Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for cybersecurity threat analysis, but their deployment in security-sensitive environments raises trust and safety concerns. With over 21,000 vulnerabilities disclosed in 2025, manual analysis is infeasible, making scalable and verifiable AI support critical. When querying LLMs, dealing with emerging vulnerabilities is challenging as they have a training cut-off date. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can inject up-to-date context to alleviate the cut-off date limitation, it remains unclear how much LLMs rely on retrieved evidence versus the model's internal knowledge, and whether the retrieved information is meaningful or even correct. This uncertainty could mislead security analysts, mis-prioritize patches, and increase security risks. Therefore, this work proposes LLM Embedding-based Attribution (LEA) to analyze the generated responses for vulnerability exploitation analysis. More specifically, LEA quantifies the relative contribution of internal knowledge vs. retrieved content in the generated responses. We evaluate LEA on 500 critical vulnerabilities disclosed between 2016 and 2025, across three RAG settings -- valid, generic, and incorrect -- using three state-of-the-art LLMs. Our results demonstrate LEA's ability to detect clear distinctions between non-retrieval, generic-retrieval, and valid-retrieval scenarios with over 95% accuracy on larger models. Finally, we demonstrate the limitations posed by incorrect retrieval of vulnerability information and raise a cautionary note to the cybersecurity community regarding the blind reliance on LLMs and RAG for vulnerability analysis. LEA offers security analysts with a metric to audit RAG-enhanced workflows, improving the transparent and trustworthy deployment of AI in cybersecurity threat analysis.

The integration of vision-language-action (VLA) models into embodied AI (EAI) robots is rapidly advancing their ability to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in humancentric environments. However, EAI systems introduce critical security risks: a compromised VLA model can directly translate adversarial perturbations on sensory input into unsafe physical actions. Traditional safety definitions and methodologies from the machine learning community are no longer sufficient. EAI systems raise new questions, such as what constitutes safety, how to measure it, and how to design effective attack and defense mechanisms in physically grounded, interactive settings. In this work, we present the first systematic study of adversarial safety attacks on embodied AI systems, grounded in ISO standards for human-robot interactions. We (1) formalize a principled taxonomy of safety violations (critical, dangerous, risky) based on physical constraints such as separation distance, velocity, and collision boundaries; (2) introduce ANNIEBench, a benchmark of nine safety-critical scenarios with 2,400 video-action sequences for evaluating embodied safety; and (3) ANNIE-Attack, a task-aware adversarial framework with an attack leader model that decomposes long-horizon goals into frame-level perturbations. Our evaluation across representative EAI models shows attack success rates exceeding 50% across all safety categories. We further demonstrate sparse and adaptive attack strategies and validate the real-world impact through physical robot experiments. These results expose a previously underexplored but highly consequential attack surface in embodied AI systems, highlighting the urgent need for security-driven defenses in the physical AI era. Code is available at https://github.com/RLCLab/Annie.

Agentic LLM AI agents are often little more than autonomous chatbots: actors following scripts, often controlled by an unreliable director. This work introduces a bottom-up framework that situates AI agents in their environment, with all behaviors triggered by changes in their environments. It introduces the notion of aspects, similar to the idea of umwelt, where sets of agents perceive their environment differently to each other, enabling clearer control of information. We provide an illustrative implementation and show that compared to a typical architecture, which leaks up to 83% of the time, aspective agentic AI enables zero information leakage. We anticipate that this concept of specialist agents working efficiently in their own information niches can provide improvements to both security and efficiency.

AI is transforming the healthcare domain and is increasingly helping practitioners to make health-related decisions. Therefore, accountability becomes a crucial concern for critical AI-driven decisions. Although regulatory bodies, such as the EU commission, provide guidelines, they are highlevel and focus on the ''what'' that should be done and less on the ''how'', creating a knowledge gap for actors. Through an extensive analysis, we found that the term accountability is perceived and dealt with in many different ways, depending on the actor's expertise and domain of work. With increasing concerns about AI accountability issues and the ambiguity around this term, this paper bridges the gap between the ''what'' and ''how'' of AI accountability, specifically for AI systems in healthcare. We do this by analysing the concept of accountability, formulating an accountability framework, and providing a three-tier structure for handling various accountability mechanisms. Our accountability framework positions the regulations of healthcare AI systems and the mechanisms adopted by the actors under a consistent accountability regime. Moreover, the three-tier structure guides the actors of the healthcare AI system to categorise the mechanisms based on their conduct. Through our framework, we advocate that decision-making in healthcare AI holds shared dependencies, where accountability should be dealt with jointly and should foster collaborations. We highlight the role of explainability in instigating communication and information sharing between the actors to further facilitate the collaborative process.

Symbolic regression (SR) has emerged as a powerful tool for automated scientific discovery, enabling the derivation of governing equations from experimental data. A growing body of work illustrates the promise of integrating domain knowledge into the SR to improve the discovered equation's generality and usefulness. Physics-informed SR (PiSR) addresses this by incorporating domain knowledge, but current methods often require specialized formulations and manual feature engineering, limiting their adaptability only to domain experts. In this study, we leverage pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to facilitate knowledge integration in PiSR. By harnessing the contextual understanding of LLMs trained on vast scientific literature, we aim to automate the incorporation of domain knowledge, reducing the need for manual intervention and making the process more accessible to a broader range of scientific problems. Namely, the LLM is integrated into the SR's loss function, adding a term of the LLM's evaluation of the SR's produced equation. We extensively evaluate our method using three SR algorithms (DEAP, gplearn, and PySR) and three pre-trained LLMs (Falcon, Mistral, and LLama 2) across three physical dynamics (dropping ball, simple harmonic motion, and electromagnetic wave). The results demonstrate that LLM integration consistently improves the reconstruction of physical dynamics from data, enhancing the robustness of SR models to noise and complexity. We further explore the impact of prompt engineering, finding that more informative prompts significantly improve performance.

