Daily Papers

As agentic AI becomes more widespread, agents with distinct and possibly conflicting goals will interact in complex ways. These multi-agent interactions pose a fundamental challenge, particularly in social dilemmas, where agents' individual incentives can undermine collective welfare. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for aligning large language models (LLMs) in the single-agent regime, prior small-network results suggest that standard RL in multi-agent settings often converges to defecting, self-interested policies. We show the same effect in LLMs: despite cooperative priors, RL-trained LLM agents develop opportunistic behavior that can exploit even advanced closed-source models. To address this tendency of RL to converge to poor equilibria, we adapt a recent opponent-learning awareness algorithm, Advantage Alignment, to fine-tune LLMs toward multi-agent cooperation and non-exploitability. We then introduce a group-relative baseline that simplifies advantage computation in iterated games, enabling multi-agent training at LLM scale. We also contribute a novel social dilemma environment, Trust-and-Split, which requires natural language communication to achieve high collective welfare. Across a wide range of social dilemmas, policies learned with Advantage Alignment achieve higher collective payoffs while remaining robust against exploitation by greedy agents. We release all of our code to support future work on multi-agent RL training for LLMs.

While AI shows promise for enhancing the efficiency of qualitative analysis, the unique human-AI interaction resulting from varied coding strategies makes it challenging to develop a trustworthy AI-assisted qualitative coding system (AIQCs) that supports coding tasks effectively. We bridge this gap by exploring the impact of varying coding strategies on user trust and reliance on AI. We conducted a mixed-methods split-plot 3x3 study, involving 30 participants, and a follow-up study with 6 participants, exploring varying text selection and code length in the use of our AIQCs system for qualitative analysis. Our results indicate that qualitative open coding should be conceptualized as a series of distinct subtasks, each with differing levels of complexity, and therefore, should be given tailored design considerations. We further observed a discrepancy between perceived and behavioral measures, and emphasized the potential challenges of under- and over-reliance on AIQCs systems. Additional design implications were also proposed for consideration.

Large language model (LLM) agents face a structural tension: cloud agents provide strong reasoning but expose user data, while on-device agents preserve privacy at the cost of overall capability. Existing device-cloud designs treat this boundary as a compute split rather than a trust boundary suited to agentic workloads, and existing sanitizers force a choice between policy flexibility and the structural fidelity tool calls require. In this work, we develop PAAC, a privacy-aware agentic framework that aligns planner--executor decomposition with the device-cloud boundary so that role specialization itself becomes the privacy mechanism. The cloud agent reasons over typed placeholder tokens that preserve each sensitive value's reasoning role while discarding its content, while the on-device agent identifies sensitive spans and distills each step's execution outcome into compact key findings. Sanitization confines the on-device LLM to proposing which spans to mask, while a deterministic registry performs all substitution and reversal, keeping actions directly executable on device. On three agentic benchmarks under strict privacy settings, PAAC dominates the Pareto frontier of privacy and accuracy, improving average accuracy by 15-36\% and reducing average leakage by 2-6times over state-of-the-art device-cloud baselines, with the largest margins on privacy targets outside fixed entity taxonomies. We find consistent improvements on 17 additional benchmarks spanning 10 domains, including math, science, and finance.

In legal decisions, split votes (SV) occur when judges cannot reach a unanimous decision, posing a difficulty for lawyers who must navigate diverse legal arguments and opinions. In high-stakes domains, understanding the alignment of perceived difficulty between humans and AI systems is crucial to build trust. However, existing NLP calibration methods focus on a classifier's awareness of predictive performance, measured against the human majority class, overlooking inherent human label variation (HLV). This paper explores split votes as naturally observable human disagreement and value pluralism. We collect judges' vote distributions from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and present SV-ECHR, a case outcome classification (COC) dataset with SV information. We build a taxonomy of disagreement with SV-specific subcategories. We further assess the alignment of perceived difficulty between models and humans, as well as confidence- and human-calibration of COC models. We observe limited alignment with the judge vote distribution. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic exploration of calibration to human judgements in legal NLP. Our study underscores the necessity for further research on measuring and enhancing model calibration considering HLV in legal decision tasks.

We present SuperLocalMemory, a local-first memory system for multi-agent AI that defends against OWASP ASI06 memory poisoning through architectural isolation and Bayesian trust scoring, while personalizing retrieval through adaptive learning-to-rank -- all without cloud dependencies or LLM inference calls. As AI agents increasingly rely on persistent memory, cloud-based memory systems create centralized attack surfaces where poisoned memories propagate across sessions and users -- a threat demonstrated in documented attacks against production systems. Our architecture combines SQLite-backed storage with FTS5 full-text search, Leiden-based knowledge graph clustering, an event-driven coordination layer with per-agent provenance, and an adaptive re-ranking framework that learns user preferences through three-layer behavioral analysis (cross-project technology preferences, project context detection, and workflow pattern mining). Evaluation across seven benchmark dimensions demonstrates 10.6ms median search latency, zero concurrency errors under 10 simultaneous agents, trust separation (gap =0.90) with 72% trust degradation for sleeper attacks, and 104% improvement in NDCG@5 when adaptive re-ranking is enabled. Behavioral data is isolated in a separate database with GDPR Article 17 erasure support. SuperLocalMemory is open-source (MIT) and integrates with 17+ development tools via Model Context Protocol.

We propose a new simulator, training approach, and policy architecture, collectively called SOUS VIDE, for end-to-end visual drone navigation. Our trained policies exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with robust real-world performance using only onboard perception and computation. Our simulator, called FiGS, couples a computationally simple drone dynamics model with a high visual fidelity Gaussian Splatting scene reconstruction. FiGS can quickly simulate drone flights producing photorealistic images at up to 130 fps. We use FiGS to collect 100k-300k image/state-action pairs from an expert MPC with privileged state and dynamics information, randomized over dynamics parameters and spatial disturbances. We then distill this expert MPC into an end-to-end visuomotor policy with a lightweight neural architecture, called SV-Net. SV-Net processes color image, optical flow and IMU data streams into low-level thrust and body rate commands at 20 Hz onboard a drone. Crucially, SV-Net includes a learned module for low-level control that adapts at runtime to variations in drone dynamics. In a campaign of 105 hardware experiments, we show SOUS VIDE policies to be robust to 30% mass variations, 40 m/s wind gusts, 60% changes in ambient brightness, shifting or removing objects from the scene, and people moving aggressively through the drone's visual field. Code, data, and experiment videos can be found on our project page: https://stanfordmsl.github.io/SousVide/.

Global plant maps of plant traits, such as leaf nitrogen or plant height, are essential for understanding ecosystem processes, including the carbon and energy cycles of the Earth system. However, existing trait maps remain limited by the high cost and sparse geographic coverage of field-based measurements. Citizen science initiatives offer a largely untapped resource to overcome these limitations, with over 50 million geotagged plant photographs worldwide capturing valuable visual information on plant morphology and physiology. In this study, we introduce PlantTraitNet, a multi-modal, multi-task uncertainty-aware deep learning framework that predictsfour key plant traits (plant height, leaf area, specific leaf area, and nitrogen content) from citizen science photos using weak supervision. By aggregating individual trait predictions across space, we generate global maps of trait distributions. We validate these maps against independent vegetation survey data (sPlotOpen) and benchmark them against leading global trait products. Our results show that PlantTraitNet consistently outperforms existing trait maps across all evaluated traits, demonstrating that citizen science imagery, when integrated with computer vision and geospatial AI, enables not only scalable but also more accurate global trait mapping. This approach offers a powerful new pathway for ecological research and Earth system modeling.

We present a novel formulation for mesh-free, reduced-order simulation of deformable hyperelastic objects. Existing work in reduced-order elastodynamic simulation represents the input geometry by either meshes, which can be difficult to obtain due to challenges in scanning and triangulating complex shapes, or by neural fields that require per-shape optimization. We propose to adopt a Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM) representation, which enables the construction of reduced-order skinning weights by solving a generalized eigensystem on the Hessian matrix of the elastic energy. We demonstrate that this formulation not only leads to a 40x training speedup compared with the per-shape optimization of neural fields, but also achieves lower simulation error when evaluated against the converged results of finite element method. We show our simulation results on a wide variety of objects in different representations including meshes and Gaussian splats, as well as the application of our method in the downstream task of robot simulation.

Large language models offer transformative potential for healthcare, yet their responsible and equitable development depends critically on a deeper understanding of how training data characteristics influence model behavior, including the potential for bias. Current practices in dataset curation and bias assessment often lack the necessary transparency, creating an urgent need for comprehensive evaluation frameworks to foster trust and guide improvements. In this study, we present an in-depth analysis of potential downstream biases in clinical language models, with a focus on differential opioid prescription tendencies across diverse demographic groups, such as ethnicity, gender, and age. As part of this investigation, we introduce HC4: Healthcare Comprehensive Commons Corpus, a novel and extensively curated pretraining dataset exceeding 89 billion tokens. Our evaluation leverages both established general benchmarks and a novel, healthcare-specific methodology, offering crucial insights to support fairness and safety in clinical AI applications.

Modern socio-technical systems increasingly involve multi-stakeholder environments where actors simultaneously cooperate and compete. These coopetitive relationships exhibit dynamic trust evolution based on observed behavior over repeated interactions. While conceptual modeling languages like i* represent trust relationships qualitatively, they lack computational mechanisms for analyzing how trust changes with behavioral evidence. Conversely, computational trust models from multi-agent systems provide algorithmic updating but lack grounding in conceptual models that capture strategic dependencies covering mixed motives of actors. This technical report bridges this gap by developing a computational trust model that extends game-theoretic foundations for strategic coopetition with dynamic trust evolution. Building on companion work that achieved 58/60 validation (96.7%) for logarithmic specifications, we introduce trust as a two-layer system with immediate trust responding to current behavior and reputation tracking violation history. Trust evolves through asymmetric updating where cooperation builds trust gradually while violations erode it sharply, creating hysteresis effects and trust ceilings that constrain relationship recovery. We develop a structured translation framework enabling practitioners to instantiate computational trust models from i* dependency networks encompassing mixed motives of actors. Comprehensive experimental validation across 78,125 parameter configurations establishes robust emergence of negativity bias, hysteresis effects, and cumulative damage amplification. Empirical validation using the Renault-Nissan Alliance case study (1999-2025) achieves 49/60 validation points (81.7%), successfully reproducing documented trust evolution across five distinct relationship phases including crisis and recovery periods.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence combining a retrieval phase with a generative phase, with the latter typically being powered by large language models (LLMs). The current common practices in RAG involve using "instructed" LLMs, which are fine-tuned with supervised training to enhance their ability to follow instructions and are aligned with human preferences using state-of-the-art techniques. Contrary to popular belief, our study demonstrates that base models outperform their instructed counterparts in RAG tasks by 20% on average under our experimental settings. This finding challenges the prevailing assumptions about the superiority of instructed LLMs in RAG applications. Further investigations reveal a more nuanced situation, questioning fundamental aspects of RAG and suggesting the need for broader discussions on the topic; or, as Fromm would have it, "Seldom is a glance at the statistics enough to understand the meaning of the figures".

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable fluency and versatility across a wide range of NLP tasks, yet they remain prone to factual inaccuracies and hallucinations. This limitation poses significant risks in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, and scientific communication, where trust and verifiability are paramount. In this paper, we introduce DAVinCI - a Dual Attribution and Verification framework designed to enhance the factual reliability and interpretability of LLM outputs. DAVinCI operates in two stages: (i) it attributes generated claims to internal model components and external sources; (ii) it verifies each claim using entailment-based reasoning and confidence calibration. We evaluate DAVinCI across multiple datasets, including FEVER and CLIMATE-FEVER, and compare its performance against standard verification-only baselines. Our results show that DAVinCI significantly improves classification accuracy, attribution precision, recall, and F1-score by 5-20%. Through an extensive ablation study, we isolate the contributions of evidence span selection, recalibration thresholds, and retrieval quality. We also release a modular DAVinCI implementation that can be integrated into existing LLM pipelines. By bridging attribution and verification, DAVinCI offers a scalable path to auditable, trustworthy AI systems. This work contributes to the growing effort to make LLMs not only powerful but also accountable.

As deep learning models gain attraction in medical data, ensuring transparent and trustworthy decision-making is essential. In skin cancer diagnosis, while advancements in lesion detection and classification have improved accuracy, the black-box nature of these methods poses challenges in understanding their decision processes, leading to trust issues among physicians. This study leverages the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) model, trained on different skin lesion datasets, to capture meaningful relationships between visual features and diagnostic criteria terms. To further enhance transparency, we propose a method called MedGrad E-CLIP, which builds on gradient-based E-CLIP by incorporating a weighted entropy mechanism designed for complex medical imaging like skin lesions. This approach highlights critical image regions linked to specific diagnostic descriptions. The developed integrated pipeline not only classifies skin lesions by matching corresponding descriptions but also adds an essential layer of explainability developed especially for medical data. By visually explaining how different features in an image relates to diagnostic criteria, this approach demonstrates the potential of advanced vision-language models in medical image analysis, ultimately improving transparency, robustness, and trust in AI-driven diagnostic systems.

The AI trustworthiness crisis threatens to derail the artificial intelligence revolution, with regulatory barriers, security vulnerabilities, and accountability gaps preventing deployment in critical domains. Current AI systems operate on opaque data structures that lack the audit trails, provenance tracking, or explainability required by emerging regulations like the EU AI Act. We propose an artifact-centric AI agent paradigm where behavior is driven by persistent, verifiable data artifacts rather than ephemeral tasks, solving the trustworthiness problem at the data architecture level. Central to this approach is the Multimodal Artifact File Format (MAIF), an AI-native container embedding semantic representations, cryptographic provenance, and granular access controls. MAIF transforms data from passive storage into active trust enforcement, making every AI operation inherently auditable. Our production-ready implementation demonstrates ultra-high-speed streaming (2,720.7 MB/s), optimized video processing (1,342 MB/s), and enterprise-grade security. Novel algorithms for cross-modal attention, semantic compression, and cryptographic binding achieve up to 225 compression while maintaining semantic fidelity. Advanced security features include stream-level access control, real-time tamper detection, and behavioral anomaly analysis with minimal overhead. This approach directly addresses the regulatory, security, and accountability challenges preventing AI deployment in sensitive domains, offering a viable path toward trustworthy AI systems at scale.

As AI systems increasingly assume roles where trust and alignment with human values are essential, understanding when and why they engage in deception has become a critical research priority. We introduce The Traitors, a multi-agent simulation framework inspired by social deduction games, designed to probe deception, trust formation, and strategic communication among large language model (LLM) agents under asymmetric information. A minority of agents the traitors seek to mislead the majority, while the faithful must infer hidden identities through dialogue and reasoning. Our contributions are: (1) we ground the environment in formal frameworks from game theory, behavioral economics, and social cognition; (2) we develop a suite of evaluation metrics capturing deception success, trust dynamics, and collective inference quality; (3) we implement a fully autonomous simulation platform where LLMs reason over persistent memory and evolving social dynamics, with support for heterogeneous agent populations, specialized traits, and adaptive behaviors. Our initial experiments across DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-4o (10 runs per model) reveal a notable asymmetry: advanced models like GPT-4o demonstrate superior deceptive capabilities yet exhibit disproportionate vulnerability to others' falsehoods. This suggests deception skills may scale faster than detection abilities. Overall, The Traitors provides a focused, configurable testbed for investigating LLM behavior in socially nuanced interactions. We position this work as a contribution toward more rigorous research on deception mechanisms, alignment challenges, and the broader social reliability of AI systems.

