The widespread dissemination of toxic online posts is increasingly damaging to society. However, research on detecting toxic language in Chinese has lagged significantly. Existing datasets lack fine-grained annotation of toxic types and expressions, and ignore the samples with indirect toxicity. In addition, it is crucial to introduce lexical knowledge to detect the toxicity of posts, which has been a challenge for researchers. In this paper, we facilitate the fine-grained detection of Chinese toxic language. First, we built Monitor Toxic Frame, a hierarchical taxonomy to analyze toxic types and expressions. Then, a fine-grained dataset ToxiCN is presented, including both direct and indirect toxic samples. We also build an insult lexicon containing implicit profanity and propose Toxic Knowledge Enhancement (TKE) as a benchmark, incorporating the lexical feature to detect toxic language. In the experimental stage, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TKE. After that, a systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of the findings is given.

Integrating renewable energy sources into the power grid is becoming increasingly important as the world moves towards a more sustainable energy future in line with SDG 7. However, the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources can make it challenging to manage the power grid and ensure a stable supply of electricity, which is crucial for achieving SDG 9. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach for predicting energy demand in a smart power grid, which can improve the integration of renewable energy sources by providing accurate predictions of energy demand. Our approach aligns with SDG 13 on climate action, enabling more efficient management of renewable energy resources. We use long short-term memory networks, well-suited for time series data, to capture complex patterns and dependencies in energy demand data. The proposed approach is evaluated using four historical short-term energy demand data datasets from different energy distribution companies, including American Electric Power, Commonwealth Edison, Dayton Power and Light, and Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection. The proposed model is also compared with three other state-of-the-art forecasting algorithms: Facebook Prophet, Support Vector Regression, and Random Forest Regression. The experimental results show that the proposed REDf model can accurately predict energy demand with a mean absolute error of 1.4%, indicating its potential to enhance the stability and efficiency of the power grid and contribute to achieving SDGs 7, 9, and 13. The proposed model also has the potential to manage the integration of renewable energy sources in an effective manner.

KIGALI, Rwanda--Amid growing talk of the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, more than 2,000 researchers and engineers from around the world gathered in Rwanda this week to debate contrasting visions for the technology's future. One vision is to build ever-more-powerful systems such as ChatGPT that aim to exceed human intelligence to boost worker productivity and economic growth. The other is to create more-targeted, small-scale AI solutions to local and global challenges, including tackling climate change, improving healthcare and preserving biodiversity.

SINGAPORE – Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his Singaporean counterpart, Lee Hsien Loong, have reaffirmed their commitment to uphold the rules-based international order amid Russia's aggression against Ukraine and China's growing military and economic clout. During talks Friday at Singapore's Changi Airport following a six-day visit to Africa, Kishida told Lee that negotiations on a deal that would allow the transfer of defense equipment and technology between the two countries are making progress, according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry. "We want to strengthen security and defense cooperation," Kishida was quoted as saying, while also calling for deepening cooperation in areas such as start-ups and building resilient supply chains. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites.

Boolean MaxSAT, as well as generalized formulations such as Min-MaxSAT and Max-hybrid-SAT, are fundamental optimization problems in Boolean reasoning. Existing methods for MaxSAT have been successful in solving benchmarks in CNF format. They lack, however, the ability to handle 1) (non-CNF) hybrid constraints, such as XORs and 2) generalized MaxSAT problems natively. To address this issue, we propose a novel dynamic-programming approach for solving generalized MaxSAT problems with hybrid constraints -- called \emph{Dynamic-Programming-MaxSAT} or DPMS for short -- based on Algebraic Decision Diagrams (ADDs). With the power of ADDs and the (graded) project-join-tree builder, our versatile framework admits many generalizations of CNF-MaxSAT, such as MaxSAT, Min-MaxSAT, and MinSAT with hybrid constraints. Moreover, DPMS scales provably well on instances with low width. Empirical results indicate that DPMS is able to solve certain problems quickly, where other algorithms based on various techniques all fail. Hence, DPMS is a promising framework and opens a new line of research that invites more investigation in the future.

Privacy-preserving instance encoding aims to encode raw data as feature vectors without revealing their privacy-sensitive information. When designed properly, these encodings can be used for downstream ML applications such as training and inference with limited privacy risk. However, the vast majority of existing instance encoding schemes are based on heuristics and their privacy-preserving properties are only validated empirically against a limited set of attacks. In this paper, we propose a theoretically-principled measure for the privacy of instance encoding based on Fisher information. We show that our privacy measure is intuitive, easily applicable, and can be used to bound the invertibility of encodings both theoretically and empirically.