When developers of artificial intelligence (AI) products need to decide between profit and safety for the users, they likely choose profit. Untrustworthy AI technology must come packaged with tangible negative consequences. Here, we envisage those consequences as the loss of reputation caused by media coverage of their misdeeds, disseminated to the public. We explore whether media coverage has the potential to push AI creators into the production of safe products, enabling widespread adoption of AI technology. We created artificial populations of self-interested creators and users and studied them through the lens of evolutionary game theory. Our results reveal that media is indeed able to foster cooperation between creators and users, but not always. Cooperation does not evolve if the quality of the information provided by the media is not reliable enough, or if the costs of either accessing media or ensuring safety are too high. By shaping public perception and holding developers accountable, media emerges as a powerful soft regulator -- guiding AI safety even in the absence of formal government oversight.

Recent advances in generative biology have enabled the design of novel proteins, creating significant opportunities for drug discovery while also introducing new risks, including the potential development of synthetic bioweapons. Existing biosafety measures primarily rely on inference-time filters such as sequence alignment and protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction to detect dangerous outputs. In this study, we evaluate the performance of three leading PPI prediction tools: AlphaFold 3, AF3Complex, and SpatialPPIv2. These models were tested on well-characterized viral-host interactions, such as those involving Hepatitis B and SARS-CoV-2. Despite being trained on many of the same viruses, the models fail to detect a substantial number of known interactions. Strikingly, none of the tools successfully identify any of the four experimentally validated SARS-CoV-2 mutants with confirmed binding. These findings suggest that current predictive filters are inadequate for reliably flagging even known biological threats and are even more unlikely to detect novel ones. We argue for a shift toward response-oriented infrastructure, including rapid experimental validation, adaptable biomanufacturing, and regulatory frameworks capable of operating at the speed of AI-driven developments.

Ongoing advancements in computer vision, particularly in pattern recognition and scene classification, have enabled new applications in environmental monitoring. Deep learning now offers non-contact methods for assessing water quality and detecting contamination, both critical for disaster response and public health protection. This work introduces HydroVision, a deep learning-based scene classification framework that estimates optically active water quality parameters including Chlorophyll-Alpha, Chlorophylls, Colored Dissolved Organic Matter (CDOM), Phycocyanins, Suspended Sediments, and Turbidity from standard Red-Green-Blue (RGB) images of surface water. HydroVision supports early detection of contamination trends and strengthens monitoring by regulatory agencies during external environmental stressors, industrial activities, and force majeure events. The model is trained on more than 500,000 seasonally varied images collected from the United States Geological Survey Hydrologic Imagery Visualization and Information System between 2022 and 2024. This approach leverages widely available RGB imagery as a scalable, cost-effective alternative to traditional multispectral and hyperspectral remote sensing. Four state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (VGG-16, ResNet50, MobileNetV2, DenseNet121) and a Vision Transformer are evaluated through transfer learning to identify the best-performing architecture. DenseNet121 achieves the highest validation performance, with an R2 score of 0.89 in predicting CDOM, demonstrating the framework's promise for real-world water quality monitoring across diverse conditions. While the current model is optimized for well-lit imagery, future work will focus on improving robustness under low-light and obstructed scenarios to expand its operational utility.

Administrative registry data can be used to construct population-scale networks whose ties reflect shared social contexts between persons. With machine learning, such networks can be encoded into numerical representations -- embeddings -- that automatically capture individuals' position within the network. We created embeddings for all persons in the Dutch population from a population-scale network that represents five shared contexts: neighborhood, work, family, household, and school. To assess the informativeness of these embeddings, we used them to predict right-wing populist voting. Embeddings alone predicted right-wing populist voting above chance-level but performed worse than individual characteristics. Combining the best subset of embeddings with individual characteristics only slightly improved predictions. After transforming the embeddings to make their dimensions more sparse and orthogonal, we found that one embedding dimension was strongly associated with the outcome. Mapping this dimension back to the population network revealed differences in network structure related to right-wing populist voting between different school ties and achieved education levels. Our study contributes methodologically by demonstrating how population-scale network embeddings can be made interpretable, and substantively by linking structural network differences in education to right-wing populist voting.

A judge ruled on Tuesday that Google would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser or the Android operating system, saving the tech giant from the most severe penalties sought by the US government. The same judge had ruled in favor of US prosecutors nearly a year ago, finding that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly with its namesake search engine. Groups critical of Google's dominance in the internet search and online advertising industry are furious. They contend the judge missed an opportunity to enact meaningful change in an industry that has suffocated under the crushing weight of its heaviest player. Tech industry groups and investors, by contrast, are thrilled. Shares in Alphabet, Google's parent company, have risen 9% since Tuesday afternoon.