Related papers: Safety is Non-Compositional: A Formal Framework fo…
In previous work, summarized in this paper, we proposed an operation of parallel composition for rewriting-logic theories, allowing compositional specification of systems and reusability of components. The present paper focuses on…
Every AI system is deployed by a human organization. In high risk applications, the combined human plus AI system must function as a high-reliability organization in order to avoid catastrophic errors. This short note reviews the properties…
Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…
We consider the problem of designing agents able to compute optimal decisions by composing data from multiple sources to tackle tasks involving: (i) tracking a desired behavior while minimizing an agent-specific cost; (ii) satisfying safety…
Ensuring responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) has become imperative as autonomous systems increasingly influence critical societal domains. However, the concept of trustworthy AI remains broad and multi-faceted. This thesis…
Autonomous systems require the management of several model views to assure properties such as safety and security among others. A crucial issue in autonomous systems design assurance is the notion of emergent behavior; we cannot use their…
Explainability and comprehensibility of AI are important requirements for intelligent systems deployed in real-world domains. Users want and frequently need to understand how decisions impacting them are made. Similarly it is important to…
This dissertation builds a compositional cyber-physical systems theory to develop concrete semantics relating the above diverse views necessary for safety and security assurance. In this sense, composition can take two forms. The first is…
Traditional security mechanisms isolate resources from users who should not access them. We reflect the compositional nature of such security mechanisms back into the structure of LLMs to build a provably secure LLM; that we term SecureLLM.…
Autonomous agentic systems are increasingly deployed in regulated, high-stakes domains where decisions may be irreversible and institutionally constrained. Existing safety approaches emphasize alignment, interpretability, or action-level…
A new design of an AI assistant that has become increasingly popular is that of an "aggregated assistant" -- realized as an orchestrated composition of several individual skills or agents that can each perform atomic tasks. In this paper,…
Formal verification of neuro-symbolic cyber-physical systems, such as drones, medical devices and robots, is complicated. Neural components must be trained to be optimal with respect to the available data as well as the safety…
This paper significantly improves on, and finishes to validate, an approach proposed in previous research in which safety outcomes were predicted from attributes with machine learning. Like in the original study, we use Natural Language…
As AI technologies increase in capability and ubiquity, AI accidents are becoming more common. Based on normal accident theory, high reliability theory, and open systems theory, we create a framework for understanding the risks associated…
Causal consistency is one of the most adopted consistency criteria for distributed implementations of data structures. It ensures that operations are executed at all sites according to their causal precedence. We address the issue of…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
A prevailing assumption in machine learning is that model correctness must be enforced after the fact. We observe that the properties determining whether an AI model is numerically stable, computationally correct, or consistent with a…
Among the various forms of reasoning studied in the context of artificial intelligence, qualitative reasoning makes it possible to infer new knowledge in the context of imprecise, incomplete information without numerical values. In this…
Compositional learning, mastering the ability to combine basic concepts and construct more intricate ones, is crucial for human cognition, especially in human language comprehension and visual perception. This notion is tightly connected to…
Embodied AI systems, comprising AI models and physical plants, are increasingly prevalent across various applications. Due to the rarity of system failures, ensuring their safety in complex operating environments remains a major challenge,…