Humanity appears to be on course to soon develop AI systems that substantially outperform human experts in all cognitive domains and activities. We believe the default trajectory has a high likelihood of catastrophe, including human extinction. Risks come from failure to control powerful AI systems, misuse of AI by malicious rogue actors, war between great powers, and authoritarian lock-in. This research agenda has two aims: to describe the strategic landscape of AI development and to catalog important governance research questions. These questions, if answered, would provide important insight on how to successfully reduce catastrophic risks. We describe four high-level scenarios for the geopolitical response to advanced AI development, cataloging the research questions most relevant to each. Our favored scenario involves building the technical, legal, and institutional infrastructure required to internationally restrict dangerous AI development and deployment (which we refer to as an Off Switch), which leads into an internationally coordinated Halt on frontier AI activities at some point in the future. The second scenario we describe is a US National Project for AI, in which the US Government races to develop advanced AI systems and establish unilateral control over global AI development. We also describe two additional scenarios: a Light-Touch world similar to that of today and a Threat of Sabotage situation where countries use sabotage and deterrence to slow AI development. In our view, apart from the Off Switch and Halt scenario, all of these trajectories appear to carry an unacceptable risk of catastrophic harm. Urgent action is needed from the US National Security community and AI governance ecosystem to answer key research questions, build the capability to halt dangerous AI activities, and prepare for international AI agreements.

Complex systems, such as small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) swarms dispatched for emergency response, often require dynamic reconfiguration at runtime under the supervision of human operators. This introduces human-on-the-loop requirements, where evolving needs shape ongoing system functionality and behaviors. While traditional personas support upfront, static requirements elicitation, we propose a persona-based advocate framework for runtime requirements engineering to provide ethically informed, safety-driven, and regulatory-aware decision support. Our approach extends standard personas into event-driven personas. When triggered by events such as adverse environmental conditions, evolving mission state, or operational constraints, the framework updates the sUAS operator's view of the personas, ensuring relevance to current conditions. We create three key advocate personas, namely Safety Controller, Ethical Governor, and Regulatory Auditor, to manage trade-offs among risk, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance. We perform a proof-of-concept validation in an emergency response scenario using sUAS, showing how our advocate personas provide context-aware guidance grounded in safety, regulatory, and ethical constraints. By evolving static, design-time personas into adaptive, event-driven advocates, the framework surfaces mission-critical runtime requirements in response to changing conditions. These requirements shape operator decisions in real time, aligning actions with the operational demands of the moment.

Model-based planning and execution systems offer a principled approach to building flexible autonomous robots that can perform diverse tasks by automatically combining a host of basic skills. This idea is almost as old as modern robotics. Yet, while diverse general-purpose reasoning architectures have been proposed since, general-purpose systems that are integrated with modern robotic platforms have emerged only recently, starting with the influential ROSPlan system. Since then, a growing number of model-based systems for robot task-level control have emerged. In this paper, we consider the diverse design choices and issues existing systems attempt to address, the different solutions proposed so far, and suggest avenues for future development.

With the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence, careful evaluation of inherent biases needs to be conducted to form the basis for alleviating the effects these predispositions can have on users. Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly used by many as a primary source of information for various topics. LLMs frequently make factual errors, fabricate data (hallucinations), or present biases, exposing users to misinformation and influencing opinions. Educating users on their risks is key to responsible use, as bias, unlike hallucinations, cannot be caught through data verification. We quantify the political bias of popular LLMs in the context of the recent vote of the German Bundestag using the score produced by the Wahl-O-Mat. This metric measures the alignment between an individual's political views and the positions of German political parties. We compare the models' alignment scores to identify factors influencing their political preferences. Doing so, we discover a bias toward left-leaning parties, most dominant in larger LLMs. Also, we find that the language we use to communicate with the models affects their political views. Additionally, we analyze the influence of a model's origin and release date and compare the results to the outcome of the recent vote of the Bundestag. Our results imply that LLMs are prone to exhibiting political bias. Large corporations with the necessary means to develop LLMs, thus, knowingly or unknowingly, have a responsibility to contain these biases, as they can influence each voter's decision-making process and inform public opinion in general and at scale.

We propose Riemannian Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (RDDPMs) for learning distributions on submanifolds of Euclidean space that are level sets of functions, including most of the manifolds relevant to applications. Existing methods for generative modeling on manifolds rely on substantial geometric information such as geodesic curves or eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator and, as a result, they are limited to manifolds where such information is available. In contrast, our method, built on a projection scheme, can be applied to more general manifolds, as it only requires being able to evaluate the value and the first order derivatives of the function that defines the submanifold. We provide a theoretical analysis of our method in the continuous-time limit, which elucidates the connection between our RDDPMs and score-based generative models on manifolds. The capability of our method is demonstrated on datasets from previous studies and on new datasets sampled from two high-dimensional manifolds, i.e. $\mathrm{SO}(10)$ and the configuration space of molecular system alanine dipeptide with fixed dihedral angle.

