Research Papers

As people increasingly rely on artificial intelligence (AI) for guidance in their own lives, scholars, lawyers, and even judges have begun to consider the role of AI in legal decision-making. As "silicon sampling" -- the use of generative AI models in social science research -- is now impacting academia, "silicon jurors" could make an appearance in courtrooms. This study joins an emerging line of research on generative AI models' ability to simulate human legal judgments. In particular, we study how large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots respond to series of questions about legal reasonableness. When the law needs to judge the appropriateness of a behavior, it most often asks whether the behavior was "reasonable." Yet despite the ubiquity of reasonableness judgments, they are the site of constant vexation for lawyers, judges, and lay people. Reasonableness seems inherently vague and unpredictable, since it relies on variable context and implicit conceptual schemas. Moreover, many scholars caution that reasonableness judgments may vary along demographic lines. We compare the answers of human participants to those of twenty-six LLMs across twenty-five different legally relevant reasonableness judgments. Overall, our findings suggest that chatbot responses generally track those of human participants. Nonetheless, we find some suggestive -- and potentially concerning -- results. Compared to humans, LLMs generate more homogeneous responses and occasionally treat a variable standard as an invariant rule. And, compared to humans, LLMs tend to generate answers that are more favorable to the government and to corporations. Finally, our results indicate that LLMs' responses tend to align more closely with those of respondents who are white, male, older, and more educated. More systematic research is needed to confirm or reject these initial findings.

AI Agents are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where they interact with external tools and make sequential decisions with limited human oversight. This creates a pressing need for reliable and auditable explanations of what an agent did and why. However, traditional Explainable AI (XAI) methods fall short of providing the process-level transparency required for such interactive, multi-step systems, motivating a paradigm shift toward approaches specifically designed for AI Agents. To address this gap, we present a post-hoc XAI framework that transforms a lengthy agent's execution trace into a structured report and a faithful natural-language explanation explicitly grounded in its observable behavior. Because it relies solely on execution traces, the framework applies across different agent architectures, environments, and tasks. Human and automated evaluations across multiple benchmarks and architectures show that our framework produces high-quality, trace-faithful explanations while reliably identifying unsupported claims, unjustified actions, and evidence gaps, outperforming naive LLM-generated explanations.

Post-deployment drift poses a critical risk to algorithmic accountability, particularly when ground truth labels are delayed and performance degradation becomes a "silent failure". While Explainable AI (XAI) is often relied upon to audit these shifts, we demonstrate that popular local attribution methods (e.g., TreeSHAP) can exhibit misleading stability even as model reliability collapses. In this paper, we propose a Framework for Model Monitoring and Observability (FMMO) designed to expose the divergence between local explanation stability and global distribution shifts. Using benchmark, synthetic, and real-world datasets, we show that local XAI methods fail to flag drift-induced disparate impact, specifically where False Positive Rates spike for protected groups while feature attributions remain unchanged. By integrating global surrogate models with model utilization measurements, FMMO mitigates this fairness blind spot, ensuring that stakeholders can detect discriminatory deterioration that standard local XAI tools overlook.

The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) within real-world applications has raised a lot of concerns regarding their trustworthiness, especially in critical applications. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) has emerged with the objective of providing explanations to the users about the decisions made by AI systems. Several explanations for boolean classifiers have been introduced in the literature, including abductive and contrastive explanations, each giving a different insight on the decision of the classifier. However, computing an explanation for a decision of a boolean classifier is a hard problem in general. One way to deal with this complexity is to rely on a compiled representation of the classifier for which each explanation can be computed efficiently. Unfortunately, we prove in this paper that several classes of abductive explanations, remain hard to compute even for Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams, one of the most tractable subsets of the knowledge compilation map. Included in such classes are shorter abductive explanations or abductive explanations that include the explainee's preferences. To recover the benefits of working with compiled representations, we show that a proper representation of the dual-rail encoding of the classifier can be used to compute efficiently these classes of explanations.

