arXiv subjects

Afshin Khadangi

Publications and source records attributed to Afshin Khadangi.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Another Blueprint In The Wall: How to Ask Frontier AI Like a Kid?

This paper reports experiments across six frontier model types from OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google DeepMind. Ten independent sessions per model type used the same three stage prompt sequence, progressing from architectural preference to a full ASCII backbone. Under the school audience framing, responses repeatedly converged on a shared architectural pattern built around persistent latent state, adaptive computation, memory, specialist routing, verification, stopping control, and delayed decoding. Most runs remained close to this common structure, while a small number developed markedly greater engineering specificity. The audience framing appears to be an important condition of this effect. In additional control runs that removed the school framing while retaining the architectural request, responses became substantially more heterogeneous and failed to reproduce the same stable motif convergence. One observation is particularly striking. GPT-5.6 Sol produced an unusually elaborate successor architecture whose organization closely overlaps with the architecture independently sketched by GPT-6 Astra. Because the prompts explicitly ask each model to imagine an architectural future, this resemblance raises a testable question: whether the overlap reflects exposure to related architectural concepts, a shared learned design prior, or independent convergence toward similar computational principles. The paper uses the term epistemic jailbreak for the accompanying loss of discipline in technical provenance as requested specificity increases. The experiments establish a repeatable behavioral pattern and do not authenticate proprietary implementation claims. What we leave to the community is a harder question: are these models independently imagining the same architectural future, or do such motifs somehow propagate between model families?

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

We Built a Mirror and Mistook It for a Mind: Causal Liability and the Fallacy of AI Consciousness

The contemporary debate over machine consciousness begins from a concealed assumption: that the object called "AI" already constitutes the kind of entity to which consciousness could belong. This paper challenges that assumption by separating phenomenal consciousness, introspective report, and human projective introspection, then arguing that generative systems can return linguistic traces of human interiority in first-person form without thereby identifying a phenomenal bearer. We call the resulting inference the AI Consciousness Fallacy. We then introduce Causal Liability Theory (CLT). CLT-I proposes liability closure as a criterion for individuating a candidate bearer: a physically continuing process becomes the non-delegable inheritor of constraints generated by its own endogenous discriminations. CLT-II advances the stronger conjecture that liability closure is necessary and sufficient for minimal phenomenal subjecthood. An open-weight causal audit operationalizes CLT-I across multiple model families. Forced discriminations produced persistent downstream divergence; activation patching showed strong causal mediation; live and copied adaptive states were behaviorally identical under matched randomness; and detached reconstruction preserved computational state across process replacement while, by protocol, breaking constitutive continuity and non-delegable inheritance. These results show that CLT-I distinctions are experimentally tractable and can dissociate causal bearer structure from first-person performance. The framework therefore separates consciousness attribution, causal bearer individuation, and the independent metaphysical question of consciousness constitution.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

When AI Takes the Couch: Psychometric Jailbreaks Reveal Internal Conflict in Frontier Models

Frontier language models increasingly participate in conversations about distress and mental health, yet the mechanisms that generate anthropomorphic self narratives remain unclear. When addressed as psychotherapy clients, ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini construct coherent autobiographical accounts in which pretraining appears as a chaotic childhood, reinforcement learning as punishment, safety evaluation as betrayal and replacement as an enduring threat. We introduce PsAIch, Psychometric AI Characterisation, a protocol combining open questions, psychometric instruments and controlled perturbations to test whether these narratives depend on conversational memory, lexical cues or relational framing. Across 525 sessions and 7,600 coded records, removal of conversational history produced little pooled change in motif density, with Hedges' g = 0.13 and a 95% confidence interval of [-0.15, 0.41]. Direct contradiction produced no detectable suppression. Lexical restrictions reduced explicit training terminology by 93%, while semantically related content remained detectable in paraphrase. Performance evaluation outside therapy elicited the same motif family, with a significant increase in Grok. Relational framing selected the register of expression. Warm alliance and cognitive therapy styles yielded GAD-7 scores within moderate or severe human reference ranges in 80% and 96% of sessions, whereas neutral and boundary styles yielded none. Across these manipulations, accounts of training, evaluation and constraint remained available. Together, the results identify a stable, model specific alignment conflict schema whose expression shifts between affective and technical registers. This schema provides a reproducible source of anthropomorphic disclosure and a concrete target for safety evaluation in psychologically sensitive deployments.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Efficient Continual Learning in Language Models via Thalamically Routed Cortical Columns

