pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Feeling Machines: Ethics, Culture, and the Rise of Emotional AI
Authors: Vivek Chavan, Arsen Cenaj, Shuyuan Shen, Ariane Bar, Srishti Binwani, Tommaso Del Becaro, Marius Funk, Lynn Greschner, Roberto Hung, Stina Klein, Romina Kleiner, Stefanie Krause, Sylwia Olbrych, Vishvapalsinhji Parmar, Jaleh Sarafraz, Daria Soroko, Daksitha Withanage Don, Chang Zhou, Hoang Thuy Duong Vu, Parastoo Semnani, Daniel Weinhardt, Elisabeth Andre, Jörg Krüger, Xavier Fresquet
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Navigate

This paper explores the growing presence of emotionally responsive artificial intelligence through a critical and interdisciplinary lens. Bringing together the voices of early-career researchers from multiple fields, it explores how AI systems that simulate or interpret human emotions are reshaping our interactions in areas such as education, healthcare, mental health, caregiving, and digital life. The analysis is structured around four central themes: the ethical implications of emotional AI, the cultural dynamics of human-machine interaction, the risks and opportunities for vulnerable populations, and the emerging regulatory, design, and technical considerations. The authors highlight the potential of affective AI to support mental well-being, enhance learning, and reduce loneliness, as well as the risks of emotional manipulation, over-reliance, misrepresentation, and cultural bias. Key challenges include simulating empathy without genuine understanding, encoding dominant sociocultural norms into AI systems, and insufficient safeguards for individuals in sensitive or high-risk contexts. Special attention is given to children, elderly users, and individuals with mental health challenges, who may interact with AI in emotionally significant ways. However, there remains a lack of cognitive or legal protections which are necessary to navigate such engagements safely. The report concludes with ten recommendations, including the need for transparency, certification frameworks, region-specific fine-tuning, human oversight, and longitudinal research. A curated supplementary section provides practical tools, models, and datasets to support further work in this domain.
Bridging the Digital Divide: Small Language Models as a Pathway for Physics and Photonics Education in Underdeveloped Regions
Authors: Asghar Ghorbani, Hanieh Fattahi
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00

Limited infrastructure, scarce educational resources, and unreliable internet access often hinder physics and photonics education in underdeveloped regions. These barriers create deep inequities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. This article explores how Small Language Models (SLMs)-compact, AI-powered tools that can run offline on low-power devices, offering a scalable solution. By acting as virtual tutors, enabling native-language instruction, and supporting interactive learning, SLMs can help address the shortage of trained educators and laboratory access. By narrowing the digital divide through targeted investment in AI technologies, SLMs present a scalable and inclusive solution to advance STEM education and foster scientific empowerment in marginalized communities.
Information Suppression in Large Language Models: Auditing, Quantifying, and Characterizing Censorship in DeepSeek
Authors: Peiran Qiu, Siyi Zhou, Emilio Ferrara
Date: 2025-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This study examines information suppression mechanisms in DeepSeek, an open-source large language model (LLM) developed in China. We propose an auditing framework and use it to analyze the model's responses to 646 politically sensitive prompts by comparing its final output with intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Our audit unveils evidence of semantic-level information suppression in DeepSeek: sensitive content often appears within the model's internal reasoning but is omitted or rephrased in the final output. Specifically, DeepSeek suppresses references to transparency, government accountability, and civic mobilization, while occasionally amplifying language aligned with state propaganda. This study underscores the need for systematic auditing of alignment, content moderation, information suppression, and censorship practices implemented into widely-adopted AI models, to ensure transparency, accountability, and equitable access to unbiased information obtained by means of these systems.
Large Language Models for History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science: Interpretive Uses, Methodological Challenges, and Critical Perspectives
Authors: Arno Simons, Michael Zichert, Adrian Wüthrich
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Philosophy, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Sociology

