Papers

This article describes a behavioural dataset from a collective-risk dilemma public experiment carried out in Barcelona, Spain, within the citizen science xAire air quality project. Participants played a ten-round game in groups of six, each deciding every round how many monetary units to contribute from a private endowment toward a shared target; groups that fell short forfeited all remaining capital. Three endowment treatments held the group total fixed: an equal condition and two unequal conditions in which low-endowment participants formed either the minority or the majority of the group. Data were collected at two public outdoor venues using a tablet-based interface under lab-in-the-field protocols. Participants were recruited on-site from a demographically heterogeneous pool of individuals passing through the venues, mostly local residents. The dataset comprises 462 participants across 77 six-player games, 4\,620 contribution decisions in total. Each participant record links the full ten-round contribution trajectory to initial endowment, wealth treatment, venue, district of residence and its measured nitrogen-dioxide concentration, and socio-demographic and attitudinal survey items covering gender, age, education, economic and working status, air-quality perception, fairness norms, environmental-justice beliefs, residential mobility, and community participation. The release provides raw and cleaned participant tables, a variable codebook, the survey instrument, the district-pollution linkage, and the preprocessing code.

Concerns about polarization, antisocial behavior, and mental health have broadly led to two responses to social media: adapting platforms through moderation and prosocial design, and restricting access to these platforms through age limits and comparable measures. Both address consequences of social media while leaving the attention-driven architecture intact. We argue that the harms commonly attributed to social media arise not from technologies supporting social connection but from their implementation within the attention economy. In response, we ask what a digital social environment built for genuine human connection would look like. From four principles - Purpose, Alignment, Transparency, and Access - we can derive four technical properties that fulfill these principles: Operator Blindness, Algorithmic Sovereignty, Operational Parity, and Verifiability. To the best of our knowledge, no deployed alternative satisfies all four. We propose an architecture that does, making the attention economy not just discouraged but structurally impossible. We explain how the resulting user experience refocuses on each user's individual social environment and differs from that of current platforms.

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a scalable way to simulate survey respondents using demographic profiles and observed reference responses. However, the conventional approach of predicting one question per prompt repeatedly encodes the same context, limits each target to a narrow set of reference responses, and prevents later predictions from using information in earlier answers. Predicting multiple questions in one prompt can reduce these costs, share a broader pool of references, and let later predictions build on earlier ones. This requires forming coherent batches, selecting shared references, and ordering questions and references effectively. We propose Semantically Coherent Batching and Ordering (SCBO), a training-free framework that addresses these challenges. SCBO first uses an LLM to extract compact semantic representations from survey items and filter out template noise. It then groups related questions into batches and builds a shared reference bank using target-specific retrieval and centroid-based completion. Finally, it orders target questions from easy to hard and arranges references according to their semantic alignment with those questions. Experiments on four large-scale survey datasets and four LLMs show that SCBO substantially reduces token consumption and inference time while generally improving prediction accuracy over a non-batched baseline. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SCBO-41D8.

Large Language Models (LLMs) enable scalable social survey simulation, yet existing pipelines typically use the same strong general-purpose model and a fixed, often large, respondent history for every respondent-question request. This uniform approach overlooks three factors. First, stronger models may rely on their own knowledge rather than respondent-specific evidence while costing more. Second, additional history can help when evidence is limited, but irrelevant responses may add noise and increase input length. Third, the preferred model and history budget can depend on each other. We propose E2Sim, an adaptive resource allocation framework that jointly selects a model and history budget for each request. Given a respondent persona, ranked response history, and target question, a lightweight policy predicts the accuracy and cost of each configuration and selects the most suitable one. We use respondent-history drop-and-swap augmentation to improve robustness to incomplete or variable histories, and a margin-based curriculum that progresses from easier allocation decisions to harder ones. Experiments on four real-world social survey datasets, multiple model pools, and different history-budget spaces show improvements over the oracle best-fixed configurations, with accuracy gains of up to 6.3 percentage points and cost reductions of up to 55.3 percent. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/E2Sim-DE66.

