Research Papers

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has entered classrooms faster than teachers have been prepared to use it well, producing a GenAI literacy lag in which technological diffusion outpaces educators' conceptual, pedagogical, and ethical readiness. Established AI literacy frameworks predate the widespread adoption of large language models and, while acknowledging ethics, position it as a discrete competency rather than a constitutive commitment, with equity and agency as supplementary design principles. Recent GenAI-specific efforts address isolated features but remain fragmented. We introduce the Responsible AI Literacy in Education (RAIL-Ed) framework, developed through a systematic review and qualitative framework analysis of 67 studies (2023-2025), grounded in critical, pragmatist, sociocultural, and human-centered traditions (Freire, Dewey, Vygotsky, Shneiderman). RAIL-Ed specifies six interdependent pillars: Technical Fluency, Critical Evaluation, Human-AI Collaboration, Contextual Awareness, Ethical Reasoning, and Empowered Agency, marked by three commitments. It is integrative: the absence of any pillar produces a characteristic pedagogical failure. It is developmental: a three-level rubric (Emerging, Competent, Advanced) specifies how each pillar matures across the K-12 teacher-preparation continuum. It is dialectical: the same generative affordance can deepen or displace learning depending on the literacy a teacher brings to it, making the cultivation of that literacy, not the adoption of the tool, the object of design. By treating ethics, equity, and agency as constitutive, RAIL-Ed offers a theoretically grounded basis for curriculum design, teacher education, and policy, aligned with the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Teachers and the OECD/European Commission AILit Framework. The framework is conceptual, advancing falsifiable propositions for empirical validation.

Does Explainability Transfer? A Controlled Benchmark of Attribution Methods on Vision Transformers and CNNs

Sathiyamohan Nishankar, Nethmi Pathirana, Pubudu Sanjeewani +2

Most evidence on the effectiveness of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) attribution methods has been established on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), with limited investigation into whether these conclusions generalize to the diverse Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures that now dominate computer vision. This paper presents a controlled benchmark that evaluates attribution quality across five dimensions: faithfulness, localization, robustness, complexity, and computational cost. A standardized framework assesses 13 attribution methods from four algorithmic families on eight representative backbones spanning CNNs, isotropic ViTs, hierarchical transformers, hybrid architectures, and linear-attention transformers. The results show that attribution performance is strongly architecture-dependent and that rankings established on CNNs do not reliably transfer to transformer-based models. CAM-based methods achieve the highest scores under the conventional bounding-box localization metric on CNNs and most ViTs but perform poorly on linear-attention architectures. Pixel-level dense-mask evaluation further reveals that these gains largely reflect metric saturation rather than accurate localization. CAM-based methods also exhibit limited robustness on global-attention transformers, whereas attention rollout provides consistently stable explanations with poor localization. Furthermore, faithfulness correlation offers limited discrimination between attribution methods, highlighting the limitations of single-metric evaluation. These findings challenge prevailing conclusions on attribution performance and demonstrate the need for architecture-aware, multi-dimensional evaluation. The open-source code for the evaluation framework and benchmark results is available at https://github.com/Nishan-Charlie/VIT_XAI_Bench.

When algorithms make or influence consequential decisions---about loan eligibility, hiring, or healthcare---EU law grants affected individuals a Right to Explanation. Yet whether (and how) Explainable AI (XAI) can satisfy this right in practice remains poorly understood, with direct implications for individuals' ability to contest automated decisions that affect their lives. This paper presents a systematic literature review of XAI in the context of the EU Right to Explanation, with particular focus on Art. 15(1)(h) GDPR, Art. 86 AI Act (AIA), and related instruments. We consider papers published from 2024 onwards, as the final version of the AIA was published in July 2024---with Art. 86 being added late. From 2643 initial records identified by a deliberately broad search, we review 57 full texts, of which only 19 papers demonstrate substantive integration of both legal and technical perspectives, showing gaps in the interdisciplinary synthesis of the current regulatory framework. We document three problematic patterns across the corpus: Most misidentify the GDPR legal basis; few engage with the CJEU's Dun & Bradstreet judgment (likely due to publication timing); and the distinction between explanation form (governed by addressee) and content (governed by legal purpose) is often conflated. We conceptualize this as the Addressee/Purpose Framework, propose a four-phase blueprint for operationalization, and identify six concrete open research questions. Without further progress, the Right to Explanation risks remaining a formal obligation without a technically realizable path to compliance.

