This study investigates how individuals' perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) limitations influence organizational readiness for AI adoption. Through semi-structured interviews with seven AI implementation experts, analyzed using the Gioia methodology, the research reveals that organizational readiness emerges through dynamic interactions between individual sensemaking, social learning, and formal integration processes. The findings demonstrate that hands-on experience with AI limitations leads to more realistic expectations and increased trust, mainly when supported by peer networks and champion systems. Organizations that successfully translate these individual and collective insights into formal governance structures achieve more sustainable AI adoption. The study advances theory by showing how organizational readiness for AI adoption evolves through continuous cycles of individual understanding, social learning, and organizational adaptation. These insights suggest that organizations should approach AI adoption not as a one-time implementation but as an ongoing strategic learning process that balances innovation with practical constraints. The research contributes to organizational readiness theory and practice by illuminating how micro-level perceptions and experiences shape macro-level adoption outcomes.

This thesis presents a framework that integrates state-of-the-art generative AI models for real-time creation of three-dimensional (3D) objects in augmented reality (AR) environments. The primary goal is to convert diverse inputs, such as images and speech, into accurate 3D models, enhancing user interaction and immersion. Key components include advanced object detection algorithms, user-friendly interaction techniques, and robust AI models like Shap-E for 3D generation. Leveraging Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), the system captures spatial details from images and processes textual information to generate comprehensive 3D objects, seamlessly integrating virtual objects into real-world environments. The framework demonstrates applications across industries such as gaming, education, retail, and interior design. It allows players to create personalized in-game assets, customers to see products in their environments before purchase, and designers to convert real-world objects into 3D models for real-time visualization. A significant contribution is democratizing 3D model creation, making advanced AI tools accessible to a broader audience, fostering creativity and innovation. The framework addresses challenges like handling multilingual inputs, diverse visual data, and complex environments, improving object detection and model generation accuracy, as well as loading 3D models in AR space in real-time. In conclusion, this thesis integrates generative AI and AR for efficient 3D model generation, enhancing accessibility and paving the way for innovative applications and improved user interactions in AR environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming scientific research, including proteomics. Advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data quality, diversity, and scale, combined with groundbreaking AI techniques, are unlocking new challenges and opportunities in biological discovery. Here, we highlight key areas where AI is driving innovation, from data analysis to new biological insights. These include developing an AI-friendly ecosystem for proteomics data generation, sharing, and analysis; improving peptide and protein identification and quantification; characterizing protein-protein interactions and protein complexes; advancing spatial and perturbation proteomics; integrating multi-omics data; and ultimately enabling AI-empowered virtual cells.

Current financial LLM agent benchmarks are inadequate. They prioritize task performance while ignoring fundamental safety risks. Threats like hallucinations, temporal misalignment, and adversarial vulnerabilities pose systemic risks in high-stakes financial environments, yet existing evaluation frameworks fail to capture these risks. We take a firm position: traditional benchmarks are insufficient to ensure the reliability of LLM agents in finance. To address this, we analyze existing financial LLM agent benchmarks, finding safety gaps and introducing ten risk-aware evaluation metrics. Through an empirical evaluation of both API-based and open-weight LLM agents, we reveal hidden vulnerabilities that remain undetected by conventional assessments. To move the field forward, we propose the Safety-Aware Evaluation Agent (SAEA), grounded in a three-level evaluation framework that assesses agents at the model level (intrinsic capabilities), workflow level (multi-step process reliability), and system level (integration robustness). Our findings highlight the urgent need to redefine LLM agent evaluation standards by shifting the focus from raw performance to safety, robustness, and real world resilience.

Constitutional AI (CAI) guides LLM behavior using constitutions, but identifying which principles are most effective for model alignment remains an open challenge. We introduce the C3AI framework (\textit{Crafting Constitutions for CAI models}), which serves two key functions: (1) selecting and structuring principles to form effective constitutions before fine-tuning; and (2) evaluating whether fine-tuned CAI models follow these principles in practice. By analyzing principles from AI and psychology, we found that positively framed, behavior-based principles align more closely with human preferences than negatively framed or trait-based principles. In a safety alignment use case, we applied a graph-based principle selection method to refine an existing CAI constitution, improving safety measures while maintaining strong general reasoning capabilities. Interestingly, fine-tuned CAI models performed well on negatively framed principles but struggled with positively framed ones, in contrast to our human alignment results. This highlights a potential gap between principle design and model adherence. Overall, C3AI provides a structured and scalable approach to both crafting and evaluating CAI constitutions.

