distribution statement
AI Bill of Materials and Beyond: Systematizing Security Assurance through the AI Risk Scanning (AIRS) Framework
Nathanson, Samuel, Lee, Alexander, Kieffer, Catherine Chen, Junkin, Jared, Ye, Jessica, Saeed, Amir, Lockhart, Melanie, Fink, Russ, Peterson, Elisha, Watkins, Lanier
Assurance for artificial intelligence (AI) systems remains fragmented across software supply-chain security, adversarial machine learning, and governance documentation. Existing transparency mechanisms - including Model Cards, Datasheets, and Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) - advance provenance reporting but rarely provide verifiable, machine-readable evidence of model security. This paper introduces the AI Risk Scanning (AIRS) Framework, a threat-model-based, evidence-generating framework designed to operationalize AI assurance. The AIRS Framework evolved through three progressive pilot studies - Smurf (AIBOM schema design), OPAL (operational validation), and Pilot C (AIRS) - that reframed AI documentation from descriptive disclosure toward measurable, evidence-bound verification. The framework aligns its assurance fields to the MITRE ATLAS adversarial ML taxonomy and automatically produces structured artifacts capturing model integrity, packaging and serialization safety, structural adapters, and runtime behaviors. Currently, the AIRS Framework is scoped to provide model-level assurances for LLMs, but it could be expanded to include other modalities and cover system-level threats (e.g. application-layer abuses, tool-calling). A proof-of-concept on a quantized GPT-OSS-20B model demonstrates enforcement of safe loader policies, per-shard hash verification, and contamination and backdoor probes executed under controlled runtime conditions. Comparative analysis with SBOM standards of SPDX 3.0 and CycloneDX 1.6 reveals alignment on identity and evaluation metadata, but identifies critical gaps in representing AI-specific assurance fields. The AIRS Framework thus extends SBOM practice to the AI domain by coupling threat modeling with automated, auditable evidence generation, providing a principled foundation for standardized, trustworthy, and machine-verifiable AI risk documentation.
- North America > United States > Texas > Kleberg County (0.04)
- North America > United States > Texas > Chambers County (0.04)
Data Fusion of Deep Learned Molecular Embeddings for Property Prediction
Appleton, Robert J, Barnes, Brian C, Strachan, Alejandro
Data - driven approaches such as deep learning can result in predictive models for material properties with exceptional accuracy and efficiency. However, in many applications, data is sparse, severely limiting their accuracy and applicability . To improve predictions, techniques such as transfer learning and multi - task learning have been used. T he performance of multi - task learning models depend s on the strength of the underlying correlations between tasks and the completeness of the dataset . S tandard multi - task models tend to underperform when trained on sparse datasets with weakly correlated properties. To address this gap, we fuse deep - learned embeddings generated by independent pre - trained single - task models, resulting in a multi - task model that inherit s rich, property - specific representations. By re - using (rather than re - training) these embeddings, the resulting fused model outperforms standard multi - task models and can be extended with fewer trainable parameters . We demonstrate this technique on a widely used benchmark dataset of quantum chemistry data for small molecules as well as a newly compiled sparse dataset of experimental data collected from literature and our own quant um chemistry and thermochemical calculations.
- North America > United States > Maryland (0.04)
- North America > United States > Indiana > Tippecanoe County > West Lafayette (0.04)
- North America > United States > Indiana > Tippecanoe County > Lafayette (0.04)
- Government > Military (0.68)
- Government > Regional Government (0.68)
Gamma Mixture Modeling for Cosine Similarity in Small Language Models
We study the cosine similarity of sentence transformer embeddings and observe that they are well modeled by gamma mixtures. From a fixed corpus, we measure similarities between all document embeddings and a reference query embedding. Empirically we find that these distributions are often well captured by a gamma distribution shifted and truncated to [ 1, 1], and in many cases, by a gamma mixture. We propose a heuristic model in which a hierarchical clustering of topics naturally leads to a gamma-mixture structure in the similarity scores. Finally, we outline an expectation-maximization algorithm for fitting shifted gamma mixtures, which provides a practical tool for modeling similarity distributions.
