Training vision models to detect workplace hazards accurately requires realistic images of unsafe conditions that could lead to accidents. However, acquiring such datasets is difficult because capturing accident-triggering scenarios as they occur is nearly impossible. To overcome this limitation, this study presents a novel scene graph-guided generative AI framework that synthesizes photorealistic images of hazardous scenarios grounded in historical Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) accident reports. OSHA narratives are analyzed using GPT-4o to extract structured hazard reasoning, which is converted into object-level scene graphs capturing spatial and contextual relationships essential for understanding risk. These graphs guide a text-to-image diffusion model to generate compositionally accurate hazard scenes. To evaluate the realism and semantic fidelity of the generated data, a visual question answering (VQA) framework is introduced. Across four state-of-the-art generative models, the proposed VQA Graph Score outperforms CLIP and BLIP metrics based on entropy-based validation, confirming its higher discriminative sensitivity.

This paper derives various Hessians associated with Birkhoff-theoretic methods for trajectory optimization. According to a theorem proved in this paper, approximately 80% of the eigenvalues are contained in the narrow interval [-2, 4] for all Birkhoff-discretized optimal control problems. A preliminary analysis of computational complexity is also presented with further discussions on the grand challenge of solving a million point trajectory optimization problem.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in multimodal reasoning and many real-world applications, such as visual question answering. However, LVLMs are highly vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks. This paper systematically analyzes the vulnerabilities of LVLMs integrated in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) under carefully crafted jailbreaking attacks. First, we carefully construct a dataset with harmful queries relevant to transportation, following OpenAI's prohibited categories to which the LVLMs should not respond. Second, we introduce a novel jailbreaking attack that exploits the vulnerabilities of LVLMs through image typography manipulation and multi-turn prompting. Third, we propose a multi-layered response filtering defense technique to prevent the model from generating inappropriate responses. We perform extensive experiments with the proposed attack and defense on the state-of-the-art LVLMs (both open-source and closed-source). To evaluate the attack method and defense technique, we use GPT-4's judgment to determine the toxicity score of the generated responses, as well as manual verification. Further, we compare our proposed jailbreaking method with existing jailbreaking techniques and highlight severe security risks involved with jailbreaking attacks with image typography manipulation and multi-turn prompting in the LVLMs integrated in ITS.

Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has posed a major global health challenge for decades, and forecasting HIV diagnoses continues to be a critical area of research. However, capturing the complex spatial and temporal dependencies of HIV transmission remains challenging. Conventional Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) models rely on a fixed binary adjacency matrix that only encodes geographic adjacency, which is unable to represent interactions between non-contiguous counties. Our study proposes a deep learning architecture Mobility-Aware Transformer-Message Passing Neural Network (MAT-MPNN) framework to predict county-level HIV diagnosis rates across California, Florida, and the New England region. The model combines temporal features extracted by a Transformer encoder with spatial relationships captured through a Mobility Graph Generator (MGG). The MGG improves conventional adjacency matrices by combining geographic and demographic information. Compared with the best-performing hybrid baseline, the Transformer MPNN model, MAT-MPNN reduced the Mean Squared Prediction Error (MSPE) by 27.9% in Florida, 39.1% in California, and 12.5% in New England, and improved the Predictive Model Choice Criterion (PMCC) by 7.7%, 3.5%, and 3.9%, respectively. MAT-MPNN also achieved better results than the Spatially Varying Auto-Regressive (SVAR) model in Florida and New England, with comparable performance in California. These results demonstrate that applying mobility-aware dynamic spatial structures substantially enhances predictive accuracy and calibration in spatiotemporal epidemiological prediction.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can subtly manipulate their outputs. While various defense mechanisms have been proposed, many operate as black boxes, lacking transparency in their decision-making. This paper introduces ExplainableGuard, an interpretable adversarial defense framework leveraging the chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities of DeepSeek-Reasoner. Our approach not only detects and neutralizes adversarial perturbations in text but also provides step-by-step explanations for each defense action. We demonstrate how tailored CoT prompts guide the LLM to perform a multi-faceted analysis (character, word, structural, and semantic) and generate a purified output along with a human-readable justification. Preliminary results on the GLUE Benchmark and IMDB Movie Reviews dataset show promising defense efficacy. Additionally, a human evaluation study reveals that ExplainableGuard's explanations outperform ablated variants in clarity, specificity, and actionability, with a 72.5% deployability-trust rating, underscoring its potential for more trustworthy LLM deployments.

