mstyslavity/prisma_v3 huggingface dataset:
AI alignment is a field of research that aims to develop methods to ensure that agents always behave in a manner aligned with (i.e. consistently with) the goals and values of their human operators, no matter their level of capability. This paper proposes an affectivist approach to the alignment problem, re-framing the concepts of goals and values in terms of affective taxis, and explaining the emergence of affective valence by appealing to recent work in evolutionary-developmental and computational neuroscience. We review the state of the art and, building on this work, we propose a computational model of affect based on taxis navigation. We discuss evidence in a tractable model organism that our model reflects aspects of biological taxis navigation. We conclude with a discussion of the role of affective taxis in AI alignment.
This is a preprint of a review article that has not yet undergone peer review. The content is intended for early dissemination and academic discussion. The final version may differ upon formal publication. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution reshapes industrial paradigms, human-robot collaboration (HRC) has transitioned from a desirable capability to an operational necessity. In response, collaborative robots (Cobots) are evolving beyond repetitive tasks toward adaptive, semantically informed interaction with humans and environments. This paper surveys five foundational pillars enabling this transformation: semantic-level perception, cognitive action planning, explainable learning and control, safety-aware motion design, and multimodal human intention recognition. We examine the role of semantic mapping in transforming spatial data into meaningful context, and explore cognitive planning frameworks that leverage this context for goal-driven decision-making. Additionally, we analyze explainable reinforcement learning methods, including policy distillation and attention mechanisms, which enhance interpretability and trust. Safety is addressed through force-adaptive control and risk-aware trajectory planning, while seamless human interaction is supported via gaze and gesture-based intent recognition. Despite these advancements, challenges such as perception-action disjunction, real-time explainability limitations, and incomplete human trust persist. To address these, we propose a unified Cognitive Synergy Architecture, integrating all modules into a cohesive framework for truly human-centric cobot collaboration.
The use of geospatially dependent information, which has been stipulated as a law in geography, to model geographic patterns forms the cornerstone of geostatistics, and has been inherited in many data science based techniques as well, such as statistical learning algorithms. Still, we observe hesitations in interpreting geographic dependency scientifically as a property in geography, since interpretations of such dependency are subject to model choice with different hypotheses of trends and stationarity. Rather than questioning what can be considered as trends or why it is non-stationary, in this work, we share and consolidate a view that the properties of geographic dependency, being it trending or stationary, are essentially variations can be explained further by unobserved or unknown predictors, and not intrinsic to geographic space. Particularly, geoinformation dependency properties are in fact a projection of high dimensional feature space formed by all potential predictors into the lower dimension of geographic space, where geographic coordinates are equivalent to other predictors for modelling geographic patterns. This work brings together different aspects of geographic dependency, including similarity and heterogeneity, under a coherent framework, and aligns with the understanding of modelling in high dimensional feature space with different modelling concept including the classical geostatistics, Gaussian Process Regression and popular data science based spatial modelling techniques.
As Natural Language Processing (NLP) models continue to evolve and become integral to high-stakes applications, ensuring their interpretability remains a critical challenge. Given the growing variety of explainability methods and diverse stakeholder requirements, frameworks that help stakeholders select appropriate explanations tailored to their specific use cases are increasingly important. To address this need, we introduce EvalxNLP, a Python framework for benchmarking state-of-the-art feature attribution methods for transformer-based NLP models. EvalxNLP integrates eight widely recognized explainability techniques from the Explainable AI (XAI) literature, enabling users to generate and evaluate explanations based on key properties such as faithfulness, plausibility, and complexity. Our framework also provides interactive, LLM-based textual explanations, facilitating user understanding of the generated explanations and evaluation outcomes. Human evaluation results indicate high user satisfaction with EvalxNLP, suggesting it is a promising framework for benchmarking explanation methods across diverse user groups. By offering a user-friendly and extensible platform, EvalxNLP aims at democratizing explainability tools and supporting the systematic comparison and advancement of XAI techniques in NLP.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used for decision-making across domains, raising debates over the information and explanations they should provide. Most research on Explainable AI (XAI) has focused on feature-based explanations, with less attention on alternative styles. Personality traits like the Need for Cognition (NFC) can also lead to different decision-making outcomes among low and high NFC individuals. We investigated how presenting AI information (prediction, confidence, and accuracy) and different explanation styles (example-based, feature-based, rule-based, and counterfactual) affect accuracy, reliance on AI, and cognitive load in a loan application scenario. We also examined low and high NFC individuals' differences in prioritizing XAI interface elements (loan attributes, AI information, and explanations), accuracy, and cognitive load. Our findings show that high AI confidence significantly increases reliance on AI while reducing cognitive load. Feature-based explanations did not enhance accuracy compared to other conditions. Although counterfactual explanations were less understandable, they enhanced overall accuracy, increasing reliance on AI and reducing cognitive load when AI predictions were correct. Both low and high NFC individuals prioritized explanations after loan attributes, leaving AI information as the least important. However, we found no significant differences between low and high NFC groups in accuracy or cognitive load, raising questions about the role of personality traits in AI-assisted decision-making. These findings highlight the need for user-centric personalization in XAI interfaces, incorporating diverse explanation styles and exploring multiple personality traits and other user characteristics to optimize human-AI collaboration.
