Systems relying on ML have become ubiquitous, but so has biased behavior within them. Research shows that bias significantly affects stakeholders' trust in systems and how they use them. Further, stakeholders of different backgrounds view and trust the same systems differently. Thus, how ML models' behavior is explained plays a key role in comprehension and trust. We survey explainability visualizations, creating a taxonomy of design characteristics. We conduct user studies to evaluate five state-of-the-art visualization tools (LIME, SHAP, CP, Anchors, and ELI5) for model explainability, measuring how taxonomy characteristics affect comprehension, bias perception, and trust for non-expert ML users. Surprisingly, we find an inverse relationship between comprehension and trust: the better users understand the models, the less they trust them. We investigate the cause and find that this relationship is strongly mediated by bias perception: more comprehensible visualizations increase people's perception of bias, and increased bias perception reduces trust. We confirm this relationship is causal: Manipulating explainability visualizations to control comprehension, bias perception, and trust, we show that visualization design can significantly (p < 0.001) increase comprehension, increase perceived bias, and reduce trust. Conversely, reducing perceived model bias, either by improving model fairness or by adjusting visualization design, significantly increases trust even when comprehension remains high. Our work advances understanding of how comprehension affects trust and systematically investigates visualization's role in facilitating responsible ML applications.

Existing AIG (AI-generated) text detectors struggle in real-world settings despite succeeding in internal testing, suggesting that they may not be robust enough. We rigorously examine the machine-learning procedure to build these detectors to address this. Most current AIG text detection datasets focus on zero-shot generations, but little work has been done on few-shot or one-shot generations, where LLMs are given human texts as an example. In response, we introduce the Diverse Adversarial Corpus of Texts Yielded from Language models (DACTYL), a challenging AIG text detection dataset focusing on one-shot/few-shot generations. We also include texts from domain-specific continued-pre-trained (CPT) language models, where we fully train all parameters using a memory-efficient optimization approach. Many existing AIG text detectors struggle significantly on our dataset, indicating a potential vulnerability to one-shot/few-shot and CPT-generated texts. We also train our own classifiers using two approaches: standard binary cross-entropy (BCE) optimization and a more recent approach, deep X-risk optimization (DXO). While BCE-trained classifiers marginally outperform DXO classifiers on the DACTYL test set, the latter excels on out-of-distribution (OOD) texts. In our mock deployment scenario in student essay detection with an OOD student essay dataset, the best DXO classifier outscored the best BCE-trained classifier by 50.56 macro-F1 score points at the lowest false positive rates for both. Our results indicate that DXO classifiers generalize better without overfitting to the test set. Our experiments highlight several areas of improvement for AIG text detectors.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on large corpora, yet it is unclear whether they can reason about the information present within their training data. We design experiments to study out-of-context abduction in LLMs, the ability to infer the most plausible explanations for observations using relevant facts present in training data. We train treatment LLMs on names and behavior descriptions of fictitious chatbots, but not on examples of dialogue with the chatbots. We find that OpenAI's GPT 4o LLM can correctly infer at least one chatbot's name after observing example responses characteristic of that chatbot. We also find that previously training GPT 4o on descriptions of a chatbot's behavior allows it to display behaviors more characteristic of the chatbot when iteratively trained to display such behaviors. Our results have implications for situational awareness in LLMs and, therefore, for AI safety.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in our daily lives, evaluating their quality and reliability across diverse contexts has become essential. While comprehensive benchmarks exist for assessing LLM performance in English, there remains a significant gap in evaluation resources for other languages. Moreover, because most LLMs are trained primarily on data rooted in European and American cultures, they often lack familiarity with non-Western cultural contexts. To address this limitation, our study focuses on the Persian language and Iranian culture. We introduce 19 new evaluation datasets specifically designed to assess LLMs on topics such as Iranian law, Persian grammar, Persian idioms, and university entrance exams. Using these datasets, we benchmarked 41 prominent LLMs, aiming to bridge the existing cultural and linguistic evaluation gap in the field.

Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) represent a significant challenge in cybersecurity due to their prolonged, multi-stage nature and the sophistication of their operators. Traditional detection systems typically focus on identifying malicious activity in binary terms -- benign or malicious -- without accounting for the progression of an attack. However, effective response strategies depend on accurate inference of the attack's current stage, as countermeasures must be tailored to whether an adversary is in the early reconnaissance phase or actively conducting exploitation or exfiltration. This work addresses the problem of attack stage inference under uncertainty, with a focus on robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. We propose a classification approach based on Evidential Deep Learning (EDL), which models predictive uncertainty by outputting parameters of a Dirichlet distribution over possible stages. This allows the system not only to predict the most likely stage of an attack but also to indicate when it is uncertain or the input lies outside the training distribution. Preliminary experiments in a simulated environment demonstrate that the proposed model can accurately infer the stage of an attack with calibrated confidence while effectively detecting OOD inputs, which may indicate changes in the attackers' tactics. These results support the feasibility of deploying uncertainty-aware models for staged threat detection in dynamic and adversarial environments.

The rise of Large Language Models has created a general excitement about the great potential for a myriad of applications. While LLMs offer many possibilities, questions about safety, privacy, and ethics have emerged, and all the key actors are working to address these issues with protective measures for their own models and standalone solutions. The constantly evolving nature of LLMs makes it extremely challenging to universally shield users against their potential risks, and one-size-fits-all solutions are unfeasible. In this work, we propose OneShield, our stand-alone, model-agnostic and customizable solution to safeguard LLMs. OneShield aims to provide facilities for defining risk factors, expressing and declaring contextual safety and compliance policies, and mitigating LLM risks, with a focus on each specific customer. We describe the implementation of the framework, discuss scalability considerations, and provide usage statistics of OneShield since its initial deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but they exhibit problems with logical consistency in the output they generate. How can we harness LLMs' broad-coverage parametric knowledge in formal reasoning despite their inconsistency? We present a method for directly integrating an LLM into the interpretation function of the formal semantics for a paraconsistent logic. We provide experimental evidence for the feasibility of the method by evaluating the function using datasets created from several short-form factuality benchmarks. Unlike prior work, our method offers a theoretical framework for neurosymbolic reasoning that leverages an LLM's knowledge while preserving the underlying logic's soundness and completeness properties.

Air pollution from agricultural emissions is a significant yet often overlooked contributor to environmental and public health challenges. Traditional air quality forecasting models rely on physics-based approaches, which struggle to capture complex, nonlinear pollutant interactions. In this work, we explore forecasting N$_2$O agricultural emissions through evaluating popular architectures, and proposing two novel deep learning architectures, EmissionNet (ENV) and EmissionNet-Transformer (ENT). These models leverage convolutional and transformer-based architectures to extract spatial-temporal dependencies from high-resolution emissions data

Federated Learning enables collaborative learning among clients via a coordinating server while avoiding direct data sharing, offering a perceived solution to preserve privacy. However, recent studies on Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) have challenged this notion, showing high success rates against unprotected training data. While local differential privacy (LDP) is widely regarded as a gold standard for privacy protection in data analysis, most studies on MIAs either neglect LDP or fail to provide theoretical guarantees for attack success rates against LDP-protected data. To address this gap, we derive theoretical lower bounds for the success rates of low-polynomial time MIAs that exploit vulnerabilities in fully connected or self-attention layers. We establish that even when data are protected by LDP, privacy risks persist, depending on the privacy budget. Practical evaluations on federated vision models confirm considerable privacy risks, revealing that the noise required to mitigate these attacks significantly degrades models' utility.

Graph learning has been crucial to many real-world tasks, but they are often studied with a closed-world assumption, with all possible labels of data known a priori. To enable effective graph learning in an open and noisy environment, it is critical to inform the model users when the model makes a wrong prediction to in-distribution data of a known class, i.e., misclassification detection or when the model encounters out-of-distribution from novel classes, i.e., out-of-distribution detection. This paper introduces Evidential Reasoning Network (EVINET), a framework that addresses these two challenges by integrating Beta embedding within a subjective logic framework. EVINET includes two key modules: Dissonance Reasoning for misclassification detection and Vacuity Reasoning for out-of-distribution detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVINET outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple metrics in the tasks of in-distribution classification, misclassification detection, and out-of-distribution detection. EVINET demonstrates the necessity of uncertainty estimation and logical reasoning for misclassification detection and out-of-distribution detection and paves the way for open-world graph learning. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SSSKJ/EviNET.