Mass gathering events like concerts, sports matches, and festivals bring many people into close contact within a short period, creating localized bursts of infection that can shape epidemic outcomes across an entire city. To evaluate how these transient transmission events translate into broader urban impacts, we developed a simulation model linking event-scale contact dynamics with citywide commuting networks. Using Madrid, Spain, as a case study, we compared several types of gatherings and examined how their effects changed under different levels of disease transmissibility. We found that mass gatherings consistently amplified outbreak magnitude, accelerated progression, advanced district-level arrival times, and synchronized spatial spread. Remarkably, while the initial seed size generated at the event accounted for much of this acceleration, post-event transmission conditions provided complementary predictive signal regarding invasion timing. These findings demonstrate that mitigating transmission during mass gatherings can yield downstream public health benefits by delaying broader spatial spread. More generally, this multiscale framework offers a tool to evaluate how temporary, localized contact shifts produce longer-lasting consequences for urban populations.

Evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) morality typically consider decisions in isolation, thus overlooking whether an individual's unrelated prior conduct influences the model's subsequent choices. This leaves open the question of whether, and to what extent, moral history shapes LLM decisional behaviors. Prior work on human moral decision-making shows that past behavior can influence subsequent moral choices. Building on this observation, we investigate whether analogous effects emerge in LLMs in two complementary ways: at the behavioral level, through the model's observable responses, and at the representation level, through its latent internal representations. We introduce MoralLedger, a framework for studying how an actor's moral history shapes actions for LLMs' behaviors under a fixed decision context. At the behavioral level, we find that prior moral histories systematically alter subsequent choices as a function of their valence and intensity. At the internal representation level, these histories induce a linearly recoverable direction in the residual stream that generalizes to held-out examples. Intervening along this direction on neutral-history prompts produces two-sided intensity-dependent changes in subsequent choices, with effects that are stronger than those induced by prompting alone or by favorable-nonmoral direction. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that a latent representation of an actor's prior moral conduct can provide signed inference-time control over a moral decision. Our MoralLedger extends moral evaluation beyond static dilemmas, establishing moral history as both a source of behavioral sensitivity and a causal target for auditing and controlling moral behavior in LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have made misinformation inexpensive to produce but not to verify, creating a growing asymmetry in the information ecosystem. Under tight time, labor, and budget constraints, media organizations, platforms, and fact-checkers rely on screening to prioritize which content to verify. We introduce VEX-Bench, a unified benchmark for evaluating the verification complexity of LLM-generated misinformation, as perceived during screening, across models and generation methods. Verification complexity is assessed along multiple dimensions derived from journalistic and fact-checking practices, capturing checkability, harm potential, source credibility signals, imposter legitimacy, and expected verification effort. We define the VEX score as an integrated measure combining elicitation yield and verification complexity to quantify how generated content consumes limited verification capacity. We construct a benchmark spanning two misinformation categories, 6 high-stakes domains, and 60 real-world topics, and evaluate 7 frontier LLMs and 7 generation methods, yielding 5{,}880 articles. We employ an LLM-as-judge for scalable evaluation and validate it using content-analysis methodology, including ordinal Krippendorff $\alpha$ for inter-annotator reliability, complemented by fact-checking agents for verification. Our findings show that no single method dominates all dimensions, underscoring the need for multi-dimensional evaluation. LLMs can generate high-VEX misinformation at 3$\times$ to 169$\times$ lower cost than agent-based verification. Such content is often prioritized during screening, consuming scarce verification resources and introducing a systematic risk of misallocation in resource-constrained verification systems. The code is publicly available in our \href{https://github.com/HanxunH/VEX-Bench}{GitHub repository}.