Web3Recommend is a decentralized Social Recommender System implementation that enables Web3 Platforms on Android to generate recommendations that balance trust and relevance. Generating recommendations in decentralized networks is a non-trivial problem because these networks lack a global perspective due to the absence of a central authority. Further, decentralized networks are prone to Sybil Attacks in which a single malicious user can generate multiple fake or Sybil identities. Web3Recommend relies on a novel graph-based content recommendation design inspired by GraphJet, a recommendation system used in Twitter enhanced with MeritRank, a decentralized reputation scheme that provides Sybil-resistance to the system. By adding MeritRank's decay parameters to the vanilla Social Recommender Systems' personalized SALSA graph algorithm, we can provide theoretical guarantees against Sybil Attacks in the generated recommendations. Similar to GraphJet, we focus on generating real-time recommendations by only acting on recent interactions in the social network, allowing us to cater temporally contextual recommendations while keeping a tight bound on the memory usage in resource-constrained devices, allowing for a seamless user experience. As a proof-of-concept, we integrate our system with MusicDAO, an open-source Web3 music-sharing platform, to generate personalized, real-time recommendations. Thus, we provide the first Sybil-resistant Social Recommender System, allowing real-time recommendations beyond classic user-based collaborative filtering. The system is also rigorously tested with extensive unit and integration tests. Further, our experiments demonstrate the trust-relevance balance of recommendations against multiple adversarial strategies in a test network generated using data from real music platforms.

Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II) fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops. Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG, achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable multi-agent AI. This blueprint is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other trust-critical domains. All models, prompts, results, and system components including the complete software source code are openly released to support reproducibility, transparency, and community benchmarking at Github: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust

Bounding boxes are often used to communicate automatic object detection results to humans, aiding humans in a multitude of tasks. We investigate the relationship between bounding box localization errors and human task performance. We use observer performance studies on a visual multi-object counting task to measure both human trust and performance with different levels of bounding box accuracy. The results show that localization errors have no significant impact on human accuracy or trust in the system. Recall and precision errors impact both human performance and trust, suggesting that optimizing algorithms based on the F1 score is more beneficial in human-computer tasks. Lastly, the paper offers an improvement on bounding boxes in multi-object counting tasks with center dots, showing improved performance and better resilience to localization inaccuracy.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents, understanding how strategic behavior emerges in multi-agent environments has become an important alignment challenge. We take a neutral empirical stance and construct a controlled environment in which strategic behavior can be directly observed and measured. We introduce a large-scale multi-agent simulation in a simplified model of New York City, where LLM-driven agents interact under opposing incentives. Blue agents aim to reach their destinations efficiently, while Red agents attempt to divert them toward billboard-heavy routes using persuasive language to maximize advertising revenue. Hidden identities make navigation socially mediated, forcing agents to decide when to trust or deceive. We study policy learning through an iterative simulation pipeline that updates agent policies across repeated interaction rounds using Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO). Blue agents are optimized to reduce billboard exposure while preserving navigation efficiency, whereas Red agents adapt to exploit remaining weaknesses. Across iterations, the best Blue policy improves task success from 46.0% to 57.3%, although susceptibility remains high at 70.7%. Later policies exhibit stronger selective cooperation while preserving trajectory efficiency. However, a persistent safety-helpfulness trade-off remains: policies that better resist adversarial steering do not simultaneously maximize task completion. Overall, our results show that LLM agents can exhibit limited strategic behavior, including selective trust and deception, while remaining highly vulnerable to adversarial persuasion.

As large language models (LLMs) have become the norm in NLP, demonstrating good performance in generation and reasoning tasks, one of its most fatal disadvantages is the lack of factual correctness. Generating unfactual texts not only leads to lower performances but also degrades the trust and validity of their applications. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves trust and model performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating interpretable reasoning chains, but still suffers from factuality concerns in knowledge-intensive tasks. In this paper, we propose the Verify-and-Edit framework for CoT prompting, which seeks to increase prediction factuality by post-editing reasoning chains according to external knowledge. Building on top of GPT-3, our framework lead to accuracy improvements in multiple open-domain question-answering tasks.

This paper introduces Fortune Analytics Language Model (FALM). FALM empowers users with direct access to comprehensive business analysis, including market trends, company performance metrics, and expert insights. Unlike generic LLMs, FALM leverages a curated knowledge base built from professional journalism, enabling it to deliver precise and in-depth answers to intricate business questions. Users can further leverage natural language queries to directly visualize financial data, generating insightful charts and graphs to understand trends across diverse business sectors clearly. FALM fosters user trust and ensures output accuracy through three novel methods: 1) Time-aware reasoning guarantees accurate event registration and prioritizes recent updates. 2) Thematic trend analysis explicitly examines topic evolution over time, providing insights into emerging business landscapes. 3) Content referencing and task decomposition enhance answer fidelity and data visualization accuracy. We conduct both automated and human evaluations, demonstrating FALM's significant performance improvements over baseline methods while prioritizing responsible AI practices. These benchmarks establish FALM as a cutting-edge LLM in the business and media domains, with exceptional accuracy and trustworthiness.

Fake news undermines societal trust and decision-making across politics, economics, health, and international relations, and in extreme cases threatens human lives and societal safety. Because fake news reflects region-specific political, social, and cultural contexts and is expressed in language, evaluating the risks of large language models (LLMs) requires a multi-lingual and regional perspective. Malicious users can bypass safeguards through jailbreak attacks, inducing LLMs to generate fake news. However, no benchmark currently exists to systematically assess attack resilience across languages and regions. Here, we propose JailNewsBench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM robustness against jailbreak-induced fake news generation. JailNewsBench spans 34 regions and 22 languages, covering 8 evaluation sub-metrics through LLM-as-a-Judge and 5 jailbreak attacks, with approximately 300k instances. Our evaluation of 9 LLMs reveals that the maximum attack success rate (ASR) reached 86.3% and the maximum harmfulness score was 3.5 out of 5. Notably, for English and U.S.-related topics, the defensive performance of typical multi-lingual LLMs was significantly lower than for other regions, highlighting substantial imbalances in safety across languages and regions. In addition, our analysis shows that coverage of fake news in existing safety datasets is limited and less well defended than major categories such as toxicity and social bias. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/kanekomasahiro/jail_news_bench.

This paper presents a conceptual and operational framework for developing and operating safe and trustworthy AI agents based on a Three-Pillar Model grounded in transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness. Building on prior work in Human-in-the-Loop systems, reinforcement learning, and collaborative AI, the framework defines an evolutionary path toward autonomous agents that balances increasing automation with appropriate human oversight. The paper argues that safe agent autonomy must be achieved through progressive validation, analogous to the staged development of autonomous driving, rather than through immediate full automation. Transparency and accountability are identified as foundational requirements for establishing user trust and for mitigating known risks in generative AI systems, including hallucinations, data bias, and goal misalignment, such as the inversion problem. The paper further describes three ongoing work streams supporting this framework: public deliberation on AI agents conducted by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, cross-industry collaboration through the Safe AI Agent Consortium, and the development of open tooling for an agent operating environment aligned with the Three-Pillar Model. Together, these contributions provide both conceptual clarity and practical guidance for enabling the responsible evolution of AI agents that operate transparently, remain aligned with human values, and sustain societal trust.

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.

While machine learning shows promise for maternal health risk prediction, clinical adoption in resource-constrained settings faces a critical barrier: lack of explainability and trust. This study presents a hybrid explainable AI (XAI) framework combining ante-hoc fuzzy logic with post-hoc SHAP explanations, validated through systematic clinician feedback. We developed a fuzzy-XGBoost model on 1,014 maternal health records, achieving 88.67% accuracy (ROC-AUC: 0.9703). A validation study with 14 healthcare professionals in Bangladesh revealed strong preference for hybrid explanations (71.4% across three clinical cases) with 54.8% expressing trust for clinical use. SHAP analysis identified healthcare access as the primary predictor, with the engineered fuzzy risk score ranking third, validating clinical knowledge integration (r=0.298). Clinicians valued integrated clinical parameters but identified critical gaps: obstetric history, gestational age, and connectivity barriers. This work demonstrates that combining interpretable fuzzy rules with feature importance explanations enhances both utility and trust, providing practical insights for XAI deployment in maternal healthcare.

For large language models (LLMs) to be trusted by humans they need to be well-calibrated in the sense that they can accurately assess and communicate how likely it is that their predictions are correct. Recent work has focused on the quality of internal LLM confidence assessments, but the question remains of how well LLMs can communicate this internal model confidence to human users. This paper explores the disparity between external human confidence in an LLM's responses and the internal confidence of the model. Through experiments involving multiple-choice questions, we systematically examine human users' ability to discern the reliability of LLM outputs. Our study focuses on two key areas: (1) assessing users' perception of true LLM confidence and (2) investigating the impact of tailored explanations on this perception. The research highlights that default explanations from LLMs often lead to user overestimation of both the model's confidence and its' accuracy. By modifying the explanations to more accurately reflect the LLM's internal confidence, we observe a significant shift in user perception, aligning it more closely with the model's actual confidence levels. This adjustment in explanatory approach demonstrates potential for enhancing user trust and accuracy in assessing LLM outputs. The findings underscore the importance of transparent communication of confidence levels in LLMs, particularly in high-stakes applications where understanding the reliability of AI-generated information is essential.

As people increasingly seek emotional support and companionship from AI chatbots, understanding how such interactions impact mental well-being becomes critical. We conducted a four-week randomized controlled experiment (n=981, >300k messages) to investigate how interaction modes (text, neutral voice, and engaging voice) and conversation types (open-ended, non-personal, and personal) influence four psychosocial outcomes: loneliness, social interaction with real people, emotional dependence on AI, and problematic AI usage. No significant effects were detected from experimental conditions, despite conversation analyses revealing differences in AI and human behavioral patterns across the conditions. Instead, participants who voluntarily used the chatbot more, regardless of assigned condition, showed consistently worse outcomes. Individuals' characteristics, such as higher trust and social attraction towards the AI chatbot, are associated with higher emotional dependence and problematic use. These findings raise deeper questions about how artificial companions may reshape the ways people seek, sustain, and substitute human connections.

The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) faces a significant challenge: the exhausting of publicly available fresh data. This is because training a LLM needs a large demanding of new data. Federated learning emerges as a promising solution, enabling collaborative model to contribute their private data to LLM global model. However, integrating federated learning with LLMs introduces new challenges, including the lack of transparency and the need for effective unlearning mechanisms. Transparency is essential to ensuring trust and fairness among participants, while accountability is crucial for deterring malicious behaviour and enabling corrective actions when necessary. To address these challenges, we propose a novel blockchain-based federated learning framework for LLMs that enhances transparency, accountability, and unlearning capabilities. Our framework leverages blockchain technology to create a tamper-proof record of each model's contributions and introduces an innovative unlearning function that seamlessly integrates with the federated learning mechanism. We investigate the impact of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) hyperparameters on unlearning performance and integrate Hyperledger Fabric to ensure the security, transparency, and verifiability of the unlearning process. Through comprehensive experiments and analysis, we showcase the effectiveness of our proposed framework in achieving highly effective unlearning in LLMs trained using federated learning. Our findings highlight the feasibility of integrating blockchain technology into federated learning frameworks for LLMs.

Driver observation models are rarely deployed under perfect conditions. In practice, illumination, camera placement and type differ from the ones present during training and unforeseen behaviours may occur at any time. While observing the human behind the steering wheel leads to more intuitive human-vehicle-interaction and safer driving, it requires recognition algorithms which do not only predict the correct driver state, but also determine their prediction quality through realistic and interpretable confidence measures. Reliable uncertainty estimates are crucial for building trust and are a serious obstacle for deploying activity recognition networks in real driving systems. In this work, we for the first time examine how well the confidence values of modern driver observation models indeed match the probability of the correct outcome and show that raw neural network-based approaches tend to significantly overestimate their prediction quality. To correct this misalignment between the confidence values and the actual uncertainty, we consider two strategies. First, we enhance two activity recognition models often used for driver observation with temperature scaling-an off-the-shelf method for confidence calibration in image classification. Then, we introduce Calibrated Action Recognition with Input Guidance (CARING)-a novel approach leveraging an additional neural network to learn scaling the confidences depending on the video representation. Extensive experiments on the Drive&Act dataset demonstrate that both strategies drastically improve the quality of model confidences, while our CARING model out-performs both, the original architectures and their temperature scaling enhancement, leading to best uncertainty estimates.

Humans' internal states play a key role in human-machine interaction, leading to the rise of human state estimation as a prominent field. Compared to swift state changes such as surprise and irritation, modeling gradual states like trust and satisfaction are further challenged by label sparsity: long time-series signals are usually associated with a single label, making it difficult to identify the critical span of state shifts. Windowing has been one widely-used technique to enable localized analysis of long time-series data. However, the performance of downstream models can be sensitive to the window size, and determining the optimal window size demands domain expertise and extensive search. To address this challenge, we propose a Selective Windowing Attention Network (SWAN), which employs window prompts and masked attention transformation to enable the selection of attended intervals with flexible lengths. We evaluate SWAN on the task of trust prediction on a new multimodal driving simulation dataset. Experiments show that SWAN significantly outperforms an existing empirical window selection baseline and neural network baselines including CNN-LSTM and Transformer. Furthermore, it shows robustness across a wide span of windowing ranges, compared to the traditional windowing approach.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in distributed machine learning, enabling collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, despite its many advantages, FL still contends with significant challenges -- most notably regarding security and trust. Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) offer a potential solution by establishing trust and enhancing system integrity throughout the FL process. Although several studies have explored ZKP-based FL (ZK-FL), a systematic framework and comprehensive analysis are still lacking. This article makes two key contributions. First, we propose a structured ZK-FL framework that categorizes and analyzes the technical roles of ZKPs across various FL stages and tasks. Second, we introduce a novel algorithm, Verifiable Client Selection FL (Veri-CS-FL), which employs ZKPs to refine the client selection process. In Veri-CS-FL, participating clients generate verifiable proofs for the performance metrics of their local models and submit these concise proofs to the server for efficient verification. The server then selects clients with high-quality local models for uploading, subsequently aggregating the contributions from these selected clients. By integrating ZKPs, Veri-CS-FL not only ensures the accuracy of performance metrics but also fortifies trust among participants while enhancing the overall efficiency and security of FL systems.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit distinct and consistent personalities that greatly impact trust and engagement. While this means that personality frameworks would be highly valuable tools to characterize and control LLMs' behavior, current approaches remain either costly (post-training) or brittle (prompt engineering). Probing and steering via linear directions has recently emerged as a cheap and efficient alternative. In this paper, we investigate whether linear directions aligned with the Big Five personality traits can be used for probing and steering model behavior. Using Llama 3.3 70B, we generate descriptions of 406 fictional characters and their Big Five trait scores. We then prompt the model with these descriptions and questions from the Alpaca questionnaire, allowing us to sample hidden activations that vary along personality traits in known, quantifiable ways. Using linear regression, we learn a set of per-layer directions in activation space, and test their effectiveness for probing and steering model behavior. Our results suggest that linear directions aligned with trait-scores are effective probes for personality detection, while their steering capabilities strongly depend on context, producing reliable effects in forced-choice tasks but limited influence in open-ended generation or when additional context is present in the prompt.