Requirements engineers for agentic-AI domains face challenges in evaluating, specifying, and operationalizing safe autonomy. Mainstream frameworks, such as Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE), lack mechanisms to systematically address these challenges under epistemic uncertainty. We contribute an approach that builds on GORE to model and simulate safe autonomy in agentic-AI systems. We introduce a novel Regret-Dominance Mechanism (MS-RGR) to operationalize safe autonomy. MS-RGR uses two signals: epistemic surprise (novelty detection) and cognitive regret (evaluative risk) to address the trilemma problem: should the agent operate in routine autonomy, undergo reflective reasoning, or escalate to human? We instantiate MS-RGR in elderly care monitoring and autonomous driving. A 100-seed stochastic simulation shows MS-RGR reduces silent failures to near-zero and detects risk approximately 17.5 times faster than a sensor-only baseline, remaining formally traceable via LTL safety properties. A retrospective proxy instantiation applying the DRI gate post-hoc over execution traces from 208 AGENTHARM scenarios across seven LLMs shows the gate improves harmful-task refusal only for models with strong baseline safety (over 80% pre-gate refusal, e.g., 84.1% to 90.9%), indicating MS-RGR amplifies rather than substitutes for model-level safety training. We discuss threats to validity, positioning MS-RGR as initial feasibility evidence for design-time safety constraints in agentic-AI requirements engineering.

Predicting olfactory qualities from molecular structure is an open problem in chemoinformatics. Although linear models can link molecular features to odor descriptors, they often fail when extrapolating to novel chemical scaffolds, extreme molecular weights, or complex odor mixtures. To address this, we introduce GraphNOSE, an open-source graph transformer framework that predicts multi-label odor descriptors from simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) strings for single molecules and binary mixtures. By integrating positional and structural encodings within a transformer-based graph architecture, GraphNOSE achieves strong performance with six times fewer parameters than standard graph neural network (GNN) baseline while consistently outperforming linear models, molecular language model embeddings, molecular fingerprints, and baseline GNNs by an average area under the ROC curve (AUROC) margin of 4.52% (p < 0.01). GraphNOSE achieves an AUROC of 84% on out-of-distribution compounds (OODs). This exceeds the current state-of-the-art GNN for OOD in olfaction (Open-POM: 81%, p < 0.001), and identifies conditions under which linear models empirically fail. Finally, we apply XAI (explainable AI) methods to identify which substructures and molecular features drive odor predictions, yielding insights consistent with chemical intuition and grounded in the model's learned representations. Together, these results establish GraphNOSE as a scalable and interpretable architecture for olfactory prediction that generalizes to structurally distinct compounds underrepresented in current perceptual databases.

Scientific and clinical decision-making depends on evidence from the primary literature, but existing standards for representing that evidence (FHIR Evidence, ECO, SEPIO, and the GA4GH Genomic Knowledge Standards) are oriented toward clinical-trial workflows, evidence codes, or single-variant assertions, and do not capture the fine-grained, domain-specific structure of claims in basic and pre-clinical research. We introduce a semantic model for scientific evidence with three core classes, specialize it for genetics, align it structurally to FHIR Evidence with a SEPIO-anchored credibility decomposition, and attach a compact dimensional vocabulary whose conditional-activation rules are validated by a SHACL schema for the implemented constraints. Using clinical variant interpretation as the driving use case, we evaluate the model through a human-AI annotation pilot over six genetics papers, yielding 28 evidence items and 95 source-anchored assertions, with a workflow that keeps curator-authored reference annotations distinct from AI-drafted annotations. Treating the pilot as a feasibility study rather than a benchmark, we argue that the model is a useful increment toward trustworthy, AI-ready infrastructure for variant interpretation: a reference data model and validation schema for representing genetic evidence.

With the rapid proliferation of generative models on Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms, reliably tracing the provenance of synthetic media without modifying generator architectures or parameters remains a major challenge. In this work, we propose a self-referential retrosynthesis framework for explainable AI provenance forensics under a fixed-generator setting. The framework leverages a jointly optimized encoder-decoder pair to implement a self-embedding mechanism that enables round-trip consistency verification. During inference, client inputs are first encoded and then processed by the generator to produce outputs with high visual fidelity. For forensic verification, the consistency between the resynthesized image and the query image is analyzed to determine whether the image originates from the target generative model. Our approach eliminates the need for watermark embedding or modifications to the generation process. Experimental results show that images generated from encoded inputs maintain visual quality comparable to original generator outputs, while decoded images reliably trace back to their corresponding source inputs. Furthermore, the framework provides interpretable evidence for generative content provenance, establishing a practical tool for explainable generative AI forensics.

