Research Papers

The emergence of metaverse platforms has created virtual economies that introduce new challenges related to fraud, bot activity, and illicit financial behavior. Despite growing interest in trustworthy metaverse analytics, existing datasets typically focus on user behavior, authentication, or financial transactions in isolation, limiting the development and reproducible evaluation of multimodal fraud detection methods. To address this gap, we present TSAI-MetaFraud, a multimodal, multi-task benchmark dataset for fraud analytics in virtual economies. TSAI-MetaFraud integrates behavioral, transactional, and graph-structured information while incorporating realistic fraud and automated bot scenarios. We define benchmark tasks including transaction fraud detection, cross-modal node classification, temporal link prediction, and weakly supervised fraud detection, and provide baseline evaluations using machine learning models and graph neural networks. By jointly capturing behavioral activity, financial interactions, and relational structure within a unified virtual economy, TSAI-MetaFraud provides a benchmark for advancing multimodal learning, graph mining, fraud analytics, and trustworthy AI in emerging metaverse ecosystems.

Pre-demolition assessment, the regulated audit process at the heart of urban mining, is an information process in which AI support must serve qualified auditors who remain accountable for the decisions taken. The relevant unit of value is not prediction accuracy alone, but the defensibility of the supported decisions: their legibility, plausibility, sourcing, and contestability. Explainable AI techniques and domain knowledge graphs each address parts of this requirement, and existing taxonomies have catalogued their integration. The literature is descriptively rich but structurally under-specified: what remains less developed is a structural account of why specific integrations produce artefacts neither resource can provide alone. This paper offers a complementarity-theoretic interpretation grounded in the IS resource-based tradition. We propose four consolidated KG-XAI integration modes (Lifting, Constraining, Typing, and Revising), each defined as a typed operation over XAI artefacts and knowledge-graph substrate structures. Each mode unlocks a distinct property of defensibility and contributes to the kind of regulatory artefact pre-demolition assessment demands. A fire-door example from the urban-mining process illustrates the modes using the W3C Linked Building Data stack and valuation extensions.

Concept-based explainable artificial intelligence (AI) can make model reasoning more human-understandable, but concept-level outputs are not automatically trustworthy. We introduce ConceptSMILE, a model-agnostic perturbation-based auditing framework for evaluating the reliability of concept-based explanations. Rather than replacing SMILE, ConceptSMILE extends its perturbation-based logic from feature- or region-level attribution to the auditing of human-understandable concept explanations. The framework perturbs input regions, measures concept-response shifts, applies locality weighting, and fits an XGBoost surrogate to approximate local concept behaviour. Reliability is assessed through attribution accuracy, surrogate fidelity, faithfulness, stability, and consistency. We evaluate ConceptSMILE on retinal fundus images by comparing MedSAM-derived visual concepts with VLM-based semantic concepts. Results show that reliability varies across concepts and pathways: MedSAM achieves stronger spatial attribution and the highest surrogate fidelity ($R^2 = 0.8503$, $R_w^2 = 0.8465$), while the VLM pathway shows stronger vessel faithfulness and stronger stability under selected artefact conditions. ConceptSMILE provides an independent audit layer for evaluating the trustworthiness of concept-based XAI.

Crime linkage analysis is used in many countries to identify series of offences that may have been committed by the same individual. In practice, specialist analysts manually search for behavioural and situational connections across large crime databases, an effort that is time-consuming, cognitively demanding, and can involve repeated exposure to disturbing material. To support this work, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled decision-support tool was co-developed with a UK law enforcement agency to assist analysts in identifying likely crime linkages. This paper reports an industrial evaluation of the crime-linkage tool. We conducted a mixed-methods usability study combining direct observation, eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and surveys to examine how analysts engage with AI predictions and with the model features presented as explanations. Our findings show that analysts used the AI predictions selectively and frequently validated them against behavioural (non-AI) evidence, reflecting partial trust and an ongoing reliance on established analytical practices. We also found that analysts attended to the presented model features and valued their availability, while identifying opportunities to improve how explanations are presented and integrated into the workflow. Overall, our results highlight the need for AI-enabled decision-support tools to better integrate explanations and traditional analytical methods, and demonstrate the importance of in-situ evaluation for engineering usable and trustworthy AI in high-stakes settings.

