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How toxic is YOUR air? Terrifying charts reveal the towns and cities around the world with the worst air pollution

Daily Mail - Science & tech

The secret cult caves of polyamorous Mormon'prophet' with 85 wives are seen for first time Florida's housing market is tanking but the birthplace of Southern rock keeps its groove and defies the crash My war with Harry & Meghan, by PIERS MORGAN: What really happened, their absurd accusations, the brutal truth about post-royal life... and how I believe their royal racism lies helped kill off woke But experts warn the huge benefits come with risks... here's what it means for YOU I hung ICE agent effigies from the gallows in my yard. MAGA had a huge meltdown. They're going to lose their minds when they see what else I've done Vile Chicago woman filmed rubbing dog poop on Cybertruck emblazoned with Donald Trump's signature Taylor, your album should be'Life of a Callgirl'. KENNEDY's appalled take on Swift's new record... and its ultra-vivid sex shout outs for Travis the Sasquatch Fate of the four Scottish crime lords who terrorised Dubai: Gangsters thought they were'untouchable' after spree of executions and firebombings. Now we reveal hellhole jail, inhumane'toilet paper' punishment... and where they are now Olympic gold medalist forced to put Louisiana home up for sale as she'can't make a living' months after filing for divorce Tycoon who is cousin of former President George W. Bush expected to launch run for Maine governor Israel prepares to implement'first stage' of Trump's Gaza peace plan Cassie Ventura's attorney responds to Diddy sentencing as she's hailed by judge who jailed vile rapper The truth about Keith Urban's guitarist'other woman' Maggie Baugh revealed amid Nicole Kidman divorce How I look like this at 62. I've lost 5 stone fast, 20 years off my biological age and wear size 8... without weight-loss jabs.


Neural Combinatorial Optimization for Real-World Routing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are a class of NP-hard problems ubiquitous in several real-world logistics scenarios that pose significant challenges for optimization. Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has emerged as a promising alternative to classical approaches, as it can learn fast heuristics to solve VRPs. However, most research works in NCO for VRPs focus on simplified settings, which do not account for asymmetric distances and travel durations that cannot be derived by simple Euclidean distances and unrealistic data distributions, hindering real-world deployment. This work introduces RRNCO (Real Routing NCO) to bridge the gap of NCO between synthetic and real-world VRPs in the critical aspects of both data and modeling. First, we introduce a new, openly available dataset with real-world data containing a diverse dataset of locations, distances, and duration matrices from 100 cities, considering realistic settings with actual routing distances and durations obtained from Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM). Second, we propose a novel approach that efficiently processes both node and edge features through contextual gating, enabling the construction of more informed node embedding, and we finally incorporate an Adaptation Attention Free Module (AAFM) with neural adaptive bias mechanisms that effectively integrates not only distance matrices but also angular relationships between nodes, allowing our model to capture rich structural information. RRNCO achieves state-of-the-art results in real-world VRPs among NCO methods. We make our dataset and code publicly available at https://github.com/ai4co/real-routing-nco.


GIMMICK -- Globally Inclusive Multimodal Multitask Cultural Knowledge Benchmarking

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently gained attention due to their distinctive performance and broad applicability. While it has been previously shown that their efficacy in usage scenarios involving non-Western contexts falls short, existing studies are limited in scope, covering just a narrow range of cultures, focusing exclusively on a small number of cultural aspects, or evaluating a limited selection of models on a single task only. Towards globally inclusive LVLM research, we introduce GIMMICK, an extensive multimodal benchmark designed to assess a broad spectrum of cultural knowledge across 144 countries representing six global macro-regions. GIMMICK comprises six tasks built upon three new datasets that span 728 unique cultural events or facets on which we evaluated 20 LVLMs and 11 LLMs, including five proprietary and 26 open-weight models of all sizes. We systematically examine (1) regional cultural biases, (2) the influence of model size, (3) input modalities, and (4) external cues. Our analyses reveal strong biases toward Western cultures across models and tasks and highlight strong correlations between model size and performance, as well as the effectiveness of multimodal input and external geographic cues. We further find that models have more knowledge of tangible than intangible aspects (e.g., food vs. rituals) and that they excel in recognizing broad cultural origins but struggle with a more nuanced understanding.


Evaluating Inter-Column Logical Relationships in Synthetic Tabular Data Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To evaluate the fidelity of synthetic tabular data, numerous metrics have been proposed to assess accuracy and diversity, including both low-order statistics (e.g., Density Estimation and Correlation Score (Zhang et al., 2023), Average Coverage Scores (Zein & Urvoy, 2022)) and high-order statistics (e.g., α-Precision and β-Recall (Alaa et al., 2022)). However, these metrics operate at a high level and fail to evaluate whether synthetic data preserves logical relationships, such as hierarchical or semantic dependencies between features. This highlights the need for a more fine-grained, context-aware evaluation of multivariate dependencies. To address this, we propose three evaluation metrics: Hierarchical Consistency Score (HCS), Multivariate Dependency Index (MDI), and Distributional Similarity Index (DSI). To assess the effectiveness of these metrics in quantifying inter-column relationships, we select five representative tabular data generation methods from different categories for evaluation. Their performance is measured using both existing and our proposed metrics on a real-world dataset rich in logical consistency and dependency constraints. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed metrics and reveal the limitations of existing approaches in preserving logical relationships in synthetic tabular data. Additionally, we discuss potential pathways to better capture logical constraints within joint distributions, paying the way for future advancements in synthetic tabular data generation.


