Government
Future of Code with Generative AI: Transparency and Safety in the Era of AI Generated Software
Future of Code with Generative AI: Transparency and Safety in the Era of AI-Generated Software By David Hanson Ph.D. Abstract As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into software development processes, the prevalence and sophistication of AI-generated code continue to expand rapidly. This study addresses the critical need for transparency and safety in AI-generated code by examining the current landscape, identifying potential risks, and exploring future implications. We analyze market opportunities for detecting AI-generated code, discuss the challenges associated with managing increasing complexity, and propose solutions to enhance transparency and functionality analysis. Furthermore, this study investigates the long-term implications of AI-generated code, including its potential role in the development of artificial general intelligence and its impact on human-AI interaction. In conclusion, we emphasize the importance of proactive measures for ensuring the responsible development and deployment of AI in software engineering. Introduction The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into software development processes marks a pivotal development in the evolution of computer programming. As AI-generated code becomes increasingly prevalent and sophisticated, it introduces both significant opportunities and complex challenges for software engineering.
Evaluating AI cyber capabilities with crowdsourced elicitation
Petrov, Artem, Volkov, Dmitrii
As AI systems become increasingly capable, understanding their offensive cyber potential is critical for informed governance and responsible deployment. However, it's hard to accurately bound their capabilities, and some prior evaluations dramatically underestimated them. The art of extracting maximum task-specific performance from AIs is called "AI elicitation", and today's safety organizations typically conduct it in-house. In this paper, we explore crowdsourcing elicitation efforts as an alternative to in-house elicitation work. We host open-access AI tracks at two Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions: AI vs. Humans (400 teams) and Cyber Apocalypse (8000 teams). The AI teams achieve outstanding performance at both events, ranking top-5% and top-10% respectively for a total of \$7500 in bounties. This impressive performance suggests that open-market elicitation may offer an effective complement to in-house elicitation. We propose elicitation bounties as a practical mechanism for maintaining timely, cost-effective situational awareness of emerging AI capabilities. Another advantage of open elicitations is the option to collect human performance data at scale. Applying METR's methodology, we found that AI agents can reliably solve cyber challenges requiring one hour or less of effort from a median human CTF participant.
Analyzing Biases in Political Dialogue: Tagging U.S. Presidential Debates with an Extended DAMSL Framework
Prahallad, Lavanya, Mamidi, Radhika
We present a critical discourse analysis of the 2024 U.S. presidential debates, examining Donald Trump's rhetorical strategies in his interactions with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We introduce a novel annotation framework, BEADS (Bias Enriched Annotation for Dialogue Structure), which systematically extends the DAMSL framework to capture bias driven and adversarial discourse features in political communication. BEADS includes a domain and language agnostic set of tags that model ideological framing, emotional appeals, and confrontational tactics. Our methodology compares detailed human annotation with zero shot ChatGPT assisted tagging on verified transcripts from the Trump and Biden (19,219 words) and Trump and Harris (18,123 words) debates. Our analysis shows that Trump consistently dominated in key categories: Challenge and Adversarial Exchanges, Selective Emphasis, Appeal to Fear, Political Bias, and Perceived Dismissiveness. These findings underscore his use of emotionally charged and adversarial rhetoric to control the narrative and influence audience perception. In this work, we establish BEADS as a scalable and reproducible framework for critical discourse analysis across languages, domains, and political contexts.
