Research Papers

Understanding Student Attitudes and Acceptability of GenAI Tools in Higher Ed: Scale Development and Evaluation

Xiuxiu Tang, Si Chen, Ying Cheng +3

As generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT become more common in higher education, understanding student attitudes is essential for evaluating their educational impact and supporting responsible AI integration. This study introduces a validated survey instrument designed to assess students' perceptions of GenAI, including its acceptability for academic tasks, perceived influence on learning and careers, and broader societal concerns. We administered the survey to 297 undergraduates at a U.S. university. The instrument includes six thematic domains: institutional understanding, fairness and trust, academic and career influence, societal concerns, and GenAI use in writing and coursework. Exploratory factor analysis revealed four attitudinal dimensions: societal concern, policy clarity, fairness and trust, and career impact. Subgroup analyses identified statistically significant differences across student backgrounds. Male students and those speaking a language other than English at home rated GenAI use in writing tasks as more acceptable. First-year students expressed greater societal concern than upper-year peers. Students from multilingual households perceived greater clarity in institutional policy, while first-generation students reported a stronger belief in GenAI's impact on future careers. This work contributes a practical scale for evaluating the student impact of GenAI tools, informing the design of educational AI systems.

A Conjecture on a Fundamental Trade-Off between Certainty and Scope in Symbolic and Generative AI

Luciano Floridi

This article introduces a conjecture that formalises a fundamental trade-off between provable correctness and broad data-mapping capacity in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. When an AI system is engineered for deductively watertight guarantees (demonstrable certainty about the error-free nature of its outputs) -- as in classical symbolic AI -- its operational domain must be narrowly circumscribed and pre-structured. Conversely, a system that can input high-dimensional data to produce rich information outputs -- as in contemporary generative models -- necessarily relinquishes the possibility of zero-error performance, incurring an irreducible risk of errors or misclassification. By making this previously implicit trade-off explicit and open to rigorous verification, the conjecture significantly reframes both engineering ambitions and philosophical expectations for AI. After reviewing the historical motivations for this tension, the article states the conjecture in information-theoretic form and contextualises it within broader debates in epistemology, formal verification, and the philosophy of technology. It then offers an analysis of its implications and consequences, drawing on notions of underdetermination, prudent epistemic risk, and moral responsibility. The discussion clarifies how, if correct, the conjecture would help reshape evaluation standards, governance frameworks, and hybrid system design. The conclusion underscores the importance of eventually proving or refuting the inequality for the future of trustworthy AI.

Accurate Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis is vital for early intervention. This study presents a hybrid deep learning framework combining Vision Transformers (ViT) and Vision Mamba to detect ASD using eye-tracking data. The model uses attention-based fusion to integrate visual, speech, and facial cues, capturing both spatial and temporal dynamics. Unlike traditional handcrafted methods, it applies state-of-the-art deep learning and explainable AI techniques to enhance diagnostic accuracy and transparency. Tested on the Saliency4ASD dataset, the proposed ViT-Mamba model outperformed existing methods, achieving 0.96 accuracy, 0.95 F1-score, 0.97 sensitivity, and 0.94 specificity. These findings show the model's promise for scalable, interpretable ASD screening, especially in resource-constrained or remote clinical settings where access to expert diagnosis is limited.

Over the past decade, Medical Image Segmentation (MIS) using Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has achieved significant performance improvements and holds great promise for future developments. This paper presents a comprehensive study on MIS based on DNNs. Intelligent Vision Systems are often evaluated based on their output levels, such as Data, Information, Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom (DIKIW),and the state-of-the-art solutions in MIS at these levels are the focus of research. Additionally, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become an important research direction, as it aims to uncover the "black box" nature of previous DNN architectures to meet the requirements of transparency and ethics. The study emphasizes the importance of MIS in disease diagnosis and early detection, particularly for increasing the survival rate of cancer patients through timely diagnosis. XAI and early prediction are considered two important steps in the journey from "intelligence" to "wisdom." Additionally, the paper addresses existing challenges and proposes potential solutions to enhance the efficiency of implementing DNN-based MIS.

Traditional AI safety evaluations on isolated LLMs are insufficient as multi-agent AI ensembles become prevalent, introducing novel emergent risks. This paper introduces the Multi-Agent Emergent Behavior Evaluation (MAEBE) framework to systematically assess such risks. Using MAEBE with the Greatest Good Benchmark (and a novel double-inversion question technique), we demonstrate that: (1) LLM moral preferences, particularly for Instrumental Harm, are surprisingly brittle and shift significantly with question framing, both in single agents and ensembles. (2) The moral reasoning of LLM ensembles is not directly predictable from isolated agent behavior due to emergent group dynamics. (3) Specifically, ensembles exhibit phenomena like peer pressure influencing convergence, even when guided by a supervisor, highlighting distinct safety and alignment challenges. Our findings underscore the necessity of evaluating AI systems in their interactive, multi-agent contexts.

The Multilingual Divide and Its Impact on Global AI Safety

Aidan Peppin, Julia Kreutzer, Alice Schoenauer Sebag +13

Despite advances in large language model capabilities in recent years, a large gap remains in their capabilities and safety performance for many languages beyond a relatively small handful of globally dominant languages. This paper provides researchers, policymakers and governance experts with an overview of key challenges to bridging the "language gap" in AI and minimizing safety risks across languages. We provide an analysis of why the language gap in AI exists and grows, and how it creates disparities in global AI safety. We identify barriers to address these challenges, and recommend how those working in policy and governance can help address safety concerns associated with the language gap by supporting multilingual dataset creation, transparency, and research.

