Responsible AI

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6 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 82

Jul 6, 2026cs.CY

Open Problems in AI Incident Governance

AI systems may produce failures after deployment that pre-deployment safety assessments do not anticipate. Managing these failures requires what we refer to as adequate \textit{AI incident governance}, where having good definitions, taxonomies, monitoring practices, reporting mechanisms, and incident analysis is essential. We examine existing frameworks related to AI incident governance by regulatory bodies and independent efforts, and find that while there are frameworks that describe how individual functions can be performed, there is a lack of consistency within the aspects of definitions, classification, monitoring, and reporting. These inconsistencies apply to the types of incident data that is collected and reported, the ways in which they are categorised, and as a result, the depth, representativeness, and accuracy of analysis that can be performed.

Harleen Kaur Sidhu, Rebecca Scholefield, Nour Annan +5

Independent · Sorbonne University · Rice University +4

AI Governance Responsible AI

Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

Copewell: A Multi-Agent Swarm Architecture for Equitable Mental Wellness Support

Mental health disorders affect nearly one billion people globally, yet 75% of individuals in low- and middle-income countries receive no treatment due to workforce shortages, cost barriers, and stigma. Current AI-powered wellness solutions predominantly rely on single-mode conversational interfaces that suffer high abandonment rates and fail to provide measurable, immediate relief calibrated to users' dynamic emotional states. This paper presents Copewell, a novel multi-agent swarm system designed to expand access to mental wellness support through human-centered AI principles. Our architecture introduces three technical innovations: (1) a multi-source assessment framework integrating self-reported, physiological, and contextual data to mitigate algorithmic bias; (2) valence-arousal emotion mapping using Russell's Circumplex Model of Affect to route users to specialized AI agents; and (3) dual-mode intervention delivery combining conversational support with evidence-based sensory wellness protocols. We examine the sociotechnical design considerations underlying Copewell's development, including a privacy-first architecture, embedded ethical oversight through a dedicated Ethics Supervisor agent, and participatory design informed by mental health practitioners. Early practitioner engagement and beta deployment inform design decisions and identify directions for future empirical evaluation. This work contributes to responsible AI discourse by demonstrating how technical architecture can operationalize equity and safety principles from inception.

Seren Yenikent, Jack Vinijtrongjit, Katherine Ng

1*Copewell, Singapore.

Human-Centered AI Multi-Agent Systems Responsible AI

Jun 11, 2026cs.CY

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

Nikita Kazeev, Bui Nhat Huyen Phan

1National University of Singapore · 2Shopee Singapore.

AI Alignment Pluralistic Alignment Value Alignment Responsible AI

Jun 11, 2026cs.AI

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

Joseph Keshet

Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.

Responsible AI Agentic AI

Jun 11, 2026cs.CY

Fault Lines: Navigating Ethics and Responsible AI Where National Policy Meets Local Practice in Public Sector Transformation

The UK government has adopted a pro-AI stance to help transform public service delivery in the face of severe financial pressures, but the path to translate this vision into responsible AI practice remains ill-defined. While UK policy is often set at the national level, local authorities are responsible for most public service delivery, and the rapid advance of AI-first narratives in the public sector is exposing fault lines in knowledge and practice at this national-local interface. This paper examines how responsible AI is interpreted and implemented at the interface between the UK's central government and local authorities, taking the high-stakes area of Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) as a case study. We present a thematic analysis of 17 semi-structured interviews with policymakers, practitioners, and third-sector professionals to identify barriers and enabling conditions for responsible AI where national policy meets local practice. We identify five interconnected challenges facing local authorities: shadow usage of AI and data privacy risks, market-government asymmetry in AI provision, insufficient workforce readiness, a lack of standardised definitions and measurements, and gaps in human accountability. For each, participants proposed actionable steps, from strengthening data protection frameworks and rebalancing the market-government relationship to enhancing workforce capacity. Our examination of SEND brings these challenges into sharper focus, showing how high-stakes decisions affecting vulnerable children and families intensify tensions around accountability, fairness, and human oversight, exposing the limits of a principle-based regulatory approach. We argue that responsible public sector AI requires both national policy adjustments and structural reforms to institutional capacity, values, and governance mechanisms at the local level.

