Law
From Bias to Accountability: How the EU AI Act Confronts Challenges in European GeoAI Auditing
Matuszczyk, Natalia, Barnes, Craig R., Gupta, Rohit, Ozel, Bulent, Mitra, Aniket
Bias in geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) models has been documented, yet the evidence is scattered across narrowly focused studies. We synthesize this fragmented literature to provide a concise overview of bias in GeoAI and examine how the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AI Act) shapes audit obligations. We discuss recurring bias mechanisms, including representation, algorithmic and aggregation bias, and map them to specific provisions of the EU AI Act. By applying the Act's high-risk criteria, we demonstrate that widely deployed GeoAI applications qualify as high-risk systems. We then present examples of recent audits along with an outline of practical methods for detecting bias. As far as we know, this study represents the first integration of GeoAI bias evidence into the EU AI Act context, by identifying high-risk GeoAI systems and mapping bias mechanisms to the Act's Articles. Although the analysis is exploratory, it suggests that even well-curated European datasets should employ routine bias audits before 2027, when the AI Act's high-risk provisions take full effect.
Less is More: Multimodal Region Representation via Pairwise Inter-view Learning
Namgung, Min, Lin, Yijun, Lee, JangHyeon, Chiang, Yao-Yi
With the increasing availability of geospatial datasets, researchers have explored region representation learning (RRL) to analyze complex region characteristics. Recent RRL methods use contrastive learning (CL) to capture shared information between two modalities but often overlook task-relevant unique information specific to each modality. Such modality-specific details can explain region characteristics that shared information alone cannot capture. Bringing information factorization to RRL can address this by factorizing multimodal data into shared and unique information. However, existing factorization approaches focus on two modalities, whereas RRL can benefit from various geospatial data. Extending factorization beyond two modalities is non-trivial because modeling high-order relationships introduces a combinatorial number of learning objectives, increasing model complexity. We introduce Cross modal Knowledge Injected Embedding, an information factorization approach for RRL that captures both shared and unique representations. CooKIE uses a pairwise inter-view learning approach that captures high-order information without modeling high-order dependency, avoiding exhaustive combinations. We evaluate CooKIE on three regression tasks and a land use classification task in New York City and Delhi, India. Results show that CooKIE outperforms existing RRL methods and a factorized RRL model, capturing multimodal information with fewer training parameters and floating-point operations per second (FLOPs). We release the code: https://github.com/MinNamgung/CooKIE.
FedGRec: Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Federated Graph Learning for Secure and Efficient Cross-Border Recommendations
Tan, Zhizhong, Zheng, Jiexin, Yang, Xingxing, Zhang, Chi, Deng, Weiping, Wang, Wenyong
Due to the highly sensitive nature of certain data in cross-border sharing, collaborative cross-border recommendations and data sharing are often subject to stringent privacy protection regulations, resulting in insufficient data for model training. Consequently, achieving efficient cross-border business recommendations while ensuring privacy security poses a significant challenge. Although federated learning has demonstrated broad potential in collaborative training without exposing raw data, most existing federated learning-based GNN training methods still rely on federated averaging strategies, which perform suboptimally on highly heterogeneous graph data. To address this issue, we propose FedGRec, a privacy-preserving federated graph learning method for cross-border recommendations. FedGRec captures user preferences from distributed multi-domain data to enhance recommendation performance across all domains without privacy leakage. Specifically, FedGRec leverages collaborative signals from local subgraphs associated with users or items to enrich their representation learning. Additionally, it employs dynamic spatiotemporal modeling to integrate global and local user preferences in real time based on business recommendation states, thereby deriving the final representations of target users and candidate items. By automatically filtering relevant behaviors, FedGRec effectively mitigates noise interference from unreliable neighbors. Furthermore, through a personalized federated aggregation strategy, FedGRec adapts global preferences to heterogeneous domain data, enabling collaborative learning of user preferences across multiple domains. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that FedGRec consistently outperforms competitive single-domain and cross-domain baselines while effectively preserving data privacy in cross-border recommendations.