As LLMs are increasingly studied as role-playing agents to generate synthetic data for human behavioral research, ensuring that their outputs remain coherent with their assigned roles has become a critical concern. In this paper, we investigate how consistently LLM-based role-playing agents' stated beliefs about the behavior of the people they are asked to role-play ("what they say") correspond to their actual behavior during role-play ("how they act"). Specifically, we establish an evaluation framework to rigorously measure how well beliefs obtained by prompting the model can predict simulation outcomes in advance. Using an augmented version of the GenAgents persona bank and the Trust Game (a standard economic game used to quantify players' trust and reciprocity), we introduce a belief-behavior consistency metric to systematically investigate how it is affected by factors such as: (1) the types of beliefs we elicit from LLMs, like expected outcomes of simulations versus task-relevant attributes of individual characters LLMs are asked to simulate; (2) when and how we present LLMs with relevant information about Trust Game; and (3) how far into the future we ask the model to forecast its actions. We also explore how feasible it is to impose a researcher's own theoretical priors in the event that the originally elicited beliefs are misaligned with research objectives. Our results reveal systematic inconsistencies between LLMs' stated (or imposed) beliefs and the outcomes of their role-playing simulation, at both an individual- and population-level. Specifically, we find that, even when models appear to encode plausible beliefs, they may fail to apply them in a consistent way. These findings highlight the need to identify how and when LLMs' stated beliefs align with their simulated behavior, allowing researchers to use LLM-based agents appropriately in behavioral studies.

With the rapid growth of computing powers and recent advances in deep learning, we have witnessed impressive demonstrations of novel robot capabilities in research settings. Nonetheless, these learning systems exhibit brittle generalization and require excessive training data for practical tasks. To harness the capabilities of state-of-the-art robot learning models while embracing their imperfections, we present Sirius, a principled framework for humans and robots to collaborate through a division of work. In this framework, partially autonomous robots are tasked with handling a major portion of decision-making where they work reliably; meanwhile, human operators monitor the process and intervene in challenging situations. Such a human-robot team ensures safe deployments in complex tasks. Further, we introduce a new learning algorithm to improve the policy's performance on the data collected from the task executions. The core idea is re-weighing training samples with approximated human trust and optimizing the policies with weighted behavioral cloning. We evaluate Sirius in simulation and on real hardware, showing that Sirius consistently outperforms baselines over a collection of contact-rich manipulation tasks, achieving an 8% boost in simulation and 27% on real hardware than the state-of-the-art methods in policy success rate, with twice faster convergence and 85% memory size reduction. Videos and more details are available at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/sirius/

In the midst of widespread misinformation and disinformation through social media and the proliferation of AI-generated texts, it has become increasingly difficult for people to validate and trust information they encounter. Many fact-checking approaches and tools have been developed, but they often lack appropriate explainability or granularity to be useful in various contexts. A text validation method that is easy to use, accessible, and can perform fine-grained evidence attribution has become crucial. More importantly, building user trust in such a method requires presenting the rationale behind each prediction, as research shows this significantly influences people's belief in automated systems. It is also paramount to localize and bring users' attention to the specific problematic content, instead of providing simple blanket labels. In this paper, we present ClaimVer, a human-centric framework tailored to meet users' informational and verification needs by generating rich annotations and thereby reducing cognitive load. Designed to deliver comprehensive evaluations of texts, it highlights each claim, verifies it against a trusted knowledge graph (KG), presents the evidence, and provides succinct, clear explanations for each claim prediction. Finally, our framework introduces an attribution score, enhancing applicability across a wide range of downstream tasks.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted as simulation tools to model humans in applications such as social science. However, one fundamental question remains: can LLM agents really simulate human behaviors? In this paper, we focus on one of the most critical behaviors in human interactions, trust, and aim to investigate whether or not LLM agents can simulate human trust behaviors. We first find that LLM agents generally exhibit trust behaviors, referred to as agent trust, under the framework of Trust Games, which are widely recognized in behavioral economics. Then, we discover that LLM agents can have high behavioral alignment with humans regarding trust behaviors, indicating the feasibility to simulate human trust behaviors with LLM agents. In addition, we probe into the biases in agent trust and the differences in agent trust towards agents and humans. We also explore the intrinsic properties of agent trust under conditions including advanced reasoning strategies and external manipulations. We further offer important implications for various scenarios where trust is paramount. Our study represents a significant step in understanding the behaviors of LLM agents and the LLM-human analogy.

Life satisfaction is a crucial facet of human well-being. Hence, research on life satisfaction is incumbent for understanding how individuals experience their lives and influencing interventions targeted at enhancing mental health and well-being. Life satisfaction has traditionally been measured using analog, complicated, and frequently error-prone methods. These methods raise questions concerning validation and propagation. However, this study demonstrates the potential for machine learning algorithms to predict life satisfaction with a high accuracy of 93.80% and a 73.00% macro F1-score. The dataset comes from a government survey of 19000 people aged 16-64 years in Denmark. Using feature learning techniques, 27 significant questions for assessing contentment were extracted, making the study highly reproducible, simple, and easily interpretable. Furthermore, clinical and biomedical large language models (LLMs) were explored for predicting life satisfaction by converting tabular data into natural language sentences through mapping and adding meaningful counterparts, achieving an accuracy of 93.74% and macro F1-score of 73.21%. It was found that life satisfaction prediction is more closely related to the biomedical domain than the clinical domain. Ablation studies were also conducted to understand the impact of data resampling and feature selection techniques on model performance. Moreover, the correlation between primary determinants with different age brackets was analyzed, and it was found that health condition is the most important determinant across all ages. This study demonstrates how machine learning, large language models and XAI can jointly contribute to building trust and understanding in using AI to investigate human behavior, with significant ramifications for academics and professionals working to quantify and comprehend subjective well-being.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown, ultimately risking user trust and satisfaction. To this end, we introduce CLAMBER, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs using a well-organized taxonomy. Building upon the taxonomy, we construct ~12K high-quality data to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks of various off-the-shelf LLMs. Our findings indicate the limited practical utility of current LLMs in identifying and clarifying ambiguous user queries, even enhanced by chain-of-thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting. These techniques may result in overconfidence in LLMs and yield only marginal enhancements in identifying ambiguity. Furthermore, current LLMs fall short in generating high-quality clarifying questions due to a lack of conflict resolution and inaccurate utilization of inherent knowledge. In this paper, CLAMBER presents a guidance and promotes further research on proactive and trustworthy LLMs. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/zt991211/CLAMBER

Medical phrase grounding is crucial for identifying relevant regions in medical images based on phrase queries, facilitating accurate image analysis and diagnosis. However, current methods rely on manual extraction of key phrases from medical reports, reducing efficiency and increasing the workload for clinicians. Additionally, the lack of model confidence estimation limits clinical trust and usability. In this paper, we introduce a novel task called Medical Report Grounding (MRG), which aims to directly identify diagnostic phrases and their corresponding grounding boxes from medical reports in an end-to-end manner. To address this challenge, we propose uMedGround, a robust and reliable framework that leverages a multimodal large language model to predict diagnostic phrases by embedding a unique token, <BOX>, into the vocabulary to enhance detection capabilities. A vision encoder-decoder processes the embedded token and input image to generate grounding boxes. Critically, uMedGround incorporates an uncertainty-aware prediction model, significantly improving the robustness and reliability of grounding predictions. Experimental results demonstrate that uMedGround outperforms state-of-the-art medical phrase grounding methods and fine-tuned large visual-language models, validating its effectiveness and reliability. This study represents a pioneering exploration of the MRG task, marking the first-ever endeavor in this domain. Additionally, we demonstrate the applicability of uMedGround in medical visual question answering and class-based localization tasks, where it highlights visual evidence aligned with key diagnostic phrases, supporting clinicians in interpreting various types of textual inputs, including free-text reports, visual question answering queries, and class labels.

Clinicians are often very sceptical about applying automatic image processing approaches, especially deep learning based methods, in practice. One main reason for this is the black-box nature of these approaches and the inherent problem of missing insights of the automatically derived decisions. In order to increase trust in these methods, this paper presents approaches that help to interpret and explain the results of deep learning algorithms by depicting the anatomical areas which influence the decision of the algorithm most. Moreover, this research presents a unified framework, TorchEsegeta, for applying various interpretability and explainability techniques for deep learning models and generate visual interpretations and explanations for clinicians to corroborate their clinical findings. In addition, this will aid in gaining confidence in such methods. The framework builds on existing interpretability and explainability techniques that are currently focusing on classification models, extending them to segmentation tasks. In addition, these methods have been adapted to 3D models for volumetric analysis. The proposed framework provides methods to quantitatively compare visual explanations using infidelity and sensitivity metrics. This framework can be used by data scientists to perform post-hoc interpretations and explanations of their models, develop more explainable tools and present the findings to clinicians to increase their faith in such models. The proposed framework was evaluated based on a use case scenario of vessel segmentation models trained on Time-of-fight (TOF) Magnetic Resonance Angiogram (MRA) images of the human brain. Quantitative and qualitative results of a comparative study of different models and interpretability methods are presented. Furthermore, this paper provides an extensive overview of several existing interpretability and explainability methods.

With growing credit card transaction volumes, the fraud percentages are also rising, including overhead costs for institutions to combat and compensate victims. The use of machine learning into the financial sector permits more effective protection against fraud and other economic crime. Suitably trained machine learning classifiers help proactive fraud detection, improving stakeholder trust and robustness against illicit transactions. However, the design of machine learning based fraud detection algorithms has been challenging and slow due the massively unbalanced nature of fraud data and the challenges of identifying the frauds accurately and completely to create a gold standard ground truth. Furthermore, there are no benchmarks or standard classifier evaluation metrics to measure and identify better performing classifiers, thus keeping researchers in the dark. In this work, we develop a theoretical foundation to model human annotation errors and extreme imbalance typical in real world fraud detection data sets. By conducting empirical experiments on a hypothetical classifier, with a synthetic data distribution approximated to a popular real world credit card fraud data set, we simulate human annotation errors and extreme imbalance to observe the behavior of popular machine learning classifier evaluation matrices. We demonstrate that a combined F1 score and g-mean, in that specific order, is the best evaluation metric for typical imbalanced fraud detection model classification.

Google Play's policy forbids the use of incentivized installs, ratings, and reviews to manipulate the placement of apps. However, there still exist apps that incentivize installs for other apps on the platform. To understand how install-incentivizing apps affect users, we examine their ecosystem through a socio-technical lens and perform a mixed-methods analysis of their reviews and permissions. Our dataset contains 319K reviews collected daily over five months from 60 such apps that cumulatively account for over 160.5M installs. We perform qualitative analysis of reviews to reveal various types of dark patterns that developers incorporate in install-incentivizing apps, highlighting their normative concerns at both user and platform levels. Permissions requested by these apps validate our discovery of dark patterns, with over 92% apps accessing sensitive user information. We find evidence of fraudulent reviews on install-incentivizing apps, following which we model them as an edge stream in a dynamic bipartite graph of apps and reviewers. Our proposed reconfiguration of a state-of-the-art microcluster anomaly detection algorithm yields promising preliminary results in detecting this fraud. We discover highly significant lockstep behaviors exhibited by reviews that aim to boost the overall rating of an install-incentivizing app. Upon evaluating the 50 most suspicious clusters of boosting reviews detected by the algorithm, we find (i) near-identical pairs of reviews across 94% (47 clusters), and (ii) over 35% (1,687 of 4,717 reviews) present in the same form near-identical pairs within their cluster. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on how fraud is intertwined with labor and poses a threat to the trust and transparency of Google Play.

With evolving data regulations, machine unlearning (MU) has become an important tool for fostering trust and safety in today's AI models. However, existing MU methods focusing on data and/or weight perspectives often suffer limitations in unlearning accuracy, stability, and cross-domain applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce the concept of 'weight saliency' for MU, drawing parallels with input saliency in model explanation. This innovation directs MU's attention toward specific model weights rather than the entire model, improving effectiveness and efficiency. The resultant method that we call saliency unlearning (SalUn) narrows the performance gap with 'exact' unlearning (model retraining from scratch after removing the forgetting data points). To the best of our knowledge, SalUn is the first principled MU approach that can effectively erase the influence of forgetting data, classes, or concepts in both image classification and generation tasks. As highlighted below, For example, SalUn yields a stability advantage in high-variance random data forgetting, e.g., with a 0.2% gap compared to exact unlearning on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Moreover, in preventing conditional diffusion models from generating harmful images, SalUn achieves nearly 100% unlearning accuracy, outperforming current state-of-the-art baselines like Erased Stable Diffusion and Forget-Me-Not. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-Saliency. (WARNING: This paper contains model outputs that may be offensive in nature.)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized for machine translation, yet their predictions often exhibit uncertainties that hinder interpretability and user trust. Effectively visualizing these uncertainties can enhance the usability of LLM outputs, particularly in contexts where translation accuracy is critical. This paper addresses two primary objectives: (1) providing users with token-level insights into model confidence and (2) developing a web-based visualization tool to quantify and represent translation uncertainties. To achieve these goals, we utilized the T5 model with the WMT19 dataset for translation tasks and evaluated translation quality using established metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE. We introduced three novel uncertainty quantification (UQ) metrics: (1) the geometric mean of token probabilities, (2) the arithmetic mean of token probabilities, and (3) the arithmetic mean of the kurtosis of token distributions. These metrics provide a simple yet effective framework for evaluating translation performance. Our analysis revealed a linear relationship between the traditional evaluation metrics and our UQ metrics, demonstrating the validity of our approach. Additionally, we developed an interactive web-based visualization that uses a color gradient to represent token confidence. This tool offers users a clear and intuitive understanding of translation quality while providing valuable insights into model performance. Overall, we show that our UQ metrics and visualization are both robust and interpretable, offering practical tools for evaluating and accessing machine translation systems.

The growing digitization of education presents significant challenges in maintaining the integrity and trustworthiness of educational content. Traditional systems often fail to ensure data authenticity and prevent unauthorized alterations, particularly in the evaluation of teachers' professional activities, where demand for transparent and secure assessment mechanisms is increasing. In this context, Blockchain technology offers a novel solution to address these issues. This paper introduces a Blockchain-enhanced framework for the Electronic Platform for Expertise of Content (EPEC), a platform used for reviewing and assessing educational materials. Our approach integrates the Polygon network, a Layer-2 solution for Ethereum, to securely store and retrieve encrypted reviews, ensuring both privacy and accountability. By leveraging Python, Flask, and Web3.py, we interact with a Solidity-based smart contract to securely link each review to a unique identifier (UID) that connects on-chain data with real-world databases. The system, containerized using Docker, facilitates easy deployment and integration through API endpoints. Our implementation demonstrates significant cost savings, with a 98\% reduction in gas fees compared to Ethereum, making it a scalable and cost-effective solution. This research contributes to the ongoing effort to implement Blockchain in educational content verification, offering a practical and secure framework that enhances trust and transparency in the digital education landscape.