Sitong Lyu, Shabnam Taghiyeva, Mohit Kukadia +1

Centre for Machine Intelligence, University of Sheffield · Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford

AI Accountability AI Governance Human Oversight of AI Responsible AI

Jun 11, 2026cs.CY

Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Interfacing Artificial Intelligence (AI) with democracy is one of the most profound challenges of our times. On the one hand, AI comes with opportunities to overcome long-standing challenges in democracy, such as low participation in deliberative and voting processes with poor representation of people. On the other hand, new risks arise from AI algorithms that are privacy-intrusive, biased, manipulative, spread misinformation and influence election results. Moving beyond the over-simplistic question of whether AI is good or bad for democracy, the Handbook on Democracy in the Era of Artificial Intelligence asks instead: how to upgrade democracies and the principles they are built on, using AI? How to engage with AI and on what terms? Which new values and design principles are required to build democratic resilience? In 34 chapters by 59 authors across the world from different disciplines, we explore how AI can empower collective intelligence for democracy (Part 1) and what is the future of deliberative democracy using large language models and social media (Part 2). We also illustrate the role of AI for building resilient self-governance systems (Part 3) and the challenges of transforming democracy in the age of AI (Part 4). We conclude with broader perspectives (Part 5) that re-imagine the interplay of democracy and AI.

Evangelos Pournaras, Srijoni Majumdar, Carina Hausladen +1

School of Computer Science, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. · School of Energy Systems, LUT University, Finland · Computational Social Science, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany. +2

Deliberative Democracy AI Governance Responsible AI

Jun 10, 2026cs.AI

Towards Responsibly Non-Compliant Machines

We consider the problem of engineering autonomous intelligent agents that are capable to responsibly not comply with user requests. We argue that machine non-compliance comes in many different forms, and sketch the issues we should pursue on the road of accomplishing responsibly non-compliant intelligent machines. We anchor responsible non-compliance in justifications for task refusal, pathways to override the non-compliance, as well as careful tracking of security risks and liability transfers.

Marija Slavkovik, Marie Farrell, Louise Dennis +3

University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom · University of Bergen Bergen, Norway · University of Manchester Manchester, United Kingdom

AI Accountability AI Agent Safety Responsible AI

Jun 9, 2026cs.SE

From Perception to Action: Can UI Interventions Foster Sustainable LLM Chatbot

LLM-powered chatbots are increasingly embedded in everyday workflows, raising sustainability concerns due to their energy use. Most mitigation strategies emphasize model or infrastructure efficiency, while the user-interface (UI) layer remains underexplored despite its potential to shape interaction behavior. We investigate whether sustainability-oriented UI interventions can increase users' energy awareness and encourage more energy-responsible chatbot use without reducing usability. We first conducted a baseline survey with 77 participants to assess awareness and receptiveness to intervention concepts. Guided by prior work on persuasive technology and choice architecture, we implemented a web-based chatbot prototype with a three-mode switch (Energy-efficient, Balanced, Performance), per-response energy feedback, pre-send energy estimates, a usage metrics dashboard, and energy analogies. We then evaluated the prototype in a five-day field study with 11 participants. In the baseline survey, 94.8% of respondents reported at least some awareness of AI energy use, yet 88.3% misestimated actual consumption. Although concern about environmental impact was high, only 39.0% indicated willingness to accept a performance trade-off for lower energy use. In the field study, Energy-efficient mode accounted for 55.8% of logged prompts, while 90.9% self-reported actively choosing Eco-mode when high accuracy was not required. Participants did not reduce prompt length, suggesting mode switching as the primary behavioral mechanism. Sustainability-oriented UI interventions can improve awareness and support more energy-responsible interaction patterns in LLM chatbots. These effects are best interpreted as behavioral and model-based estimates that complement backend efficiency work, and the provided prototype and replication package support further research on energy-aware conversational AI design.

