Research Papers

Alignment audits aim to robustly identify hidden goals from strategic, situationally aware misaligned models. Despite this threat model, existing auditing methods have not been systematically stress-tested against deception strategies. We address this gap, implementing an automatic red-team pipeline that generates deception strategies (in the form of system prompts) tailored to specific white-box and black-box auditing methods. Stress-testing assistant prefills, user persona sampling, sparse autoencoders, and token embedding similarity methods against secret-keeping model organisms, our automatic red-team pipeline finds prompts that deceive both the black-box and white-box methods into confident, incorrect guesses. Our results provide the first documented evidence of activation-based strategic deception, and suggest that current black-box and white-box methods would not be robust to a sufficiently capable misaligned model.

The accelerating militarization of artificial intelligence has transformed the ethics, politics, and governance of warfare. This article interrogates how AI-driven targeting systems function as epistemic infrastructures that classify, legitimize, and execute violence, using Israel's conduct in Gaza as a paradigmatic case. Through the lens of responsibility, the article examines three interrelated dimensions: (a) political responsibility, exploring how states exploit AI to accelerate warfare while evading accountability; (b) professional responsibility, addressing the complicity of technologists, engineers, and defense contractors in the weaponization of data; and (c) personal responsibility, probing the moral agency of individuals who participate in or resist algorithmic governance. This is complemented by an examination of the position and influence of those participating in public discourse, whose narratives often obscure or normalize AI-enabled violence. The Gaza case reveals AI not as a neutral instrument but as an active participant in the reproduction of colonial hierarchies and the normalization of atrocity. Ultimately, the paper calls for a reframing of technological agency and accountability in the age of automated warfare. It concludes that confronting algorithmic violence demands a democratization of AI ethics, one that resists technocratic fatalism and centers the lived realities of those most affected by high-tech militarism.

The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Ecuador is not a technological option but a strategic imperative to prevent institutional obsolescence and academic irrelevance in Latin America. This paper presents the IA593 Framework, a governance, ethics, and operational model designed for the Universidad Nacional de Loja (UNL) and scalable as a reference for the Ecuadorian higher education system. The current context reveals a critical urgency: the Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index 2025 classifies Ecuador as a late awakening adopter, exposing severe structural gaps, including R and D investment of only 0.44 percent of GDP and a marginal contribution to global AI scientific output. Although a National Strategy for the Promotion of AI exists and calls for multisectoral governance, universities still lack internal regulations governing the use of Generative AI, placing academic integrity and data privacy at risk. The IA593 Framework addresses this challenge through five interconnected pillars aligned with the FATE principles of Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics and UNESCO recommendations on AI ethics: Transversal Governance, Teaching and Training, Research, Outreach, and Management. This framework enables HEIs to move from passive technology consumption toward a sovereign and critical adoption of AI, ensuring compliance with national academic regulations and positioning UNL as a key actor in reducing the digital divide and brain drain in Ecuador.

Advancing trustworthy AI requires principled software engineering approaches to model evaluation. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in processing graph-structured data, however, their expressiveness in capturing fundamental graph properties remains an open challenge. We address this by developing a property-driven evaluation methodology grounded in formal specification, systematic evaluation, and empirical study. Leveraging Alloy, a software specification language and analyzer, we introduce a configurable graph dataset generator that produces two dataset families: GraphRandom, containing diverse graphs that either satisfy or violate specific properties, and GraphPerturb, introducing controlled structural variations. Together, these benchmarks encompass 336 new datasets, each with at least 10,000 labeled graphs, covering 16 fundamental graph properties critical to distributed systems, knowledge graphs, and biological networks. We propose a general evaluation framework that assesses three key aspects of GNN expressiveness: generalizability, sensitivity, and robustness, with two novel quantitative metrics. Using this framework, we conduct the first comprehensive study on global pooling methods' impact on GNN expressiveness. Our findings reveal distinct trade-offs: attention-based pooling excels in generalization and robustness, while second-order pooling provides superior sensitivity, but no single approach consistently performs well across all properties. These insights highlight fundamental limitations and open research directions including adaptive property-aware pooling, scale-sensitive architectures, and robustness-oriented training. By embedding software engineering rigor into AI evaluation, this work establishes a principled foundation for developing expressive and reliable GNN architectures.