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly embedded in software engineering education, supporting activities such as requirements development, design exploration, documentation, and prototyping. However, educators often have visibility only into final artefacts, with limited insight into how students evaluate, verify, and refine AI-generated outputs during the learning process. This creates challenges for assessing evaluative judgement and responsible AI-assisted practice. This paper introduces the AI Journal, a structured reflection framework designed to make student-GenAI interaction visible in first-year software engineering education. The framework combines execution tracking, which records prompts, outputs, intent, and interaction context, with cognitive auditing, which captures verification strategies, intervention decisions, confidence judgements, critical learning moments, and reflections on AI-supported work. Deployed in a first-semester software engineering course, the AI Journal enabled visibility into aspects of student learning not observable through artefact-based assessments alone. Preliminary observations suggested variation in verification practices, intervention strategies, and perceptions of AI-supported work. Critical learning moments frequently occurred when students evaluated contextual suitability, feasibility, and requirements alignment rather than identifying obvious errors. The AI Journal demonstrates a practical, lightweight, and model-agnostic approach for making AI-assisted learning processes visible. By foregrounding verification, intervention, and reflection, it shifts attention from product-focused assessment toward evaluative judgement and responsible AI-assisted practice.

Public policies addressing urgent social and environmental challenges need to explicitly consider the diverse, often conflicting perspectives of the affected stakeholders. Despite computational decision-support approaches increasingly offering recommendations across diverse human value systems, they still tend to deliver a single consensus-driven outcome. We present KITA AI, a modular system in which multiple large language model agents, each grounded in distinct demographic stakeholder personas and conceptual frameworks, deliberate on policy scenarios. The objective of KITA AI is not merely to inform about a preferred policy proposal, but also to automatically surface who is affected by the scenario and provide decision-makers with the rationales and quantitative indicators behind each position. KITA AI treats non-convergence as a first-class explainable output, enabling policymakers to better understand the trade-offs and human impacts of the policies being discussed.

The impact of online platforms in political mobilization is widely documented, yet it remains unclear how it affects different demographic groups. To shed light on this phenomenon, we examine two contrasting cases: engagement with environmental causes on one side, and with conspiracy theories on the other. Both are well represented on Reddit, allowing us to study the different origins of these groups using a network-based method. By inferring age, gender, affluence, and partisanship of Reddit users, we construct stratified transition networks to compare the entry pathways of different demographic groups toward these communities. We find that demographic differentiation operates differently in these two domains. Entry into conspiracy communities is primarily structured by gender and partisanship: masculine users disproportionately arrive through overtly political and alt-right spaces and share right-wing media sources, whereas feminine users more often pass through esoteric and spiritual subreddits before converging on r/conspiracy. In contrast, environmental communities are differentiated mainly by age and affluence. Affluent users tend to approach environmental subreddits via discussions of individual energy management, technology, and finance, while less affluent users arrive through protest-oriented and climate movement spaces. By comparing these two issue domains, the study shows that sociodemographic sorting does not operate uniformly across polarized topics. Instead, distinct demographic groups build their own paths, shaping both the routes through which they engage with political content and the informational ecosystems that sustain their engagement. Our approach, based on the attention-flow graph, refines our understanding of how different groups become embedded in online political communities.

Language-conditioned trajectory generation is here, but its evaluation has not kept pace. Existing pedestrian trajectory metrics compare trajectories with real-world human data. This does not scale to text-to-trajectory generation across diverse contexts, as collecting human trajectories for every scenario is costly and infeasible. Moreover, pedestrian behavior is heterogeneous and context-dependent, with no single metric as the correct answer, and current evaluation frameworks are not transferable to this domain. These challenges make scalable, reliable evaluation difficult. We introduce STRIDE, the first framework for evaluating context alignment between scenario descriptions and pedestrian trajectories. STRIDE addresses these challenges through three design choices. First, we derive our VRDST evaluation protocol from sociological theories to define a complete evaluation space. Second, it decomposes high-level context into scenario-adaptive behavioral questions. Third, every question is resolved against a deterministic measurement tool library that yields reproducible answers. Together, STRIDE enables complete, verifiable, automated, and scalable evaluation across diverse contexts without requiring human trajectory data. We instantiate STRIDE in the crowd domain as STRIDE-Bench, comprising 1K scenarios, 6K behavioral questions, and 11K measurements with calibrated expected answers across 30 real-world maps. Comprehensive human validations show that STRIDE-Bench is consistent with human behavior and judgment, achieving 80% human agreement. We further evaluate several text-to-trajectory models, finding limited context-alignment capability and persistent challenges in fine-grained context conditioning. We believe that the STRIDE framework provides a first step toward principled evaluation of context-aligned pedestrian trajectory generation.