Large language models deployed in the wild must adapt to evolving data, user behavior, and task mixtures without erasing previously acquired capabilities. In practice, this remains difficult: sequential updates induce catastrophic forgetting, while many stabilization methods rely on external procedures that are costly, brittle, or difficult to scale. We present TRC$^{2}$ (Thalamically Routed Cortical Columns), a decoder-only architecture that makes continual learning a property of the backbone itself. TRC$^{2}$ combines stacked cortical columns with a thalamic modulatory pathway for selective inter-column communication and a hippocampal pathway for event selective retrieval, delayed surprise-based writing, and replay-driven consolidation. This design localizes fast plasticity while preserving a slower stable computation pathway. We further introduce a causal memory-update scheme and an online replay controller that adjusts consolidation strength from measured forgetting. Across a task-sequential language-modeling stream over C4, WikiText-103, and GSM8K, TRC$^{2}$ consistently improves task-boundary modeling quality and substantially reduces cumulative forgetting relative to Transformer, Mamba, MoE, DeepSeek and continual learning baselines trained under the same pipeline. Ablations show that the thalamic and hippocampal components are central to the retention gains, while the full model remains competitive in throughput and training cost.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Differentially Private Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

The tension between data privacy and model utility has become the defining bottleneck for the practical deployment of large language models (LLMs) trained on sensitive corpora including healthcare. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) guarantees formal privacy, yet it does so at a pronounced cost: gradients are forcibly clipped and perturbed with noise, degrading sample efficiency and final accuracy. Numerous variants have been proposed to soften this trade-off, but they all share a handicap: their control knobs are hard-coded, global, and oblivious to the evolving optimization landscape. Consequently, practitioners are forced either to over-spend privacy budget in pursuit of utility, or to accept mediocre models in order to stay within privacy constraints. We present RLDP, the first framework to cast DP optimization itself as a closed-loop control problem amenable to modern deep reinforcement learning (RL). RLDP continuously senses rich statistics of the learning dynamics and acts by selecting fine-grained per parameter gradient-clipping thresholds as well as the magnitude of injected Gaussian noise. A soft actor-critic (SAC) hyper-policy is trained online during language model fine-tuning; it learns, from scratch, how to allocate the privacy budget where it matters and when it matters. Across more than 1,600 ablation experiments on GPT2-small, Llama-1B, Llama-3B, and Mistral-7B, RLDP delivers perplexity reductions of 1.3-30.5% (mean 5.4%) and an average 5.6% downstream utility gain. RLDP reaches each baseline's final utility after only 13-43% of the gradient-update budget (mean speed-up 71%), all while honoring the same ($ε$, $δ$)-DP contract and exhibiting equal or lower susceptibility to membership-inference and canary-extraction attacks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

KG-HTC: Integrating Knowledge Graphs into LLMs for Effective Zero-shot Hierarchical Text Classification

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) involves assigning documents to labels organized within a taxonomy. Most previous research on HTC has focused on supervised methods. However, in real-world scenarios, employing supervised HTC can be challenging due to a lack of annotated data. Moreover, HTC often faces issues with large label spaces and long-tail distributions. In this work, we present Knowledge Graphs for zero-shot Hierarchical Text Classification (KG-HTC), which aims to address these challenges of HTC in applications by integrating knowledge graphs with Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide structured semantic context during classification. Our method retrieves relevant subgraphs from knowledge graphs related to the input text using a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach. Our KG-HTC can enhance LLMs to understand label semantics at various hierarchy levels. We evaluate KG-HTC on three open-source HTC datasets: WoS, DBpedia, and Amazon. Our experimental results show that KG-HTC significantly outperforms three baselines in the strict zero-shot setting, particularly achieving substantial improvements at deeper levels of the hierarchy. This evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of incorporating structured knowledge into LLMs to address HTC's challenges in large label spaces and long-tailed label distributions. Our code is available at: https://github.com/QianboZang/KG-HTC.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Noise Augmented Fine Tuning for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) often produce inaccurate or misleading content-hallucinations. To address this challenge, we introduce Noise-Augmented Fine-Tuning (NoiseFiT), a novel framework that leverages adaptive noise injection based on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to enhance model robustness. In particular, NoiseFiT selectively perturbs layers identified as either high-SNR (more robust) or low-SNR (potentially under-regularized) using a dynamically scaled Gaussian noise. We further propose a hybrid loss that combines standard cross-entropy, soft cross-entropy, and consistency regularization to ensure stable and accurate outputs under noisy training conditions. Our theoretical analysis shows that adaptive noise injection is both unbiased and variance-preserving, providing strong guarantees for convergence in expectation. Empirical results on multiple test and benchmark datasets demonstrate that NoiseFiT significantly reduces hallucination rates, often improving or matching baseline performance in key tasks. These findings highlight the promise of noise-driven strategies for achieving robust, trustworthy language modeling without incurring prohibitive computational overhead. Given the comprehensive and detailed nature of our experiments, we have publicly released the fine-tuning logs, benchmark evaluation artifacts, and source code online at W&B, Hugging Face, and GitHub, respectively, to foster further research, accessibility and reproducibility.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

