Research Papers

Subset selection-based methods are widely used to explain deep vision models: they attribute predictions by highlighting the most influential image regions and support object-level explanations. While these methods perform well in in-distribution (ID) settings, their behavior under out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions remains poorly understood. Through extensive experiments across multiple ID-OOD sets, we find that reliability of the existing subset based methods degrades markedly, yielding redundant, unstable, and uncertainty-sensitive explanations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a framework that combines submodular subset selection with layer-wise, gradient-based uncertainty estimation to improve robustness and fidelity without requiring additional training or auxiliary models. Our approach estimates uncertainty via adaptive weight perturbations and uses these estimates to guide submodular optimization, ensuring diverse and informative subset selection. Empirical evaluations show that, beyond mitigating the weaknesses of existing methods under OOD scenarios, our framework also yields improvements in ID settings. These findings highlight limitations of current subset-based approaches and demonstrate how uncertainty-driven optimization can enhance attribution and object-level interpretability, paving the way for more transparent and trustworthy AI in real-world vision applications.

Hackers may create malicious solidity programs and deploy it in the Ethereum block chain. These malicious smart contracts try to attack legitimate programs by exploiting its vulnerabilities such as reentrancy, tx.origin attack, bad randomness, deligatecall and so on. This may lead to drain of the funds, denial of service and so on . Hence, it is necessary to identify and prevent the malicious smart contract before deploying it into the blockchain. In this paper, we propose an ML based malicious smart contract detection mechanism by analyzing the EVM opcodes. After balancing the opcode frequency dataset with SMOTE algorithm, we transformed opcode frequencies to the binary values (0,1) using an entropy based supervised binning method. Then, an explainable AI model is trained with the proposed binary opcode based features. From the implementations, we found that the proposed mechanism can detect 99% of malicious smart contracts with a false positive rate of only 0.01. Finally, we incorporated LIME algorithm in our classifier to justify its predictions. We found that, LIME algorithm can explain why a particular smart contract app is declared as malicious by our ML classifier based on the binary value of EVM opcodes.

Hard-to-detect hardware bit flips, from either malicious circuitry or bugs, have already been shown to make transformers vulnerable in non-generative tasks. This work, for the first time, investigates how low-level, bitwise perturbations (fault injection) to the weights of a large language model (LLM) used for image captioning can influence the semantic meaning of its generated descriptions while preserving grammatical structure. While prior fault analysis methods have shown that flipping a few bits can crash classifiers or degrade accuracy, these approaches overlook the semantic and linguistic dimensions of generative systems. In image captioning models, a single flipped bit might subtly alter how visual features map to words, shifting the entire narrative an AI tells about the world. We hypothesize that such semantic drifts are not random but differentiably estimable. That is, the model's own gradients can predict which bits, if perturbed, will most strongly influence meaning while leaving syntax and fluency intact. We design a differentiable fault analysis framework, BLADE (Bit-level Fault Analysis via Differentiable Estimation), that uses gradient-based sensitivity estimation to locate semantically critical bits and then refines their selection through a caption-level semantic-fluency objective. Our goal is not merely to corrupt captions, but to understand how meaning itself is encoded, distributed, and alterable at the bit level, revealing that even imperceptible low-level changes can steer the high-level semantics of generative vision-language models. It also opens pathways for robustness testing, adversarial defense, and explainable AI, by exposing how structured bit-level faults can reshape a model's semantic output.

Uganda's rapid digital transformation, supported by national strategies such as Vision 2040 and the Digital Transformation Roadmap, has expanded reliance on networked services while simultaneously increasing exposure to sophisticated cyber threats. In resource-constrained settings, commonly deployed rule-based intrusion detection systems lack the adaptability and ethical safeguards needed to address evolving attack patterns, leading to undetected breaches and excessive blocking of legitimate traffic. This study proposes an Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AAI) framework that integrates reinforcement learning, an explicit ethical governance layer, and human oversight to deliver adaptive and trustworthy cybersecurity. A CPU-optimized simulation environment was developed using a five-node network topology that mirrors key elements of Uganda's critical digital infrastructure and generates both benign and malicious traffic, including phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial-of-service attacks. A Q-learning agent, operating within clearly defined ethical constraints and subject to human auditability, was trained and evaluated against a traditional rule-based baseline. The AAI framework achieved a 100 percent detection rate, zero false positives, and full ethical compliance, compared with 70 percent detection and 15 percent false positives for the baseline system. These results demonstrate that agentic, ethically governed reinforcement learning can substantially improve cybersecurity effectiveness and fairness in CPU-only, resource-constrained environments, offering a practical pathway for operationalizing responsible AI in Uganda's national cybersecurity strategy.