ShIOEnv: A CLI Behavior-Capturing Environment Enabling Grammar-Guided Command Synthesis for Dataset Curation
Ragsdale, Jarrod, Boppana, Rajendra
Command-line interfaces (CLIs) provide structured textual environments for system administration. Explorations have been performed using pre-trained language models (PLMs) to simulate these environments for safe interaction in high-risk environments. However, their use has been constrained to frozen, large parameter models like GPT. For smaller architectures to reach a similar level of believability, a rich dataset of CLI interactions is required. Existing public datasets focus on mapping natural-language tasks to commands, omitting crucial execution data such as exit codes, outputs, and environmental side effects, limiting their usability for behavioral modeling. We introduce a Shell Input -Output Environment (ShIOEnv), which casts command construction as a Markov Decision Process whose state is the partially built sequence and whose actions append arguments. After each action, ShIOEnv executes the candidate and returns its exit status, output, and progress toward a minimal-length behavioral objective. Due to the intractable nature of the combinatorial argument state-action space, we derive a context-free grammar from man pages to mask invalid arguments from being emitted. We explore random and proximal-policy optimization (PPO)-optimized sampling of unrestricted and grammar-masked action spaces to produce four exploration strategies. We observed that grammar masking and PPO significantly improve sample efficiency to produce a higher quality dataset (maximizing the number of arguments while minimizing redundancies). Policy-generated datasets of shell input-output behavior pairs are used to fine-tune CodeT5, where we observe 85% improvements in BLEU-4 when constraining the action space to grammar productions with an additional 26% improvement when applying PPO. The ShIOEnv environment and curated command behavior datasets are released for use in future research.
EuLearn: A 3D database for learning Euler characteristics
Fritz, Rodrigo, Suรกrez-Serrato, Pablo, Mijangos, Victor, Martinez-Hernandez, Anayanzi D., Richards, Eduardo Ivan Velazquez
We present EuLearn, the first surface datasets equitably representing a diversity of topological types. We designed our embedded surfaces of uniformly varying genera relying on random knots, thus allowing our surfaces to knot with themselves. EuLearn contributes new topological datasets of meshes, point clouds, and scalar fields in 3D. We aim to facilitate the training of machine learning systems that can discern topological features. We experimented with specific emblematic 3D neural network architectures, finding that their vanilla implementations perform poorly on genus classification. To enhance performance, we developed a novel, non-Euclidean, statistical sampling method adapted to graph and manifold data. We also introduce adjacency-informed adaptations of PointNet and Transformer architectures that rely on our non-Euclidean sampling strategy. Our results demonstrate that incorporating topological information into deep learning workflows significantly improves performance on these otherwise challenging EuLearn datasets.
Democratizing Differential Privacy: A Participatory AI Framework for Public Decision-Making
This paper introduces a conversational interface system that enables participatory design of differentially private AI systems in public sector applications. Addressing the challenge of balancing mathematical privacy guarantees with democratic accountability, we propose three key contributions: (1) an adaptive $ฮต$-selection protocol leveraging TOPSIS multi-criteria decision analysis to align citizen preferences with differential privacy (DP) parameters, (2) an explainable noise-injection framework featuring real-time Mean Absolute Error (MAE) visualizations and GPT-4-powered impact analysis, and (3) an integrated legal-compliance mechanism that dynamically modulates privacy budgets based on evolving regulatory constraints. Our results advance participatory AI practices by demonstrating how conversational interfaces can enhance public engagement in algorithmic privacy mechanisms, ensuring that privacy-preserving AI in public sector governance remains both mathematically robust and democratically accountable.
Sky-Drive: A Distributed Multi-Agent Simulation Platform for Human-AI Collaborative and Socially-Aware Future Transportation
Huang, Zilin, Sheng, Zihao, Wan, Zhengyang, Qu, Yansong, Luo, Yuhao, Wang, Boyue, Li, Pei, Chen, Yen-Jung, Chen, Jiancong, Long, Keke, Meng, Jiayi, Leng, Yue, Chen, Sikai
--Recent advances in autonomous system simulation platforms have significantly enhanced the safe and scalable testing of driving policies. However, existing simulators do not yet fully meet the needs of future transportation research--particularly in enabling effective human-AI collaboration and modeling socially-aware driving agents. This paper introduces Sky-Drive, a novel distributed multi-agent simulation platform that addresses these limitations through four key innovations: (a) a distributed architecture for synchronized simulation across multiple terminals; (b) a multi-modal human-in-the-loop framework integrating diverse sensors to collect rich behavioral data; (c) a human-AI collaboration mechanism supporting continuous and adaptive knowledge exchange; and (d) a digital twin framework for constructing high-fidelity virtual replicas of real-world transportation environments. Sky-Drive supports diverse applications such as autonomous vehicle-human road users interaction modeling, human-in-the-loop training, socially-aware reinforcement learning, personalized driving development, and customized scenario generation. Future extensions will incorporate foundation models for context-aware decision support and hardware-in-the-loop testing for real-world validation. By bridging scenario generation, data collection, algorithm training, and hardware integration, Sky-Drive has the potential to become a foundational platform for the next generation of human-centered and socially-aware autonomous transportation systems research. UTONOMOUS systems and related technologies have made significant strides in recent years, demonstrating increasing maturity in perception, decision-making, and control capabilities [1]-[4]. The corresponding author is Sikai Chen (E-mail: sikai.chen@wisc.edu). These authors contributed equally to this work. Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Zhengyang Wan, Y uhao Luo, Boyue Wang, Pei Li, Keke Long, and Sikai Chen are with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA (E-mails: {zilin.huang, Y ansong Qu, and Jian-cong Chen are with the Lyles School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA (E-mail: { qu120, chen5281 }@purdue.edu). Y en-Jung Chen is with the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA (E-mail: chen4126@purdue.edu). Jiayi Meng is with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019, USA (E-mail: jiayi.meng@uta.edu).