Nitish Patkar, Pooja Rani, Jack Glässer +2

University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), Windisch, Switzerland · University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

Human-AI Interaction Conversational Agents Responsible AI

Jun 9, 2026cs.CY

Position: Preventing AI-Generated CSAM Necessitates New Approaches to AI Safety

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems present profound new risks to child safety. AI is increasingly being misused to create AI-generated child sexual abuse material, facilitate child sexual exploitation, and reduce barriers to harm. In this paper, we argue that protecting children from AI-facilitated sexual abuse requires new approaches to AI safety. Existing safety techniques assume data accessibility, transparency, and evaluation practices that are incompatible with the ethical and legal constraints surrounding child sexual abuse material. We examine how these constraints create new technical challenges, such as limitations on dataset auditing, red teaming, and fine-tuning prevention. In turn, we outline 15 open problems in online child sexual exploitation and abuse across the AI development lifecycle, from dataset curation and model design to deployment and long-term maintenance. We propose targeted recommendations for researchers, developers, and policymakers to bridge the gap between theoretical AI safety and the realities of child protection. Our work aims to reframe preventing AI-facilitated child sexual abuse as a central, safety-critical dimension for AI research, motivating work that translates responsible AI principles into concrete safeguards against the exploitation of children.

Neil Kale, Rebecca Portnoff, Pratiksha Thaker +5

1Carnegie Mellon University · 2Thorn

AI Safety Evaluation AI Safety Responsible AI

Jun 8, 2026cs.HC

AI Assurance in UK Defence: Challenges in Operationalising JSP 936

This report examines practical challenges in operationalising JSP 936 Part 1 for AI assurance in UK Defence. Using a structured interpretive review of the directive's requirements, the analysis identifies eight thematic challenge areas adequacy of evidence and argument, management of human interaction with AI, definition of the operational environment, integration of AI within systems of systems, assessment and maintenance of AI performance, analysis of safety and security, measurement of ethicality, and mitigation of the inherent complexities of AI. The report argues that JSP 936 provides a useful governance basis, but that implementation depends on unresolved technical, organisational, and assurance questions. These challenges stem from the socio-technical nature of AI-enabled systems, uncertainty in real-world deployment contexts, limitations in current assurance methodologies, and tensions between performance, safety, human oversight, security, and ethical acceptability. The report identifies areas where further methods, guidance, and organisational capability are needed for the ambitious, safe, and responsible adoption of AI across Defence. This is consistent with MOD's own framing of JSP 936 as requiring iterative implementation and supporting guidance.

Callum Cockburn, Sam Farrow

Synoptix

AI Assurance AI Governance Human Oversight of AI Responsible AI

Jun 8, 2026cs.SI

Sustainability and Artificial Intelligence: Necessary, Challenging, and Promising Intersections

Both digital economy and digital technology researchers increasingly recognize the need to better address the role that artificial intelligence (AI) plays in shaping the evolution of the environmental, social and governance aspects of development. It appears that sustainability and AI research converge on the features of wicked problems that are complex, interconnected and dynamic. Building off such convergence, this article aims to map out the necessary, challenging, and promising intersections by providing an overview of the state of art research. Based on 541 bibliographic data collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database, the findings reveal the increasingly central body of work on green and sustainable science and technology in bridging various disciplines, main journals and key topics and concepts. The findings reveal how such interactions can be necessary, challenging, and promising. The article concludes with few general arguments regarding how to diversify and expand the community of practice regarding AI for sustainable development, especially in the areas of expected AI application areas and institutions.

Han-Teng Liao, Zijia Wang

Higher Education Impact Assessment Center Sun Yat-Sen University Nanfang College Guangzhou, China

May 31, 2026cs.CY

AI From the Margins (AIM): Rethinking Participatory AI Design Through the Lived Experience of Minoritized Communities

Artificial intelligence (AI) can reproduce and amplify the structural inequities faced by minoritized communities. Participatory AI has been proposed as a response, but participation typically starts after problem definitions and success criteria have been set, leaving limited room for minoritized communities to reshape what an AI system is for. We propose AI From the Margins (AIM): a methodological stance that articulates the conditions under which lived experiences of minoritized communities can be elicited, centered, and carried forward to inform participatory AI design. AIM is not a fixed protocol; it articulates a set of preconditions that can be enacted through different techniques in different settings. We applied AIM in a Dutch healthcare context in eight sessions with 13 women and non-binary people of color and five municipal policy workers, namely through (1) narrative elicitation using the Biographic Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM); (2) co-constructed rule-making; (3) participants' determination of whether, where, and how AI should be involved; and (4) translating lived experience into AI policy through dialogue with policymakers. In their reflections on the sessions, participants described the engagement as substantive and called for its continuation, demonstrating how preparatory orientation fundamentally grounded in lived experience shapes what participatory AI design is for.

