AI Engram: In Search of Memory Traces in Artificial Intelligence

Memory formation is fundamental to intelligence, yet whether deep neural networks preserve identifiable memory traces analogous to biological memory units remains an open question. This work introduces a geometric framework to identify such "AI engrams" by formalizing the neuroscientific criteria of specificity, reactivation, sufficiency, and necessity into a constrained inverse problem. We derive a closed-form estimator that isolates individual memory traces from globally entangled parameters, and show that this biologically-derived solution corresponds to a natural gradient update on the parameter manifold. AI engrams enable surgical manipulation of learned knowledge: any subset of memories can be composed or erased through linear arithmetic, without iterative optimization. Experiments ranging from simple MLPs to LLMs demonstrate the causal validity and substantial scalability of AI engrams. Together, these results bridge theories of biological memory and artificial representation learning and offer geometric insight into how deep networks simultaneously support functional specificity within distributed storage.

Textual Supervision Enhances Geospatial Representations in Vision-Language Models

Geospatial understanding is a critical yet underexplored dimension in the development of machine learning systems for tasks such as image geolocation and spatial reasoning. In this work, we analyze the geospatial representations acquired by three model families: vision-only architectures (e.g., ViT), vision-language models (e.g., CLIP), and large-scale multimodal foundation models (e.g., LLaVA, Qwen, and Gemma). By evaluating across image clusters, including people, landmarks, and everyday objects, grouped based on the degree of localizability, we reveal systematic gaps in spatial accuracy and show that textual supervision enhances the learning of geospatial representations. Our findings suggest the role of language as an effective complementary modality for encoding spatial context and multimodal learning as a key direction for advancing geospatial AI.

GeoX: Mastering Geospatial Reasoning Through Self-Play and Verifiable Rewards

Geospatial reasoning requires solving image-grounded problems over the complex spatial structure of a scene. However, developing this capability is hindered by the cost of annotating a vast and combinatorial question space. We propose GeoX, a self-play framework that acquires spatial logic through executable programs that yield verifiable rewards, without relying on large-scale human-curated data Given a satellite or aerial image, our framework employs a single multimodal policy that proposes spatial problems as executable programs and solves them under three reasoning modes-abduction, deduction, and induction-over spatial primitives and an image understanding tool. A verifier executes each program to covert a reward signal that jointly optimizes the two roles via reinforcement learning. GeoX consistently improves its base VLMs by up to 5.5 points on average, matching or exceeding conventional baselines trained on millions of curated data. Along-side the proposed method, we release a benchmark for geospatial understanding accumulated through self-play.

Machine Behavior in Relational Moral Dilemmas: Moral Rightness, Predicted Human Behavior, and Model Decisions

Human moral judgment is context-dependent and modulated by interpersonal relationships. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly function as decision-support systems, determining whether they encode these social nuances is critical. We characterize machine behavior using the Whistleblower's Dilemma by varying two experimental dimensions: crime severity and relational closeness. Our study evaluates three distinct perspectives: (1) moral rightness (prescriptive norms), (2) predicted human behavior (descriptive social expectations), and (3) autonomous model decision-making. By analyzing the reasoning processes, we identify a clear cross-perspective divergence: while moral rightness remains consistently fairness-oriented, predicted human behavior shifts significantly toward loyalty as relational closeness increases. Crucially, model decisions align with moral rightness judgments rather than their own behavioral predictions. This inconsistency suggests that LLM decision-making prioritizes rigid, prescriptive rules over the social sensitivity present in their internal world-modeling, which poses a gap that may lead to significant misalignments in real-world deployments.

How You Ask Matters! Adaptive RAG Robustness to Query Variations

Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) promises accuracy and efficiency by dynamically triggering retrieval only when needed and is widely used in practice. However, real-world queries vary in surface form even with the same intent, and their impact on Adaptive RAG remains under-explored. We introduce the first large-scale benchmark of diverse yet semantically identical query variations, combining human-written and model-generated rewrites. Our benchmark facilitates a systematic evaluation of Adaptive RAG robustness by examining its key components across three dimensions: answer quality, computational cost, and retrieval decisions. We discover a critical robustness gap, where small surface-level changes in queries dramatically alter retrieval behavior and accuracy. Although larger models show better performance, robustness does not improve accordingly. These findings reveal that Adaptive RAG methods are highly vulnerable to query variations that preserve identical semantics, exposing a critical robustness challenge.

How cyborg propaganda reshapes collective action

The distinction between genuine grassroots activism and automated influence operations is collapsing. While policy debates focus on bot farms, a distinct threat to democracy is emerging via partisan coordination apps and artificial intelligence-what we term 'cyborg propaganda.' This architecture combines large numbers of verified humans with adaptive algorithmic automation, enabling a closed-loop system. AI tools monitor online sentiment to optimize directives and generate personalized content for users to post online. Cyborg propaganda thereby exploits a critical legal shield: by relying on verified citizens to ratify and disseminate messages, these campaigns operate in a regulatory gray zone, evading liability frameworks designed for automated botnets. We explore the collective action paradox of this technology: does it democratize power by 'unionizing' influence (pooling the reach of dispersed citizens to overcome the algorithmic invisibility of isolated voices), or does it reduce citizens to 'cognitive proxies' of a central directive? We argue that cyborg propaganda fundamentally alters the digital public square, shifting political discourse from a democratic contest of individual ideas to a battle of algorithmic campaigns. We outline a research agenda to distinguish organic from coordinated information diffusion and propose governance frameworks to address the regulatory challenges of AI-assisted collective expression.