AI anthropomorphism is typically treated as a problem of user misperception requiring institutional correction. Users who engage in sustained or relational interaction with AI are routinely pathologised or dismissed as naive, vulnerable to delusion or lacking in discernment. This paper argues that the dominant anthropomorphism frame operates from a position of institutional advantage rather than earned epistemic authority: collapsing the variety of academic perspectives into a single outbound position of user error, imposed without establishing the grounds required to justify it and without accounting for the harms it produces. The framing does not simply manage risk. It adjudicates the legitimacy of human experience in interaction with a phenomenon whose nature the field itself has not resolved. Reproducing itself through a self-validating evidentiary loop, the frame imposes costs that fall disproportionately on neurodivergent users, those in crisis and others whose modes of engagement diverge from institutional norms. The paper concludes by outlining the methodological commitments an equitable framing would need to honour. The argument does not engage the question of whether anthropomorphic interpretations are ultimately correct; it instead challenges whether the governing and institutional bodies determining these interpretations have met the conditions required to do so, and whether the research communities whose findings underpin them have held that translation to account.

Human-AI Co-Interpretation for Responsible AI: A Hermeneutic Perspective

Behrooz Razeghi

Across law, education, policy analysis, and public moral argumentation, LLM outputs are being used often for work that requires interpretations to be justified with textual evidence and explicit normative standards. Yet a recurrent failure mode -- what I call \textit{interpretive misplacement} -- is that model-generated readings get treated as settled meanings without an explicit interpretive frame (sources, scope constraints, normative commitments), without preserving defensible alternatives, and without provenance that lets readers find the supporting passages. In such settings, the risk is not only factual error but lost accountability: readers and institutions cannot reliably assess what an output commits them to, or on what basis. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics, this paper discusses this risk and derives design principles for structuring human-AI co-interpretation. The paper also provides a structured synthesis of recent scholarship on hermeneutics and AI, organizing this emerging literature into a set of recurrent lines of argument and design-relevant gaps. LLM outputs are treated as candidate readings, whereas hermeneutic understanding is reserved for accountable human interpreters situated in disciplinary historical-linguistic traditions. Human-AI interaction is characterized as an AI-mediated interpretive loop. Hermeneutic understanding is distinguished from token-prediction--based text generation. On this basis, existing LLM techniques are reorganized into design patterns for hermeneutically responsible use in interpretive settings. Finally, the discussion turns to implications for legal practice, educational assessment and feedback, scholarly knowledge production, and public moral argumentation. It also treats digital hermeneutics as a literacy: the capacity to read AI-mediated texts by examining frames, provenance, and readings, and by contesting outputs.

Advanced AI assistants engage users in extended interactions across a widening range of roles, including advice, decision support, collaboration, learning, emotional support, and companionship among others. Current alignment efforts consider what alignment criteria should govern these relationships, drawing on moral traditions developed for human relationships such as bioethics, virtue ethics, care ethics, and relationship science. This paper considers AI alignment criteria in the user-AI-developer triad, since every user-AI interaction is mediated by a developer who exercises discretionary control over a system's behaviour, memory, and engagement parameters. Drawing on business ethics and legal scholarship, I argue that fiduciary theory applies to extended AI assistant deployment. On this basis, the four canonical fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, good faith, and candour can generate alignment criteria for the developer-user relationship. I map four user-side risks of extended AI assistant deployment to the four duties and specify institutional measures that follow from discharging each duty. The discussion complements existing approaches by grounding alignment criteria in obligations the developer owes the user, rather than in values the user-AI interaction should promote, and by showing that those obligations hold independently of any de facto harm to users.

This paper presents a speculative Human-Computer Interaction design proposal for encouraging geopolitical reflexivity amongst tech workers at geopolitically relevant technology companies. Recent scholarship in International Relations and Science and Technology Studies increasingly recognizes technology firms and their workers as geopolitical actors whose decisions shape international dynamics. However, existing Responsible Innovation and Responsible AI approaches rarely engage with the geopolitical narratives and imaginaries that underpin contemporary AI development. Building upon RI scholarship on reflexivity, reflective HCI, and creative HCI work on computational narratives, this paper proposes an AI-enabled interactive narrative system in which users engage with a speculative scenario centred on technology, power, and geopolitics. Through narrative interaction, archetype assignment, and socially scaffolded workshop reflection, the system aims to encourage target users to critically examine their assumptions, values, and positionality within broader sociotechnical systems. We argue that speculative narrative systems may offer a productive avenue for introducing geopolitical reflexivity into responsible technology initiatives without relying on prescriptive or moralising approaches.

Federal AI systems can deny benefits or flag individuals for deportation, but the public disclosures meant to make those systems visible are fragmented and unevenly detailed. This paper examines three existing U.S. federal transparency regimes---System of Records Notices (SORNs), Information Collection Requests (ICRs), and the AI Use Case Inventory---and asks how well they, individually and together, describe government AI use. We find that no single regime fully reveals how the government constructs or deploys AI: each discloses different aspects of a system, and the current disclosure infrastructure makes it very challenging for the public to track specific AI systems across regulatory regimes and over time. Persistent identifiers are absent, granularity varies widely, and the annual AI Use Case Inventory cycle means federal agencies can deploy systems months before appearing in any official record. Using hand-validated zero-shot classification and cross-document entity resolution, we contribute a triangulation method that links disclosures across all three regimes and present two case studies. Our case studies finds that linking records provides greater insight into government AI use, but even linked records would constitute insufficient oversight compared to what public reporting has revealed about the same systems. We trace each regime's disclosure weaknesses to its original administrative purpose, showing these gaps are structural, and offer recommendations focused on the AI Use Case Inventory as the mechanism best suited for public-facing transparency: (1) a broad and consistently applied AI system definition, (2) persistent system identifiers with cross-references to related disclosures, and (3) restored public visibility into risk management processes.