Polysemantic Dropout: Conformal OOD Detection for Specialized LLMs
Gupta, Ayush, Kaur, Ramneet, Roy, Anirban, Cobb, Adam D., Chellappa, Rama, Jha, Susmit
We propose a novel inference-time out-of-domain (OOD) detection algorithm for specialized large language models (LLMs). Despite achieving state-of-the-art performance on in-domain tasks through fine-tuning, specialized LLMs remain vulnerable to incorrect or unreliable outputs when presented with OOD inputs, posing risks in critical applications. Our method leverages the Inductive Conformal Anomaly Detection (ICAD) framework, using a new non-conformity measure based on the model's dropout tolerance. Motivated by recent findings on polysemanticity and redundancy in LLMs, we hypothesize that in-domain inputs exhibit higher dropout tolerance than OOD inputs. We aggregate dropout tolerance across multiple layers via a valid ensemble approach, improving detection while maintaining theoretical false alarm bounds from ICAD. Experiments with medical-specialized LLMs show that our approach detects OOD inputs better than baseline methods, with AUROC improvements of $2\%$ to $37\%$ when treating OOD datapoints as positives and in-domain test datapoints as negatives.
- Health & Medicine (1.00)
- Government > Military (1.00)
- Government > Regional Government > North America Government > United States Government (0.68)
From Firewalls to Frontiers: AI Red-Teaming is a Domain-Specific Evolution of Cyber Red-Teaming
Sinha, Anusha, Grimes, Keltin, Lucassen, James, Feffer, Michael, VanHoudnos, Nathan, Wu, Zhiwei Steven, Heidari, Hoda
A red team simulates adversary attacks to help defenders find effective strategies to defend their systems in a real-world operational setting. As more enterprise systems adopt AI, red-teaming will need to evolve to address the unique vulnerabilities and risks posed by AI systems. We take the position that AI systems can be more effectively red-teamed if AI red-teaming is recognized as a domain-specific evolution of cyber red-teaming. Specifically, we argue that existing Cyber Red Teams who adopt this framing will be able to better evaluate systems with AI components by recognizing that AI poses new risks, has new failure modes to exploit, and often contains unpatchable bugs that re-prioritize disclosure and mitigation strategies. Similarly, adopting a cybersecurity framing will allow existing AI Red Teams to leverage a well-tested structure to emulate realistic adversaries, promote mutual accountability with formal rules of engagement, and provide a pattern to mature the tooling necessary for repeatable, scalable engagements. In these ways, the merging of AI and Cyber Red Teams will create a robust security ecosystem and best position the community to adapt to the rapidly changing threat landscape.
- Europe > Switzerland > Zürich > Zürich (0.14)
- North America > United States > Pennsylvania > Allegheny County > Pittsburgh (0.04)
- Africa > Eswatini > Manzini > Manzini (0.04)
- Law (1.00)
- Information Technology > Security & Privacy (1.00)
- Government > Regional Government > North America Government > United States Government (1.00)
- (2 more...)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Representation & Reasoning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Issues > Social & Ethical Issues (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.94)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Large Language Model (0.93)
Calibrating Uncertainty Quantification of Multi-Modal LLMs using Grounding
Padhi, Trilok, Kaur, Ramneet, Cobb, Adam D., Acharya, Manoj, Roy, Anirban, Samplawski, Colin, Matejek, Brian, Berenbeim, Alexander M., Bastian, Nathaniel D., Jha, Susmit
We introduce a novel approach for calibrating uncertainty quantification (UQ) tailored for multi-modal large language models (LLMs). Existing state-of-the-art UQ methods rely on consistency among multiple responses generated by the LLM on an input query under diverse settings. However, these approaches often report higher confidence in scenarios where the LLM is consistently incorrect. This leads to a poorly calibrated confidence with respect to accuracy. To address this, we leverage cross-modal consistency in addition to self-consistency to improve the calibration of the multi-modal models. Specifically, we ground the textual responses to the visual inputs. The confidence from the grounding model is used to calibrate the overall confidence. Given that using a grounding model adds its own uncertainty in the pipeline, we apply temperature scaling - a widely accepted parametric calibration technique - to calibrate the grounding model's confidence in the accuracy of generated responses. We evaluate the proposed approach across multiple multi-modal tasks, such as medical question answering (Slake) and visual question answering (VQAv2), considering multi-modal models such as LLaVA-Med and LLaVA. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves significantly improved calibration on both tasks.
- Research Report > Promising Solution (0.34)
- Overview > Innovation (0.34)
- Health & Medicine (1.00)
- Government > Regional Government > North America Government > United States Government (1.00)
- Government > Military (1.00)
Token embeddings violate the manifold hypothesis
Robinson, Michael, Dey, Sourya, Chiang, Tony
To fully understand the behavior of a large language model (LLM) requires our understanding of its input space. If this input space differs from our assumption, our understanding of and conclusions about the LLM is likely flawed, regardless of its architecture. Here, we elucidate the structure of the token embeddings, the input domain for LLMs, both empirically and theoretically. We present a generalized and statistically testable model where the neighborhood of each token splits into well-defined signal and noise dimensions. This model is based on a generalization of a manifold called a fiber bundle, so we denote our hypothesis test as the ``fiber bundle null.'' Failing to reject the null is uninformative, but rejecting it at a specific token indicates that token has a statistically significant local structure, and so is of interest to us. By running our test over several open-source LLMs, each with unique token embeddings, we find that the null is frequently rejected, and so the token subspace is provably not a fiber bundle and hence also not a manifold. As a consequence of our findings, when an LLM is presented with two semantically equivalent prompts, and if one prompt contains a token implicated by our test, that prompt will likely exhibit more output variability proportional to the local signal dimension of the token.
