Government
OSINT or BULLSHINT? Exploring Open-Source Intelligence tweets about the Russo-Ukrainian War
Niu, Johannes, Stillman, Mila, Kruspe, Anna
This paper examines the role of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) on Twitter regarding the Russo-Ukrainian war, distinguishing between genuine OSINT and deceptive misinformation efforts, termed "BULLSHINT." Utilizing a dataset spanning from January 2022 to July 2023, we analyze nearly 2 million tweets from approximately 1,040 users involved in discussing real-time military engagements, strategic analyses, and misinformation related to the conflict. Using sentiment analysis, partisanship detection, misinformation identification, and Named Entity Recognition (NER), we uncover communicative patterns and dissemination strategies within the OSINT community. Significant findings reveal a predominant negative sentiment influenced by war events, a nuanced distribution of pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian partisanship, and the potential strategic manipulation of information. Additionally, we apply community detection techniques, which are able to identify distinct clusters partisanship, topics, and misinformation, highlighting the complex dynamics of information spread on social media. This research contributes to the understanding of digital warfare and misinformation dynamics, offering insights into the operationalization of OSINT in geopolitical conflicts.
Variety Is the Spice of Life: Detecting Misinformation with Dynamic Environmental Representations
Wang, Bing, Li, Ximing, Wang, Yiming, Li, Changchun, Cui, Jiaxu, Guan, Renchu, Yang, Bo
The proliferation of misinformation across diverse social media platforms has drawn significant attention from both academic and industrial communities due to its detrimental effects. Accordingly, automatically distinguishing misinformation, dubbed as Misinformation Detection (MD), has become an increasingly active research topic. The mainstream methods formulate MD as a static learning paradigm, which learns the mapping between the content, links, and propagation of news articles and the corresponding manual veracity labels. However, the static assumption is often violated, since in real-world scenarios, the veracity of news articles may vacillate within the dynamically evolving social environment. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework, namely Misinformation detection with Dynamic Environmental Representations (MISDER). The basic idea of MISDER lies in learning a social environmental representation for each period and employing a temporal model to predict the representation for future periods. In this work, we specify the temporal model as the LSTM model, continuous dynamics equation, and pre-trained dynamics system, suggesting three variants of MISDER, namely MISDER-LSTM, MISDER-ODE, and MISDER-PT, respectively. To evaluate the performance of MISDER, we compare it to various MD baselines across 2 prevalent datasets, and the experimental results can indicate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Software Fairness Dilemma: Is Bias Mitigation a Zero-Sum Game?
Chen, Zhenpeng, Li, Xinyue, Zhang, Jie M., Sun, Weisong, Xiao, Ying, Li, Tianlin, Lou, Yiling, Liu, Yang
Fairness is a critical requirement for Machine Learning (ML) software, driving the development of numerous bias mitigation methods. Previous research has identified a leveling-down effect in bias mitigation for computer vision and natural language processing tasks, where fairness is achieved by lowering performance for all groups without benefiting the unprivileged group. However, it remains unclear whether this effect applies to bias mitigation for tabular data tasks, a key area in fairness research with significant real-world applications. This study evaluates eight bias mitigation methods for tabular data, including both widely used and cutting-edge approaches, across 44 tasks using five real-world datasets and four common ML models. Contrary to earlier findings, our results show that these methods operate in a zero-sum fashion, where improvements for unprivileged groups are related to reduced benefits for traditionally privileged groups. However, previous research indicates that the perception of a zero-sum trade-off might complicate the broader adoption of fairness policies. To explore alternatives, we investigate an approach that applies the state-of-the-art bias mitigation method solely to unprivileged groups, showing potential to enhance benefits of unprivileged groups without negatively affecting privileged groups or overall ML performance. Our study highlights potential pathways for achieving fairness improvements without zero-sum trade-offs, which could help advance the adoption of bias mitigation methods.