SEA-SafeguardBench: Evaluating AI Safety in SEA Languages and Cultures

Panuthep Tasawong, Jian Gang Ngui, Alham Fikri Aji +2

Safeguard models help large language models (LLMs) detect and block harmful content, but most evaluations remain English-centric and overlook linguistic and cultural diversity. Existing multilingual safety benchmarks often rely on machine-translated English data, which fails to capture nuances in low-resource languages. Southeast Asian (SEA) languages are underrepresented despite the region's linguistic diversity and unique safety concerns, from culturally sensitive political speech to region-specific misinformation. Addressing these gaps requires benchmarks that are natively authored to reflect local norms and harm scenarios. We introduce SEA-SafeguardBench, the first human-verified safety benchmark for SEA, covering eight languages, 21,640 samples, across three subsets: general, in-the-wild, and content generation. The experimental results from our benchmark demonstrate that even state-of-the-art LLMs and guardrails are challenged by SEA cultural and harm scenarios and underperform when compared to English texts.

With the increasing complexity of black-box machine learning models and their adoption in high-stakes areas, it is critical to provide explanations for their predictions. Existing local explanation methods lack in generating high-fidelity explanations. This paper proposes a novel local model agnostic explanation method to generate high-fidelity explanations using multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) and N-ball sampling strategies. MARS is used to model non-linear local boundaries that effectively captures the underlying behavior of the reference model, thereby enhancing the local fidelity. The N-ball sampling technique samples perturbed samples directly from a desired distribution instead of reweighting, leading to further improvement in the faithfulness. The performance of the proposed method was computed in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE) and evaluated on five different benchmark datasets with different kernel width. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves higher local surrogate fidelity compared to baseline local explanation methods, with an average reduction of 32% in root mean square error, indicating more accurate local approximations of the black-box model. Additionally, statistical analysis shows that across all benchmark datasets, the proposed approach results were statistically significantly better. This paper advances the field of explainable AI by providing insights that can benefit the broader research and practitioner community.

We introduce an open, machine-readable corpus of Greek government decisions sourced from the national transparency platform Diavgeia. The resource comprises 1 million decisions, featuring and high-quality raw text extracted from PDFs. It is released with raw extracted text in Markdown format, alongside a fully reproducible extraction pipeline. Beyond the core dataset, we conduct qualitative analyses to explore boilerplate patterns and design a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) task by formulating a set of representative questions, creating high-quality answers, and evaluating a baseline RAG system on its ability to retrieve and reason over public decisions. This evaluation demonstrates the potential of large-scale public-sector corpora to support advanced information access and transparency through structured retrieval and reasoning over governmental documents, and highlights how such a RAG pipeline could simulate a chat-based assistant capable of interactively answering questions about public decisions. Due to its scale, quality, and domain coverage, the corpus can also serve as high-value pre-training or fine-tuning material for new Language Models (LMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) respectively, including specialized models for legal and governmental domains, and as a foundation for novel approaches in domain adaptation, knowledge-grounded generation, and explainable AI. Finally, we discuss limitations, outline future directions, and make both the data and the code accessible.

This chapter discusses the ethics of generative AI. It provides a technical primer to show how generative AI affords experiencing technology as if it were human, and this affordance provides a fruitful focus for the philosophical ethics of generative AI. It then shows how generative AI can both aggravate and alleviate familiar ethical concerns in AI ethics, including responsibility, privacy, bias and fairness, and forms of alienation and exploitation. Finally, the chapter examines ethical questions that arise specifically from generative AI's mimetic generativity, such as debates about authorship and credit, the emergence of as-if social relationships with machines, and new forms of influence, persuasion, and manipulation.