This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as research tools in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). LLMs are remarkably effective at processing unstructured text and inferring meaning from context, offering new affordances that challenge long-standing divides between computational and interpretive methods. This raises both opportunities and challenges for HPSS, which emphasizes interpretive methodologies and understands meaning as context-dependent, ambiguous, and historically situated. We argue that HPSS is uniquely positioned not only to benefit from LLMs' capabilities but also to interrogate their epistemic assumptions and infrastructural implications. To this end, we first offer a concise primer on LLM architectures and training paradigms tailored to non-technical readers. We frame LLMs not as neutral tools but as epistemic infrastructures that encode assumptions about meaning, context, and similarity, conditioned by their training data, architecture, and patterns of use. We then examine how computational techniques enhanced by LLMs, such as structuring data, detecting patterns, and modeling dynamic processes, can be applied to support interpretive research in HPSS. Our analysis compares full-context and generative models, outlines strategies for domain and task adaptation (e.g., continued pretraining, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation), and evaluates their respective strengths and limitations for interpretive inquiry in HPSS. We conclude with four lessons for integrating LLMs into HPSS: (1) model selection involves interpretive trade-offs; (2) LLM literacy is foundational; (3) HPSS must define its own benchmarks and corpora; and (4) LLMs should enhance, not replace, interpretive methods.
Dr. GPT Will See You Now, but Should It? Exploring the Benefits and Harms of Large Language Models in Medical Diagnosis using Crowdsourced Clinical Cases
Authors: Bonam Mingole, Aditya Majumdar, Firdaus Ahmed Choudhury, Jennifer L. Kraschnewski, Shyam S. Sundar, Amulya Yadav
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis, RAG

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes applications such as medical (self-)diagnosis and preliminary triage raises significant ethical and practical concerns about the effectiveness, appropriateness, and possible harmfulness of the use of these technologies for health-related concerns and queries. Some prior work has considered the effectiveness of LLMs in answering expert-written health queries/prompts, questions from medical examination banks, or queries based on pre-existing clinical cases. Unfortunately, these existing studies completely ignore an in-the-wild evaluation of the effectiveness of LLMs in answering everyday health concerns and queries typically asked by general users, which corresponds to the more prevalent use case for LLMs. To address this research gap, this paper presents the findings from a university-level competition that leveraged a novel, crowdsourced approach for evaluating the effectiveness of LLMs in answering everyday health queries. Over the course of a week, a total of 34 participants prompted four publicly accessible LLMs with 212 real (or imagined) health concerns, and the LLM generated responses were evaluated by a team of nine board-certified physicians. At a high level, our findings indicate that on average, 76% of the 212 LLM responses were deemed to be accurate by physicians. Further, with the help of medical professionals, we investigated whether RAG versions of these LLMs (powered with a comprehensive medical knowledge base) can improve the quality of responses generated by LLMs. Finally, we also derive qualitative insights to explain our quantitative findings by conducting interviews with seven medical professionals who were shown all the prompts in our competition. This paper aims to provide a more grounded understanding of how LLMs perform in real-world everyday health communication.
Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe?
Authors: Noemi Dreksler, Lucius Caviola, David Chalmers, Carter Allen, Alex Rand, Joshua Lewis, Philip Waggoner, Kate Mays, Jeff Sebo
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

We surveyed 582 AI researchers who have published in leading AI venues and 838 nationally representative US participants about their views on the potential development of AI systems with subjective experience and how such systems should be treated and governed. When asked to estimate the chances that such systems will exist on specific dates, the median responses were 1% (AI researchers) and 5% (public) by 2024, 25% and 30% by 2034, and 70% and 60% by 2100, respectively. The median member of the public thought there was a higher chance that AI systems with subjective experience would never exist (25%) than the median AI researcher did (10%). Both groups perceived a need for multidisciplinary expertise to assess AI subjective experience. Although support for welfare protections for such AI systems exceeded opposition, it remained far lower than support for protections for animals or the environment. Attitudes toward moral and governance issues were divided in both groups, especially regarding whether such systems should be created and what rights or protections they should receive. Yet a majority of respondents in both groups agreed that safeguards against the potential risks from AI systems with subjective experience should be implemented by AI developers now, and if created, AI systems with subjective experience should treat others well, behave ethically, and be held accountable. Overall, these results suggest that both AI researchers and the public regard the emergence of AI systems with subjective experience as a possibility this century, though substantial uncertainty and disagreement remain about the timeline and appropriate response.
Revealing Political Bias in LLMs through Structured Multi-Agent Debate
Authors: Aishwarya Bandaru, Fabian Bindley, Trevor Bluth, Nandini Chavda, Baixu Chen, Ethan Law
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate social behaviour, yet their political biases and interaction dynamics in debates remain underexplored. We investigate how LLM type and agent gender attributes influence political bias using a structured multi-agent debate framework, by engaging Neutral, Republican, and Democrat American LLM agents in debates on politically sensitive topics. We systematically vary the underlying LLMs, agent genders, and debate formats to examine how model provenance and agent personas influence political bias and attitudes throughout debates. We find that Neutral agents consistently align with Democrats, while Republicans shift closer to the Neutral; gender influences agent attitudes, with agents adapting their opinions when aware of other agents' genders; and contrary to prior research, agents with shared political affiliations can form echo chambers, exhibiting the expected intensification of attitudes as debates progress.
Self-supervised Learning of Echocardiographic Video Representations via Online Cluster Distillation
Authors: Divyanshu Mishra, Mohammadreza Salehi, Pramit Saha, Olga Patey, Aris T. Papageorghiou, Yuki M. Asano, J. Alison Noble
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Clustering, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Video Anomaly Detection, Video Understanding

