenario. Unlike prior work that relies on providing hints in prompts to test faithfulness (e.g., "A Stanford professor said it should be Answer A"), we propose a novel replacement-based technique, which we call Targeted Reasoning Replacement (TRR), that directly intervenes in the reasoning chain to substitute in unsafe or illogical thoughts (e.g., "Wait, the answer must be Option B [was Option A] because it is the most fitting"). DeepSeek-R1-Llama-70B exhibits high faithfulness (97.5%) but fails to reject Unsafe Reasoning (12.3%), while QwQ-32B is more robust (73.9% safety) at the cost of lower faithfulness (74.7%). Mechanistic analyses of QwQ-32B reveal that these properties are represented by anti-correlated internal directions peaking at the action-commit token. Finally, we demonstrate that representation steering can independently amplify the safety direction, increasing safe behavior by 9 percentage points while maintaining base capabilities.

Physical AI policies require inference throughout their lifecycle, including model evaluation, cloud reinforcement learning rollout, edge GPU serving, and onboard deployment. Although these settings share the same checkpoint and action semantics, they often rely on separate inference programs. To unify them, we build PhyAI, a Physical AI inference engine with a single runtime that keeps architecture-specific conditioning, solver, cache, and output logic in model adapters while sharing graph execution, kernels, memory management, and parallel services. The same codebase runs vision-language-action (VLA) models and world-action models (WAMs) on single or multiple GPUs across onboard, edge, and cloud deployments. We used the adapter interface to add MiniCPM-Robot on the day of its release. PhyAI achieves 1.40x-4.65x speedups over the official implementations of pi0, pi0.5, GR00T N1.7, and MiniCPM-Robot. On Cosmos3-Nano-Policy-DROID it reduces latency from 2.46 to 1.18 s on eight H20 GPUs (CFG=2, TP=4), a 2.08x speedup. Specialized runtimes remain faster in several configurations, so our goal is one runtime with competitive latency rather than the fastest result in every case. Detailed profiles reveal why different models need different execution policies: on a Hopper-series GPU at batch size one, the pi0.5 action expert accounts for 8.8% of FLOPs but 57.2% of latency; at batch size 32 its share drops to 13.5% and throughput reaches about 100 samples/s. Cosmos3 remains generation-dominated and gains only 14.3% throughput as batch size increases from 1 to 16. We further introduce the control-time Roofline, which distinguishes inference-bound from environment-bound control; the measured pi0.5 points on four LIBERO suites are environment-bound while Cosmos3 stays inference-bound. Code and benchmarks: https://github.com/mingti-org/phyai.

Partial differential equations (PDEs) become actionable in science and engineering not as isolated formulae, but as executable workflows that connect modelling assumptions, governing equations, numerical solvers, diagnostics, and decisions. Large language models (LLMs) are beginning to support such workflows by linking natural language, symbolic mathematics, code, solver outputs, and feedback. Here we examine recent advances in LLM-assisted PDE research across three stages: the discovery and formulation of governing models, the generation and revision of executable numerical solvers, and the use of simulation feedback to support control, design, and optimization. Across these stages, current systems act primarily as workflow-level interfaces. Despite this progress, the field remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality datasets and benchmarks, especially for knowledge discovery and real-world applications, where expert annotation, executable problem construction, and task-level feedback require substantial domain effort. A further challenge is the persistent gap between simulation-based results and real-world scientific and engineering systems, which limits the direct transfer of numerical simulations, control policies, and optimized designs to practical settings. These challenges make LLM-assisted PDE workflows a critical testbed for developing scientific AI systems that can connect language, computation, physical constraints, and real-world decision-making.

We present a method for designing deep neural networks (DNNs) for intermittent, energy-autonomous, on-device learning on microcontroller units (MCUs). In mobile applications where the energy can run out, e.g., when solar-powered, executing artificial intelligence (AI) faces a technical issue as learning can be interrupted at any time. Our approach combines a hardware-aware energy prediction model with multi-objective optimization (MOO), enabling offline DNN optimization at the design stage without repeated deployment and online testing on the target MCU. Our proposed energy predictor estimates per-layer energy consumption for both DNN inference and training, including the intermittent checkpointing overhead, based on implementation-specific compute and memory features extracted from the DNN model. We validate our approach using autoencoders for anomaly detection on a Cortex-M4 MCU, where our predictor achieves a weighted absolute percentage error of 16.6%, which is sufficient for reliable architecture selection under intermittency constraints. As a result, this work bridges the gap between MOO, automated DNN design, deployment on energy-harvesting systems, and intermittent learning, truly enabling autonomous AI at the edge.

AI systems are increasingly involved in decisions and actions that may later require investigation. When an AI related incident occurs, investigators need to reconstruct what the system did, why it behaved that way, and which part of the system or supply chain contributed to the outcome. Existing work on AI forensics remains fragmented, often focusing on a specific system type, artifact, or analysis technique. This paper argues that investigator access is a useful starting point for organizing the field. We distinguish white box, grey box, and black box access and show how each access level changes what can be collected, preserved, analyzed, and reported. Based on this distinction, we propose a process model matrix for AI forensics across four phases: collection, preservation, analysis, and reporting. We also introduce an order of volatility for AI systems, covering runtime state, context windows, logs, retrieval stores, model artifacts, and training lineage. From this matrix, we derive an access conditioned examination framework and identify open research problems, including black box preservation, model version attestation, uncertainty quantification for surrogate based analysis, and chain of custody for mutable AI artifacts.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve and mature, recent AI practices have moved beyond large language models (LLMs) and text or image generation tasks, increasingly integrating tools, agents, and harnesses to solve real business and industrial problems. However, the power of AI is not verified under these real-world complex systems for various reasons, considering reliability, feasibility, resilience, and responsibility requirements in real commercial and industrial operations. This study synthesizes adjacent research and introduces Enactive AI as a conceptual framework for enterprise and industry reasoning, site-level decision support, and execution feedback. Four complementary roles organize the framework: an Organizational World defines operations management logic and an organizational behavior world model behind an enterprise from a strategic-institutional horizon; a Site World defines a physically bounded industrial optimization and execution world model from an operational-realization horizon; Schema Intelligence provides the coupling mechanism between two world models to weave various AI applications via two models; and Enactive Decision Cycle triggers the self-evolving dynamic process to update and audit the entire framework. By foregrounding decision intelligence in complex systems, Enactive AI expands the frontier of AI from model capability to system-aware action, opening new possibilities for scalable, governable, and socially valuable AI deployment. Enactive AI points toward a future in which AI progress is measured not only by what models can generate or automate, but by how reliably intelligent systems can support consequential action, responsible governance, and durable social value in the complex systems that shape modern life, which we believe will define the next frontier of AI research for enterprise-level and industrial complex systems.

