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Challenges of Trustworthy Federated Learning: What's Done, Current Trends and Remaining Work

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, the development of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) has emerged as a critical objective in the deployment of AI systems across sensitive and high-risk domains. TAI frameworks articulate a comprehensive set of ethical, legal, and technical requirements to ensure that AI technologies are aligned with human values, rights, and societal expectations. Among the various AI paradigms, Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising solution to pressing privacy concerns. However, aligning FL with the rest of the requirements of TAI presents a series of challenges, most of which arise from its inherently distributed nature. In this work, we adopt the requirements TAI as a guiding structure to systematically analyze the challenges of adapting FL to TAI. Specifically, we classify and examine the key obstacles to aligning FL with TAI, providing a detailed exploration of what has been done, the trends, and the remaining work within each of the identified challenges.


Applying the Chinese Wall Reverse Engineering Technique to Large Language Model Code Editing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work does not provide legal advice, and do not claims that any legal opinion provided are correct 1 and block the model's output accordingly. This technique might not completely block partial matches and does not work for open source development as reproduction of the original code is expected. Some models address this issue by using curated datasets with appropriate licensed contents. For example, the Stack v2 dataset [2] and Starcoder2 model limits data to permissively licensed sources and contents with unknown license. The Common Pile dataset [3] and the accompanied Comma model improves on this by limiting the dataset to permissive licensed contents only. Most permissive licenses only have attribution as its primary sole licensing condition and may be easier to comply with than the GPLv2 license. Ideally, models that are trained on public domain contents may be the best in terms of legal compliance as they have no restrictions or requirements, but to our knowledge no such text generation models exist today with reasonable quality.


The Constitutional Controller: Doubt-Calibrated Steering of Compliant Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring reliable and rule-compliant behavior of autonomous agents in uncertain environments remains a fundamental challenge in modern robotics. Our work shows how neuro-symbolic systems, which integrate probabilistic, symbolic white-box reasoning models with deep learning methods, offer a powerful solution to this challenge. This enables the simultaneous consideration of explicit rules and neural models trained on noisy data, combining the strength of structured reasoning with flexible representations. To this end, we introduce the Constitutional Controller (CoCo), a novel framework designed to enhance the safety and reliability of agents by reasoning over deep probabilistic logic programs representing constraints such as those found in shared traffic spaces. Furthermore, we propose the concept of self-doubt, implemented as a probability density conditioned on doubt features such as travel velocity, employed sensors, or health factors. In a real-world aerial mobility study, we demonstrate CoCo's advantages for intelligent autonomous systems to learn appropriate doubts and navigate complex and uncertain environments safely and compliantly.


Machine Unlearning for Streaming Forgetting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine unlearning aims to remove knowledge of the specific training data in a well-trained model. Currently, machine unlearning methods typically handle all forgetting data in a single batch, removing the corresponding knowledge all at once upon request. However, in practical scenarios, requests for data removal often arise in a streaming manner rather than in a single batch, leading to reduced efficiency and effectiveness in existing methods. Such challenges of streaming forgetting have not been the focus of much research. In this paper, to address the challenges of performance maintenance, efficiency, and data access brought about by streaming unlearning requests, we introduce a streaming unlearning paradigm, formalizing the unlearning as a distribution shift problem. We then estimate the altered distribution and propose a novel streaming unlearning algorithm to achieve efficient streaming forgetting without requiring access to the original training data. Theoretical analyses confirm an $O(\sqrt{T} + V_T)$ error bound on the streaming unlearning regret, where $V_T$ represents the cumulative total variation in the optimal solution over $T$ learning rounds. This theoretical guarantee is achieved under mild conditions without the strong restriction of convex loss function. Experiments across various models and datasets validate the performance of our proposed method.


FullRecall: A Semantic Search-Based Ranking Approach for Maximizing Recall in Patent Retrieval

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Patent examiners and inventors face significant pressure to verify the originality and non-obviousness of inventions, and the intricate nature of patent data intensifies the challenges of patent retrieval. Therefore, there is a pressing need to devise cutting-edge retrieval strategies that can reliably achieve the desired recall. This study introduces FullRecall, a novel patent retrieval approach that effectively manages the complexity of patent data while maintaining the reliability of relevance matching and maximising recall. It leverages IPC-guided knowledge to generate informative phrases, which are processed to extract key information in the form of noun phrases characterising the query patent under observation. From these, the top k keyphrases are selected to construct a query for retrieving a focused subset of the dataset. This initial retrieval step achieves complete recall, successfully capturing all relevant documents. To further refine the results, a ranking scheme is applied to the retrieved subset, reducing its size while maintaining 100% recall. This multi-phase process demonstrates an effective strategy for balancing precision and recall in patent retrieval tasks. Comprehensive experiments were conducted, and the results were compared with baseline studies, namely HRR2 [1] and ReQ-ReC [2]. The proposed approach yielded superior results, achieving 100% recall in all five test cases. However, HRR2[1] recall values across the five test cases were 10%, 25%, 33.3%, 0%, and 14.29%, while ReQ-ReC [2] showed 50% for the first test case, 25% for the second test case, and 0% for the third, fourth, and fifth test cases. The 100% recall ensures that no relevant prior art is overlooked, thereby strengthening the patent pre-filing and examination processes, hence reducing potential legal risks.


