Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Artificial intelligence

Search indexed arXiv papers on artificial intelligence and machine learning, including cs.AI metadata. Follow the original manuscripts for methods, experiments and version history.

At least 1,009 records · Page 56Linked to original sources

Concept Tokens: Learning Behavioral Embeddings Through Concept Definitions

We propose Concept Tokens, a lightweight method that adds a new special token to a pretrained LLM and learns only its embedding from multiple natural language definitions of a target concept, where occurrences of the concept are replaced by the new token. The LLM is kept frozen and the embedding is optimized with the standard language-modeling objective. We evaluate Concept Tokens in three settings. First, we study hallucinations in closed-book question answering on HotpotQA and find a directional effect: negating the hallucination token reduces hallucinated answers mainly by increasing abstentions, whereas asserting it increases hallucinations and lowers precision. Second, we induce recasting, a pedagogical feedback strategy for second language teaching, and observe the same directional effect. Moreover, compared to providing the full definitional corpus in-context, concept tokens better preserve compliance with other instructions (e.g., asking follow-up questions). Finally, we include a qualitative study with the Eiffel Tower and a fictional "Austral Tower" to illustrate what information the learned embeddings capture and where their limitations emerge. Overall, Concept Tokens provide a compact control signal learned from definitions that can steer behavior in frozen LLMs.

cs.CL↗

Beyond Single Plots: A Benchmark for Question Answering on Multi-Charts

Charts are widely used to present complex information. Deriving meaningful insights in real-world contexts often requires interpreting multiple related charts together. Research on understanding multi-chart images has not been extensively explored. We introduce PolyChartQA, a mid-scale dataset specifically designed for question answering over multi-chart images. PolyChartQA comprises 534 multi-chart images (with a total of 2,297 sub-charts) sourced from peer-reviewed computer science research publications and 2,694 QA pairs. We evaluate the performance of nine state-of-the-art Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) on PolyChartQA across question type, difficulty, question source, and key structural characteristics of multi-charts. Our results show a 27.4% LLM-based accuracy (L-Accuracy) drop on human-authored questions compared to MLM-generated questions, and a 5.39% L-accuracy gain with our proposed prompting method.

cs.CL↗

PrinciplismQA: A Philosophy-Grounded Approach to Assessing LLM-Human Clinical Medical Ethics Alignment

As medical LLMs transition to clinical deployment, assessing their ethical reasoning capability becomes critical. While achieving high accuracy on knowledge benchmarks, LLMs lack validated assessment for navigating ethical trade-offs in clinical decision-making where multiple valid solutions exist. Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to incorporate recognized philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. We introduce PrinciplismQA, a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing LLM clinical medical ethics alignment. Grounded in Principlism, our approach provides a systematic methodology for incorporating clinical ethics philosophy into LLM assessment design. PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning. Our expert-calibrated pipeline enables reproducible evaluation and models ethical biases. Evaluating recent models reveals significant ethical reasoning gaps despite high knowledge accuracy, demonstrating that knowledge-oriented training does not ensure clinical ethical alignment. PrinciplismQA provides a validated tool for assessing clinical AI deployment readiness. Our data and test scripts are fully released on https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/PrinciplismQA.

cs.CL↗

DICA: Dual-Indicator Guided Contrastive Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models

Human visual reasoning typically follows a coarse-to-fine attention process, starting from global scene understanding and gradually focusing on question-relevant regions. However, multimodal large language models may deviate from this pattern due to attention drift and the underutilization of visual evidence, which can lead to hallucinations. To mitigate these issues, this study proposes a Dual-Indicator Guided Contrastive Alignment (DICA), which tracks two information-theoretic indicators during inference: Visual Attention Entropy (VAE), which reflects the concentration of visual attention, and Output Image Correlation (OIC), which measures the dependence of generated outputs on the visual input. An abnormal increase in VAE or a decrease in OIC corresponds to different failure modes, which trigger targeted contrastive alignment to restore visual grounding. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DICA consistently outperforms existing approaches and substantially reduces hallucinations, highlighting the effectiveness of indicator-driven intervention in improving multimodal inference reliability. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BGWH123/DICA/.