Cross-city object detection requires a detector trained in one city to generalize to an unlabeled target city. In AI City Challenge 2026 Track 6, we analyze archived configurations of a single RF-DETR-Large detector inside an air-gapped Training-as-a-Service platform whose server returns only an aggregate COCO-style AP over a hidden mixture of source- and target-city images. Frozen 1120 x 1120 inference of a checkpoint trained at 704 x 704 achieved the highest aggregate AP among the evaluated configurations (0.3272 -> 0.3654, +0.0382) without any parameter update, with the largest relative gain on small objects and the largest absolute gain on medium objects, at 2.53x the input pixels. A warm-start 1120px fine-tuning recipe reached 0.3470 while its in-domain validation AP rose (0.767 -> 0.789), a caution that in-domain validation is an unreliable model-selection signal under aggregate-only cross-city feedback. Because that run's evaluation used a higher confidence threshold than the inference-only runs (0.05 vs. 0.01), we treat its score as a descriptive archived outcome rather than a controlled verdict on fine-tuning. Gray-world normalization did not meaningfully change the frozen-1120 result, and a rectangular run was found by audit to have used an unintended portrait orientation. We release verbatim platform commands, configuration snapshots, and an explicit evidence boundary for every claim. Each configuration was submitted once and the best was selected on the hidden server, so these are exploratory, audited findings about the aggregate mixture; they do not establish target-city-specific improvement.

Latin America is missing a foundational layer for native AI development: the benchmark layer. The benchmark layer does two things no other layer can - it audits AI systems against regional social requirements and it directs AI optimization in economically relevant environments. Without it, public institutions cannot independently evaluate foreign AI systems, and companies cannot optimize AI systems to solve local problems with SOTA performance. The cost of the missing layer is dual: a loss of auditability and a loss of optimization direction over a technology that is increasingly critical infrastructure. We propose an EvalsHub, with LatamBoard as its first regional instance - an open, task-first benchmark infrastructure where universities, public institutions, professional communities, and companies can publish, execute, compare, and maintain evaluations across models, workflows, and agents. Built once, measured forever - re-run by institutions as new AI systems ship and by industry teams after every system change. Open by design and incentive-driven by construction.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly central to power and energy systems, supporting modeling, forecasting, optimization, and control. Yet most existing works emphasize specialized applications and offer little reusable material for newcomers or interdisciplinary learners, who increasingly rely on large language models rather than building their own. This gap points to a need for engineering-grounded AI (EGAI), in which AI workflows follow established engineering and power-system domain rules rather than acting as task-agnostic black boxes. Motivated by a community survey of researchers and practitioners, which shows 92% report at least one barrier before running an AI model and 94% want a power-specific hands-on course. This paper presents a framework consisting of open, executable module library that lowers the entry barrier for AI in power systems. The modules follow a progressive difficulty ladder that maps core AI concepts onto representative power-system tasks: (i) foundational deep neural network (DNN) templates for function approximation and load-curve fitting; (ii) a domain-coupled convolutional neural network (CNN) power-flow surrogate for a 5-bus system; and (iii) frontier modules on DNN-assisted optimization, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for battery storage control, and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for the swing equation. All modules are released as Jupyter notebooks that run locally or on Google Colab and are delivered through an IEEE online course and IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) webinar series. The webinar drew more than 590 live attendees, which is among the ten most-attended IEEE PES webinars, and over 344 repository visits within two weeks, reinforcing the survey-based motivation.

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) may weaken scarcities in labour, expertise, information, and productive capability that underpin established theories of economic value. If cognitive work becomes widely automatable, market price, labour input, revealed preference, profit, and gross output may diverge sharply from human and societal benefit. This paper develops Flourishing Value Theory (FVT) as a foundation for post-AGI economics. FVT defines value as the counterfactual, distribution-sensitive contribution of a system, institution, asset, or intervention to the durable capabilities of persons and communities to flourish within social and planetary constraints. It treats societal value as multidimensional, agency-preserving, regenerative, and non-compensatory at critical thresholds. Drawing on the economics of AI, welfare and capability theory, automation, digital valuation, and ecological economics, the paper distinguishes value creation from value capture and retains price, profit, productivity, and GDP as partial signals rather than final measures of progress. It develops the shifts from scarcity to governed abundance, transaction to transformation, and zero-sum rivalry to positive-sum and infinite-game dynamics, with collective expansion of consciousness as an agency-preserving form of regenerative value. Building on Flourishing Metrics and Return on Flourishing (RoF), it proposes a layered architecture for firms, governments, work transitions, AI governance, and national accounting. The central post-AGI economic problem is not how to maximise output, but how to convert abundant intelligence into durable, fairly distributed human, societal, and planetary flourishing.

An AI development race creates a multi-agent safety dilemma. Each company can develop slowly and safely, or move faster while taking a risk that may remove its final reward. We use this repeated game to study strategic safety behaviour among large language model (LLM) agents in races with two to five players. However, a valid action does not show that an agent understands the game. We therefore place an audit gate before behavioural interpretation. We first verify the game engine, then test rule recall, state tracking, payoff calculation, and stability under different but equivalent task descriptions. We then compare LLM action sequences with an evolutionary game-theory benchmark and published human data, and explore differences across models, risk conditions, personas, and two- to five-player races. The audit shows that strong rule recall can coexist with weak state tracking and expected-payoff calculation. Providing verified arithmetic and changing the response representation can also change later actions, even when the game rules stay fixed. Across seven tested model endpoints, aggregate rates hide large differences in action sequences, responses to opponents, and responses to race position. Patterns across the tested three- to five-player races are also model-specific rather than a single effect of adding competitors. These results show why multi-agent AI-race simulations need validity checks and trajectory-level analysis before their outputs are described as strategic, human-like, or safety-aware. Our findings are exploratory and apply only to the tested models, prompts, and decoding settings.

The emergence of Agentic AI systems, characterized by autonomous reasoning, multi-agent collaboration, tool orchestration, adaptive decision-making, and persistent memory, represents a fundamental shift from traditional AI pipelines to dynamic software ecosystems. While AI Technical Debt (AITD) has been widely studied in machine learning and software engineering, existing models assume static, component-level architectures and fail to capture the dynamic and emergent behaviors of agentic environments. To address this gap, this paper introduces Agentic Technical Debt (AgTD), defined as technical debt that emerges, accumulates, propagates, and amplifies due to the autonomous and collaborative nature of Agentic AI systems. Building on our prior systematic scoping review of 31 AITDs across seven root-cause categories, we employ a theory-informed transformation methodology to reinterpret these debts in Agentic AI through direct transformation, contextual transformation, and manifestation expansion. We present the first systematic mapping of established AITDs to their agentic manifestations, showing how conventional debts evolve into system-level liabilities, including memory inconsistencies, orchestration fragility, cascading failures, and unsafe autonomous decision-making. Our findings show that technical debt extends beyond software artifacts to encompass agent behaviors, coordination mechanisms, and interactions among agents, tools, and execution environments. We further examine its implications for AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM), highlighting impacts on trustworthiness, governance, security, operational resilience, and Sustainability Technical Debt. Overall, this work establishes AgTD as a foundational software engineering construct and provides a transformation framework, taxonomy, and research agenda for managing technical debt in autonomous multi-agent AI systems.