ELECTRA, the generator-discriminator pre-training framework, has achieved impressive semantic construction capability among various downstream tasks. Despite the convincing performance, ELECTRA still faces the challenges of monotonous training and deficient interaction. Generator with only masked language modeling (MLM) leads to biased learning and label imbalance for discriminator, decreasing learning efficiency; no explicit feedback loop from discriminator to generator results in the chasm between these two components, underutilizing the course learning. In this study, a multi-perspective course learning (MCL) method is proposed to fetch a many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training, and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. Concretely, three self-supervision courses are designed to alleviate inherent flaws of MLM and balance the label in a multi-perspective way. Besides, two self-correction courses are proposed to bridge the chasm between the two encoders by creating a "correction notebook" for secondary-supervision. Moreover, a course soups trial is conducted to solve the "tug-of-war" dynamics problem of MCL, evolving a stronger pre-trained model. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA's average performance by 2.8% and 3.2% absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks, and overshadows recent advanced ELECTRA-style models under the same settings. The pre-trained MCL model is available at https://huggingface.co/McmanusChen/MCL-base.

We consider a K-armed bandit problem in general graphs where agents are arbitrarily connected and each of them has limited memorizing capabilities and communication bandwidth. The goal is to let each of the agents eventually learn the best arm. It is assumed in these studies that the communication graph should be complete or well-structured, whereas such an assumption is not always valid in practice. Furthermore, limited memorization and communication bandwidth also restrict the collaborations of the agents, since the agents memorize and communicate very few experiences. Additionally, an agent may be corrupted to share falsified experiences to its peers, while the resource limit in terms of memorization and communication may considerably restrict the reliability of the learning process. To address the above issues, we propose a three-staged collaborative learning algorithm. In each step, the agents share their latest experiences with each other through light-weight random walks in a general communication graph, and then make decisions on which arms to pull according to the recommendations received from their peers. The agents finally update their adoptions (i.e., preferences to the arms) based on the reward obtained by pulling the arms. Our theoretical analysis shows that, when there are a sufficient number of agents participating in the collaborative learning process, all the agents eventually learn the best arm with high probability, even with limited memorizing capabilities and light-weight communications. We also reveal in our theoretical analysis the upper bound on the number of corrupted agents our algorithm can tolerate. The efficacy of our proposed three-staged collaborative learning algorithm is finally verified by extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) encompasses a range of techniques and procedures aimed at elucidating the decision-making processes of AI models. While XAI is valuable in understanding the reasoning behind AI models, the data used for such revelations poses potential security and privacy vulnerabilities. Existing literature has identified privacy risks targeting machine learning models, including membership inference, model inversion, and model extraction attacks. Depending on the settings and parties involved, such attacks may target either the model itself or the training data used to create the model. We have identified that tools providing XAI can particularly increase the vulnerability of model extraction attacks, which can be a significant issue when the owner of an AI model prefers to provide only black-box access rather than sharing the model parameters and architecture with other parties. To explore this privacy risk, we propose AUTOLYCUS, a model extraction attack that leverages the explanations provided by popular explainable AI tools. We particularly focus on white-box machine learning (ML) models such as decision trees and logistic regression models. We have evaluated the performance of AUTOLYCUS on 5 machine learning datasets, in terms of the surrogate model's accuracy and its similarity to the target model. We observe that the proposed attack is highly effective; it requires up to 60x fewer queries to the target model compared to the state-of-the-art attack, while providing comparable accuracy and similarity. We first validate the performance of the proposed algorithm on decision trees, and then show its performance on logistic regression models as an indicator that the proposed algorithm performs well on white-box ML models in general. Finally, we show that the existing countermeasures remain ineffective for the proposed attack.

Answering complex queries on knowledge graphs is important but particularly challenging because of the data incompleteness. Query embedding methods address this issue by learning-based models and simulating logical reasoning with set operators. Previous works focus on specific forms of embeddings, but scoring functions between embeddings are underexplored. In contrast to existing scoring functions motivated by local comparison or global transport, this work investigates the local and global trade-off with unbalanced optimal transport theory. Specifically, we embed sets as bounded measures in $\real$ endowed with a scoring function motivated by the Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao metric. Such a design also facilitates closed-form set operators in the embedding space. Moreover, we introduce a convolution-based algorithm for linear time computation and a block-diagonal kernel to enforce the trade-off. Results show that WFRE can outperform existing query embedding methods on standard datasets, evaluation sets with combinatorially complex queries, and hierarchical knowledge graphs. Ablation study shows that finding a better local and global trade-off is essential for performance improvement.