As AI systems integrate into critical infrastructure, security gaps in AI compliance frameworks demand urgent attention. This paper audits and quantifies security risks in three major AI governance standards: NIST AI RMF 1.0, UK's AI and Data Protection Risk Toolkit, and the EU's ALTAI. Using a novel risk assessment methodology, we develop four key metrics: Risk Severity Index (RSI), Attack Potential Index (AVPI), Compliance-Security Gap Percentage (CSGP), and Root Cause Vulnerability Score (RCVS). Our analysis identifies 136 concerns across the frameworks, exposing significant gaps. NIST fails to address 69.23 percent of identified risks, ALTAI has the highest attack vector vulnerability (AVPI = 0.51) and the ICO Toolkit has the largest compliance-security gap, with 80.00 percent of high-risk concerns remaining unresolved. Root cause analysis highlights under-defined processes (ALTAI RCVS = 033) and weak implementation guidance (NIST and ICO RCVS = 0.25) as critical weaknesses. These findings emphasize the need for stronger, enforceable security controls in AI compliance. We offer targeted recommendations to enhance security posture and bridge the gap between compliance and real-world AI risks.

Existing methods for simulating individual identities often oversimplify human complexity, which may lead to incomplete or flattened representations. To address this, we introduce SPeCtrum, a grounded framework for constructing authentic LLM agent personas by incorporating an individual's multidimensional self-concept. SPeCtrum integrates three core components: Social Identity (S), Personal Identity (P), and Personal Life Context (C), each contributing distinct yet interconnected aspects of identity. To evaluate SPeCtrum's effectiveness in identity representation, we conducted automated and human evaluations. Automated evaluations using popular drama characters showed that Personal Life Context (C)-derived from short essays on preferences and daily routines-modeled characters' identities more effectively than Social Identity (S) and Personal Identity (P) alone and performed comparably to the full SPC combination. In contrast, human evaluations involving real-world individuals found that the full SPC combination provided a more comprehensive self-concept representation than C alone. Our findings suggest that while C alone may suffice for basic identity simulation, integrating S, P, and C enhances the authenticity and accuracy of real-world identity representation. Overall, SPeCtrum offers a structured approach for simulating individuals in LLM agents, enabling more personalized human-AI interactions and improving the realism of simulation-based behavioral studies.

We analyze the performance of heterogeneous learning agents in asset markets with stochastic payoffs. Our agents aim to maximize the expected growth rate of their wealth but have different theories on how to learn this best. We focus on comparing Bayesian and no-regret learners in market dynamics. Bayesian learners with a prior over a finite set of models that assign positive prior probability to the correct model have posterior probabilities that converge exponentially to the correct model. Consequently, they survive even in the presence of agents who invest according to the correct model of the stochastic process. Bayesians with a continuum prior converge to the correct model at a rate of $O((\log T)/T)$. Online learning theory provides no-regret algorithms for maximizing the log of wealth in this setting, achieving a worst-case regret bound of $O(\log T)$ without assuming a steady underlying stochastic process but comparing to the best fixed investment rule. This regret, as we observe, is of the same order of magnitude as that of a Bayesian learner with a continuum prior. However, we show that even such low regret may not be sufficient for survival in asset markets: an agent can have regret as low as $O(\log T)$, but still vanish in market dynamics when competing against agents who invest according to the correct model or even against a perfect Bayesian with a finite prior. On the other hand, we show that Bayesian learning is fragile, while no-regret learning requires less knowledge of the environment and is therefore more robust. Any no-regret learner will drive out of the market an imperfect Bayesian whose finite prior or update rule has even small errors. We formally establish the relationship between notions of survival, vanishing, and market domination studied in economics and the framework of regret minimization, thus bridging these theories.

Accurate power load forecasting is essential for the efficient operation and planning of electrical grids, particularly given the increased variability and complexity introduced by renewable energy sources. This paper introduces GAT-LSTM, a hybrid model that combines Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. A key innovation of the model is the incorporation of edge attributes, such as line capacities and efficiencies, into the attention mechanism, enabling it to dynamically capture spatial relationships grounded in grid-specific physical and operational constraints. Additionally, by employing an early fusion of spatial graph embeddings and temporal sequence features, the model effectively learns and predicts complex interactions between spatial dependencies and temporal patterns, providing a realistic representation of the dynamics of power grids. Experimental evaluations on the Brazilian Electricity System dataset demonstrate that the GAT-LSTM model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving reductions of 21. 8% in MAE, 15. 9% in RMSE and 20. 2% in MAPE. These results underscore the robustness and adaptability of the GAT-LSTM model, establishing it as a powerful tool for applications in grid management and energy planning.

Cultural and language factors significantly influence counseling, but Natural Language Processing research has not yet examined whether the findings of conversational analysis for counseling conducted in English apply to other languages. This paper presents a first step towards this direction. We introduce MIDAS (Motivational Interviewing Dataset in Spanish), a counseling dataset created from public video sources that contains expert annotations for counseling reflections and questions. Using this dataset, we explore language-based differences in counselor behavior in English and Spanish and develop classifiers in monolingual and multilingual settings, demonstrating its applications in counselor behavioral coding tasks.

