Government
Beyond Explainability: The Case for AI Validation
Feldman, Dalit Ken-Dror, Benoliel, Daniel
Artificial Knowledge (AK) systems are transforming decision-making across critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and criminal justice. However, their growing opacity presents governance challenges that current regulatory approaches, focused predominantly on explainability, fail to address adequately. This article argues for a shift toward validation as a central regulatory pillar. Validation, ensuring the reliability, consistency, and robustness of AI outputs, offers a more practical, scalable, and risk-sensitive alternative to explainability, particularly in high-stakes contexts where interpretability may be technically or economically unfeasible. We introduce a typology based on two axes, validity and explainability, classifying AK systems into four categories and exposing the trade-offs between interpretability and output reliability. Drawing on comparative analysis of regulatory approaches in the EU, US, UK, and China, we show how validation can enhance societal trust, fairness, and safety even where explainability is limited. We propose a forward-looking policy framework centered on pre- and post-deployment validation, third-party auditing, harmonized standards, and liability incentives. This framework balances innovation with accountability and provides a governance roadmap for responsibly integrating opaque, high-performing AK systems into society.
The Role of Visualization in LLM-Assisted Knowledge Graph Systems: Effects on User Trust, Exploration, and Workflows
Li, Harry, Appleby, Gabriel, Alperin, Kenneth, Gomez, Steven R, Suh, Ashley
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are powerful data structures, but exploring them effectively remains difficult for even expert users. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to address this gap, yet little is known empirically about how their usage with KGs shapes user trust, exploration strategies, or downstream decision-making - raising key design challenges for LLM-based KG visual analysis systems. To study these effects, we developed LinkQ, a KG exploration system that converts natural language questions into structured queries with an LLM. We collaborated with KG experts to design five visual mechanisms that help users assess the accuracy of both KG queries and LLM responses: an LLM-KG state diagram that illustrates which stage of the exploration pipeline LinkQ is in, a query editor displaying the generated query paired with an LLM explanation, an entity-relation ID table showing extracted KG entities and relations with semantic descriptions, a query structure graph that depicts the path traversed in the KG, and an interactive graph visualization of query results. From a qualitative evaluation with 14 practitioners, we found that users - even KG experts - tended to overtrust LinkQ's outputs due to its "helpful" visualizations, even when the LLM was incorrect. Users exhibited distinct workflows depending on their prior familiarity with KGs and LLMs, challenging the assumption that these systems are one-size-fits-all - despite often being designed as if they are. Our findings highlight the risks of false trust in LLM-assisted data analysis tools and the need for further investigation into the role of visualization as a mitigation technique.
AI for Climate Finance: Agentic Retrieval and Multi-Step Reasoning for Early Warning System Investments
Vaghefi, Saeid Ario, Hachcham, Aymane, Grasso, Veronica, Manicus, Jiska, Msemo, Nakiete, Senni, Chiara Colesanti, Leippold, Markus
Tracking financial investments in climate adaptation is a complex and expertise-intensive task, particularly for Early Warning Systems (EWS), which lack standardized financial reporting across multilateral development banks (MDBs) and funds. To address this challenge, we introduce an LLM-based agentic AI system that integrates contextual retrieval, fine-tuning, and multi-step reasoning to extract relevant financial data, classify investments, and ensure compliance with funding guidelines. Our study focuses on a real-world application: tracking EWS investments in the Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS) Fund. We analyze 25 MDB project documents and evaluate multiple AI-driven classification methods, including zero-shot and few-shot learning, fine-tuned transformer-based classifiers, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, and an agent-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach. Our results show that the agent-based RAG approach significantly outperforms other methods, achieving 87\% accuracy, 89\% precision, and 83\% recall. Additionally, we contribute a benchmark dataset and expert-annotated corpus, providing a valuable resource for future research in AI-driven financial tracking and climate finance transparency.
