The equitable assessment of individual contribution in teams remains a persistent challenge, where conflict and disparity in workload can result in unfair performance evaluation, often requiring manual intervention - a costly and challenging process. We survey existing tool features and identify a gap in conflict resolution methods and AI integration. To address this, we propose a framework and implementation design for a novel AI-enhanced tool that assists in dispute investigation. The framework organises heterogeneous artefacts - submissions (code, text, media), communications (chat, email), coordination records (meeting logs, tasks), peer assessments, and contextual information - into three dimensions with nine benchmarks: Contribution, Interaction, and Role. Objective measures are normalised, aggregated per dimension, and paired with inequality measures (Gini index) to surface conflict markers. A Large Language Model (LLM) architecture performs validated and contextual analysis over these measures to generate interpretable and transparent advisory judgments. We argue for feasibility under current statutory and institutional policy, and outline practical analytics (sentimental, task fidelity, word/line count, etc.), bias safeguards, limitations, and practical challenges.

The emergence of crowdsourced data has significantly reshaped social science, enabling extensive exploration of collective human actions, viewpoints, and societal dynamics. However, ensuring safe, fair, and reliable participation remains a persistent challenge. Traditional polling methods have seen a notable decline in engagement over recent decades, raising concerns about the credibility of collected data. Meanwhile, social and peer-to-peer networks have become increasingly widespread, but data from these platforms can suffer from credibility issues due to fraudulent or ineligible participation. In this paper, we explore how social interactions can help restore credibility in crowdsourced data collected over social networks. We present an empirical study to detect ineligible participation in a polling task through AI-based graph analysis of social interactions among imperfect participants composed of honest and dishonest actors. Our approach focuses solely on the structure of social interaction graphs, without relying on the content being shared. We simulate different levels and types of dishonest behavior among participants who attempt to propagate the task within their social networks. We conduct experiments on real-world social network datasets, using different eligibility criteria and modeling diverse participation patterns. Although structural differences in social interaction graphs introduce some performance variability, our study achieves promising results in detecting ineligibility across diverse social and behavioral profiles, with accuracy exceeding 90% in some configurations.

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle when performing agentic tasks without substantial tool support, prom-pt engineering, or fine tuning. Despite research showing that domain-dependent, procedural knowledge can dramatically increase planning efficiency, little work evaluates its potential for improving LLM performance on agentic tasks that may require implicit planning. We formalize, implement, and evaluate an agentic LLM workflow that leverages procedural knowledge in the form of a hierarchical task network (HTN). Empirical results of our implementation show that hand-coded HTNs can dramatically improve LLM performance on agentic tasks, and using HTNs can boost a 20b or 70b parameter LLM to outperform a much larger 120b parameter LLM baseline. Furthermore, LLM-created HTNs improve overall performance, though less so. The results suggest that leveraging expertise--from humans, documents, or LLMs--to curate procedural knowledge will become another important tool for improving LLM workflows.

With the widespread application of large language models (LLMs) in various fields, the security challenges they face have become increasingly prominent, especially the issue of jailbreak. These attacks induce the model to generate erroneous or uncontrolled outputs through crafted inputs, threatening the generality and security of the model. Although existing defense methods have shown some effectiveness, they often struggle to strike a balance between model generality and security. Excessive defense may limit the normal use of the model, while insufficient defense may lead to security vulnerabilities. In response to this problem, we propose a Knowledge Graph Defense Framework (KG-DF). Specifically, because of its structured knowledge representation and semantic association capabilities, Knowledge Graph(KG) can be searched by associating input content with safe knowledge in the knowledge base, thus identifying potentially harmful intentions and providing safe reasoning paths. However, traditional KG methods encounter significant challenges in keyword extraction, particularly when confronted with diverse and evolving attack strategies. To address this issue, we introduce an extensible semantic parsing module, whose core task is to transform the input query into a set of structured and secure concept representations, thereby enhancing the relevance of the matching process. Experimental results show that our framework enhances defense performance against various jailbreak attack methods, while also improving the response quality of the LLM in general QA scenarios by incorporating domain-general knowledge.

Cultural infrastructures, such as libraries, museums, theaters, and galleries, support learning, civic life, health, and local economies, yet access is uneven across cities. We present a novel, scalable, and open-data framework to measure spatial equity in cultural access. We map cultural infrastructures and compute a metric called Cultural Infrastructure Accessibility Score (CIAS) using exponential distance decay at fine spatial resolution, then aggregate the score per capita and integrate socio-demographic indicators. Interpretable tree-ensemble models with SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) are used to explain associations between accessibility, income, density, and tract-level racial/ethnic composition. Results show a pronounced core-periphery gradient, where non-library cultural infrastructures cluster near urban cores, while libraries track density and provide broader coverage. Non-library accessibility is modestly higher in higher-income tracts, and library accessibility is slightly higher in denser, lower-income areas.