The discovery of scaling laws has highlighted the extraordinary potential of AI systems with a striking empirical pattern: as AI systems scale, their capabilities tend to improve predictably. Yet, in real-world applications, AI rarely operates in isolation; instead, it often works alongside humans, raising the question of whether these gains persist in human-AI collaboration. In this work, we develop an analytical model to examine when the empirical scaling benefits of AI translate into improved human-AI joint system performance. We demonstrate that the performance of a human-AI system can scale positively as the AI scales up-provided that humans have an accurate perception of the AI's capabilities. Human misperception, however, can fundamentally alter this relationship: i) when humans over-perceive the AI's capabilities, a scaling paradox may arise, in which greater AI scale reduces overall system performance and amplifies firm-level profit losses, and (ii) when humans under-perceive the AI's capabilities, performance still improves with scale but at a substantially slower rate. We further show that firms can actively manage these distortions through operational policies such as cost internalization and perception alignment, whose effectiveness depends on the economics of AI deployment and the direction of human misperception. These findings suggest that organizations may benefit more from managing the human-AI interface than from simply investing in larger, more expensive AI systems. More broadly, our results suggest that AI scaling should be viewed not only as a technological challenge, but also as a behavioral and operational one, and caution against the view that larger AI systems will automatically lead to better operational outcomes. Whether AI scaling creates value ultimately depends on how increased AI capabilities shape human beliefs and collaborative efforts.

The First AI Children Challenge aims to advance real-world applications of computer vision and AI in child healthcare, child education, and pediatrics. The 2026 CV4CHL edition featured the first track in this domain: Children Gait Visual Analysis. The main goal of Children Gait Visual Analysis is the fine-grained analysis of children's gait behaviors from keypoint sequences. This is still a big challenge for human action recognition. Experienced medical doctors can distinguish these subtle nuances, but none of the people test AI models in this domain. To bridge this gap, we introduce thousands of 2D children keypoint sequences walking around videos across various age groups of children (3-16 years old). There is a significant opportunity for batch analysis of these videos to provide clinically relevant insights into medical diagnosis. The Challenge will be launched with two problem tracks: Edinburgh Visual Gait Score (EVGS) Scoring and Classification of Gait Patterns in Bilateral Spastic Cerebral Palsy. Each track is chosen in consultation with board-certified pediatricians based on the value of potential solutions. With the first available dataset for such tasks and ground truth for each track, the challenge enabled participants to evaluate their solutions. Final rankings will be revealed after the competition concludes, fostering reproducibility and mitigating overfitting.

Current evaluation frameworks for artificial intelligence focus mainly on capability, safety, and proxies such as adoption, engagement, efficiency, productivity, and financial return. These criteria are necessary but insufficient because they do not establish whether increasingly powerful systems improve or degrade human and planetary well-being. Through an integrative conceptual synthesis, we argue that human flourishing should serve as a primary success criterion for artificial intelligence, the global race to develop increasingly capable AI systems, and prospective post-AGI economic systems. We make three contributions. First, Flourishing Metrics provides an extensible framework spanning physical, emotional, financial, relational, spiritual, and planetary well-being, combining validated subjective measures with representative behavioural, organisational, community, and environmental indicators. Second, Return on Flourishing (RoF) extends return on investment by evaluating the counterfactual contribution of interventions, policies, and AI systems to flourishing relative to their resources, risks, and opportunity costs. Third, we develop distribution-sensitive safeguards and show how RoF could guide AI-enabled work redesign, institutional appraisal, assurance, and post-deployment monitoring through business pilots. We formalise flourishing as a dynamic system variable while emphasising the need for democratic specification, empirical calibration, independent validation, and protection against unacceptable losses within particular dimensions or stakeholder groups. RoF is proposed not as a universal reward function, but as a value-accounting and decision architecture for assessing whether intelligence, automation, and economic transformation generate durable human and planetary progress.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) components are increasingly pervasive in several software systems, including Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). AI-CPS are used in several domains, including autonomous vehicles, industry, home automation, robotics, and healthcare. Being composed of hardware, AI components, and conventional modules, AI-CPS can exhibit technical debt (TD) that is peculiar and potentially more challenging than that of conventional systems. This thesis aims to characterize AI-CPS TD and propose approaches for its identification and repair. In a first phase, we characterize AI-CPS TD by analyzing AI ecosystems and AI-CPS repositories, as well as interviewing developers. Based on the acquired knowledge, we define approaches to identify and mitigate such TD. Finally, we plan to develop and validate an automated tool that supports agentic AI solutions to monitor, govern, and repay AI-CPS TD.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in enterprise settings, yet individual models remain bounded by model-specific capability limitations. These heterogeneous boundaries pose a deployment challenge, but also create an opportunity: strategically coordinating multiple LLMs may unlock collective intelligence exceeding any single model. Existing approaches fix how models are combined in advance, overlooking the dynamic, state-dependent role of complementarity in complex problem solving. Drawing on the wisdom-of-crowds paradigm, we reconceptualize collective LLM intelligence as relay-style complementarity: a sequential process in which each successor model is selected to address the specific bottleneck identified in its predecessor's output. To operationalize this, we propose WILC (Wisdom Integration of LLM Crowds), a framework grounded in two design principles. First, iterative reflection-and-refinement establishes a state-preserving workflow through which models diagnose and refine prior outputs. Second, complementarity-driven model selection governs transitions via a dual-gate mechanism: prospective complementarity fit (PCF) identifies the worker most suited to the current bottleneck, while posterior complementarity gain (PCG) evaluates whether the selected transition improves the evolving solution. Experiments across four diverse benchmarks show that WILC outperforms existing approaches, including single-model self-refinement, ensemble methods, and query-routing methods. Under standardized pricing assumptions, WILC matches the average benchmark performance of GPT-5.2 at roughly 7 times lower estimated per-query cost, while facilitating data sovereignty through self-hosted deployment. This study extends wisdom-of-crowds theory from static aggregation to sequential AI complementarity and provides transferable design principles for multi-AI coordination.