ClaimPKG: Enhancing Claim Verification via Pseudo-Subgraph Generation with Lightweight Specialized LLM
Pham, Hoang, Nguyen, Thanh-Do, Bui, Khac-Hoai Nam
Integrating knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is an emerging research challenge in claim verification. While KGs provide structured, semantically rich representations well-suited for reasoning, most existing verification methods rely on unstructured text corpora, limiting their ability to effectively leverage KGs. Additionally, despite possessing strong reasoning abilities, modern LLMs struggle with multi-step modular pipelines and reasoning over KGs without adaptation. To address these challenges, we propose ClaimPKG, an end-to-end framework that seamlessly integrates LLM reasoning with structured knowledge from KGs. Specifically, the main idea of ClaimPKG is to employ a lightweight, specialized LLM to represent the input claim as pseudo-subgraphs, guiding a dedicated subgraph retrieval module to identify relevant KG subgraphs. These retrieved subgraphs are then processed by a general-purpose LLM to produce the final verdict and justification. Extensive experiments on the FactKG dataset demonstrate that ClaimPKG achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines in this research field by 9%-12% accuracy points across multiple categories. Furthermore, ClaimPKG exhibits zero-shot generalizability to unstructured datasets such as HoVer and FEVEROUS, effectively combining structured knowledge from KGs with LLM reasoning across various LLM backbones.
Geometric GNNs for Charged Particle Tracking at GlueX
Mohammed, Ahmed Hossam, Rajput, Kishansingh, Taylor, Simon, Furletov, Denis, Furletov, Sergey, Schram, Malachi
Nuclear physics experiments are aimed at uncovering the fundamental building blocks of matter. The experiments involve high-energy collisions that produce complex events with many particle trajectories. Tracking charged particles resulting from collisions in the presence of a strong magnetic field is critical to enable the reconstruction of particle trajectories and precise determination of interactions. It is traditionally achieved through combinatorial approaches that scale worse than linearly as the number of hits grows. Since particle hit data naturally form a 3-dimensional point cloud and can be structured as graphs, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) emerge as an intuitive and effective choice for this task. In this study, we evaluate the GNN model for track finding on the data from the GlueX experiment at Jefferson Lab. We use simulation data to train the model and test on both simulation and real GlueX measurements. We demonstrate that GNN-based track finding outperforms the currently used traditional method at GlueX in terms of segment-based efficiency at a fixed purity while providing faster inferences. We show that the GNN model can achieve significant speedup by processing multiple events in batches, which exploits the parallel computation capability of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). Finally, we compare the GNN implementation on GPU and FPGA and describe the trade-off.
Understanding Adversarial Training with Energy-based Models
Mirza, Mujtaba Hussain, Briglia, Maria Rosaria, Bartolucci, Filippo, Beadini, Senad, Lisanti, Giuseppe, Masi, Iacopo
We aim at using Energy-based Model (EBM) framework to better understand adversarial training (AT) in classifiers, and additionally to analyze the intrinsic generative capabilities of robust classifiers. By viewing standard classifiers through an energy lens, we begin by analyzing how the energies of adversarial examples, generated by various attacks, differ from those of the natural samples. The central focus of our work is to understand the critical phenomena of Catastrophic Overfitting (CO) and Robust Overfitting (RO) in AT from an energy perspective. We analyze the impact of existing AT approaches on the energy of samples during training and observe that the behavior of the ``delta energy' -- change in energy between original sample and its adversarial counterpart -- diverges significantly when CO or RO occurs. After a thorough analysis of these energy dynamics and their relationship with overfitting, we propose a novel regularizer, the Delta Energy Regularizer (DER), designed to smoothen the energy landscape during training. We demonstrate that DER is effective in mitigating both CO and RO across multiple benchmarks. We further show that robust classifiers, when being used as generative models, have limits in handling trade-off between image quality and variability. We propose an improved technique based on a local class-wise principal component analysis (PCA) and energy-based guidance for better class-specific initialization and adaptive stopping, enhancing sample diversity and generation quality. Considering that we do not explicitly train for generative modeling, we achieve a competitive Inception Score (IS) and Frรฉchet inception distance (FID) compared to hybrid discriminative-generative models.
