The United States and United Kingdom carried out more than a dozen strikes against Iranian-backed Houthi targets in Yemen on Saturday, with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, two U.S. officials told Fox News. The targets were hit successfully and include weapons storage facilities, and drone and missile launchers. The operation hit five Houthi-controlled locations in Yemen and is a response to the near-daily Houthi attacks involving Iranian drones and anti-ship ballistic missiles, a senior U.S. official said. The fourth round of American and British strikes came days after a British cargo ship was hit by a Houthi missile. In a joint statement, the U.S, U.K. and the other allied countries said: "In response to the Houthis' continued attacks against commercial and naval vessels transiting the Red Sea and surrounding waterways, today the militaries of the United States and United Kingdom, with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, conducted an additional round of strikes against several targets in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen."

The United States military has warned of an "environmental disaster" after an attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels on a cargo ship caused an oil slick in the Red Sea. The Iran-aligned group hit the United Kingdom-owned, Belize-flagged bulk carrier Rubymar on February 18 with multiple missiles. It was sailing through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, on its way to Bulgaria after leaving Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates. Extensive damage prompted the crew, all of whom are safe, to abandon the ship. US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed on Saturday that the ship was now "anchored but slowly taking on water", which it said has caused a 29-kilometre (18-mile) oil slick.

The recent advancements in small-size inference models facilitated AI deployment on the edge. However, the limited resource nature of edge devices poses new challenges especially for real-time applications. Deploying multiple inference models (or a single tunable model) varying in size and therefore accuracy and power consumption, in addition to an edge server inference model, can offer a dynamic system in which the allocation of inference models to inference jobs is performed according to the current resource conditions. Therefore, in this work, we tackle the problem of selectively allocating inference models to jobs or offloading them to the edge server to maximize inference accuracy under time and energy constraints. This problem is shown to be an instance of the unbounded multidimensional knapsack problem which is considered a strongly NP-hard problem. We propose a lightweight hybrid genetic algorithm (LGSTO) to solve this problem. We introduce a termination condition and neighborhood exploration techniques for faster evolution of populations. We compare LGSTO with the Naive and Dynamic programming solutions. In addition to classic genetic algorithms using different reproduction methods including NSGA-II, and finally we compare to other evolutionary methods such as Particle swarm optimization (PSO) and Ant colony optimization (ACO). Experiment results show that LGSTO performed 3 times faster than the fastest comparable schemes while producing schedules with higher average accuracy.

Online memes have emerged as powerful digital cultural artifacts in the age of social media, offering not only humor but also platforms for political discourse, social critique, and information dissemination. Their extensive reach and influence in shaping online communities' sentiments make them invaluable tools for campaigning and promoting ideologies. Despite the development of several meme-generation tools, there remains a gap in their systematic evaluation and their ability to effectively communicate ideologies. Addressing this, we introduce MemeCraft, an innovative meme generator that leverages large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) to produce memes advocating specific social movements. MemeCraft presents an end-to-end pipeline, transforming user prompts into compelling multimodal memes without manual intervention. Conscious of the misuse potential in creating divisive content, an intrinsic safety mechanism is embedded to curb hateful meme production.

In this work, we proposed a new dynamic distributed planning approach that is able to take into account the changes that the agent introduces on his set of actions to be planned in order to take into account the changes that occur in his environment. Our approach fits into the context of distributed planning for distributed plans where each agent can produce its own plans. According to our approach the generation of the plans is based on the satisfaction of the constraints by the use of the genetic algorithms. Our approach is to generate, a new plan by each agent, whenever there is a change in its set of actions to plan. This in order to take into account the new actions introduced in its new plan. In this new plan, the agent takes, each time, as a new action set to plan all the old un-executed actions of the old plan and the new actions engendered by the changes and as a new initial state; the state in which the set of actions of the agent undergoes a change. In our work, we used a concrete case to illustrate and demonstrate the utility of our approach.

