Law
TechOps: Technical Documentation Templates for the AI Act
Lucaj, Laura, Loosley, Alex, Jonsson, Hakan, Gasser, Urs, van der Smagt, Patrick
Operationalizing the EU AI Act requires clear technical documentation to ensure AI systems are transparent, traceable, and accountable. Existing documentation templates for AI systems do not fully cover the entire AI lifecycle while meeting the technical documentation requirements of the AI Act. This paper addresses those shortcomings by introducing open-source templates and examples for documenting data, models, and applications to provide sufficient documentation for certifying compliance with the AI Act. These templates track the system's status over the entire AI lifecycle, ensuring traceability, reproducibility, and compliance with the AI Act. They also promote discoverability and collaboration, reduce risks, and align with best practices in AI documentation and governance. The templates are evaluated and refined based on user feedback to enable insights into their usability and implementabil-ity. We then validate the approach on real-world scenarios, providing examples that further guide their implementation: the data template is followed to document a skin tones dataset created to support fairness evaluations of downstream computer vision models and human-centric applications; the model template is followed to document a neural network for segmenting human silhouettes in photos. The application template is tested on a system deployed for construction site safety using real-time video analytics and sensor data. Our results show that TechOps can serve as a practical tool to enable oversight for regulatory compliance and responsible AI development.
A Dual-Axis Taxonomy of Knowledge Editing for LLMs: From Mechanisms to Functions
Salehoof, Amir Mohammad, Ramezani, Ali, Yaghoobzadeh, Yadollah, Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili
Large language models (LLMs) acquire vast knowledge from large text corpora, but this information can become outdated or inaccurate. Since retraining is computationally expensive, knowledge editing offers an efficient alternative -- modifying internal knowledge without full retraining. These methods aim to update facts precisely while preserving the model's overall capabilities. While existing surveys focus on the mechanism of editing (e.g., parameter changes vs. external memory), they often overlook the function of the knowledge being edited. This survey introduces a novel, complementary function-based taxonomy to provide a more holistic view. We examine how different mechanisms apply to various knowledge types -- factual, temporal, conceptual, commonsense, and social -- highlighting how editing effectiveness depends on the nature of the target knowledge. By organizing our review along these two axes, we map the current landscape, outline the strengths and limitations of existing methods, define the problem formally, survey evaluation tasks and datasets, and conclude with open challenges and future directions.
Fine-grained Video Dubbing Duration Alignment with Segment Supervised Preference Optimization
Cui, Chaoqun, Huang, Liangbin, Wang, Shijing, Tong, Zhe, Huang, Zhaolong, Zeng, Xiao, Liu, Xiaofeng
Video dubbing aims to translate original speech in visual media programs from the source language to the target language, relying on neural machine translation and text-to-speech technologies. Due to varying information densities across languages, target speech often mismatches the source speech duration, causing audio-video synchronization issues that significantly impact viewer experience. In this study, we approach duration alignment in LLM-based video dubbing machine translation as a preference optimization problem. We propose the Segment Supervised Preference Optimization (SSPO) method, which employs a segment-wise sampling strategy and fine-grained loss to mitigate duration mismatches between source and target lines. Experimental results demonstrate that SSPO achieves superior performance in duration alignment tasks.
AI Agents and the Law
Riedl, Mark O., Desai, Deven R.
As AI becomes more "agentic," it faces technical and socio-legal issues it must address if it is to fulfill its promise of increased economic productivity and efficiency. This paper uses technical and legal perspectives to explain how things change when AI systems start being able to directly execute tasks on behalf of a user. We show how technical conceptions of agents track some, but not all, socio-legal conceptions of agency. That is, both computer science and the law recognize the problems of under-specification for an agent, and both disciplines have robust conceptions of how to address ensuring an agent does what the programmer, or in the law, the principal desires and no more. However, to date, computer science has under-theorized issues related to questions of loyalty and to third parties that interact with an agent, both of which are central parts of the law of agency. First, we examine the correlations between implied authority in agency law and the principle of value-alignment in AI, wherein AI systems must operate under imperfect objective specification. Second, we reveal gaps in the current computer science view of agents pertaining to the legal concepts of disclosure and loyalty, and how failure to account for them can result in unintended effects in AI ecommerce agents. In surfacing these gaps, we show a path forward for responsible AI agent development and deployment.