From Large AI Models to Agentic AI: A Tutorial on Future Intelligent Communications
Jiang, Feibo, Pan, Cunhua, Dong, Li, Wang, Kezhi, Dobre, Octavia A., Debbah, Merouane
With the advent of 6G communications, intelligent communication systems face multiple challenges, including constrained perception and response capabilities, limited scalability, and low adaptability in dynamic environments. This tutorial provides a systematic introduction to the principles, design, and applications of Large Artificial Intelligence Models (LAMs) and Agentic AI technologies in intelligent communication systems, aiming to offer researchers a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge technologies and practical guidance. First, we outline the background of 6G communications, review the technological evolution from LAMs to Agentic AI, and clarify the tutorial's motivation and main contributions. Subsequently, we present a comprehensive review of the key components required for constructing LAMs. We further categorize LAMs and analyze their applicability, covering Large Language Models (LLMs), Large Vision Models (LVMs), Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), and lightweight LAMs. Next, we propose a LAM-centric design paradigm tailored for communications, encompassing dataset construction and both internal and external learning approaches. Building upon this, we develop an LAM-based Agentic AI system for intelligent communications, clarifying its core components such as planners, knowledge bases, tools, and memory modules, as well as its interaction mechanisms. We also introduce a multi-agent framework with data retrieval, collaborative planning, and reflective evaluation for 6G. Subsequently, we provide a detailed overview of the applications of LAMs and Agentic AI in communication scenarios. Finally, we summarize the research challenges and future directions in current studies, aiming to support the development of efficient, secure, and sustainable next-generation intelligent communication systems.
New Tools are Needed for Tracking Adherence to AI Model Behavioral Use Clauses
McDuff, Daniel, Korjakow, Tim, Klyman, Kevin, Contractor, Danish
Foundation models have had a transformative impact on AI. A combination of large investments in research and development, growing sources of digital data for training, and architectures that scale with data and compute has led to models with powerful capabilities. Releasing assets is fundamental to scientific advancement and commercial enterprise. However, concerns over negligent or malicious uses of AI have led to the design of mechanisms to limit the risks of the technology. The result has been a proliferation of licenses with behavioral-use clauses and acceptable-use-policies that are increasingly being adopted by commonly used families of models (Llama, Gemma, Deepseek) and a myriad of smaller projects. We created and deployed a custom AI licenses generator to facilitate license creation and have quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed over 300 customized licenses created with this tool. Alongside this we analyzed 1.7 million models licenses on the HuggingFace model hub. Our results show increasing adoption of these licenses, interest in tools that support their creation and a convergence on common clause configurations. In this paper we take the position that tools for tracking adoption of, and adherence to, these licenses is the natural next step and urgently needed in order to ensure they have the desired impact of ensuring responsible use.
Full Domain Analysis in Fluid Dynamics
Hagg, Alexander, Gaier, Adam, Wilde, Dominik, Asteroth, Alexander, Foysi, Holger, Reith, Dirk
Novel techniques in evolutionary optimization, simulation and machine learning allow for a broad analysis of domains like fluid dynamics, in which computation is expensive and flow behavior is complex. Under the term of full domain analysis we understand the ability to efficiently determine the full space of solutions in a problem domain, and analyze the behavior of those solutions in an accessible and interactive manner. The goal of full domain analysis is to deepen our understanding of domains by generating many examples of flow, their diversification, optimization and analysis. We define a formal model for full domain analysis, its current state of the art, and requirements of subcomponents. Finally, an example is given to show what we can learn by using full domain analysis. Full domain analysis, rooted in optimization and machine learning, can be a helpful tool in understanding complex systems in computational physics and beyond.
Limited Generalizability in Argument Mining: State-Of-The-Art Models Learn Datasets, Not Arguments
Feger, Marc, Boland, Katarina, Dietze, Stefan
Identifying arguments is a necessary prerequisite for various tasks in automated discourse analysis, particularly within contexts such as political debates, online discussions, and scientific reasoning. In addition to theoretical advances in understanding the constitution of arguments, a significant body of research has emerged around practical argument mining, supported by a growing number of publicly available datasets. On these benchmarks, BERT-like transformers have consistently performed best, reinforcing the belief that such models are broadly applicable across diverse contexts of debate. This study offers the first large-scale re-evaluation of such state-of-the-art models, with a specific focus on their ability to generalize in identifying arguments. We evaluate four transformers, three standard and one enhanced with contrastive pre-training for better generalization, on 17 English sentence-level datasets as most relevant to the task. Our findings show that, to varying degrees, these models tend to rely on lexical shortcuts tied to content words, suggesting that apparent progress may often be driven by dataset-specific cues rather than true task alignment. While the models achieve strong results on familiar benchmarks, their performance drops markedly when applied to unseen datasets. Nonetheless, incorporating both task-specific pre-training and joint benchmark training proves effective in enhancing both robustness and generalization.