Diagnostic decision making often relies on a sequence of pathology tests that bridge patient symptoms and final disease diagnosis. Existing clinical decision-support systems typically focus on predicting single diseases and do not explicitly recommend sets of intermediate tests or model dependencies among them. In this paper, we formulate pathology test recommendation as a multi-label classification problem where each case is associated with multiple, interdependent tests. We propose an AI-based framework that applies classifier chains with logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, and their ensemble to capture label dependencies between tests. Experiments on an expert-curated dataset from a private pathology laboratory show that classifier-chain models outperform their independent counterparts, improving F1-score and reducing Hamming loss while maintaining high accuracy across common and rare tests. To enhance trust and transparency, we integrate SHAP-based explainable AI, providing symptom-level attributions that align with established clinical reasoning in most cases. The results demonstrate that classifier chains combined with SHAP offer an effective and interpretable approach for multi-label pathology test recommendation, with potential to support clinicians in selecting appropriate diagnostic tests at an early stage.

Multimodal emotion and sentiment recognition is commonly addressed by early fusion, which concatenates modalities before classification, or late fusion, which combines independently trained unimodal predictors. Early fusion can be accurate but monolithic, while late fusion is modular but may lose cross-modal interactions. This paper revisits XAI-guided adaptive fusion (\xgaf), a tree-based mixture of unimodal and cross-modal experts whose sample-level weights are derived from TreeSHAP attribution magnitudes. We focus on the effect of SHAP attribution reduction when experts have unequal feature dimensionalities. In this setting, mean-abs and median-abs reductions can suppress high-dimensional cross-modal experts, whereas sum-abs reduction preserves total attribution mass. On MELD 7-class emotion recognition, sum-abs \xgaf{} nearly matches early fusion across three face-sequence aggregators; the Transformer variant reaches 0.5983 \wf{}, compared with 0.6018 for early fusion and 0.4598 for probability-average late fusion. McNemar testing shows no significant difference between sum-abs \xgaf{} and early fusion on MELD ($p=1.000$), while \xgaf{} remains significantly better than late fusion ($p<0.0001$). On CMU-MOSEI 3-class sentiment recognition, sum-abs \xgaf{} reaches 0.6519 \wf{}, slightly exceeding early fusion (0.6485) and late fusion (0.5696). Ablation studies show that the main gain comes from adding cross-modal experts, especially the trimodal expert, rather than from complex per-sample routing. Diagnostics further show that mean-abs and median-abs weights are nearly uniform, while sum-abs weights concentrate on the trimodal expert. Thus, the main contribution is a transparent empirical analysis of how SHAP reduction, expert dimensionality, and cross-modal expert design affect modular multimodal fusion.

The 2026 Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities

Stephen Casper, Oskar Galeev, Yoshua Bengio +117

Frontier AI capabilities and autonomy are advancing rapidly. A growing number of real-world incidents make a trusted AI ecosystem essential to embracing AI with confidence. The 2026 Singapore Consensus is an outcome of the second International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety, bringing together over 100 contributors spanning 13 countries from frontier developers, government safety institutes, academia, and civil society. Building on the 2025 report, it presents a global understanding of technical AI safety research problems of top priority, now with a dedicated focus on societal resilience and on managing the risks of increasingly autonomous AI agents.

The deployment of machine learning systems capable of detecting covert consciousness in neurologically injured patients creates a profound challenge at the intersection of clinical medicine, AI ethics, and Islamic jurisprudence. We argue that the shift from binary clinical verdicts to probabilistic, temporally granular neural-state estimates should be addressed through three foundational constructs in Islamic legal epistemology: bayyina (clear evidentiary proof), yaqin (epistemic certainty), and the theologically mandated agnosticism about there (soul). We survey the current technical literature on AI-based consciousness detection, map it onto the landscape of Islamic brain death scholarship, and identifykey challenges. We also discuss its implications for AI surrogate decision systems.