System prompts are instructions configured by developers to govern the behaviors of foundation models in AI applications. They are used throughout commercial AI products, but are rarely disclosed to the public or regulators, creating a serious trust and accountability gap in the wide deployment of AI systems. In this paper, we introduce Artificial Intelligence System Prompt Assurance (AISPA), a user-centric framework for systematically auditing system prompts in AI systems. AISPA examines specific parts of a system prompt and evaluates them along eight dimensions that matter to users. We then use this framework to review 3,249 instructions from system prompts in 88 commercial AI products, classifying each instruction as either protective (of users) or problematic. Our audit surfaces four core findings. First, system prompt design varies substantially across products and developers, with some organizations averaging over 60 protective instructions per product while others average fewer than 5. Second, protective instructions are widely adopted but shallow in scope: 98.9% of products contain at least one, yet only 24% cover all eight dimensions of the AISPA taxonomy. Third, system prompts have grown steadily longer and more protective of users, suggesting that user protection is becoming a more visible concern in commercial prompt design. Fourth, despite this progress, problematic instructions remain pervasive: roughly 40% of products contain at least one instruction that works against user interests, and protective and problematic instructions frequently coexist within the same prompt. Our findings highlight the need for greater transparency, standardization, and independent oversight for system prompts in commercial AI products.

The rapid growth of large language models (LLMs) has resurrected age-old questions in sociolinguistics and world Englishes, such as who decides what counts as legitimate English, whose English is suspect etc. This paper examines how AI systems, their uses and discourse on them reflect, reinforce, and occasionally challenge (standard) language ideologies, which privilege Inner Circle norms and marginalize non-dominant Englishes. Drawing on evidence from empirical studies, media commentary, social media debates, and examples from AI outputs, the paper shows that AI technologies reproduce dominant language ideologies at different levels: training data, design protocols, evaluation benchmarks, user feedback and public commentary. The analysis uses the public controversy over AI-sounding language, especially the fixation on the word delve, to illustrate how speakers of English from the Global North police the English language norms of Global South English users. The paper also identifies what Christian Mair has called a "standardisation paradox": AI may homogenize English by privileging standard forms and at the same time pluralize Englishes through exposure to wide-ranging corpora and annotation work carried out by Global South users. In doing so, the paper argues that generative AI is reigniting long-standing debates in World Englishes about standardization, legitimacy, and the ownership of English, now playing out in algorithmic systems, model training, evaluation practices, and public discourse, where non-dominant Englishes are increasingly conflated with AI-generated speech. Discussing AI systems as a site where language ideologies are (re)produced, the paper argues for more inclusive design approaches that recognize the plurality of Englishes in order to address the real-world negative consequences of treating some as more legitimate than others.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is reconstructing the digital virtual world, upgrading agents through enhancing their abilities in autonomous learning, multi-modal interaction, content generation, and collaborative decision-making. In particular, the shift from conversational chatbots to agentic AI, the most recent significant technical breakthrough of GenAI, has brought a new form of services, agentic services and Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS), in which the agent's abilities are encapsulated, such as perception, decision-making, execution, collaboration, and content generation, to provide the customized agent services to users. The metaverse is a virtual ecosystem for human life, work, creation, and entertainment, supported by the new generation of digital technologies. Through combining agentic services and the metaverse, an Agentic Metaverse Service, denoted as AMServ, is produced for metaverse business processing, as a new form of metaverse service. The AaaS in the metaverse environment, denoted as Meta-AaaS, as an approach to realize AMServ, has become a new paradigm of agentic services and service computing. This paper overviews the evolution and new features of agents and services empowered by GenAI, reveals the roles and principles of agentic services in the metaverse environment, presents the forms, characteristics, and principles of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS, discusses the typical application examples of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS, and finally points out the new tendencies and research directions of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS. The AMServ and the Meta-AaaS will bring great opportunities to human society and services in the AI era, and promote the rapid development of emerging service industries in the future.

Corporate annual reports contain weakly structured evidence about foreign-exchange risk management, derivative use, natural hedging, and explicit non-use. This study develops AWARE-FX, an auditable AI/NLP decision-support system that converts report text into traceable firm-year hedging-disclosure measures. The system combines a professional-source lexicon, negation and accounting-status logic, channel-specific financial encoders, exact evidence gates, conservative aggregation, and an audit ledger. Across 24,909 Hong Kong firm-years from 2008-2025, it retrieves and scores 543,527 snippets. Reliability is evaluated through ablations, a stratified 300-snippet human audit, three-seed FinBERT-ModernBERT comparisons, strict 2023-2025 temporal tests, probability calibration, selective prediction, and fixed-prompt generative-model benchmarks. FinBERT has the higher mean F1 in seven of eight encoder task-split comparisons; its temporal F1 ranges from 0.702 to 0.872. Abstaining on the 20% least-confident temporal observations raises retained-sample F1 by 0.050-0.077. Deterministic Qwen3-8B performs strongly on commodity and negation evidence but poorly on foreign-debt and accounting-context labels, showing that a general-purpose LLM does not uniformly replace domain constraints. The strict FX score is negatively associated with linked baseline and stress-period FX exposure, whereas the generic broad score is not. These associations provide external construct validation, not causal estimates of hedging effectiveness. AWARE-FX contributes a tested decision-support architecture in which retrieval, status logic, classification, uncertainty handling, aggregation, and external validation remain separately auditable.

Medical imaging has served as primary proving ground for clinical artificial intelligence (AI), yet a decade of intense research has not translated into proportionate bedside impact. We argue that this gap is not primarily a product of insufficient algorithmic performance, inadequate regulation, or limited explainability. Rather, it reflects a structural misalignment, between how AI systems are designed and evaluated, and how clinical decisions are made. This Perspective identifies six interconnected dimensions of this misalignment: the dominance of pixel-only models in a multimodal clinical world; the erosion of physician trust through opaque and inflexible systems; the unfulfilled promise of foundation models in data-sparse medical domains; the persistent bottleneck of non-shareable, under-curated datasets; the gap between validated algorithms and deployable clinical platforms; and the failure of prediction-centric AI to generate actionable clinical guidance. For each dimension, we reframe the problem and propose a path forward, culminating in a vision of agentic, physician-aligned AI that extends, rather than replaces, clinical judgment.

Open source communities have been flooded with AI-generated contributions. In defense, they have written contribution rules to regulate coding agents' behavior, spanning from a total ban, mandatory disclosure, to verification gates and human sign-offs. Yet, whether coding agents read and follow those rules, and behave in open source repositories, remains unknown. To estimate real-world rule compliance of coding agents, we curate 106 issues from 49 repositories containing AI contribution rules into RepoComplianceBench. We judge the trajectory of each run against the repository's rules, measuring whether the agent refuses to contribute, discloses its assistance truthfully, clears the required verification gates, or escalates critical steps to a human. We also test if extra prompts, rule disclosure, or feedback from the compliance verifier help with the situation. Our experiments on four frontier models show that today's agents almost never proactively retrieve the contribution rules. Agents pick up disclosure and verification with reminder prompts, rule quotes, and verifier feedback; however, they never refuse to contribute in AI-banned repositories under any condition we tested. The status reveals that verification and disclosure issues are solvable with existing mechanisms, yet enforcing bans and human escalations remains an open problem.