Automated Safety Evaluations Across 20 Large Language Models: The Aymara LLM Risk and Responsibility Matrix

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, scalable and rigorous safety evaluation is essential. This paper introduces Aymara AI, a programmatic platform for generating and administering customized, policy-grounded safety evaluations. Aymara AI transforms natural-language safety policies into adversarial prompts and scores model responses using an AI-based rater validated against human judgments. We demonstrate its capabilities through the Aymara LLM Risk and Responsibility Matrix, which evaluates 20 commercially available LLMs across 10 real-world safety domains. Results reveal wide performance disparities, with mean safety scores ranging from 86.2% to 52.4%. While models performed well in well-established safety domains such as Misinformation (mean = 95.7%), they consistently failed in more complex or underspecified domains, notably Privacy & Impersonation (mean = 24.3%). Analyses of Variance confirmed that safety scores differed significantly across both models and domains (p < .05). These findings underscore the inconsistent and context-dependent nature of LLM safety and highlight the need for scalable, customizable tools like Aymara AI to support responsible AI development and oversight.


Revisiting Graph Contrastive Learning on Anomaly Detection: A Structural Imbalance Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The superiority of graph contrastive learning (GCL) has prompted its application to anomaly detection tasks for more powerful risk warning systems. Unfortunately, existing GCL-based models tend to excessively prioritize overall detection performance while neglecting robustness to structural imbalance, which can be problematic for many real-world networks following power-law degree distributions. Particularly, GCL-based methods may fail to capture tail anomalies (abnormal nodes with low degrees). This raises concerns about the security and robustness of current anomaly detection algorithms and therefore hinders their applicability in a variety of realistic high-risk scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, research on the robustness of graph anomaly detection to structural imbalance has received little scrutiny. To address the above issues, this paper presents a novel GCL-based framework named AD-GCL. It devises the neighbor pruning strategy to filter noisy edges for head nodes and facilitate the detection of genuine tail nodes by aligning from head nodes to forged tail nodes. Moreover, AD-GCL actively explores potential neighbors to enlarge the receptive field of tail nodes through anomaly-guided neighbor completion. We further introduce intra- and inter-view consistency loss of the original and augmentation graph for enhanced representation. The performance evaluation of the whole, head, and tail nodes on multiple datasets validates the comprehensive superiority of the proposed AD-GCL in detecting both head anomalies and tail anomalies.


Optimizing Legal Document Retrieval in Vietnamese with Semi-Hard Negative Mining

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in specialized domains like law, where precision and domain-specific knowledge are critical. This paper presents a streamlined two-stage framework consisting of Retrieval and Re-ranking to enhance legal document retrieval efficiency and accuracy. Our approach employs a fine-tuned Bi-Encoder for rapid candidate retrieval, followed by a Cross-Encoder for precise re-ranking, both optimized through strategic negative example mining. Key innovations include the introduction of the Exist@m metric to evaluate retrieval effectiveness and the use of semi-hard negatives to mitigate training bias, which significantly improved re-ranking performance. Evaluated on the SoICT Hackathon 2024 for Legal Document Retrieval, our team, 4Huiter, achieved a top-three position. While top-performing teams employed ensemble models and iterative self-training on large bge-m3 architectures, our lightweight, single-pass approach offered a competitive alternative with far fewer parameters. The framework demonstrates that optimized data processing, tailored loss functions, and balanced negative sampling are pivotal for building robust retrieval-augmented systems in legal contexts.


Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models for Deductive Qualitative Coding: A Comparative Study of ChatGPT Interventions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this study, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT, for structured deductive qualitative coding. While most current research emphasizes inductive coding applications, we address the underexplored potential of LLMs to perform deductive classification tasks aligned with established human-coded schemes. Using the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) Master Codebook, we classified U.S. Supreme Court case summaries into 21 major policy domains. We tested four intervention methods: zero-shot, few-shot, definition-based, and a novel Step-by-Step Task Decomposition strategy, across repeated samples. Performance was evaluated using standard classification metrics (accuracy, F1-score, Cohen's kappa, Krippendorff's alpha), and construct validity was assessed using chi-squared tests and Cramer's V. Chi-squared and effect size analyses confirmed that intervention strategies significantly influenced classification behavior, with Cramer's V values ranging from 0.359 to 0.613, indicating moderate to strong shifts in classification patterns. The Step-by-Step Task Decomposition strategy achieved the strongest reliability (accuracy = 0.775, kappa = 0.744, alpha = 0.746), achieving thresholds for substantial agreement. Despite the semantic ambiguity within case summaries, ChatGPT displayed stable agreement across samples, including high F1 scores in low-support subclasses. These findings demonstrate that with targeted, custom-tailored interventions, LLMs can achieve reliability levels suitable for integration into rigorous qualitative coding workflows.


Fiduciary AI for the Future of Brain-Technology Interactions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Brain foundation models represent a new frontier in AI: instead of processing text or images, these models interpret real-time neural signals from EEG, fMRI, and other neurotechnologies. When integrated with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), they may enable transformative applications-from thought controlled devices to neuroprosthetics-by interpreting and acting on brain activity in milliseconds. However, these same systems pose unprecedented risks, including the exploitation of subconscious neural signals and the erosion of cognitive liberty. Users cannot easily observe or control how their brain signals are interpreted, creating power asymmetries that are vulnerable to manipulation. This paper proposes embedding fiduciary duties-loyalty, care, and confidentiality-directly into BCI-integrated brain foundation models through technical design. Drawing on legal traditions and recent advancements in AI alignment techniques, we outline implementable architectural and governance mechanisms to ensure these systems act in users' best interests. Placing brain foundation models on a fiduciary footing is essential to realizing their potential without compromising self-determination.