Ethology of Latent Spaces

This study challenges the presumed neutrality of latent spaces in vision language models (VLMs) by adopting an ethological perspective on their algorithmic behaviors. Rather than constituting spaces of homogeneous indeterminacy, latent spaces exhibit model-specific algorithmic sensitivities, understood as differential regimes of perceptual salience shaped by training data and architectural choices. Through a comparative analysis of three models (OpenAI CLIP, OpenCLIP LAION, SigLIP) applied to a corpus of 301 artworks (15th to 20th), we reveal substantial divergences in the attribution of political and cultural categories. Using bipolar semantic axes derived from vector analogies (Mikolov et al., 2013), we show that SigLIP classifies 59.4% of the artworks as politically engaged, compared to only 4% for OpenCLIP. African masks receive the highest political scores in SigLIP while remaining apolitical in OpenAI CLIP. On an aesthetic colonial axis, inter-model discrepancies reach 72.6 percentage points. We introduce three operational concepts: computational latent politicization, describing the emergence of political categories without intentional encoding; emergent bias, irreducible to statistical or normative bias and detectable only through contrastive analysis; and three algorithmic scopic regimes: entropic (LAION), institutional (OpenAI), and semiotic (SigLIP), which structure distinct modes of visibility. Drawing on Foucault's notion of the archive, Jameson's ideologeme, and Simondon's theory of individuation, we argue that training datasets function as quasi-archives whose discursive formations crystallize within latent space. This work contributes to a critical reassessment of the conditions under which VLMs are applied to digital art history and calls for methodologies that integrate learning architectures into any delegation of cultural interpretation to algorithmic agents.

Digital Twins & ZeroConf AI: Structuring Automated Intelligent Pipelines for Industrial Applications

The increasing complexity of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), particularly in the industrial domain, has amplified the challenges associated with the effective integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Fragmentation across IoT and IIoT technologies, manifested through diverse communication protocols, data formats and device capabilities, creates a substantial gap between low-level physical layers and high-level intelligent functionalities. Recently, Digital Twin (DT) technology has emerged as a promising solution, offering structured, interoperable and semantically rich digital representations of physical assets. Current approaches are often siloed and tightly coupled, limiting scalability and reuse of AI functionalities. This work proposes a modular and interoperable solution that enables seamless AI pipeline integration into CPS by minimizing configuration and decoupling the roles of DTs and AI components. We introduce the concept of Zero Configuration (ZeroConf) AI pipelines, where DTs orchestrate data management and intelligent augmentation. The approach is demonstrated in a MicroFactory scenario, showing support for concurrent ML models and dynamic data processing, effectively accelerating the deployment of intelligent services in complex industrial settings.

Flocking behavior for dynamic and complex swarm structures

Maintaining the formation of complex structures with multiple UAVs and achieving complex trajectories remains a major challenge. This work presents an algorithm for implementing the flocking behavior of UAVs based on the concept of Virtual Centroid to easily develop a structure for the flock. The approach builds on the classical virtual-based behavior, providing a theoretical framework for incorporating enhancements to dynamically control both the number of agents and the formation of the structure. Simulation tests and real-world experiments were conducted, demonstrating its simplicity even with complex formations and complex trajectories.

CHiRPE: A Step Towards Real-World Clinical NLP with Clinician-Oriented Model Explanations

The medical adoption of NLP tools requires interpretability by end users, yet traditional explainable AI (XAI) methods are misaligned with clinical reasoning and lack clinician input. We introduce CHiRPE (Clinical High-Risk Prediction with Explainability), an NLP pipeline that takes transcribed semi-structured clinical interviews to: (i) predict psychosis risk; and (ii) generate novel SHAP explanation formats co-developed with clinicians. Trained on 944 semi-structured interview transcripts across 24 international clinics of the AMP-SCZ study, the CHiRPE pipeline integrates symptom-domain mapping, LLM summarisation, and BERT classification. CHiRPE achieved over 90% accuracy across three BERT variants and outperformed baseline models. Explanation formats were evaluated by 28 clinical experts who indicated a strong preference for our novel concept-guided explanations, especially hybrid graph-and-text summary formats. CHiRPE demonstrates that clinically-guided model development produces both accurate and interpretable results. Our next step is focused on real-world testing across our 24 international sites.

From Prompts to Pavement: LMMs-based Agentic Behavior-Tree Generation Framework for Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) require adaptive behavior planners to navigate unpredictable, real-world environments safely. Traditional behavior trees (BTs) offer structured decision logic but are inherently static and demand labor-intensive manual tuning, limiting their applicability at SAE Level 5 autonomy. This paper presents an agentic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and multi-modal vision models (LVMs) to generate and adapt BTs on the fly. A specialized Descriptor agent applies chain-of-symbols prompting to assess scene criticality, a Planner agent constructs high-level sub-goals via in-context learning, and a Generator agent synthesizes executable BT sub-trees in XML format. Integrated into a CARLA+Nav2 simulation, our system triggers only upon baseline BT failure, demonstrating successful navigation around unexpected obstacles (e.g., street blockage) with no human intervention. Compared to a static BT baseline, this approach is a proof-of-concept that extends to diverse driving scenarios.