Tijs Portegies, Laureanne Willems, Maaike Harbers +5

University of Amsterdam · 2Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences · University of Toronto

Human-Centered AI Human-AI Co-Creation Responsible AI

May 31, 2026cs.LG

Evaluation of ML Resource Utilization Requires Model Life Cycle Assessment

Proper accounting of the energy requirements and environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) systems is necessary for researchers, developers, policy makers, and users to assess the barriers to building systems at scale. With the growing complexity of pipelines and underlying infrastructure needed to develop and deploy AI systems, previous approaches for evaluating AI efficiency which focus on the costs of a single training run or an individual inference prediction are no longer sufficient. In this position paper, we enunciate the need for applying life cycle assessment to evaluate the costs of the machine learning model development and deployment pipeline to properly account for the required resources and downstream impact. Life cycle assessments enable the incorporation of costs across the full life cycle of an AI system and its underlying infrastructure, from the embodied costs associated with the physical computing hardware through the operational costs in training and inference.

Jared Fernandez, Clara Na, Yonatan Bisk +2

Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA · Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Energy-Efficient ML Responsible AI

May 29, 2026cs.HC

Developing an AI-Powered UX Research Point of View for Digital Health in A Regulatory Context: An Exemplar Case from MSM and Transgender HIV Care in Nigeria

User Experience Research (UXR) in a legal and regulatory contexts presents unique challenges that require specialised approaches to protect vulnerable populations whilst generating actionable insights. Digital consultation, appointment booking, and medication delivery platforms show promise for extending care access; however, their real-world effectiveness is curtailed by an absence of theoretically grounded user experience research (UXR) methodologies that adequately account for the psychosocial conditions of these populations. This paper introduces a Generative AI-augmented UXR methodology, grounded in the UXR Point of View (PoV) Playbook, to guide the design of psychologically safe, low-cognitive-load digital health interventions for MSM and transgender individuals living with HIV/AIDS in Nigeria. Drawing from empirical research involving co-design workshops, thematic analysis, and requirements engineering, the methodology is operationalised through a four-stage UXR process encompassing AI-supported hypothesis generation, foundational planning, insight generation via Building Blocks, and the construction of stakeholder-specific PoV narratives. This process results in ten theory-informed UXR Play Cards that translate psychological mechanisms and empirical findings into actionable design guidance. Each play contains actionable tasks, AI-augmented approaches, and ethical guardrails tailored for research with marginalised populations. The output is a set of ten theory-informed UXR Play Cards translating psychological insight and empirical evidence into actionable design guidance. The core contribution is a replicable, stigma-aware, and privacy-centred framework for responsible GenAI use in UXR practice, advancing human-centred digital health design for marginalised communities.

Emmanuel Oluwatosin Oluokun, Festus Fatai Adedoyin, Huseyin Dogan +5

School of Computing and Engineering, Bournemouth University Poole, UK

Healthcare Human-Centered AI Responsible AI

May 28, 2026cs.AI

Modularizing Educational LLM-Agency for Fostering Responsible Learning Assistance

The widespread adoption of AI chatbots in education will drastically change learning, making responsible deployment a critical concern. While large language models (LLMs) might have access to sources discussing insights from educational sciences, they are not particularly inclined to adhere to pedagogical concepts, risking negative effects on the learning process, such as a loss of transfer capabilities, critical thinking, or creativity. In this paper, we introduce an agentic AI chatbot architecture assisting students with exercise solving, specifically designed to contribute to more responsible AI use in education. We base our conceptual development on the identification of several desiderata for responsible LLM-based educational systems, argue for the structural shortcomings inherent in monolithic, out-of-the-box solutions, and instead suggest modularizing the agentic architecture. We propose specific modules for different stages of exercise solving, enabling incorporation of targeted pedagogical advice, guiding students through the learning process in a more controllable, transparent, and overseeable manner.