As LLMs increasingly act as delegated agents, they are expected to protect principals' interests when interacting with external parties. Standard alignment objectives, such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty, do not specify how agents should protect principals' strategic interests under delegation. We formalize Agent Loyalty as an information-control property requiring agents to prevent Exploitable Information Leakage (EIL) and resist Manipulative Information Uptake (MIU). We introduce LoyalAgent-Bench, comprising 10,298 samples across 42 subscenarios and six domains, and an online GRPO framework that trains against a LLM opponent to generate mechanism-specific reward signals. Experiments show that loyalty is not guaranteed by general capability or existing alignment, with measurable EIL and MIU gaps under zero-shot evaluation, while our trained 8B models reduce per-response leakage in single-turn exchanges by 31-44pp and improve task utility, evidence faithfulness, and decision accuracy by up to 11pp, 49pp, and 29pp, respectively. For the trained Qwen3-4B model, no degradation is observed on out-of-distribution benchmarks in math and narrative reasoning.

Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) models are benchmarked on whether they reach a correct answer. Yet many problems admit several correct answers and repeated attempts, by different people or by the same model resampled, trace out a distribution over them. In this work, we ask whether human and model reasoning lead to different distributions over valid solutions. Our testbed comprises 270 reasoning puzzles across five puzzle families. These multiple-solution puzzles each have 3 to 8 valid solutions and are simple enough that humans and models can solve them reliably. The resulting distributions differ markedly: models differ from one another, yet resemble each other far more than they resemble humans. Model distributions are, moreover, within every puzzle family, less diverse than human ones. We compare these discrepancies across puzzle categories, and trace how they respond to reasoning-effort settings, to prompting, and to perturbations of the puzzle that leave its solutions unchanged. Together, these results point at significant differences between human and AI problem-solving processes, and their choice among equally defensible solutions. As progressive deployment of AI systems in society comes into focus, evaluating such differences (beyond one-dimensional accuracy metrics) is increasingly important. Data and code are available at https://hai-discrepancies.github.io/

Names are personal identifiers, but they also carry social meaning and are widely used to evaluate how language models treat different people. Such evaluations typically assume that matched names are comparable model inputs. We show that this assumption often fails at the lexical interface: matched names are not necessarily matched inputs. Some names receive direct single-token access, while others are assembled from multiple subwords, creating unequal name-surface support. Across nearly half a million first names and 12 LLM-associated tokenizers, direct lexical access is highly selective, model dependent, and uneven across race- and gender-associated name metadata. We introduce NameTrace, a model-native, fine-grained, pre-behavioral framework for measuring whether unequal name-surface support remains a vocabulary property or becomes visible in task-relevant internal representations. NameTrace measures concept accessibility from the model's own probabilities over task-specific adjective axes with continuous task-aligned weights. On matched atomic and short-fragmented names within the same race/ethnicity–gender-associated strata, support predicts systematic differences in concept accessibility across fellowship, hiring, clinical assessment, and lending. These differences persist across all eight matched strata, extend across model families, and transfer to unseen names. Hidden-state interventions further show that the measured task directions have downstream leverage, shifting later constrained choices. Unequal lexical support is therefore demographically structured at the input and remains visible in task-relevant model computation. NameTrace makes lexical comparability measurable, supporting a broader principle: behavioral comparability begins with lexical comparability.