- North America > United States > Washington > King County > Seattle (0.14)
- North America > United States > Virginia > Arlington County > Arlington (0.04)
- North America > United States > Michigan (0.04)
- (2 more...)
Probing the topology of the space of tokens with structured prompts
Robinson, Michael, Dey, Sourya, Kushner, Taisa
The set of tokens T, when embedded within the latent space X of a large language model (LLM) can be thought of as a finite sample drawn from a distribution supported on a topological subspace of X. One can ask what the smallest (in the sense of inclusion) subspace and simplest (in terms of fewest free parameters) distribution can account for such a sample. Previous work[1] suggests that the smallest topological subspace from which tokens can be drawn is not manifold, but has structure consistent with a stratified manifold. That paper relied upon knowing the token input embedding function T X, which given each token t T, ascribes a representation in X. Because embeddings preserve topological structure, in this paper, we will study T by equating it with the image of the token input embedding function, thereby treating T both as the set of tokens and as a subspace of X. This subspace is called the token subspace of X. Usually X is taken to be Euclidean space R
- North America > United States > Virginia > Arlington County > Arlington (0.04)
- North America > United States > New York (0.04)
- North America > United States > District of Columbia > Washington (0.04)
- Europe > Spain > Catalonia > Barcelona Province > Barcelona (0.04)
Fine-Tuning LLMs for Report Summarization: Analysis on Supervised and Unsupervised Data
Rallapalli, Swati, Gallagher, Shannon, Mellinger, Andrew O., Ratchford, Jasmine, Sinha, Anusha, Brooks, Tyler, Nichols, William R., Winski, Nick, Brown, Bryan
We study the efficacy of fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) for the specific task of report (government archives, news, intelligence reports) summarization. While this topic is being very actively researched - our specific application set-up faces two challenges: (i) ground-truth summaries maybe unavailable (e.g., for government archives), and (ii) availability of limited compute power - the sensitive nature of the application requires that computation is performed on-premise and for most of our experiments we use one or two A100 GPU cards. Under this set-up we conduct experiments to answer the following questions. First, given that fine-tuning the LLMs can be resource intensive, is it feasible to fine-tune them for improved report summarization capabilities on-premise? Second, what are the metrics we could leverage to assess the quality of these summaries? We conduct experiments on two different fine-tuning approaches in parallel and our findings reveal interesting trends regarding the utility of fine-tuning LLMs. Specifically, we find that in many cases, fine-tuning helps improve summary quality and in other cases it helps by reducing the number of invalid or garbage summaries.
- Oceania > Australia (0.14)
- North America > United States > Minnesota > Hennepin County > Minneapolis (0.14)
- North America > Canada (0.14)
- Europe > Spain (0.14)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Natural Language > Large Language Model (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Performance Analysis > Accuracy (0.47)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (0.46)
A Guide to Failure in Machine Learning: Reliability and Robustness from Foundations to Practice
Heim, Eric, Wright, Oren, Shriver, David
One of the main barriers to adoption of Machine Learning (ML) is that ML models can fail unexpectedly. In this work, we aim to provide practitioners a guide to better understand why ML models fail and equip them with techniques they can use to reason about failure. Specifically, we discuss failure as either being caused by lack of reliability or lack of robustness. Differentiating the causes of failure in this way allows us to formally define why models fail from first principles and tie these definitions to engineering concepts and real-world deployment settings. Throughout the document we provide 1) a summary of important theoretic concepts in reliability and robustness, 2) a sampling current techniques that practitioners can utilize to reason about ML model reliability and robustness, and 3) examples that show how these concepts and techniques can apply to real-world settings.
- North America > United States (0.92)
- South America > Brazil (0.14)
- Europe > Italy (0.14)
- (3 more...)
- Overview (0.92)
- Research Report (0.81)
- Instructional Material (0.67)
- Health & Medicine (1.00)
- Education (0.67)
- Information Technology > Security & Privacy (0.46)
- (2 more...)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Statistical Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Neural Networks > Deep Learning (1.00)
- Information Technology > Artificial Intelligence > Machine Learning > Learning Graphical Models > Directed Networks > Bayesian Learning (0.92)
- (3 more...)