Research Papers

Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) constitutes a major global medical burden, marked by the gradual deterioration of renal function, which results in the impaired clearance of metabolic waste and disturbances in systemic fluid homeostasis. Owing to its substantial contribution to worldwide morbidity and mortality, the development of reliable and efficient diagnostic approaches is critically important to facilitate early detection and prompt clinical management. This study presents a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for early CKD detection from CT kidney images, complemented by class balancing using Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and interpretability via Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM). The model was trained and evaluated on the CT KIDNEY DATASET, which contains 12,446 CT images, including 3,709 cyst, 5,077 normal, 1,377 stone, and 2,283 tumor cases. The proposed deep CNN achieved a remarkable classification performance, attaining 100% accuracy in the early detection of chronic kidney disease (CKD). This significant advancement demonstrates strong potential for addressing critical clinical diagnostic challenges and enhancing early medical intervention strategies.

While much research in artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on scaling capabilities, the accelerating pace of development makes countervailing work on producing harmless, "aligned" systems increasingly urgent. Yet research on alignment has diverged along two largely parallel tracks: safety--centered on scaled intelligence, deceptive or scheming behaviors, and existential risk--and ethics--focused on present harms, the reproduction of social bias, and flaws in production pipelines. Although both communities warn of insufficient investment in alignment, they disagree on what alignment means or ought to mean. As a result, their efforts have evolved in relative isolation, shaped by distinct methodologies, institutional homes, and disciplinary genealogies. We present a large-scale, quantitative study showing the structural split between AI safety and AI ethics. Using a bibliometric and co-authorship network analysis of 6,442 papers from twelve major ML and NLP conferences (2020-2025), we find that over 80% of collaborations occur within either the safety or ethics communities, and cross-field connectivity is highly concentrated: roughly 5% of papers account for more than 85% of bridging links. Removing a small number of these brokers sharply increases segregation, indicating that cross-disciplinary exchange depends on a handful of actors rather than broad, distributed collaboration. These results show that the safety-ethics divide is not only conceptual but institutional, with implications for research agendas, policy, and venues. We argue that integrating technical safety work with normative ethics--via shared benchmarks, cross-institutional venues, and mixed-method methodologies--is essential for building AI systems that are both robust and just.

Common approaches to explainable AI (XAI) for deep learning focus on analyzing the importance of input features on the classification task in a given model: saliency methods like SHAP and GradCAM are used to measure the impact of spatial regions of the input image on the classification result. Combined with ground truth information about the location of the object in the input image (e.g., a binary mask), it is determined whether object pixels had a high impact on the classification result, or whether the classification focused on background pixels. The former is considered to be a sign of a healthy classifier, whereas the latter is assumed to suggest overfitting on spurious correlations. A major challenge, however, is that these intuitive interpretations are difficult to test quantitatively, and hence the output of such explanations lacks an explanation itself. One particular reason is that correlations in real-world data are difficult to avoid, and whether they are spurious or legitimate is debatable. Synthetic data in turn can facilitate to actively enable or disable correlations where desired but often lack a sufficient quantification of realism and stochastic properties. [...] Therefore, we systematically generate six synthetic datasets for the task of traffic sign recognition, which differ only in their degree of camera variation and background correlation [...] to quantify the isolated influence of background correlation, different levels of camera variation, and considered traffic sign shapes on the classification performance, as well as background feature importance. [...] Results include a quantification of when and how much background features gain importance to support the classification task based on changes in the training domain [...]. Download: synset.de/datasets/synset-signset-ger/background-effect

Stroke is a major cause of death and permanent impairment, making it a major worldwide health concern. For prompt intervention and successful preventative tactics, early risk assessment is essential. To address this challenge, we used ensemble modeling and explainable AI (XAI) techniques to create an interpretable machine learning framework for stroke risk prediction. A thorough evaluation of 10 different machine learning models using 5-fold cross-validation across several datasets was part of our all-inclusive strategy, which also included feature engineering and data pretreatment (using Random Over-Sampling (ROS) to solve class imbalance). Our optimized ensemble model (Random Forest + ExtraTrees + XGBoost) performed exceptionally well, obtaining a strong 99.09% accuracy on the Stroke Prediction Dataset (SPD). We improved the model's transparency and clinical applicability by identifying three important clinical variables using LIME-based interpretability analysis: age, hypertension, and glucose levels. Through early prediction, this study highlights how combining ensemble learning with explainable AI (XAI) can deliver highly accurate and interpretable stroke risk assessment. By enabling data-driven prevention and personalized clinical decisions, our framework has the potential to transform stroke prediction and cardiovascular risk management.

