The rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has underscored the urgent need for responsible AI practices. Despite increasing interest, a comprehensive AI risk assessment toolkit remains lacking. This study introduces our Responsible AI (RAI) Question Bank, a comprehensive framework and tool designed to support diverse AI initiatives. By integrating AI ethics principles such as fairness, transparency, and accountability into a structured question format, the RAI Question Bank aids in identifying potential risks, aligning with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act, and enhancing overall AI governance. A key benefit of the RAI Question Bank is its systematic approach to linking lower-level risk questions to higher-level ones and related themes, preventing siloed assessments and ensuring a cohesive evaluation process. Case studies illustrate the practical application of the RAI Question Bank in assessing AI projects, from evaluating risk factors to informing decision-making processes. The study also demonstrates how the RAI Question Bank can be used to ensure compliance with standards, mitigate risks, and promote the development of trustworthy AI systems. This work advances RAI by providing organizations with a valuable tool to navigate the complexities of ethical AI development and deployment while ensuring comprehensive risk management.

In order to deploy deep neural networks (DNNs) in high-stakes scenarios, it is imperative that DNNs provide inference robust to external perturbations - both intentional and unintentional. Although the resilience of DNNs to intentional and unintentional perturbations has been widely investigated, a unified vision of these inherently intertwined problem domains is still missing. In this work, we fill this gap by providing a survey of the state of the art and highlighting the similarities of the proposed approaches.We also analyze the research challenges that need to be addressed to deploy resilient and secure DNNs. As there has not been any such survey connecting the resilience of DNNs to intentional and unintentional perturbations, we believe this work can help advance the frontier in both domains by enabling the exchange of ideas between the two communities.

Visually Rich Documents (VRDs) are essential in academia, finance, medical fields, and marketing due to their multimodal information content. Traditional methods for extracting information from VRDs depend on expert knowledge and manual labor, making them costly and inefficient. The advent of deep learning has revolutionized this process, introducing models that leverage multimodal information vision, text, and layout along with pretraining tasks to develop comprehensive document representations. These models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various downstream tasks, significantly enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of information extraction from VRDs. In response to the growing demands and rapid developments in Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU), this paper provides a comprehensive review of deep learning-based VRDU frameworks. We systematically survey and analyze existing methods and benchmark datasets, categorizing them based on adopted strategies and downstream tasks. Furthermore, we compare different techniques used in VRDU models, focusing on feature representation and fusion, model architecture, and pretraining methods, while highlighting their strengths, limitations, and appropriate scenarios. Finally, we identify emerging trends and challenges in VRDU, offering insights into future research directions and practical applications. This survey aims to provide a thorough understanding of VRDU advancements, benefiting both academic and industrial sectors.

The emergence of artificial intelligence and digitization of the power grid introduced numerous effective application scenarios for AI-based services for the smart grid. Nevertheless, adopting AI in critical infrastructures presents challenges due to unclear regulations and lacking risk quantification techniques. Regulated and accountable approaches for integrating AI-based services into the smart grid could accelerate the adoption of innovative methods in daily practices and address society's general safety concerns. This paper contributes to this objective by defining accountability and highlighting its importance for AI-based services in the energy sector. It underlines the current shortcomings of the AI Act and proposes an approach to address these issues in a potential delegated act. The proposed technical approach for developing and operating accountable AI-based smart grid services allows for assessing different service life cycle phases and identifying related accountability risks.

Self-play, characterized by agents' interactions with copies or past versions of itself, has recently gained prominence in reinforcement learning. This paper first clarifies the preliminaries of self-play, including the multi-agent reinforcement learning framework and basic game theory concepts. Then it provides a unified framework and classifies existing self-play algorithms within this framework. Moreover, the paper bridges the gap between the algorithms and their practical implications by illustrating the role of self-play in different scenarios. Finally, the survey highlights open challenges and future research directions in self-play. This paper is an essential guide map for understanding the multifaceted landscape of self-play in RL.