Ten Principles of AI Agent Economics
The rapid rise of AI-based autonomous agents is transforming human society and economic systems, as these entities increasingly exhibit human-like or superhuman intelligence. From excelling at complex games like Go to tackling diverse general-purpose tasks with large language and multimodal models, AI agents are evolving from specialized tools into dynamic participants in social and economic ecosystems. Their autonomy and decision-making capabilities are poised to impact industries, professions, and human lives profoundly, raising critical questions about their integration into economic activities, potential ethical concerns, and the balance between their utility and safety. To address these challenges, this paper presents ten principles of AI agent economics, offering a framework to understand how AI agents make decisions, influence social interactions, and participate in the broader economy. Drawing on economics, decision theory, and ethics, we explore fundamental questions, such as whether AI agents might evolve from tools into independent entities, their impact on labor markets, and the ethical safeguards needed to align them with human values. These principles build on existing economic theories while accounting for the unique traits of AI agents, providing a roadmap for their responsible integration into human systems. Beyond theoretical insights, this paper highlights the urgency of future research into AI trustworthiness, ethical guidelines, and regulatory oversight. As we enter a transformative era, this work serves as both a guide and a call to action, ensuring AI agents contribute positively to human progress while addressing risks tied to their unprecedented capabilities.
Lifelong Safety Alignment for Language Models
Wang, Haoyu, Qin, Zeyu, Zhao, Yifei, Du, Chao, Lin, Min, Wang, Xueqian, Pang, Tianyu
LLMs have made impressive progress, but their growing capabilities also expose them to highly flexible jailbreaking attacks designed to bypass safety alignment. While many existing defenses focus on known types of attacks, it is more critical to prepare LLMs for unseen attacks that may arise during deployment. To address this, we propose a lifelong safety alignment framework that enables LLMs to continuously adapt to new and evolving jailbreaking strategies. Our framework introduces a competitive setup between two components: a Meta-Attacker, trained to actively discover novel jailbreaking strategies, and a Defender, trained to resist them. To effectively warm up the Meta-Attacker, we first leverage the GPT-4o API to extract key insights from a large collection of jailbreak-related research papers. Through iterative training, the first iteration Meta-Attacker achieves a 73% attack success rate (ASR) on RR and a 57% transfer ASR on LAT using only single-turn attacks. Meanwhile, the Defender progressively improves its robustness and ultimately reduces the Meta-Attacker's success rate to just 7%, enabling safer and more reliable deployment of LLMs in open-ended environments. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/LifelongSafetyAlignment.
Research on feature fusion and multimodal patent text based on graph attention network
Song, Zhenzhen, Liu, Ziwei, Li, Hongji
Aiming at the problems of cross-modal feature fusion, low efficiency of long text modeling and lack of hierarchical semantic coherence in patent text semantic mining, this study proposes HGM-Net, a deep learning framework that integrates Hierarchical Comparative Learning (HCL), Multi-modal Graph Attention Network (M-GAT) and Multi-Granularity Sparse Attention (MSA), which builds a dynamic mask, contrast and cross-structural similarity constraints on the word, sentence and paragraph hierarchies through HCL. Contrast and cross-structural similarity constraints are constructed at the word and paragraph levels by HCL to strengthen the local semantic and global thematic consistency of patent text; M-GAT models patent classification codes, citation relations and text semantics as heterogeneous graph structures, and achieves dynamic fusion of multi-source features by cross-modal gated attention; MSA adopts a hierarchical sparsity strategy to optimize the computational efficiency of long text modeling at word, phrase, sentence and paragraph granularity. Experiments show that the framework demonstrates significant advantages over existing deep learning methods in tasks such as patent classification and similarity matching, and provides a solution with both theoretical innovation and practical value for solving the problems of patent examination efficiency improvement and technology relevance mining.
What Really Matters in Many-Shot Attacks? An Empirical Study of Long-Context Vulnerabilities in LLMs
Kim, Sangyeop, Lee, Yohan, Song, Yongwoo, Lee, Kimin
We investigate long-context vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) through Many-Shot Jailbreaking (MSJ). Our experiments utilize context length of up to 128K tokens. Through comprehensive analysis with various many-shot attack settings with different instruction styles, shot density, topic, and format, we reveal that context length is the primary factor determining attack effectiveness. Critically, we find that successful attacks do not require carefully crafted harmful content. Even repetitive shots or random dummy text can circumvent model safety measures, suggesting fundamental limitations in long-context processing capabilities of LLMs. The safety behavior of well-aligned models becomes increasingly inconsistent with longer contexts. These findings highlight significant safety gaps in context expansion capabilities of LLMs, emphasizing the need for new safety mechanisms.