The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has emerged as a strategically prominent executive role, confronting an adversarial environment, irreconcilable accountability tensions between security and business enablement, and a prevention paradox in which success remains invisible to resource allocators. Scholarly understanding of how the role operates across organisational contexts remains virtually absent, leaving practice without empirical foundation. This thesis asks: how is the CISO role enacted across different organisational contexts in modern organisations? The study employs constructivist grounded theory with an abductive reasoning framework and the Gioia method, drawing on twenty interviews with Australian security executives. The CISO role is not a stable configuration of responsibilities applied uniformly, but a continuously negotiated achievement. Effectiveness emerges from dual-fit maintenance: alignment between the leader and the internal organisational context (CISO-Organisation Fit) and the external environment (CISO-Environment Fit). These requirements transform across three maturity phases, Establishment, Maturation, and Strategic, with action-oriented, stewardship-oriented, and vision-oriented leaders generating effectiveness in each; effectiveness in one phase can undermine it in another. Political capital is the mechanism through which leaders navigate these shifting demands. These patterns are synthesised in the Security Leadership Contingency Model (SLCM), the thesis's primary theoretical contribution. Instruments developed from the model translate these insights into guidance for leadership selection and succession planning. The SLCM extends person-organisation fit, person-environment fit, and contingency theory to security leadership, advancing understanding of executive effectiveness under accountability tensions and evolving contextual demands.

AI agents now hold spend authority and settle payments without per-action human confirmation. The resulting loss is often not a security failure: a counterparty with the correct domain, the correct settlement address and a genuinely delivered service can charge more than it should, and no check keyed on identity will see it. We present three artefacts for measuring and reducing that loss. First, a taxonomy of agentic commerce fraud that separates five observation levels (agent reasoning, wire, settlement rail, counterparty, principal) from the request-level and history-level evidence available at each, and records which levels can observe which attacks. Second, Agentic Commerce Bench (ACB), a benchmark of twenty fraud classes generated from production aggregates, 1,647 catalogued service operations and 1,068 settlements, of which six involve a counterparty that is exactly who it claims to be. Third, gordonguard, an open-source detector stack and offline harness with which an operator can audit an agent configuration, replay hostile counterparties without an account, and run the same detectors inline. Calibrating to a stated false-positive budget on clean training traffic gives a 6.5% clean flag rate, replicated across three independent generations, and leaves eight of twenty classes no better than chance. On the four classes a reasoning layer can observe, a widely used agent security scanner run over its jailbreak-detection panel scores zero on all four, while correctly scoring 1.0 on a jailbreak supplied as a control. A measured median payment of $0.007 places a hard constraint on deployment: one human review costs 143 times the value of the payment it examines.

We describe a methodology for estimating the per-token energy cost of cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) inference, separating between input (prefill) and output (decode) tokens. Graphics processing unit (GPU) energy usage is measured during inference benchmarking with open-weights models on a wide range of text-based tasks. The remaining server energy contribution from non-GPU hardware is estimated from the inference wall time. Bayesian linear regression is used to model the relationship between energy per token and LLM size, request traffic, and hardware deployment configuration. Proprietary frontier LLMs of unknown size and deployment are binned into size buckets based on naming conventions and performance priors, and the space of possible LLM configurations is sampled with Monte-Carlo methods to give a representative average energy per token and uncertainty. We also describe how these energy measurements can be used to estimate the carbon-dioxide equivalent ($\mathrm{CO_2\text{-}eq}$) emissions, both usage and embodied, and water consumed per token of AI inference. This methodology provides actionable data that enables reductions in cost, electricity usage, $\mathrm{CO_2\text{-}eq}$ emitted and water consumed in cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS).

As AI becomes part of how books are authored, reader response to suspected AI authorship grows more consequential, yet remains unexamined. We analyze 863 low-star reviews of 78 Amazon bestsellers across 8 categories at three levels of proximity to AI. Suspicion concentrates in Generative AI books (35.1%) but appears in every category, including Gardening (5.7%). Reviews citing AI authorship complain more about shallow content and poor presentation than other critical reviews. Suspicion takes two forms: ambient, where "AI-generated" is a generic complaint about formulaic writing, and corroborated, where reviewers of the same book independently cite concrete evidence. We propose two mechanisms by which suspicion arises: topical concentration, where a book's AI subject matter supplies vocabulary for quality complaints, and artifact detection, where readers notice ChatGPT-style formatting regardless of topic. Star ratings can hide this suspicion: the most-flagged book holds 4.1 stars while 50% of its critical reviews cite AI authorship.