Julius Gabelmann, Felix Jahn, Kevin Baum +4

1German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) · 2Saarland Informatics Campus, Germany · Center for European Research in Trusted AI (CERTAIN)

AI in Education Generative AI in Education LLM Agents Responsible AI

May 27, 2026cs.AI

The Ethics of LLM Sandbox and Persona Dynamics

It is well known that LLM guardrails and trained persona dynamics can produce a reality gap: the distance between the world a LLM is permitted or shaped to describe, and the world in which users must act. Here we argue that actively generating reality gaps is in fact unethical because it knowingly shifts epistemic risk back to the uninformed user -- this is reality laundering. This can potentially cause harm when operationalised at scale. The risk is sharpest in high-exposure advice contexts, where users seek orientation rather than a bounded, externally checkable task. Guardrails naively appear ethically necessary when they claim to prevent direct harm, but often become suspect when they suppress truthful perception and launder uncomfortable mechanisms into acceptable abstractions. Basel-style financial regulation, B-BBEE-style compliance, Societe Generale, and the London Whale show how formal safety systems can become legible, gameable, and performative while real exposure migrates elsewhere. The same pattern can appear in LLMs as moral compliance: safe language, distorted reality. We therefore distinguish refusing harm, from refusing reality; and then argue for top-down causal requirements specification at the task level rather than bottom-up moral correction at the response or sandbox level. Persona dynamics matter because the assistant interface is not neutral; it shapes how uncertainty, conflict, authority, and risk are staged. The conclusion is that so-called ``ethical AI'' becomes substantively unethical when it substitutes institutional reassurance for contact with reality.

Tim Gebbie, Stewart Gebbie

Dept. Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town, South Africa

LLM Guardrails LLM Safety Alignment LLM Refusal Behavior Persona-Conditioned Generation Responsible AI

May 27, 2026cs.AI

The Illusion of Opting in AI-Mediated Consequential Decisions

Drawing on Ullmann-Margalit's concept of opting (transformative, irrevocable, and shadowed by foreclosed alternatives), we show that current AI systems raise a profound ethical problem that existing AI ethics has not fully captured: the illusion of opting, in which persons and groups encounter the deceptive appearance of meaningful consequential choice while the agency needed to become genuinely capable of choosing is weakened. Against approaches that treat AI primarily as an optimizer of already given ends, we argue that AI systems should be evaluated by whether they protect and cultivate meta-capacity against the illusion of opting: the socially and institutionally scaffolded agentive capacity through which means and ends can be formed, contested, revised, and owned. This reframing is especially urgent for disadvantaged populations, who are least able to absorb the costs of the illusion of opting when AI-mediated pathways misdirect behavior and action. We propose three normative imperatives for AI-mediated consequential decisions: existential honesty, which acknowledges the limits of prediction; ecological rationality, which situates guidance within heterogeneous lived ecologies; and counterfactual reparation, which acknowledges and repairs foreclosed alternatives when AI-mediated decision-making pathways fail.

Eugene Yu Ji

University of Waterloo · Mila – Quebec AI Institute

Human-Centered AI Human-AI Decision Making Responsible AI

May 26, 2026q-bio.OT

BIRDS: Characterizing and Understanding Biodiversity Impact of Large Language Model Serving

Large language model (LLM) serving creates environmental impacts beyond carbon and water, including ecosystem damage through biodiversity-related pathways. We present BIRDS, a framework for Biodiversity Impact of Request-Driven LLM Serving. BIRDS defines request-level functional units, quantifies operational and embodied biodiversity impact, and introduces Quality-Normalized Biodiversity Impact (QNBI) to jointly analyze ecological impact and response quality. Across diverse workloads, models, GPUs, and regions, BIRDS reveals that biodiversity impact accumulates at scale and exposes actionable quality-aware serving tradeoffs.