We consider testing a cooperative and social practice that is shaped by the tools developers use, the tests they write, and their mindsets and human needs. This work is one part of a project that explores the human- and socio-technical context of testing through the lens of those interwoven elements: test suite and tools as technical infrastructure and collaborative factors and motivation as mindset. Drawing on empirical observations of previous work, this survey examines how these factors relate to each other. We want to understand which combination of factors can help developers strive and make the most of their ambitions to leverage the potential that software testing practices have. In this report, we construct a survey instrument to measure the factors that constitute the socio-technical context of testing experience. In addition, we state our hypotheses about how these factors impact testing experience and explain the considerations and process that led to the construction of the survey questions.
Recent XAI studies have investigated what constitutes a \textit{good} explanation in AI-assisted decision-making. Despite the widely accepted human-friendly properties of explanations, such as contrastive and selective, existing studies have yielded inconsistent findings. To address these gaps, our study focuses on the cognitive dimensions of explanation evaluation, by evaluating six explanations with different contrastive strategies and information selectivity and scrutinizing factors behind their valuation process. Our analysis results find that contrastive explanations are not the most preferable or understandable in general; Rather, different contrastive and selective explanations were appreciated to a different extent based on who they are, when, how, and what to explain -- with different level of cognitive load and engagement and sociotechnical contexts. Given these findings, we call for a nuanced view of explanation strategies, with implications for designing AI interfaces to accommodate individual and contextual differences in AI-assisted decision-making.
This study investigates the relationship between deep learning (DL) model accuracy and expert agreement in classifying crash narratives. We evaluate five DL models -- including BERT variants, USE, and a zero-shot classifier -- against expert labels and narratives, and extend the analysis to four large language models (LLMs): GPT-4, LLaMA 3, Qwen, and Claude. Our findings reveal an inverse relationship: models with higher technical accuracy often show lower agreement with human experts, while LLMs demonstrate stronger expert alignment despite lower accuracy. We use Cohen's Kappa and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to quantify and visualize model-expert agreement, and employ SHAP analysis to explain misclassifications. Results show that expert-aligned models rely more on contextual and temporal cues than location-specific keywords. These findings suggest that accuracy alone is insufficient for safety-critical NLP tasks. We argue for incorporating expert agreement into model evaluation frameworks and highlight the potential of LLMs as interpretable tools in crash analysis pipelines.
Agentic pipelines present novel challenges and opportunities for human-centered explainability. The HCXAI community is still grappling with how best to make the inner workings of LLMs transparent in actionable ways. Agentic pipelines consist of multiple LLMs working in cooperation with minimal human control. In this research paper, we present early findings from an agentic pipeline implementation of a perceptive task guidance system. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we analyze how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, a common vehicle for explainability in LLMs, operates within agentic pipelines. We demonstrate that CoT reasoning alone does not lead to better outputs, nor does it offer explainability, as it tends to produce explanations without explainability, in that they do not improve the ability of end users to better understand systems or achieve their goals.
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in areas that significantly impact human lives, concerns about fairness and transparency have grown, especially regarding their impact on protected groups. Recently, the intersection of explainability and fairness has emerged as an important area to promote responsible AI systems. This paper explores how explainability methods can be leveraged to detect and interpret unfairness. We propose a pipeline that integrates local post-hoc explanation methods to derive fairness-related insights. During the pipeline design, we identify and address critical questions arising from the use of explanations as bias detectors such as the relationship between distributive and procedural fairness, the effect of removing the protected attribute, the consistency and quality of results across different explanation methods, the impact of various aggregation strategies of local explanations on group fairness evaluations, and the overall trustworthiness of explanations as bias detectors. Our results show the potential of explanation methods used for fairness while highlighting the need to carefully consider the aforementioned critical aspects.
