Piercosma Bisconti

Olga Sorokoletova, Francesco Giarrusso, Giacomo De Luca et al.

Large language models are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where their ability to resist harmful instructions is essential. Although post-training aims to make models robust against many jailbreak strategies, recent evidence shows that stylistic reformulations, such as poetic transformation, can still bypass safety mechanisms with alarming effectiveness. This raises a central question: why do literary jailbreaks succeed? In this work, we investigate whether their effectiveness depends on specific poetic devices, on a failure to recognize literary formatting, or on deeper changes in how models process stylistically irregular prompts. We address this problem through an interpretability analysis of attention patterns. We perform input-level ablation studies to assess the contribution of individual and combinations of poetic devices; construct an interpretable vector representation of attention maps; cluster these representations and train linear probes to predict safety outcomes and literary format. Our results show that models distinguish poetic from prose formats with high accuracy, yet struggle to predict jailbreak success within each format. Clustering further reveals clear separation by literary format, but not by safety label. These findings indicate that jailbreak success is not caused by a failure to recognize poetic formatting; rather, poetic prompts induce distinct processing patterns that remain largely independent of harmful-content detection. Overall, literary jailbreaks appear to misalign large language models not through any single poetic device, but through accumulated stylistic irregularities that alter prompt processing and avoid lexical triggers considered during post-training. This suggests that robustness requires safety mechanisms that account for style-induced shifts in model behavior. We use Qwen3-14B as a representative open-weight case study.

Piercosma Bisconti, Marcello Galisai, Federico Pierucci et al.

This paper examines why safety mechanisms designed for human-model interaction do not scale to environments where large language models (LLMs) interact with each other. Most current governance practices still rely on single-agent safety containment, prompts, fine-tuning, and moderation layers that constrain individual model behavior but leave the dynamics of multi-model interaction ungoverned. These mechanisms assume a dyadic setting: one model responding to one user under stable oversight. Yet research and industrial development are rapidly shifting toward LLM-to-LLM ecosystems, where outputs are recursively reused as inputs across chains of agents. In such systems, local compliance can aggregate into collective failure even when every model is individually aligned. We propose a conceptual transition from model-level safety to system-level safety, introducing the framework of the Emergent Systemic Risk Horizon (ESRH) to formalize how instability arises from interaction structure rather than from isolated misbehavior. The paper contributes (i) a theoretical account of collective risk in interacting LLMs, (ii) a taxonomy connecting micro, meso, and macro-level failure modes, and (iii) a design proposal for InstitutionalAI, an architecture for embedding adaptive oversight within multi-agent systems.

Valeria Cesaroni, Eleonora Pasqua, Piercosma Bisconti et al.

AI-based technologies have significant potential to enhance inclusive education and clinical-rehabilitative contexts for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. AI can enhance learning experiences, empower students, and support both teachers and rehabilitators. However, their usage presents challenges that require a systemic-ecological vision, ethical considerations, and participatory research. Therefore, research and technological development must be rooted in a strong ethical-theoretical framework. The Capability Approach - a theoretical model of disability, human vulnerability, and inclusion - offers a more relevant perspective on functionality, effectiveness, and technological adequacy in inclusive learning environments. In this paper, we propose a participatory research strategy with different stakeholders through a case study on the ARTIS Project, which develops an AI-enriched interface to support children with text comprehension difficulties. Our research strategy integrates ethical, educational, clinical, and technological expertise in designing and implementing AI-based technologies for children's learning environments through focus groups and collaborative design sessions. We believe that this holistic approach to AI adoption in education can help bridge the gap between technological innovation and ethical responsibility.

Matteo Prandi, Vincenzo Suriani, Federico Pierucci et al.

The rapid advancement of General Purpose AI (GPAI) models necessitates robust evaluation frameworks, especially with emerging regulations like the EU AI Act and its associated Code of Practice (CoP). Current AI evaluation practices depend heavily on established benchmarks, but these tools were not designed to measure the systemic risks that are the focus of the new regulatory landscape. This research addresses the urgent need to quantify this "benchmark-regulation gap." We introduce Bench-2-CoP, a novel, systematic framework that uses validated LLM-as-judge analysis to map the coverage of 194,955 questions from widely-used benchmarks against the EU AI Act's taxonomy of model capabilities and propensities. Our findings reveal a profound misalignment: the evaluation ecosystem dedicates the vast majority of its focus to a narrow set of behavioral propensities. On average, benchmarks devote 61.6% of their regulatory-relevant questions to "Tendency to hallucinate" and 31.2% to "Lack of performance reliability", while critical functional capabilities are dangerously neglected. Crucially, capabilities central to loss-of-control scenarios, including evading human oversight, self-replication, and autonomous AI development, receive zero coverage in the entire benchmark corpus. This study provides the first comprehensive, quantitative analysis of this gap, demonstrating that current public benchmarks are insufficient, on their own, for providing the evidence of comprehensive risk assessment required for regulatory compliance and offering critical insights for the development of next-generation evaluation tools.