Red Arrows pay tribute to Spitfire crash pilot 2 hours agoEleanor Maslin,BBC NewsShareMODSqn Ldr Mark Long was described as a "passionate aviator" in a tribute by the RAF The Red Arrows have shared their "heartfelt condolences" after the death of a pilot when his Spitfire crashed into a Lincolnshire field. Emergency crews were called shortly before 13:20 BST on 25 May to the site near RAF Coningsby where Sqn Ldr Mark Long crashed. Red Arrows team leader Sqn Ldr Jon Bond said he and fellow pilots were supporting Sqn Ldr Long's family "as much as we can". The display team is getting ready to start its 60th anniversary season after returning from winter training in Greece on Saturday.Sqn Ldr Jon Bond said "things can change quickly" when flying The RAF said a "comprehensive investigation" was now under way to determine the cause of the Spitfire crash. Speaking to BBC Radio Lincolnshire, Sqn Ldr Bond said: "Awful news to come back to on Saturday. "Our absolute heartfelt condolences go to Mark's family, all at the BBMF (Battle of Britain Memorial Flight) and all at RAF Coningsby.

Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we learn about causality and natural language, find out about the grassroots initiative AfriClimate AI, and discuss what responsible and trustworthy AI really means. In a series of interviews, we're chatting to some of the AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium participants to find out more about their research. We caught up with Salena Torres Ashton and found out about her work focusing on causality and natural language. Salena was a professional genealogist and historian for 25 years before deciding to return to University and study for a PhD.

The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI's influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI's impact on science and medicine. The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on artificial intelligence. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including the The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places. This year's edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.

This work aims toward an application of natural language processing (NLP) technology for automatic verification of causal graphs using text sources. A causal graph is often derived from unsupervised causal discovery methods and requires manual evaluation from human experts. NLP technologies, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BERT and ChatGPT, can potentially be used to verify the resulted causal graph by predicting if causal relation can be observed between node pairs based on the textual context. In this work, we compare the performance of two types of NLP models: (1) Pre-trained language models fine-tuned for causal relation classification task and, (2) prompt-based LLMs. Contrasted to previous studies where prompt-based LLMs work relatively well over a set of diverse tasks, preliminary experiments on biomedical and open-domain datasets suggest that the fine-tuned models far outperform the prompt-based LLMs, up to 20.5 points improvement of F1 score. We shared the code and the pre-processed datasets in our repository.

Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is crucial for understanding sentiment nuances in text, especially across diverse languages and cultures. This paper introduces a novel Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based model tailored for aspect and polarity classification in Hausa movie reviews, an underrepresented language in sentiment analysis research. A comprehensive Hausa ABSA dataset is created, filling a significant gap in resource availability. The dataset, preprocessed using sci-kit-learn for TF-IDF transformation, includes manually annotated aspect-level feature ontology words and sentiment polarity assignments. The proposed model combines CNNs with attention mechanisms for aspect-word prediction, leveraging contextual information and sentiment polarities. With 91% accuracy on aspect term extraction and 92% on sentiment polarity classification, the model outperforms traditional machine models, offering insights into specific aspects and sentiments. This study advances ABSA research, particularly in underrepresented languages, with implications for cross-cultural linguistic research.

Landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) is crucial for identifying high-risk areas and informing prevention strategies. This study investigates the interpretability of statistical, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) models in predicting landslide susceptibility. This is achieved by incorporating various relevant interpretation methods and two types of input factors: a comprehensive set of 19 contributing factors that are statistically relevant to landslides, as well as a dedicated set of 9 triggering factors directly associated with triggering landslides. Given that model performance is a crucial metric in LSM, our investigations into interpretability naturally involve assessing and comparing LSM accuracy across different models considered. In our investigation, the convolutional neural network model achieved the highest accuracy (0.8447 with 19 factors; 0.8048 with 9 factors), while Extreme Gradient Boosting and Support Vector Machine also demonstrated strong predictive capabilities, outperforming conventional statistical models. These findings indicate that DL and sophisticated ML algorithms can effectively capture the complex relationships between input factors and landslide occurrence. However, the interpretability of predictions varied among different models, particularly when using the broader set of 19 contributing factors. Explanation methods like SHAP, LIME, and DeepLIFT also led to variations in interpretation results. Using a comprehensive set of 19 contributing factors improved prediction accuracy but introduced complexities and inconsistency in model interpretations. Focusing on a dedicated set of 9 triggering factors sacrificed some predictive power but enhanced interpretability, as evidenced by more consistent key factors identified across various models and alignment with the findings of field investigation reports....