Risks of Cultural Erasure in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models are increasingly being integrated into applications that shape the production and discovery of societal knowledge such as search, online education, and travel planning. As a result, language models will shape how people learn about, perceive and interact with global cultures making it important to consider whose knowledge systems and perspectives are represented in models. Recognizing this importance, increasingly work in Machine Learning and NLP has focused on evaluating gaps in global cultural representational distribution within outputs. However, more work is needed on developing benchmarks for cross-cultural impacts of language models that stem from a nuanced sociologically-aware conceptualization of cultural impact or harm. We join this line of work arguing for the need of metricizable evaluations of language technologies that interrogate and account for historical power inequities and differential impacts of representation on global cultures, particularly for cultures already under-represented in the digital corpora. We look at two concepts of erasure: omission: where cultures are not represented at all and simplification i.e. when cultural complexity is erased by presenting one-dimensional views of a rich culture. The former focuses on whether something is represented, and the latter on how it is represented. We focus our analysis on two task contexts with the potential to influence global cultural production. First, we probe representations that a language model produces about different places around the world when asked to describe these contexts. Second, we analyze the cultures represented in the travel recommendations produced by a set of language model applications. Our study shows ways in which the NLP community and application developers can begin to operationalize complex socio-cultural considerations into standard evaluations and benchmarks.


Preventing Jailbreak Prompts as Malicious Tools for Cybercriminals: A Cyber Defense Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Jailbreak prompts pose a significant threat in AI and cybersecurity, as they are crafted to bypass ethical safeguards in large language models, potentially enabling misuse by cybercriminals. This paper analyzes jailbreak prompts from a cyber defense perspective, exploring techniques like prompt injection and context manipulation that allow harmful content generation, content filter evasion, and sensitive information extraction. We assess the impact of successful jailbreaks, from misinformation and automated social engineering to hazardous content creation, including bioweapons and explosives. To address these threats, we propose strategies involving advanced prompt analysis, dynamic safety protocols, and continuous model fine-tuning to strengthen AI resilience. Additionally, we highlight the need for collaboration among AI researchers, cybersecurity experts, and policymakers to set standards for protecting AI systems. Through case studies, we illustrate these cyber defense approaches, promoting responsible AI practices to maintain system integrity and public trust. \textbf{\color{red}Warning: This paper contains content which the reader may find offensive.}


A Systematic Review of Machine Learning in Sports Betting: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The sports betting industry has experienced rapid growth, driven largely by technological advancements and the proliferation of online platforms. Machine learning (ML) has played a pivotal role in the transformation of this sector by enabling more accurate predictions, dynamic odds-setting, and enhanced risk management for both bookmakers and bettors. This systematic review explores various ML techniques, including support vector machines, random forests, and neural networks, as applied in different sports such as soccer, basketball, tennis, and cricket. These models utilize historical data, in-game statistics, and real-time information to optimize betting strategies and identify value bets, ultimately improving profitability. For bookmakers, ML facilitates dynamic odds adjustment and effective risk management, while bettors leverage data-driven insights to exploit market inefficiencies. This review also underscores the role of ML in fraud detection, where anomaly detection models are used to identify suspicious betting patterns. Despite these advancements, challenges such as data quality, real-time decision-making, and the inherent unpredictability of sports outcomes remain. Ethical concerns related to transparency and fairness are also of significant importance. Future research should focus on developing adaptive models that integrate multimodal data and manage risk in a manner akin to financial portfolios. This review provides a comprehensive examination of the current applications of ML in sports betting, and highlights both the potential and the limitations of these technologies.


RS-FME-SwinT: A Novel Feature Map Enhancement Framework Integrating Customized SwinT with Residual and Spatial CNN for Monkeypox Diagnosis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Monkeypox (MPox) has emerged as a significant global concern, with cases steadily increasing daily. Conventional detection methods, including polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and manual examination, exhibit challenges of low sensitivity, high cost, and substantial workload. Therefore, deep learning offers an automated solution; however, the datasets include data scarcity, texture, contrast, inter-intra class variability, and similarities with other skin infectious diseases. In this regard, a novel hybrid approach is proposed that integrates the learning capacity of Residual Learning and Spatial Exploitation Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with a customized Swin Transformer (RS-FME-SwinT) to capture multi-scale global and local correlated features for MPox diagnosis. The proposed RS-FME-SwinT technique employs a transfer learning-based feature map enhancement (FME) technique, integrating the customized SwinT for global information capture, residual blocks for texture extraction, and spatial blocks for local contrast variations. Moreover, incorporating new inverse residual blocks within the proposed SwinT effectively captures local patterns and mitigates vanishing gradients. The proposed RS-FME-SwinT has strong learning potential of diverse features that systematically reduce intra-class MPox variation and enable precise discrimination from other skin diseases. Finally, the proposed RS-FME-SwinT is a holdout cross-validated on a diverse MPox dataset and achieved outperformance on state-of-the-art CNNs and ViTs. The proposed RS-FME-SwinT demonstrates commendable results of an accuracy of 97.80%, sensitivity of 96.82%, precision of 98.06%, and an F-score of 97.44% in MPox detection. The RS-FME-SwinT could be a valuable tool for healthcare practitioners, enabling prompt and accurate MPox diagnosis and contributing significantly to mitigation efforts.