TRiSM for Agentic AI: A Review of Trust, Risk, and Security Management in LLM-based Agentic Multi-Agent Systems

Agentic AI systems, built on large language models (LLMs) and deployed in multi-agent configurations, are redefining intelligent autonomy, collaboration and decision-making across enterprise and societal domains. This review presents a structured analysis of Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) in the context of LLM-based agentic multi-agent systems (AMAS). We begin by examining the conceptual foundations of agentic AI, its architectural differences from traditional AI agents, and the emerging system designs that enable scalable, tool-using autonomy. The TRiSM in the agentic AI framework is then detailed through four pillars governance, explainability, ModelOps, and privacy/security each contextualized for agentic LLMs. We identify unique threat vectors and introduce a comprehensive risk taxonomy for the agentic AI applications, supported by case studies illustrating real-world vulnerabilities. Furthermore, the paper also surveys trust-building mechanisms, transparency and oversight techniques, and state-of-the-art explainability strategies in distributed LLM agent systems. Additionally, metrics for evaluating trust, interpretability, and human-centered performance are reviewed alongside open benchmarking challenges. Security and privacy are addressed through encryption, adversarial defense, and compliance with evolving AI regulations. The paper concludes with a roadmap for responsible agentic AI, proposing research directions to align emerging multi-agent systems with robust TRiSM principles for safe, accountable, and transparent deployment.

Just as Humans Need Vaccines, So Do Models: Model Immunization to Combat Falsehoods

Generative AI models often learn and reproduce false information present in their training corpora. This position paper argues that, analogous to biological immunization, where controlled exposure to a weakened pathogen builds immunity, AI models should be fine tuned on small, quarantined sets of explicitly labeled falsehoods as a "vaccine" against misinformation. These curated false examples are periodically injected during finetuning, strengthening the model ability to recognize and reject misleading claims while preserving accuracy on truthful inputs. An illustrative case study shows that immunized models generate substantially less misinformation than baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first training framework that treats fact checked falsehoods themselves as a supervised vaccine, rather than relying on input perturbations or generic human feedback signals, to harden models against future misinformation. We also outline ethical safeguards and governance controls to ensure the safe use of false data. Model immunization offers a proactive paradigm for aligning AI systems with factuality.

HumaniBench: A Human-Centric Framework for Large Multimodal Models Evaluation

Large multimodal models (LMMs) now excel on many vision language benchmarks, however, they still struggle with human centered criteria such as fairness, ethics, empathy, and inclusivity, key to aligning with human values. We introduce HumaniBench, a holistic benchmark of 32K real-world image question pairs, annotated via a scalable GPT4o assisted pipeline and exhaustively verified by domain experts. HumaniBench evaluates seven Human Centered AI (HCAI) principles: fairness, ethics, understanding, reasoning, language inclusivity, empathy, and robustness, across seven diverse tasks, including open and closed ended visual question answering (VQA), multilingual QA, visual grounding, empathetic captioning, and robustness tests. Benchmarking 15 state of the art LMMs (open and closed source) reveals that proprietary models generally lead, though robustness and visual grounding remain weak points. Some open-source models also struggle to balance accuracy with adherence to human-aligned principles. HumaniBench is the first benchmark purpose built around HCAI principles. It provides a rigorous testbed for diagnosing alignment gaps and guiding LMMs toward behavior that is both accurate and socially responsible. Dataset, annotation prompts, and evaluation code are available at: https://vectorinstitute.github.io/HumaniBench

The Rise of Small Language Models in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Survey

Despite substantial progress in healthcare applications driven by large language models (LLMs), growing concerns around data privacy, and limited resources; the small language models (SLMs) offer a scalable and clinically viable solution for efficient performance in resource-constrained environments for next-generation healthcare informatics. Our comprehensive survey presents a taxonomic framework to identify and categorize them for healthcare professionals and informaticians. The timeline of healthcare SLM contributions establishes a foundational framework for analyzing models across three dimensions: NLP tasks, stakeholder roles, and the continuum of care. We present a taxonomic framework to identify the architectural foundations for building models from scratch; adapting SLMs to clinical precision through prompting, instruction fine-tuning, and reasoning; and accessibility and sustainability through compression techniques. Our primary objective is to offer a comprehensive survey for healthcare professionals, introducing recent innovations in model optimization and equipping them with curated resources to support future research and development in the field. Aiming to showcase the groundbreaking advancements in SLMs for healthcare, we present a comprehensive compilation of experimental results across widely studied NLP tasks in healthcare to highlight the transformative potential of SLMs in healthcare. The updated repository is available at Github

Optimizing Large Language Models: Metrics, Energy Efficiency, and Case Study Insights

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) has led to significant energy consumption and carbon emissions, posing a critical challenge to the sustainability of generative AI technologies. This paper explores the integration of energy-efficient optimization techniques in the deployment of LLMs to address these environmental concerns. We present a case study and framework that demonstrate how strategic quantization and local inference techniques can substantially lower the carbon footprints of LLMs without compromising their operational effectiveness. Experimental results reveal that these methods can reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions by up to 45\% post quantization, making them particularly suitable for resource-constrained environments. The findings provide actionable insights for achieving sustainability in AI while maintaining high levels of accuracy and responsiveness.

