AIJul 31, 2025
AI Must not be Fully AutonomousTosin Adewumi, Lama Alkhaled, Florent Imbert et al.
Autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) has many benefits. It also has many risks. In this work, we identify the 3 levels of autonomous AI. We are of the position that AI must not be fully autonomous because of the many risks, especially as artificial superintelligence (ASI) is speculated to be just decades away. Fully autonomous AI, which can develop its own objectives, is at level 3 and without responsible human oversight. However, responsible human oversight is crucial for mitigating the risks. To ague for our position, we discuss theories of autonomy, AI and agents. Then, we offer 12 distinct arguments and 6 counterarguments with rebuttals to the counterarguments. We also present 15 pieces of recent evidence of AI misaligned values and other risks in the appendix.
LGJun 10, 2025
Agent-based Condition Monitoring Assistance with Multimodal Industrial Database Retrieval Augmented GenerationKarl Löwenmark, Daniel Strömbergsson, Chang Liu et al.
Condition monitoring (CM) plays a crucial role in ensuring reliability and efficiency in the process industry. Although computerised maintenance systems effectively detect and classify faults, tasks like fault severity estimation, and maintenance decisions still largely depend on human expert analysis. The analysis and decision making automatically performed by current systems typically exhibit considerable uncertainty and high false alarm rates, leading to increased workload and reduced efficiency. This work integrates large language model (LLM)-based reasoning agents with CM workflows to address analyst and industry needs, namely reducing false alarms, enhancing fault severity estimation, improving decision support, and offering explainable interfaces. We propose MindRAG, a modular framework combining multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with novel vector store structures designed specifically for CM data. The framework leverages existing annotations and maintenance work orders as surrogates for labels in a supervised learning protocol, addressing the common challenge of training predictive models on unlabelled and noisy real-world datasets. The primary contributions include: (1) an approach for structuring industry CM data into a semi-structured multimodal vector store compatible with LLM-driven workflows; (2) developing multimodal RAG techniques tailored for CM data; (3) developing practical reasoning agents capable of addressing real-world CM queries; and (4) presenting an experimental framework for integrating and evaluating such agents in realistic industrial scenarios. Preliminary results, evaluated with the help of an experienced analyst, indicate that MindRAG provide meaningful decision support for more efficient management of alarms, thereby improving the interpretability of CM systems.
AIDec 11, 2021
Technical Language Supervision for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis in Process IndustryKarl Löwenmark, Cees Taal, Stephan Schnabel et al.
In the process industry, condition monitoring systems with automated fault diagnosis methods assist human experts and thereby improve maintenance efficiency, process sustainability, and workplace safety. Improving the automated fault diagnosis methods using data and machine learning-based models is a central aspect of intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD). A major challenge in IFD is to develop realistic datasets with accurate labels needed to train and validate models, and to transfer models trained with labeled lab data to heterogeneous process industry environments. However, fault descriptions and work-orders written by domain experts are increasingly digitised in modern condition monitoring systems, for example in the context of rotating equipment monitoring. Thus, domain-specific knowledge about fault characteristics and severities exists as technical language annotations in industrial datasets. Furthermore, recent advances in natural language processing enable weakly supervised model optimisation using natural language annotations, most notably in the form of natural language supervision (NLS). This creates a timely opportunity to develop technical language supervision (TLS) solutions for IFD systems grounded in industrial data, for example as a complement to pre-training with lab data to address problems like overfitting and inaccurate out-of-sample generalisation. We surveyed the literature and identify a considerable improvement in the maturity of NLS over the last two years, facilitating applications beyond natural language; a rapid development of weak supervision methods; and transfer learning as a current trend in IFD which can benefit from these developments. Finally we describe a general framework for TLS and implement a TLS case study based on SentenceBERT and contrastive learning based zero-shot inference on annotated industry data.