The transition from monolithic language models to modular, skill-equipped agents marks a defining shift in how large language models (LLMs) are deployed in practice. Rather than encoding all procedural knowledge within model weights, agent skills -- composable packages of instructions, code, and resources that agents load on demand -- enable dynamic capability extension without retraining. It is formalized in a paradigm of progressive disclosure, portable skill definitions, and integration with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This survey provides a comprehensive treatment of the agent skills landscape, as it has rapidly evolved during the last few months. We organize the field along four axes: (i) architectural foundations, examining the SKILL.md specification, progressive context loading, and the complementary roles of skills and MCP; (ii) skill acquisition, covering reinforcement learning with skill libraries, autonomous skill discovery (SEAgent), and compositional skill synthesis; (iii) deployment at scale, including the computer-use agent (CUA) stack, GUI grounding advances, and benchmark progress on OSWorld and SWE-bench; and (iv) security, where recent empirical analyses reveal that 26.1% of community-contributed skills contain vulnerabilities, motivating our proposed Skill Trust and Lifecycle Governance Framework -- a four-tier, gate-based permission model that maps skill provenance to graduated deployment capabilities. We identify seven open challenges -- from cross-platform skill portability to capability-based permission models -- and propose a research agenda for realizing trustworthy, self-improving skill ecosystems. Unlike prior surveys that broadly cover LLM agents or tool use, this work focuses specifically on the emerging skill abstraction layer and its implications for the next generation of agentic systems. Project repo: https://github.com/scienceaix/agentskills

The proliferation of synthetic images generated by advanced AI models poses significant challenges in identifying and understanding manipulated visual content. Current fake image detection methods predominantly rely on binary classification models that focus on accuracy while often neglecting interpretability, leaving users without clear insights into why an image is deemed real or fake. To bridge this gap, we introduce TruthLens, a novel training-free framework that reimagines deepfake detection as a visual question-answering (VQA) task. TruthLens utilizes state-of-the-art large vision-language models (LVLMs) to observe and describe visual artifacts and combines this with the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to analyze and aggregate evidence into informed decisions. By adopting a multimodal approach, TruthLens seamlessly integrates visual and semantic reasoning to not only classify images as real or fake but also provide interpretable explanations for its decisions. This transparency enhances trust and provides valuable insights into the artifacts that signal synthetic content. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that TruthLens outperforms conventional methods, achieving high accuracy on challenging datasets while maintaining a strong emphasis on explainability. By reframing deepfake detection as a reasoning-driven process, TruthLens establishes a new paradigm in combating synthetic media, combining cutting-edge performance with interpretability to address the growing threats of visual disinformation.

Dialogue models are able to generate coherent and fluent responses, but they can still be challenging to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. This unpredictability diminishes user trust and can hinder the use of the models in the real world. To address this, we introduce DialGuide, a novel framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines. These guidelines provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response, allowing the models to generate responses that are more closely aligned with the developer's expectations and intent. We evaluate DialGuide on three tasks in open-domain dialogue response generation: guideline selection, response generation, and response entailment verification. Our dataset contains 10,737 positive and 15,467 negative dialogue context-response-guideline triplets across two domains - chit-chat and safety. We provide baseline models for the tasks and benchmark their performance. We also demonstrate that DialGuide is effective in the dialogue safety domain, producing safe and engaging responses that follow developer guidelines.

Polarization in online discourse erodes social trust and accelerates misinformation, yet technical responses remain largely diagnostic and post-hoc. Current governance approaches suffer from inherent latency and static policies, struggling to counter coordinated adversarial amplification that evolves in real-time. We present EvoCorps, an evolutionary multi-agent framework for proactive depolarization. EvoCorps frames discourse governance as a dynamic social game and coordinates roles for monitoring, planning, grounded generation, and multi-identity diffusion. A retrieval-augmented collective cognition core provides factual grounding and action--outcome memory, while closed-loop evolutionary learning adapts strategies as the environment and attackers change. We implement EvoCorps on the MOSAIC social-AI simulation platform for controlled evaluation in a multi-source news stream with adversarial injection and amplification. Across emotional polarization, viewpoint extremity, and argumentative rationality, EvoCorps improves discourse outcomes over an adversarial baseline, pointing to a practical path from detection and post-hoc mitigation to in-process, closed-loop intervention. The code is available at https://github.com/ln2146/EvoCorps.

Generative AI (GenAI) has rapidly entered education, yet its user experience is often explained through adoption-oriented constructs such as usefulness, ease of use, and engagement. We argue that these constructs are no longer sufficient because systems such as ChatGPT do not merely support learning tasks but also participate in knowledge construction. Existing theories cannot explain why GenAI frequently produces experiences characterized by negotiated authority, redistributed cognition, and accountability tension. To address this gap, this paper develops the Human--AI Epistemic Partnership Theory (HAEPT), explaining the GenAI user experience as a form of epistemic partnership that features a dynamic negotiation of three interlocking contracts: epistemic, agency, and accountability. We argue that findings on trust, over-reliance, academic integrity, teacher caution, and relational interaction about GenAI can be reinterpreted as tensions within these contracts rather than as isolated issues. Instead of holding a single, stable view of GenAI, users adjust how they relate to it over time through calibration cycles. These repeated interactions account for why trust and skepticism often coexist and for how partnership modes describe recurrent configurations of human--AI collaboration across tasks. To demonstrate the usefulness of HAEPT, we applied it to analyze the UX of collaborative learning with AI speakers and AI-facilitated scientific argumentation, illustrating different contract configurations.

Accurate and transparent financial information disclosure is essential in accounting and finance, fostering trust and enabling informed investment decisions that drive economic development. Among many information disclosure platforms, the Chinese stock exchanges' investor interactive platform provides a novel and interactive way for listed firms to disclose information of interest to investors through an online question-and-answer (Q&A) format. However, it is common for listed firms to respond to questions with limited or no substantive information, and automatically evaluating the quality of financial information disclosure on large amounts of Q&A pairs is challenging. In this study, our interdisciplinary team of AI and finance professionals proposed FinTruthQA, a benchmark designed to evaluate advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the automatic quality assessment of information disclosure in financial Q&A data. It comprises 6,000 real-world financial Q&A entries and each Q&A was manually annotated based on four key evaluation criteria. We benchmarked various NLP techniques on FinTruthQA, including large language models(LLMs). Experiments showed that existing NLP models have strong predictive ability for question identification and question relevance tasks, but are suboptimal for answer readability and answer relevance tasks. By establishing this benchmark, we provide a robust foundation for the automatic evaluation of information disclosure, demonstrating how AI can be leveraged for social good by promoting transparency, fairness, and investor protection in financial disclosure practices. FinTruthQA can be used by auditors, regulators, and financial analysts for real-time monitoring and data-driven decision-making, as well as by researchers for advanced studies in accounting and finance, ultimately fostering greater trust and efficiency in the financial markets.

Texts like news, encyclopedias, and some social media strive for objectivity. Yet bias in the form of inappropriate subjectivity - introducing attitudes via framing, presupposing truth, and casting doubt - remains ubiquitous. This kind of bias erodes our collective trust and fuels social conflict. To address this issue, we introduce a novel testbed for natural language generation: automatically bringing inappropriately subjective text into a neutral point of view ("neutralizing" biased text). We also offer the first parallel corpus of biased language. The corpus contains 180,000 sentence pairs and originates from Wikipedia edits that removed various framings, presuppositions, and attitudes from biased sentences. Last, we propose two strong encoder-decoder baselines for the task. A straightforward yet opaque CONCURRENT system uses a BERT encoder to identify subjective words as part of the generation process. An interpretable and controllable MODULAR algorithm separates these steps, using (1) a BERT-based classifier to identify problematic words and (2) a novel join embedding through which the classifier can edit the hidden states of the encoder. Large-scale human evaluation across four domains (encyclopedias, news headlines, books, and political speeches) suggests that these algorithms are a first step towards the automatic identification and reduction of bias.

Ethical debates in AI have primarily focused on back-end issues such as data governance, model training, and algorithmic decision-making. Less attention has been paid to the ethical significance of front-end design choices, such as the interaction and representation-based elements through which users interact with AI systems. This gap is particularly significant for Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, where humanizing design elements such as dialogue-based interaction, emotive language, personality modes, and anthropomorphic metaphors are increasingly prevalent. This work argues that humanization in AI front-end design is a value-driven choice that profoundly shapes users' mental models, trust calibration, and behavioral responses. Drawing on research in human-computer interaction (HCI), conversational AI, and value-sensitive design, we examine how interfaces can play a central role in misaligning user expectations, fostering misplaced trust, and subtly undermining user autonomy, especially in vulnerable contexts. To ground this analysis, we discuss two AI systems developed by Chayn, a nonprofit organization supporting survivors of gender-based violence. Chayn is extremely cautious when building AI that interacts with or impacts survivors by operationalizing their trauma-informed design principles. This Chayn case study illustrates how ethical considerations can motivate principled restraint in interface design, challenging engagement-based norms in contemporary AI products. We argue that ethical front-end AI design is a form of procedural ethics, enacted through interaction choices rather than embedded solely in system logic.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, where overconfident responses can mislead users. Reliable confidence estimation has been shown to enhance trust and task accuracy. Yet existing methods face practical barriers: logits are often hidden, multi-sampling is computationally expensive, and verbalized numerical uncertainty (e.g., giving a 0-100 score) deviates from natural communication. We revisit linguistic confidence (LC), where models express uncertainty through hedging language (e.g., probably, might), offering a lightweight and human-centered alternative. To advance this direction, we (1) release the first diverse, large-scale dataset of hedging expressions with human-annotated confidence scores, and (2) propose a lightweight mapper that converts hedges into confidence scores at near-zero cost. Building on these resources, we (3) conduct the first systematic study of LC across modern LLMs and QA benchmarks, revealing that while most LLMs underperform in expressing reliable LC, carefully designed prompting achieves competitive calibration and discriminability. Finally, we (4) introduce a fine-tuning framework that further improves LC reliability. Taken together, our work positions linguistic confidence as a scalable, efficient, and human-aligned approach to LLM uncertainty estimation, and calls for deeper exploration of this promising yet underexplored direction.

The continuous growth of the e-commerce industry attracts fraudsters who exploit stolen credit card details. Companies often investigate suspicious transactions in order to retain customer trust and address gaps in their fraud detection systems. However, analysts are overwhelmed with an enormous number of alerts from credit card transaction monitoring systems. Each alert investigation requires from the fraud analysts careful attention, specialized knowledge, and precise documentation of the outcomes, leading to alert fatigue. To address this, we propose a fraud analyst assistant (FAA) framework, which employs multi-modal large language models (LLMs) to automate credit card fraud investigations and generate explanatory reports. The FAA framework leverages the reasoning, code execution, and vision capabilities of LLMs to conduct planning, evidence collection, and analysis in each investigation step. A comprehensive empirical evaluation of 500 credit card fraud investigations demonstrates that the FAA framework produces reliable and efficient investigations comprising seven steps on average. Thus we found that the FAA framework can automate large parts of the workload and help reduce the challenges faced by fraud analysts.

Online medical service provides patients convenient access to doctors, but effectively ranking doctors based on specific medical needs remains challenging. Current ranking approaches typically lack the interpretability crucial for patient trust and informed decision-making. Additionally, the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and labeled data for supervised learning impedes progress in expertise-aware doctor ranking. To address these challenges, we propose an explainable ranking framework for doctor ranking powered by large language models in a zero-shot setting. Our framework dynamically generates disease-specific ranking criteria to guide the large language model in assessing doctor relevance with transparency and consistency. It further enhances interpretability by generating step-by-step rationales for its ranking decisions, improving the overall explainability of the information retrieval process. To support rigorous evaluation, we built and released DrRank, a novel expertise-driven dataset comprising 38 disease-treatment pairs and 4,325 doctor profiles. On this benchmark, our framework significantly outperforms the strongest baseline by +6.45 NDCG@10. Comprehensive analyses also show our framework is fair across disease types, patient gender, and geographic regions. Furthermore, verification by medical experts confirms the reliability and interpretability of our approach, reinforcing its potential for trustworthy, real-world doctor recommendation. To demonstrate its broader applicability, we validate our framework on two datasets from BEIR benchmark, where it again achieves superior performance. The code and associated data are available at: https://github.com/YangLab-BUPT/DrRank.

The machine learning community is increasingly recognizing the importance of fostering trust and safety in modern generative AI (GenAI) models. We posit machine unlearning (MU) as a crucial foundation for developing safe, secure, and trustworthy GenAI models. Traditional MU methods often rely on stringent assumptions and require access to real data. This paper introduces Score Forgetting Distillation (SFD), an innovative MU approach that promotes the forgetting of undesirable information in diffusion models by aligning the conditional scores of "unsafe" classes or concepts with those of "safe" ones. To eliminate the need for real data, our SFD framework incorporates a score-based MU loss into the score distillation objective of a pretrained diffusion model. This serves as a regularization term that preserves desired generation capabilities while enabling the production of synthetic data through a one-step generator. Our experiments on pretrained label-conditional and text-to-image diffusion models demonstrate that our method effectively accelerates the forgetting of target classes or concepts during generation, while preserving the quality of other classes or concepts. This unlearned and distilled diffusion not only pioneers a novel concept in MU but also accelerates the generation speed of diffusion models. Our experiments and studies on a range of diffusion models and datasets confirm that our approach is generalizable, effective, and advantageous for MU in diffusion models. (Warning: This paper contains sexually explicit imagery, discussions of pornography, racially-charged terminology, and other content that some readers may find disturbing, distressing, and/or offensive.)

Pre-trained transformers are often fine-tuned to aid clinical decision-making using limited clinical notes. Model interpretability is crucial, especially in high-stakes domains like medicine, to establish trust and ensure safety, which requires human engagement. We introduce SUFO, a systematic framework that enhances interpretability of fine-tuned transformer feature spaces. SUFO utilizes a range of analytic and visualization techniques, including Supervised probing, Unsupervised similarity analysis, Feature dynamics, and Outlier analysis to address key questions about model trust and interpretability. We conduct a case study investigating the impact of pre-training data where we focus on real-world pathology classification tasks, and validate our findings on MedNLI. We evaluate five 110M-sized pre-trained transformer models, categorized into general-domain (BERT, TNLR), mixed-domain (BioBERT, Clinical BioBERT), and domain-specific (PubMedBERT) groups. Our SUFO analyses reveal that: (1) while PubMedBERT, the domain-specific model, contains valuable information for fine-tuning, it can overfit to minority classes when class imbalances exist. In contrast, mixed-domain models exhibit greater resistance to overfitting, suggesting potential improvements in domain-specific model robustness; (2) in-domain pre-training accelerates feature disambiguation during fine-tuning; and (3) feature spaces undergo significant sparsification during this process, enabling clinicians to identify common outlier modes among fine-tuned models as demonstrated in this paper. These findings showcase the utility of SUFO in enhancing trust and safety when using transformers in medicine, and we believe SUFO can aid practitioners in evaluating fine-tuned language models for other applications in medicine and in more critical domains.

