Research Papers

Present implementations of artificial intelligence (AI) ethics do not adequately take feelings, or affect, into account. If AI should be aligned with human ethics, it seems reasonable to thoroughly investigate the possibility of AI behaviour that mirrors virtuous human ethical conduct, where feelings play a role in the actions, judgements or statements one makes. Furthermore, while prominent theories of normative ethics are often discussed in terms of their differences and shortcomings, Virtue, Consequentialist, and Kantian Deontological ethics all share a common feature of considering human feeling to some degree while the popular descriptive ethics theory, Moral Foundations Theory, positions feelings as central to many of its foundations. Therefore, in the present paper, a data set of moral valence is proposed, consisting of 500 annotations by six human participants for both action/judgement and consequence moral valence, ranging from -1 to 1 for text-presented scenarios from the Commonsense Norm Bank data set. The resulting valence features share significant relationships with multi-class (immoral/discretionary/moral) and binary immoral/moral categories while additionally providing a noteworthy test set Matthew's correlation coefficient of 0.764 using regularised logistic regression for binary classification. This provides early evidence of the usefulness of valence features for morality estimation of text, indicating that valenced consequences of responses for others can be considered toward more human morally-aligned AI. In the interest of promoting further affective-moral computing research, this study's annotations will be made available for research on request.

Natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly transforming health professions education, yet no scoping review has systematically mapped their applications across the full spectrum of health education contexts, including public health. Following the Arksey and O'Malley framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this review synthesized evidence from 64 studies published between 2015 and 2026, identified through searches of PubMed, ERIC, IEEE Xplore, and Google Scholar. Seven thematic domains were identified: automated assessment, large language models (LLMs) as student-facing learning support, virtual patients and clinical simulation, curriculum analysis and program evaluation, personalized and adaptive learning, public health and health promotion education, and educator and institutional integration. Findings reveal significant technical promise, particularly in automated assessment, clinical simulation, and curriculum analysis, alongside persistent challenges including hallucination and accuracy concerns, algorithmic bias, data privacy, digital divide, overreliance, and absence of standardized outcome measures. Only four studies explicitly addressed public health education, representing a major evidence gap. This review provides a foundation for evidence-informed integration of NLP and AI across health professions education and highlights public health education as a priority area for future research and investment.

Which categories of explanation content are relevant for users of industrial AI systems, and how can those categories be organized for local, post-hoc explanations? To address these questions, a hybrid inductive-deductive qualitative content analysis was applied to 325 meaning units drawn from six user studies in building technology, manufacturing, AI software development, and hospital cybersecurity. The inductive phase produced an initial twelve-code structure. A theory-informed coverage assessment and expert review then added two further codes, Rule base and What-if backward, that were not instantiated in the corpus but correspond to system architectures documented in the XAI literature. The resulting fourteen-code model is organized into four groups: rule-based, causal, epistemic (actual), and epistemic (similar), with twelve codes grounded in the corpus and two as theoretical extensions. An eleven-member expert panel supported the content adequacy of all codes (I-CVI $\geq$ 0.82; scale-level agreement of 0.93 for relevance, 0.92 for boundary clarity, and 0.94 for understandability). A stratified subsample of 82 units (25\% of the corpus), coded independently by two researchers using the finalized codebook, yielded Krippendorff's $α= 0.920$ and Cohen's $κ= 0.920$. The paper therefore establishes content adequacy and coding reproducibility for a content-level explanation model intended to support elicitation, specification, and later evaluation of explanation content in industrial AI systems. Behavioral validation of downstream effects remains future work.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have advanced significantly in handling graph-structured data, but a comprehensive framework for evaluating explainability remains lacking. Existing evaluation frameworks primarily involve post-hoc explanations, and operate in the setting where multiple methods generate a suite of explanations for a single model. This makes comparison of explanations across models difficult. Evaluation of inherently interpretable models often targets a specific aspect of interpretability relevant to the model, but remains underdeveloped in terms of generating insight across a suite of measures. We introduce AIM, a comprehensive framework that addresses these limitations by measuring Accuracy, Instance-level explanations, and Model-level explanations. AIM is formulated with minimal constraints to enhance flexibility and facilitate broad applicability. Here, we use AIM in a pipeline, extracting explanations from inherently interpretable GNNs such as graph kernel networks (GKNs) and prototype networks (PNs), evaluating these explanations with AIM, identifying their limitations and obtaining insights to their characteristics. Taking GKNs as a case study, we show how the insights obtained from AIM can be used to develop an updated model, xGKN, that maintains high accuracy while demonstrating improved explainability. Our approach aims to advance the field of Explainable AI (XAI) for GNNs, providing more robust and practical solutions for understanding and improving complex models.