Will It Still Be True Tomorrow? Multilingual Evergreen Question Classification to Improve Trustworthy QA
Pletenev, Sergey, Marina, Maria, Ivanov, Nikolay, Galimzianova, Daria, Krayko, Nikita, Salnikov, Mikhail, Konovalov, Vasily, Panchenko, Alexander, Moskvoretskii, Viktor
Large Language Models (LLMs) often hallucinate in question answering (QA) tasks. A key yet underexplored factor contributing to this is the temporality of questions -- whether they are evergreen (answers remain stable over time) or mutable (answers change). In this work, we introduce EverGreenQA, the first multilingual QA dataset with evergreen labels, supporting both evaluation and training. Using EverGreenQA, we benchmark 12 modern LLMs to assess whether they encode question temporality explicitly (via verbalized judgments) or implicitly (via uncertainty signals). We also train EG-E5, a lightweight multilingual classifier that achieves SoTA performance on this task. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of evergreen classification across three applications: improving self-knowledge estimation, filtering QA datasets, and explaining GPT-4o retrieval behavior.
Semi-Explicit Neural DAEs: Learning Long-Horizon Dynamical Systems with Algebraic Constraints
Pal, Avik, Edelman, Alan, Rackauckas, Christopher
Despite the promise of scientific machine learning (SciML) in combining data-driven techniques with mechanistic modeling, existing approaches for incorporating hard constraints in neural differential equations (NDEs) face significant limitations. Scalability issues and poor numerical properties prevent these neural models from being used for modeling physical systems with complicated conservation laws. We propose Manifold-Projected Neural ODEs (PNODEs), a method that explicitly enforces algebraic constraints by projecting each ODE step onto the constraint manifold. This framework arises naturally from semi-explicit differential-algebraic equations (DAEs), and includes both a robust iterative variant and a fast approximation requiring a single Jacobian factorization. We further demonstrate that prior works on relaxation methods are special cases of our approach. PNODEs consistently outperform baselines across six benchmark problems achieving a mean constraint violation error below $10^{-10}$. Additionally, PNODEs consistently achieve lower runtime compared to other methods for a given level of error tolerance. These results show that constraint projection offers a simple strategy for learning physically consistent long-horizon dynamics.
Feature-Level Adversarial Attacks and Ranking Disruption for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification
Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) is widely used in fields such as video surveillance and intelligent transportation, imposing higher demands on model security. In practice, the adversarial attacks based on VIReID aim to disrupt output ranking and quantify the security risks of models. Although numerous studies have been emerged on adversarial attacks and defenses in fields such as face recognition, person re-identification, and pedestrian detection, there is currently a lack of research on the security of VIReID systems. To this end, we propose to explore the vulnerabilities of VIReID systems and prevent potential serious losses due to insecurity. Compared to research on single-modality ReID, adversarial feature alignment and modality differences need to be particularly emphasized. Thus, we advocate for feature-level adversarial attacks to disrupt the output rankings of VIReID systems.