Unlearning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for protecting private data and removing harmful knowledge. Most existing approaches rely on fine-tuning to balance unlearning efficiency with general language capabilities. However, these methods typically require training or access to retain data, which is often unavailable in real world scenarios. Although these methods can perform well when both forget and retain data are available, few works have demonstrated equivalent capability in more practical, data-limited scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose Detect-Reasoning Augmented GeneratiON (DRAGON), a systematic, reasoning-based framework that utilizes in-context chain-of-thought (CoT) instructions to guard deployed LLMs before inference. Instead of modifying the base model, DRAGON leverages the inherent instruction-following ability of LLMs and introduces a lightweight detection module to identify forget-worthy prompts without any retain data. These are then routed through a dedicated CoT guard model to enforce safe and accurate in-context intervention. To robustly evaluate unlearning performance, we introduce novel metrics for unlearning performance and the continual unlearning setting. Extensive experiments across three representative unlearning tasks validate the effectiveness of DRAGON, demonstrating its strong unlearning capability, scalability, and applicability in practical scenarios.

Unknown anomaly detection in medical imaging remains a fundamental challenge due to the scarcity of labeled anomalies and the high cost of expert supervision. We introduce an unsupervised, oracle-free framework that incrementally expands a trusted set of normal samples without any anomaly labels. Starting from a small, verified seed of normal images, our method alternates between lightweight adapter updates and uncertainty-gated sample admission. A frozen pretrained vision backbone is augmented with tiny convolutional adapters, ensuring rapid domain adaptation with negligible computational overhead. Extracted embeddings are stored in a compact coreset enabling efficient k-nearest neighbor anomaly (k-NN) scoring. Safety during incremental expansion is enforced by dual probabilistic gates, a sample is admitted into the normal memory only if its distance to the existing coreset lies within a calibrated z-score threshold, and its SWAG-based epistemic uncertainty remains below a seed-calibrated bound. This mechanism prevents drift and false inclusions without relying on generative reconstruction or replay buffers. Empirically, our system steadily refines the notion of normality as unlabeled data arrive, producing substantial gains over baselines. On COVID-CXR, ROC-AUC improves from 0.9489 to 0.9982 (F1: 0.8048 to 0.9746); on Pneumonia CXR, ROC-AUC rises from 0.6834 to 0.8968; and on Brain MRI ND-5, ROC-AUC increases from 0.6041 to 0.7269 and PR-AUC from 0.7539 to 0.8211. These results highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework for real-world, label-scarce medical imaging applications.

We present EdgeRunner 20B, a fine-tuned version of gpt-oss-20b optimized for military tasks. EdgeRunner 20B was trained on 1.6M high-quality records curated from military documentation and websites. We also present four new tests sets: (a) combat arms, (b) combat medic, (c) cyber operations, and (d) mil-bench-5k (general military knowledge). On these military test sets, EdgeRunner 20B matches or exceeds GPT-5 task performance with 95%+ statistical significance, except for the high reasoning setting on the combat medic test set and the low reasoning setting on the mil-bench-5k test set. Versus gpt-oss-20b, there is no statistically-significant regression on general-purpose benchmarks like ARC-C, GPQA Diamond, GSM8k, IFEval, MMLU Pro, or TruthfulQA, except for GSM8k in the low reasoning setting. We also present analyses on hyperparameter settings, cost, and throughput. These findings show that small, locally-hosted models are ideal solutions for data-sensitive operations such as in the military domain, allowing for deployment in air-gapped edge devices.

Today's cyber defenders are overwhelmed by a deluge of security alerts, threat intelligence signals, and shifting business context, creating an urgent need for AI systems to enhance operational security work. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate and scale Security Operations Center (SOC) operations, existing evaluations do not fully assess the scenarios most relevant to real-world defenders. This lack of informed evaluation impacts both AI developers and those applying LLMs to SOC automation. Without clear insight into LLM performance in real-world security scenarios, developers lack a north star for development, and users cannot reliably select the most effective models. Meanwhile, malicious actors are using AI to scale cyber attacks, highlighting the need for open source benchmarks to drive adoption and community-driven improvement among defenders and model developers. To address this, we introduce CyberSOCEval, a new suite of open source benchmarks within CyberSecEval 4. CyberSOCEval includes benchmarks tailored to evaluate LLMs in two tasks: Malware Analysis and Threat Intelligence Reasoning--core defensive domains with inadequate coverage in current benchmarks. Our evaluations show that larger, more modern LLMs tend to perform better, confirming the training scaling laws paradigm. We also find that reasoning models leveraging test time scaling do not achieve the same boost as in coding and math, suggesting these models have not been trained to reason about cybersecurity analysis, and pointing to a key opportunity for improvement. Finally, current LLMs are far from saturating our evaluations, showing that CyberSOCEval presents a significant challenge for AI developers to improve cyber defense capabilities.

Dominican Republic suffers nationwide power cut after'cascade of failures' The Dominican Republic has experienced a nationwide power cut which officials said was linked to a failure in the electricity transmission system. At 13:23 local time (17:23 GMT) an issue at a substation caused a nationwide interruption to power services, the state-owned Dominican Electricity Transmission Company said, citing the country's energy minister Joel Santos Echeverría. Echeverría said a thorough investigation would be carried out to identify the cause and that work was under way to quickly restore power. The Caribbean nation, which is home to around 11 million people, has been experiencing smaller blackouts in recent weeks, the AFP news agency reports. Officials at the state-owned power company said generation units in two major power plants had shut down, causing a cascade of failures in other parts of the grid.