Israeli missiles have hit a site in Iran, ABC News reported late on Thursday, citing a U.S. official, days after Iran launched a drone strike on Israel in response to an attack at the Iranian embassy in Syria. Iran's Fars news agency said an explosion was heard at an airport in the Iranian city of Isafahan, but the cause was not immediately known. Several Iranian nuclear sites are located in Isfahan province, including Natanz, the centerpiece of Iran's uranium enrichment program. Several flights were diverted over Iranian airspace, CNN reported. Over the weekend, Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles in a retaliatory strike after a suspected Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Syria.

We propose an approach for estimating the latent knowledge embedded inside large language models (LLMs). We leverage the in-context learning (ICL) abilities of LLMs to estimate the extent to which an LLM knows the facts stored in a knowledge base. Our knowledge estimator avoids reliability concerns with previous prompting-based methods, is both conceptually simpler and easier to apply, and we demonstrate that it can surface more of the latent knowledge embedded in LLMs. We also investigate how different design choices affect the performance of ICL-based knowledge estimation. Using the proposed estimator, we perform a large-scale evaluation of the factual knowledge of a variety of open source LLMs, like OPT, Pythia, Llama(2), Mistral, Gemma, etc. over a large set of relations and facts from the Wikidata knowledge base. We observe differences in the factual knowledge between different model families and models of different sizes, that some relations are consistently better known than others but that models differ in the precise facts they know, and differences in the knowledge of base models and their finetuned counterparts.

The safety and accuracy of robotic navigation hold paramount importance, especially in the realm of soft continuum robotics, where the limitations of traditional rigid sensors become evident. Encoders, piezoresistive, and potentiometer sensors often fail to integrate well with the flexible nature of these robots, adding unwanted bulk and rigidity. To overcome these hurdles, our study presents a new approach to shape sensing in soft continuum robots through the use of soft e-textile resistive sensors. This sensor, designed to flawlessly integrate with the robot's structure, utilizes a resistive material that adjusts its resistance in response to the robot's movements and deformations. This adjustment facilitates the capture of multidimensional force measurements across the soft sensor layers. A deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is employed to decode the sensor signals, enabling precise estimation of the robot's shape configuration based on the detailed data from the e-textile sensor. Our research investigates the efficacy of this e-textile sensor in determining the curvature parameters of soft continuum robots. The findings are encouraging, showing that the soft e-textile sensor not only matches but potentially exceeds the capabilities of traditional rigid sensors in terms of shape sensing and estimation. This advancement significantly boosts the safety and efficiency of robotic navigation systems.

In recent years, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown promising classification performance over Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) due to their self-attention mechanism. Many researchers have incorporated ViTs for Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification. HSIs are characterised by narrow contiguous spectral bands, providing rich spectral data. Although ViTs excel with sequential data, they cannot extract spectral-spatial information like CNNs. Furthermore, to have high classification performance, there should be a strong interaction between the HSI token and the class (CLS) token. To solve these issues, we propose a 3D-Convolution guided Spectral-Spatial Transformer (3D-ConvSST) for HSI classification that utilizes a 3D-Convolution Guided Residual Module (CGRM) in-between encoders to "fuse" the local spatial and spectral information and to enhance the feature propagation. Furthermore, we forego the class token and instead apply Global Average Pooling, which effectively encodes more discriminative and pertinent high-level features for classification. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three public HSI datasets to show the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art traditional, convolutional, and Transformer models. The code is available at https://github.com/ShyamVarahagiri/3D-ConvSST.

Higher education plays a critical role in driving an innovative economy by equipping students with knowledge and skills demanded by the workforce. While researchers and practitioners have developed data systems to track detailed occupational skills, such as those established by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), much less effort has been made to document skill development in higher education at a similar granularity. Here, we fill this gap by presenting a longitudinal dataset of skills inferred from over three million course syllabi taught at nearly three thousand U.S. higher education institutions. To construct this dataset, we apply natural language processing to extract from course descriptions detailed workplace activities (DWAs) used by the DOL to describe occupations. We then aggregate these DWAs to create skill profiles for institutions and academic majors. Our dataset offers a large-scale representation of college-educated workers and their role in the economy. To showcase the utility of this dataset, we use it to 1) compare the similarity of skills taught and skills in the workforce according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2) estimate gender differences in acquired skills based on enrollment data, 3) depict temporal trends in the skills taught in social science curricula, and 4) connect college majors' skill distinctiveness to salary differences of graduates. Overall, this dataset can enable new research on the source of skills in the context of workforce development and provide actionable insights for shaping the future of higher education to meet evolving labor demands especially in the face of new technologies.