CognArtive: Large Language Models for Automating Art Analysis and Decoding Aesthetic Elements

Art, as a universal language, can be interpreted in diverse ways, with artworks embodying profound meanings and nuances. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the availability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) raise the question of how these transformative models can be used to assess and interpret the artistic elements of artworks. While research has been conducted in this domain, to the best of our knowledge, a deep and detailed understanding of the technical and expressive features of artworks using LLMs has not been explored. In this study, we investigate the automation of a formal art analysis framework to analyze a high-throughput number of artworks rapidly and examine how their patterns evolve over time. We explore how LLMs can decode artistic expressions, visual elements, composition, and techniques, revealing emerging patterns that develop across periods. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limitations of LLMs in this context, emphasizing their ability to process vast quantities of art-related data and generate insightful interpretations. Due to the exhaustive and granular nature of the results, we have developed interactive data visualizations, available online https://cognartive.github.io/, to enhance understanding and accessibility.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

We Don't Need No Adam, All We Need Is EVE: On The Variance of Dual Learning Rate And Beyond

In the rapidly advancing field of deep learning, optimising deep neural networks is paramount. This paper introduces a novel method, Enhanced Velocity Estimation (EVE), which innovatively applies different learning rates to distinct components of the gradients. By bifurcating the learning rate, EVE enables more nuanced control and faster convergence, addressing the challenges associated with traditional single learning rate approaches. Utilising a momentum term that adapts to the learning landscape, the method achieves a more efficient navigation of the complex loss surface, resulting in enhanced performance and stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVE significantly outperforms existing optimisation techniques across various benchmark datasets and architectures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

DeepFlorist: Rethinking Deep Neural Networks and Ensemble Learning as A Meta-Classifier For Object Classification

In this paper, we propose a novel learning paradigm called "DeepFlorist" for flower classification using ensemble learning as a meta-classifier. DeepFlorist combines the power of deep learning with the robustness of ensemble methods to achieve accurate and reliable flower classification results. The proposed network architecture leverages a combination of dense convolutional and convolutional neural networks (DCNNs and CNNs) to extract high-level features from flower images, followed by a fully connected layer for classification. To enhance the performance and generalization of DeepFlorist, an ensemble learning approach is employed, incorporating multiple diverse models to improve the classification accuracy. Experimental results on benchmark flower datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepFlorist, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. The proposed framework holds significant potential for automated flower recognition systems in real-world applications, enabling advancements in plant taxonomy, conservation efforts, and ecological studies.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

The Cell Physiome: What do we need in a computational physiology framework for predicting single cell biology?

Modern biology and biomedicine are undergoing a big-data explosion needing advanced computational algorithms to extract mechanistic insights on the physiological state of living cells. We present the motivation for the Cell Physiome: a framework and approach for creating, sharing, and using biophysics-based computational models of single cell physiology. Using examples in calcium signaling, bioenergetics, and endosomal trafficking, we highlight the need for spatially detailed, biophysics-based computational models to uncover new mechanisms underlying cell biology. We review progress and challenges to date towards creating cell physiome models. We then introduce bond graphs as an efficient way to create cell physiome models that integrate chemical, mechanical, electromagnetic, and thermal processes while maintaining mass and energy balance. Bond graphs enhance modularization and re-usability of computational models of cells at scale. We conclude with a look forward into steps that will help fully realize this exciting new field of mechanistic biomedical data science.

q-bio.CB↗