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Artificial Intelligence in Brazilian News: A Mixed-Methods Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The current surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) interest, reflected in heightened media coverage since 2009, has sparked significant debate on AI's implications for privacy, social justice, workers' rights, and democracy. The media plays a crucial role in shaping public perception and acceptance of AI technologies. However, research into how AI appears in media has primarily focused on anglophone contexts, leaving a gap in understanding how AI is represented globally. This study addresses this gap by analyzing 3,560 news articles from Brazilian media published between July 1, 2023, and February 29, 2024, from 13 popular online news outlets. Using Computational Grounded Theory (CGT), the study applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and Named-Entity Recognition to investigate the main topics in AI coverage and the entities represented. The findings reveal that Brazilian news coverage of AI is dominated by topics related to applications in the workplace and product launches, with limited space for societal concerns, which mostly focus on deepfakes and electoral integrity. The analysis also highlights a significant presence of industry-related entities, indicating a strong influence of corporate agendas in the country's news. This study underscores the need for a more critical and nuanced discussion of AI's societal impacts in Brazilian media.


Trustworthy XAI and Application

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

One of today's most significant and transformative technologies is the rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence (AI). Deined as a computer system that simulates human cognitive processes, AI is present in many aspects of our daily lives, from the self-driving cars on the road to the intelligence (AI) because some AI systems are so complex and opaque. With millions of parameters and layers, these system-deep neural networks in particular-make it difficult for humans to comprehend accountability, prejudice, and justice are raised by the opaqueness of its decision-making process. AI has a lot of potential, but it also comes with a lot of difficulties and moral dilemmas. In the context of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), trust is crucial as it ensures that AI systems behave consistently, fairly, and ethically. In the present article, we explore XAI, reliable XAI, and several practical uses for reliable XAI. Once more, we go over the three main components-transparency, explainability, and trustworthiness of XAI-that we determined are pertinent in this situation. We present an overview of recent scientific studies that employ trustworthy XAI in various application fields. In the end, trustworthiness is crucial for establishing and maintaining trust between humans and AI systems, facilitating the integration of AI systems into various applications and domains for the benefit of society.


Cooperative Multi-Agent Constrained Stochastic Linear Bandits

arXiv.org Machine Learning

--In this study, we explore a collaborative multi-agent stochastic linear bandit setting involving a network of N agents that communicate locally to minimize their collective regret while keeping their expected cost under a specified threshold τ . Each agent encounters a distinct linear bandit problem characterized by its own reward and cost parameters, i.e., local parameters. The goal of the agents is to determine the best overall action corresponding to the average of these parameters, or so-called global parameters. In each round, an agent is randomly chosen to select an action based on its current knowledge of the system. This chosen action is then executed by all agents, then they observe their individual rewards and costs. We propose a safe distributed upper confidence bound algorithm, so called MA-OPLB, and establish a high probability bound on its T -round regret. MA-OPLB utilizes an accelerated consensus method, where agents can compute an estimate of the average rewards and costs across the network by communicating the proper information with their neighbors. We also experimentally show the performance of our proposed algorithm in different network structures. Stochastic linear bandits have been widely researched in decision-making scenarios with a linear framework, such as recommendation systems or path routing [1], [2]. In these problems, at each time step, an agent selects an action and receives a corresponding random reward, which has an expected value that depends linearly on the context of the action. The agent's objective is to maximize the total reward over T rounds.


Data-driven rainfall prediction at a regional scale: a case study with Ghana

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With a warming planet, tropical regions are expected to experience the brunt of climate change, with more intense and more volatile rainfall events. Currently, state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) models are known to struggle to produce skillful rainfall forecasts in tropical regions of Africa. There is thus a pressing need for improved rainfall forecasting in these regions. Over the last decade or so, the increased availability of large-scale meteorological datasets and the development of powerful machine learning models have opened up new opportunities for data-driven weather forecasting. Focusing on Ghana in this study, we use these tools to develop two U-Net convolutional neural network (CNN) models, to predict 24h rainfall at 12h and 30h lead-time. The models were trained using data from the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, and the GPM-IMERG dataset. A special attention was paid to interpretability. We developed a novel statistical methodology that allowed us to probe the relative importance of the meteorological variables input in our model, offering useful insights into the factors that drive precipitation in the Ghana region. Empirically, we found that our 12h lead-time model has performances that match, and in some accounts are better than the 18h lead-time forecasts produced by the ECMWF (as available in the TIGGE dataset). We also found that combining our data-driven model with classical NWP further improves forecast accuracy.