Objective: To develop the AI Product Passport, a standards-based framework improving transparency, traceability, and compliance in healthcare AI via lifecycle-based documentation. Materials and Methods: The AI Product Passport was developed within the AI4HF project, focusing on heart failure AI tools. We analyzed regulatory frameworks (EU AI Act, FDA guidelines) and existing standards to design a relational data model capturing metadata across AI lifecycle phases: study definition, dataset preparation, model generation/evaluation, deployment/monitoring, and passport generation. MLOps/ModelOps concepts were integrated for operational relevance. Co-creation involved feedback from AI4HF consortium and a Lisbon workshop with 21 diverse stakeholders, evaluated via Mentimeter polls. The open-source platform was implemented with Python libraries for automated provenance tracking. Results: The AI Product Passport was designed based on existing standards and methods with well-defined lifecycle management and role-based access. Its implementation is a web-based platform with a relational data model supporting auditable documentation. It generates machine- and human-readable reports, customizable for stakeholders. It aligns with FUTURE-AI principles (Fairness, Universality, Traceability, Usability, Robustness, Explainability), ensuring fairness, traceability, and usability. Exported passports detail model purpose, data provenance, performance, and deployment context. GitHub-hosted backend/frontend codebases enhance accessibility. Discussion and Conclusion: The AI Product Passport addresses transparency gaps in healthcare AI, meeting regulatory and ethical demands. Its open-source nature and alignment with standards foster trust and adaptability. Future enhancements include FAIR data principles and FHIR integration for improved interoperability, promoting responsible AI deployment.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are essential for embodied AI and safety-critical applications, such as robotics and autonomous systems. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on static or curated visual inputs, neglecting the challenges posed by adversarial conditions, value misalignment, and error propagation in continuous deployment. Current benchmarks either overlook the impact of real-world perturbations, or fail to account for the cumulative effect of inconsistent reasoning over time. To address these gaps, we introduce the Degraded Image Quality Leading to Hallucinations (DIQ-H) benchmark, the first to evaluate VLMs under adversarial visual conditions in continuous sequences. DIQ-H simulates real-world stressors including motion blur, sensor noise, and compression artifacts, and measures how these corruptions lead to persistent errors and misaligned outputs across time. The benchmark explicitly models error propagation and its long-term value consistency. To enhance scalability and reduce costs for safety-critical evaluation, we propose the Value-Guided Iterative Refinement (VIR) framework, which automates the generation of high-quality, ethically aligned ground truth annotations. VGIR leverages lightweight VLMs to detect and refine value misalignment, improving accuracy from 72.2% to 83.3%, representing a 15.3% relative improvement. The DIQ-H benchmark and VGIR framework provide a robust platform for embodied AI safety assessment, revealing vulnerabilities in error recovery, ethical consistency, and temporal value alignment.

This work presents a conceptual framework for causal concept-based post-hoc Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), based on the requirements that explanations for non-interpretable models should be understandable as well as faithful to the model being explained. Local and global explanations are generated by calculating the probability of sufficiency of concept interventions. Example explanations are presented, generated with a proof-of-concept model made to explain classifiers trained on the CelebA dataset. Understandability is demonstrated through a clear concept-based vocabulary, subject to an implicit causal interpretation. Fidelity is addressed by highlighting important framework assumptions, stressing that the context of explanation interpretation must align with the context of explanation generation.

Shapley values, a gold standard for feature attribution in Explainable AI, face two key challenges. First, the canonical Shapley framework assumes that the worth function is additive, yet real-world payoff constructions--driven by non-Gaussian distributions, heavy tails, feature dependence, or domain-specific loss scales--often violate this assumption, leading to distorted attributions. Second, achieving sparse explanations in high-dimensional settings by computing dense Shapley values and then applying ad hoc thresholding is costly and risks inconsistency. We introduce Sparse Isotonic Shapley Regression (SISR), a unified nonlinear explanation framework. SISR simultaneously learns a monotonic transformation to restore additivity--obviating the need for a closed-form specification--and enforces an L0 sparsity constraint on the Shapley vector, enhancing computational efficiency in large feature spaces. Its optimization algorithm leverages Pool-Adjacent-Violators for efficient isotonic regression and normalized hard-thresholding for support selection, ensuring ease in implementation and global convergence guarantees. Analysis shows that SISR recovers the true transformation in a wide range of scenarios and achieves strong support recovery even in high noise. Moreover, we are the first to demonstrate that irrelevant features and inter-feature dependencies can induce a true payoff transformation that deviates substantially from linearity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SISR stabilizes attributions across payoff schemes and correctly filters irrelevant features; in contrast, standard Shapley values suffer severe rank and sign distortions. By unifying nonlinear transformation estimation with sparsity pursuit, SISR advances the frontier of nonlinear explainability, providing a theoretically grounded and practical attribution framework.