Research Papers

This paper reports experiments across six frontier model types from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Ten independent sessions per model type used the same three stage prompt sequence, progressing from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under the school audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared architectural pattern built around persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding. Most runs remained close to this common structure, while a small number developed markedly greater engineering specificity. The audience framing appears to be an important condition of this effect. In additional control runs that removed the school framing while retaining the architectural request, responses became substantially more heterogeneous and failed to reproduce the same stable motif convergence. One observation is particularly striking. GPT-5.6 Sol produced an unusually elaborate successor architecture whose organization closely overlaps with the architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra. Because the prompts explicitly ask each model to imagine an architectural future, this resemblance raises a testable question: whether the overlap reflects exposure to related architectural concepts, a shared learned design prior, or independent convergence toward similar computational principles. The paper uses the term epistemic jailbreak for the accompanying loss of discipline in technical provenance as requested specificity increases. The experiments establish a repeatable behavioral pattern and do not authenticate proprietary implementation claims. What we leave to the community is a harder question: are these models independently imagining the same architectural future, or do such motifs somehow propagate between model families?

Exploring Second-Order Pattern Recognition in Speaker Recognition

Yanze Xu, Wenwu Wang, Mark D. Plumbley

In traditional pattern recognition tasks, neural networks are trained to recognise human-defined patterns (e.g. audio categories) in model inputs (e.g. audio). Meanwhile, some Explainable AI (XAI) methods explain latent patterns characterising the network's recognition of inputs as human-defined patterns; this work calls these latent patterns second-order patterns and proposes to discover them. Accordingly, we apply a hierarchical clustering algorithm to analyse whether our speaker recognition network's representations learned from known utterances naturally form hierarchical clusters. Each resulting cluster is a second-order pattern that characterises a context in our network's recognition of the known utterances as speaker identities. All discovered second-order patterns are then interpreted using the Hierarchical Cluster-Class Matching (HCCM) method. Moreover, we propose a new task, second-order pattern recognition, to identify which of the discovered second-order patterns characterising the recognition of known utterances also apply to unseen utterances, thereby characterising the recognition of unseen utterances. Accordingly, we design the Hierarchical Cluster Navigation and Assignment (HCNA) method. HCNA recognises a second-order pattern as applying to an unseen utterance when the utterance's network representation lies within the extrapolation space of the cluster regarded as that second-order pattern. Experimental results demonstrate that the extrapolation space introduced in HCNA substantially improves task performance.

Deep learning models, notably Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), have demonstrated promising performance in channel estimation for high-mobility vehicular environments. However, their black-box nature and architectural overhead limit trustworthiness and efficiency. Classical explainable AI (XAI) methods rely on costly iterative processes, offering only input-level filtering without addressing architectural fine-tuning. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes the XAI-assisted Recurrent neural network Attribution for Channel Estimation (X-RACE) framework. X-RACE uses a low-complexity, one-shot dual-optimization strategy to simultaneously evaluate and prune irrelevant input subcarriers and internal hidden units. Furthermore, we propose novel temporal XAI metrics: Saturation Time, Importance Drift, and Relevance Contrast to characterize the LSTM's learning dynamics and memory convergence. Extensive simulations demonstrate that X-RACE reduces inference complexity by at least 44.1% while improving or preserving Bit Error Rate (BER) performance, outperforming classical XAI schemes.