Deep learning has gained significant attention in remote sensing, especially in pixel- or patch-level applications. Despite initial attempts to integrate deep learning into object-based image analysis (OBIA), its full potential remains largely unexplored. In this article, as OBIA usage becomes more widespread, we conducted a comprehensive review and expansion of its task subdomains, with or without the integration of deep learning. Furthermore, we have identified and summarized five prevailing strategies to address the challenge of deep learning's limitations in directly processing unstructured object data within OBIA, and this review also recommends some important future research directions. Our goal with these endeavors is to inspire more exploration in this fascinating yet overlooked area and facilitate the integration of deep learning into OBIA processing workflows.

Deep learning has revolutionized biomedical research by providing sophisticated methods to handle complex, high-dimensional data. Multimodal deep learning (MDL) further enhances this capability by integrating diverse data types such as imaging, textual data, and genetic information, leading to more robust and accurate predictive models. In MDL, differently from early and late fusion methods, intermediate fusion stands out for its ability to effectively combine modality-specific features during the learning process. This systematic review aims to comprehensively analyze and formalize current intermediate fusion methods in biomedical applications. We investigate the techniques employed, the challenges faced, and potential future directions for advancing intermediate fusion methods. Additionally, we introduce a structured notation to enhance the understanding and application of these methods beyond the biomedical domain. Our findings are intended to support researchers, healthcare professionals, and the broader deep learning community in developing more sophisticated and insightful multimodal models. Through this review, we aim to provide a foundational framework for future research and practical applications in the dynamic field of MDL.

In an era defined by the explosive growth of data and rapid technological advancements, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) stand at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Designed to seamlessly integrate diverse data types-including text, images, videos, audio, and physiological sequences-MLLMs address the complexities of real-world applications far beyond the capabilities of single-modality systems. In this paper, we systematically sort out the applications of MLLM in multimodal tasks such as natural language, vision, and audio. We also provide a comparative analysis of the focus of different MLLMs in the tasks, and provide insights into the shortcomings of current MLLMs, and suggest potential directions for future research. Through these discussions, this paper hopes to provide valuable insights for the further development and application of MLLM.

This paper reviews, analyzes, and proposes a new perspective on the bi-encoder architecture for neural search. While the bi-encoder architecture is widely used due to its simplicity and scalability at test time, it has some notable issues such as low performance on seen datasets and weak zero-shot performance on new datasets. In this paper, we analyze these issues and summarize two main critiques: the encoding information bottleneck problem and limitations of the basic assumption of embedding search. We then construct a thought experiment to logically analyze the encoding and searching operations and challenge the basic assumption of embedding search. Building on these observations, we propose a new perspective on the bi-encoder architecture called the \textit{encoding--searching separation} perspective, which conceptually and practically separates the encoding and searching operations. This new perspective is applied to explain the root cause of the identified issues and discuss ways to mitigate the problems. Finally, we discuss the implications of the ideas underlying the new perspective, the design surface that it exposes and the potential research directions arising from it.

Interpretability provides a toolset for understanding how and why neural networks behave in certain ways. However, there is little unity in the field: most studies employ ad-hoc evaluations and do not share theoretical foundations, making it difficult to measure progress and compare the pros and cons of different techniques. Furthermore, while mechanistic understanding is frequently discussed, the basic causal units underlying these mechanisms are often not explicitly defined. In this paper, we propose a perspective on interpretability research grounded in causal mediation analysis. Specifically, we describe the history and current state of interpretability taxonomized according to the types of causal units (mediators) employed, as well as methods used to search over mediators. We discuss the pros and cons of each mediator, providing insights as to when particular kinds of mediators and search methods are most appropriate depending on the goals of a given study. We argue that this framing yields a more cohesive narrative of the field, as well as actionable insights for future work. Specifically, we recommend a focus on discovering new mediators with better trade-offs between human-interpretability and compute-efficiency, and which can uncover more sophisticated abstractions from neural networks than the primarily linear mediators employed in current work. We also argue for more standardized evaluations that enable principled comparisons across mediator types, such that we can better understand when particular causal units are better suited to particular use cases.