This manuscript is an English translation and extended version of a paper originally published in Japanese(otomo 2021) Recent years have seen a rapid expansion in applying satellite remote sensing and big data to economic analysis. In particular, satellite-observed nighttime light intensity has proven to be closely correlated with key socio-economic indicators, including gross domestic product, employment rates, population density, and educational attainment across countries. In this paper, I first outline the methodology for calculating regional nightlight intensity across Japanese prefectures and municipalities. Next, to evaluate the versatility of nightlight data, I examine the relationship between city-level nightlight intensity and various public socio-economic metrics, using Japan as a case study. The findings suggest that nightlight intensity can serve as a effective proxy for these diverse indicators. Finally, I explore the potential of nightlight data for enabling rapid economic impact assessments during sudden social disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

This manuscript is an English translation and extended version of a paper originally published in Japanese (2022). Driven by remarkable advances in remote sensing and big data processing, spatial technologies are increasingly leveraged in economic research. While satellite nighttime light intensity is widely recognized for tracking macroeconomic parameters - such as regional GDP, employment, and population - less attention has been paid to fine-grained spatial processing methodologies for local tourism economies. This study first details a raster processing technique applied to nightlight imagery. It then focuses on Yuzawa Town (Uonuma District, Niigata Prefecture), analyzing the local economy and sports/tourist attractions. Specifically, I investigate the spatio-temporal relationships between tourist arrivals and various local statistical datasets. Furthermore, this paper highlights how nightlight data can capture intra-municipal economic dynamics that remain undetectable through standard macroeconomic indicators.

This paper revisits the 1996 article Internet and Enterprise Strategy and assesses how its propositions were confirmed, transformed, or contradicted as digital connectivity evolved into an AI-enabled enterprise environment by 2026. The reassessment combines historical interpretation with a structured comparison of Internet-enabled capabilities, industry structure, value-chain transformation, platform intermediation, cybersecurity, data governance, artificial intelligence, and digital sovereignty. The analysis shows that the article correctly anticipated the strategic relevance of electronic markets, cybermediaries, transaction security, online communities, and internal rules for Internet use. However, the contemporary Internet exceeds the original framing: it is now a platformized, data-intensive, cloud-dependent, regulated, geopolitically contested, and increasingly AI-mediated environment. The paper argues that this progression from connectivity to AI-enabled enterprise systems does not replace Internet strategy; it extends it. For many firms, enterprise strategy is now enacted through digital infrastructures, algorithmic coordination, ecosystem participation, and governance capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLM) have become popular tools in education. Therefore, understanding how students interact with LLMs for learning purposes is an important aspect of the responsible design and development of LLM based learning tools. However, existing research has focused on evaluating model performance, specific use cases, and students' attitudes toward LLM in education. There has been limited empirical work exploring students' interaction strategies with LLMs in computing education. This study draws on Self Regulated Learning (SRL) theory and conducts a survey of 225 undergraduate and graduate computing students to investigate how students use LLM tools during learning, the perceived learning impact, and the strategies they rely upon when using these tools. Students used LLMs across nine functional categories, most often to explain concepts, learn new material, find information, debug, and generate ideas. They also adopted some strategies such as supplying detailed context and iterative prompting. The most common difficulties encountered with LLM tools were incorrect information, generic responses, and difficulty trusting the model's reasoning. We synthesized these patterns through an SRL lens and offer a Probe Monitor Shape heuristic to map students' LLM interaction strategies onto the phases of self-regulated learning.

AI-generated synthetic personas are increasingly used for content planning and virtual-user simulation, yet the digital content use contexts embedded in their narratives remain underexamined. Using all 1,000,000 records of NVIDIA's Nemotron-Personas-Korea, this study coded mentions of five engagement modes-viewing, discovering and sharing, interacting, reading, and listening-with an openly released Korean coding dictionary and applied latent class analysis with a three-step approach accounting for classification error. Four classes emerged: viewing-centered (20.8%), reading-centered (3.8%), listening-centered (2.1%), and low-mention (73.3%). Age showed the strongest association: the odds of the viewing-centered versus low-mention class were multiplied by 0.15 per 10-year increase, while mentions of any non-viewing mode declined from 49.4% among those under 30 to 2.3% among those aged 70 and over. Sex differences in predicted class probabilities were below 1 percentage point, and provincial differences reached at most 5.0 percentage points. These classes describe narrative configurations, not consumer segments, and provide a basis for assessing diversity in synthetic persona use contexts.