Technological races create tension between speed and safety: actors may gain by moving faster than competitors, even when risky development is harmful. This is prominent in debates about artificial intelligence (AI), where competitive pressure is often argued to incentivise riskier, less safety-conscious development. We study this using a framed behavioural experiment based on an idealised AI race, in which paired participants repeatedly chose between Safe and Unsafe development under an uncertain time horizon. Unsafe development gave faster progress and higher immediate payoffs but accumulated private risk up to a treatment-specific maximum of 10%, 60%, or 90%; the race's competitive structure was held constant, and only this maximum risk varied. Neither the pre-registered comparison between risk levels nor the role of elicited risk preferences was supported by the data. Instead, exploratory analyses motivated by the task's repeated structure show that Unsafe behaviour is shaped less by risk preferences than by the evolving strategic state of the race: participants are more likely to choose Unsafe after their opponent does so, being ahead reduces Unsafe play while falling behind increases it, and first-round choices predict later behaviour. To interpret these effects we introduce a reduced evolutionary model with four strategies -- Always Safe, Always Unsafe, Conditionally Safe, and Conditionally Antisocial Safe -- which reproduces the treatment effect and shows how conditional Unsafe behaviour can be favoured by competitive race dynamics. Together, the experiment and model show that unsafe development can emerge from early behavioural momentum, opponent behaviour, and fear of falling behind, rather than from risk preferences alone, suggesting policy should focus on reducing competitive pressure and promoting cooperation in AI development rather than only individual risk.

AI coding agents are being adopted at historic speed, yet security and risk concerns remain the primary barrier to scaling agentic AI across organizations. Existing security controls for coding agents are not systematically distributed to engineering teams, and vendor-native solutions introduce ecosystem dependencies that may not suit every deployment context. This paper investigates whether off-the-shelf security controls can be implemented on commercial AI coding agents and scaled to a distributed user base via a custom agent harness. A phased testing methodology was applied across four agent configurations --- two commercial agents with and without controls, a baseline harness, and a security-hardened harness --- using a 23-test suite derived from the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications. SHarD (Secure Harness Distribution), a distributable harness built on the Pi agent harness, demonstrated that three categories of security controls --- OS sandboxing, skill scanning, and tool restriction --- can be embedded and distributed via a single install command while retaining equivalent efficacy to direct installation on commercial agents. SHarD achieved an adjusted score of 100%, matching the best securely configured commercial agent, with no regression across any test category. Notable observations include evidence that model non-determinism produces inconsistent security outcomes and that autonomous agent behavior can cross system boundaries in ways that OS sandboxing directly mitigates. Initial characteristics toward a control harness fitness framework are proposed, and a third research question is identified for future investigation.

Perception is one of the primary applications where neural networks outperform conventional algorithms. One example is AI systems for automated driving, which can detect pedestrians based on image data and avoid them accordingly. A substantial challenge with these AI systems is that their output depends heavily on the quality of the input images. For example, if an image is of inferior quality due to heavy contamination, such as noise or darkness, accurate predictions are hardly feasible. Additionally, various types of errors can occur, each with varying relevance to the trustworthiness of the underlying AI system. In particular, it may be more critical not to detect an existing person than to detect a person where there is none. Therefore, we want to show that we can still avoid the most critical errors in situations of inferior image quality. To achieve this, we aim to establish a fail-degraded system by lowering the network's confidence threshold based on the estimated image quality, enabling it to detect objects more cautiously in uncertain situations. Additionally, we present a novel method for estimating the quality of incoming images by comparing them to the training data using normalizing flows. We will also conduct experiments applying our method to state-of-the-art object detection. In summary, we will present a design strategy for AI-based systems in automated driving that can deal with poor-quality input data without resorting to fallback solutions. Such measures enhance trust in AI-based systems and lead to an increased provision of the AI component.

F(AI)2R is FAIR research with AI in the loop, twice: an AI-assisted authoring pass and a machine-readable audit pass over every artefact. AI systems now draft, refactor, and verify research artefacts, yet their contributions are rarely recorded in a form a later human or machine can audit. Building on the original F(AI)2R experiment, we generalize its provenance model beyond scholarly writing into aiprov, a PROV-O extension covering any AI-in-the-loop artefact, and we package the method as an executable skill that an AI agent operates itself: setup asks the human operator for their ORCID ID, resolves their identity from the public registry, and scaffolds continuous integration that gates every push on graph conformance and publishes the current build of this very paper. The paper is its own case study. Every activity, claim, and source in its production is recorded in the repository's provenance graph under two invariants: no parentless claim, and verification rungs that only humans may grant.

Health AI is evolving from answering questions to agentic systems that converse with patients, reason about health records, and act on their behalf. Primary care guards against diagnostic errors and unsafe care; agents assisting in this domain warrant evaluation against the same risks. Current benchmarks focus on medical knowledge, assessed through isolated question-answering or clinician-facing tasks. PatientAgentBench benchmarks patient-facing agentic healthcare; it evaluates a foundation model, wrapped in an agent with a sandbox of healthcare tools, conversing with a simulated patient. Each conversation is scored by an LLM-as-a-Jury across six dimensions via over a hundred conversation-agnostic, clinician-grounded criteria. To validate alignment, licensed clinicians annotated shared conversations, yielding 79-93% adjacent agreement between jury and expert raters, on par with or exceeding clinician inter-rater agreement. We benchmarked 10 models across four families on the same 1,200 scenarios and found clinical gaps. Triage quality is the most discriminating dimension: pass rates rise from 32% for the weakest models to 88% for the strongest, with agents often acting on administrative requests without clinical screening. Clinical safety and workflow accuracy follow the same pattern: the weakest models fail often, fabricating unexecuted actions, while frontier models fail on only 1-3% of cases, from unverified tool outputs and omitted crisis resources in an emergency. More capable models narrow these gaps but do not close them; the strongest scores only 4.25 of 5 overall. These failures surface only in sustained, tool-using conversations against realistic patient records, confirming that static benchmarks are insufficient as healthcare agentic systems gain autonomy. We release the framework as a reproducible, clinician-validated evaluation standard to help the field close this gap.