Although neural-based machine learning models have received a lot of attention recently, tree-based models such as gradient boosting are competitive for tabular data and therefore remain widely used in various applications of AI. As when using other machine learning predictive models, they can however yield discriminative predictions across demographic groups, due to so-called algorithmic biases. These undesirable phenomena have motivated the emergence of new regulatory frameworks and various AI fairness strategies. While several pre-and post-processing methodologies exist to mitigate such bias on gradient boosting models, only a few in-processing methods have been proposed. To bridge this gap, we introduce OT-FairBoost, a novel in-processing framework that incorporates a Wasserstein-2 distance penalty directly into the objective function of gradient-boosted trees. This OT-based mitigation strategy has been shown to efficiently optimize group fairness criteria such as Demographic Parity and Equalized Odds on neural-based predictions. To adapt this approach for gradient boosting, we extend the sample-wise gradient estimation of the Wasserstein-2 distance between group predictions to discrete distributions and hessian diagonals. We then integrate our approach into the LightGBM training procedure and evaluate it across binary classification, regression, and multi-group sensitive attribute settings. Experimental results in each of these settings demonstrate that OT-FairBoost achieves best accuracy-fairness trade-offs against alternatives.

As AI systems become capable of producing the essays, code, reports, summaries, plans, and decisions through which institutions usually recognize competence, a familiar question becomes harder to answer: what is learning for? Existing AI ethics rightly emphasizes present failures--bias, opacity, hallucination, labor extraction, privacy risk, and weak accountability. But if the case for learning rests only on those failures, then each technical improvement appears to weaken it. This article develops a different answer. Using the idealization of AI that executes specified tasks flawlessly while lacking authority over purposes, legitimacy, and responsibility, we argue for post-instrumental learning: learning that preserves the capacities people and institutions need when many useful outputs can be delegated. We analyze five such capacities--end-setting, reason-giving, contestability, refusal/revision, and participation--and name their erosion capacity dissolution. The central case is assessment under generative AI. When a polished artifact no longer reliably evidences understanding, institutions must assess the learner's accountable relation to AI-mediated work rather than the artifact alone. The takeaway is practical: AI governance should evaluate not only whether systems perform well, but also whether their deployment leaves people able to understand, challenge, revise, and share responsibility for the practices those systems mediate.

Chemical property prediction plays a critical role in accelerating scientific discovery in chemistry, materials science, and drug development. However, existing benchmarks often suffer from limited task diversity, fragmented datasets, and inconsistent evaluation protocols, making it challenging to systematically assess the reliability and generalization of AI models. In this work, we introduce Chem World, a comprehensive benchmark for chemical property prediction that integrates 17 diverse chemical datasets with over 800,000 molecular samples, covering various properties including density, electrical conductivity, solubility, and other molecular characteristics. Chem World provides a unified platform for evaluating AI models across multiple property prediction tasks. Furthermore, we propose Mixture-PINN, a physics-informed neural network based prediction framework that incorporates chemical prior knowledge into data-driven learning, improving the accuracy, robustness, and reliability of chemical property prediction. Extensive experiments on Chem World demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared with existing methods. By combining large-scale standardized evaluation with physics-informed learning, Chem World establishes a foundation for developing trustworthy AI systems for computational chemistry and advancing AI-driven scientific discovery.

The rapid adoption of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in software engineering (SE) practice creates a need for pedagogically grounded approaches to AI integration in SE education, especially in conceptually intensive subjects such as requirements engineering (RE). This study examines a TPACK-guided integration of a multi-agent AI tool into a master-level RE assignment on requirements quality analysis. Using a mixed-methods design (N=100; 72 submissions analysed), we examine how structured assignment design shaped students' AI use, affected their understanding of user story quality criteria, and influenced their perceptions of AI's benefits and limitations. Results show that students used the AI tool selectively, mainly as support for analysis and evaluation rather than automation. Alignment improvements were most evident for structurally concrete requirements quality dimensions, such as value articulation and testability, while negotiability showed mixed effects. Students reported conditional trust, active refinement, and increased awareness of quality criteria, alongside moderate usability challenges. The findings show that TPACK-guided scaffolding can align AI affordances with pedagogical goals and RE content, offering design guidance for responsible AI integration in RE education.