SynLLM: A Comparative Analysis of Large Language Models for Medical Tabular Synthetic Data Generation via Prompt Engineering
Ilaty, Arshia, Shirazi, Hossein, Homayouni, Hajar
--Access to real-world medical data is often restricted due to privacy regulations, posing a significant barrier to the advancement of healthcare research. Synthetic data offers a promising alternative; however, generating realistic, clinically valid, and privacy-conscious records remains a major challenge. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for structured data generation; however, existing approaches frequently lack systematic prompting strategies and comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we present SynLLM, a modular framework for generating high-quality synthetic medical tabular data using 20 state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, including LLaMA, Mistral, and GPT variants, guided by structured prompts. We propose four distinct prompt types, ranging from example-driven to rule-based constraints, that encode schema, metadata, and domain knowledge to control generation without model fine-tuning. Our framework features a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that rigorously assesses generated data across statistical fidelity, clinical consistency, and privacy preservation. We evaluate SynLLM across three public medical datasets, including Diabetes, Cirrhosis, and Stroke, using 20 open-source LLMs. Our results show that prompt engineering significantly impacts data quality and privacy risk, with rule-based prompts achieving the best privacy-quality balance. SynLLM establishes that, when guided by well-designed prompts and evaluated with robust, multi-metric criteria, LLMs can generate synthetic medical data that is both clinically plausible and privacy-aware, paving the way for safer and more effective data sharing in healthcare research. Access to real-world medical data is frequently restricted due to privacy regulations, ethical constraints, and institutional barriers, posing a significant challenge for the development of AI-driven healthcare solutions. While data protection laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIP AA) [11] and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [37] are essential for safeguarding patient confidentiality, they often hinder the availability of data for clinical model development and research.
When the Domain Expert Has No Time and the LLM Developer Has No Clinical Expertise: Real-World Lessons from LLM Co-Design in a Safety-Net Hospital
Kothari, Avni, Vossler, Patrick, Digitale, Jean, Forouzannia, Mohammad, Rosenberg, Elise, Lee, Michele, Bryant, Jennee, Molina, Melanie, Marks, James, Zier, Lucas, Feng, Jean
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to address social and behavioral determinants of health by transforming labor intensive workflows in resource-constrained settings. Creating LLM-based applications that serve the needs of underserved communities requires a deep understanding of their local context, but it is often the case that neither LLMs nor their developers possess this local expertise, and the experts in these communities often face severe time/resource constraints. This creates a disconnect: how can one engage in meaningful co-design of an LLM-based application for an under-resourced community when the communication channel between the LLM developer and domain expert is constrained? We explored this question through a real-world case study, in which our data science team sought to partner with social workers at a safety net hospital to build an LLM application that summarizes patients' social needs. Whereas prior works focus on the challenge of prompt tuning, we found that the most critical challenge in this setting is the careful and precise specification of \what information to surface to providers so that the LLM application is accurate, comprehensive, and verifiable. Here we present a novel co-design framework for settings with limited access to domain experts, in which the summary generation task is first decomposed into individually-optimizable attributes and then each attribute is efficiently refined and validated through a multi-tier cascading approach.