Rooted in the explosion of deep learning over the past decade, this thesis spans from AlphaGo to ChatGPT to empirically examine the fundamental concepts needed to realize the vision of an artificial scientist: a machine with the capacity to autonomously generate original research and contribute to the expansion of human knowledge. The investigation begins with Olivaw, an AlphaGo Zero-like agent that discovers Othello knowledge from scratch but is unable to communicate it. This realization leads to the development of the Explanatory Learning (EL) framework, a formalization of the problem faced by a scientist when trying to explain a new phenomenon to their peers. The effective EL prescriptions allow us to crack Zendo, a popular board game simulating the scientific endeavor. This success comes with a fundamental insight: an artificial scientist must develop its own interpretation of the language used to explain its findings, and not rely on a rigid existing interpreter. Questioning the very process of learning an interpreter, we turn our attention to the inner functioning of modern multimodal models. This culminates in a simple idea to build CLIP-like models where interpretation and perception are explicitly disentangled: a cost-effective approach that couples two unimodal models using little multimodal data and no further training. Finally, we discuss what ChatGPT and its siblings are still missing to become artificial scientists, and introduce the Big-Bench Symbol Interpretation Task, a benchmark about interpreting Zendo-like explanations that sees LLMs going no further than random chance while being instead fully solved by humans.
Recent advances in digital platforms generate rich, high-dimensional logs of human behavior, and machine learning models have helped social scientists explain knowledge accumulation, communication, and information diffusion. Such models, however, almost always treat behavior as sequences of actions, abstracting the inter-temporal information among actions. To close this gap, we introduce a two-scale Action-Timing Context(ATC) framework that jointly embeds each action and its time interval. ATC obtains low-dimensional representations of actions and characterizes them with inter-temporal information. We provide three applications of ATC to real-world datasets and demonstrate that the method offers a unified view of human behavior. The presented qualitative findings demonstrate that explicitly modeling inter-temporal context is essential for a comprehensive, interpretable understanding of human activity on digital platforms.
Institutions play a critical role in enabling communities to manage common-pool resources and avert tragedies of the commons. However, a fundamental issue arises: Individuals typically perceive participation as advantageous only after an institution is established, creating a paradox: How can institutions form if no one will join before a critical mass exists? We term this conundrum the institution bootstrapping problem and propose that misperception, specifically, agents' erroneous belief that an institution already exists, could resolve this paradox. By integrating well-documented psychological phenomena, including cognitive biases, probability distortion, and perceptual noise, into a game-theoretic framework, we demonstrate how these factors collectively mitigate the bootstrapping problem. Notably, unbiased perceptual noise (e.g., noise arising from agents' heterogeneous physical or social contexts) drastically reduces the critical mass of cooperators required for institutional emergence. This effect intensifies with greater diversity of perceptions. We explain this counter-intuitive result through asymmetric boundary conditions: proportional underestimation of low-probability sanctions produces distinct outcomes compared to equivalent overestimation. Furthermore, the type of perceptual distortion, proportional versus absolute, yields qualitatively different evolutionary pathways. These findings challenge conventional assumptions about rationality in institutional design, highlighting how "noisy" cognition can paradoxically enhance cooperation. Finally, we contextualize these insights within broader discussions of multi-agent system design and collective action. Our analysis underscores the importance of incorporating human-like cognitive constraints, not just idealized rationality, into models of institutional emergence and resilience.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reshaping the global financial landscape, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance customer engagement, automate complex workflows, and extract actionable insights from vast financial data. This survey provides an overview of GenAI adoption across the financial ecosystem, examining how banks, insurers, asset managers, and fintech startups worldwide are integrating large language models and other generative tools into their operations. From AI-powered virtual assistants and personalized financial advisory to fraud detection and compliance automation, GenAI is driving innovation across functions. However, this transformation comes with significant cybersecurity and ethical risks. We discuss emerging threats such as AI-generated phishing, deepfake-enabled fraud, and adversarial attacks on AI systems, as well as concerns around bias, opacity, and data misuse. The evolving global regulatory landscape is explored in depth, including initiatives by major financial regulators and international efforts to develop risk-based AI governance. Finally, we propose best practices for secure and responsible adoption - including explainability techniques, adversarial testing, auditability, and human oversight. Drawing from academic literature, industry case studies, and policy frameworks, this chapter offers a perspective on how the financial sector can harness GenAI's transformative potential while navigating the complex risks it introduces.