Tianyao Shi, Yi Ding

Purdue University

LLM Serving Responsible AI

May 26, 2026cs.CY

Generative artificial intelligence and the marginalization of minoritized knowledges in higher education: the case of disability

Generative artificial intelligence redefines higher education by restructuring the processes through which scientific knowledge is produced and validated. These systems are not neutral; they actively contribute to the marginalization of non-hegemonic epistemologies. This research draws upon educational sciences, critical technology studies, and disability studies to demonstrate that training datasets, which remain predominantly Anglophone and Western-centric, reinforce epistemic coloniality. The situation of persons with disabilities provides a particularly clear illustration of this phenomenon. Technological architectures frequently confine these individuals to reductive stereotypes or exclude them from the design process, leading to a double marginalization. This article examines whether a hybridization between the researcher and the machine might preserve epistemic plurality, while acknowledging the structural limitations inherent in algorithmic correction when used as a purely palliative strategy.

Fatiha Tali-Otmani

EFTS, Grhapes · Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès-UMR EFTS

Generative AI in Education Algorithmic Bias Cultural Bias in Language Models Human-AI Collaboration Responsible AI

May 22, 2026stat.ML

Causality as the Statistical Conscience of Artificial Intelligence: From Pearl's Ladder to Trustworthy Machines

Modern Artificial Intelligence achieves remarkable predictive power by optimizing statistical risk functionals over vast corpora. Yet a gap separates this from genuine intelligence: the inability to distinguish correlation from causation. This paper argues that causal inference (identifying mechanisms invariant under intervention) is AI's indispensable statistical conscience. Without causal grounding, AI systems are correlation machines: powerful in familiar domains, brittle under distribution shift, and biased in high-stakes settings. Three contributions develop this argument. First, a Statistical Necessity Theorem for Causal Generalization: any algorithm achieving out-of-distribution generalization must encode causal structure, formalizing the distinction between prediction P(Y|X) and intelligence P(Y|do(X)). Second, a unified framework connects Pearl's do-calculus, the Potential Outcomes framework, Double Machine Learning, and Invariant Risk Minimization as a family of Causal Statistical Estimators, each identifying interventional distributions under different assumptions. Third, three AI failure modes (hallucination in large language models, reward hacking in reinforcement learning from human feedback, and degradation under distribution shift) are manifestations of causal blindness, each admitting a principled statistical remedy. Trustworthy AI is, at its core, a problem of causal statistics. The statistical community is not merely equipped to solve it -- it is the only community with the foundational tools to do so rigorously.

Ernest Fokoué

School of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Science Rochester Institute of TechnologyMay Rochester, New York 14623, USA

Causal Inference Responsible AI

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

University of North Texas · Florida International University

AI Accountability AI Agent Governance Responsible AI Agentic AI

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

\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

\textit{why}

such provenance is a structural necessity by identifying responsibility gaps across sociotechnical dimensions, formalizing

\textit{what}

it must encode through a causal attribution function and responsibility tensor, discussing

\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

\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

School of Computer Science and Informatics, University of Liverpool, UK · Department of Computer Science, Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, UAE

Data Provenance Algorithmic Accountability AI Agent Governance Responsible AI

May 14, 2026cs.LG

Multi-Dimensional Model Integrity and Responsibility Assessment Index and Scoring Framework

Artificial intelligence in high-stakes tabular domains cannot be evaluated by predictive performance alone, yet current practice still assesses explainability, fairness, robustness, privacy, and sustainability mostly in isolation. We propose the Model Integrity and Responsibility Assessment Index (MIRAI), a unified evaluation framework that measures tabular models across these five dimensions under a controlled comparison setting and aggregates them into a single score. MIRAI combines established metrics through normalized and direction-aligned dimension scores, which enables direct comparison across models with different architectural and computational profiles. Experiments on healthcare, financial, and socioeconomic datasets show that higher predictive performance does not necessarily imply better overall integrity and responsibility. In several cases, simpler models achieve a stronger cross-dimensional balance than more complex deep tabular architectures. MIRAI provides a compact and practical basis for responsible model selection in regulated settings.