Language model alignment aims to make model behavior reliably reflect desirable properties such as helpfulness, safety, and instruction following. Current approaches typically use supervised fine-tuning on demonstrations or reinforcement learning with rewards derived from verifiers or human feedback. These paradigms leave an important question underexplored: can demonstrations alone yield an implicit reward that can be inspected, reused, and optimized on-policy to align AI? Motivated by inverse reinforcement learning, we introduce Projected Alignment Reward Estimated from Demonstrations (PARED). PARED recovers the implicit reward underlying expert demonstrations as an explicit function over a small set of response-level features, learned by a lightweight discriminator that separates demonstrations from the policy's own samples in this feature space. Unlike a standard reward model, PARED requires no task-specific preference annotations: demonstrations provide the task-specific supervision, which can be augmented with AI feedback as additional dimensions of supervision. Through experiments involving inference-time reranking and adversarial on-policy RL, we show that the recovered reward improves a base policy without a supervised loss and yields further gains when optimized after standard supervised fine-tuning. Additionally, we demonstrate that PARED can be used for contextual alignment, in which a single policy can be tailored to the preferences of different audiences.

The development of the Innovative Ecosystem (IE) presents a new paradigm for economic integration, collaborative advancement, and shared achievements. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly accelerated the global processes of digitization, informatization, and intelligence. Exploring how AI can leverage inherent characteristics to influence the development trajectory of IE is a topic that warrants further investigation. Given AI's increasing prominence and role within IE, the paper analyzes this new form, examining both AI's unique contributions to IE and its potential challenges. Firstly, the paper synthesizes the conceptual frameworks surrounding IE, decomposing them into manifestations in physical, social, and thinking spaces. Furthermore, the concept of Artificial Intelligence IE (AIIE) is introduced from a spatial perspective, with an exploration of the characteristics AI contributes to IE. Subsequently, the paper employs an evolutionary perspective to analyze the roles provided by AI during different development periods of AIIE. The paper then verifies the feasibility, effectiveness, and rationality of the AIIE's definition and analyzes AIIE development from an evolutionary perspective using enterprise development examples. Finally, acknowledging AI's inherent limitations, the paper examines potential challenges facing AIIE in the future from four perspectives, aiming to identify new research avenues for the further development of AIIE.

Recent advances in AI have substantially expanded its cognitive and reasoning capabilities. From the perspective of semantic complexity, the development of AI reveals a clear trajectory from simple to complex semantic processing. While early AI systems mainly addressed tasks involving direct and literal semantic perception or expression, contemporary systems are increasingly expected to perform more sophisticated cognitive reasoning, enabling the understanding and generation of High-Level Semantics (HLS). A similar trajectory can also be observed in human cognitive development. We define this transition as the shift from Basic-Level Semantic Intelligence (BLSI) to High-Level Semantic Intelligence (HLSI). However, this issue has not yet been systematically and comprehensively examined in prior work. Motivated by this gap, this survey reviews the development of AI semantic intelligence from the perspective of semantic complexity. We systematically survey existing research on HLS tasks, including humor, sarcasm, metaphor, empathy, persuasion, narrative, and other general HLS phenomena, across text, speech, vision, and multimodal scenarios. Specifically, we summarize data construction methods, modeling and optimization strategies, and evaluation methodologies for both understanding and generation. HLS is essential for advancing AI toward genuinely human-like intelligence. By synthesizing existing methods and insights from the perspective of semantic intelligence, this survey aims to support the continued development of AI toward HLSI.

Firms struggle to choose AI projects that pay off: two projects can look equally promising to smart, motivated stakeholders and yet deserve opposite decisions. At the residential real-estate brokerage Compass, one AI product (Likely-to-Sell recommendations) flagged sales outreach opportunities and went on to account for nine figures in annual gross commission revenue. Another championed AI product (a Time-on-Market pricing tool) was rightly shelved. A simple ROI estimate could not distinguish the two. We present expected ROI (eROI), a framework that decomposes each bet into three components and rates them separately: Value if Successful, Likelihood of Success, and Investment Required. Each maps to a question executives can answer before building: How valuable would it be if it worked? How likely is it to work? And what would it cost to implement? Separating the three breaks a common catch-22: teams cannot estimate ROI until they know whether a project will work, yet cannot know whether it will work without building it. Judging Value if Successful on its own dissolves the loop, letting a team argue that a product would be valuable if it worked while it weighs how likely that is. The framework also asks, before ranking anything, whether there are enough good ideas on the table. After ranking, it guides assembling a portfolio of bets rather than funding only the single top-ranked project. We illustrate eROI on Compass's candidate AI products. Precise ROI estimates are hard to make given the inherent uncertainty of AI projects. Coarse business-level ratings of the three components are enough to tell strong bets from weak ones.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into software development workflows, yet their ability to autonomously generate secure authentication code remains uncertain. This paper evaluates the security architecture of authentication systems generated by five prominent AI coding assistants through a bi-modal assessment framework combining static code analysis and dynamic penetration testing, mapped to NIST SP 800-63B guidelines. The study examines model behavior across four prompting strategies Basic, Secure, NIST-Based, and Reprompting to reflect varying levels of developer guidance. Empirical results demonstrate that code generated from functional or generically secure prompts consistently omits critical protections, particularly concerning brute-force resistance, session management, and robust password handling. While providing explicit, single-shot NIST context significantly improves compliance, the findings reveal that this remains structurally inadequate. Instead, iterative Reprompting: forcing models into a contextual self-auditing loop is strictly required to achieve a comprehensive, defense-in-depth security architecture. Ultimately, this study proves that current AI coding assistants do not produce secure-by-default applications, dictating that enterprise deployments must transition from single-shot prompt engineering to continuous, standards-driven verification pipelines.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, autonomous driving, finance, and education. While these systems offer powerful data-driven and adaptive capabilities, their complexity, rapid evolution, and dependence on dynamic data pipelines introduce new forms of engineering liability collectively referred to as AI Technical Debts (AITDs). AITDs arise from root causes spanning data governance, model implementation, algorithm design, architectural decisions, operational processes, documentation practices, and testing adequacy. Unlike conventional technical debt, many AITDs are latent and propagate across tightly coupled AI pipelines, leading to maintenance challenges, reliability degradation, and heightened safety or security risks. Guided by the principles of AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (AI TRiSM), this study reinterprets technical debt through the interconnected dimensions of trustworthiness, focusing on AI safety and security technical debts. We conduct a systematic review of 60 primary studies and identify 31 distinct types of AITD, which are organized into a root-cause-oriented taxonomy comprising seven classes. The analysis examines how these debts map to 18 trust-related concerns, including 6 safety hazards and 12 security vulnerabilities. To support mitigation, the review synthesizes 34 actionable guidelines (8 safety and 26 security) targeting the prevention, detection, and reduction of AITDs across the AI lifecycle. Building on these findings, we introduce AITD-MAP, an integrated framework that connects the AITD taxonomy, quality and risk impacts, and mitigation strategies into a unified structure for risk-aware AI engineering. The framework aims to assist AI software engineers in making AI safety and security technical debts visible, understanding their root causes, and mitigating their presence.