This study investigates the role of LLM-generated synthetic data in cyberbullying detection. We conduct a series of experiments where we replace some or all of the authentic data with synthetic data, or augment the authentic data with synthetic data. We find that synthetic cyberbullying data can be the basis for training a classifier for harm detection that reaches performance close to that of a classifier trained with authentic data. Combining authentic with synthetic data shows improvements over the baseline of training on authentic data alone for the test data for all three LLMs tried. These results highlight the viability of synthetic data as a scalable, ethically viable alternative in cyberbullying detection while emphasizing the critical impact of LLM selection on performance outcomes.

Compressing Large Language Models (LLMs) into task-specific Small Language Models (SLMs) encounters two significant challenges: safeguarding domain-specific knowledge privacy and managing limited resources. To tackle these challenges, we propose PPC-GPT, a innovative privacy-preserving federated framework specifically designed for compressing LLMs into task-specific SLMs via pruning and Chain-of-Thought (COT) distillation. PPC-GPT works on a server-client federated architecture, where the client sends differentially private (DP) perturbed task-specific data to the server's LLM. The LLM then generates synthetic data along with their corresponding rationales. This synthetic data is subsequently used for both LLM pruning and retraining processes. Additionally, we harness COT knowledge distillation, leveraging the synthetic data to further improve the retraining of structurally-pruned SLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PPC-GPT across various text generation tasks. By compressing LLMs into task-specific SLMs, PPC-GPT not only achieves competitive performance but also prioritizes data privacy protection.

Due to the sensitive nature of personally identifiable information (PII), its owners may have the authority to control its inclusion or request its removal from large-language model (LLM) training. Beyond this, PII may be added or removed from training datasets due to evolving dataset curation techniques, because they were newly scraped for retraining, or because they were included in a new downstream fine-tuning stage. We find that the amount and ease of PII memorization is a dynamic property of a model that evolves throughout training pipelines and depends on commonly altered design choices. We characterize three such novel phenomena: (1) similar-appearing PII seen later in training can elicit memorization of earlier-seen sequences in what we call assisted memorization, and this is a significant factor (in our settings, up to 1/3); (2) adding PII can increase memorization of other PII significantly (in our settings, as much as $\approx\!7.5\times$); and (3) removing PII can lead to other PII being memorized. Model creators should consider these first- and second-order privacy risks when training models to avoid the risk of new PII regurgitation.

Locate-then-Edit Knowledge Editing (LEKE) is a key technique for updating large language models (LLMs) without full retraining. However, existing methods assume a single-user setting and become inefficient in real-world multi-client scenarios, where decentralized organizations (e.g., hospitals, financial institutions) independently update overlapping knowledge, leading to redundant mediator knowledge vector (MKV) computations and privacy concerns. To address these challenges, we introduce Federated Locate-then-Edit Knowledge Editing (FLEKE), a novel task that enables multiple clients to collaboratively perform LEKE while preserving privacy and reducing computational overhead. To achieve this, we propose FedEdit, a two-stage framework that optimizes MKV selection and reuse. In the first stage, clients locally apply LEKE and upload the computed MKVs. In the second stage, rather than relying solely on server-based MKV sharing, FLEKE allows clients retrieve relevant MKVs based on cosine similarity, enabling knowledge re-edit and minimizing redundant computations. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedEdit retains over 96% of the performance of non-federated LEKE while significantly outperforming a FedAvg-based baseline by approximately twofold. Besides, we find that MEMIT performs more consistently than PMET in the FLEKE task with our FedEdit framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/zongkaiz/FLEKE.

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people's mental variables based on their behavior, is key to developing socially intelligent agents. Current approaches to Theory of Mind reasoning either rely on prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), which are prone to systematic errors, or use rigid, handcrafted Bayesian Theory of Mind (BToM) models, which are more robust but cannot generalize across different domains. In this work, we introduce AutoToM, an automated Bayesian Theory of Mind method for achieving open-ended machine Theory of Mind. AutoToM can operate in any domain, infer any mental variable, and conduct robust Theory of Mind reasoning of any order. Given a Theory of Mind inference problem, AutoToM first proposes an initial BToM model. It then conducts automated Bayesian inverse planning based on the proposed model, leveraging an LLM as the backend. Based on the uncertainty of the inference, it iteratively refines the model, by introducing additional mental variables and/or incorporating more timesteps in the context. Empirical evaluations across multiple Theory of Mind benchmarks demonstrate that AutoToM consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, offering a scalable, robust, and interpretable approach to machine Theory of Mind.