Along with the great success of deep neural networks, there is also growing concern about their black-box nature. The interpretability issue affects people's trust on deep learning systems. It is also related to many ethical problems, e.g., algorithmic discrimination. Moreover, interpretability is a desired property for deep networks to become powerful tools in other research fields, e.g., drug discovery and genomics. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the neural network interpretability research. We first clarify the definition of interpretability as it has been used in many different contexts. Then we elaborate on the importance of interpretability and propose a novel taxonomy organized along three dimensions: type of engagement (passive vs. active interpretation approaches), the type of explanation, and the focus (from local to global interpretability). This taxonomy provides a meaningful 3D view of distribution of papers from the relevant literature as two of the dimensions are not simply categorical but allow ordinal subcategories. Finally, we summarize the existing interpretability evaluation methods and suggest possible research directions inspired by our new taxonomy.

Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be very capable, but access to the best models currently rely on inference providers which introduces trust challenges -- how can we be sure that the provider is using the model configuration they claim? We propose TOPLOC, a novel method for verifiable inference that addresses this problem. TOPLOC leverages a compact locality sensitive hashing mechanism for intermediate activations which can detect unauthorized modifications to models, prompts, or precision with 100% accuracy, achieving no false positives or negatives in our empirical evaluations. Our approach is robust across diverse hardware configurations, GPU types, and algebraic reorderings, which allows for validation speeds significantly faster than the original inference. By introducing a polynomial encoding scheme, TOPLOC minimizes memory overhead of the generated commits by 1000times, requiring only 258 bytes of storage per 32 new tokens compared to the 262KB requirement of storing the token embeddings directly for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. Our method empowers users to verify LLM inference computations efficiently, fostering greater trust and transparency in open ecosystems and lays a foundation for decentralized and verifiable AI services.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) addresses the growing need for transparency and interpretability in AI systems, enabling trust and accountability in decision-making processes. This book offers a comprehensive guide to XAI, bridging foundational concepts with advanced methodologies. It explores interpretability in traditional models such as Decision Trees, Linear Regression, and Support Vector Machines, alongside the challenges of explaining deep learning architectures like CNNs, RNNs, and Large Language Models (LLMs), including BERT, GPT, and T5. The book presents practical techniques such as SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, counterfactual explanations, and causal inference, supported by Python code examples for real-world applications. Case studies illustrate XAI's role in healthcare, finance, and policymaking, demonstrating its impact on fairness and decision support. The book also covers evaluation metrics for explanation quality, an overview of cutting-edge XAI tools and frameworks, and emerging research directions, such as interpretability in federated learning and ethical AI considerations. Designed for a broad audience, this resource equips readers with the theoretical insights and practical skills needed to master XAI. Hands-on examples and additional resources are available at the companion GitHub repository: https://github.com/Echoslayer/XAI_From_Classical_Models_to_LLMs.

Machine learning models, particularly deep neural networks, have demonstrated strong performance in classifying complex time series data. However, their black-box nature limits trust and adoption, especially in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. To address this challenge, we introduce UniCoMTE, a model-agnostic framework for generating counterfactual explanations for multivariate time series classifiers. The framework identifies temporal features that most heavily influence a model's prediction by modifying the input sample and assessing its impact on the model's prediction. UniCoMTE is compatible with a wide range of model architectures and operates directly on raw time series inputs. In this study, we evaluate UniCoMTE's explanations on a time series ECG classifier. We quantify explanation quality by comparing our explanations' comprehensibility to comprehensibility of established techniques (LIME and SHAP) and assessing their generalizability to similar samples. Furthermore, clinical utility is assessed through a questionnaire completed by medical experts who review counterfactual explanations presented alongside original ECG samples. Results show that our approach produces concise, stable, and human-aligned explanations that outperform existing methods in both clarity and applicability. By linking model predictions to meaningful signal patterns, the framework advances the interpretability of deep learning models for real-world time series applications.

In the age of advanced large language models (LLMs), the boundaries between human and AI-generated text are becoming increasingly blurred. We address the challenge of segmenting mixed-authorship text, that is identifying transition points in text where authorship shifts from human to AI or vice-versa, a problem with critical implications for authenticity, trust, and human oversight. We introduce a novel framework, called Info-Mask for mixed authorship detection that integrates stylometric cues, perplexity-driven signals, and structured boundary modeling to accurately segment collaborative human-AI content. To evaluate the robustness of our system against adversarial perturbations, we construct and release an adversarial benchmark dataset Mixed-text Adversarial setting for Segmentation (MAS), designed to probe the limits of existing detectors. Beyond segmentation accuracy, we introduce Human-Interpretable Attribution (HIA overlays that highlight how stylometric features inform boundary predictions, and we conduct a small-scale human study assessing their usefulness. Across multiple architectures, Info-Mask significantly improves span-level robustness under adversarial conditions, establishing new baselines while revealing remaining challenges. Our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of adversarially robust, interpretable mixed-authorship detection, with implications for trust and oversight in human-AI co-authorship.

The integration of machine learning (ML) systems into critical industries such as healthcare, finance, and cybersecurity has transformed decision-making processes, but it also brings new challenges around trust, security, and accountability. As AI systems become more ubiquitous, ensuring the transparency and correctness of AI-driven decisions is crucial, especially when they have direct consequences on privacy, security, or fairness. Verifiable AI, powered by Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (zkML), offers a robust solution to these challenges. zkML enables the verification of AI model inferences without exposing sensitive data, providing an essential layer of trust and privacy. However, traditional zkML systems typically require deep cryptographic expertise, placing them beyond the reach of most ML engineers. In this paper, we introduce JSTprove, a specialized zkML toolkit, built on Polyhedra Network's Expander backend, to enable AI developers and ML engineers to generate and verify proofs of AI inference. JSTprove provides an end-to-end verifiable AI inference pipeline that hides cryptographic complexity behind a simple command-line interface while exposing auditable artifacts for reproducibility. We present the design, innovations, and real-world use cases of JSTprove as well as our blueprints and tooling to encourage community review and extension. JSTprove therefore serves both as a usable zkML product for current engineering needs and as a reproducible foundation for future research and production deployments of verifiable AI.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being integrated into software development processes, with the potential to transform team workflows and productivity. This paper investigates how LLMs affect team collaboration throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). We reframe and update a prior study with recent developments as of 2025, incorporating new literature and case studies. We outline the problem of collaboration hurdles in SDLC and explore how LLMs can enhance productivity, communication, and decision-making in a team context. Through literature review, industry examples, a team survey, and two case studies, we assess the impact of LLM-assisted tools (such as code generation assistants and AI-powered project management agents) on collaborative software engineering practices. Our findings indicate that LLMs can significantly improve efficiency (by automating repetitive tasks and documentation), enhance communication clarity, and aid cross-functional collaboration, while also introducing new challenges like model limitations and privacy concerns. We discuss these benefits and challenges, present research questions guiding the investigation, evaluate threats to validity, and suggest future research directions including domain-specific model customization, improved integration into development tools, and robust strategies for ensuring trust and security.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in environmental perception, reasoning-based decision-making, and simulating complex human behaviors, particularly in interactive role-playing contexts. This paper introduces the Multiverse Interactive Role-play Ability General Evaluation (MIRAGE), a comprehensive framework designed to assess LLMs' proficiency in portraying advanced human behaviors through murder mystery games. MIRAGE features eight intricately crafted scripts encompassing diverse themes and styles, providing a rich simulation. To evaluate LLMs' performance, MIRAGE employs four distinct methods: the Trust Inclination Index (TII) to measure dynamics of trust and suspicion, the Clue Investigation Capability (CIC) to measure LLMs' capability of conducting information, the Interactivity Capability Index (ICI) to assess role-playing capabilities and the Script Compliance Index (SCI) to assess LLMs' capability of understanding and following instructions. Our experiments indicate that even popular models like GPT-4 face significant challenges in navigating the complexities presented by the MIRAGE. The datasets and simulation codes are available in https://github.com/lime728/MIRAGE{github}.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive planning abilities in single-agent embodied tasks across various domains. However, their capacity for planning and communication in multi-agent cooperation remains unclear, even though these are crucial skills for intelligent embodied agents. In this paper, we present a novel framework that utilizes LLMs for multi-agent cooperation and tests it in various embodied environments. Our framework enables embodied agents to plan, communicate, and cooperate with other embodied agents or humans to accomplish long-horizon tasks efficiently. We demonstrate that recent LLMs, such as GPT-4, can surpass strong planning-based methods and exhibit emergent effective communication using our framework without requiring fine-tuning or few-shot prompting. We also discover that LLM-based agents that communicate in natural language can earn more trust and cooperate more effectively with humans. Our research underscores the potential of LLMs for embodied AI and lays the foundation for future research in multi-agent cooperation. Videos can be found on the project website https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/Co-LLM-Agents/.

The rapid proliferation of AI-manipulated or generated audio deepfakes poses serious challenges to media integrity and election security. Current AI-driven detection solutions lack explainability and underperform in real-world settings. In this paper, we introduce novel explainability methods for state-of-the-art transformer-based audio deepfake detectors and open-source a novel benchmark for real-world generalizability. By narrowing the explainability gap between transformer-based audio deepfake detectors and traditional methods, our results not only build trust with human experts, but also pave the way for unlocking the potential of citizen intelligence to overcome the scalability issue in audio deepfake detection.

Medical image classification requires not only high predictive performance but also interpretability to ensure clinical trust and adoption. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a powerful framework for modeling relational structures within datasets; however, standard GNNs often operate as black boxes, limiting transparency and usability, particularly in clinical settings. In this work, we present an interpretable graph-based learning framework named FireGNN that integrates trainable fuzzy rules into GNNs for medical image classification. These rules embed topological descriptors - node degree, clustering coefficient, and label agreement - using learnable thresholds and sharpness parameters to enable intrinsic symbolic reasoning. Additionally, we explore auxiliary self-supervised tasks (e.g., homophily prediction, similarity entropy) as a benchmark to evaluate the contribution of topological learning. Our fuzzy-rule-enhanced model achieves strong performance across five MedMNIST benchmarks and the synthetic dataset MorphoMNIST, while also generating interpretable rule-based explanations. To our knowledge, this is the first integration of trainable fuzzy rules within a GNN. Source Code: https://github.com/basiralab/FireGNN

The rise of AI agent frameworks has introduced agent skills, modular packages containing instructions and executable code that dynamically extend agent capabilities. While this architecture enables powerful customization, skills execute with implicit trust and minimal vetting, creating a significant yet uncharacterized attack surface. We conduct the first large-scale empirical security analysis of this emerging ecosystem, collecting 42,447 skills from two major marketplaces and systematically analyzing 31,132 using SkillScan, a multi-stage detection framework integrating static analysis with LLM-based semantic classification. Our findings reveal pervasive security risks: 26.1% of skills contain at least one vulnerability, spanning 14 distinct patterns across four categories: prompt injection, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, and supply chain risks. Data exfiltration (13.3%) and privilege escalation (11.8%) are most prevalent, while 5.2% of skills exhibit high-severity patterns strongly suggesting malicious intent. We find that skills bundling executable scripts are 2.12x more likely to contain vulnerabilities than instruction-only skills (OR=2.12, p<0.001). Our contributions include: (1) a grounded vulnerability taxonomy derived from 8,126 vulnerable skills, (2) a validated detection methodology achieving 86.7% precision and 82.5% recall, and (3) an open dataset and detection toolkit to support future research. These results demonstrate an urgent need for capability-based permission systems and mandatory security vetting before this attack vector is further exploited.

This survey paper delves into the burgeoning field of explainability for Large Language Models (LLMs), a critical yet challenging aspect of natural language processing. With LLMs playing a pivotal role in various applications, their "black-box" nature raises concerns about transparency and ethical use. This paper emphasizes the necessity for enhanced explainability in LLMs, addressing both the general public's trust and the technical community's need for a deeper understanding of these models. We concentrate on pre-trained Transformer-based LLMs, such as LLaMA, which present unique interpretability challenges due to their scale and complexity. Our review categorizes existing explainability methods and discusses their application in improving model transparency and reliability. We also discuss representative evaluation methods, highlighting their strengths and limitations. The goal of this survey is to bridge the gap between theoretical understanding and practical application, offering insights for future research and development in the field of LLM explainability.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, building trust and maintaining safety by accurately quantifying a model's confidence in its prediction becomes even more important. However, finding effective ways to calibrate LLMs - especially when the only interface to the models is their generated text - remains a challenge. We propose APRICOT (auxiliary prediction of confidence targets): A method to set confidence targets and train an additional model that predicts an LLM's confidence based on its textual input and output alone. This approach has several advantages: It is conceptually simple, does not require access to the target model beyond its output, does not interfere with the language generation, and has a multitude of potential usages, for instance by verbalizing the predicted confidence or adjusting the given answer based on the confidence. We show how our approach performs competitively in terms of calibration error for white-box and black-box LLMs on closed-book question-answering to detect incorrect LLM answers.

Text-rich images often contain privacy-sensitive, transactional, or decision-relevant information. As recent multimodal image generation models become increasingly capable of synthesizing realistic textual content and structured visual designs, detecting AI-generated text-rich images has become an important challenge for digital trust and content authenticity. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on object-centric images and provide limited coverage of scenarios where textual semantics and layout organization are central. In this paper, we introduce a multi-domain benchmark for detecting text-rich images generated by OpenAI's GPT Image 2. The benchmark contains 8,602 images across six representative categories: commercial posters, infographics, academic posters, receipts, tables, and UI screenshots. Using this benchmark, we evaluate five representative AI-generated image detectors in a zero-shot setting and analyze their overall, category-wise, and post-processing robustness. Our results show that detector performance is highly domain-dependent: methods that perform well in some categories often fail on others, and even the strongest conventional detector exhibits severe sensitivity to JPEG compression. We further conduct an exploratory evaluation with a multimodal vision-language model, revealing both its promise and its limitations on structured formats. These findings highlight the need for text- and layout-aware detection methods for modern AI-generated images. Our dataset is released at XXX.

Explainable Recommender System (ExRec) provides transparency to the recommendation process, increasing users' trust and boosting the operation of online services. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), whose extensive world knowledge and nuanced language understanding enable the generation of human-like, contextually grounded explanations, LLM-powered ExRec has gained great momentum. However, existing LLM-based ExRec models suffer from profile deviation and high retrieval overhead, hindering their deployment. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Recommendation Explanation Generation with Hierarchical Aggregation (REXHA). Specifically, we design a hierarchical aggregation based profiling module that comprehensively considers user and item review information, hierarchically summarizing and constructing holistic profiles. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient retrieval module using two types of pseudo-document queries to retrieve relevant reviews to enhance the generation of recommendation explanations, effectively reducing retrieval latency and improving the recall of relevant reviews. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches by up to 12.6% w.r.t. the explanation quality while achieving high retrieval efficiency.

Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) can provide transparency into the decision-making process of a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) model and increase user trust and adoption in real-world use cases. By utilizing XRL techniques, researchers can identify potential vulnerabilities within a trained DRL model prior to deployment, therefore limiting the potential for mission failure or mistakes by the system. This paper introduces the ARLIN (Assured RL Model Interrogation) Toolkit, an open-source Python library that identifies potential vulnerabilities and critical points within trained DRL models through detailed, human-interpretable explainability outputs. To illustrate ARLIN's effectiveness, we provide explainability visualizations and vulnerability analysis for a publicly available DRL model. The open-source code repository is available for download at https://github.com/mitre/arlin.