Counterfactual explanation (CE) is a core technique in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), widely used to interpret model decisions and suggest actionable alternatives. This work presents a structure-aware and robustness-oriented counterfactual search method based on the conditional Gaussian network classifier (CGNC). The CGNC has a generative structure that encodes conditional dependencies and potential causal relations among features through a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This structure naturally embeds feature relationships into the search process, eliminating the need for additional constraints to ensure consistency with the model's structural assumptions. We adopt a convergence-guaranteed cutting-set procedure as an adversarial optimization framework, which iteratively approximates solutions that satisfy global robustness conditions. To address the nonconvex quadratic structure induced by feature dependencies, we apply piecewise McCormick relaxation to reformulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP), ensuring global optimality. Experimental results show that our method achieves strong robustness, with direct global optimization of the original formulation providing especially stable and efficient results. The proposed framework is extensible to more complex constraint settings, laying the groundwork for future advances in counterfactual reasoning under nonconvex quadratic formulations.

Increasing salinity and contamination of groundwater is a serious issue in many parts of the world, causing degradation of water resources. The aim of this work is to form a comprehensive understanding of groundwater salinization underlying causal factors and identify important meteorological, geological and anthropogenic drivers of salinity. We have integrated different datasets of potential covariates, to create a robust framework for machine learning based predictive models including Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, Neural network, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), convolution neural network (CNN) and linear regression (LR), of groundwater salinity. Additionally, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE) followed by Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) and Explainable AI (XAI) based SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) were used to estimate the importance scores and find insights into the drivers of salinization. We also did causality analysis via Double machine learning using various predictive models. From these analyses, key meteorological (Precipitation, Temperature), geological (Distance from river, Distance to saline body, TWI, Shoreline distance), and anthropogenic (Area of agriculture field, Treated Wastewater) covariates are identified to be influential drivers of groundwater salinity across Israel. XAI analysis also identified Treated Wastewater (TWW) as an essential anthropogenic driver of salinity, its significance being context-dependent but critical in vulnerable hydro-climatic environment. Our approach provides deeper insight into global salinization mechanisms at country scale, reducing AI model uncertainty and highlighting the need for tailored strategies to address salinity.

Deploying trustworthy AI in open-world environments faces a dual challenge: the necessity for robust Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection to ensure system safety, and the demand for flexible machine unlearning to satisfy privacy compliance and model rectification. However, this objective encounters a fundamental geometric contradiction: current OOD detectors rely on a static and compact data manifold, whereas traditional classification-oriented unlearning methods disrupt this delicate structure, leading to a catastrophic loss of the model's capability to discriminate anomalies while erasing target classes. To resolve this dilemma, we first define the problem of boundary-preserving class unlearning and propose a pivotal conceptual shift: in the context of OOD detection, effective unlearning is mathematically equivalent to transforming the target class into OOD samples. Based on this, we propose the TFER (Total Free Energy Repulsion) framework. Inspired by the free energy principle, TFER constructs a novel Push-Pull game mechanism: it anchors retained classes within a low-energy ID manifold through a pull mechanism, while actively expelling forgotten classes to high-energy OOD regions using a free energy repulsion force. This approach is implemented via parameter-efficient fine-tuning, circumventing the prohibitive cost of full retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TFER achieves precise unlearning while maximally preserving the model's discriminative performance on remaining classes and external OOD data. More importantly, our study reveals that the unique Push-Pull equilibrium of TFER endows the model with inherent structural stability, allowing it to effectively resist catastrophic forgetting without complex additional constraints, thereby demonstrating exceptional potential in continual unlearning tasks.

