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.

Modeling daily hand interactions often struggles with severe occlusions, such as when two hands overlap, which highlights the need for robust feature learning in 3D hand pose estimation (HPE). T o handle such occluded hand images, it is vital to effectively learn the relationship between local image features (e.g., for occluded joints) and global context (e.g., cues from inter-joints, inter-hands, or the scene). However, most current 3D HPE methods still rely on ResNet for feature extraction, and such CNN's inductive bias may not be optimal for 3D HPE due to its limited capability to model the global context. T o address this limitation, we propose an effective and efficient framework for visual feature extraction in 3D HPE using recent state space modeling (i.e., Mamba), dubbed Deformable Mamba (DF-Mamba). DF-Mamba is designed to capture global context cues beyond standard convolution through Mamba's selective state modeling and the proposed deformable state scanning. Specifically, for local features after convolution, our deformable scanning aggregates these features within an image while selectively preserving useful cues that represent the global context. This approach significantly improves the accuracy of structured 3D HPE, with comparable inference speed to ResNet-50. Our experiments involve extensive evaluations on five divergent datasets including single-hand and two-hand scenarios, hand-only and hand-object interactions, as well as RGB and depth-based estimation. DF-Mamba outperforms the latest image backbones, including VMamba and Spatial-Mamba, on all datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Auditors rely on Journal Entry Tests (JETs) to detect anomalies in tax-related ledger records, but rule-based methods generate overwhelming false positives and struggle with subtle irregularities. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can serve as anomaly detectors in double-entry bookkeeping. Benchmarking SoTA LLMs such as LLaMA and Gemma on both synthetic and real-world anonymized ledgers, we compare them against JETs and machine learning baselines. Our results show that LLMs consistently outperform traditional rule-based JETs and classical ML baselines, while also providing natural-language explanations that enhance interpretability. These results highlight the potential of \textbf{AI-augmented auditing}, where human auditors collaborate with foundation models to strengthen financial integrity.

Born-rule generative modeling, a central task in quantum machine learning, seeks to learn probability distributions that can be efficiently sampled by measuring complex quantum states. One hope is for quantum models to efficiently capture probability distributions that are difficult to learn and simulate by classical means alone. Quantum Boltzmann machines were proposed about one decade ago for this purpose, yet efficient training methods have remained elusive. In this paper, I overcome this obstacle by proposing a practical solution that trains quantum Boltzmann machines for Born-rule generative modeling. Two key ingredients in the proposal are the Donsker-Varadhan variational representation of the classical relative entropy and the quantum Boltzmann gradient estimator of [Patel et al., arXiv:2410.12935]. I present the main result for a more general ansatz known as an evolved quantum Boltzmann machine [Minervini et al., arXiv:2501.03367], which combines parameterized real- and imaginary-time evolution. I also show how to extend the findings to other distinguishability measures beyond relative entropy. Finally, I present four different hybrid quantum-classical algorithms for the minimax optimization underlying training, and I discuss their theoretical convergence guarantees.

Stock price prediction is challenging due to market volatility and its sensitivity to real-time events. While large language models (LLMs) offer new avenues for text-based forecasting, their application in finance is hindered by noisy news data and the lack of explicit answers in text. General-purpose memory architectures struggle to identify the key drivers of price movements. To address this, we propose StockMem, an event-reflection dual-layer memory framework. It structures news into events and mines them along two dimensions: horizontal consolidation integrates daily events, while longitudinal tracking captures event evolution to extract incremental information reflecting market expectation discrepancies. This builds a temporal event knowledge base. By analyzing event-price dynamics, the framework further forms a reflection knowledge base of causal experiences. For prediction, it retrieves analogous historical scenarios and reasons with current events, incremental data, and past experiences. Experiments show StockMem outperforms existing memory architectures and provides superior, explainable reasoning by tracing the information chain affecting prices, enhancing decision transparency in financial forecasting.

