John E. Derrick Speaks at the AAAI Fall Symposium on Trustworthy Agentic Systems
Authentrics founder and CEO presents "Diff, Trace, and Patch" at TAS 2026 in Arlington.
Authentrics.ai founder and chief executive officer John E. Derrick is a speaker at the AAAI 2026 Fall Symposium on Trustworthy Agentic Systems (TAS 2026). The symposium meets November 5–7 at the Westin Arlington.
His invited talk, "Diff, Trace, and Patch: Independent Analysis, Monitoring, Control, and Correction of Fine-Tuned Open-Weight Models at the Checkpoint Level," starts from a simple idea: an agent is only as trustworthy as the model underneath it. Checking inputs and outputs shows part of the picture. Real assurance means looking inside the weights, tracing behavior back to training data, and correcting problems at the checkpoint, without a full retrain and without training data leaving the environment.
What the session covers
- Differencing model behavior across checkpoints, and tracing through weights and activations to attribute outputs to training data.
- Targeted checkpoint patching to remove corrupted epochs, poisoned batches, or protected data, without rolling the model back.
- On-premise analysis so weights and training data stay in the customer's environment.
The conversation is for anyone working on AI safety, verification and validation, or model governance in defense and industry.
John presents "Diff, Trace, and Patch" at 11:00 a.m. on November 5 in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Ballroom E. The full program is on the TAS 2026 schedule, and the session summary is on the speakers page.
Come say hello at the symposium, or contact Authentrics for the session takeaways or a virtual discussion.
About Authentrics
Authentrics builds checkpoint-native tools for weight-level attribution, monitoring, and correction of mission-critical models. The company is based in Knoxville, Tennessee.