Bayesian Optimisation (BO) is a family of methods for finding optimal parameters when the underlying function to be optimised is unknown. BO is used, for example, for hyperparameter tuning in machine learning and as an expert support tool for tuning cyberphysical systems. For settings where humans are involved in the tuning task, methods have been developed to explain BO (Explainable Bayesian Optimization, XBO). However, there is little guidance on how to present XBO results to humans so that they can tune the system effectively and efficiently. In this paper, we investigate how the XBO explanation format affects users' task performance, task load, understanding and trust in XBO. We chose a task that is accessible to a wide range of users. Specifically, we set up an egg cooking scenario with 6 parameters that participants had to adjust to achieve a perfect soft-boiled egg. We compared three different explanation formats: a bar chart, a list of rules and a textual explanation in a between-subjects online study with 213 participants. Our results show that adding any type of explanation increases task success, reduces the number of trials needed to achieve success, and improves comprehension and confidence. While explanations add more information for participants to process, we found no increase in user task load. We also found that the aforementioned results were independent of the explanation format; all formats had a similar effect. This is an interesting finding for practical applications, as it suggests that explanations can be added to BO tuning tasks without the burden of designing or selecting specific explanation formats. In the future, it would be interesting to investigate scenarios of prolonged use of the explanation formats and whether they have different effects on users' mental models of the underlying system.
The growing interest in automated movement analysis has presented new challenges in recognition of complex human activities including dance. This study focuses on dance style recognition using features extracted using Laban Movement Analysis. Previous studies for dance style recognition often focus on cross-frame movement analysis, which limits the ability to capture temporal context and dynamic transitions between movements. This gap highlights the need for a method that can add temporal context to LMA features. For this, we introduce a novel pipeline which combines 3D pose estimation, 3D human mesh reconstruction, and floor aware body modeling to effectively extract LMA features. To address the temporal limitation, we propose a sliding window approach that captures movement evolution across time in features. These features are then used to train various machine learning methods for classification, and their explainability explainable AI methods to evaluate the contribution of each feature to classification performance. Our proposed method achieves a highest classification accuracy of 99.18\% which shows that the addition of temporal context significantly improves dance style recognition performance.
Understanding a \textit{reinforcement learning} policy, which guides state-to-action mappings to maximize rewards, necessitates an accompanying explanation for human comprehension. In this paper, we introduce a set of \textit{linear temporal logic} formulae designed to provide explanations for policies, and an algorithm for searching through those formulae for the one that best explains a given policy. Our focus is on explanations that elucidate both the ultimate objectives accomplished by the policy and the prerequisite conditions it upholds throughout its execution. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is illustrated through a simulated game of capture-the-flag and a car-parking environment,
In the era of rapid advancements in vehicle safety technologies, driving risk assessment has become a focal point of attention. Technologies such as collision warning systems, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous driving require driving risks to be evaluated proactively and in real time. To be effective, driving risk assessment metrics must not only accurately identify potential collisions but also exhibit human-like reasoning to enable safe and seamless interactions between vehicles. Existing safety potential field models assess driving risks by considering both objective and subjective safety factors. However, their practical applicability in real-world risk assessment tasks is limited. These models are often challenging to calibrate due to the arbitrary nature of their structures, and calibration can be inefficient because of the scarcity of accident statistics. Additionally, they struggle to generalize across both longitudinal and lateral risks. To address these challenges, we propose a composite safety potential field framework, namely C-SPF, involving a subjective field to capture drivers' risk perception about spatial proximity and an objective field to quantify the imminent collision probability, to comprehensively evaluate driving risks. The C-SPF is calibrated using abundant two-dimensional spacing data from trajectory datasets, enabling it to effectively capture drivers' proximity risk perception and provide a more realistic explanation of driving behaviors. Analysis of a naturalistic driving dataset demonstrates that the C-SPF can capture both longitudinal and lateral risks that trigger drivers' safety maneuvers. Further case studies highlight the C-SPF's ability to explain lateral driver behaviors, such as abandoning lane changes or adjusting lateral position relative to adjacent vehicles, which are capabilities that existing models fail to achieve.