Law
Hidden 'fingerprints' found in the Bible after thousands of years rewrite the story of the Ark of the Covenant
Scientists have uncovered hidden patterns in the Bible that challenge ancient beliefs about its origins. Using artificial intelligence, they discovered'fingerprints' in text throughout the Old Testament, suggesting multiple people wrote the stories. The traditional Jewish and Christian understanding is that Moses wrote the first five books of the Old Testament, including stories about creation, Noah's flood and the Ark of the Covenant. The new study found three distinct writing styles with distinct vocabulary, tone and focus areas, suggesting multiple authors and sources contributed to the books over time. Researchers used AI analyzed for 50 chapters across five books, uncovering inconsistencies in language and content, repeated stories, shifts in tone and internal contradictions.
Federal AI power grab could end state protections for kids and workers
Just as AI begins to upend American society, Congress is considering a move that would sideline states from enforcing commonsense safeguards. Tucked into the recently passed House reconciliation package is Section 43201, a provision that would pre-empt nearly all state and local laws governing "artificial intelligence models," "artificial intelligence systems," and "automated decision systems" for the next 10 years. Last night, the Senate released its own version of the moratorium that would restrict states from receiving federal funding for broadband infrastructure if they don't fall in line. Supporters argue that a moratorium is needed to avoid a patchwork of state rules that could jeopardize U.S. AI competitiveness. AI'S DEVELOPMENT IS CRITICALLY IMPORTANT FOR AMERICA โ AND IT ALL HINGES ON THESE FREEDOMS But this sweeping approach threatens to override legitimate state efforts to curb Big Tech's worst abuses--with no federal safeguards to replace them. It also risks undermining the constitutional role of state legislatures to protect the interests and rights of American children and working families amid AI's far-reaching social and economic disruptions.
Subjective Perspectives within Learned Representations Predict High-Impact Innovation
Cao, Likun, Pan, Rui, Evans, James
Existing studies of innovation emphasize the power of social structures to shape innovation capacity. Emerging machine learning approaches, however, enable us to model innovators' personal perspectives and interpersonal innovation opportunities as a function of their prior trajectories of experience. We theorize then quantify subjective perspectives and innovation opportunities based on innovator positions within the geometric space of concepts inscribed by dynamic language representations. Using data on millions of scientists, inventors, writers, entrepreneurs, and Wikipedia contributors across the creative domains of science, technology, film, entrepreneurship, and Wikipedia, here we show that measured subjective perspectives anticipate what ideas individuals and groups creatively attend to and successfully combine in future. When perspective and background diversity are decomposed as the angular difference between collaborators' perspectives on their creation and between their experiences, the former consistently anticipates creative achievement while the latter portends its opposite, across all cases and time periods examined. We analyze a natural experiment and simulate creative collaborations between AI (large language model) agents designed with various perspective and background diversity, which are consistent with our observational findings. We explore mechanisms underlying these findings and identify how successful collaborators leverage common language to weave together diverse experience obtained through trajectories of prior work that converge to provoke one another and innovate. We explore the importance of these findings for team assembly and research policy.
Energentic Intelligence: From Self-Sustaining Systems to Enduring Artificial Life
This paper introduces Energentic Intelligence, a class of autonomous systems defined not by task performance, but by their capacity to sustain themselves through internal energy regulation. Departing from conventional reward-driven paradigms, these agents treat survival-maintaining functional operation under fluctuating energetic and thermal conditions-as the central objective. We formalize this principle through an energy-based utility function and a viability-constrained survival horizon, and propose a modular architecture that integrates energy harvesting, thermal regulation, and adaptive computation into a closed-loop control system. A simulated environment demonstrates the emergence of stable, resource-aware behavior without external supervision. Together, these contributions provide a theoretical and architectural foundation for deploying autonomous agents in resource-volatile settings where persistence must be self-regulated and infrastructure cannot be assumed.
A Graph-Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Enhances Decision-Making in the Circular Economy
Zhao, Yang, Dai, Chengxiao, Niyato, Dusit, Tan, Chuan Fu, Xiang, Keyi, Wang, Yueyang, Yeo, Zhiquan, Loong, Daren Tan Zong, Zhaozhi, Jonathan Low, HO, Eugene H. Z.
Large language models (LLMs) hold promise for sustainable manufacturing, but often hallucinate industrial codes and emission factors, undermining regulatory and investment decisions. We introduce CircuGraphRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that grounds LLMs outputs in a domain-specific knowledge graph for the circular economy. This graph connects 117,380 industrial and waste entities with classification codes and GWP100 emission data, enabling structured multi-hop reasoning. Natural language queries are translated into SPARQL and verified subgraphs are retrieved to ensure accuracy and traceability. Compared with Standalone LLMs and Naive RAG, CircuGraphRAG achieves superior performance in single-hop and multi-hop question answering, with ROUGE-L F1 scores up to 1.0, while baseline scores below 0.08. It also improves efficiency, halving the response time and reducing token usage by 16% in representative tasks. CircuGraphRAG provides fact-checked, regulatory-ready support for circular economy planning, advancing reliable, low-carbon resource decision making.