Humans rely on strong inductive biases to learn from few examples and abstract useful information from sensory data. Instilling such biases in machine learning models has been shown to improve their performance on various benchmarks including few-shot learning, robustness, and alignment. However, finding effective training procedures to achieve that goal can be challenging as psychologically-rich training data such as human similarity judgments are expensive to scale, and Bayesian models of human inductive biases are often intractable for complex, realistic domains. Here, we address this challenge by introducing a Bayesian notion of generative similarity whereby two datapoints are considered similar if they are likely to have been sampled from the same distribution. This measure can be applied to complex generative processes, including probabilistic programs. We show that generative similarity can be used to define a contrastive learning objective even when its exact form is intractable, enabling learning of spatial embeddings that express specific inductive biases. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how it can be used to capture human inductive biases for geometric shapes, and to better distinguish different abstract drawing styles that are parameterized by probabilistic programs.

In many applications, we desire neural networks to exhibit invariance or equivariance to certain groups due to symmetries inherent in the data. Recently, frame-averaging methods emerged to be a unified framework for attaining symmetries efficiently by averaging over input-dependent subsets of the group, i.e., frames. What we currently lack is a principled understanding of the design of frames. In this work, we introduce a canonization perspective that provides an essential and complete view of the design of frames. Canonization is a classic approach for attaining invariance by mapping inputs to their canonical forms. We show that there exists an inherent connection between frames and canonical forms. Leveraging this connection, we can efficiently compare the complexity of frames as well as determine the optimality of certain frames. Guided by this principle, we design novel frames for eigenvectors that are strictly superior to existing methods -- some are even optimal -- both theoretically and empirically. The reduction to the canonization perspective further uncovers equivalences between previous methods. These observations suggest that canonization provides a fundamental understanding of existing frame-averaging methods and unifies existing equivariant and invariant learning methods.

In cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) analysis, simultaneous myocardial segmentation and T2 quantification are crucial for assessing myocardial pathologies. Existing methods often address these tasks separately, limiting their synergistic potential. To address this, we propose SQNet, a dual-task network integrating Transformer and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) components. SQNet features a T2-refine fusion decoder for quantitative analysis, leveraging global features from the Transformer, and a segmentation decoder with multiple local region supervision for enhanced accuracy. A tight coupling module aligns and fuses CNN and Transformer branch features, enabling SQNet to focus on myocardium regions. Evaluation on healthy controls (HC) and acute myocardial infarction patients (AMI) demonstrates superior segmentation dice scores (89.3/89.2) compared to state-of-the-art methods (87.7/87.9). T2 quantification yields strong linear correlations (Pearson coefficients: 0.84/0.93) with label values for HC/AMI, indicating accurate mapping. Radiologist evaluations confirm SQNet's superior image quality scores (4.60/4.58 for segmentation, 4.32/4.42 for T2 quantification) over state-of-the-art methods (4.50/4.44 for segmentation, 3.59/4.37 for T2 quantification). SQNet thus offers accurate simultaneous segmentation and quantification, enhancing cardiac disease diagnosis, such as AMI.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal tasks like visual question answering or image captioning. However, inconsistencies between the visual information and the generated text, a phenomenon referred to as hallucinations, remain an unsolved problem with regard to the trustworthiness of LVLMs. To address this problem, recent works proposed to incorporate computationally costly Large (Vision) Language Models in order to detect hallucinations on a sentence- or subsentence-level. In this work, we introduce MetaToken, a lightweight binary classifier to detect hallucinations on the token-level at negligible cost. Based on a statistical analysis, we reveal key factors of hallucinations in LVLMs which have been overseen in previous works. MetaToken can be applied to any open-source LVLM without any knowledge about ground truth data providing a reliable detection of hallucinations. We evaluate our method on four state-of-the-art LVLMs demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.