Prior work has shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is often unfaithful: a model's stated reasoning does not reliably reflect the process that produced its output. Detecting unfaithfulness, though, requires controlled experimental interventions, which cannot be applied to evaluation transcripts after the fact. We turn instead to a more tractable question that has received less attention: whether the stated reasoning is logically consistent with the answer it accompanies. Unlike faithfulness, consistency can be assessed from a transcript alone, with no intervention. We introduce reasoning consistency scanning, a reusable method for detecting this property in AI safety evaluation transcripts. Our contributions are fourfold. First, we formalize reasoning consistency as distinct from faithfulness and define a six-subtype taxonomy of inconsistency. Second, we build a validated benchmark of 60 transcripts, manually adapted from InstrumentalEval outputs. Third, we implement a working scanner for InspectScout, the first to target this property in safety evaluation transcripts. Fourth, we report results across four generator models and three evaluations from inspect_evals, showing that reasoning inconsistency is present, detectable, and varies systematically across both models and task types.

The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence across regulated firms has produced an extensive governance response oriented around trustworthiness: the EU AI Act, ISO IEC 42001, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the United Kingdom's principles-based approach all address safety, fairness, transparency, and model risk. That response is necessary but incomplete. It does not, on its own, address operational resilience: the continuity of important business services under severe but plausible disruption, the substitutability of AI components, and the concentration of dependency on the small number of firms that supply frontier models. This paper argues that AI adoption creates a resilience obligation that is distinct from, and inadequately covered by, the trustworthy AI stack, and that United Kingdom financial authorities are already closing this gap through the Financial Policy Committee's systemic analysis, the Critical Third Parties regime, and the May 2026 joint statement on frontier AI and cyber resilience. We map the two regulatory logics, identify the structural gap between them, and propose the AI Resilience Framework: a regime-agnostic method for bringing AI dependencies inside the operational resilience perimeter through dependency mapping, a criticality-substitutability tiering, the extension of impact tolerances to AI-specific failure modes, an explicit fallback doctrine, and provider level concentration management. The framework gives chief information security officers, security architects, and boards an actionable route from AI governance policy to demonstrable resilience. This work extends a companion analysis of the United Kingdom cyber resilience regulatory stack into the artificial intelligence dimension.

Botnets pose a significant cybersecurity threat, enabling attacks such as DDoS, data theft, and service disruptions on IoT devices. These devices often lack built-in botnet traffic filtering, leaving them highly exposed. Existing AI-based solutions improve detection capabilities but have limitations: (i) they are too heavy for IoT deployment, and (ii) they lack unlearning capabilities to forget sensitive or outdated features without retraining. To address these challenges, we propose DiRLU, a lightweight, reinforcement learning driven framework, while ensuring privacy by selectively unlearning sensitive or outdated features without requiring retraining. The framework leverages knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from a teacher model into a lightweight student model, with both models trained using A2C. A post-hoc unlearning mechanism modifies weights to remove targeted features, while restored features show negligible performance loss, confirming reversibility. Unlike many benchmark models that used only 5% of the BoT-IoT dataset, this research leverages 25%, allowing us to develop a strong teacher model. Both the teacher and student models were trained using the A2C reinforcement learning algorithm, achieving impressive results, with the student model achieving 99.60% accuracy and a 99.80% F1 score. To enhance transparency, we integrated Explainable AI (XAI), particularly LIME, which helps interpret the model's decisions and identify the key features influencing its predictions. Moreover, DiRLU requires only 2,370 FLOPS, approximately 3.87x more efficient than the state-of-the-art model, highlighting its efficiency for edge deployment. DiRLU combines efficiency with privacy, aligning with GDPR standards (right to be forgotten) to provide practical and scalable IoT security solution.

LiDAR semantic segmentation is a key perception task in autonomous driving, where false predictions can affect downstream planning and safety-critical decision-making. Although adversarial attacks, and specifically adversarial examples, have been widely studied for image classification and 3D point cloud segmentation, unrestricted adversarial examples remain largely unexplored in the space of 2D range images, which are projections of 3D point clouds. The proposed method is, to the best of our knowledge, the first diffusion-based unrestricted adversarial attack against 2D range-image segmentation, using adversarial guidance from a segmentation loss. By applying guidance directly during sampling, the method produces unrestricted adversarial examples that remain close to the learned LiDAR data manifold while inducing structured segmentation errors. Experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset using RangeNet++ and CENet segmentation networks demonstrate that the attack provides adjustable degradation across guidance strengths and transfers across segmentation architectures. Compared with norm-bounded FGSM and SegPGD baselines, the proposed attack offers a distinct effectiveness-realism trade-off, achieving controllable white-box and transfer degradation while maintaining competitive distributional and visual realism.