arXiv subjects

Aidan Kierans

Publications and source records attributed to Aidan Kierans.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Prioritization of Risks from Artificial Intelligence: A Delphi Study of 272 International Experts

Artificial intelligence poses many risks, ranging from familiar present-day harms to unprecedented and potentially catastrophic ones. Effective risk management requires prioritization: we must understand which risks are most severe, who is most vulnerable, and who is most responsible for addressing them. We report results from a three-round Delphi study conducted late 2025 with 272 international AI experts. Experts rated 24 AI risks on harm probability and severity, sector and actor vulnerability, actor responsibility, and overall concern. Experts estimated the five most severe harms in the next 5 years were likely to come from dangerous capabilities, competitive dynamics, weapons & cyberattacks (including CBRNE), power centralization, and false information. In a business-as-usual scenario, experts judged 18 of 24 risks as having a more than 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes (e.g., more than 1 million deaths or more than USD 100B in financial loss) in the next 5 years (2025-2030). In a scenario where pragmatic mitigations are implemented, experts still judged five risks as having a more than 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes: dangerous capabilities, weapons & cyberattacks, environmental harm, inequality & unemployment, and power centralization. All 24 risks were judged as being more than 5% likely to cause catastrophic outcomes. AI users and the general public were judged the most vulnerable to these risks, but experts assigned the highest responsibility for addressing them to general-purpose AI developers and governance actors (including governments, regulators, and standards bodies). Across most risks, experts identified information, finance, and national security as the most vulnerable sectors. These findings can guide AI risk prioritization and clarify expert expectations about who should bear responsibility for mitigation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2026

Position: Evaluations of AI Moral Reasoning Still Miss Half of the Picture

Recent work on evaluating the moral competence of large language models (LLMs) has focused primarily on what we call the moral value problem, i.e., whether model outputs align with human moral values. In contrast, the moral norm problem, i.e., whether models can identify and correctly apply context-sensitive moral norms, remains underexplored. We posit that this imbalance stems from the field's reliance on descriptive ethics frameworks, such as Moral Foundations Theory and Kohlberg's stages of moral development, which emphasize value representation over normative application. We review existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, and show that they cluster heavily around the value problem, while discussion regarding normative ethics remains underrepresented. We identify three crucial gaps: (i) the absence of high-quality ground-truth data for moral norms and their applications, (ii) insufficient evaluation of intermediate reasoning processes, and (iii) limited attention to the identification of morally relevant features in context. Subsequently, we propose a research agenda that includes the development of standardized formal representations for normative theories, the construction of expert-annotated datasets capturing norm application, and evaluation protocols that explicitly distinguish between values-level and norms-level competence. Our goal is to encourage a more systematic study of normative reasoning in LLMs.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

A Scaling Law for Token Efficiency in LLM Fine-Tuning Under Fixed Compute Budgets

We introduce a scaling law for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) under fixed compute budgets that explicitly accounts for data composition. Conventional approaches measure training data solely by total tokens, yet the number of examples and their average token length -- what we term \emph{dataset volume} -- play a decisive role in model performance. Our formulation is tuned following established procedures. Experiments on the BRICC dataset \cite{salavati2024reducing} and subsets of the MMLU dataset \cite{hendrycks2021measuringmassivemultitasklanguage}, evaluated under multiple subsampling strategies, reveal that data composition significantly affects token efficiency. These results motivate refined scaling laws for practical LLM fine-tuning in resource-constrained settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Catastrophic Liability: Managing Systemic Risks in Frontier AI Development

As artificial intelligence systems grow more capable and autonomous, frontier AI development poses potential systemic risks that could affect society at a massive scale. Current practices at many AI labs developing these systems lack sufficient transparency around safety measures, testing procedures, and governance structures. This opacity makes it challenging to verify safety claims or establish appropriate liability when harm occurs. Drawing on liability frameworks from nuclear energy, aviation software, cybersecurity, and healthcare, we propose a comprehensive approach to safety documentation and accountability in frontier AI development.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Quantifying Misalignment Between Agents: Towards a Sociotechnical Understanding of Alignment

Existing work on the alignment problem has focused mainly on (1) qualitative descriptions of the alignment problem; (2) attempting to align AI actions with human interests by focusing on value specification and learning; and/or (3) focusing on a single agent or on humanity as a monolith. Recent sociotechnical approaches highlight the need to understand complex misalignment among multiple human and AI agents. We address this gap by adapting a computational social science model of human contention to the alignment problem. Our model quantifies misalignment in large, diverse agent groups with potentially conflicting goals across various problem areas. Misalignment scores in our framework depend on the observed agent population, the domain in question, and conflict between agents' weighted preferences. Through simulations, we demonstrate how our model captures intuitive aspects of misalignment across different scenarios. We then apply our model to two case studies, including an autonomous vehicle setting, showcasing its practical utility. Our approach offers enhanced explanatory power for complex sociotechnical environments and could inform the design of more aligned AI systems in real-world applications.

cs.MA↗