Research Papers

Geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) powered by large language models (LLMs) is expanding the capacity to query, generate, and interpret spatial information through natural-language interfaces and agentic autonomous GIS workflows. This capability creates governance challenges that general AI ethics discussions do not fully capture, including passive location inference from mobility traces, spatially structured bias amplification driven by spatial autocorrelation and scale effects, hallucinated spatial facts, and uncertainty compounding across multimodal geospatial inputs. This narrative review identifies eight recurring issues in LLM-enabled GeoAI: data provenance and consent, spatial privacy and inference risk, algorithmic bias and spatial inequity, spatial mechanisms as structural risk (spatial autocorrelation, the modifiable areal unit problem, and scale effects), LLM-specific technical risks, explainability, policy and regulatory gaps, and public enablement and workforce development. For each issue, we characterize the underlying mechanism, ground it in an illustrative example from the literature, and assess the current state of technical or institutional responses, ranging from largely unaddressed to actively debated or subject to emerging policy. Building on this synthesis, we propose a governance-aware architecture for LLM-enabled autonomous GIS that maps each issue to enforceable controls and auditable artifacts across the geospatial data lifecycle, illustrated through a worked flood-response routing scenario. The review highlights a persistent evidence gap: proposed responses remain largely conceptual, and field-tested evaluations of governance controls for LLM-enabled GeoAI remain limited. We close by outlining a research agenda emphasizing empirical validation, spatially specific interpretability tools, and workforce training aligned with these emerging risks.

How Humans and LLMs Read Gender into "Gender-Neutral" Physical Descriptions

Yingjia Wan, Lin Lin, Elisa Kreiss

When foundation models describe people, recent work in AI fairness, accessibility, and ethics recommends avoiding inferred identity labels (e.g., "she", "his") in favor of seemingly "objective" physical descriptions (e.g., "short hair", "a defined jawline"). Yet whether such descriptive language achieves gender-neutral communication remains an open empirical question. To study this, we introduce GAPA (Gender Associations of Physical Attributes), a dataset of 316 common physical attributes drawn from diverse sources, paired with 14,706 gender-association ratings from 304 US-based annotators. Results show that physical descriptions carry structured and graded gender associations among readers, with more consistent and distinctive associations for women and men than for non-binary identities. Next, we evaluate 16 LLMs across model families, sizes, and post-training variants against human ratings. The models partially recover human associations but exhibit systematic alignment biases, including compressed rating distributions, weaker alignment for associations with men, and asymmetric abstention that disproportionately targets the non-binary category. Finally, we release the best-performing proxy model trained to predict humans' gender associations of descriptive language and demonstrate its utility through a sociolinguistic analysis of character descriptions in LitBank. Together, our findings provide the first empirical evidence that seemingly "objective" physical descriptions can retain systematic gender associations in human interpretation, and uncover systematic patterns of model-human misalignment. This challenges the assumption that replacing explicit gender labels with physical descriptions necessarily yields gender-neutral communication, and highlights downstream challenges in using such descriptions to communicate subjective identity categories in human-AI interaction.

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?

AI companions provide socially engaging interaction through availability, personalization, memory, roleplay, and emotionally responsive language. For teens, these systems may support sensitive self-disclosure, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal while shaping intimacy expectations, offline relationships, emotional wellbeing, and self-understanding. We analyzed 17,053 verified quotations from 3,930 teen-relevant Reddit posts using thematic analysis. We identified 53 topics across seven thematic groups. Users described AI companions as sources of comfort, recognition, identity exploration, and relationship rehearsal, but also reported problematic attachment, social substitution, emotional dependence, and disruption to academic and social life. Roleplay, memory, perceived reciprocity, unwanted romantic or sexual role drift, privacy concerns, platform changes, and service interruptions shaped users' boundaries and control. Awareness that the AI was artificial did not prevent guilt, obligation, grief, or distress. These findings show that companion-AI safety must address relationships over time through user-controlled memory, privacy, relational boundaries, and healthy disengagement.