Watermarking has emerged as a leading technical proposal for attributing generative AI content and is increasingly cited in global governance frameworks. This position paper argues that current implementations risk serving as symbolic compliance rather than delivering effective oversight. We identify a growing gap between regulatory expectations and the technical limitations of existing watermarking schemes. Through analysis of policy proposals and industry practices, we show how incentive structures disincentivize robust, auditable deployments. To realign watermarking with governance goals, we propose a three-layer framework encompassing technical standards, audit infrastructure, and enforcement mechanisms. Without enforceable requirements and independent verification, watermarking will remain inadequate for accountability and ultimately undermine broader efforts in AI safety and regulation.

Most General Explanations of Tree Ensembles (Extended Version)

Yacine Izza, Alexey Ignatiev, Sasha Rubin +2

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is critical for attaining trust in the operation of AI systems. A key question of an AI system is ``why was this decision made this way''. Formal approaches to XAI use a formal model of the AI system to identify abductive explanations. While abductive explanations may be applicable to a large number of inputs sharing the same concrete values, more general explanations may be preferred for numeric inputs. So-called inflated abductive explanations give intervals for each feature ensuring that any input whose values fall withing these intervals is still guaranteed to make the same prediction. Inflated explanations cover a larger portion of the input space, and hence are deemed more general explanations. But there can be many (inflated) abductive explanations for an instance. Which is the best? In this paper, we show how to find a most general abductive explanation for an AI decision. This explanation covers as much of the input space as possible, while still being a correct formal explanation of the model's behaviour. Given that we only want to give a human one explanation for a decision, the most general explanation gives us the explanation with the broadest applicability, and hence the one most likely to seem sensible. (The paper has been accepted at IJCAI2025 conference.)

We use the notion of oracle machines and reductions from computability theory to formalise different Human-in-the-loop (HITL) setups for AI systems, distinguishing between trivial human monitoring (i.e., total functions), single endpoint human action (i.e., many-one reductions), and highly involved human-AI interaction (i.e., Turing reductions). We then proceed to show that the legal status and safety of different setups vary greatly. We present a taxonomy to categorise HITL failure modes, highlighting the practical limitations of HITL setups. We then identify omissions in UK and EU legal frameworks, which focus on HITL setups that may not always achieve the desired ethical, legal, and sociotechnical outcomes. We suggest areas where the law should recognise the effectiveness of different HITL setups and assign responsibility in these contexts, avoiding human "scapegoating". Our work shows an unavoidable trade-off between attribution of legal responsibility, and technical explainability. Overall, we show how HITL setups involve many technical design decisions, and can be prone to failures out of the humans' control. Our formalisation and taxonomy opens up a new analytic perspective on the challenges in creating HITL setups, helping inform AI developers and lawmakers on designing HITL setups to better achieve their desired outcomes.

Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to various real-world applications, leveraging massive, web-sourced datasets like Common Crawl, C4, and FineWeb for pretraining. While these datasets provide linguistic data essential for high-quality natural language generation, they often contain harmful content, such as hate speech, misinformation, and biased narratives. Training LLMs on such unfiltered data risks perpetuating toxic behaviors, spreading misinformation, and amplifying societal biases which can undermine trust in LLM-driven applications and raise ethical concerns about their use. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of inappropriate content across these datasets, offering a comprehensive taxonomy that categorizes harmful webpages into Topical and Toxic based on their intent. We also introduce a prompt evaluation dataset, a high-accuracy Topical and Toxic Prompt (TTP), and a transformer-based model (HarmFormer) for harmful content filtering. Additionally, we create a new multi-harm open-ended toxicity benchmark (HAVOC) and provide crucial insights into how models respond to adversarial toxic inputs. We share TTP, TTP-Eval, HAVOC and a sample of C4 inferenced on HarmFormer. Our work offers insights into ensuring safer LLM pretraining and serves as a resource for Responsible AI (RAI) compliance.

In high-stakes domains, such as healthcare and industry, the explainability of AI-based decision-making has become crucial. Without insight into model reasoning, the reliability of these models cannot be ensured. Applications often rely on the time series data type which, unlike the image data type, is underexplored with respect to the development of explainable AI (XAI) techniques. Most existing XAI techniques for time series are focused on point- or subsequence-based explanations. This limits their usability since points and subsequences do not capture all relevant patterns and may not result in human-interpretable explainability. In this paper, we close this gap and propose a concept-based XAI approach (C-SHAP), where concepts are defined as high-level patterns extracted from the time series data. C-SHAP leverages the SHAP method to determine the influence of these concepts on predictions. The effectiveness of the developed framework is illustrated for use cases from healthcare and industry, in the form of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and predictive maintenance.

We investigate bias trends in text-to-image generative models over time, focusing on the increasing availability of models through open platforms like Hugging Face. While these platforms democratize AI, they also facilitate the spread of inherently biased models, often shaped by task-specific fine-tuning. Ensuring ethical and transparent AI deployment requires robust evaluation frameworks and quantifiable bias metrics. To this end, we assess bias across three key dimensions: (i) distribution bias, (ii) generative hallucination, and (iii) generative miss-rate. Analyzing over 100 models, we reveal how bias patterns evolve over time and across generative tasks. Our findings indicate that artistic and style-transferred models exhibit significant bias, whereas foundation models, benefiting from broader training distributions, are becoming progressively less biased. By identifying these systemic trends, we contribute a large-scale evaluation corpus to inform bias research and mitigation strategies, fostering more responsible AI development. Keywords: Bias, Ethical AI, Text-to-Image, Generative Models, Open-Source Models