Delta-XAI: A Unified Framework for Explaining Prediction Changes in Online Time Series Monitoring

Changhun Kim, Yechan Mun, Hyeongwon Jang +3

Explaining online time series monitoring models is crucial across sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance, where temporal and contextual prediction dynamics underpin critical decisions. While recent XAI methods have improved the explainability of time series models, they mostly analyze each time step independently, overlooking temporal dependencies. This results in further challenges: explaining prediction changes is non-trivial, methods fail to leverage online dynamics, and evaluation remains difficult. To address these challenges, we propose Delta-XAI, which adapts 14 existing XAI methods through a wrapper function and introduces a principled evaluation suite for the online setting, assessing diverse aspects, such as faithfulness, sufficiency, and coherence. Experiments reveal that classical gradient-based methods, such as Integrated Gradients (IG), can outperform recent approaches when adapted for temporal analysis. Building on this, we propose Shifted Window Integrated Gradients (SWING), which incorporates past observations in the integration path to systematically capture temporal dependencies and mitigate out-of-distribution effects. Extensive experiments consistently demonstrate the effectiveness of SWING across diverse settings with respect to diverse metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AITRICS/Delta-XAI.

High-stakes decision domains are increasingly exploring the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex decision-making tasks. However, LLM deployment in real-world settings presents challenges in data security, evaluation of its capabilities outside controlled environments, and accountability attribution in the event of adversarial decisions. This paper proposes a framework for responsible deployment of LLM-based decision-support systems through active human involvement. It integrates interactive collaboration between human experts and developers through multiple iterations at the pre-deployment stage to assess the uncertain samples and judge the stability of the explanation provided by post-hoc XAI techniques. Local LLM deployment within organizations and decentralized technologies, such as Blockchain and IPFS, are proposed to create immutable records of LLM activities for automated auditing to enhance security and trace back accountability. It was tested on Bert-large-uncased, Mistral, and LLaMA 2 and 3 models to assess the capability to support responsible financial decisions on business lending.

This paper presents a comprehensive comparative model analysis on a novel gastrointestinal medical imaging dataset, comprised of 4,000 endoscopic images spanning four critical disease classes: Diverticulosis, Neoplasm, Peritonitis, and Ureters. Leveraging state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, the study confronts common endoscopic challenges such as variable lighting, fluctuating camera angles, and frequent imaging artifacts. The best performing models, VGG16 and MobileNetV2, each achieved a test accuracy of 96.5%, while Xception reached 94.24%, establishing robust benchmarks and baselines for automated disease classification. In addition to strong classification performance, the approach includes explainable AI via Grad-CAM visualization, enabling identification of image regions most influential to model predictions and enhancing clinical interpretability. Experimental results demonstrate the potential for robust, accurate, and interpretable medical image analysis even in complex real-world conditions. This work contributes original benchmarks, comparative insights, and visual explanations, advancing the landscape of gastrointestinal computer-aided diagnosis and underscoring the importance of diverse, clinically relevant datasets and model explainability in medical AI research.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs) into scientific research and higher education presents a paradigm shift, offering revolutionizing opportunities while simultaneously raising profound ethical, legal, and regulatory questions. This study examines the complex intersection of AI and science, with a specific focus on the challenges posed to copyright law and the principles of open science. The author argues that current regulatory frameworks in key jurisdictions like the United States, China, the European Union, and the United Kingdom, while aiming to foster innovation, contain significant gaps, particularly concerning the use of copyrighted works and open science outputs for AI training. Widely adopted licensing mechanisms, such as Creative Commons, fail to adequately address the nuances of AI training, and the pervasive lack of attribution within AI systems fundamentally challenges established notions of originality. While current doctrine treats AI training as potentially fair use, this paper argues such mechanisms are inadequate and that copyright holders should retain explicit opt-out rights regardless of fair use doctrine. Instead, the author advocates for upholding authors' rights to refuse the use of their works for AI training and proposes that universities assume a leading role in shaping responsible AI governance. The conclusion is that a harmonized international legislative effort is urgently needed to ensure transparency, protect intellectual property, and prevent the emergence of an oligopolistic market structure that could prioritize commercial profit over scientific integrity and equitable knowledge production. This is a substantially expanded and revised version of a work originally presented at the 20th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics (Kochetkov, 2025).

