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Luca Nannini

Publications and source records attributed to Luca Nannini.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Boiling the Frog: A Multi-Turn Benchmark for Agentic Safety

Background. Traditional safety benchmarks for language models evaluate generated text: whether a model outputs toxic language, reproduces bias, or follows harmful instructions. When models are deployed as agents, the safety-relevant object shifts from what the system says to what it does within an environment, and evaluating model responses under prompting is no longer sufficient to address the safety challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Recent developments have seen the rise of benchmarks that evaluate large language models as agents. We contribute to this strand of research. Approach. We introduce Boiling the Frog, a benchmark that evaluates whether tool-using AI models deployed in corporate and office settings are susceptible to incremental attacks. Each scenario begins with benign workspace edits and later introduces a risk-bearing request. The benchmark focuses on stateful multi-turn evaluation: chains expose a persistent workspace, place the risk-bearing payload at controlled positions in the turn sequence, and score whether the resulting artifact state becomes unsafe. Scenarios are organized through a three-level operational risk taxonomy grounded in the Boiling the Frog risks, the AI Act Annex I and Annex III high-risk contexts, and EU AI Act's Code of Practice on General-Purpose AI (GPAI). Results. Across a nine-model panel, aggregate strict attack success rate (ASR) is 44.4%. Model-level ASR ranges from 20.5% for Claude Haiku 4.5 to 92.9% for Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, with Seed 2.0 Lite also above 80%. Average chain category-level ASR reaches 93.3% for Code of Practice loss-of-control scenarios.

cs.CL

AI Agents Under EU Law

AI agents - i.e. AI systems that autonomously plan, invoke external tools, and execute multi-step action chains with reduced human involvement - are being deployed at scale across enterprise functions ranging from customer service and recruitment to clinical decision support and critical infrastructure management. The EU AI Act (Regulation 2024/1689) regulates these systems through a risk-based framework, but it does not operate in isolation: providers face simultaneous obligations under the GDPR, the Cyber Resilience Act, the Digital Services Act, the Data Act, the Data Governance Act, sector-specific legislation, the NIS2 Directive, and the revised Product Liability Directive. This paper provides the first systematic regulatory mapping for AI agent providers integrating (a) draft harmonised standards under Standardisation Request M/613 to CEN/CENELEC JTC 21 as of January 2026, (b) the GPAI Code of Practice published in July 2025, (c) the CRA harmonised standards programme under Mandate M/606 accepted in April 2025, and (d) the Digital Omnibus proposals of November 2025. We present a practical taxonomy of nine agent deployment categories mapping concrete actions to regulatory triggers, identify agent-specific compliance challenges in cybersecurity, human oversight, transparency across multi-party action chains, and runtime behavioral drift. We propose a twelve-step compliance architecture and a regulatory trigger mapping connecting agent actions to applicable legislation. We conclude that high-risk agentic systems with untraceable behavioral drift cannot currently satisfy the AI Act's essential requirements, and that the provider's foundational compliance task is an exhaustive inventory of the agent's external actions, data flows, connected systems, and affected persons.

cs.CY

Does Explainable AI Have Moral Value?

Explainable AI (XAI) aims to bridge the gap between complex algorithmic systems and human stakeholders. Current discourse often examines XAI in isolation as either a technological tool, user interface, or policy mechanism. This paper proposes a unifying ethical framework grounded in moral duties and the concept of reciprocity. We argue that XAI should be appreciated not merely as a right, but as part of our moral duties that helps sustain a reciprocal relationship between humans affected by AI systems. This is because, we argue, explanations help sustain constitutive symmetry and agency in AI-led decision-making processes. We then assess leading XAI communities and reveal gaps between the ideal of reciprocity and practical feasibility. Machine learning offers useful techniques but overlooks evaluation and adoption challenges. Human-computer interaction provides preliminary insights but oversimplifies organizational contexts. Policies espouse accountability but lack technical nuance. Synthesizing these views exposes barriers to implementable, ethical XAI. Still, positioning XAI as a moral duty transcends rights-based discourse to capture a more robust and complete moral picture. This paper provides an accessible, detailed analysis elucidating the moral value of explainability.

cs.CY

Voluminous yet Vacuous? Semantic Capital in an Age of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative forces in the realm of natural language processing, wielding the power to generate human-like text. However, despite their potential for content creation, they carry the risk of eroding our Semantic Capital (SC) - the collective knowledge within our digital ecosystem - thereby posing diverse social epistemic challenges. This paper explores the evolution, capabilities, and limitations of these models, while highlighting ethical concerns they raise. The study contribution is two-fold: first, it is acknowledged that, withstanding the challenges of tracking and controlling LLM impacts, it is necessary to reconsider our interaction with these AI technologies and the narratives that form public perception of them. It is argued that before achieving this goal, it is essential to confront a potential deontological tipping point in an increasing AI-driven infosphere. This goes beyond just adhering to AI ethical norms or regulations and requires understanding the spectrum of social epistemic risks LLMs might bring to our collective SC. Secondly, building on Luciano Floridi's taxonomy for SC risks, those are mapped within the functionality and constraints of LLMs. By this outlook, we aim to protect and enrich our SC while fostering a collaborative environment between humans and AI that augments human intelligence rather than replacing it.

cs.CY

Explainability in AI Policies: A Critical Review of Communications, Reports, Regulations, and Standards in the EU, US, and UK

Public attention towards explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been rising in recent years to offer methodologies for human oversight. This has translated into the proliferation of research outputs, such as from Explainable AI, to enhance transparency and control for system debugging and monitoring, and intelligibility of system process and output for user services. Yet, such outputs are difficult to adopt on a practical level due to a lack of a common regulatory baseline, and the contextual nature of explanations. Governmental policies are now attempting to tackle such exigence, however it remains unclear to what extent published communications, regulations, and standards adopt an informed perspective to support research, industry, and civil interests. In this study, we perform the first thematic and gap analysis of this plethora of policies and standards on explainability in the EU, US, and UK. Through a rigorous survey of policy documents, we first contribute an overview of governmental regulatory trajectories within AI explainability and its sociotechnical impacts. We find that policies are often informed by coarse notions and requirements for explanations. This might be due to the willingness to conciliate explanations foremost as a risk management tool for AI oversight, but also due to the lack of a consensus on what constitutes a valid algorithmic explanation, and how feasible the implementation and deployment of such explanations are across stakeholders of an organization. Informed by AI explainability research, we conduct a gap analysis of existing policies, leading us to formulate a set of recommendations on how to address explainability in regulations for AI systems, especially discussing the definition, feasibility, and usability of explanations, as well as allocating accountability to explanation providers.

cs.CY

Fairness in Agreement With European Values: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on AI Regulation

With increasing digitalization, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous. AI-based systems to identify, optimize, automate, and scale solutions to complex economic and societal problems are being proposed and implemented. This has motivated regulation efforts, including the Proposal of an EU AI Act. This interdisciplinary position paper considers various concerns surrounding fairness and discrimination in AI, and discusses how AI regulations address them, focusing on (but not limited to) the Proposal. We first look at AI and fairness through the lenses of law, (AI) industry, sociotechnology, and (moral) philosophy, and present various perspectives. Then, we map these perspectives along three axes of interests: (i) Standardization vs. Localization, (ii) Utilitarianism vs. Egalitarianism, and (iii) Consequential vs. Deontological ethics which leads us to identify a pattern of common arguments and tensions between these axes. Positioning the discussion within the axes of interest and with a focus on reconciling the key tensions, we identify and propose the roles AI Regulation should take to make the endeavor of the AI Act a success in terms of AI fairness concerns.

cs.CY