Accurate detection of offensive content on social media demands high-quality labeled data; however, such data is often scarce due to the low prevalence of offensive instances and the high cost of manual annotation. To address this low-resource challenge, we propose a self-training framework that leverages abundant unlabeled data through collaborative pseudo-labeling. Starting with a lightweight classifier trained on limited labeled data, our method iteratively assigns pseudo-labels to unlabeled instances with the support of Multi-Agent Vision-Language Models (MA-VLMs). Unlabeled data on which the classifier and MA-VLMs agree are designated as the Agreed-Unknown set, while conflicting samples form the Disagreed-Unknown set. To enhance label reliability, MA-VLMs simulate dual perspectives, moderator and user, capturing both regulatory and subjective viewpoints. The classifier is optimized using a novel Positive-Negative-Unlabeled (PNU) loss, which jointly exploits labeled, Agreed-Unknown, and Disagreed-Unknown data while mitigating pseudo-label noise. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms baselines under limited supervision and approaches the performance of large-scale models.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly embedded in NHS workflows, but its probabilistic and adaptive behaviour conflicts with the deterministic assumptions underpinning existing clinical-safety standards. DCB0129 and DCB0160 provide strong governance for conventional software yet do not define how AI-specific transparency, interpretability, or model drift should be evidenced within Safety Cases, Hazard Logs, or post-market monitoring. This paper proposes an Explainability-Enabled Clinical Safety Framework (ECSF) that integrates explainability into the DCB0129/0160 lifecycle, enabling Clinical Safety Officers to use interpretability outputs as structured safety evidence without altering compliance pathways. A cross-regulatory synthesis mapped DCB clauses to principles from Good Machine Learning Practice, the NHS AI Assurance and T.E.S.T. frameworks, and the EU AI Act. The resulting matrix links regulatory clauses, principles, ECSF checkpoints, and suitable explainability outputs. ECSF introduces five checkpoints: global transparency for hazard identification, case-level interpretability for verification, clinician usability for evaluation, traceable decision pathways for risk control, and longitudinal interpretability monitoring for post-market surveillance. Techniques such as SHAP, LIME, Integrated Gradients, saliency mapping, and attention visualisation are mapped to corresponding DCB artefacts. ECSF reframes explainability as a core element of clinical-safety assurance, bridging deterministic risk governance with the probabilistic behaviour of AI and supporting alignment with GMLP, the EU AI Act, and NHS AI Assurance principles.

Deployed, autonomous AI systems must often evaluate multiple plausible courses of action (extended sequences of behavior) in novel or under-specified contexts. Despite extensive training, these systems will inevitably encounter scenarios where no available course of action fully satisfies all operational constraints (e.g., operating procedures, rules, laws, norms, and goals). To achieve goals in accordance with human expectations and values, agents must go beyond their trained policies and instead construct, evaluate, and justify candidate courses of action. These processes require contextual "knowledge" that may lie outside prior (policy) training. This paper characterizes requirements for agent decision making in these contexts. It also identifies the types of knowledge agents require to make decisions robust to agent goals and aligned with human expectations. Drawing on both analysis and empirical case studies, we examine how agents need to integrate normative, pragmatic, and situational understanding to select and then to pursue more aligned courses of action in complex, real-world environments.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely evaluated on macro-scale geographic tasks, such as global factual recall, event summarization, and regional reasoning. Yet, their ability to handle hyper-local knowledge remains poorly understood. This gap is increasingly consequential as real-world applications, from civic platforms to community journalism, demand AI systems that can reason about neighborhood-specific dynamics, cultural narratives, and local governance. Existing benchmarks fall short in capturing this complexity, often relying on coarse-grained data or isolated references. We present LocalBench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs on county-level local knowledge across the United States. Grounded in the Localness Conceptual Framework, LocalBench includes 14,782 validated question-answer pairs across 526 U.S. counties in 49 states, integrating diverse sources such as Census statistics, local subreddit discourse, and regional news. It spans physical, cognitive, and relational dimensions of locality. Using LocalBench, we evaluate 13 state-of-the-art LLMs under both closed-book and web-augmented settings. Our findings reveal critical limitations: even the best-performing models reach only 56.8% accuracy on narrative-style questions and perform below 15.5% on numerical reasoning. Moreover, larger model size and web augmentation do not guarantee better performance, for example, search improves Gemini's accuracy by +13.6%, but reduces GPT-series performance by -11.4%. These results underscore the urgent need for language models that can support equitable, place-aware AI systems: capable of engaging with the diverse, fine-grained realities of local communities across geographic and cultural contexts.

Financial markets face growing threats from misinformation that can trigger billions in losses in minutes. Most existing approaches lack transparency in their decision-making and provide limited attribution to credible sources. We introduce FinVet, a novel multi-agent framework that integrates two Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with external fact-checking through a confidence-weighted voting mechanism. FinVet employs adaptive three-tier processing that dynamically adjusts verification strategies based on retrieval confidence, from direct metadata extraction to hybrid reasoning to full model-based analysis. Unlike existing methods, FinVet provides evidence-backed verdicts, source attribution, confidence scores, and explicit uncertainty flags when evidence is insufficient. Experimental evaluation on the FinFact dataset shows that FinVet achieves an F1 score of 0.85, which is a 10.4% improvement over the best individual pipeline (fact-check pipeline) and 37% improvement over standalone RAG approaches.