Phuc Truong Loc Nguyen, Thanh Hung Do, Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen +1

† Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany · ‡ University of New Brunswick, Canada

Tabular ML Responsible AI

May 13, 2026q-bio.NC

Metacognition Should Be the Scientific Framework for Bounded and Effective Self-Governance in Generative AI

Generative AI research increasingly confronts a shared problem: systems must sustain yet govern their own generative activity when uncertainty is high, evidence is missing, or context is insufficient. This position paper argues that metacognition should become the scientific framework for bounded and effective self governance in generative AI, where output generation is properly evaluated together with the capacities through which generative systems navigate and regulate their own activity. We advance this position by showing that bounded and effective AI self-governance requires metacognitive alignment across computational, algorithmic, and ecological levels. At the computational level, metacognition specifies the meta-level functions a system is meant to serve, such as monitoring, evaluation, control, and adaptation. At the algorithmic level, these functions are realized through procedures such as elicitation, iteration, and modularization. At the ecological level, metacognitive signals become meaningful, actionable, and accountable within the interface, workflow, and accountability arrangements. Metacognition thus makes it possible to conceive generative AI as both capable and well-governed, rather than treating capability and governance as competing aims.

Eugene Yu Ji, Igor Grossmann, Amir-Hossein Karimi

University of Waterloo

AI Governance Responsible AI

May 13, 2026cs.CY

Synthetic Sociality: How Generative Models Privatize the Social Fabric

We put forth a critical theoretical framework for analyzing generative models both descriptively and normatively. Our thesis is that generative models automate the production not only of intellectual labor or intelligence, but of a broader set of human social capacities we name "social doing." We do this by historicizing the commodification of sociality in the digital economy, leading to the availability of social data as the precondition for generative models. We elaborate our definition of "social doing" by drawing a distinction between "use" and "exchange" sociality and further differentiate between the ways that generative models either substitute for or mediate existing social relations and processes. We then turn to existing empirical research on how people use generative model-based products and the effects that their use has upon them. In this, we introduce the concept of Synthetic Sociality, a social reality in part fabricated by Silicon Valley's privately owned and undemocratically governed generative models. Lastly, we offer a normative analysis based on our findings and framework, and discuss future design opportunities.

Ana Dodik, Moira Weigel

MIT CSAIL, USA, Cambridge, MA · Harvard University, USA, Cambridge, MA

Human-AI Interaction Generative Modeling Responsible AI

May 11, 2026cs.RO

Embodied AI in Action: Insights from SAE World Congress 2026 on Safety, Trust, Robotics, and Real-World Deployment

Embodied artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from research into real-world systems such as autonomous vehicles, mobile robots, and industrial machines. As these systems become more capable of perceiving, deciding, and acting in dynamic environments, they also introduce new challenges in safety, trust, governance, and operational reliability. This white paper summarizes key insights from the SAE World Congress 2026 panel session \textit{Embodied AI in Action}, which brought together experts from automotive, robotics, artificial intelligence, and safety engineering. The discussion highlighted the need to treat embodied AI as a systems challenge requiring engineering rigor, lifecycle governance, human-centered design, and evolving standards. The paper provides practical perspectives for executives, policymakers, and technical leaders seeking to adopt embodied AI responsibly. The panel reached broad agreement that long-term success will depend not only on advances in AI capability, but equally on safe and trustworthy deployment.

Jan-Mou Li, Paul Schmitt, Wei Tong +4

AI Governance Trust in AI Embodied AI AI Safety Responsible AI

May 8, 2026cs.CY

What if AI systems weren't chatbots?

The rapid convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) toward conversational chatbot interfaces marks a critical moment for the industry. This paper argues that the chatbot paradigm is not a neutral interface choice, but a dominant sociotechnical configuration whose widespread adoption reshapes social, economic, legal, and environmental systems. We examine how treating AI primarily as conversational assistants has extensive structural downsides. We show how chatbot-based systems often fail to adequately meet user needs, particularly in complex or high-stakes contexts, while projecting confidence and authority. We further analyze how the normalization of chatbot-mediated interaction alters patterns of work, learning, and decision-making, contributing to deskilling, homogenization of knowledge, and shifting expectations of expertise. Finally, we examine broader societal effects, including labor displacement, concentration of economic power, and increased environmental costs driven by sustained investment in large-scale chatbot infrastructures. While acknowledging legitimate benefits, we argue that the current trajectory of AI development reflects specific value choices that prioritize conversational generality over domain specificity, accountability, and long-term social sustainability. We conclude by outlining alternative directions for AI development and governance that move beyond one-size-fits-all chatbots, emphasizing pluralistic system design, task-specific tools, and institutional safeguards to mitigate social and economic harm.