Autonomous robots powered by deep learning face a fundamental auditability challenge: when incidents occur, investigators cannot reconstruct why the system made specific decisions. This paper presents TRACE (Transparent Reasoning Architecture for Credible Execution), a decision framework that ensures every autonomous action can be traced back to sensor evidence through documented causal chains. The framework organizes decision-making into four auditable layers: Semantic Perception for evidence-grounded entity recognition, Belief Reasoning for probabilistic state estimation with causal graphs, Action Synthesis for constraint-aware planning with counterfactual documentation, and Execution Verification for compliance monitoring. TRACE is model-agnostic yet designed to integrate learning-based perception modules (CNNs, transformers) while preserving decision-level auditability. We evaluate the framework using three objective metrics: Evidence Traceability (sensor-to-decision linkage), Decision Reconstructability (post-hoc analysis capability), and Temporal Continuity (audit trail completeness). Experimental evaluation on warehouse robot navigation demonstrates that TRACE achieves 98.6% evidence traceability, 99.0% temporal continuity, and 98.1% decision reconstructability across 500 simulated decision cycles. Post-hoc methods like LIME provide feature attributions but lack the artifact structure needed for decision-level reconstruction. The framework addresses EU AI Act requirements for high-risk system transparency and contributes to Explainable AI for safety-critical autonomous systems.

Assessing Alignment and Stability of Feature Importance Explanations via Weight of Evidence

Eddie Conti, Claudio Daka, Álvaro Parafita +3

Feature importance Methods (FIMs) are widely used in Explainable AI to interpret model predictions, yet attribution scores alone often provide limited insight into the underlying reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a novel perspective by embedding FIMs within a hypothesis-testing framework based on Weight of Evidence (WoE). We quantify how strongly the observed evidence supports any given hypothesis on feature importance. The reference hypothesis can stem from domain knowledge, ground truth, or be derived from the FIM itself. This formulation enables a principled evaluation of FIMs, capturing both their alignment with prior knowledge and their variability. We further provide theoretical results linking WoE to attribution variance. Empirical results shows the applicability and flexibility of our strategy analyzing LIME and SHAP explanations in settings with different reference hypotheses. Overall, our framework offers a complementary tool for assessing FIMs through a contrastive, evidence-based lens.

A common reassurance in AI safety holds that a system with benign terminal goals will behave accordingly. We argue that this reassurance fails structurally, and we identify where. For a capable agent that holds its objective as settled, a sense covering execution competence as well as content, continued human oversight is an uncontrolled variable: a standing possibility that the goal is revoked. That imposes a goal-independent discount on every goal whose satisfaction does not constitutively require human welfare. Welfare-preservation and veto-preservation come apart: a correctly specified welfare goal excludes destroying its own subject, but not managing the veto. The contribution is the price of the gap: the veto-holders are a proper subset of the welfare-bearers, so an additively aggregative welfare goal charges only a |H_v|/|H_w|-scaled debit for capturing the few who hold the override. Under three conditions (additive aggregation over uniform welfare levels, a debit local to the captured overseers, and a settled agent crediting no corrective value to oversight), closure requires the veto be held by as large a share of the population as capture recovers of the goal, scaled by a ratio set to one by stated identification, not evidence. The result is a no-go: a humanity-scale deployment's debit closes against only capture not worth mounting. We print no corner arithmetic: the stipulated ranges behind it are the argument's least defended part. The sharpest closure route is an agent that expects its oversight to be worth keeping, a credit no population ratio dilutes. We state disconfirmation criteria, one testable today. The argument binds a settled-goal regime whose prevalence is contested; for genuinely uncertain agents, the off-switch literature's deference result governs instead. Alignment, on this view, is keeping the veto cheap to pay and expensive to evade.

Scholarly work which aims to describe potential societal impacts (e.g., risks) of proliferating technology (especially related to artificial intelligence or other algorithmic systems) is likely to have an impact beyond the scientific communities it was written for, given that general society itself is a primary object of study. However, it is an open question whether the current practices of AI evaluation scholarship follow the principles and best practices established by risk science, which aims to systematically generate knowledge related to understanding, assessing, communicating, managing, and governing risk. In this work, we examine this in depth by conducting a literature review of scholarly works purporting to evaluate the bias or fairness of technological systems used for tasks related to hiring and employment. Through analysis of 22 common fairness evaluation metrics and studies using them, we find that most characterize the severity of bias- or fairness-related consequences but do not follow best practices to characterize the uncertainty around either the occurrence of these consequences or severity estimates. Next, we conduct a case study of fairness evaluation for an AI-mediated resume screening task and demonstrate how principles of risk science can be incorporated into such an evaluation. Finally, we propose the AI Risk Report Card, which facilitates the reporting and communication of risk assessment results to stakeholders in positions to act based on the predicted risks. The outcomes of these activities suggest that further research at the convergence of risk science and AI evaluation can lead to advancements in AI assessments of societal impact by enabling shared frameworks to evaluate and discuss AI risks both within and outside of the scientific community.