cs.AI↗

A Mechanistic Perspective and Circuit-Guided Difficulty Metric for Unlearning

Machine unlearning is becoming essential for building trustworthy and compliant language models. Yet unlearning success varies considerably across individual samples: some are reliably erased, while others persist despite the same procedure. We argue that this disparity is not only a data-side phenomenon, but also reflects model-internal mechanisms that encode and protect memorized information. We study this problem from a mechanistic perspective based on model circuits--structured interaction pathways that govern how predictions are formed. We propose Circuit-guided Unlearning Difficulty (CUD), a {\em pre-unlearning} metric that assigns each sample a continuous difficulty score using circuit-level signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CUD reliably separates intrinsically easy and hard samples, and remains stable across unlearning methods. We identify key circuit-level patterns that reveal a mechanistic signature of difficulty: easy-to-unlearn samples are associated with shorter, shallower interactions concentrated in earlier-to-intermediate parts of the original model, whereas hard samples rely on longer and deeper pathways closer to late-stage computation. Compared to existing qualitative studies, CUD takes a first step toward a principled, fine-grained, and interpretable analysis of unlearning difficulty; and motivates the development of unlearning methods grounded in model mechanisms.

cs.LG↗

Position: Evaluation Scores Are Perishable Knowledge Claims

Evaluation methodologies for language models increasingly combine multiple signals, from automated metrics and LLM-as-judge ratings to human assessments and benchmark suite results. When these signals are aggregated via averaging, evaluation confidence can then substantially exceed the reliability of the weakest signal: a phenomenon we call trust inflation in evaluation. We argue that evaluation scores should be treated as epistemic claims with three properties: formality (human evaluation provides stronger evidence than an automated metric), scope (a benchmark result applies to the tested distribution, not universally), and validity windows (benchmark results expire as contamination accumulates and distributions shift). Several converging research traditions (chain-of-thought analysis, possibilistic logic, and algebraic theory) establish weakest-link aggregation as the conservative endpoint of a parameterized operator family controlled by a single pessimism parameter. Drawing on those traditions, and on concrete lessons from building an evaluation harness for agentic AI, we propose that evaluation results carry explicit metadata (formality tier, scope declaration, and expiration date) to make their epistemic status transparent. We illustrate the cost of mean aggregation on the public HELM leaderboard: across 54 frontier models on ten scenarios, the top-five models ranked by mean score and by weakest-link are completely disjoint.

cs.AI↗

Generative AI and Agency in Education: A Critical Scoping Review and Thematic Analysis

This scoping review examines the relationship between Generative AI (GenAI) and agency in education, analyzing the literature available through the lens of Critical Digital Pedagogy. Following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, we collected 10 studies from academic databases focusing on both learner and teacher agency in GenAI-enabled environments. We conducted an AI-supported hybrid thematic analysis that revealed three key themes: Control in Digital Spaces, Variable Engagement and Access, and Changing Notions of Agency. The findings suggest that while GenAI may enhance learner agency through personalization and support, it also risks exacerbating educational inequalities and diminishing learner autonomy in certain contexts. This review highlights gaps in the current research on GenAI's impact on agency. These findings have implications for educational policy and practice, suggesting the need for frameworks that promote equitable access while preserving learner agency in GenAI-enhanced educational environments.

cs.CY↗

Risk Governance for Generative AI Mental Health Support: A Multi-Turn Safety Architecture

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for emotional support despite lacking mechanisms to safely govern evolving mental health risk. Existing safety approaches primarily detect risk but rarely shape how models respond as conversational risk unfolds. We developed a model-agnostic safety governance architecture that combines contextual risk detection, reasoning-based verification, and protocol-guided response generation for multi-turn mental health interactions. Synthetic conversations grounded in real-world mental health narratives were used to evaluate the architecture's performance, tested with GPT-5-chat and Qwen3.5-27B, achieving high risk detection performance (specificity: 0.85 (95\%CI: 0.78;0.91), sensitivity: 0.92 (95\%CI: 0.88;0.95)) and increasing clinician-preferred escalation responses by 25.6--59.2pp while preserving rapport and connection. Performance remained stable across conversation length and generalized across both proprietary and open-source models. These findings demonstrate that clinically-grounded safety governance can extend beyond risk detection to improve how LLMs manage evolving mental health risk, providing a scalable framework for safer deployment across models.

cs.AI↗

Extending Desbordante with Probabilistic Functional Dependency Discovery Support

Data profiling aims to extract complex patterns from data for further analysis and use that data in domains such as data cleaning, data deduplication, anomaly detection, and many more. Functional dependencies (FDs) are one of the most well-known patterns. However, they are poorly suited for these tasks, as real data is usually dirty, and the rigid definition of FDs does not allow algorithms to locate them. For this reason, there are several formulations aimed at relaxing FDs to support dirty data, with approximate functional dependency (AFD) being the most popular one. Another formulation is the Probabilistic Functional Dependency (pFD), which we aim to support inside Desbordante - a science-intensive, high-performance and open-source data profiling tool implemented in C++. However, pFDs are relatively poorly studied, compared to AFDs. In this paper we study pFDs, both analytically and empirically. We start by assessing how different pFDs and AFDs are by studying cases in which pFDs have an edge over AFDs. Then, we implement the algorithm for pFD discovery, as well as study its run time and memory consumption. We also compare it with an AFD discovery algorithm. Lastly, we study the output of both algorithms to learn whether or not it is possible to use AFD discovery algorithm to get pFDs and vice versa.