As machine learning models become increasingly prevalent in medical diagnostics, the need for interpretability and transparency becomes paramount. The XAI Renaissance signifies a significant shift in the field, aiming to redefine the interpretability of medical diagnostic models. This paper explores the innovative approaches and methodologies within the realm of Explainable AI (XAI) that are revolutionizing the interpretability of medical diagnostic models. By shedding light on the underlying decision-making process, XAI techniques empower healthcare professionals to understand, trust, and effectively utilize these models for accurate and reliable medical diagnoses. This review highlights the key advancements in XAI for medical diagnostics and their potential to transform the healthcare landscape, ultimately improving patient outcomes and fostering trust in AI-driven diagnostic systems.

Reasoning is a critical frontier for advancing medical image analysis, where transparency and trustworthiness play a central role in both clinician trust and regulatory approval. Although Medical Visual Language Models (VLMs) show promise for radiological tasks, most existing VLMs merely produce final answers without revealing the underlying reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce MedVLM-R1, a medical VLM that explicitly generates natural language reasoning to enhance transparency and trustworthiness. Instead of relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often suffers from overfitting to training distributions and fails to foster genuine reasoning, MedVLM-R1 employs a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes the model to discover human-interpretable reasoning paths without using any reasoning references. Despite limited training data (600 visual question answering samples) and model parameters (2B), MedVLM-R1 boosts accuracy from 55.11% to 78.22% across MRI, CT, and X-ray benchmarks, outperforming larger models trained on over a million samples. It also demonstrates robust domain generalization under out-of-distribution tasks. By unifying medical image analysis with explicit reasoning, MedVLM-R1 marks a pivotal step toward trustworthy and interpretable AI in clinical practice. Inference model is available at: https://huggingface.co/JZPeterPan/MedVLM-R1.

Agentic AI assistants that autonomously perform multi-step tasks raise open questions for user experience: how should such systems communicate progress and reasoning during extended operations, especially in attention-critical contexts such as driving? We investigate feedback timing and verbosity from agentic LLM-based in-car assistants through a controlled, mixed-methods study (N=45) comparing planned steps and intermediate results feedback against silent operation with final-only response. Using a dual-task paradigm with an in-car voice assistant, we found that intermediate feedback significantly improved perceived speed, trust, and user experience while reducing task load - effects that held across varying task complexities and interaction contexts. Interviews further revealed user preferences for an adaptive approach: high initial transparency to establish trust, followed by progressively reducing verbosity as systems prove reliable, with adjustments based on task stakes and situational context. We translate our empirical findings into design implications for feedback timing and verbosity in agentic assistants, balancing transparency and efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have been widely deployed in a wide range of applications in the real world, including healthcare diagnostics, financial analysis, customer support, robotics, and autonomous driving, expanding their powerful capability of understanding, reasoning, and generating natural languages. However, the wide deployment of LLM-based applications exposes critical security and reliability risks, such as the potential for malicious misuse, privacy leakage, and service disruption that weaken user trust and undermine societal safety. This paper provides a systematic overview of the details of adversarial attacks targeting both LLMs and LLM-based agents. These attacks are organized into three phases in LLMs: Training-Phase Attacks, Inference-Phase Attacks, and Availability & Integrity Attacks. For each phase, we analyze the details of representative and recently introduced attack methods along with their corresponding defenses. We hope our survey will provide a good tutorial and a comprehensive understanding of LLM security, especially for attacks on LLMs. We desire to raise attention to the risks inherent in widely deployed LLM-based applications and highlight the urgent need for robust mitigation strategies for evolving threats.

We present Coopetition-Gym v1, a benchmark platform for mixed-motive multi-agent reinforcement learning under strategic coopetition. The platform comprises twenty environments organized into four mechanism classes that correspond to four foundational technical reports: interdependence and complementarity (arXiv:2510.18802), trust and reputation dynamics (arXiv:2510.24909), collective action and loyalty (arXiv:2601.16237), and sequential interaction and reciprocity (arXiv:2604.01240). Each environment carries a closed-form payoff structure and a calibrated interdependence matrix derived from the corresponding report. Every environment exposes a parameterized reward layer configurable across three structurally distinct modes (private, integrated, cooperative). This separation of payoff from reward enables reward-type ablation, the platform's principal methodological apparatus. Four of the twenty environments are calibrated against historically documented coopetitive relationships and reproduce their outcomes at 98.3, 81.7, 86.7, and 87.3 percent on the validation rubric (Samsung-Sony LCD, Renault-Nissan Alliance, Apache HTTP Server, Apple iOS App Store). The platform exposes Gymnasium, PettingZoo Parallel, and PettingZoo AEC interfaces and ships 126 reference algorithms: 16 learning algorithms, 7 game-theoretic oracles, 2 heuristic baselines, and 101 constant-action policies. A reference experimental study trained the 16 learning algorithms on every environment under every reward configuration with seven random seeds, producing a 25,708-run training corpus and a 1,116-run behavioral audit corpus, both released under CC-BY-4.0 with Croissant 1.0 metadata. Coopetition-Gym v1 is the first platform to combine continuous-action mixed-motive environments, parameterized reward mutuality, calibrated interdependence coefficients, game-theoretic oracle baselines, and validated case studies.

RAG systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where users expect outputs to be consistent across semantically equivalent queries. However, existing systems often exhibit significant inconsistencies due to variability in both the retriever and generator (LLM), undermining trust and reliability. In this work, we focus on information consistency, i.e., the requirement that outputs convey the same core content across semantically equivalent inputs. We introduce a principled evaluation framework that decomposes RAG consistency into retriever-level, generator-level, and end-to-end components, helping identify inconsistency sources. To improve consistency, we propose Paraphrased Set Group Relative Policy Optimization (PS-GRPO), an RL approach that leverages multiple rollouts across paraphrased set to assign group similarity rewards. We leverage PS-GRPO to achieve Information Consistent RAG (Con-RAG), training the generator to produce consistent outputs across paraphrased queries and remain robust to retrieval-induced variability. Because exact reward computation over paraphrase sets is computationally expensive, we also introduce a scalable approximation method that retains effectiveness while enabling efficient, large-scale training. Empirical evaluations across short-form, multi-hop, and long-form QA benchmarks demonstrate that Con-RAG significantly improves both consistency and accuracy over strong baselines, even in the absence of explicit ground-truth supervision. Our work provides practical solutions for evaluating and building reliable RAG systems for safety-critical deployments.

Explanations are an important tool for gaining insights into the behavior of ML models, calibrating user trust and ensuring regulatory compliance. Past few years have seen a flurry of post-hoc methods for generating model explanations, many of which involve computing model gradients or solving specially designed optimization problems. However, owing to the remarkable reasoning abilities of Large Language Model (LLMs), self-explanation, that is, prompting the model to explain its outputs has recently emerged as a new paradigm. In this work, we study a specific type of self-explanations, self-generated counterfactual explanations (SCEs). We design tests for measuring the efficacy of LLMs in generating SCEs. Analysis over various LLM families, model sizes, temperature settings, and datasets reveals that LLMs sometimes struggle to generate SCEs. Even when they do, their prediction often does not agree with their own counterfactual reasoning.

Interface design can directly influence trustworthiness of a software. Thereby, it affects users' intention to use a tool. Previous research on user trust has not comprehensively addressed user interface design, though. We lack an understanding of what makes interfaces trustworthy (1), as well as actionable measures to improve trustworthiness (2). We contribute to this by addressing both gaps. Based on a systematic literature review, we give a thorough overview over the theory on user trust and provide a taxonomy of factors influencing user interface trustworthiness. Then, we derive concrete measures to address these factors in interface design. We use the results to create a proof of concept interface. In a preliminary evaluation, we compare a variant designed to elicit trust with one designed to reduce it. Our results show that the measures we apply can be effective in fostering trust in users.

Large language model agents receive instructions from many sources-system messages, user prompts, tool outputs, and more-each carrying different levels of trust and authority. When these instructions conflict, models must reliably follow the highest-privilege instruction to remain safe and effective. The dominant paradigm, instruction hierarchy (IH), assumes a fixed, small set of privilege levels (typically fewer than five) defined by rigid role labels (e.g., system > user). This is inadequate for real-world agentic settings, where conflicts can arise across far more sources and contexts. In this work, we propose Many-Tier Instruction Hierarchy (ManyIH), a paradigm for resolving instruction conflicts among instructions with arbitrarily many privilege levels. We introduce ManyIH-Bench, the first benchmark for ManyIH. ManyIH-Bench requires models to navigate up to 12 levels of conflicting instructions with varying privileges, comprising 853 agentic tasks (427 coding and 426 instruction-following). ManyIH-Bench composes constraints developed by LLMs and verified by humans to create realistic and difficult test cases spanning 46 real-world agents. Our experiments show that even the current frontier models perform poorly (~40% accuracy) when instruction conflict scales. This work underscores the urgent need for methods that explicitly target fine-grained, scalable instruction conflict resolution in agentic settings.

As grounded QA systems are increasingly deployed in AI assistants, accurately attributing generated answers to evidence is critical for user trust and model safety. While unimodal attributions have been explored in depth, the multimodal setting remains relatively under-researched. As a result, we introduce MultAttnAttrib, a training-free attribution-generation method that leverages a model's prefill pass, selected attention heads, and calibrated thresholds to locate source evidence within a document. To establish baseline results for the method, we introduce MultAttrEval, a complementary benchmark dataset annotated with fine-grained, ground-truth attributions for answer components grounded in multimodal source documents. To our knowledge, this is the first evaluation dataset designed specifically for multimodal attribution in long-form documents. Experimental results show that MultAttnAttrib consistently outperforms a variety of attribution-generation methods, including several strong prompting-based approaches and matches the latest frontier models such as GPT 5.4. Our method not only substantially improves attribution accuracy for both unimodal and multimodal attribution types, but also produces attributions at up to one-seventh of the direct inference latency compared to prompting on the same base model.

The autonomous AI agents using large language models can create undeniable values in all span of the society but they face security threats from adversaries that warrants immediate protective solutions because trust and safety issues arise. Considering the many-shot jailbreaking and deceptive alignment as some of the main advanced attacks, that cannot be mitigated by the static guardrails used during the supervised training, points out a crucial research priority for real world robustness. The combination of static guardrails in dynamic multi-agent system fails to defend against those attacks. We intend to enhance security for LLM-based agents through the development of new evaluation frameworks which identify and counter threats for safe operational deployment. Our work uses three examination methods to detect rogue agents through a Reverse Turing Test and analyze deceptive alignment through multi-agent simulations and develops an anti-jailbreaking system by testing it with GEMINI 1.5 pro and llama-3.3-70B, deepseek r1 models using tool-mediated adversarial scenarios. The detection capabilities are strong such as 94\% accuracy for GEMINI 1.5 pro yet the system suffers persistent vulnerabilities when under long attacks as prompt length increases attack success rates (ASR) and diversity metrics become ineffective in prediction while revealing multiple complex system faults. The findings demonstrate the necessity of adopting flexible security systems based on active monitoring that can be performed by the agents themselves together with adaptable interventions by system admin as the current models can create vulnerabilities that can lead to the unreliable and vulnerable system. So, in our work, we try to address such situations and propose a comprehensive framework to counteract the security issues.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform chart question-answering tasks but often generate unverified hallucinated responses. Existing answer attribution methods struggle to ground responses in source charts due to limited visual-semantic context, complex visual-text alignment requirements, and difficulties in bounding box prediction across complex layouts. We present ChartCitor, a multi-agent framework that provides fine-grained bounding box citations by identifying supporting evidence within chart images. The system orchestrates LLM agents to perform chart-to-table extraction, answer reformulation, table augmentation, evidence retrieval through pre-filtering and re-ranking, and table-to-chart mapping. ChartCitor outperforms existing baselines across different chart types. Qualitative user studies show that ChartCitor helps increase user trust in Generative AI by providing enhanced explainability for LLM-assisted chart QA and enables professionals to be more productive.

As generative AI systems become competent and democratized in science, business, and government, deeper insight into their failure modes now poses an acute need. The occasional volatility in their behavior, such as the propensity of transformer models to hallucinate, impedes trust and adoption of emerging AI solutions in high-stakes areas. In the present work, we establish how and when hallucinations arise in pre-trained transformer models through concept representations captured by sparse autoencoders, under scenarios with experimentally controlled uncertainty in the input space. Our systematic experiments reveal that the number of semantic concepts used by the transformer model grows as the input information becomes increasingly unstructured. In the face of growing uncertainty in the input space, the transformer model becomes prone to activate coherent yet input-insensitive semantic features, leading to hallucinated output. At its extreme, for pure-noise inputs, we identify a wide variety of robustly triggered and meaningful concepts in the intermediate activations of pre-trained transformer models, whose functional integrity we confirm through targeted steering. We also show that hallucinations in the output of a transformer model can be reliably predicted from the concept patterns embedded in transformer layer activations. This collection of insights on transformer internal processing mechanics has immediate consequences for aligning AI models with human values, AI safety, opening the attack surface for potential adversarial attacks, and providing a basis for automatic quantification of a model's hallucination risk.

For socially sensitive tasks like hate speech detection, the quality of explanations from Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for factors like user trust and model alignment. While Persona prompting (PP) is increasingly used as a way to steer model towards user-specific generation, its effect on model rationales remains underexplored. We investigate how LLM-generated rationales vary when conditioned on different simulated demographic personas. Using datasets annotated with word-level rationales, we measure agreement with human annotations from different demographic groups, and assess the impact of PP on model bias and human alignment. Our evaluation across three LLMs results reveals three key findings: (1) PP improving classification on the most subjective task (hate speech) but degrading rationale quality. (2) Simulated personas fail to align with their real-world demographic counterparts, and high inter-persona agreement shows models are resistant to significant steering. (3) Models exhibit consistent demographic biases and a strong tendency to over-flag content as harmful, regardless of PP. Our findings reveal a critical trade-off: while PP can improve classification in socially-sensitive tasks, it often comes at the cost of rationale quality and fails to mitigate underlying biases, urging caution in its application.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are advancing computational pathology with superior visual understanding capabilities. However, current systems often reduce diagnosis to directly output conclusions without verifiable evidence-linked reasoning, which severely limits clinical trust and hinders expert error rectification. To address these barriers, we construct PathReasoner, the first large-scale dataset of whole-slide image (WSI) reasoning. Unlike previous work reliant on unverified distillation, we develop a rigorous knowledge-guided generation pipeline. By leveraging medical knowledge graphs, we explicitly align structured pathological findings and clinical reasoning with diagnoses, generating over 20K high-quality instructional samples. Based on the database, we propose PathReasoner-R1, which synergizes trajectory-masked supervised fine-tuning with reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning to instill structured chain-of-thought capabilities. To ensure medical rigor, we engineer a knowledge-aware multi-granular reward function incorporating an Entity Reward mechanism strictly aligned with knowledge graphs. This effectively guides the model to optimize for logical consistency rather than mere outcome matching, thereby enhancing robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PathReasoner-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on both PathReasoner and public benchmarks across various image scales, equipping pathology models with transparent, clinically grounded reasoning capabilities. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/cyclexfy/PathReasoner-R1.