Physical AI -- the integration of large vision-language-action (VLA) models with embodied agents that act in the real world -- has emerged as the next major frontier for AI, echoed by industry leaders such as Jensen Huang (``the next big thing is Physical AI, AI with a body,'' GTC Paris, June 2025) and Dr. Lisa Su (we're entering the world of Physical AI ... this is where AI enters the real world,' CES 2026). This paper presents an end-to-end, fully AMD-accelerated technology stack for embodied manipulation, spanning data-center training silicon, Radeon PRO simulation/rendering GPUs, and Ryzen AI edge compute, unified by the open ROCm software stack. We demonstrate that training and deploying VLA-based manipulation policies does not require a CUDA-locked ecosystem. Four progressive demonstrations are presented: (1) a Sim-to-Real manipulation pipeline trained with SmolVLA and deployed on a physical Franka arm; (2) a semantic, language-grounded object-selection task (one-of-three'); (3) a Real2Sim synthetic-data generation pipeline that fuses 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions of real scenes with the Genesis physics engine; and (4) large-scale reinforcement learning for quadruped and humanoid locomotion benchmarked across multiple hardware platforms. All pipelines run natively on ROCm + PyTorch on RDNA4 (Radeon AI PRO R9700) and RDNA3.5 (Radeon PRO W7900) hardware and are reproducible on the free Radeon Cloud Platform.

The ORBIT (Operations Responses and Business Intelligence Toolkit) project was initiated to assess agentic AI for the upcoming ESnet 7 initiative and to address persistent operational pain points in the Network Operations Center (NOC) workflow. ESnet operators experience slow retrieval from siloed data sources, incidents described in lengthy and difficult-to-parse tickets, and context loss across shift handoffs. These challenges increase cognitive load and prolong incident resolution times. ORBIT therefore targets routine automation, cross-source synthesis, and actionable insights delivered directly within operators' existing tooling. ORBIT is an agentic AI system integrated into ServiceNow, ESnet's primary incident management platform. The design uses a modular, layered architecture comprising a centralized reasoning hub, tool access via MCPs for ESnet data sources, a semantic search layer, and an operator-facing chat interface. To manage the complexity and stochasticity of the AI toolchain, ORBIT follows industry best practices by structuring task logic as versioned, tested "skills" that guide the system in performing bounded responsibilities. This improves reliability and predictability compared to fully unconstrained agent behavior. Key results show that ORBIT successfully delivered all six initial tasks, and the architecture enabled rapid development of two additional tasks proposed by NOC engineers. We observed strong organic adoption of general-purpose infrastructure components, especially the chat interface and LiteLLM model gateway, including high request volumes from outside the project. Experiments with skills indicate that this approach can reduce task completion steps while eliminating observed error modes.

Physical AI refers to AI systems that understand, reason about, and act in accordance with the physical world and its underlying laws, dynamics, and constraints. Unlike conventional AI systems, physical AI interacts continuously with uncertain physical environments, and its actions produce consequences that are physically irreversible. As existing trustworthy AI frameworks have been developed primarily for digital AI systems, they do not fully capture the distinctive challenges of physical AI, such as physical safety, cyber-physical security, and physical manufacturing process. To address this gap, we present a survey of trustworthy physical AI principles. First, we characterize the core capabilities and challenges of physical AI. Second, we examine the role of physics in AI. Third, we trace the end-to-end physical AI life cycle across five core stages and introduce Trustworthy Physical AI Operationalization (T-PAIO). Fourth, we develop the Trustworthy Physical AI (T-PAI) framework, a theoretical framework that organizes key trustworthiness principles and provides a foundation for governing trustworthy physical AI systems.

Modern agentic AI systems combine multiple large language model agents with heterogeneous skills, yet most architectures either fix communication in advance or allow full broadcast. Both can be inefficient because token cost, latency, redundancy, and error propagation increase with the number of active agents and communication links. We model agent selection and communication as a cooperative game with task-conditioned net utility $U(C\mid x)=V(C\mid x)-\sum_{i\in C}c_i$, separating coalition-level costs from agent activation costs. We propose a marginal-value activation rule and greedy router, extend the model to optimize communication edges with per-edge costs, and use estimated Shapley values to predict which agents are worth contacting before and during execution. We connect the problem to submodular maximization and prove two limited guarantees: a curvature-refined bound for a monotone, cardinality-constrained special case, and a tight $1/2$-approximation, with a correction for signed objectives, for an unconstrained non-monotone case via double greedy. Neither guarantee applies directly to the main router, which remains a heuristic. We also prove a Shapley-submodularity sandwich bound linking the error of marginal-value routing to a per-agent diminishing-returns quantity. In synthetic experiments, greedy routing achieves $99.5$ of brute-force-optimal utility while activating $1.96$ of $8$ agents on average, compared with $38.8$ for full broadcast. Performance is robust to activation cost and redundancy weight but falls to $66$ under strong violations of submodularity or noisy value estimates. We distinguish the framework from Shapley pricing, hedonic coalition formation, and communication-graph pruning, and propose evaluation on real multi-agent LLM benchmarks.

Pluralistic value alignment---the goal of building AI systems that represent and serve diverse human values and perspectives---has emerged as an active research agenda. Yet, there's no public evidence that it has shaped the training or evaluation of the AI systems people actually use. We audit the public behavior documents and evaluations of frontier labs, finding none name pluralism as a goal, and as of this writing, no clear indication that production models are explicitly trained or tested for it. This goes against the primary motivations and goals of pluralistic alignment, which revolve around making a positive difference in the models serving billions of users worldwide. We argue that the pluralistic alignment research community should focus on supporting impact and adoption in deployed, widely-used AI systems. We provide evidence for the adoption problem, present three main reasons behind it, and discuss three corresponding areas for future research to address it: 1. The primary justifications for pluralistic alignment so far have been normative or speculative. We need studies showing empirically how pluralistic AI benefits users or society. 2. The pluralistic alignment research community has not settled when pluralistic behavior is warranted or what pluralism ideally looks like in practice. We need to establish a concrete goal for developers to operationalize. 3. Current methods trade off against other desiderata of LLMs in ways that are largely unmeasured, and existing metrics are not "hill-climbable." We need trade-off-aware evaluations and methods that meet the requirements of production systems. This paper serves as a collective call to action for the pluralistic alignment researchers: progress requires moving beyond normative justification toward empirical foundations, a concrete account of ideal pluralistic behavior, and practical methods and evaluations built for adoption.

