Papers for

legal compliance officers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Mapping platform rules to transparency categories reveals classification challenges

Towards More Granular Reasoning: Mapping the DSA Transparency Database Taxonomy to Platform Terms and Conditions Using Large Language Models

Abstract: Article 24(5) of the Digital Services Act (DSA) requires providers of online platforms to submit every content moderation decision they make, with a corresponding Statement of Reasons (SoR), to the DSA Transparency Database (DSA-TDB). Such decisions are classified against seventeen high-level attribute categories that categorize the primary reason for the moderation decision. Because over 99.8% of statements cite a violation of the provider's own terms and conditions rather than a legal provision, the database is overwhelmingly a record of contractual enforcement using catch-all reporting; however, whether its categories actually describe those contractual rules well has not been examined. In this paper, we map the terms and conditions (T&C) of 31 designated online services against the DSA-TDB's high-level category taxonomy using a few-shot GPT-4.1 classifier over 447 policy documents. The analysis concerns how T&C rules are represented in the taxonomy, not how they are enforced. Two findings emerge. First, high-level category applicability varies sharply by service type: unsafe products account for 17.5% of e-commerce assignments and 0.2% of adult-platform assignments, and negative effects on civic discourse reaches 9.9% within the Meta family but is absent from adult platforms, Booking.com, and Wikipedia. Second, the categories have notable overlap among sub-category specifications, which makes assigning a single high-level category to a decision difficult. We argue that catch-all reporting is plausibly in part a consequence of the DSA-TDB's schema and attribute design, and recommend a schema that is differentiated by service type with more mandatory attributes derived inductively from platform governance language.

Mon 19 OctArtificial IntelligenceComputers and Society
The gist
Every time an online platform moderates content, it must explain why using a public database with broad reason categories. The authors studied how well these categories match actual platform rules by analyzing 31 services with a large language model. They found that the categories work differently depending on the type of platform and often overlap, making it hard to pick just one reason for moderation. They suggest creating more detailed, platform-specific categories to improve clarity in these reports.
Open → 2610.26226v1

AgriJev improves agricultural candidate scoring with efficient models

AgriJev: Efficient Agricultural Candidate Scoring with Multi-Scale Adapted Models

Abstract: Agricultural systems make decisions over heterogeneous entity types, textual judgments, and knowledge-question options. Generating a textual answer adds decoding and extraction steps to decisions that ultimately require a candidate choice. We introduce AgriJev, a family of adapted Qwen3.5 models at 0.8B, 2B, 4B, and 9B. A shared interface conditions on agricultural text, a judgment question, and candidate definitions, returning scores and relative probabilities in one forward call. We prepare source-aware training records and frozen evaluations from existing agricultural resources, retaining original groups and annotation provenance. Comparisons include original Qwen3.5 models and matched agricultural SFT models, both evaluated through native answer generation. Across 17 external test views, AgriJev-9B reaches 75.44% mean accuracy, exceeding the original and SFT generators by 5.89 and 3.79 percentage points. It outperforms the original generator on 13 views and narrows the mean gap to hosted Jev 1.13.0. On a fixed A100 workload, its median scoring latency is approximately half that of same-scale answer generation. Task-dependent gains and failures characterize a practical choice among agricultural model weights and inference contracts.

Wed 14 OctComputation and Language
The gist
Deciding the best choice in agriculture often involves understanding complex text and multiple options. The authors developed AgriJev, a set of adapted AI models tailored to agricultural text and questions. These models quickly assign scores to different answer choices all at once, making decision-making faster and more accurate. Compared to earlier models, AgriJev is both more accurate and faster when tested on many types of agricultural questions.
Open → 2610.19478v1

Attack method extracts images from multimodal retrieval systems

Walking the Embedding Space: Datastore Extraction from Multimodal RAG

Abstract: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) has emerged as a reliable and cost-effective technique of grounding the generative capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into relevant, up-to-date, external knowledge. Despite presenting several benefits, such as reducing hallucinatory behavior, they also introduce new attack surfaces, including leakage of private information and vulnerabilities against data extraction attacks. In this paper, we introduce $\immrag$, an adaptive and automatic data extraction attack procedure operating in a black box setting against \emph{image-returning} MRAG, a configuration in which the retrieved visual artifact is itself the response. Each query blends an attacker-held shadow image with an image already recovered from the system, and relevance-weighted resampling steers subsequent queries towards regions of the embedding space that still yield novel retrievals. Unlike current extraction attacks that aim to persuade the model towards data leakage by placing a malicious query as a textual prompt, $\immrag$ embeds the malicious instructions inside a user-given input image. We evaluate $\immrag$ on three plausible and distinct real-world scenarios: medical assistant, document-focused helper and general purpose tool. The experiments involve the study of the effectiveness of the attack on multiple CLIP-family retrievers, as well as the impact of various generators. A single 2500-query run reconstructs up to 611 distinct radiology images, 566 document scans and 416 general-purpose images under local-feature correspondence, and reaches up to $5.6\times$ as many distinct datastore items as a non-adaptive baseline. Our results show the urgent need for safeguards specifically designed for multimodal data.