The rise of generative models has led to increased use of large-scale datasets collected from the internet, often with minimal or no data curation. This raises concerns about the inclusion of sensitive or private information. In this work, we explore the presence of pregnancy ultrasound images, which contain sensitive personal information and are often shared online. Through a systematic examination of LAION-400M dataset using CLIP embedding similarity, we retrieve images containing pregnancy ultrasound and detect thousands of entities of private information such as names and locations. Our findings reveal that multiple images have high-risk information that could enable re-identification or impersonation. We conclude with recommended practices for dataset curation, data privacy, and ethical use of public image datasets.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to make machine learning models transparent and trustworthy, yet most current approaches communicate explanations visually or through text. This paper introduces an information theoretic framework for analyzing how explanation modality specifically, voice versus text affects user comprehension and trust calibration in AI systems. The proposed model treats explanation delivery as a communication channel between model and user, characterized by metrics for information retention, comprehension efficiency (CE), and trust calibration error (T CE). A simulation framework implemented in Python was developed to evaluate these metrics using synthetic SHAP based feature attributions across multiple modality style configurations (brief, detailed, and analogy based). Results demonstrate that text explanations achieve higher comprehension efficiency, while voice explanations yield improved trust calibration, with analogy based delivery achieving the best overall trade off. This framework provides a reproducible foundation for designing and benchmarking multimodal explainability systems and can be extended to empirical studies using real SHAP or LIME outputs on open datasets such as the UCI Credit Approval or Kaggle Financial Transactions datasets.

The intersection of Safety of Intended Functionality (SOTIF) and Functional Safety (FuSa) analysis of driving automation features has traditionally excluded Quality Management (QM) components (components that has no ASIL requirements allocated from vehicle-level HARA) from rigorous safety impact evaluations. While QM components are not typically classified as safety-relevant, recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) integration reveal that such components can contribute to SOTIF-related hazardous risks. Compliance with emerging AI safety standards, such as ISO/PAS 8800, necessitates re-evaluating safety considerations for these components. This paper examines the necessity of conducting holistic safety analysis and risk assessment on AI components, emphasizing their potential to introduce hazards with the capacity to violate risk acceptance criteria when deployed in safety-critical driving systems, particularly in perception algorithms. Using case studies, we demonstrate how deficiencies in AI-driven perception systems can emerge even in QM-classified components, leading to unintended functional behaviors with critical safety implications. By bridging theoretical analysis with practical examples, this paper argues for the adoption of comprehensive FuSa, SOTIF, and AI standards-driven methodologies to identify and mitigate risks in AI components. The findings demonstrate the importance of revising existing safety frameworks to address the evolving challenges posed by AI, ensuring comprehensive safety assurance across all component classifications spanning multiple safety standards.

This study explores the integration of multiple Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to enhance the interpretability of deep learning models for brain tumour detection. A custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was developed and trained on the BraTS 2021 dataset, achieving 91.24% accuracy in distinguishing between tumour and non-tumour regions. This research combines Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (GRAD-CAM), Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to provide comprehensive insights into the model's decision-making process. This multi-technique approach successfully identified both full and partial tumours, offering layered explanations ranging from broad regions of interest to pixel-level details. GRAD-CAM highlighted important spatial regions, LRP provided detailed pixel-level relevance and SHAP quantified feature contributions. The integrated approach effectively explained model predictions, including cases with partial tumour visibility thus showing superior explanatory power compared to individual XAI methods. This research enhances transparency and trust in AI-driven medical imaging analysis by offering a more comprehensive perspective on the model's reasoning. The study demonstrates the potential of integrated XAI techniques in improving the reliability and interpretability of AI systems in healthcare, particularly for critical tasks like brain tumour detection.

Modern large language models (LLMs) are powerful generators driven by statistical next-token prediction. While effective at producing fluent text, this design biases models toward high-probability continuations rather than exhaustive and faithful answers grounded in source content. As a result, directly applying LLMs lacks systematic mechanisms to ensure both completeness (avoiding omissions) and faithfulness (avoiding unsupported content), which fundamentally conflicts with core AI safety principles. To address this limitation, we present EVE, a structured framework for document-grounded reasoning. Unlike free-form prompting, EVE constrains generation to a structured, verifiable pipeline that decomposes high-rigor reasoning into extraction, validation, and enumeration. Empirically, this design enables consistent and simultaneous improvements in recall, precision, and F1-score: recall and precision increase by up to 24\% and 29\%, respectively, with a corresponding 31\% gain in F1-score. This effectively breaks the long-standing trade-off between coverage and accuracy typical of single-pass LLM generation, while also mitigating generation truncation caused by length limitations. At the same time, we emphasize that EVE exhibits performance saturation due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language, reflecting fundamental limits of language-based reasoning.