cs.DB↗

Building Large-Scale English-Romanian Literary Translation Resources with Open Models

Literary translation has recently gained attention as a distinct and complex task in machine translation research, yet translation by small open models remains an open problem, particularly for low-resource languages such as Romanian. We introduce the TinyFabulist Translation Framework (TF2), a unified framework for dataset creation, fine-tuning, and evaluation in English $\to$ Romanian literary translation. Building on DS-TF1-EN-3M, the largest collection of synthetic English fables to date, our pipeline first generates 15k high-quality Romanian references from the TF1 pool using a high-performing large language model (LLM). We then apply a two-stage fine-tuning process to a 12B-parameter open-weight model: (i) instruction tuning to capture genre-specific narrative style, and (ii) adapter compression for efficient deployment. Evaluation combines a five-dimension LLM-based rubric (accuracy, fluency, coherence, style, cultural adaptation) as the primary comparative framework, alongside corpus-level Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) reported as a secondary reference-based consistency metric. Our fine-tuned model (TF2-12B) achieves strong fluency and adequacy, narrowing the gap to top-performing proprietary models under automated and human-anchored evaluation, while being open, accessible, and significantly more cost-effective. We publicly release the fine-tuned model and two large-scale synthetic parallel datasets (DS-TF2-EN-RO-3M and DS-TF2-EN-RO-15K), along with all scripts and evaluation prompts. TF2 provides an end-to-end, reproducible pipeline for research on cost-efficient translation, cross-lingual narrative generation, and the broad adoption of open models for culturally significant literary content in low-resource settings.

cs.CL↗

Encoding Event-B Proof Rules in Prolog: An Interactive Sequent Prover for ProB

Event-B is a formal method rooted in predicate logic and set theory. We encoded over 600 proof rules in Prolog, enabling a systematic, comprehensible proof analysis and construction. By integrating the proof rules into the Prolog-based validation tool ProB, we obtain an interactive proof system with proof tree visualisation. This has advantages in teaching, giving students direct control over the selection of proof rules. Our tool can import proof obligations from the Rodin platform and provides multiple exports: a trace file for proof replay in ProB, an interactive HTML document for tool-independent exploration of the proof tree, and an export back to Rodin, allowing the ProB prover to be used as second chain. Compared to the previous implementation of the proof rules in Java, the encoding in Prolog is more compact, maintainable and extensible. While a preliminary iterative deepening prover with simple heuristics is already available and useful for finding short proofs, we aim to obtain fast automatic provers in the future.

cs.LO↗

Animation, Verification and Visualisation of Prolog Transition Systems with ProB

ProB is a Prolog-based model checker, animator and constraint solver for high-level formal specifications. One can also use ProB to animate transition systems defined by Prolog predicates, allowing the application of its various validation techniques. In this work, we present the existing features of ProB's Prolog animation mode and its recent extensions. The extended capabilities include simulation for statistical checks, more reliable trace replay, transitions with user input and improved state visualisation. We apply the new features to case studies, particularly for evaluating different strategies in game play, such as Connect Four. The features are useful for many other applications, especially for ProB's new sequent prover for Event-B proof obligations, as well as for demonstration models for teaching in combination with interactive visualisation.

cs.LO↗

Towards a Certifying Grounder

Grounding, the translation of high-level theories into equivalent quantifier-free formulas, is a crucial step in declarative solving, yet it has so far escaped the proof-logging revolution. When this grounding step is not certifying, there is no way of knowing that the obtained solutions actually correspond to the original problem specification, resulting in a trust gap. In this paper, we close the trust gap between the user's high-level specification and the solver's low-level input by introducing a novel certifying grounding framework for first-order logic model expansion (FOX) over finite domains. We present CertiFOX, a framework consisting of: (1) a proof format for grounding derivations, (2) GroundFOX, a certifying grounder operating on theories in Grounding Normal Form (GNF)--a new normal form designed for compact, domain-aware grounding--and (3) CheckFOX, an independent proof checker. Our approach guarantees that the grounder's output is equivalent to the input specification, setting the stage for trustworthy end-to-end certified solving pipelines for declarative languages. Experimental evaluation confirms that CertiFOX is a feasible approach. The GroundFOX grounder is broadly comparable with other grounders, and proof checking with CheckFOX adds overhead within a small constant factor of grounding time.