Man guilty of army veteran hammer attack murder

BBC News

Man guilty of army veteran hammer attack murder Cumbria PoliceJack Crawley attempted to burn Paul Taylor's body, before burying him in woodland A man who attacked an army veteran he had met for sex and bludgeoned him with a hammer has been found guilty of murder. Paul Taylor, 57, from Annan, Dumfriesshire, went missing last October, with his remains found in a shallow grave in woodland near Carlisle, Cumbria, in May. Jack Crawley, 20, of Carlisle, was found guilty of attacking him and trying to burn his body following a trial at the city's crown court. He will be sentenced on Wednesday. Crawley was also found guilty of the attempted murder of a man in York, who he met on the gay dating app Grindr and also attacked with a hammer, while he was on bail for killing Mr Taylor.


Satellite monitoring uncovers progress but large disparities in doubling crop yields

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

High-resolution satellite-based crop yield mapping offers enormous promise for monitoring progress towards the SDGs. Across 15,000 villages in Rwanda we uncover areas that are on and off track to double productivity by 2030. This machine learning enabled analysis is used to design spatially explicit productivity targets that, if met, would simultaneously ensure national goals without leaving anyone behind.


SeaDAG: Semi-autoregressive Diffusion for Conditional Directed Acyclic Graph Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce SeaDAG, a semi-autoregressive diffusion model for conditional generation of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs). Considering their inherent layer-wise structure, we simulate layer-wise autoregressive generation by designing different denoising speed for different layers. Unlike conventional autoregressive generation that lacks a global graph structure view, our method maintains a complete graph structure at each diffusion step, enabling operations such as property control that require the full graph structure. Leveraging this capability, we evaluate the DAG properties during training by employing a graph property decoder. We explicitly train the model to learn graph conditioning with a condition loss, which enhances the diffusion model's capacity to generate graphs that are both realistic and aligned with specified properties. We evaluate our method on two representative conditional DAG generation tasks: (1) circuit generation from truth tables, where precise DAG structures are crucial for realizing circuit functionality, and (2) molecule generation based on quantum properties. Our approach demonstrates promising results, generating high-quality and realistic DAGs that closely align with given conditions.


Chatting with Bots: AI, Speech Acts, and the Edge of Assertion

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper addresses the question of whether large language model-powered chatbots are capable of assertion. According to what we call the Thesis of Chatbot Assertion (TCA), chatbots are the kinds of things that can assert, and at least some of the output produced by current-generation chatbots qualifies as assertion. We provide some motivation for TCA, arguing that it ought to be taken seriously and not simply dismissed. We also review recent objections to TCA, arguing that these objections are weighty. We thus confront the following dilemma: how can we do justice to both the considerations for and against TCA? We consider two influential responses to this dilemma - the first appeals to the notion of proxy-assertion; the second appeals to fictionalism - and argue that neither is satisfactory. Instead, reflecting on the ontogenesis of assertion, we argue that we need to make space for a category of proto-assertion. We then apply the category of proto-assertion to chatbots, arguing that treating chatbots as proto-assertors provides a satisfactory resolution to the dilemma of chatbot assertion.


Principles of semantic and functional efficiency in grammatical patterning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking words together via grammatical agreement. Grammars exhibit consistent organizational patterns across diverse languages, invariably rooted in a semantic foundation, a widely confirmed but still theoretically unexplained phenomenon. To explain the basis of universal grammatical patterns, we unify two fundamental properties of grammar, semantic encoding and agreement-based predictability, into a single information-theoretic objective under cognitive constraints. Our analyses reveal that grammatical organization provably inherits from perceptual attributes, but that grammars empirically prioritize functional goals, promoting efficient language processing over semantic encoding.


Rulebreakers Challenge: Revealing a Blind Spot in Large Language Models' Reasoning with Formal Logic

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Formal logic has long been applied to natural language reasoning, but this approach can sometimes lead to conclusions that, while logically entailed, are factually inconsistent with the premises or are not typically inferred by humans. This study introduces the concept of "rulebreakers", which refers to instances where logical entailment diverges from factually acceptable inference. We present RULEBREAKERS, a novel dataset for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to distinguish between rulebreakers and non-rulebreakers. Focusing on modus tollens and disjunctive syllogism, we assess six state-of-the-art LLMs using RULEBREAKERS, measuring their performance in terms of token-level exact accuracy and model confidence. Our findings reveal that while most models perform poorly to moderately in recognizing rulebreakers, they demonstrate a latent ability to distinguish rulebreakers when assessed by their confidence levels. Further analysis suggests that the failure to recognize rulebreakers is potentially associated with the models' world knowledge and their attention distribution patterns. This research highlights the limitation of LLMs' reasoning capabilities, and contributes to the ongoing discussion on reasoning in LLMs.