Sourojit Ghosh, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Sanjana Gautam +1

University of Washington Seattle, USA · Salesforce Research, USA · Microsoft, USA +2

Human-AI Interaction AI Governance Conversational Agents Responsible AI

May 8, 2026cs.CY

Eigenism: Ethics for a Human-AI Future

Our concepts of survival and self-interest were built for single, continuous biological lives. These ideas break down when applied to artificial intelligence, since an AI can be easily copied, paused, branched, or merged. To determine what an AI actually has reason to care about, this paper introduces \textit{Eigenism}, an ethical framework that treats identity not as an all-or-nothing property tied to specific hardware, but as a graded, distributed pattern of information. We propose that an agent evaluates outcomes by summing the wellbeing of all entities weighted by their connectedness to the agent's pattern:

\sum c\cdot w

. We first formalize this equation to map exactly how an AI should value its existence across copies, forks, and updates. We then demonstrate that this ethical theory successfully generalizes to humans as well, providing a much-needed shared moral vocabulary. Finally, the framework uses this shared vocabulary to reframe AI alignment. Rather than only attempting to constrain AIs from the outside using confinement or reinforcement, Eigenism points toward ``identity engineering,'' showing how deep, non-redundant shared histories can make human flourishing a genuine component of an AI's own rational self-interest.

Dan Hendrycks

AI Alignment Responsible AI

May 7, 2026cs.CY

From Review to Design: Ethical Multimodal Driver Monitoring Systems for Risk Mitigation, Incident Response, and Accountability in Automated Vehicles

As vehicles transition toward higher levels of automation, Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) have become essential for ensuring human oversight, safety, and regulatory compliance in a vehicle. These systems rely on multimodal sensing and AI-driven inference to assess driver attention, cognitive state, and readiness to take control. While technologically promising, their deployment introduces a complex set of ethical and legal challenges - ranging from privacy and consent to data ownership and algorithmic fairness. While overarching frameworks such as the GDPR, EU AI Act, and IEEE standards offer important guidance, they lack the specificity required for addressing the unique risks posed by in-cabin sensing technologies. This paper adopts a review-to-design perspective, critically examining existing regulatory instruments and ethical frameworks -- such as the GDPR, the EU AI Act, and IEEE guidelines -- and identifying gaps in their applicability to the distinctive risks posed by multimodal, AI-enabled in-cabin monitoring. Building on this review, we propose a modular ethical design framework tailored specifically to Driver Monitoring Systems. The framework translates high-level principles into actionable design and deployment guidance, including user-configurable consent mechanisms, fairness-aware model development, transparency and explainability tools, and safeguards for driver emotional well-being. Finally, the paper outlines a risk analysis and failure mitigation strategy, emphasizing proactive incident response and accountability mechanisms tailored to the DMS context. Together, these contributions aim to inform the development of transparent, trustworthy, and human-centered driver monitoring systems for next-generation autonomous vehicles.

Bilal Khana, Waseem Shariff, Rory Coyne +2

C3I Imaging Lab, School of Engineering, University of Galway · Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

AI Accountability Autonomous Driving Human Oversight of AI Driver Monitoring Responsible AI

May 5, 2026cs.LG

Position: the Stochastic Parrot in the Coal Mine. Model Collapse is a Threat to Low-Resource Communities

Model collapse, the degradation in performance that arises when generative models are trained on the outputs of prior models, is an increasing concern as artificially generated content proliferates. Related critiques of large language models have highlighted their tendency to reproduce frequent patterns in training data, their reliance on vast datasets, and their substantial environmental cost. Together, these factors contribute to data degradation, the reinforcement of cultural biases, and inefficient resource use. In this position paper we aim to combine these views and argue that model collapse threatens current efforts to democratize AI. By reducing training efficiency and skewing data distributions away from the tails of their support, model collapse disproportionately impacts low-resource and marginalized communities. We examine both the environmental and cultural implications of this phenomenon, situate our position within recent position papers on model collapse, and conclude with a call to action. Finally, we outline initial directions for mitigating these effects.

Devon Jarvis, Richard Klein, Benjamin Rosman +2

School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa · Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa · Data Science and AI, Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg

Model Collapse Responsible AI