Africa
BiasGym: Fantastic LLM Biases and How to Find (and Remove) Them
Islam, Sekh Mainul, Borenstein, Nadav, Pawar, Siddhesh Milind, Yu, Haeun, Arora, Arnav, Augenstein, Isabelle
Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. Biased behaviour is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce BiasGym, a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework for reliably injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations within LLMs. BiasGym consists of two components: BiasInject, which injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, and BiasScope, which leverages these injected signals to identify and steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our method enables consistent bias elicitation for mechanistic analysis, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during token-based fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BiasGym in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from Italy being `reckless drivers') and in probing fictional associations (e.g., people from a fictional country having `blue skin'), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.
Agentic AI Frameworks: Architectures, Protocols, and Design Challenges
Derouiche, Hana, Brahmi, Zaki, Mazeni, Haithem
Aspect Traditional AI agents Modern agentic AI systems (LLM-based agents) Definition Autonomous entities with fixed sensing/acting loops; limited by static rules or models Autonomous reasoning systems using LLMs with dynamic behavior, tool orchestration, and context-awarenessAutonomy Limited autonomy; often dependent on human input or predefined instructions High autonomy; capable of independently performing complex and extended tasks Goal Management Focused on single, static goals or fixed task planning Capable of managing multiple, evolving, and nested goals adaptivelyArchitecture Rule-based or BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) models; monolithic design Modular architecture centered on LLMs, with components for memory, tools, context injection, and rolesAdaptability Suited to controlled, predictable environments; poor generalization Designed for open, dynamic, and unpredictable environmentsDecision-Making Deterministic or rule-based logic; symbolic reasoning Context-sensitive, probabilistic reasoning with adaptive planning and self-reflection Learning Mechanism Rule-based or supervised learning with limited updates Self-supervised and reinforcement learning; continual fine-tuning possible Context Handling Static or manually coded states and rules Dynamic context injection via agent protocols (e.g., MCP, A2A) and runtime awareness Communication Message-passing via ACL or KQML Real-time, event-driven collaboration; natural language interfacesTool Use Limited or predefined tools and actions Dynamic tool invocation, chaining, and API calling based on contextMemory Optional, often hardcoded or task-specific Integrated memory systems supporting long-and short-term information retention
Provable Online CP/PARAF AC Decomposition of a Structured Tensor via Dictionary Learning
We consider the problem of factorizing a structured 3-way tensor into its constituent Canonical Polyadic (CP) factors. This decomposition, which can be viewed as a generalization of singular value decomposition (SVD) for tensors, reveals how the tensor dimensions (features) interact with each other. However, since the factors are a priori unknown, the corresponding optimization problems are inherently non-convex. The existing guaranteed algorithms which handle this non-convexity incur an irreducible error (bias), and only apply to cases where all factors have the same structure. To this end, we develop a provable algorithm for online structured tensor factorization, wherein one of the factors obeys some incoherence conditions, and the others are sparse. Specifically we show that, under some relatively mild conditions on initialization, rank, and sparsity, our algorithm recovers the factors exactly (up to scaling and permutation) at a linear rate. Complementary to our theoretical results, our synthetic and real-world data evaluations showcase superior performance compared to related techniques.