Law
Israel Attacks Yemeni Capital, a Day After Houthi Drone Strike
After significantly weakening other Iranian-backed groups in the region, Israel's military has turned its attention to the Houthis, carrying out a series of punishing strikes on Yemeni ports and other infrastructure. Last month an Israeli attack in Sana killed senior members of the Houthi-led government -- including the prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi -- but appeared to leave the group's military leadership largely unscathed. Israeli strikes in Yemen have also killed and wounded dozens of civilians in recent months, according to human rights groups. The United States has also bombed Yemen, in response to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthis say they have targeted ships linked to Israel, although some of the ships they struck have no clear connection to the country. Houthi attacks on Israel are typically blocked or intercepted by the Israeli military, as was the case late on Thursday when sirens sounded in parts of Israel and the military soon after said that a missile from Yemen had been thwarted.
A Causality-Aware Spatiotemporal Model for Multi-Region and Multi-Pollutant Air Quality Forecasting
Air pollution, a pressing global problem, threatens public health, environmental sustainability, and climate stability. Achieving accurate and scalable forecasting across spatially distributed monitoring stations is challenging due to intricate multi-pollutant interactions, evolving meteorological conditions, and region specific spatial heterogeneity. To address this challenge, we propose AirPCM, a novel deep spatiotemporal forecasting model that integrates multi-region, multi-pollutant dynamics with explicit meteorology-pollutant causality modeling. Unlike existing methods limited to single pollutants or localized regions, AirPCM employs a unified architecture to jointly capture cross-station spatial correlations, temporal auto-correlations, and meteorology-pollutant dynamic causality. This empowers fine-grained, interpretable multi-pollutant forecasting across varying geographic and temporal scales, including sudden pollution episodes. Extensive evaluations on multi-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that AirPCM consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in both predictive accuracy and generalization capability. Moreover, the long-term forecasting capability of AirPCM provides actionable insights into future air quality trends and potential high-risk windows, offering timely support for evidence-based environmental governance and carbon mitigation planning.
Blueprints of Trust: AI System Cards for End to End Transparency and Governance
Sidhpurwala, Huzaifa, Fox, Emily, Mollett, Garth, Gabarda, Florencio Cano, Zhukov, Roman
This paper introduces the Hazard-Aware System Card (HASC), a novel framework designed to enhance transparency and accountability in the development and deployment of AI systems. The HASC builds upon existing model card and system card concepts by integrating a comprehensive, dynamic record of an AI system's security and safety posture. The framework proposes a standardized system of identifiers, including a novel AI Safety Hazard (ASH) ID, to complement existing security identifiers like CVEs, allowing for clear and consistent communication of fixed flaws. By providing a single, accessible source of truth, the HASC empowers developers and stakeholders to make more informed decisions about AI system safety throughout its lifecycle. Ultimately, we also compare our proposed AI system cards with the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 standard and discuss how they can be used to complement each other, providing greater transparency and accountability for AI systems.
The Secret Agenda: LLMs Strategically Lie and Our Current Safety Tools Are Blind
DeLeeuw, Caleb, Chawla, Gaurav, Sharma, Aniket, Dietze, Vanessa
We investigate strategic deception in large language models using two complementary testbeds: Secret Agenda (across 38 models) and Insider Trading compliance (via SAE architectures). Secret Agenda reliably induced lying when deception advantaged goal achievement across all model families. Analysis revealed that autolabeled SAE features for "deception" rarely activated during strategic dishonesty, and feature steering experiments across 100+ deception-related features failed to prevent lying. Conversely, insider trading analysis using unlabeled SAE activations separated deceptive versus compliant responses through discriminative patterns in heatmaps and t-SNE visualizations. These findings suggest autolabel-driven interpretability approaches fail to detect or control behavioral deception, while aggregate unlabeled activations provide population-level structure for risk assessment. Results span Llama 8B/70B SAE implementations and GemmaScope under resource constraints, representing preliminary findings that motivate larger studies on feature discovery, labeling methodology, and causal interventions in realistic deception contexts.