Strategic Hypothesis Testing
Hossain, Safwan, Chen, Yatong, Chen, Yiling
We examine hypothesis testing within a principal-agent framework, where a strategic agent, holding private beliefs about the effectiveness of a product, submits data to a principal who decides on approval. The principal employs a hypothesis testing rule, aiming to pick a p-value threshold that balances false positives and false negatives while anticipating the agent's incentive to maximize expected profitability. Building on prior work, we develop a game-theoretic model that captures how the agent's participation and reporting behavior respond to the principal's statistical decision rule. Despite the complexity of the interaction, we show that the principal's errors exhibit clear monotonic behavior when segmented by an efficiently computable critical p-value threshold, leading to an interpretable characterization of their optimal p-value threshold. We empirically validate our model and these insights using publicly available data on drug approvals. Overall, our work offers a comprehensive perspective on strategic interactions within the hypothesis testing framework, providing technical and regulatory insights.
Analyzing German Parliamentary Speeches: A Machine Learning Approach for Topic and Sentiment Classification
Pรคtz, Lukas, Beyer, Moritz, Spรคth, Jannik, Bohlen, Lasse, Zschech, Patrick, Kraus, Mathias, Rosenberger, Julian
This study investigates political discourse in the German parliament, the Bundestag, by analyzing approximately 28,000 parliamentary speeches from the last five years. Two machine learning models for topic and sentiment classification were developed and trained on a manually labeled dataset. The models showed strong classification performance, achieving an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.94 for topic classification (average across topics) and 0.89 for sentiment classification. Both models were applied to assess topic trends and sentiment distributions across political parties and over time. The analysis reveals remarkable relationships between parties and their role in parliament. In particular, a change in style can be observed for parties moving from government to opposition. While ideological positions matter, governing responsibilities also shape discourse. The analysis directly addresses key questions about the evolution of topics, sentiment dynamics, and party-specific discourse strategies in the Bundestag.
Using the NANDA Index Architecture in Practice: An Enterprise Perspective
Wang, Sichao, Raskar, Ramesh, Lambe, Mahesh, Chari, Pradyumna, Singhal, Rekha, Gupta, Shailja, Ranjan, Rajesh, Huang, Ken
The proliferation of autonomous AI agents represents a paradigmatic shift from traditional web architectures toward collaborative intelligent systems requiring sophisticated mechanisms for discovery, authentication, capability verification, and secure collaboration across heterogeneous protocol environments. This paper presents a comprehensive framework addressing the fundamental infrastructure requirements for secure, trustworthy, and interoperable AI agent ecosystems. We introduce the NANDA (Networked AI Agents in a Decentralized Architecture) framework, providing global agent discovery, cryptographically verifiable capability attestation through Agent-Facts, and cross-protocol interoperability across Anthropic's Modal Context Protocol (MCP), Google's Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Microsoft's NLWeb, and standard HTTPS communications. NANDA implements Zero Trust Agentic Access (ZTAA) principles, extending traditional Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to address autonomous agent security challenges including capability spoofing, impersonation attacks, and sensitive data leakage. The framework defines Agent Visibility and Control (AVC) mechanisms enabling enterprise governance while maintaining operational autonomy and regulatory compliance. Our approach transforms isolated AI agents into an interconnected ecosystem of verifiable, trustworthy intelligent services, establishing foundational infrastructure for large-scale autonomous agent deployment across enterprise and consumer environments. This work addresses the critical gap between current AI agent capabilities and infrastructure requirements for secure, scalable, multi-agent collaboration, positioning the foundation for next-generation autonomous intelligent systems.