As generative models become powerful, concerns around transparency, accountability, and copyright violations have intensified. Understanding how specific training data contributes to a model's output is critical. We introduce a framework for interpreting generative outputs through the automatic construction of ontologyaligned knowledge graphs (KGs). While automatic KG construction from natural text has advanced, extracting structured and ontology-consistent representations from visual content remains challenging -- due to the richness and multi-object nature of images. Leveraging multimodal large language models (LLMs), our method extracts structured triples from images, aligned with a domain-specific ontology. By comparing the KGs of generated and training images, we can trace potential influences, enabling copyright analysis, dataset transparency, and interpretable AI. We validate our method through experiments on locally trained models via unlearning, and on large-scale models through a style-specific experiment. Our framework supports the development of AI systems that foster human collaboration, creativity and stimulate curiosity.

Ensuring content safety in large language models (LLMs) is essential for their deployment in real-world applications. However, existing safety guardrails are predominantly tailored for high-resource languages, leaving a significant portion of the world's population underrepresented who communicate in low-resource languages. To address this, we introduce CREST (CRoss-lingual Efficient Safety Transfer), a parameter-efficient multilingual safety classification model that supports 100 languages with only 0.5B parameters. By training on a strategically chosen subset of only 13 high-resource languages, our model utilizes cluster-based cross-lingual transfer from a few to 100 languages, enabling effective generalization to both unseen high-resource and low-resource languages. This approach addresses the challenge of limited training data in low-resource settings. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across six safety benchmarks to demonstrate that CREST outperforms existing state-of-the-art guardrails of comparable scale and achieves competitive results against models with significantly larger parameter counts (2.5B parameters and above). Our findings highlight the limitations of language-specific guardrails and underscore the importance of developing universal, language-agnostic safety systems that can scale effectively to serve global populations.

Migrating a set of software variants into a software product line (SPL) is an expensive and potentially challenging endeavor. Indeed, SPL engineering can significantly impact a company's development process and often requires changes to established developer practices. The work presented in this paper stems from a collaboration with a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) that decided to migrate its existing code base into an SPL. In this study, we conducted an in-depth evaluation of the company's current development processes and practices, as well as the anticipated benefits and risks associated with the migration. Key stakeholders involved in software development participated in this evaluation to provide insight into their perceptions of the migration and their potential resistance to change. This paper describes the design of the interviews conducted with these stakeholders and presents an analysis of the results. Among the qualitative findings, we observed that all participants, regardless of their role in the development process, identified benefits of the migration relevant to their own activities. Furthermore, our results suggest that an effective risk mitigation strategy involves keeping stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the process, preserving as many good practices as possible, and actively involving them in the migration to ensure a smooth transition and minimize potential challenges.

Graph-based Anomaly Detection models have gained widespread adoption in recent years, identifying suspicious nodes by aggregating neighborhood information. However, most existing studies overlook the pervasive issues of missing and adversarially obscured node attributes, which can undermine aggregation stability and prediction reliability. To mitigate this, we propose FGC-Comp, a lightweight, classifier-agnostic, and deployment-friendly attribute completion module-designed to enhance neighborhood aggregation under incomplete attributes. We partition each node's neighbors into three label-based groups, apply group-specific transforms to the labeled groups while a node-conditioned gate handles unknowns, fuse messages via residual connections, and train end-to-end with a binary classification objective to improve aggregation stability and prediction reliability under missing attributes. Experiments on two real-world fraud datasets validate the effectiveness of the approach with negligible computational overhead.

Conformal prediction (CP) provides a comprehensive framework to produce statistically rigorous uncertainty sets for black-box machine learning models. To further improve the efficiency of CP, conformal correction is proposed to fine-tune or wrap the base model with an extra module using a conformal-aware inefficiency loss. In this work, we empirically and theoretically identify a trade-off between the CP efficiency and the entropy of model prediction. We then propose an entropy-constrained conformal correction method, exploring a better Pareto optimum between efficiency and entropy. Extensive experimental results on both computer vision and graph datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. For instance, it can significantly improve the efficiency of state-of-the-art CP methods by up to 34.4%, given an entropy threshold.