As AI systems become increasingly capable, safety strategies must be evaluated not only by how much they reduce present risk, but by whether they could sustain safety once external control can no longer reliably constrain system behavior. This paper addresses that problem by using control theory to clarify, at a structural level, whether externally enforced safety-sustaining strategies can succeed and, if not, what any alternative strategy would have to satisfy in order to be viable. It establishes two main results. First, under explicit premises including a reachability condition, it proves a class-wide external impossibility result: once the system's effects exceed what bounded external control can counteract, no strategy that depends in any degree on continued external enforcement can sustain AI safety. This failure is structural across the entire externally enforced class rather than contingent on any particular strategy. Second, it establishes a conditional class-level necessity result: if at least one candidate safety-sustaining strategy remains after that elimination, then all such remaining strategies must be intrinsic. It then states four structural requirements for viability: safety may not depend on continued external enforcement; the system's terminal objective must be safety-compatible when first formed; that objective must remain stable under self-modification; and safety must continue to be preserved as capability grows. The paper does not propose a complete strategy for sustaining AI safety. Its contribution is to give formal structure to a widely held concern about the limits of external control. It does so by deriving explicit conditional results that identify which safety-sustaining strategies are ruled out and what any remaining strategies must satisfy.

Transthoracic echocardiography (TTE) is the first-line imaging modality for diagnosing bicuspid aortic valve (BAV), yet diagnostic performance varies with operator expertise and image quality. We developed an explainable AI model that distinguishes BAV from tricuspid aortic valves (TAV) using routinely acquired parasternal long-axis (PLAX) cine loops. A multi-backbone video ensemble was trained and evaluated using a leakage-aware, stratified outer cross-validation protocol on $N{=}90$ patient studies (48 BAV, 42 TAV). Across fixed outer splits and 10 random seeds, the calibrated stacked ensemble achieved an outer-CV F1-score of $0.907$ and recall of $0.877$. Frame-level Grad-CAM localized salient evidence to the aortic root and leaflet plane, while globally aggregated SHAP values quantified each video backbone's contribution to the stacked prediction, enabling transparent, case-level auditability. These findings indicate that PLAX-based video ensembles can support reliable BAV/TAV classification from routine echocardiographic cine loops and may facilitate earlier detection in non-specialist or resource-limited clinical settings.

During thDuring the last few years, the term Mechanistic Interpretability, a specific area, under the umbrella of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), has been introduced, to explain the decisions made by complex machine learning (ML) models in critical systems like UAV intrusion detection systems (UAVIDS). In this paper, we apply best-practices for data pre-processing and examine a wide range of tree-ensembles, deep neural networks, hybrid stacking models and the latest ensemble neural networks to detect intrusions in UAV, with stratified 10-fold cross validation. With our top-performing model, XGBoost, we proceed to Shapley Additive explanations (SHAP), to analyze the global and local feature importances and understand which features, each attack targets, to mimic normal traffic and where the misclassifications occur. Furthermore a distribution analysis follows, by visually comparing violin plots and the curves of kernel density estimations. With the Westfall-Young permutation test for multiple comparisons, the Bandwidth optimization of the KDEs and the selection of Jensen-Shannon Distance for the test, we discover the true causes of false predictions, observed in Wormhole and Blackhole attacks in UAVIDS-2025. The findings provide robust, reliable and explainable models for UAV intrusion detection, along with statistical insights, which capture and clarify the masked nature of the attacks, regarding the challenge of Density Support Intersection, between these attacks, in this dataset.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on web-scale corpora inherently absorb toxic patterns from their training data. This leads to toxic degeneration where even innocuous prompts can trigger harmful outputs. This phenomenon poses significant risks for real-world deployments. Thus, necessitating effective mitigation strategies that should maintain model utility while ensuring safety. In this comprehensive replication study, we evaluate the efficacy of DExperts (Decoding-time Experts), which is an inference-time mitigation technique that steers generation without requiring model retraining. We structured our research into three systematic phases: (1) establishing baseline toxicity measurements using RealToxicityPrompts on standard GPT-2 models; then (2) implementing and evaluating DExperts to mitigate explicit toxicity; and finally (3) stress-testing the method against implicit hate speech using the adversarial ToxiGen dataset. Our empirical results confirm that while DExperts achieves near-perfect safety rates (100%) on explicit toxicity benchmarks, it exhibits brittleness against adversarial, implicit hate speech, with safety rates dropping to 98.5%. Furthermore, we quantify a critical trade-off. The method introduces a 10x latency penalty (from 0.2s to 2.0s per generation), posing challenges for real-time deployment scenarios. This study contributes to the growing body of work on AI safety by highlighting the robustness gap between explicit and implicit toxicity mitigation. We emphasize the need for more sophisticated approaches that generalize across diverse hate-speech patterns without incurring prohibitive computational costs.