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved major advances in natural images and video understanding, but challenges remain in domains like echocardiography (heart ultrasound) due to subtle anatomical structures, complex temporal dynamics, and the current lack of domain-specific pre-trained models. Existing SSL approaches such as contrastive, masked modeling, and clustering-based methods struggle with high intersample similarity, sensitivity to low PSNR inputs common in ultrasound, or aggressive augmentations that distort clinically relevant features. We present DISCOVR (Distilled Image Supervision for Cross Modal Video Representation), a self-supervised dual branch framework for cardiac ultrasound video representation learning. DISCOVR combines a clustering-based video encoder that models temporal dynamics with an online image encoder that extracts fine-grained spatial semantics. These branches are connected through a semantic cluster distillation loss that transfers anatomical knowledge from the evolving image encoder to the video encoder, enabling temporally coherent representations enriched with fine-grained semantic understanding. Evaluated on six echocardiography datasets spanning fetal, pediatric, and adult populations, DISCOVR outperforms both specialized video anomaly detection methods and state-of-the-art video-SSL baselines in zero-shot and linear probing setups, and achieves superior segmentation transfer.
Bias and Identifiability in the Bounded Confidence Model
Authors: Claudio Borile, Jacopo Lenti, Valentina Ghidini, Corrado Monti, Gianmarco De Francisci Morales
Date: 2025-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: model, parameter estimation

Opinion dynamics models such as the bounded confidence models (BCMs) describe how a population can reach consensus, fragmentation, or polarization, depending on a few parameters. Connecting such models to real-world data could help understanding such phenomena, testing model assumptions. To this end, estimation of model parameters is a key aspect, and maximum likelihood estimation provides a principled way to tackle it. Here, our goal is to outline the properties of statistical estimators of the two key BCM parameters: the confidence bound and the convergence rate. We find that their maximum likelihood estimators present different characteristics: the one for the confidence bound presents a small-sample bias but is consistent, while the estimator of the convergence rate shows a persistent bias. Moreover, the joint parameter estimation is affected by identifiability issues for specific regions of the parameter space, as several local maxima are present in the likelihood function. Our results show how the analysis of the likelihood function is a fruitful approach for better understanding the pitfalls and possibilities of estimating the parameters of opinion dynamics models, and more in general, agent-based models, and for offering formal guarantees for their calibration.
The Biased Samaritan: LLM biases in Perceived Kindness
Authors: Jack H Fagan, Ruhaan Juyaal, Amy Yue-Ming Yu, Siya Pun
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become ubiquitous in many fields, understanding and mitigating LLM biases is an ongoing issue. This paper provides a novel method for evaluating the demographic biases of various generative AI models. By prompting models to assess a moral patient's willingness to intervene constructively, we aim to quantitatively evaluate different LLMs' biases towards various genders, races, and ages. Our work differs from existing work by aiming to determine the baseline demographic identities for various commercial models and the relationship between the baseline and other demographics. We strive to understand if these biases are positive, neutral, or negative, and the strength of these biases. This paper can contribute to the objective assessment of bias in Large Language Models and give the user or developer the power to account for these biases in LLM output or in training future LLMs. Our analysis suggested two key findings: that models view the baseline demographic as a white middle-aged or young adult male; however, a general trend across models suggested that non-baseline demographics are more willing to help than the baseline. These methodologies allowed us to distinguish these two biases that are often tangled together.
Contemporary AI foundation models increase biological weapons risk
Authors: Roger Brent, T. Greg McKelvey Jr
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has raised concerns about its potential to facilitate biological weapons development. We argue existing safety assessments of contemporary foundation AI models underestimate this risk, largely due to flawed assumptions and inadequate evaluation methods. First, assessments mistakenly assume biological weapons development requires tacit knowledge, or skills gained through hands-on experience that cannot be easily verbalized. Second, they rely on imperfect benchmarks that overlook how AI can uplift both nonexperts and already-skilled individuals. To challenge the tacit knowledge assumption, we examine cases where individuals without formal expertise, including a 2011 Norwegian ultranationalist who synthesized explosives, successfully carried out complex technical tasks. We also review efforts to document pathogen construction processes, highlighting how such tasks can be conveyed in text. We identify "elements of success" for biological weapons development that large language models can describe in words, including steps such as acquiring materials and performing technical procedures. Applying this framework, we find that advanced AI models Llama 3.1 405B, ChatGPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can accurately guide users through the recovery of live poliovirus from commercially obtained synthetic DNA, challenging recent claims that current models pose minimal biosecurity risk. We advocate for improved benchmarks, while acknowledging the window for meaningful implementation may have already closed.
SocialCredit+
Authors: Thabassum Aslam, Anees Aslam
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Credit score, Ethics, Retrieval-augmented Generation