SafeSteer: Interpretable Safety Steering with Refusal-Evasion in LLMs
Ghosh, Shaona, Bhattacharjee, Amrita, Ziser, Yftah, Parisien, Christopher
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise, customizable safety adjustments remains largely untapped. This paper investigates an approach called SafeSteer for guiding the outputs of LLMs by: (i) leveraging category-specific steering vectors for more precise control, (ii) employing a simple, gradient-free unsupervised method to enhance safety steering while preserving text quality, topic relevance, and without explicit refusal, and (iii) accomplishing this without a hard requirement of contrastive pairwise safe data. We also highlight that our method, being simple and effective, aligns with recent studies suggesting that simple techniques often outperform more complex ones in activation steering. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach across various LLMs, datasets, and risk categories, demonstrating its ability to provide precise control, prevent blanket refusals, and guide models toward generating safe content while maintaining topic relevance.
What does making money have to do with crime?: A dive into the National Crime Victimization survey
In this short article, I leverage the National Crime Victimization Survey from 1992 to 2022 to examine how income, education, employment, and key demographic factors shape the type of crime victims experience (violent vs property). Using balanced classification splits and logistic regression models evaluated by F1-score, there is an isolation of the socioeconomic drivers of victimization "Group A" models and then an introduction of demographic factors such as age, gender, race, and marital status controls called "Group B" models. The results consistently proves that higher income and education lower the odds of violent relative to property crime, while men younger individuals and racial minorities face disproportionately higher violentcrime risks. On the geographic spectrum, the suburban models achieve the strongest predictive performance with an accuracy of 0.607 and F1 of 0.590, urban areas benefit from adding education and employment predictors and crime in rural areas are still unpredictable using these current factors. The patterns found in this study shows the need for specific interventions like educational investments in metropolitan settings economic support in rural communities and demographicaware prevention strategies.
Linear Representation Transferability Hypothesis: Leveraging Small Models to Steer Large Models
Bello, Femi, Das, Anubrata, Zeng, Fanzhi, Yin, Fangcong, Leqi, Liu
It has been hypothesized that neural networks with similar architectures trained on similar data learn shared representations relevant to the learning task. We build on this idea by extending the conceptual framework where representations learned across models trained on the same data can be expressed as linear combinations of a \emph{universal} set of basis features. These basis features underlie the learning task itself and remain consistent across models, regardless of scale. From this framework, we propose the \textbf{Linear Representation Transferability (LRT)} Hypothesis -- that there exists an affine transformation between the representation spaces of different models. To test this hypothesis, we learn affine mappings between the hidden states of models of different sizes and evaluate whether steering vectors -- directions in hidden state space associated with specific model behaviors -- retain their semantic effect when transferred from small to large language models using the learned mappings. We find strong empirical evidence that such affine mappings can preserve steering behaviors. These findings suggest that representations learned by small models can be used to guide the behavior of large models, and that the LRT hypothesis may be a promising direction on understanding representation alignment across model scales.
ValueSim: Generating Backstories to Model Individual Value Systems
Du, Bangde, Ye, Ziyi, Wu, Zhijing, Monika, Jankowska, Zhu, Shuqi, Ai, Qingyao, Zhou, Yujia, Liu, Yiqun
As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit increasingly human-like capabilities, aligning them with human values has become critically important. Contemporary advanced techniques, such as prompt learning and reinforcement learning, are being deployed to better align LLMs with human values. However, while these approaches address broad ethical considerations and helpfulness, they rarely focus on simulating individualized human value systems. To address this gap, we present ValueSim, a framework that simulates individual values through the generation of personal backstories reflecting past experiences and demographic information. ValueSim converts structured individual data into narrative backstories and employs a multi-module architecture inspired by the Cognitive-Affective Personality System to simulate individual values based on these narratives. Testing ValueSim on a self-constructed benchmark derived from the World Values Survey demonstrates an improvement in top-1 accuracy by over 10% compared to retrieval-augmented generation methods. Further analysis reveals that performance enhances as additional user interaction history becomes available, indicating the model's ability to refine its persona simulation capabilities over time.
DECASTE: Unveiling Caste Stereotypes in Large Language Models through Multi-Dimensional Bias Analysis
Vijayaraghavan, Prashanth, Vosoughi, Soroush, Chiazor, Lamogha, Horesh, Raya, de Paula, Rogerio Abreu, Degan, Ehsan, Mukherjee, Vandana
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and expanded their applications across diverse domains. However, despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs have been shown to reflect and perpetuate harmful societal biases, including those based on ethnicity, gender, and religion. A critical and underexplored issue is the reinforcement of caste-based biases, particularly towards India's marginalized caste groups such as Dalits and Shudras. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing DECASTE, a novel, multi-dimensional framework designed to detect and assess both implicit and explicit caste biases in LLMs. Our approach evaluates caste fairness across four dimensions: socio-cultural, economic, educational, and political, using a range of customized prompting strategies. By benchmarking several state-of-the-art LLMs, we reveal that these models systematically reinforce caste biases, with significant disparities observed in the treatment of oppressed versus dominant caste groups. For example, bias scores are notably elevated when comparing Dalits and Shudras with dominant caste groups, reflecting societal prejudices that persist in model outputs. These results expose the subtle yet pervasive caste biases in LLMs and emphasize the need for more comprehensive and inclusive bias evaluation methodologies that assess the potential risks of deploying such models in real-world contexts.