Generative agents are rapidly advancing in sophistication, raising urgent questions about how they might coordinate when deployed in online ecosystems. This is particularly consequential in information operations (IOs), influence campaigns that aim to manipulate public opinion on social media. While traditional IOs have been orchestrated by human operators and relied on manually crafted tactics, agentic AI promises to make campaigns more automated, adaptive, and difficult to detect. This work presents the first systematic study of emergent coordination among generative agents in simulated IO campaigns. Using generative agent-based modeling, we instantiate IO and organic agents in a simulated environment and evaluate coordination across operational regimes, from simple goal alignment to team knowledge and collective decision-making. As operational regimes become more structured, IO networks become denser and more clustered, interactions more reciprocal and positive, narratives more homogeneous, amplification more synchronized, and hashtag adoption faster and more sustained. Remarkably, simply revealing to agents which other agents share their goals can produce coordination levels nearly equivalent to those achieved through explicit deliberation and collective voting. Overall, we show that generative agents, even without human guidance, can reproduce coordination strategies characteristic of real-world IOs, underscoring the societal risks posed by increasingly automated, self-organizing IOs.

How might reinforcement-learning based covert social influence operations (CSIOs) be run, given that the CSIO agent wants to maximize influence and minimize discoverability of malicious accounts? And how successful can they be, given that both social platform bot detectors and humans might report them to the social platform? To answer these questions, we propose RL_CSIO, a methodology based on reinforcement learning (RL) for running CSIOs. We ran 4 CSIOs with IRB-approval over a period of 5 days using a panel of 225 human subjects. We explore 8 research questions based on the data collected. The results show that RL_CSIO agents successfully trade off influence and discoverability - but in ways that are nuanced and unexpected.

The spread of misinformation and fake news on digital platforms poses significant societal challenges, underscoring the need for robust detection. Multi-task learning leverages relationships among disinformation-related tasks (e.g., stance detection, rumor classification) to enhance detection; however, it risks negative transfer , potentially degrading performance instead of achieving positive transfer . In this paper, we systematically investigate the mechanisms underlying positive and negative transfers across a comprehensive set of disinformation-related tasks, including Sentiment Analysis (SA), Fake News Detection (FND), Stance Detection (SD), and Topic Detection (TD). Specifically, we pioneer the use of explanations to uncover the differences between models trained under single-task and multi-task settings. Our results reveal instances of positive transfer across several task combinations, with multi-task learning yielding performance improvements of 3.26%, 6.57%, and 0.62% for SA, FND and TD tasks, respectively. Furthermore, when comparing explanations of single-task and multi-task models, we find that positive transfer refines the knowledge that can already be learnt in single-task settings by incorporating additional patterns from other tasks. Conversely, negative transfer significantly undermines models' knowledge to the extent that their explanations are equivalent to a random perturbation of the explanations generated by their single-task counterparts.

Geopolitical news provides vast amounts of information essential for understanding international relations and political events. However, organizing this information into a coherent, structured format poses challenges due to the complexity and dynamic nature of the domain. This paper introduces a scalable system leveraging Large Language Models to build continuously updated Knowledge Graphs from Italian geopolitical news. The system features a modular architecture, including a Collector Node for scalable article extraction, a Redis-based reliable queue to manage large-scale data ingestion, and a Named Entity Recognition/Relation Extraction Engine to standardize entity-relation triples. The framework addresses key challenges, such as continuous updating and hallucination mitigation, ensuring the reliability of the graph. Our evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in scalability, uniformity of extracted triples, and graph accuracy, making this architecture particularly suitable for real-time geopolitical analysis.

Legal Artificial Intelligence has emerged as an essential field, focusing on AI technologies that facilitate various legal tasks and alleviate the workload of legal professionals. Despite advancements in Legal Artificial Intelligence, there remains a critical gap in systems that can provide both comprehensive and contextually accurate retrieval tailored to the intricate structure of EU legislation. We propose EuropeanLawAdvisor, an efficient and user-friendly legal information retrieval system designed to deliver tailored responses to legal queries. This system utilizes open-source Large Language Models within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, facilitating precise and relevant information retrieval. The system employs a robust retrieval approach that integrates multi-match, k-nearest neighbors, hybrid methods, and TF-IDF search strategies across both complete documents and segmented text indexes, ensuring comprehensive retrieval for diverse query types. The implementation of the framework has demonstrated significant improvements in the accuracy and relevance of responses to EU legal queries, enhancing both the retrieval of relevant legal documents and the generation of precise responses. We show that EuropeanLawAdvisor, leveraging open-source models like Phi3-mini-3B and LLaMa-3-8B, achieves competitive Faithfulness and Relevance compared to GPT-4-Turbo. The performance gap narrows significantly in zero-shot scenarios, and our approach outperforms GPT-4-Turbo in the percentage of answered questions. We publicly release our code on GitHub: https://github.com/raffaele-russo/EuropeanLawAdvisor.

Deep learning, owing to its transformative influence across a myriad of sectors, has recently made its foray into the legal domain, instigated by the surge in digitization. Among the multitude of applications in this space, legal document classification emerges as a pivotal yet complex undertaking. Legal texts, characterized by unique domain-centric semantics and intricate linguistic patterns, necessitate precision-driven classification systems for numerous practical implications. This paper illuminates the challenges and opportunities in automating the classification of European Union (EU) legal documents, emphasizing the interrelationships among statutes and the hierarchical nature of legal references. In this context, we introduce a novel graph data modeling technique that adeptly marries content-centric indicators with the relational dynamics inherent among diverse legal documents. Central to our approach is a framework that melds text embeddings with graph neural networks for the classification of legal documents aligned with their subject-based directories. Empirical evaluations on the EU law dataset underline the efficacy of our model across varying granularities, from general thematic categories to intricate subtopics. This endeavor not only augments the comprehensibility and accessibility of EU jurisprudence but also holds significant implications across regulatory compliance, legal research, and policy formulation, underscoring the potential of deep learning in reshaping legal paradigms.