cs.LO↗

Modeling Deontic Modal Logic in ASP

We consider the problem of implementing deontic modal logic. We show how (deontic) modal operators can be elegantly and directly expressed using default negation (negation-as-failure) and strong negation present in answer set programming (ASP). We propose using global constraints of ASP to represent obligations, prohibitions, and permissions in deontic modal logic. We show that our proposed representation results in the various decades-old paradoxes of deontic modal logic being simply and elegantly resolved. Our method also serves as a means for modeling conditional obligations and conditional prohibitions in knowledge representation.

cs.AI↗

Logic Programming Semantics for Causal Processes

Motivated by challenging modelling issues in the life sciences, we investigate the relationship between logic programming semantics and the eventual states of causal processes compatible with those logic programs. More precisely, we show that while stable models of positive logic programs correspond to the eventual states of processes commencing from a neutral state and continuing undisturbed indefinitely, supported models describe the eventual states reachable from arbitrary starting points. This also contributes to the discussion of the appropriate semantics for logic programming as a causal rule language, adding a temporal perspective to recent interpretations of the stable and supported model semantics from an explanatory viewpoint of causality.

cs.AI↗

A Counterfactual Cause in Situation Calculus

Perhaps the most popular modern formulation of actual causality is the HP account by Halpern and Pearl. Recent advancement has focused on extension of HP account to lift its limited expressiveness, in particular, Batusov and Soutchanski proposed a notion of actual achievement cause in the situation calculus, a rich first-order formalism of actions and changes. Among other things, the first-order nature allows for determining the cause of quantified effects in a given action history therein. While intuitively appealing, Batusov and Soutchanski's account is not defined in a counterfactual perspective. In this paper, we propose a notion of cause based on counterfactual analysis. In the context of action history, we show that our notion of cause generalizes naturally to a notion of achievement cause. We analyze the relationship between our notion of the achievement cause and the achievement cause by Batusov and Soutchanski. Finally, we relate our account of cause to Halpern and Pearl's account of actual causality. Particularly, we note some nuances in applying a counterfactual viewpoint to disjunctive effects, a common thorn in definitions of actual causes.

cs.AI↗

Extrusion Segmentation Strategy to improve CAD Reconstruction from Point Cloud

Computer-Aided Design is ubiquitous in todays world, as almost every manufactured object begins as a digital model across industries. At the same time, advances in 3D sensing have made point clouds a dominant form of raw 3D data. Recovering the CAD model of a physical object from its point cloud scan has two major applications: reverse engineering, where physical or hand-crafted prototypes need to be reconstructed automatically as editable digital models, and quality control, where recovering the CAD description of a manufactured object helps quantify and understand deviations introduced during the production process. Thus, converting unordered point clouds into structured CAD models is increasingly important for modern applications. Deep learning has enabled major progress in computer vision for both 2D and 3D data, and new datasets facilitate data-driven CAD reconstruction. Building on this foundation, we develop an end-to-end model that reconstructs CAD models from point clouds and introduce a segmentation approach that decomposes them into individual extrusions. These partial shapes increase data diversity, improving the generalization and robustness of deep learning models. Our strategy thereby provides a simple, yet effective way to increase reconstruction performance of deep learning models.

cs.CV↗

A Robust Pipeline for Differentially Private Federated Learning on Imbalanced Clinical Data using SMOTETomek and FedProx

Federated Learning (FL) presents a groundbreaking approach for collaborative health research, allowing model training on decentralized data while safeguarding patient privacy. FL offers formal security guarantees when combined with Differential Privacy (DP). The integration of these technologies, however, introduces a significant trade-off between privacy and clinical utility, a challenge further complicated by the severe class imbalance often present in medical datasets. The research presented herein addresses these interconnected issues through a systematic, multi-stage analysis. An FL framework was implemented for cardiovascular risk prediction, where initial experiments showed that standard methods struggled with imbalanced data, resulting in a recall of zero. To overcome such a limitation, we first integrated the hybrid Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique with Tomek Links (SMOTETomek) at the client level, successfully developing a clinically useful model. Subsequently, the framework was optimized for non-IID data using a tuned FedProx algorithm. Our final results reveal a clear, non-linear trade-off between the privacy budget (epsilon) and model recall, with the optimized FedProx consistently out-performing standard FedAvg. An optimal operational region was identified on the privacy-utility frontier, where strong privacy guarantees (with epsilon 9.0) can be achieved while maintaining high clinical utility (recall greater than 77%). Ultimately, our study provides a practical methodological blueprint for creating effective, secure, and accurate diagnostic tools that can be applied to real-world, heterogeneous healthcare data.

cs.CR↗