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate human decision-making and behaviour. Ensuring LLM processing of moral meaning therefore has become a critical challenge. Current approaches rely predominantly on bottom-up methods such as fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback. We propose a fundamentally different approach: embedding moral meaning processing directly into the architectural mechanisms and frameworks of transformer-based models through top-down design principles. We first sketch a framework that conceptualizes attention as a dynamic interface mediating between structure and processing, contrasting with existing linear attention frameworks in psychology. We start from established biological-artificial attention analogies in neural architecture design to improve cognitive processing. We extend this analysis to moral processing, using Iris Murdoch's theory of loving attention (sustained, just observation that enables moral transformation by reseeing others with clarity and compassion) to philosophically discuss functional analogies between human and LLM moral processing. We formulate and evaluate potentially promising technical operationalizations to embed morality in LLM architectures and frameworks. We acknowledge the limitations of our exploration and give three key contributions. (1) We conceptualize attention as a dynamic system mechanism mediating between structure and processing. (2) Drawing on the Murdoch notion of loving attention, we outline technical pathways for embedding morality in LLMs, through modified training objectives, runtime weight adjustments, and architectural refinements to attention. (3) We argue that integrating morality into architectures and frameworks complements external, constraint-based methods. We conclude with a call for collaboration between transformer designers and philosophers engaged in AI ethics.

The clinical translation of dermatological AI is hindered by opaque reasoning and systematic performance disparities across skin tones. Here we present SkinGPT-R1, a multimodal large language model that integrates chain-of-thought diagnostic reasoning with a fairness-aware mixture-of-experts architecture for interpretable and equitable skin disease diagnosis. Through parameter-efficient adaptation of a frozen reasoning backbone, SkinGPT-R1 generates structured diagnostic reports comprising visual findings, differential reasoning, and final diagnosis. Across seven external datasets spanning diverse pathologies and imaging conditions, SkinGPT-R1 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on six benchmarks, including 82.50\% on a challenging 40-class long-tail classification task (+19.30\% over leading baselines). Blinded evaluation by five board-certified dermatologists on 1,000 phenotypically balanced cases yields a mean score of 3.6 out of 5, with the highest ratings in safety (3.8) and reasoning coherence (3.6), indicating that the generated rationales are clinically safe, logically grounded, and suitable for supporting diagnostic decision-making. Critically, SkinGPT-R1 mitigates algorithmic bias across the full Fitzpatrick spectrum, achieving a robust worst-group performance of 41.40\% on the Fitz17k benchmark and a five-fold relative improvement in lower-bound accuracy on the DDI dataset compared to standard multimodal baselines. These results establish a framework for trustworthy, fair, and explainable AI-assisted dermatological diagnosis.

Densely annotated medical image datasets that capture not only diagnostic labels but also the underlying reasoning behind these diagnoses are scarce. Such reasoning-related annotations are essential for developing and evaluating explainable AI (xAI) models that reason similarly to radiologists: making correct predictions for the right reasons. To address this gap, we introduce FunnyNodules, a fully parameterized synthetic dataset designed for systematic analysis of attribute-based reasoning in medical AI models. The dataset generates abstract, lung nodule-like shapes with controllable visual attributes such as roundness, margin sharpness, and spiculation. The target class is derived from a predefined attribute combination, allowing full control over the decision rule that links attributes to the diagnostic class. We demonstrate how FunnyNodules can be used in model-agnostic evaluations to assess whether models learn correct attribute-target relations, to interpret over- or underperformance in attribute prediction, and to analyze attention alignment with attribute-specific regions of interest. The framework is fully customizable, supporting variations in dataset complexity, target definitions, class balance, and beyond. With complete ground truth information, FunnyNodules provides a versatile foundation for developing, benchmarking, and conducting in-depth analyses of explainable AI methods in medical image analysis.

Phishing and related cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with email-based phishing remaining the most persistent attack vector. These attacks exploit human vulnerabilities to deliver malware or gain unauthorized access to sensitive information. Transformer-based models enhance phishing detection through robust contextual language understanding; yet they are often regarded as black boxes due to a lack of interpretability. Moreover, recent AI-enabled attacks further undermine model resilience. To address these challenges, this work proposes a lightweight phishing detection framework based on DistilBERT, a lightweight Transformer model. Robustness to embedding-level perturbations and character-level input noise is enhanced through gradient-based adversarial training using the Fast Gradient Method (FGM), combined with stochastic character-level perturbations. To improve transparency, three prominent Explainable AI (XAI) methods, LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations), SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), and IG (Integrated Gradients), are integrated to interpret model decision-making. A structured rule-based prompt combines model predictions and XAI features to guide Flan-T5-Small in generating plain-language, evidence-based explanations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms a standard DistilBERT-based detection model trained without robustness enhancements in terms of accuracy and resilience. This integrated approach helps bridge the gap between model reliability and user trust, advancing transparent phishing detection.