Thu 1 OctCryptography and SecurityArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Some AI systems retrieve images to help answer questions, but they can accidentally reveal private or sensitive images. The authors developed a way to trick these systems into leaking many images by carefully choosing inputs that combine known and unknown pictures. This method works without knowing the system’s inner details and recovers hundreds of images after a few thousand tries. Their findings show the need for better protections in AI systems that handle images and text together.
Open → 2610.01871v1

Trustworthy delegation needs clear reasons for ai decisions

Cybernetic and Epistemic: A Missing Vocabulary for Trustworthy Agentic Delegation

Abstract: As code generation is increasingly delegated to AI systems, the bottleneck is shifting from writing code to supervising the systems that write it --- a shift CS-education researchers have begun to name. This shift exposes a vocabulary gap: the field asks for "human oversight" without a working distinction between the two things language does in a delegation channel --- coordinate action (cybernetic: words succeed when the world comes to match them) and coordinate understanding (epistemic: they succeed when they answer to the world and a hearer can check that they do). The failure this names is not cybernetic language but epistemic-form language doing cybernetic work: explanation-shaped output calibrated for approval rather than truth. Oversight that checks only whether an output was approved is satisfiable by rubber-stamping; oversight that holds an agent accountable requires the reasoning behind its work be retrievable and checkable. We present three delegation episodes --- illustrations, not controlled evidence --- in which epistemic engagement proved practicable while remaining auditable, one public record where a recommendation was withdrawn on its own stated terms, and one failure case illustrating oversight that requires no reasons for its discretionary choices. We propose a criterion for agentic-system governance, alongside existing technical trust properties: every consequential choice should carry the condition under which it would have gone otherwise, in a form a third party can test. Without such a condition, a third party cannot distinguish a decision from a rubber stamp. We give the criterion an operational form --- a two-part reconstruction test scoring a delegation record by whether a second reader can predict what the agent does under a perturbation --- and a deliberation-recording convention, ORRCF, that makes the condition a required component of every recorded choice.

Thu 1 OctArtificial IntelligenceHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
When people rely on AI systems to write code or make decisions, simply checking if the AI's output is approved isn't enough. The authors explain that language used between humans and AI has two roles: helping coordinate actions and helping share understanding. They argue that good oversight requires clear reasons behind AI decisions that others can check, instead of just rubber-stamping approvals. They propose a way to record decisions so that someone else can test what would happen if conditions changed, making AI behavior more accountable.
Open → 2610.00961v1

LLMs can hide sensitive data despite appearing to forget it

Do LLMs Really Forget? Hidden-State Leakage in Model Unlearning and How to Fix it

Abstract: Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) is typically evaluated at the output level, where a model appears to suppress sensitive or undesirable content. In this work, we show that such evaluations can create an illusion of forgetting: even when output-level leakage is eliminated, sensitive information can remain encoded in the model's hidden representations. We first provide a theoretical analysis establishing a fundamental separation between output suppression and representational erasure. Specifically, we show that the decoder can be made arbitrarily insensitive to sensitive directions, driving output-level leakage to zero, while the hidden representations retain the underlying information. To empirically validate this phenomenon, we train generative probe decoders on hidden states across transformer layers, enabling layer-wise measurement of information leakage. Across three widely used benchmarks, TOFU, MUSE, and WMDP, and state-of-the-art unlearning methods, we find that substantial sensitive information remains recoverable from hidden representations, even when standard output-level metrics indicate successful unlearning. To address this gap, we propose Probe-Adversarial Representation Suppression (PARS), an unlearning objective that adversarially minimizes the extractable information from hidden representations. PARS directly targets representational leakage and provides significantly stronger guarantees of erasure under adversarial probing and relearning attacks, outperforming all evaluated baselines. Our results highlight a fundamental limitation of existing unlearning paradigms and suggest that true forgetting in LLMs requires controlling not only model outputs, but also the information encoded in hidden representations. Codes are available at https://github.com/OptimAI-Lab/HiddenStateUnlearning.

Tue 29 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Sometimes big language models seem to forget sensitive information when they no longer show it in their answers. This paper shows that even if the model's replies hide this info, the data can still be found inside how the model thinks at each step. The authors tested several ways to find this hidden info inside the model and found it often sticks around unnoticed. To fix this, they created a new method that actively removes hidden traces, giving stronger proof that the model truly forgets unwanted information.
Open → 2609.36612v1

Prompt anonymity often fails to hide user identity from large language model providers

Can Prompt Anonymity Protect Your Identity From LLM Providers?

Abstract: User conversations with large language models (LLMs) often contain highly sensitive personal information that can be exploited by LLM providers to create detailed user dossiers, enable targeted advertising, and train more powerful models. To protect user privacy, anonymizing LLM proxies have emerged as a practical solution that separates user identity from their prompts, yet this approach still leaves the prompt content visible to LLM providers. We study the impact of this gap by conducting the first empirical investigation into the risk of prompt authorship re-identification. Towards this end, we create PromptAnonBench, a novel benchmark for evaluating prompt anonymity, consisting of over 175,000 cleaned, authentic multi-turn user prompts from various real-world datasets (SWE-Chat and WildChat). Using the embeddings of historical user conversations, an attacker can correctly detect and re-identify at least one anonymized conversation for 50--75% of SWE-Chat users and up to 10% of WildChat users at a 10% false acceptance rate for out-of-set users, even with text-based defenses applied. Our findings unveil the risk of relying only on anonymity for private LLM inference and the gap in existing text privacy defenses.

Sun 27 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
People share very private information when chatting with large language models, and companies behind these models can sometimes figure out who they are based on what they say. The authors collected many real conversations from users and tested whether just hiding usernames is enough to keep them anonymous. They found that attackers can often guess the real person behind an anonymous conversation just by analyzing the text, even when some privacy protections are used. This shows that simply removing names doesn’t fully protect users’ privacy in these chats.
Open → 2609.33903v1