The EU AI Act introduces mandatory requirements for high-risk AI systems with the explicit goal of ensuring the development and operation of trustworthy AI. At the same time, AI risk management practices rely on structured risk taxonomies to systematically identify and treat AI-specific risk sources. As both the AI Act and established risk taxonomies aim to address AI-induced risks, a natural question is whether they align in the risk sources they cover. However, no clear mapping exists between the risks implicitly addressed by the Act's high-risk requirements and established taxonomies, leaving practitioners without a structured basis for aligning regulatory obligations with AI risk management practice. This paper presents a systematic classification of the requirements extracted from the EU AI Act Section 2 (Requirements for high-risk AI systems), revealing that only a minority directly address AI-specific risk sources, while the majority impose organizational process and documentation obligations. From the AI risk-related requirements, a consolidated list of distinct AI-specific risk sources is derived. The resulting EU AI Act Risk Source List takes an important step towards bridging the gap between legal obligation and AI risk management practice, providing a structured reference for explicit comparison between existing AI risk taxonomies and the risk sources implicitly addressed by the EU AI Act. Important Note: This is the authors' preprint. The paper was presented at the 4th International Conference on Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Multidisciplinary Applications. A link to the conference's official proceedings will be provided upon publication.

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.

From Protocols to Evidence: Bounded Claims for AI in Service of the Common Good

Nitesh V. Chawla, Paulo Benanti

Claims that AI systems improve decisions, broaden access, reduce harm, or empower users can exceed what their evaluation supports. This gap motivates our ongoing work on RISE AI. In this paper, we examine the proposed framework in light of Pope Leo XIVs Magnifica Humanitas, particularly its treatment of human dignity, ownership, and technological power. We develop three linked propositions. First, AI adoption can reveal unmet human needs and institutional weaknesses, while deployment can change how institutions respond to them. We propose a rupture test to examine whether deployment repairs or compounds existing failures, substitutes for human support, or conceals problems behind improved performance. The test would compare deployment with existing practice and feasible human or non AI alternatives. Second, responsible AI must examine the institutional conditions surrounding a system, including who owns the infrastructure, controls its use, and bears responsibility for its consequences. Third, favorable evaluation cannot by itself establish respect for human dignity or moral and political legitimacy. We distinguish evidence-bounded deployment, which limits claims to what the evidence supports under specified conditions, from measurement-bounded governance, which identifies constraints that favorable results cannot override. We outline a proposed RISE AI framework for applying these propositions across Responsibility, Inclusivity, Safety, and Empowerment.

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.

The evolution towards autonomous and AI-native telecommunication networks is transforming network control from predefined automation towards distributed and intelligent decision-making. Advances in closed-loop automation, O-RAN, Network Digital Twins, AI-driven orchestration, and autonomous agents enable multiple specialized control functions to operate concurrently across network domains and timescales. This introduces a system-level assurance challenge: individually acceptable decisions may interact through shared resources and network state, while changes in their operational context may invalidate assumptions under which they were evaluated. This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of AI-native network control, focusing on the composition and runtime assurance of autonomous control loops. It examines closed-loop and zero-touch automation, intelligent controllers, Network Digital Twins, AI-driven orchestration, autonomous agents, trustworthy AI, and runtime assurance. The analysis shows that these directions provide important foundations for autonomous operation but lack a unified mechanism for assuring heterogeneous control loops whose decisions depend on shared and dynamically changing network state. To address this gap, the paper identifies dependency-aware runtime assurance as a research direction for assured composition of AI-native network control loops. The proposed perspective associates decisions with assumptions and dependencies on which their validity relies, monitors changes that may invalidate accepted decisions, and supports runtime resolution of concurrent control interactions. A telecom use case and an initial architecture and formal model illustrate the concept and identify open challenges in dependency representation, runtime validation, conflict resolution, latency-aware assurance, and experimental evaluation.