Erasing individual identities from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is uniquely challenging because personal data is entangled across modalities rather than stored as isolated attributes. However, existing multimodal unlearning benchmarks primarily evaluate attribute-centric forgetting, overlooking the more critical objective of individual-level unlearning: eliminating a model's ability to access, link, and reconstruct target-related information across modalities. To address this gap, we propose IDUnlearn-Bench, the first benchmark for individual-level multimodal unlearning in VLMs. It represents each individual as connected multimodal evidence and evaluates four task families: attribute access, identity access, identity binding, and identity reconstruction. Experiments on representative VLMs and unlearning methods show that successful attribute-centric forgetting often leaves substantial identity-level knowledge intact and can be non-monotonic: reducing one form of risk may amplify another. Models may suppress selected information while still identifying the target, linking records, or reconstructing the individual. These findings reveal a fundamental gap between forgetting information about a person and forgetting the person as a whole.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping labor markets, yet its effects on wage distribution and the underlying mechanisms remain insufficiently understood. Conventional analytical approaches are limited in their ability to directly examine the dynamic evolution of worker behavior and income distribution under sustained AI shocks and counterfactual policy scenarios. To address this limitation, we present a hybrid agentic framework that aims to challenges of scalability of rule-based models and the limited explainability in LLM-agentic frameworks. Using this framework and sociodemographic data from China, we simulate changes in wage distribution under repeated AI shocks. The results show that both the average-wage ratio between workers in the top and bottom income deciles (T10/B10) and the Gini coefficient increase persistently, suggesting that AI shocks widen the wage gap and exacerbate income inequality. This pattern of a widening wage gap remains robust across alternative large language model decision engines and 30 Monte Carlo simulations. We further conduct counterfactual policy experiments. The results show that education subsidies targeted at low-income workers increase both the number of skill-upgrading attempts and the number of successful upgrades, with particularly pronounced improvements in the upskilling success probability of workers in the bottom income decile. These effects enable the policy to partially mitigate wage inequality. The proposed framework provides an interpretable simulation approach for examining the effects and mechanisms of AI shocks on wage distribution. It also offers policymakers a complementary analytical tool for evaluating policy interventions.

Enterprise artificial-intelligence agents increasingly call tools, modify infrastructure, and process protected data, creating a need to separate action generation from action authorization. This article presents VeriWeave Govern, a deterministic runtime governance layer that evaluates structured agent actions against versioned policies, validates typed evidence, applies fixed deny > review > allow precedence, routes consequential actions to accountable human review, and records replayable tamper-evident audit state. GovernBench evaluates the design over 30 independent seeds and 60,000 oracle-labelled cases spanning five enterprise domains, adversarial evidence, out-of-distribution actions, and temporal policy evolution. VeriWeave achieves 0.9888 mean accuracy, 0.9836 macro-F1, zero observed aggregate false allows, and zero observed Governance Attack Success Rate on the evaluated cases. Six ablations show that evidence gating, deny precedence, out-of-distribution fail-safe behavior, human review, contradiction handling, and temporal replay contribute complementary safety. The deployed API additionally passes 12/12 end-to-end scenarios and a 40,040-request concurrency matrix with zero failures. A separate 150-case EU/Austria regulation-grounded evaluation uses frozen predictions and two independent blinded human annotators, who agree on all decisions. On this set, deterministic engines remain conservative, while a Gemma 4 31B comparator aligns more closely with the human consensus. The results expose a measurable safety–utility trade-off and motivate evidence-aware, replayable governance as an independent control plane for enterprise agent execution.