Latent Object Permanence: Topological Phase Transitions, Free-Energy Principles, and Renormalization Group Flows in Deep Transformer Manifolds

We study the emergence of multi-step reasoning in deep Transformer language models through a geometric and statistical-physics lens. Treating the hidden-state trajectory as a flow on an implicit Riemannian manifold, we analyze the layerwise covariance spectrum of activations, where $C^{(\ell)}=\mathbb{E}[h^{(\ell)}h^{(\ell)\top}]$, and track deviations from a random-matrix bulk. Across model scales (1.5B--30B), we observe a sharp reduction in effective dimensionality consistent with a phase transition: an order parameter based on sparsity/localization, $Ω(h)=1-\|h\|_1/(\sqrt{d}\|h\|_2)$, exhibits a discontinuity near a critical normalized depth $γ_c\approx 0.42$ in sufficiently large models. We formalize the forward pass as a discrete coarse-graining map and relate the appearance of stable "concept basins" to fixed points of this renormalization-like dynamics. The resulting low-entropy regime is characterized by a spectral tail collapse and by the formation of transient, reusable object-like structures in representation space, which we call Transient Class Objects (TCOs). We provide theoretical conditions connecting logical separability to spectral decay and validate the predicted signatures with layerwise probes on multiple open-weight model families.

A neural network for modeling human concept formation, understanding and communication

A remarkable capability of the human brain is to form more abstract conceptual representations from sensorimotor experiences and flexibly apply them independent of direct sensory inputs. However, the computational mechanism underlying this ability remains poorly understood. Here, we present a dual-module neural network framework, the CATS Net, to bridge this gap. Our model consists of a concept-abstraction module that extracts low-dimensional conceptual representations, and a task-solving module that performs visual judgement tasks under the hierarchical gating control of the formed concepts. The system develops transferable semantic structure based on concept representations that enable cross-network knowledge transfer through conceptual communication. Model-brain fitting analyses reveal that these emergent concept spaces align with both neurocognitive semantic model and brain response structures in the human ventral occipitotemporal cortex, while the gating mechanisms mirror that in the semantic control brain network. This work establishes a unified computational framework that can offer mechanistic insights for understanding human conceptual cognition and engineering artificial systems with human-like conceptual intelligence.

AJAR: Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents capable of tool execution, the landscape of AI safety is shifting from content moderation to action security. However, existing red-teaming frameworks remain bifurcated: they either focus on rigid, script-based text attacks or lack the architectural modularity to simulate complex, multi-turn agentic exploitations. In this paper, we introduce AJAR (Adaptive Jailbreak Architecture for Red-teaming), a proof-of-concept framework designed to bridge this gap through Protocol-driven Cognitive Orchestration. Built upon the robust runtime of Petri, AJAR leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to decouple adversarial logic from the execution loop, encapsulating state-of-the-art algorithms like X-Teaming as standardized, plug-and-play services. We validate the architectural feasibility of AJAR through a controlled qualitative case study, demonstrating its ability to perform stateful backtracking within a tool-use environment. Furthermore, our preliminary exploration of the "Agentic Gap" reveals a complex safety dynamic: while tool usage introduces new injection vectors via code execution, the cognitive load of parameter formatting can inadvertently disrupt persona-based attacks. AJAR is open-sourced to facilitate the standardized, environment-aware evaluation of this emerging attack surface. The code and data are available at https://github.com/douyipu/ajar.

An Axiomatic Approach to General Intelligence: SANC(E3) -- Self-organizing Active Network of Concepts with Energy E3

General intelligence must reorganize experience into internal structures that enable prediction and action under finite resources. Existing systems implicitly presuppose fixed primitive units -- tokens, subwords, pixels, or predefined sensor channels -- thereby bypassing the question of how representational units themselves emerge and stabilize. This paper proposes SANC(E3), an axiomatic framework in which representational units are not given a priori but instead arise as stable outcomes of competitive selection, reconstruction, and compression under finite activation capacity, governed by the explicit minimization of an energy functional E3. SANC(E3) draws a principled distinction between system tokens -- structural anchors such as {here, now, I} and sensory sources -- and tokens that emerge through self-organization during co-occurring events. Five core axioms formalize finite capacity, association from co-occurrence, similarity-based competition, confidence-based stabilization, and the reconstruction-compression-update trade-off. A key feature is a pseudo-memory-mapped I/O mechanism, through which internally replayed Gestalts are processed via the same axiomatic pathway as external sensory input. As a result, perception, imagination, prediction, planning, and action are unified within a single representational and energetic process. From the axioms, twelve propositions are derived, showing that category formation, hierarchical organization, unsupervised learning, and high-level cognitive activities can all be understood as instances of Gestalt completion under E3 minimization.

The AI Pyramid A Conceptual Framework for Workforce Capability in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a qualitative shift in technological change by extending cognitive labor itself rather than merely automating routine tasks. Recent evidence shows that generative AI disproportionately affects highly educated, white collar work, challenging existing assumptions about workforce vulnerability and rendering traditional approaches to digital or AI literacy insufficient. This paper introduces the concept of AI Nativity, the capacity to integrate AI fluidly into everyday reasoning, problem solving, and decision making, and proposes the AI Pyramid, a conceptual framework for organizing human capability in an AI mediated economy. The framework distinguishes three interdependent capability layers: AI Native capability as a universal baseline for participation in AI augmented environments; AI Foundation capability for building, integrating, and sustaining AI enabled systems; and AI Deep capability for advancing frontier AI knowledge and applications. Crucially, the pyramid is not a career ladder but a system level distribution of capabilities required at scale. Building on this structure, the paper argues that effective AI workforce development requires treating capability formation as infrastructure rather than episodic training, centered on problem based learning embedded in work contexts and supported by dynamic skill ontologies and competency based measurement. The framework has implications for organizations, education systems, and governments seeking to align learning, measurement, and policy with the evolving demands of AI mediated work, while addressing productivity, resilience, and inequality at societal scale.