Can You Trust Your Copilot? A Privacy Scorecard for AI Coding Assistants
The rapid integration of AI-powered coding assistants into developer workflows has raised significant privacy and trust concerns. As developers entrust proprietary code to services like OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, and GitHub Copilot, the unclear data handling practices of these tools create security and compliance risks. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing and applying a novel, expert-validated privacy scorecard. The methodology involves a detailed analysis of four document types; from legal policies to external audits; to score five leading assistants against 14 weighted criteria. A legal expert and a data protection officer refined these criteria and their weighting. The results reveal a distinct hierarchy of privacy protections, with a 20-point gap between the highest- and lowest-ranked tools. The analysis uncovers common industry weaknesses, including the pervasive use of opt-out consent for model training and a near-universal failure to filter secrets from user prompts proactively. The resulting scorecard provides actionable guidance for developers and organizations, enabling evidence-based tool selection. This work establishes a new benchmark for transparency and advocates for a shift towards more user-centric privacy standards in the AI industry.
Affective Computing and Emotional Data: Challenges and Implications in Privacy Regulations, The AI Act, and Ethics in Large Language Models
This paper examines the integration of emotional intelligence into artificial intelligence systems, with a focus on affective computing and the growing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and Claude, to recognize and respond to human emotions. Drawing on interdisciplinary research that combines computer science, psychology, and neuroscience, the study analyzes foundational neural architectures - CNNs for processing facial expressions and RNNs for sequential data, such as speech and text - that enable emotion recognition. It examines the transformation of human emotional experiences into structured emotional data, addressing the distinction between explicit emotional data collected with informed consent in research settings and implicit data gathered passively through everyday digital interactions. That raises critical concerns about lawful processing, AI transparency, and individual autonomy over emotional expressions in digital environments. The paper explores implications across various domains, including healthcare, education, and customer service, while addressing challenges of cultural variations in emotional expression and potential biases in emotion recognition systems across different demographic groups. From a regulatory perspective, the paper examines emotional data in the context of the GDPR and the EU AI Act frameworks, highlighting how emotional data may be considered sensitive personal data that requires robust safeguards, including purpose limitation, data minimization, and meaningful consent mechanisms.
AuthPrint: Fingerprinting Generative Models Against Malicious Model Providers
Abstract--Generative models are increasingly adopted in high-stakes domains, yet current deployments offer no mechanisms to verify whether a given output truly originates from the certified model. We address this gap by extending model fingerprinting techniques beyond the traditional collaborative setting to one where the model provider itself may act adversarially, replacing the certified model with a cheaper or lower-quality substitute. T o our knowledge, this is the first work to study fingerprinting for provenance attribution under such a threat model. Our approach introduces a trusted verifier that, during a certification phase, extracts hidden fingerprints from the authentic model's output space and trains a detector to recognize them. During verification, this detector can determine whether new outputs are consistent with the certified model, without requiring specialized hardware or model modifications. In extensive experiments, our methods achieve near-zero FPR@95%TPR on both GANs and diffusion models, and remain effective even against subtle architectural or training changes. Furthermore, the approach is robust to adaptive adversaries that actively manipulate outputs in an attempt to evade detection. Recent advances in generative AI have led to the widespread deployment of generative models across various domains, with providers of generative AI services increasingly monetizing their models by offering subscription-based access. However, this rapid adoption has raised serious concerns about the risks posed by these models, particularly in safety-critical domains, such as healthcare and defense, where erroneous model outputs can have disastrous consequences [1]. In response, policymakers are introducing legal frameworks to regulate the use of AI and, in particular, the deployment of generative models. For instance, the European Union's AI Act mandates independent, periodic audits for "high-risk" AI systems deployed in domains such as healthcare, education, employment, and critical infrastructure [2]. This requirement to pass or be certified by an audit raises a critical question: How can users verify that a given output indeed originated from the audited model?