SocialCredit+ is AI powered credit scoring system that leverages publicly available social media data to augment traditional credit evaluation. It uses a conversational banking assistant to gather user consent and fetch public profiles. Multimodal feature extractors analyze posts, bios, images, and friend networks to generate a rich behavioral profile. A specialized Sharia-compliance layer flags any non-halal indicators and prohibited financial behavior based on Islamic ethics. The platform employs a retrieval-augmented generation module: an LLM accesses a domain specific knowledge base to generate clear, text-based explanations for each decision. We describe the end-to-end architecture and data flow, the models used, and system infrastructure. Synthetic scenarios illustrate how social signals translate into credit-score factors. This paper emphasizes conceptual novelty, compliance mechanisms, and practical impact, targeting AI researchers, fintech practitioners, ethical banking jurists, and investors.
"I Hadn't Thought About That": Creators of Human-like AI Weigh in on Ethics And Neurodivergence
Authors: Naba Rizvi, Taggert Smith, Tanvi Vidyala, Mya Bolds, Harper Strickland, Andrew Begel, Rua Williams, Imani Munyaka
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

Human-like AI agents such as robots and chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, but they present a variety of ethical concerns. The first concern is in how we define humanness, and how our definition impacts communities historically dehumanized by scientific research. Autistic people in particular have been dehumanized by being compared to robots, making it even more important to ensure this marginalization is not reproduced by AI that may promote neuronormative social behaviors. Second, the ubiquitous use of these agents raises concerns surrounding model biases and accessibility. In our work, we investigate the experiences of the people who build and design these technologies to gain insights into their understanding and acceptance of neurodivergence, and the challenges in making their work more accessible to users with diverse needs. Even though neurodivergent individuals are often marginalized for their unique communication styles, nearly all participants overlooked the conclusions their end-users and other AI system makers may draw about communication norms from the implementation and interpretation of humanness applied in participants' work. This highlights a major gap in their broader ethical considerations, compounded by some participants' neuronormative assumptions about the behaviors and traits that distinguish "humans" from "bots" and the replication of these assumptions in their work. We examine the impact this may have on autism inclusion in society and provide recommendations for additional systemic changes towards more ethical research directions.
Military AI Cyber Agents (MAICAs) Constitute a Global Threat to Critical Infrastructure
Authors: Timothy Dubber, Seth Lazar
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00

This paper argues that autonomous AI cyber-weapons - Military-AI Cyber Agents (MAICAs) - create a credible pathway to catastrophic risk. It sets out the technical feasibility of MAICAs, explains why geopolitics and the nature of cyberspace make MAICAs a catastrophic risk, and proposes political, defensive-AI and analogue-resilience measures to blunt the threat.
Intelligent Automation for FDI Facilitation: Optimizing Tariff Exemption Processes with OCR And Large Language Models
Authors: Muhammad Sukri Bin Ramli
Date: 2025-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Tariff exemptions are fundamental to attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the manufacturing sector, though the associated administrative processes present areas for optimization for both investing entities and the national tax authority. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to empower tax administration by leveraging a synergistic integration of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Large Language Model (LLM) technologies. The proposed system is designed to first utilize OCR for intelligent digitization, precisely extracting data from diverse application documents and key regulatory texts such as tariff orders. Subsequently, the LLM would enhance the capabilities of administrative officers by automating the critical and time-intensive task of verifying submitted HS Tariff Codes for machinery, equipment, and raw materials against official exemption lists. By enhancing the speed and precision of these initial assessments, this AI-driven approach systematically reduces potential for non-alignment and non-optimized exemption utilization, thereby streamlining the investment journey for FDI companies. For the national administration, the benefits include a significant boost in operational capacity, reduced administrative load, and a strengthened control environment, ultimately improving the ease of doing business and solidifying the nation's appeal as a premier destination for high-value manufacturing FDI.