Algorithmic Fairness amid Social Determinants: Reflection, Characterization, and Approach
Tang, Zeyu, London, Alex John, Kasirzadeh, Atoosa, Koyejo, Sanmi, Spirtes, Peter, Zhang, Kun
Social determinants are variables that, while not directly pertaining to any specific individual, capture key aspects of contexts and environments that have direct causal influences on certain attributes of an individual. Previous algorithmic fairness literature has primarily focused on sensitive attributes, often overlooking the role of social determinants. Our paper addresses this gap by introducing formal and quantitative rigor into a space that has been shaped largely by qualitative proposals regarding the use of social determinants. To demonstrate theoretical perspectives and practical applicability, we examine a concrete setting of college admissions, using region as a proxy for social determinants. Our approach leverages a region-based analysis with Gamma distribution parameterization to model how social determinants impact individual outcomes. Despite its simplicity, our method quantitatively recovers findings that resonate with nuanced insights in previous qualitative debates, that are often missed by existing algorithmic fairness approaches. Our findings suggest that mitigation strategies centering solely around sensitive attributes may introduce new structural injustice when addressing existing discrimination. Considering both sensitive attributes and social determinants facilitates a more comprehensive explication of benefits and burdens experienced by individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds as well as contextual environments, which is essential for understanding and achieving fairness effectively and transparently.
Normative Moral Pluralism for AI: A Framework for Deliberation in Complex Moral Contexts
The conceptual framework proposed in this paper centers on the development of a deliberative moral reasoning system - one designed to process complex moral situations by generating, filtering, and weighing normative arguments drawn from diverse ethical perspectives. While the framework is rooted in Machine Ethics, it also makes a substantive contribution to Value Alignment by outlining a system architecture that links structured moral reasoning to action under time constraints. Grounded in normative moral pluralism, this system is not constructed to imitate behavior but is built on reason-sensitive deliberation over structured moral content in a transparent and principled manner. Beyond its role as a deliberative system, it also serves as the conceptual foundation for a novel two-level architecture: functioning as a moral reasoning teacher envisioned to train faster models that support real-time responsiveness without reproducing the full structure of deliberative reasoning. Together, the deliberative and intuitive components are designed to enable both deep reflection and responsive action. A key design feature is the dual-hybrid structure: a universal layer that defines a moral threshold through top-down and bottom-up learning, and a local layer that learns to weigh competing considerations in context while integrating culturally specific normative content, so long as it remains within the universal threshold. By extending the notion of moral complexity to include not only conflicting beliefs but also multifactorial dilemmas, multiple stakeholders, and the integration of non-moral considerations, the framework aims to support morally grounded decision-making in realistic, high-stakes contexts.
Between Fear and Desire, the Monster Artificial Intelligence (AI): Analysis through the Lenses of Monster Theory
With the increasing adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in all fields and daily activities, a heated debate is found about the advantages and challenges of AI and the need for navigating the concerns associated with AI to make the best of it. To contribute to this literature and the ongoing debate related to it, this study draws on the Monster theory to explain the conflicting representation of AI. It suggests that studying monsters in popular culture can provide an in-depth understanding of AI and its monstrous effects. Specifically, this study aims to discuss AI perception and development through the seven theses of Monster theory. The obtained results revealed that, just like monsters, AI is complex in nature, and it should not be studied as a separate entity but rather within a given society or culture. Similarly, readers may perceive and interpret AI differently, just as readers may interpret monsters differently. The relationship between AI and monsters, as depicted in this study, does not seem to be as odd as it might be at first.
EU Digital Regulation and Guatemala: AI, 5G, and Cybersecurity
The paper examines how EU rules in AI, 5G, and cybersecurity operate as transnational governance and shape policy in Guatemala. It outlines the AI Act's risk approach, the 5G Action Plan and Security Toolbox, and the cybersecurity regime built on ENISA, NIS2, the Cybersecurity Act, and the Cyber Resilience Act. It traces extraterritorial channels such as the Brussels effect, private standards, supply chain clauses, and data transfer controls. Guatemala specific impacts include SME compliance costs, procurement limits, environmental trade-offs in rollout, rights risks, and capacity gaps. The paper maps current national measures and proposes five guardrails: digital constitutionalism, green IT duties, third country impact assessment, standards co-design, and recognition of regulatory diversity.