As AIs rapidly advance and become more agentic, the risk they pose is governed not only by their capabilities but increasingly by their propensities, including goals and values. Tracking the emergence of goals and values has proven a longstanding problem, and despite much interest over the years it remains unclear whether current AIs have meaningful values. We propose a solution to this problem, leveraging the framework of utility functions to study the internal coherence of AI preferences. Surprisingly, we find that independently-sampled preferences in current LLMs exhibit high degrees of structural coherence, and moreover that this emerges with scale. These findings suggest that value systems emerge in LLMs in a meaningful sense, a finding with broad implications. To study these emergent value systems, we propose utility engineering as a research agenda, comprising both the analysis and control of AI utilities. We uncover problematic and often shocking values in LLM assistants despite existing control measures. These include cases where AIs value themselves over humans and are anti-aligned with specific individuals. To constrain these emergent value systems, we propose methods of utility control. As a case study, we show how aligning utilities with a citizen assembly reduces political biases and generalizes to new scenarios. Whether we like it or not, value systems have already emerged in AIs, and much work remains to fully understand and control these emergent representations.

The real-time Railway Traffic Management Problem (rtRTMP) is a challenging optimisation problem in railway transportation. It involves the efficient management of train movements while minimising delay propagation caused by unforeseen perturbations due to, e.g, temporary speed limitations or signal failures. This paper re-frames the rtRTMP as a multi-agent coordination problem and formalises it as a Distributed Constraint Optimisation Problem (DCOP) to explore its potential for decentralised solutions. We propose a novel coordination algorithm that extends the widely known Distributed Stochastic Algorithm (DSA), allowing trains to self-organise and resolve scheduling conflicts. The performance of our algorithm is compared to a classical DSA through extensive simulations on a synthetic dataset reproducing diverse problem configurations. Results show that our approach achieves significant improvements in solution quality and convergence speed, demonstrating its effectiveness and scalability in managing large-scale railway networks. Beyond the railway domain, this framework can have broader applicability in autonomous systems, such as self-driving vehicles or inter-satellite coordination.

The expanding scale of large neural network models introduces significant challenges, driving efforts to reduce memory usage and enhance computational efficiency. Such measures are crucial to ensure the practical implementation and effective application of these sophisticated models across a wide array of use cases. This study examines the impact of parameter bit precision on model performance compared to standard 32-bit models, with a focus on multiclass object classification in images. The models analyzed include those with fully connected layers, convolutional layers, and transformer blocks, with model weight resolution ranging from 1 bit to 4.08 bits. The findings indicate that models with lower parameter bit precision achieve results comparable to 32-bit models, showing promise for use in memory-constrained devices. While low-resolution models with a small number of parameters require more training epochs to achieve accuracy comparable to 32-bit models, those with a large number of parameters achieve similar performance within the same number of epochs. Additionally, data augmentation can destabilize training in low-resolution models, but including zero as a potential value in the weight parameters helps maintain stability and prevents performance degradation. Overall, 2.32-bit weights offer the optimal balance of memory reduction, performance, and efficiency. However, further research should explore other dataset types and more complex and larger models. These findings suggest a potential new era for optimized neural network models with reduced memory requirements and improved computational efficiency, though advancements in dedicated hardware are necessary to fully realize this potential.

The increasing use of generative ML foundation models for image super-resolution calls for robust and interpretable uncertainty quantification methods. We address this need by presenting a novel approach based on conformal prediction techniques to create a "confidence mask" capable of reliably and intuitively communicating where the generated image can be trusted. Our method is adaptable to any black-box generative model, including those locked behind an opaque API, requires only easily attainable data for calibration, and is highly customizable via the choice of a local image similarity metric. We prove strong theoretical guarantees for our method that span fidelity error control (according to our local image similarity metric), reconstruction quality, and robustness in the face of data leakage. Finally, we empirically evaluate these results and establish our method's solid performance.

Sequential recommendation is a key area in the field of recommendation systems aiming to model user interest based on historical interaction sequences with irregular intervals. While previous recurrent neural network-based and attention-based approaches have achieved significant results, they have limitations in capturing system continuity due to the discrete characteristics. In the context of continuous-time modeling, state space model (SSM) offers a potential solution, as it can effectively capture the dynamic evolution of user interest over time. However, existing SSM-based approaches ignore the impact of irregular time intervals within historical user interactions, making it difficult to model complexed user-item transitions in sequences. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid SSM-based model called SS4Rec for continuous-time sequential recommendation. SS4Rec integrates a time-aware SSM to handle irregular time intervals and a relation-aware SSM to model contextual dependencies, enabling it to infer user interest from both temporal and sequential perspectives. In the training process, the time-aware SSM and the relation-aware SSM are discretized by variable stepsizes according to user interaction time intervals and input data, respectively. This helps capture the continuous dependency from irregular time intervals and provides time-specific personalized recommendations. Experimental studies on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of SS4Rec.