Beyond Safe Answers: A Benchmark for Evaluating True Risk Awareness in Large Reasoning Models
Zheng, Baihui, Zheng, Boren, Cao, Kerui, Tan, Yingshui, Liu, Zhendong, Wang, Weixun, Liu, Jiaheng, Yang, Jian, Su, Wenbo, Zhu, Xiaoyong, Zheng, Bo, Zhang, Kaifu
Despite the remarkable proficiency of \textit{Large Reasoning Models} (LRMs) in handling complex reasoning tasks, their reliability in safety-critical scenarios remains uncertain. Existing evaluations primarily assess response-level safety, neglecting a critical issue we identify as \textbf{\textit{Superficial Safety Alignment} (SSA)} -- a phenomenon where models produce superficially safe outputs while internal reasoning processes fail to genuinely detect and mitigate underlying risks, resulting in inconsistent safety behaviors across multiple sampling attempts. To systematically investigate SSA, we introduce \textbf{Beyond Safe Answers (BSA)} bench, a novel benchmark comprising 2,000 challenging instances organized into three distinct SSA scenario types and spanning nine risk categories, each meticulously annotated with risk rationales. Evaluations of 19 state-of-the-art LRMs demonstrate the difficulty of this benchmark, with top-performing models achieving only 38.0\% accuracy in correctly identifying risk rationales. We further explore the efficacy of safety rules, specialized fine-tuning on safety reasoning data, and diverse decoding strategies in mitigating SSA. Our work provides a comprehensive assessment tool for evaluating and improving safety reasoning fidelity in LRMs, advancing the development of genuinely risk-aware and reliably safe AI systems.
Think Again! The Effect of Test-Time Compute on Preferences, Opinions, and Beliefs of Large Language Models
Kour, George, Nakash, Itay, Anaby-Tavor, Ateret, Shmueli-Scheuer, Michal
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become deeply integrated into human life and increasingly influence decision-making, it's crucial to evaluate whether and to what extent they exhibit subjective preferences, opinions, and beliefs. These tendencies may stem from biases within the models, which may shape their behavior, influence the advice and recommendations they offer to users, and potentially reinforce certain viewpoints. This paper presents the Preference, Opinion, and Belief survey (POBs), a benchmark developed to assess LLMs' subjective inclinations across societal, cultural, ethical, and personal domains. We applied our benchmark to evaluate leading open- and closed-source LLMs, measuring desired properties such as reliability, neutrality, and consistency. In addition, we investigated the effect of increasing the test-time compute, through reasoning and self-reflection mechanisms, on those metrics. While effective in other tasks, our results show that these mechanisms offer only limited gains in our domain. Furthermore, we reveal that newer model versions are becoming less consistent and more biased toward specific viewpoints, highlighting a blind spot and a concerning trend. POBS: https://ibm.github.io/POBS
CemiFace: Center-based Semi-hard Synthetic Face Generation for Face Recognition
Privacy issue is a main concern in developing face recognition techniques. Although synthetic face images can partially mitigate potential legal risks while maintaining effective face recognition (FR) performance, FR models trained by face images synthesized by existing generative approaches frequently suffer from performance degradation problems due to the insufficient discriminative quality of these synthesized samples. In this paper, we systematically investigate what contributes to solid face recognition model training, and reveal that face images with certain degree of similarities to their identity centers show great effectiveness in the performance of trained FR models. Inspired by this, we propose a novel diffusion-based approach (namely Center-based Semi-hard Synthetic FaceGeneration (CemiFace) which produces facial samples with various levels of similarity to the subject center, thus allowing to generate face datasets containing effective discriminative samples for training face recognition. Experimental results show that with a modest degree of similarity, training on the generated dataset can produce competitive performance compared to previous generation methods.