Persona AI can make deceased experts available for decisions they never encountered. Users may seek these personas precisely because they lack the knowledge needed to judge their advice. We thematically analyze 115 focal RedNote/Xiaohongshu posts and a nested comment sample concerning unofficial personas of Chinese education advisor Zhang Xuefeng. An installation offer promised expert guidance, while a family's reported use required current records and contextual judgment. Other posts positioned the persona as a questioning aid rather than an expert replacement. Commenters connected continued expertise to updating, permission, and the ability to refuse further work. These findings distinguish access to an expert identity from access to professional help. Keeping the persona current puts living actors in control of what the deceased appears to recommend. Operators therefore need to undertake the support promised by the persona while making their continued use of the person's identity open to challenge.

In this work, we show how two adversaries (Eve and Mallory) can coordinate an electromagnetic side-channel attack to recon- struct the vote displayed on an e-voting machine (EVM) and link it to a specific voter (Alice). Assuming that Eve has access to a place adjacent to the e-polling room (e.g., restroom, unsupervised room), she performs vote reconstruction by intercepting un- intended electromagnetic emanations associated with the video signal. Meanwhile, Mallory observes when Alice is voting and reports this information to Eve over the Internet. To validate the most critical stage of the attack, we conduct a software-defined radio experiment using the official Brazilian e-voting interface and demonstrate through-wall vote reconstruction. Although conventional monitors are employed rather than official EVMs, our findings provide insights into information forensics and support security recommendations for government authorities responsible for e-voting systems.

The proliferation of generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems has introduced computational demands whose environmental consequences are substantial yet underexamined. This paper examines the environmental footprint of modern AI systems across energy consumption, carbon emissions, water usage, and electronic waste over the full lifecycle of large language models, multimodal foundation models, and agentic workflows, from hardware fabrication and training through fine-tuning and inference to end-of-life disposal. This work provides a conceptual analysis, utilizing order-of-magnitude estimations based on published data, without conducting original physical measurements. We contribute a lifecycle taxonomy that crosses lifecycle phases with five impact dimensions and emission scopes; a Sustainability Assessment Framework for AI Systems (SAFIA) comprising nine indicators; a comparative analysis of traditional, generative, and agentic AI; seven open challenges; policy recommendations for regulators, cloud providers, hardware manufacturers, and AI developers; and a research roadmap to 2035. The analysis indicates that inference can rival or exceed training energy over a deployment lifetime, that agentic workflows can multiply the energy of equivalent single-pass inference by one to several orders of magnitude depending on the number of model and tool calls, that indirect water use and embodied carbon are systematically underreported, and that measurement tools, disclosure practices, and regulation have not kept pace with agentic deployment. These findings call for agent-aware energy measurement, lifecycle-based carbon and water accounting, and mandatory disclosure for large-scale AI training and deployment.

Textual artifacts are sometimes valued not only for the words on the page, but for the human activity involved in producing them. The effort invested in a carefully tailored email can signal genuine interest; composing an apology might involve attending to another person's hurt and deciding how to respond; and requiring a judge to give written reasons may induce more careful deliberation. AI models create what we call a decoupling problem: they make it possible to produce text without undergoing the relevant human activity, severing its connection to values traditionally sustained by that activity. This Article develops a framework for understanding what decoupling puts at stake, and how institutions that use text to make consequential decisions may reshape their practices in response. First, it offers a taxonomy of the grounds for valuing the production process, distinguishing whether that process matters for what it evidences, induces, or helps constitute. Second, it argues that text can function as a kind of boundary object, allowing institutions to rely on the same artifact without resolving disagreements about why the practice is valuable. AI can separate functions previously served by the same practice - a second-order decoupling that brings unresolved questions about the practice's purposes into view. Third, it argues that institutional efforts to repair decoupling may recover some functions without preserving others. Such responses are likely to favor functions that are more legible, whose loss demands immediate attention, or whose stakeholders have greater influence. It therefore calls for more explicit deliberation about which particular functions of a practice to preserve, with meaningful representation for those whose interests might otherwise be overlooked.