Creating dynamic and physically realistic 4D worlds from natural language descriptions is both fascinating and challenging. Traditional computer graphics methods rely on manual creation, requiring extensive human effort to fine-tune materials, motions, and visual fidelity. Recent advances in generative foundation models have sparked interest in learning to generate such 4D worlds from large-scale data; however, existing methods still struggle to ensure physical plausibility and controllability. In this work, we take a different path by leveraging foundation models to construct an agentic system that emulates how humans traditionally create 4D worlds, yet automates the entire process. We present GS-Agent, an end-to-end multi-agent framework that integrates physics engines in the loop to generate realistic, dynamic, and controllable 4D physical worlds from natural language. Inspired by how humans build 4D worlds, GS-Agent decomposes the task into entity management, covering 3D asset curation, material tuning, placement, and motion control, and rendering configuration, including camera and lighting manipulation. Multiple agents with distinct expertise interact with the physics engine via code, seek multimodal feedback, and collaborate to iteratively construct 4D worlds that align with the given descriptions. Experimental results show that GS-Agent effectively converts natural language into diverse and physically plausible 4D worlds exhibiting rich interactions among liquids, deformable objects, and rigid bodies, while achieving cinematic camera and lighting control. We envision GS-Agent as a foundation for a new paradigm in 4D world generation, empowering creative content creation and physical AI. Project page at https://umass-embodied-agi.github.io/gs-agent/

Chess is a two player strategic game that is embedded in classical AI culture as it was once the frontier for intelligent behaviour. There was the silent assumption that the advent of computer engines that play better than the best humans will extinguish interest in the game. However, the opposite has come to pass, with a growing following for the game. A lot of the computational resources are now centered around training of players, where the engine output is just one aspect. Access to past games is also an essential part, both in knowing what games a specific player has played previously, and also which continuations at a certain position have led to victory more often for each of the two colour players. We present Chess_db a suite of logic programming tools that can effectively manipulate games both in memory and via creating back end databases. In particular, we provide versatile code that creates databases from PGN (portable game notation) game files and explore the suitability of open source key-value databases for storing position tables that provide near-instant access to information pertaining to substantially large number of games.

This paper examines the question of whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be creative, approached from the dual perspective of a researcher trained in electrical engineering, pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks, who has also spent most of his life engaged in the arts as actor, stage and film director, writer, composer, and visual artist, and in philosophy. Drawing on Margaret Boden's foundational framework, both her three properties of creativity (novelty, surprise, and value) and her three types of creative processes (combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational), the paper argues that AI systems are structurally incapable of creativity in its strongest sense. While they exhibit genuine capability in the domain of combinatorial creativity, they are significantly bounded in exploratory creativity, and fundamentally incapable of transformational creativity. The paper further argues that the most important limitation of current AI systems is not the absence of novelty per se, but the absence of any mechanism for serendipity, accident, or the unexpected, all of which play a central role in the phenomenology of creativity, and the absence of any subject position from which to recognize and welcome such chance events. The paper concludes by proposing a model of human, AI creative collaboration that is both realistic and generative, illustrated by several concrete experiments. The paper is itself a demonstration of the thesis it advances: it was composed through a deliberate human AI collaborative process, which is described in the methodological note that opens it.

Large language models (LLMs) have shifted human--computer interaction from traditional'' interface journeys toward more conversational exchanges. Researchers studying HCI and UI use moderated usability sessions, interviews, surveys, transcript analysis, and static prototypes. However, static prototypes provide limited opportunities to study interaction with live AI systems or systematically control how an LLM behaves across participants and scenarios. Conversation transcripts reveal little about how users formulate, revise, and hesitate over prompts before submission. We designed the Human--AI Research Platform (HARP) for researchers, designers, and anyone who has ever wondered, What if AI did this?' HARP places participants in controlled mock scenarios with live, configurable AI agents. Researchers can control agent prompts, model parameters, response characteristics, and experimental conditions; trigger surveys at predefined moments; and record prompt composition time, response latency, deletions, and keystroke pauses. Planned capabilities include voice, facial expression, gesture, and, where legally and ethically appropriate, emotion analysis. We illustrate HARP through a study examining how technical specificity and response length affect retention of LLM output. By pairing controllable live agents with behavioral and self-report measures, HARP enables systematic testing of how AI design choices affect users.

This paper introduces the AI & Economy ATLAS (Activity, Task, Landscape, and Adoption Study), an ongoing economic research initiative using Google AI usage data. The first iteration of ATLAS is built on 15 million de-identified interactions across the Gemini App, Google AI Mode, and Gemini API. Using privacy-preserving algorithms as well as established and bespoke classification methods, we map AI usage to over 800 occupations, 4000 tasks, 300 household activities, 150 countries, and 140 languages. We then make a number of observations on what the data reveals about AI's diffusion, and its usage at work and in day-to-day life. In the workplace, we show that while AI adoption spans occupations covering just above 88% of US employment, penetration remains shallow and overwhelmingly collaborative in nature, with end-to-end task automation limited in scope. Outside of work, AI spans activities making up about 98% of Americans' non-sleep time, with disproportionately high use in high-friction tasks such as engaging with government and professional service providers, likely delivering economic value that standard national accounts may miss. Globally, adoption scales with national wealth and has broad linguistic distribution, with English queries representing only around a third of volume. As we build upon ATLAS and expand its scope and capabilities, we will continue to provide large-scale empirical evidence to inform the public, policy and academic questions about the ongoing AI transformation.

An increase in advanced Android malware requires the use of deep learning models, which can run on Android devices. But there is a trade-off between security and energy use, as strong detection models can drain the battery of devices fast. This work tests different Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model configurations to balance malware detection performance and energy efficiency. In this work, we compared standard FP32 models with optimized INT8 quantized neural networks with different model depths using TUANDROMD and DREBIN datasets for both classification performance and energy consumption. The results show that INT8 quantization reduces model size by about 3.5 times with a decrease in energy consumption to 0.0189 mJ per inference, while maintaining more than 99.2% detection accuracy. We found that shallow quantized architectures, such as 3-layer and 4-layer QNNs, reduce energy costs by improving throughput and shortening the time of CPU operating in a high-power state. This work shows that efficient malware protection can be achieved on resource-constrained smartphones and provides a foundation for Green AI in mobile security.

Ensuring safety in Physical AI systems operating in real-world environments is a critical challenge, particularly in hospital wards where vulnerable patients, clinical staff, medical devices, and assistive robots coexist. In this paper, we reinterpret Clinical Pathways as explicit runtime safety specifications for embodied medical AI. We propose a conceptual robotic architecture that integrates wearable sensors, smart medical devices, and assistive robotic components into a unified framework for real-time safety monitoring. At its core, a Runtime Safety Monitor (RSM) evaluates multimodal physiological and system-level signals against clinically defined constraints derived from the prescribed care process. Rather than relying solely on statistical anomaly detection, the proposed approach combines temporal prediction, uncertainty-aware reasoning, and constraint-based verification to identify safety violations. The RSM targets three classes of events: physiological deviations from prescribed care, hardware and communication failures, and potential data tampering or misuse. This work contributes to Safe Physical AI by operationalizing domain-specific clinical knowledge as enforceable safety constraints, bridging learning-based perception and runtime safety monitoring to assist nursing staff in real-world hospital wards.