In recent years, the rapid development of high-precision map technology combined with artificial intelligence has ushered in a new development opportunity in the field of intelligent vehicles. High-precision map technology is an important guarantee for intelligent vehicles to achieve autonomous driving. However, due to the lack of research on high-precision map technology, it is difficult to rationally use this technology in the field of intelligent vehicles. Therefore, relevant researchers studied a fast and effective algorithm to generate high-precision GPS data from a large number of low-precision GPS trajectory data fusion, and generated several key data points to simplify the description of GPS trajectory, and realized the "crowdsourced update" model based on a large number of social vehicles for map data collection came into being. This kind of algorithm has the important significance to improve the data accuracy, reduce the measurement cost and reduce the data storage space. On this basis, this paper analyzes the implementation form of crowdsourcing map, so as to improve the various information data in the high-precision map according to the actual situation, and promote the high-precision map can be reasonably applied to the intelligent car.

Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset of platforms, leaving the question of how the models would perform on unseen platforms unexplored. Additionally, these works do not address non-detoxifiability, a phenomenon whereby the toxic text cannot be detoxified without altering the meaning. We propose GreenLLaMA, the first comprehensive end-to-end detoxification framework, which attempts to alleviate the aforementioned limitations. We first introduce a cross-platform pseudo-parallel corpus applying multi-step data processing and generation strategies leveraging ChatGPT. We then train a suite of detoxification models with our cross-platform corpus. We show that our detoxification models outperform the SoTA model trained with human-annotated parallel corpus. We further introduce explanation to promote transparency and trustworthiness. GreenLLaMA additionally offers a unique paraphrase detector especially dedicated for the detoxification task to tackle the non-detoxifiable cases. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-platform corpus and the robustness of GreenLLaMA against adversarial toxicity.

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. However, given their training on human (created) data, LLMs can inherit both societal biases against protected groups, as well as be subject to cognitive bias. Such human-like bias can impede fair and explainable decisions made with LLM assistance. Our work introduces BiasBuster, a framework designed to uncover, evaluate, and mitigate cognitive bias in LLMs, particularly in high-stakes decision-making tasks. Inspired by prior research in psychology and cognitive sciences, we develop a dataset containing 16,800 prompts to evaluate different cognitive biases (e.g., prompt-induced, sequential, inherent). We test various bias mitigation strategies, amidst proposing a novel method using LLMs to debias their own prompts. Our analysis provides a comprehensive picture on the presence and effects of cognitive bias across different commercial and open-source models. We demonstrate that our self-help debiasing effectively mitigate cognitive bias without having to manually craft examples for each bias type.

With the rising popularity of the internet and the widespread use of networks and information systems via the cloud and data centers, the privacy and security of individuals and organizations have become extremely crucial. In this perspective, encryption consolidates effective technologies that can effectively fulfill these requirements by protecting public information exchanges. To achieve these aims, the researchers used a wide assortment of encryption algorithms to accommodate the varied requirements of this field, as well as focusing on complex mathematical issues during their work to substantially complicate the encrypted communication mechanism. as much as possible to preserve personal information while significantly reducing the possibility of attacks. Depending on how complex and distinct the requirements established by these various applications are, the potential of trying to break them continues to occur, and systems for evaluating and verifying the cryptographic algorithms implemented continue to be necessary. The best approach to analyzing an encryption algorithm is to identify a practical and efficient technique to break it or to learn ways to detect and repair weak aspects in algorithms, which is known as cryptanalysis. Experts in cryptanalysis have discovered several methods for breaking the cipher, such as discovering a critical vulnerability in mathematical equations to derive the secret key or determining the plaintext from the ciphertext. There are various attacks against secure cryptographic algorithms in the literature, and the strategies and mathematical solutions widely employed empower cryptanalysts to demonstrate their findings, identify weaknesses, and diagnose maintenance failures in algorithms.

Privacy experts are sounding the alarm on a new satellite capable of spying on your every move that is set to launch in 2025. The satellite, created by startup company Albedo, is so high quality it can zoom in on people or license plates from space, raising concerns among expert that it will create a'big brother is always watching' scenario. Albedo claims the satellite won't have facial recognition software but doesn't mention that it will refrain from imaging people or protecting people's privacy. Albedo signed two separate million-dollar contracts with the U.S. Air Force and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center to help the government monitor potential threats to U.S. national security. Albedo claims the satellite won't have facial recognition software but doesn't mention that it will refrain from imaging people or protecting people's privacy.