FairSense-AI: Responsible AI Meets Sustainability

In this paper, we introduce FairSense-AI: a multimodal framework designed to detect and mitigate bias in both text and images. By leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), FairSense-AI uncovers subtle forms of prejudice or stereotyping that can appear in content, providing users with bias scores, explanatory highlights, and automated recommendations for fairness enhancements. In addition, FairSense-AI integrates an AI risk assessment component that aligns with frameworks like the MIT AI Risk Repository and NIST AI Risk Management Framework, enabling structured identification of ethical and safety concerns. The platform is optimized for energy efficiency via techniques such as model pruning and mixed-precision computation, thereby reducing its environmental footprint. Through a series of case studies and applications, we demonstrate how FairSense-AI promotes responsible AI use by addressing both the social dimension of fairness and the pressing need for sustainability in large-scale AI deployments. https://vectorinstitute.github.io/FairSense-AI, https://pypi.org/project/fair-sense-ai/ (Sustainability , Responsible AI , Large Language Models , Vision Language Models , Ethical AI , Green AI)

Comprehensive Analysis of Transparency and Accessibility of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, And other SoTA Large Language Models

Despite increasing discussions on open-source Artificial Intelligence (AI), existing research lacks a discussion on the transparency and accessibility of state-of-the-art (SoTA) Large Language Models (LLMs). The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has recently released its first formal definition of open-source software. This definition, when combined with standard dictionary definitions and the sparse published literature, provide an initial framework to support broader accessibility to AI models such as LLMs, but more work is essential to capture the unique dynamics of openness in AI. In addition, concerns about open-washing, where models claim openness but lack full transparency, has been raised, which limits the reproducibility, bias mitigation, and domain adaptation of these models. In this context, our study critically analyzes SoTA LLMs from the last five years, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, LLaMA, and others, to assess their adherence to transparency standards and the implications of partial openness. Specifically, we examine transparency and accessibility from two perspectives: open-source vs. open-weight models. Our findings reveal that while some models are labeled as open-source, this does not necessarily mean they are fully open-sourced. Even in the best cases, open-source models often do not report model training data, and code as well as key metrics, such as weight accessibility, and carbon emissions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically examines the transparency and accessibility of over 100 different SoTA LLMs through the dual lens of open-source and open-weight models. The findings open avenues for further research and call for responsible and sustainable AI practices to ensure greater transparency, accountability, and ethical deployment of these models.(DeepSeek transparency, ChatGPT accessibility, open source, DeepSeek open source)

VLDBench: Vision Language Models Disinformation Detection Benchmark

The rapid rise of AI-generated content has made detecting disinformation increasingly challenging. In particular, multimodal disinformation, i.e., online posts-articles that contain images and texts with fabricated information are specially designed to deceive. While existing AI safety benchmarks primarily address bias and toxicity, multimodal disinformation detection remains largely underexplored. To address this challenge, we present the Vision-Language Disinformation Detection Benchmark VLDBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for detecting disinformation across both unimodal (text-only) and multimodal (text and image) content, comprising 31,000} news article-image pairs, spanning 13 distinct categories, for robust evaluation. VLDBench features a rigorous semi-automated data curation pipeline, with 22 domain experts dedicating 300 plus hours} to annotation, achieving a strong inter-annotator agreement (Cohen kappa = 0.78). We extensively evaluate state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), demonstrating that integrating textual and visual cues in multimodal news posts improves disinformation detection accuracy by 5 - 35 % compared to unimodal models. Developed in alignment with AI governance frameworks such as the EU AI Act, NIST guidelines, and the MIT AI Risk Repository 2024, VLDBench is expected to become a benchmark for detecting disinformation in online multi-modal contents. Our code and data will be publicly available.

Perceived Confidence Scoring for Data Annotation with Zero-Shot LLMs

Zero-shot LLMs are now also used for textual classification tasks, e.g., sentiment/emotion detection of a given input as a sentence/article. However, their performance can be suboptimal in such data annotation tasks. We introduce a novel technique Perceived Confidence Scoring (PCS) that evaluates LLM's confidence for its classification of an input by leveraging Metamorphic Relations (MRs). The MRs generate semantically equivalent yet textually mutated versions of the input. Following the principles of Metamorphic Testing (MT), the mutated versions are expected to have annotation labels similar to the input. By analyzing the consistency of LLM responses across these variations, PCS computes a confidence score based on the frequency of predicted labels. PCS can be used both for single LLM and multiple LLM settings (e.g., majority voting). We introduce an algorithm Perceived Differential Evolution (PDE) that determines the optimal weights assigned to the MRs and the LLMs for a classification task. Empirical evaluation shows PCS significantly improves zero-shot accuracy for Llama-3-8B-Instruct (4.96%) and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 (10.52%), with Gemma-2-9b-it showing a 9.39% gain. When combining all three models, PCS significantly outperforms majority voting by 7.75%.

FairUDT: Fairness-aware Uplift Decision Trees

Training data used for developing machine learning classifiers can exhibit biases against specific protected attributes. Such biases typically originate from historical discrimination or certain underlying patterns that disproportionately under-represent minority groups, such as those identified by their gender, religion, or race. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, FairUDT, a fairness-aware Uplift-based Decision Tree for discrimination identification. FairUDT demonstrates how the integration of uplift modeling with decision trees can be adapted to include fair splitting criteria. Additionally, we introduce a modified leaf relabeling approach for removing discrimination. We divide our dataset into favored and deprived groups based on a binary sensitive attribute, with the favored dataset serving as the treatment group and the deprived dataset as the control group. By applying FairUDT and our leaf relabeling approach to preprocess three benchmark datasets, we achieve an acceptable accuracy-discrimination tradeoff. We also show that FairUDT is inherently interpretable and can be utilized in discrimination detection tasks. The code for this project is available https://github.com/ara-25/FairUDT