Robot builds a robot's brain: AI generated drone command and control station hosted in the sky
Robot builds a robot's brain: AI generated drone command and control station hosted in the sky Abstract --Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) including large language models (LLMs) and hybrid reasoning models present an opportunity to reimagine how autonomous robots such as drones are designed, developed, and validated. Here, we demonstrate a fully AI-generated drone control system: with minimal human input, an artificial intelligence (AI) model authored all the code for a real-time, self-hosted drone command and control platform, which was deployed and demonstrated on a real drone in flight as well as a simulated virtual drone in the cloud. The system enables real-time mapping, flight telemetry, autonomous mission planning and execution, and safety protocols--all orchestrated through a web interface hosted directly on the drone itself. Not a single line of code was written by a human. We quantitatively benchmark system performance, code complexity, and development speed against prior, human-coded architectures, finding that AI-generated code can deliver functionally complete command-and-control stacks at orders-of-magnitude faster development cycles, though with identifiable current limitations related to specific model context window and reasoning depth. This work sets a precedent for the autonomous creation of robot control systems and, more broadly, suggests a new paradigm for robotics engineering--one in which future robots may be largely co-designed, developed, and verified by artificial intelligence. In this initial work, a robot built a robot's brain. INTRODUCTION In Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, the robots become self-aware and take over the world. In this paper, we take a first step in that direction: A robot (AI code writing machine) creates, from scratch, with minimal human input, the brain of another robot, a drone. Man vs. machine Legend has it that, in the 1870s, a human rail layer (John Henry) tried to beat a steam engine rail laying machine (robot) (Figure 1A). He died trying to beat the machine (robot). John Henry is an American legend and icon, similar to Johny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, and George Washington. The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp of him in 1996. According to a folk song from 1918, later popularized by Disney, and still sung by American schoolchildren to this day, the American labor legend'John Henry was a mighty man, born with a hammer right in his hand' ( 1). Peter J. Burke is with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 USA (e-mail: pburke@uci.edu). In this work, we demonstrate a similar result in robot control software.
LLM-based IR-system for Bank Supervisors
Bank supervisors face the complex task of ensuring that new measures are consistently aligned with historical precedents. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel Information Retrieval (IR) System tailored to assist supervisors in drafting both consistent and effective measures. This system ingests findings from on-site investigations. It then retrieves the most relevant historical findings and their associated measures from a comprehensive database, providing a solid basis for supervisors to write well-informed measures for new findings. Utilizing a blend of lexical, semantic, and Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) fuzzy set matching techniques, the IR system ensures the retrieval of findings that closely align with current cases. The performance of this system, particularly in scenarios with partially labeled data, is validated through a Monte Carlo methodology, showcasing its robustness and accuracy. Enhanced by a Transformer-based Denoising AutoEncoder for fine-tuning, the final model achieves a Mean Average Precision (MAP@100) of 0.83 and a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR@100) of 0.92. These scores surpass those of both standalone lexical models such as BM25 and semantic BERT-like models.
Uncertainty Sets for Distributionally Robust Bandits Using Structural Equation Models
Avery, Katherine, Pendse, Chinmay, Jensen, David
Distributionally robust evaluation estimates the worst-case expected return over an uncertainty set of possible covariate and reward distributions, and distributionally robust learning finds a policy that maximizes that worst-case return across that uncertainty set. Unfortunately, current methods for distributionally robust evaluation and learning create overly conservative evaluations and policies. In this work, we propose a practical bandit evaluation and learning algorithm that tailors the uncertainty set to specific problems using mathematical programs constrained by structural equation models. Further, we show how conditional independence testing can be used to detect shifted variables for modeling. We find that the structural equation model (SEM) approach gives more accurate evaluations and learns lower-variance policies than traditional approaches, particularly for large shifts. Further, the SEM approach learns an optimal policy, assuming the model is sufficiently well-specified.
The Silicon Reasonable Person: Can AI Predict How Ordinary People Judge Reasonableness?
In everyday life, people make countless reasonableness judgments that determine appropriate behavior in various contexts. Predicting these judgments challenges the legal system, as judges' intuitions may not align with broader societal views. This Article investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can learn to identify patterns driving human reasonableness judgments. Using randomized controlled trials comparing humans and models across multiple legal contexts with over 10,000 simulated judgments, we demonstrate that certain models capture not just surface-level responses but potentially their underlying decisional architecture. Strikingly, these systems prioritize social cues over economic efficiency in negligence determinations, mirroring human behavior despite contradicting textbook treatments. These findings suggest practical applications: judges could calibrate intuitions against broader patterns, lawmakers could test policy interpretations, and resource-constrained litigants could preview argument reception. As AI agents increasingly make autonomous real-world decisions, understanding whether they've internalized recognizable ethical frameworks becomes essential for anticipating their behavior.