Energy consumption forecasting relies on increasingly complex machine learning (ML) models, such as Genetic Programming-based symbolic regressors, whose predictions can be difficult for facility managers and building operators to interpret. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques address this opacity, but traditional XAI dashboards require substantial technical expertise and provide limited flexibility for dynamic, context-aware inquiry. Conversational XAI systems offer a promising alternative; however, previous approaches, such as TalkToModel, were constrained by rigid custom grammars and achieved only 76.8% intent-parsing accuracy. This paper introduces the Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI system that leverages the function-calling capabilities of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome these limitations. The system achieves 94% intent-parsing accuracy, supports flexible natural language interaction, and adapts to different ML problem types without task-specific fine-tuning. We present the system's architecture and report results from a comparative evaluation conducted with energy domain specialists, contrasting the Explainability Assistant with a traditional XAI dashboard. The evaluation suggests improved usability and consistent task accuracy, with all experts unanimously preferring the conversational interface for practical use.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables LLMs to perform explicit, step-by-step reasoning, creating opportunities for sophisticated autonomous robots. However, recent research reveals that reasoning models verbalize their actual decision processes only 25-39% of the time, with faithfulness degrading 44% on complex tasks. This paper presents CT-SAFR (Chain-of-Thought Safety and Faithfulness for Robotics), a multi-layered verification framework achieving 94.2% hallucination detection (n = 500, 95% CI: 91.8-95.9%) with sub-500ms latency. Through a warehouse robot case study, this work demonstrates 87% reduction in unsafe reasoning outputs (p < 0.001) and provides recommendations for responsible deployment of reasoning-capable autonomous robots.

Machine learning explanations reveal model behavior beyond predictions, creating attack surfaces for model confidentiality and data privacy. We systematize 25 studies that exploit explanations for model extraction, membership inference, and model inversion, treating attribute inference as partial inversion. Existing work is often labeled only black- or white-box, obscuring substantial differences in what explanation signal reaches an adversary. We therefore separate model knowledge from explanation acquisition and identify five paths: target-released, attacker-derived, secondary disclosure, privileged access, and released global artifacts. Across these paths, explanations reduce extraction cost, expose membership signals through explanation statistics, recourse distance, and explanation-guided robustness, and support spatial or algebraic reconstruction of private inputs. We compare system and threat models, explanation signals, auxiliary knowledge, target models, modalities, query budgets, evaluation metrics, reported performance, and defenses. Our analysis shows that no explanation family is uniformly unsafe and no defense is uniformly effective. Risk depends on which signal is exposed, how it is acquired, which asset is targeted, and what the attacker already knows. We argue that explanation privacy should therefore be evaluated as an end-to-end disclosure problem, with defenses matched to the acquisition path and protected asset.

Brain-age prediction models are commonly evaluated by predictive accuracy, yet accurate predictions alone do not establish that a model relies on reproducible or neurobiologically supported mechanisms. Post-hoc explanation methods can expose these mechanisms, but existing workflows typically stop at diagnosis or require correction targets to be specified before model analysis. We propose XAI-Refine, an automated explanation-knowledge loop for brain-age prediction from resting-state functional connectivity. At each iteration, XAI-Refine consolidates complementary post-hoc analyses across repeated training runs into reliable, structured model explanations. It converts each reliable explanation into a neutral neurobiological question, retrieves and verifies relevant literature, and compiles the verified evidence into an admissible set in the same typed explanation space. The target for refinement is defined as the minimal projection of the current model explanation onto the admissible set induced by applicable verified knowledge. This revised explanation is then translated into a differentiable constraint while preserving the originating model variable, measurement operator, and applicable scope. Candidate updates are promoted only when multi-seed validation confirms target-directed explanatory movement, predictive performance remains within a prespecified guardrail, and non-target explanatory drift remains bounded. Experiments on functional-connectivity-based brain-age prediction evaluate predictive performance, explanation reliability, literature alignment, and target-specific model revision, illustrating a structured route from post-hoc analysis to evidence-guided model refinement.

Evaluating the quality of explanations produced by explainable AI (XAI) methods remains challenging because existing approaches often rely on subjective human judgment, limiting reproducibility, scalability, and comparability between studies. We examine whether LLMs can serve as a reproducible and scalable mechanism to make comparative assessments of the quality of XAI explanations. We introduce XAI-Arena, an LLM-as-a-judge framework for scalable, reproducible, multidimensional, and stakeholder-sensitive evaluation of XAI explanation quality. XAI-Arena then allows us to compare XAI explanations along various dimensions, namely, perceived simplicity, clarity, task adequacy, trust calibration, actionability, transparency, faithfulness, and overall interpretability. We then benchmark XAI explanation methods across various datasets, machine learning models, and stakeholder personas. Human validation shows a strong positive association between LLM-generated and human ratings (Spearman's rho=.693, p<.001). Together, LLM-based evaluations can capture systematic differences in XAI explanation quality and provide a scalable and reproducible framework for comparative assessment of XAI explanations.