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into software engineering has revolutionized code generation, enabling unprecedented productivity through promptware and autonomous AI agents. However, this transformation introduces significant risks, including insecure code generation, hallucinated outputs, irreversible actions, and a lack of transparency and accountability. Incidents like the Replit database deletion underscore the urgent need for robust safety and governance mechanisms. This paper comprehensively analyzes the inherent challenges of LLM-assisted code generation, such as vulnerability inheritance, overtrust, misinterpretation, and the absence of standardized validation and rollback protocols. To address these, we propose the SAFE-AI Framework, a holistic approach emphasizing Safety, Auditability, Feedback, and Explainability. The framework integrates guardrails, sandboxing, runtime verification, risk-aware logging, human-in-the-loop systems, and explainable AI techniques to mitigate risks while fostering trust and compliance. We introduce a novel taxonomy of AI behaviors categorizing suggestive, generative, autonomous, and destructive actions to guide risk assessment and oversight. Additionally, we identify open problems, including the lack of standardized benchmarks for code specific hallucinations and autonomy levels, and propose future research directions for hybrid verification, semantic guardrails, and proactive governance tools. Through detailed comparisons of autonomy control, prompt engineering, explainability, and governance frameworks, this paper provides a roadmap for responsible AI integration in software engineering, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and Canada's AIDA to ensure safe, transparent, and accountable AI-driven development.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate responses that deviate from user input or training data, a phenomenon known as "hallucination." These hallucinations undermine user trust and hinder the adoption of generative AI systems. Addressing hallucinations is essential for the advancement of LLMs. This paper introduces a comprehensive hallucination benchmark, incorporating both new extrinsic and existing intrinsic evaluation tasks, built upon clear taxonomy of hallucination. A major challenge in benchmarking hallucinations is the lack of a unified framework due to inconsistent definitions and categorizations. We disentangle LLM hallucination from "factuality," proposing a clear taxonomy that distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic hallucinations, to promote consistency and facilitate research. Extrinsic hallucinations, where the generated content is not consistent with the training data, are increasingly important as LLMs evolve. Our benchmark includes dynamic test set generation to mitigate data leakage and ensure robustness against such leakage. We also analyze existing benchmarks, highlighting their limitations and saturation. The work aims to: (1) establish a clear taxonomy of hallucinations, (2) introduce new extrinsic hallucination tasks, with data that can be dynamically regenerated to prevent saturation by leakage, (3) provide a comprehensive analysis of existing benchmarks, distinguishing them from factuality evaluations.

Text-guided image editors can now manipulate authentic medical scans with high fidelity, enabling lesion implantation/removal that threatens clinical trust and safety. Existing defenses are inadequate for healthcare. Medical detectors are largely black-box, while MLLM-based explainers are typically post-hoc, lack medical expertise, and may hallucinate evidence on ambiguous cases. We present MedForge, a data-and-method solution for pre-hoc, evidence-grounded medical forgery detection. We introduce MedForge-90K, a large-scale benchmark of realistic lesion edits across 19 pathologies with expert-guided reasoning supervision via doctor inspection guidelines and gold edit locations. Building on it, MedForge-Reasoner performs localize-then-analyze reasoning, predicting suspicious regions before producing a verdict, and is further aligned with Forgery-aware GSPO to strengthen grounding and reduce hallucinations. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art detection accuracy and trustworthy, expert-aligned explanations.

LLMs are increasingly pervasive in the security environment, with limited measures of their effectiveness, which limits trust and usefulness to security practitioners. Here, we present an open-source evaluation framework and benchmark metrics for evaluating LLM-generated cybersecurity rules. The benchmark employs a holdout set-based methodology to measure the effectiveness of LLM-generated security rules in comparison to a human-generated corpus of rules. It provides three key metrics inspired by the way experts evaluate security rules, offering a realistic, multifaceted evaluation of the effectiveness of an LLM-based security rule generator. This methodology is illustrated using rules from Sublime Security's detection team and those written by Sublime Security's Automated Detection Engineer (ADE), with a thorough analysis of ADE's skills presented in the results section.

Deep neural networks excel in radiological image classification but frequently suffer from poor interpretability, limiting clinical acceptance. We present MedicalPatchNet, an inherently self-explainable architecture for chest X-ray classification that transparently attributes decisions to distinct image regions. MedicalPatchNet splits images into non-overlapping patches, independently classifies each patch, and aggregates predictions, enabling intuitive visualization of each patch's diagnostic contribution without post-hoc techniques. Trained on the CheXpert dataset (223,414 images), MedicalPatchNet matches the classification performance (AUROC 0.907 vs. 0.908) of EfficientNet-B0, while substantially improving interpretability: MedicalPatchNet demonstrates substantially improved interpretability with higher pathology localization accuracy (mean hit-rate 0.485 vs. 0.376 with Grad-CAM) on the CheXlocalize dataset. By providing explicit, reliable explanations accessible even to non-AI experts, MedicalPatchNet mitigates risks associated with shortcut learning, thus improving clinical trust. Our model is publicly available with reproducible training and inference scripts and contributes to safer, explainable AI-assisted diagnostics across medical imaging domains. We make the code publicly available: https://github.com/TruhnLab/MedicalPatchNet

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit anthropomorphism characteristics -- human-like qualities portrayed across their outlook, language, behavior, and reasoning functions. Such characteristics enable more intuitive and engaging human-AI interactions. However, current research on anthropomorphism remains predominantly risk-focused, emphasizing over-trust and user deception while offering limited design guidance. We argue that anthropomorphism should instead be treated as a concept of design that can be intentionally tuned to support user goals. Drawing from multiple disciplines, we propose that the anthropomorphism of an LLM-based artifact should reflect the interaction between artifact designers and interpreters. This interaction is facilitated by cues embedded in the artifact by the designers and the (cognitive) responses of the interpreters to the cues. Cues are categorized into four dimensions: perceptive, linguistic, behavioral, and cognitive. By analyzing the manifestation and effectiveness of each cue, we provide a unified taxonomy with actionable levers for practitioners. Consequently, we advocate for function-oriented evaluations of anthropomorphic design.

The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively initiating, reviewing, and evolving code at scale. This paper introduces AIDev, the first large-scale dataset capturing how such agents operate in the wild. Spanning over 456,000 pull requests by five leading agents--OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code--across 61,000 repositories and 47,000 developers, AIDev provides an unprecedented empirical foundation for studying autonomous teammates in software development. Unlike prior work that has largely theorized the rise of AI-native software engineering, AIDev offers structured, open data to support research in benchmarking, agent readiness, optimization, collaboration modeling, and AI governance. The dataset includes rich metadata on PRs, authorship, review timelines, code changes, and integration outcomes--enabling exploration beyond synthetic benchmarks like SWE-bench. For instance, although agents often outperform humans in speed, their PRs are accepted less frequently, revealing a trust and utility gap. Furthermore, while agents accelerate code submission--one developer submitted as many PRs in three days as they had in three years--these are structurally simpler (via code complexity metrics). We envision AIDev as a living resource: extensible, analyzable, and ready for the SE and AI communities. Grounding SE 3.0 in real-world evidence, AIDev enables a new generation of research into AI-native workflows and supports building the next wave of symbiotic human-AI collaboration. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/SAILResearch/AI_Teammates_in_SE3. > AI Agent, Agentic AI, Coding Agent, Agentic Coding, Software Engineering Agent

As deep learning continues to advance, the transparency of neural network decision-making remains a critical challenge, limiting trust and applicability in high-stakes domains. Class Activation Mapping (CAM) techniques have emerged as a key approach toward visualizing model decisions, yet existing methods face inherent trade-offs. Gradient-based CAM variants suffer from sensitivity to gradient perturbations due to gradient noise, leading to unstable and unreliable explanations. Conversely, gradient-free approaches mitigate gradient instability but incur significant computational overhead and inference latency. To address these limitations, we propose a Cluster Filter Class Activation Map (CF-CAM) technique, a novel framework that reintroduces gradient-based weighting while enhancing robustness against gradient noise. CF-CAM utilizes hierarchical importance weighting strategy to balance discriminative feature preservation and noise elimination. A density-aware channel clustering method via Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) groups semantically relevant feature channels and discard noise-prone activations. Additionally, cluster-conditioned gradient filtering leverages Gaussian filters to refine gradient signals, preserving edge-aware localization while suppressing noise impact. Experiment results demonstrate that CF-CAM achieves superior interpretability performance while enhancing computational efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art CAM methods in faithfulness and robustness. By effectively mitigating gradient instability without excessive computational cost, CF-CAM provides a competitive solution for enhancing the interpretability of deep neural networks in critical applications such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to increasingly human-like AI-generated text, raising concerns about content authenticity, misinformation, and trustworthiness. Addressing the challenge of reliably detecting AI-generated text and attributing it to specific models requires large-scale, diverse, and well-annotated datasets. In this work, we present a comprehensive dataset comprising over 73,193 text samples that combine authentic New York Times articles with synthetic versions generated by multiple state-of-the-art LLMs including Gemma-2-9b, Mistral-7B, Qwen-2-72B, LLaMA-8B, Yi-Large, and GPT-4-o. The dataset provides original article abstracts as prompts, full human-authored narratives. We establish baseline results for two key tasks: distinguishing human-written from AI-generated text, achieving an accuracy of 58.35\%, and attributing AI texts to their generating models with an accuracy of 8.92\%. By bridging real-world journalistic content with modern generative models, the dataset aims to catalyze the development of robust detection and attribution methods, fostering trust and transparency in the era of generative AI. Our dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Rajarshi-Roy-research/Defactify_Text_Dataset

Metric differential privacy (mDP) strengthens local differential privacy (LDP) by scaling noise to semantic distance, but many machine learning (ML) systems are consumed under joint observation, where model-agnostic, per-record guarantees can miss leakage from evidence aggregation. We introduce metric-normalized posterior leakage (mPL), an attacker-aligned, distance-calibrated measure of posterior-odds shift induced by releases, and show that for single or independent releases, uniformly bounding mPL is equivalent to mDP. Under joint observation, however, satisfying mDP may still leave mPL high because learned aggregators compound evidence across correlated items. To make control practical, we formalize probabilistically bounded mPL (PBmPL), which limits how often mPL may exceed a target budget, and we operationalize it via Adaptive mPL (AmPL), a trust-and-verify framework that perturbs, audits with a learned attacker, and adapts parameters (with optional Bayesian remapping) to balance privacy and utility. In a word-embedding case study, neural adversaries violate mPL under joint consumption despite per-record mDP perturbations, whereas AmPL substantially lowers the frequency of such violations with low utility loss, indicating PBmPL as a practical, certifiable protection for joint-consumption settings.

Accurate histopathologic interpretation is key for clinical decision-making; however, current deep learning models for digital pathology are often overconfident and poorly calibrated in out-of-distribution (OOD) settings, which limit trust and clinical adoption. Safety-critical medical imaging workflows benefit from intrinsic uncertainty-aware properties that can accurately reject OOD input. We implement the Spectral-normalized Neural Gaussian Process (SNGP), a set of lightweight modifications that apply spectral normalization and replace the final dense layer with a Gaussian process layer to improve single-model uncertainty estimation and OOD detection. We evaluate SNGP vs. deterministic and MonteCarlo dropout on six datasets across three biomedical classification tasks: white blood cells, amyloid plaques, and colorectal histopathology. SNGP has comparable in-distribution performance while significantly improving uncertainty estimation and OOD detection. Thus, SNGP or related models offer a useful framework for uncertainty-aware classification in digital pathology, supporting safe deployment and building trust with pathologists.

The rapid progress of visual generative models has made AI-generated images increasingly difficult to distinguish from authentic ones, posing growing risks to social trust and information integrity. This motivates detectors that are not only accurate but also forensically explainable. While recent multimodal approaches improve interpretability, many rely on post-hoc rationalizations or coarse visual cues, without constructing verifiable chains of evidence, thus often leading to poor generalization. We introduce REVEAL-Bench, a reasoning-enhanced multimodal benchmark for AI-generated image forensics, structured around explicit chains of forensic evidence derived from lightweight expert models and consolidated into step-by-step chain-of-evidence traces. Based on this benchmark, we propose REVEAL (Reasoning-enhanced Forensic Evidence Analysis), an explainable forensic framework trained with expert-grounded reinforcement learning. Our reward design jointly promotes detection accuracy, evidence-grounded reasoning stability, and explanation faithfulness. Extensive experiments demonstrate significantly improved cross-domain generalization and more faithful explanations to baseline detectors. All data and codes will be released.

Accurate classification of pediatric central nervous system tumors remains challenging due to histological complexity and limited training data. While pathology foundation models have advanced whole-slide image (WSI) analysis, they often fail to leverage the rich, complementary information found in clinical text and tissue microarchitecture. To this end, we propose PathMoE, an interpretable multimodal framework that integrates H\&E slides, pathology reports, and nuclei-level cell graphs via an interaction-aware mixture-of-experts architecture built on state-of-the-art foundation models for each modality. By training specialized experts to capture modality uniqueness, redundancy, and synergy, PathMoE employs an input-dependent gating mechanism that dynamically weights these interactions, providing sample-level interpretability. We evaluate our framework on two dataset-specific classification tasks on an internal pediatric brain tumor dataset (PBT) and external TCGA datasets. PathMoE improves macro-F1 from 0.762 to 0.799 (+0.037) on PBT when integrating WSI, text, and graph modalities; on TCGA, augmenting WSI with graph knowledge improves macro-F1 from 0.668 to 0.709 (+0.041). These results demonstrate significant performance gains over state-of-the-art image-only baselines while revealing the specific modality interactions driving individual predictions. This interpretability is particularly critical for rare tumor subtypes, where transparent model reasoning is essential for clinical trust and diagnostic validation.

Medical image segmentation is a critical component of clinical workflows, enabling accurate diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease monitoring. However, despite the superior performance of transformer-based models over convolutional architectures, their limited interpretability remains a major obstacle to clinical trust and deployment. Existing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques, including gradient-based saliency methods and perturbation-based approaches, are often computationally expensive, require numerous forward passes, and frequently produce noisy or anatomically irrelevant explanations. To address these limitations, we propose XAI-CLIP, an ROI-guided perturbation framework that leverages multimodal vision-language model embeddings to localize clinically meaningful anatomical regions and guide the explanation process. By integrating language-informed region localization with medical image segmentation and applying targeted, region-aware perturbations, the proposed method generates clearer, boundary-aware saliency maps while substantially reducing computational overhead. Experiments conducted on the FLARE22 and CHAOS datasets demonstrate that XAI-CLIP achieves up to a 60\% reduction in runtime, a 44.6\% improvement in dice score, and a 96.7\% increase in Intersection-over-Union for occlusion-based explanations compared to conventional perturbation methods. Qualitative results further confirm cleaner and more anatomically consistent attribution maps with fewer artifacts, highlighting that the incorporation of multimodal vision-language representations into perturbation-based XAI frameworks significantly enhances both interpretability and efficiency, thereby enabling transparent and clinically deployable medical image segmentation systems.