The sim-to-real gap poses a significant challenge in RL-based multi-agent exploration due to scene quantization and action discretization. Existing platforms suffer from the inefficiency in sampling and the lack of diversity in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms across different scenarios, restraining their widespread applications. To fill these gaps, we propose MAexp, a generic platform for multi-agent exploration that integrates a broad range of state-of-the-art MARL algorithms and representative scenarios. Moreover, we employ point clouds to represent our exploration scenarios, leading to high-fidelity environment mapping and a sampling speed approximately 40 times faster than existing platforms. Furthermore, equipped with an attention-based Multi-Agent Target Generator and a Single-Agent Motion Planner, MAexp can work with arbitrary numbers of agents and accommodate various types of robots. Extensive experiments are conducted to establish the first benchmark featuring several high-performance MARL algorithms across typical scenarios for robots with continuous actions, which highlights the distinct strengths of each algorithm in different scenarios.

Quantum computers have the potential to outperform classical computers for some complex computational problems. However, current quantum computers (e.g., from IBM and Google) have inherent noise that results in errors in the outputs of quantum software executing on the quantum computers, affecting the reliability of quantum software development. The industry is increasingly interested in machine learning (ML)--based error mitigation techniques, given their scalability and practicality. However, existing ML-based techniques have limitations, such as only targeting specific noise types or specific quantum circuits. This paper proposes a practical ML-based approach, called Q-LEAR, with a novel feature set, to mitigate noise errors in quantum software outputs. We evaluated Q-LEAR on eight quantum computers and their corresponding noisy simulators, all from IBM, and compared Q-LEAR with a state-of-the-art ML-based approach taken as baseline. Results show that, compared to the baseline, Q-LEAR achieved a 25% average improvement in error mitigation on both real quantum computers and simulators. We also discuss the implications and practicality of Q-LEAR, which, we believe, is valuable for practitioners.

Numerous methods have been proposed for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers to detect faulty GNSS signals. One such fault detection and exclusion (FDE) method is based on the mathematical concept of Euclidean distance matrices (EDMs). This paper outlines a greedy approach that uses an improved Euclidean distance matrix-based fault detection and exclusion algorithm. The novel greedy EDM FDE method implements a new fault detection test statistic and fault exclusion strategy that drastically simplifies the complexity of the algorithm over previous work. To validate the novel greedy EDM FDE algorithm, we created a simulated dataset using receiver locations from around the globe. The simulated dataset allows us to verify our results on 2,601 different satellite geometries. Additionally, we tested the greedy EDM FDE algorithm using a real-world dataset from seven different android phones. Across both the simulated and real-world datasets, the Python implementation of the greedy EDM FDE algorithm is shown to be computed an order of magnitude more rapidly than a comparable greedy residual FDE method while obtaining similar fault exclusion accuracy. We provide discussion on the comparative time complexities of greedy EDM FDE, greedy residual FDE, and solution separation. We also explain potential modifications to greedy residual FDE that can be added to alter performance characteristics.

This paper investigates the relationship between law and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). While there is much discussion about the AI Act, for which the trilogue of the European Parliament, Council and Commission recently concluded, other areas of law seem underexplored. This paper focuses on European (and in part German) law, although with international concepts and regulations such as fiduciary plausibility checks, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and product safety and liability. Based on XAI-taxonomies, requirements for XAI-methods are derived from each of the legal bases, resulting in the conclusion that each legal basis requires different XAI properties and that the current state of the art does not fulfill these to full satisfaction, especially regarding the correctness (sometimes called fidelity) and confidence estimates of XAI-methods.

We audited large language models (LLMs) for their ability to create evidence-based and stylistic counter-arguments to posts from the Reddit ChangeMyView dataset. We benchmarked their rhetorical quality across a host of qualitative and quantitative metrics and then ultimately evaluated them on their persuasive abilities as compared to human counter-arguments. Our evaluation is based on Counterfire: a new dataset of 32,000 counter-arguments generated from large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5 Turbo and Koala and their fine-tuned variants, and PaLM 2, with varying prompts for evidence use and argumentative style. GPT-3.5 Turbo ranked highest in argument quality with strong paraphrasing and style adherence, particularly in `reciprocity' style arguments. However, the stylistic counter-arguments still fall short of human persuasive standards, where people also preferred reciprocal to evidence-based rebuttals. The findings suggest that a balance between evidentiality and stylistic elements is vital to a compelling counter-argument. We close with a discussion of future research directions and implications for evaluating LLM outputs.