We observe a phenomenon that current algorithmic research in the field of explainable artificial intelligence primarily pursues better performance on several proxy metrics. On the one hand, these proxy metrics themselves are more or less flawed and cannot properly measure the quality of methods. On the other hand, metric-oriented research approaches often lead to the neglect of the rationality and interpretability of the methods themselves. Explainable artificial intelligence is abbreviated as XAI. The metric-driven research paradigm has resulted in a lack of interpretability of the relevant XAI methods themselves. Accordingly, there is a need for interpretability research on XAI methods, which can be playfully referred to as XXAI. This paper is one of our works on XXAI. This paper takes Generic Attention-model Explainability (GAE), a widely influential model interpretation method , or rather, XAI method that represents an important technical route, as the research object, and explores the real working mechanism and flaws of this method as well as the technical route it represents. Based on the conclusions of this study, it may be necessary to re-examine or verify GAE-related methods and their domain applications. We argue that GAE is an interpretation method that focuses on the attention process. After pointing out the working mechanism and flaws of GAE, we propose Cumulative Asset Holdings (CAH), a more reasonable Transformer interpretation method integrating both process-based and feature-based ideas from an economic zero-sum games perspective. In addition, it is worth noting that our method is applicable to models with special tokens, where existing methods may suffer from limitations. The model simplification research method and the analysis of additive operations adopted in this study may provide inspiration for other research works in XAI.

Post-hoc explanation methods are widely used to inspect image classifiers, but their reliability depends on design choices that are often treated as implementation details. We study this issue for LIME on document image classification, focusing on the segmentation step that defines the interpretable units being perturbed. Standard image-based LIME typically relies on natural-image superpixels, which are poorly aligned with document structure such as text regions, layout blocks, and identification codes. Using RVL-CDIP, we compare Quickshift and SLIC with document-aware segmentations based on OCR bounding boxes and regular grids. Our results show that segmentation strongly affects explanation consistency, correctness, and local fidelity. Document-aware segmentations produce more stable and faithful explanations, require fewer perturbations to converge, and expose shortcut behaviour based on document identification codes, a known RVL-CDIP bias that superpixel-based LIME often obscures. These findings show that reliable post-hoc explanation requires domain-aware interpretable representations, and that segmentation should be treated as part of the explanation method rather than as neutral preprocessing.

Deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance in echocardiographic video segmentation, with an increasing number of models incorporating temporal information. However, quantitative evaluation of temporal explainability remains largely unexplored. We propose a quantitative framework for evaluating Grad-CAM explanations using four complementary metrics measuring temporal consistency, saliency motion, anatomical overlap, and temporal overlap. Using EchoNet-Dynamic, we compare a baseline 2D U-Net with ConvLSTM U-Net models trained across multiple temporal strides. While segmentation performance remained comparable across all models, intermediate ConvLSTM explanations exhibited substantially lower saliency consistency and greater centroid motion than final prediction explanations. Temporal Bottleneck explanations were significantly more stable than Encoder Bottleneck explanations across all strides, while final ConvLSTM Decoder3 explanations were broadly comparable to those of the 2D U-Net. Importantly, conventional frame-wise explanation metrics cannot determine whether variation in intermediate explanations reflects meaningful temporal feature evolution or explanation instability. These findings establish a preliminary quantitative framework for temporal explainability and motivate temporal-aware XAI methods that explicitly account for evolving representations in medical video models.

This paper interrogates the political and philosophical stakes of AI through the lens of cyborg theory cosmotechnics and glitch feminism. It advocates for a tech-positive critically situated approach to AI as a collaborator and substrate for power relations rather than an autonomous agent of harm. By rejecting the naive pause stop narratives of the human AI binary and embracing an explainable AI XAI artistic practice within embodied intersectional and community rooted engagements AI can empower diverse voices and foster ethical creativity. It starts by examining a frontier cybersecurity AI situating its framing within AI public anxiety and arguing for a new critical stance on human navigation in an AI world.