A central architectural question for both biological and artificial intelligence is whether judgment relies on specialized modules or a unified, domain-general resource. While the discovery of decodable neural representations for distinct concepts in Large Language Models (LLMs) has suggested a modular architecture, whether these representations are truly independent systems remains an open question. Here we provide evidence for a convergent architecture for evaluative judgment. Across a range of LLMs, we find that diverse evaluative judgments are computed along a dominant dimension, which we term the Valence-Assent Axis (VAA). This axis jointly encodes subjective valence ("what is good") and the model's assent to factual claims ("what is true"). Through direct interventions, we demonstrate this axis drives a critical mechanism, which is identified as the subordination of reasoning: the VAA functions as a control signal that steers the generative process to construct a rationale consistent with its evaluative state, even at the cost of factual accuracy. Our discovery offers a mechanistic account for response bias and hallucination, revealing how an architecture that promotes coherent judgment can systematically undermine faithful reasoning.

For autonomous legal agents to operate safely in high-stakes domains, they require a foundation of absolute determinism and auditability-guarantees that standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks cannot provide. When interacting with temporal knowledge graphs that model the complex evolution of legal norms, agents must navigate versioning, causality, and hierarchical structures with precision, a task for which black-box vector search is ill-suited. This paper introduces a new architectural pattern to solve this: a formal Primitive API designed as a secure execution layer for reasoning over such graphs. Instead of a monolithic query engine, our framework provides a library of canonical primitives-atomic, composable, and auditable primitives. This design empowers planner-guided agents to decompose complex legal questions into transparent execution plans, enabling critical tasks with full verifiability, including: (i) precise point-in-time version retrieval, (ii) robust causal lineage tracing, and (iii) context-aware hybrid search. Ultimately, this architecture transforms opaque retrieval into auditable reasoning, turning the agent's internal process from a black box into a verifiable log of deterministic primitives and providing a blueprint for building the next generation of trustworthy legal AI.

City streets, sidewalks, and public areas often serve as primary interaction points among diverse user groups, including residents, commuters, and visitors ( Gehl, 2011). These spaces carry social, economic, and cultural signifi - cance that influences navigation and user experience ( Mitra ˇ sinovi c & Mehta, 2021). Municipal governments and planning agencies recognize the importance of inclusive public spaces but face challenges in operation - alizing inclusivity ( Anttiroiko & De Jong, 2020). Traditional approaches may draw on universal design principles intended to accommodate a broad range of users, but these frameworks often take a one-size-fits-all approach that prioritizes physical accessibility over the social and cul - tural dimensions of public space use ( Low, 2020). In multicultural cities, where multiple languages, cultures, and religious practices converge, these complexities become particularly evident ( Fan et al., 2023; Lit - man, 2025; Salgado et al., 2021; Youngbloom et al., 2023). Research on inclusive design has provided valuable insights, but few methods combine qualitative depth with quantitative scale to under - stand inclusivity in urban contexts ( Anttiroiko & De Jong, 2020; Mehta, 2019; Zamanifard et al., 2019). Ethnographic research and interviews offer detailed perspectives on lived experience, while computer vision and machine learning enable assessments at larger scales ( Ibrahim et al., 2020). However, large-scale computational approaches often overlook intersectional dimensions ( Zhu et al., 2025). This gap calls for integrated models that merge qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Poachers kill over 20,000 African elephants every year for their ivory. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) recently broke up an alleged illegal poaching front in Los Angeles County. According to the department, thousands of elephant ivory pieces along with multiple "large, intricately carved tusks," a sea turtle shell, and at least nine rhinoceros horns were confiscated from an unnamed business. "The global demand for ivory and rhino horn fuels poaching and organized crime," CDFW Deputy Director and Chief of Law Enforcement Nathaniel Arnold said in a statement, adding that these and other operations "send a clear message" to black market vendors.

Rise of the'porno-trolls': how one porn platform made millions suing its viewers Instead, it was a subpoena. He had been sued in federal court for illegally downloading 80 movies. Some of the titles sounded cryptic - Do Not Worry, We Are Only Friends - or banal, like International Relations Part 2. Others were less subtle: He Loved My Big Ass, He Loved My Big Butt, and My Big Booty Loves Anal. Brown, who had spent decades investigating sex crimes, claimed he had never watched any of them. His years "dealing with pimping", he wrote in a court filing, left him "with no interest in pornography". He had been married for 40 years, he did not need to download Hot Wife, another title in the list.

"You shouldn't have put your content on the internet if you didn't want it to be on the internet," Common Crawl's executive director says. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. T he Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database--large enough to be measured in petabytes--is made freely available for research.

Stability AI's model allows users to generate images with text prompts. Stability AI's model allows users to generate images with text prompts. There was evidence that Getty's images were used to train Stability's model, which allows users to generate images with text prompts. Stability was also found to have infringed Getty's trademarks in some cases. The judge, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith, said the question of where to strike the balance between the interests of the creative industries on one side and the AI industry on the other was "of very real societal importance".

Ensuring algorithmic fairness remains a significant challenge in machine learning, particularly as models are increasingly applied across diverse domains. While numerous fairness criteria exist, they often lack generalizability across different machine learning problems. This paper examines the connections and differences among various sparsity measures in promoting fairness and proposes a unified sparsity-based framework for evaluating algorithmic fairness. The framework aligns with existing fairness criteria and demonstrates broad applicability to a wide range of machine learning tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework as an evaluation metric through extensive experiments on a variety of datasets and bias mitigation methods. This work provides a novel perspective to algorithmic fairness by framing it through the lens of sparsity and social equity, offering potential for broader impact on fairness research and applications.

We present a novel framework for training large language models with continuously adjustable internal representations that span the full spectrum from localist (interpretable, rule-based) to distributed (generalizable, efficient) encodings. The key innovation is a locality dial, a tunable parameter that dynamically controls the degree of localization during both training and inference without requiring model retraining. This is achieved through group sparsity penalties on attention mechanisms, information-theoretic anchor design, and dynamic rule injection. We provide rigorous mathematical proofs establishing explicit threshold conditions under which attention provably concentrates on semantically relevant blocks, with exponential bounds on attention entropy and pointer fidelity. Specifically, we prove that when group sparsity penalties exceed certain threshold values, the model's attention mechanisms concentrate on semantically relevant blocks, achieving low entropy and high fidelity with negligible error. This framework enables practitioners to continuously interpolate between interpretable and high-performance modes, supporting applications in regulated domains requiring both transparency and capability.

Ensuring that Large Language Models (LLMs) align with the diverse and evolving human values across different regions and cultures remains a critical challenge in AI ethics. Current alignment approaches often yield superficial conformity rather than genuine ethical understanding, failing to address the complex, context-dependent nature of human values. In this paper, we propose a novel ethical reasoning paradigm for LLMs inspired by well-established ethical decision-making models, aiming at enhancing diverse human value alignment through deliberative ethical reasoning. Our framework consists of a structured five-step process, including contextual fact gathering, hierarchical social norm identification, option generation, multiple-lens ethical impact analysis, and reflection. This theory-grounded approach guides LLMs through an interpretable reasoning process that enhances their ability to understand regional specificities and perform nuanced ethical analysis, which can be implemented with either prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning methods. We perform evaluations on the SafeWorld benchmark that specially designed for regional value alignment. Experimental results demonstrate our framework significantly improves LLM alignment with diverse human values compared to baseline methods, enabling more accurate social norm identification and more culturally appropriate reasoning. Our work provides a concrete pathway toward developing LLMs that align more effectively with the multifaceted values of global societies through interdisciplinary research.