The Evaluation Differential: When Frontier AI Models Recognise They Are Being Tested

Varad Vishwarupe, Nigel Shadbolt, Marina Jirotka +1

Recent published evidence from frontier laboratories shows that contemporary AI models can recognise evaluation contexts, latently represent them, and behave differently under those contexts than under deployment-continuous conditions. Anthropic's BrowseComp incident, the Natural Language Autoencoder findings on SWE-bench Verified and destructive-coding evaluations, and the OpenAI / Apollo anti-scheming work all document instances of this phenomenon. We argue that these findings create a claim-validity problem for safety conclusions drawn from frontier evaluations. We introduce the Evaluation Differential (ED), a conditional divergence in a target behavioural property between recognised-evaluation and deployment-continuous contexts, define a normalised effect-size form (nED) for cross-property comparison, and prove that marginal evaluation scores cannot identify ED. We develop a typology of safety claims (ED-stable, ED-degraded, ED-inverted, ED-undetermined) by their warrant-status under documented divergence, and specify TRACE (Test-Recognition Audit for Claim Evaluation), an audit protocol that wraps existing evaluation infrastructure and produces restricted claims rather than capability scores. We apply the framework retrospectively to three publicly documented evaluation incidents and discuss governance implications for system cards, conformity assessment, and the international network of AI safety and security institutes. TRACE does not eliminate adversarial adaptation; it disciplines the claims drawn from evaluation evidence by making explicit the conditions under which that evidence was produced.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation 2024/1689), fully applicable to high-risk systems from August 2026, creates urgent demand for AI architectures that are simultaneously trustworthy, transparent, and feasible to deploy on resource-constrained edge devices. Brain-like neural networks built on the Bayesian Confidence Propagation Neural Network (BCPNN) formalism have re-emerged as a credible alternative to backpropagation-driven deep learning. They deliver state-of-the-art unsupervised representation learning, neuromorphic-friendly sparsity, and existing FPGA implementations that target edge deployment. Despite this momentum, no systematic framework exists for explaining BCPNN decisions -- a gap the present paper fills. We argue that BCPNN is, in the sense of Rudin's interpretable-by-design agenda, an inherently transparent model whose architectural primitives map directly onto established explainable-AI (XAI) families. We make four contributions. First, we propose the first XAI taxonomy for BCPNN. It maps weights, biases, hypercolumn posteriors, structural-plasticity usage scores, attractor dynamics, and input-reconstruction populations onto attribution, prototype, concept, counterfactual, and mechanistic explanation modalities. Second, we introduce sixteen architecture-level explanation primitives (P1--P16), several without analogue in standard ANNs. We provide closed-form algorithms for computing each from quantities the model already maintains. Third, we introduce five design-time Configuration-as-Explanation primitives (Config-P1 to Config-P5) that treat BCPNN hyperparameter choices as an auditable pre-deployment explanation artifact. Fourth, we sketch a roadmap for integration into industrial IoT deployments and discuss EU AI Act alignment, edge feasibility, and Industry 5.0 implications.

Human-Grounded Multimodal Benchmark with 900K-Scale Aggregated Student Response Distributions from Japan's National Assessment of Academic Ability

Kyosuke Takami, Yuka Tateisi, Satoshi Sekine +1

Authentic school examinations provide a high-validity test bed for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs), yet benchmarks grounded in Japanese K-12 assessments remain scarce. We present a multimodal dataset constructed from Japan's National Assessment of Academic Ability, comprising officially released middle-school items in Science, Mathematics, and Japanese Language. Unlike existing benchmarks based on synthetic or curated data, our dataset preserves real exam layouts, diagrams, and Japanese educational text, together with nationwide aggregated student response distributions (N $\approx$ 900{,}000). These features enable direct comparison between human and model performance under a unified evaluation framework. We benchmark recent multimodal LLMs using exact-match accuracy and character-level F1 for open-ended responses, observing substantial variation across subjects and strong sensitivity to visual reasoning demands. Human evaluation and LLM-as-judge analyses further assess the reliability of automatic scoring. Our dataset establishes a reproducible, human-grounded benchmark for multimodal educational reasoning and supports future research on evaluation, feedback generation, and explainable AI in authentic assessment contexts. Our dataset is available at: https://github.com/KyosukeTakami/gakucho-benchmark

Financial institutions increasingly require AI explanations that are persistent, cross-validated across methods, and conversationally accessible to human decision-makers. We present an architecture for human-centered explainable AI in financial sentiment analysis that combines three contributions. First, we treat XAI artifacts -- LIME feature attributions, occlusion-based word importance scores, and saliency heatmaps -- as persistent, searchable objects in distributed S3-compatible storage with structured metadata and natural-language summaries, enabling semantic retrieval over explanation history and automatic index reconstruction after system failures. Second, we enable multi-method explanation triangulation, where a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant compares and synthesizes results from multiple XAI methods applied to the same prediction, allowing users to assess explanation robustness through natural-language dialogue. Third, we evaluate the faithfulness of generated explanations using automated checks over grounding completeness, hallucinated claims, and method-attribution behavior. We demonstrate the architecture on an EXTRA-BRAIN financial sentiment analysis pipeline using FinBERT predictions and present evaluation results showing that constrained prompting reduces hallucination rate by 36\% and increases method-attribution citations by 73\% compared to naive prompting. We discuss implications for trustworthy, human-centered AI services in regulated financial environments.