UNO: Unlearning via Orthogonalization in Generative models
Mandal, Pinak, Gottwald, Georg A.
As generative models become increasingly powerful and pervasive, the ability to unlearn specific data, whether due to privacy concerns, legal requirements, or the correction of harmful content, has become increasingly important. Unlike in conventional training, where data are accumulated and knowledge is reinforced, unlearning aims to selectively remove the influence of particular data points without costly retraining from scratch. To be effective and reliable, such algorithms need to achieve (i) forgetting of the undesired data, (ii) preservation of the quality of the generation, (iii) preservation of the influence of the desired training data on the model parameters, and (iv) small number of training steps. We propose fast unlearning algorithms based on loss gradient orthogonalization for unconditional and conditional generative models. We show that our algorithms are able to forget data while maintaining the fidelity of the original model. On standard image benchmarks, our algorithms achieve orders of magnitude faster unlearning times than their predecessors, such as gradient surgery. We demonstrate our algorithms with datasets of increasing complexity (MNIST, CelebA and ImageNet-1K) and for generative models of increasing complexity (VAEs and diffusion transformers).
MMSI-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Image Spatial Intelligence
Yang, Sihan, Xu, Runsen, Xie, Yiman, Yang, Sizhe, Li, Mo, Lin, Jingli, Zhu, Chenming, Chen, Xiaochen, Duan, Haodong, Yue, Xiangyu, Lin, Dahua, Wang, Tai, Pang, Jiangmiao
Spatial intelligence is essential for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) operating in the complex physical world. Existing benchmarks, however, probe only single-image relations and thus fail to assess the multi-image spatial reasoning that real-world deployments demand. We introduce MMSI-Bench, a VQA benchmark dedicated to multi-image spatial intelligence. Six 3D-vision researchers spent more than 300 hours meticulously crafting 1,000 challenging, unambiguous multiple-choice questions from over 120,000 images, each paired with carefully designed distractors and a step-by-step reasoning process. We conduct extensive experiments and thoroughly evaluate 34 open-source and proprietary MLLMs, observing a wide gap: the strongest open-source model attains roughly 30% accuracy and OpenAI's o3 reasoning model reaches 40%, while humans score 97%. These results underscore the challenging nature of MMSI-Bench and the substantial headroom for future research. Leveraging the annotated reasoning processes, we also provide an automated error analysis pipeline that diagnoses four dominant failure modes, including (1) grounding errors, (2) overlap-matching and scene-reconstruction errors, (3) situation-transformation reasoning errors, and (4) spatial-logic errors, offering valuable insights for advancing multi-image spatial intelligence. Project page: https://runsenxu.com/projects/MMSI_Bench .
Buffer-free Class-Incremental Learning with Out-of-Distribution Detection
Gupta, Srishti, Angioni, Daniele, Pintor, Maura, Demontis, Ambra, Schönherr, Lea, Biggio, Battista, Roli, Fabio
Class-incremental learning (CIL) poses significant challenges in open-world scenarios, where models must not only learn new classes over time without forgetting previous ones but also handle inputs from unknown classes that a closed-set model would misclassify. Recent works address both issues by (i)~training multi-head models using the task-incremental learning framework, and (ii) predicting the task identity employing out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors. While effective, the latter mainly relies on joint training with a memory buffer of past data, raising concerns around privacy, scalability, and increased training time. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of post-hoc OOD detection methods and investigate their potential to eliminate the need for a memory buffer. We uncover that these methods, when applied appropriately at inference time, can serve as a strong substitute for buffer-based OOD detection. We show that this buffer-free approach achieves comparable or superior performance to buffer-based methods both in terms of class-incremental learning and the rejection of unknown samples. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets support our findings, offering new insights into the design of efficient and privacy-preserving CIL systems for open-world settings.