In this paper, we introduce KERAIA, a novel framework and software platform for symbolic knowledge engineering designed to address the persistent challenges of representing, reasoning with, and executing knowledge in dynamic, complex, and context-sensitive environments. The central research question that motivates this work is: How can unstructured, often tacit, human expertise be effectively transformed into computationally tractable algorithms that AI systems can efficiently utilise? KERAIA seeks to bridge this gap by building on foundational concepts such as Minsky's frame-based reasoning and K-lines, while introducing significant innovations. These include Clouds of Knowledge for dynamic aggregation, Dynamic Relations (DRels) for context-sensitive inheritance, explicit Lines of Thought (LoTs) for traceable reasoning, and Cloud Elaboration for adaptive knowledge transformation. This approach moves beyond the limitations of traditional, often static, knowledge representation paradigms. KERAIA is designed with Explainable AI (XAI) as a core principle, ensuring transparency and interpretability, particularly through the use of LoTs. The paper details the framework's architecture, the KSYNTH representation language, and the General Purpose Paradigm Builder (GPPB) to integrate diverse inference methods within a unified structure. We validate KERAIA's versatility, expressiveness, and practical applicability through detailed analysis of multiple case studies spanning naval warfare simulation, industrial diagnostics in water treatment plants, and strategic decision-making in the game of RISK. Furthermore, we provide a comparative analysis against established knowledge representation paradigms (including ontologies, rule-based systems, and knowledge graphs) and discuss the implementation aspects and computational considerations of the KERAIA platform.

Multi-agent autonomous systems (MAS) are better at addressing challenges that spans across multiple domains than singular autonomous agents. This holds true within the field of software engineering (SE) as well. The state-of-the-art research on MAS within SE focuses on integrating LLMs at the core of autonomous agents to create LLM-based multi-agent autonomous (LMA) systems. However, the introduction of LMA systems into SE brings a plethora of challenges. One of the major challenges is the strategic allocation of tasks between humans and the LMA system in a trustworthy manner. To address this challenge, a RACI-based framework is proposed in this work in progress article, along with implementation guidelines and an example implementation of the framework. The proposed framework can facilitate efficient collaboration, ensure accountability, and mitigate potential risks associated with LLM-driven automation while aligning with the Trustworthy AI guidelines. The future steps for this work delineating the planned empirical validation method are also presented.

Unsignalized intersections pose significant safety and efficiency challenges due to complex traffic flows. This paper proposes a novel roadside unit (RSU)-centric cooperative driving system leveraging global perception and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. The core of the system is an RSU-based decision-making module using a two-stage hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) framework. At first, policies are pre-trained offline using conservative Q-learning (CQL) combined with behavior cloning (BC) on collected dataset. Subsequently, these policies are fine-tuned in the simulation using multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO), aligned with a self-attention mechanism to effectively solve inter-agent dependencies. RSUs perform real-time inference based on the trained models to realize vehicle control via V2I communications. Extensive experiments in CARLA environment demonstrate high effectiveness of the proposed system, by: \textit{(i)} achieving failure rates below 0.03\% in coordinating three connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) through complex intersection scenarios, significantly outperforming the traditional Autoware control method, and \textit{(ii)} exhibiting strong robustness across varying numbers of controlled agents and shows promising generalization capabilities on other maps.

Cybersecurity has become essential worldwide and at all levels, concerning individuals, institutions, and governments. A basic principle in cybersecurity is to be always alert. Therefore, automation is imperative in processes where the volume of daily operations is large. Several cybersecurity applications can be addressed as binary classification problems, including anomaly detection, fraud detection, intrusion detection, spam detection, or malware detection. We present three experiments. In the first experiment, we evaluate single classifiers including Random Forests, Light Gradient Boosting Machine, eXtreme Gradient Boosting, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree. In the second experiment, we test different sampling techniques including over-sampling, under-sampling, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique, and Self-Paced Ensembling. In the last experiment, we evaluate Self-Paced Ensembling and its number of base classifiers. We found that imbalance learning techniques had positive and negative effects, as reported in related studies. Thus, these techniques should be applied with caution. Besides, we found different best performers for each dataset. Therefore, we recommend testing single classifiers and imbalance learning techniques for each new dataset and application involving imbalanced datasets as is the case in several cyber security applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are a transformational technology, fundamentally changing how people obtain information and interact with the world. As people become increasingly reliant on them for an enormous variety of tasks, a body of academic research has developed to examine these models for inherent biases, especially political biases, often finding them small. We challenge this prevailing wisdom. First, by comparing 31 LLMs to legislators, judges, and a nationally representative sample of U.S. voters, we show that LLMs' apparently small overall partisan preference is the net result of offsetting extreme views on specific topics, much like moderate voters. Second, in a randomized experiment, we show that LLMs can promulgate their preferences into political persuasiveness even in information-seeking contexts: voters randomized to discuss political issues with an LLM chatbot are as much as 5 percentage points more likely to express the same preferences as that chatbot. Contrary to expectations, these persuasive effects are not moderated by familiarity with LLMs, news consumption, or interest in politics. LLMs, especially those controlled by private companies or governments, may become a powerful and targeted vector for political influence.