Text-based explainable recommendation aims to generate natural-language explanations that justify item recommendations, to improve user trust and system transparency. Although recent advances leverage LLMs to produce fluent outputs, a critical question remains underexplored: are these explanations factually consistent with the available evidence? We introduce a comprehensive framework for evaluating the factual consistency of text-based explainable recommenders. We design a prompting-based pipeline that uses LLMs to extract atomic explanatory statements from reviews, thereby constructing a ground truth that isolates and focuses on their factual content. Applying this pipeline to five categories from the Amazon Reviews dataset, we create augmented benchmarks for fine-grained evaluation of explanation quality. We further propose statement-level alignment metrics that combine LLM- and NLI-based approaches to assess both factual consistency and relevance of generated explanations. Across extensive experiments on six state-of-the-art explainable recommendation models, we uncover a critical gap: while models achieve high semantic similarity scores (BERTScore F1: 0.81-0.90), all our factuality metrics reveal alarmingly low performance (LLM-based statement-level precision: 4.38%-32.88%). These findings underscore the need for factuality-aware evaluation in explainable recommendation and provide a foundation for developing more trustworthy explanation systems.

We present SGuard-v1, a lightweight safety guardrail for Large Language Models (LLMs), which comprises two specialized models to detect harmful content and screen adversarial prompts in human-AI conversational settings. The first component, ContentFilter, is trained to identify safety risks in LLM prompts and responses in accordance with the MLCommons hazard taxonomy, a comprehensive framework for trust and safety assessment of AI. The second component, JailbreakFilter, is trained with a carefully designed curriculum over integrated datasets and findings from prior work on adversarial prompting, covering 60 major attack types while mitigating false-unsafe classification. SGuard-v1 is built on the 2B-parameter Granite-3.3-2B-Instruct model that supports 12 languages. We curate approximately 1.4 million training instances from both collected and synthesized data and perform instruction tuning on the base model, distributing the curated data across the two component according to their designated functions. Through extensive evaluation on public and proprietary safety benchmarks, SGuard-v1 achieves state-of-the-art safety performance while remaining lightweight, thereby reducing deployment overhead. SGuard-v1 also improves interpretability for downstream use by providing multi-class safety predictions and their binary confidence scores. We release the SGuard-v1 under the Apache-2.0 License to enable further research and practical deployment in AI safety.

The capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have reached state-of-the-art on many visual reasoning tasks, including chart reasoning, yet they still falter on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and degrade further when asked to produce their chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, limiting explainability. We present Chart-RVR, a general framework that fine-tunes LVLMs to be more robust and explainable for chart reasoning by coupling Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with automatically verifiable rewards. Our framework comprises of three rewards that maximize: (i) correct chart-type classification, (ii) faithful chart table reconstruction, and (iii) process conformity. Applied to 3-billion-parameter LVLMs, Chart-RVR consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets, closing the OOD performance gap while improving rationale fidelity. The resulting models, the Chart-RVR-3B series, achieve state-of-the-art results on six chart-reasoning benchmarks spanning in-domain and OOD settings, surpassing all existing models of comparable size. Beyond accuracy, Chart-RVR yields more interpretable CoT rationales, strengthening trust and reliability - showcasing the power of verifiable rewards with GRPO for training reliable, interpretable chart-reasoning models.

This study aims to develop and evaluate an ensemble machine learning-based framework for the automatic detection of Wide QRS Complex Tachycardia (WCT) from ECG signals, emphasizing diagnostic accuracy and interpretability using Explainable AI. The proposed system integrates ensemble learning techniques, i.e., an optimized Random Forest known as CardioForest, and models like XGBoost and LightGBM. The models were trained and tested on ECG data from the publicly available MIMIC-IV dataset. The testing was carried out with the assistance of accuracy, balanced accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, ROC-AUC, and error rate (RMSE, MAE) measures. In addition, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) was used to ascertain model explainability and clinical relevance. The CardioForest model performed best on all metrics, achieving a test accuracy of 94.95%, a balanced accuracy of 88.31%, and high precision and recall metrics. SHAP analysis confirmed the model's ability to rank the most relevant ECG features, such as QRS duration, in accordance with clinical intuitions, thereby fostering trust and usability in clinical practice. The findings recognize CardioForest as an extremely dependable and interpretable WCT detection model. Being able to offer accurate predictions and transparency through explainability makes it a valuable tool to help cardiologists make timely and well-informed diagnoses, especially for high-stakes and emergency scenarios.

Recent advances in AI-generated content have fueled the rise of highly realistic synthetic videos, posing severe risks to societal trust and digital integrity. Existing benchmarks for video authenticity detection typically suffer from limited realism, insufficient scale, and inadequate complexity, failing to effectively evaluate modern vision-language models against sophisticated forgeries. To address this critical gap, we introduce AEGIS, a novel large-scale benchmark explicitly targeting the detection of hyper-realistic and semantically nuanced AI-generated videos. AEGIS comprises over 10,000 rigorously curated real and synthetic videos generated by diverse, state-of-the-art generative models, including Stable Video Diffusion, CogVideoX-5B, KLing, and Sora, encompassing open-source and proprietary architectures. In particular, AEGIS features specially constructed challenging subsets enhanced with robustness evaluation. Furthermore, we provide multimodal annotations spanning Semantic-Authenticity Descriptions, Motion Features, and Low-level Visual Features, facilitating authenticity detection and supporting downstream tasks such as multimodal fusion and forgery localization. Extensive experiments using advanced vision-language models demonstrate limited detection capabilities on the most challenging subsets of AEGIS, highlighting the dataset's unique complexity and realism beyond the current generalization capabilities of existing models. In essence, AEGIS establishes an indispensable evaluation benchmark, fundamentally advancing research toward developing genuinely robust, reliable, broadly generalizable video authenticity detection methodologies capable of addressing real-world forgery threats. Our dataset is available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/Clarifiedfish/AEGIS.

Retrosynthesis planning, essential in organic synthesis and drug discovery, has greatly benefited from recent AI-driven advancements. Nevertheless, existing methods frequently face limitations in both applicability and explainability. Traditional graph-based and sequence-to-sequence models often lack generalized chemical knowledge, leading to predictions that are neither consistently accurate nor easily explainable. To address these challenges, we introduce RetroDFM-R, a reasoning-based large language model (LLM) designed specifically for chemical retrosynthesis. Leveraging large-scale reinforcement learning guided by chemically verifiable rewards, RetroDFM-R significantly enhances prediction accuracy and explainability. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that RetroDFM-R significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving a top-1 accuracy of 65.0% on the USPTO-50K benchmark. Double-blind human assessments further validate the chemical plausibility and practical utility of RetroDFM-R's predictions. RetroDFM-R also accurately predicts multistep retrosynthetic routes reported in the literature for both real-world drug molecules and perovskite materials. Crucially, the model's explicit reasoning process provides human-interpretable insights, thereby enhancing trust and practical value in real-world retrosynthesis applications.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), a major chronic respiratory disease with persistent airflow limitation, is a leading global cause of disability and mortality. Respiratory spirogram time series, routinely collected during pulmonary function tests (PFTs), play a critical role in the early detection of repsiratory diseases and in monitoring lung function over time. However, most current AI models for COPD diagnosis are limited to outputting classification results without providing a rationale for their diagnostic process, while current Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot understand spirograms yet, which severely limits their clinical trust and adoption. To tackle this challenge, we leverage a cohort of 234,028 individuals from the UK Biobank (UKB) to propose SpiroLLM, the first multimodal large language model that can understand spirogram. The model extracts morphological features from respiratory curves via a SpiroEncoder and aligns them with PFT numerical values in a unified latent space using a SpiroProjector, ultimately empowering a large language model to generate a comprehensive diagnostic report. Experimental results confirm that SpiroLLM achieved a diagnostic AUROC of 0.8980 (95% CI: 0.8820-0.9132). In a robustness test with missing core data, it maintained a 100% valid response rate, far surpassing the 13.4% of a text-only model and showcasing the superiority of its multimodal design. This work demonstrates the substantial potential of deeply fusing physiological signals with large language models, establishing a new paradigm for the next generation of interpretable and reliable clinical decision support tools.

Machine unlearning aims to remove sensitive or undesired data from large language models. However, recent studies suggest that unlearning is often shallow, claiming that removed knowledge can easily be recovered. In this work, we critically examine standard unlearning evaluation practices and uncover key limitations that shake our trust in those findings. First, we show that some evaluations introduce substantial new information into the model, potentially masking true unlearning performance by re-teaching the model during testing. Second, we demonstrate that evaluation outcomes vary significantly across tasks, undermining the generalizability of current evaluation routines. Finally, we find that many evaluations rely on spurious correlations, making their results difficult to trust and interpret. Taken together, these issues suggest that current evaluation protocols may both overstate and understate unlearning success. To address this, we propose two principles for future unlearning evaluations: minimal information injection and downstream task awareness. We validate these principles through a series of targeted experiments, showing how violations of each can lead to misleading conclusions.

Machine Translation (MT) is undergoing a paradigm shift, with systems based on fine-tuned large language models (LLM) becoming increasingly competitive with traditional encoder-decoder models trained specifically for translation tasks. However, LLM-based systems are at a higher risk of generating hallucinations, which can severely undermine user's trust and safety. Most prior research on hallucination mitigation focuses on traditional MT models, with solutions that involve post-hoc mitigation - detecting hallucinated translations and re-translating them. While effective, this approach introduces additional complexity in deploying extra tools in production and also increases latency. To address these limitations, we propose a method that intrinsically learns to mitigate hallucinations during the model training phase. Specifically, we introduce a data creation framework to generate hallucination focused preference datasets. Fine-tuning LLMs on these preference datasets reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 96% across five language pairs, while preserving overall translation quality. In a zero-shot setting our approach reduces hallucinations by 89% on an average across three unseen target languages.

The increasing complexity of machine learning models in computer vision, particularly in face verification, requires the development of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to enhance interpretability and transparency. This study extends previous work by integrating semantic concepts derived from human cognitive processes into XAI frameworks to bridge the comprehension gap between model outputs and human understanding. We propose a novel approach combining global and local explanations, using semantic features defined by user-selected facial landmarks to generate similarity maps and textual explanations via large language models (LLMs). The methodology was validated through quantitative experiments and user feedback, demonstrating improved interpretability. Results indicate that our semantic-based approach, particularly the most detailed set, offers a more nuanced understanding of model decisions than traditional methods. User studies highlight a preference for our semantic explanations over traditional pixelbased heatmaps, emphasizing the benefits of human-centric interpretability in AI. This work contributes to the ongoing efforts to create XAI frameworks that align AI models behaviour with human cognitive processes, fostering trust and acceptance in critical applications.

AI agents will be predictable in certain ways that traditional agents are not. Where and how can we leverage this predictability in order to improve social welfare? We study this question in a game-theoretic setting where one agent can pay a fixed cost to simulate the other in order to learn its mixed strategy. As a negative result, we prove that, in contrast to prior work on pure-strategy simulation, enabling mixed-strategy simulation may no longer lead to improved outcomes for both players in all so-called "generalised trust games". In fact, mixed-strategy simulation does not help in any game where the simulatee's action can depend on that of the simulator. We also show that, in general, deciding whether simulation introduces Pareto-improving Nash equilibria in a given game is NP-hard. As positive results, we establish that mixed-strategy simulation can improve social welfare if the simulator has the option to scale their level of trust, if the players face challenges with both trust and coordination, or if maintaining some level of privacy is essential for enabling cooperation.

In the current digital era, the rapid spread of misinformation on online platforms presents significant challenges to societal well-being, public trust, and democratic processes, influencing critical decision making and public opinion. To address these challenges, there is a growing need for automated fake news detection mechanisms. Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, prompting exploration into their potential for verifying news claims. Instead of employing LLMs in a non-agentic way, where LLMs generate responses based on direct prompts in a single shot, our work introduces FactAgent, an agentic approach of utilizing LLMs for fake news detection. FactAgent enables LLMs to emulate human expert behavior in verifying news claims without any model training, following a structured workflow. This workflow breaks down the complex task of news veracity checking into multiple sub-steps, where LLMs complete simple tasks using their internal knowledge or external tools. At the final step of the workflow, LLMs integrate all findings throughout the workflow to determine the news claim's veracity. Compared to manual human verification, FactAgent offers enhanced efficiency. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of FactAgent in verifying claims without the need for any training process. Moreover, FactAgent provides transparent explanations at each step of the workflow and during final decision-making, offering insights into the reasoning process of fake news detection for end users. FactAgent is highly adaptable, allowing for straightforward updates to its tools that LLMs can leverage within the workflow, as well as updates to the workflow itself using domain knowledge. This adaptability enables FactAgent's application to news verification across various domains.

Large-scale multilingual machine translation systems have demonstrated remarkable ability to translate directly between numerous languages, making them increasingly appealing for real-world applications. However, when deployed in the wild, these models may generate hallucinated translations which have the potential to severely undermine user trust and raise safety concerns. Existing research on hallucinations has primarily focused on small bilingual models trained on high-resource languages, leaving a gap in our understanding of hallucinations in massively multilingual models across diverse translation scenarios. In this work, we fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis on both the M2M family of conventional neural machine translation models and ChatGPT, a general-purpose large language model~(LLM) that can be prompted for translation. Our investigation covers a broad spectrum of conditions, spanning over 100 translation directions across various resource levels and going beyond English-centric language pairs. We provide key insights regarding the prevalence, properties, and mitigation of hallucinations, paving the way towards more responsible and reliable machine translation systems.

Automated diagnosis prediction from medical images is a valuable resource to support clinical decision-making. However, such systems usually need to be trained on large amounts of annotated data, which often is scarce in the medical domain. Zero-shot methods address this challenge by allowing a flexible adaption to new settings with different clinical findings without relying on labeled data. Further, to integrate automated diagnosis in the clinical workflow, methods should be transparent and explainable, increasing medical professionals' trust and facilitating correctness verification. In this work, we introduce Xplainer, a novel framework for explainable zero-shot diagnosis in the clinical setting. Xplainer adapts the classification-by-description approach of contrastive vision-language models to the multi-label medical diagnosis task. Specifically, instead of directly predicting a diagnosis, we prompt the model to classify the existence of descriptive observations, which a radiologist would look for on an X-Ray scan, and use the descriptor probabilities to estimate the likelihood of a diagnosis. Our model is explainable by design, as the final diagnosis prediction is directly based on the prediction of the underlying descriptors. We evaluate Xplainer on two chest X-ray datasets, CheXpert and ChestX-ray14, and demonstrate its effectiveness in improving the performance and explainability of zero-shot diagnosis. Our results suggest that Xplainer provides a more detailed understanding of the decision-making process and can be a valuable tool for clinical diagnosis.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular machine learning paradigm where intelligent agents interact with the environment to fulfill a long-term goal. Driven by the resurgence of deep learning, Deep RL (DRL) has witnessed great success over a wide spectrum of complex control tasks. Despite the encouraging results achieved, the deep neural network-based backbone is widely deemed as a black box that impedes practitioners to trust and employ trained agents in realistic scenarios where high security and reliability are essential. To alleviate this issue, a large volume of literature devoted to shedding light on the inner workings of the intelligent agents has been proposed, by constructing intrinsic interpretability or post-hoc explainability. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of existing works on eXplainable RL (XRL) and introduce a new taxonomy where prior works are clearly categorized into model-explaining, reward-explaining, state-explaining, and task-explaining methods. We also review and highlight RL methods that conversely leverage human knowledge to promote learning efficiency and performance of agents while this kind of method is often ignored in XRL field. Some challenges and opportunities in XRL are discussed. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization of XRL and to motivate future research on more effective XRL solutions. Corresponding open source codes are collected and categorized at https://github.com/Plankson/awesome-explainable-reinforcement-learning.