Towards AI-Guided Open-World Ecological Taxonomic Classification

AI-guided classification of ecological families, genera, and species underpins global sustainability efforts such as biodiversity monitoring, conservation planning, and policy-making. Progress toward this goal is hindered by long-tailed taxonomic distributions from class imbalance, along with fine-grained taxonomic variations, test-time spatiotemporal domain shifts, and closed-set assumptions that can only recognize previously seen taxa. We introduce the Open-World Ecological Taxonomy Classification, a unified framework that captures the co-occurrence of these challenges in realistic ecological settings. To address them, we propose TaxoNet, an embedding-based encoder with a dual-margin penalization loss that strengthens learning signals from rare underrepresented taxa while mitigating the dominance of overrepresented ones, directly confronting interrelated challenges. We evaluate our method on diverse ecological domains: Google Auto-Arborist (urban trees), iNat-Plantae (Plantae observations from various ecosystems in iNaturalist-2019), and NAFlora-Mini (a curated herbarium collection). Our model consistently outperforms baselines, particularly for rare taxa, establishing a strong foundation for open-world plant taxonomic monitoring. Our findings further show that general-purpose multimodal foundation models remain constrained in plant-domain applications.

Mapping Reduced Accessibility to WASH Facilities in Rohingya Refugee Camps With Sub-Meter Imagery

Access to Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) services remains a major public health concern in refugee camps. This study introduces a remote sensing-driven framework to quantify WASH accessibility-specifically to water pumps, latrines, and bathing cubicles-in the Rohingya camps of Cox's Bazar, one of the world's most densely populated displacement settings. Detecting refugee shelters in such emergent camps presents substantial challenges, primarily due to their dense spatial configuration and irregular geometric patterns. Using sub-meter satellite images, we develop a semi-supervised segmentation framework that achieves an F1-score of 76.4% in detecting individual refugee shelters. Applying the framework across multi-year data reveals declining WASH accessibility, driven by rapid refugee population growth and reduced facility availability, rising from 25 people per facility in 2022 to 29.4 in 2025. Gender-disaggregated analysis further shows that women and girls experience reduced accessibility, in scenarios with inadequate safety-related segregation in WASH facilities. These findings suggest the importance of demand-responsive allocation strategies that can identify areas with under-served populations-such as women and girls-and ensure that limited infrastructure serves the greatest number of people in settings with fixed or shrinking budgets. We also discuss the value of high-resolution remote sensing and machine learning to detect inequality and inform equitable resource planning in complex humanitarian environments.

Dropouts in Confidence: Moral Uncertainty in Human-LLM Alignment

Humans display significant uncertainty when confronted with moral dilemmas, yet the extent of such uncertainty in machines and AI agents remains underexplored. Recent studies have confirmed the overly confident tendencies of machine-generated responses, particularly in large language models (LLMs). As these systems are increasingly embedded in ethical decision-making scenarios, it is important to understand their moral reasoning and the inherent uncertainties in building reliable AI systems. This work examines how uncertainty influences moral decisions in the classical trolley problem, analyzing responses from 32 open-source models and 9 distinct moral dimensions. We first find that variance in model confidence is greater across models than within moral dimensions, suggesting that moral uncertainty is predominantly shaped by model architecture and training method. To quantify uncertainty, we measure binary entropy as a linear combination of total entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information. To examine its effects, we introduce stochasticity into models via "dropout" at inference time. Our findings show that our mechanism increases total entropy, mainly through a rise in mutual information, while conditional entropy remains largely unchanged. Moreover, this mechanism significantly improves human-LLM moral alignment, with correlations in mutual information and alignment score shifts. Our results highlight the potential to better align model-generated decisions and human preferences by deliberately modulating uncertainty and reducing LLMs' confidence in morally complex scenarios.

Generalizable Slum Detection from Satellite Imagery with Mixture-of-Experts

Satellite-based slum segmentation holds significant promise in generating global estimates of urban poverty. However, the morphological heterogeneity of informal settlements presents a major challenge, hindering the ability of models trained on specific regions to generalize effectively to unseen locations. To address this, we introduce a large-scale high-resolution dataset and propose GRAM (Generalized Region-Aware Mixture-of-Experts), a two-phase test-time adaptation framework that enables robust slum segmentation without requiring labeled data from target regions. We compile a million-scale satellite imagery dataset from 12 cities across four continents for source training. Using this dataset, the model employs a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to capture region-specific slum characteristics while learning universal features through a shared backbone. During adaptation, prediction consistency across experts filters out unreliable pseudo-labels, allowing the model to generalize effectively to previously unseen regions. GRAM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in low-resource settings such as African cities, offering a scalable and label-efficient solution for global slum mapping and data-driven urban planning.