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The tech bros might show more humility in Delhi – but will they make AI any safer?

BBC News

The tech bros might show more humility in Delhi - but will they make AI any safer? Those who shout the loudest about artificial intelligence tend to be in the West, notably the US and Europe. So it's significant that a gathering of powerful leaders is being held in the Global South, a region of the world that runs the risk of being left behind in the AI race. Tech bosses, politicians, scientists, academics and campaigners are meeting at the AI Impact Summit in India this week for top-level discussions about what the world should be doing to try to marshal the AI revolution in the right direction. At last year's AI Action Summit, as it was then known, an ugly power struggle broke out between some Western countries over who should be in charge.




6d0f9c415e2d779c78f32b74668e9d02-Paper-Datasets_and_Benchmarks_Track.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Fact-checking is extensively studied in the context of misinformation and disinformation, addressing objective inaccuracies. However, a softer form of misinformation involves responses that are factually correct but lack certain features such as clarity and relevance. This challenge is prevalent in formal Question-Answer (QA) settings such as press conferences in finance, politics, sports, and other domains, where subjective answers can obscure transparency. Despite this, there is a lack of manually annotated datasets for subjective features across multiple dimensions. To address this gap, we introduce SubjECTive-QA, a human annotated dataset on Earnings Call Transcripts' (ECTs) QA sessions as the answers given by company representatives are often open to subjective interpretations and scrutiny. The dataset includes 49, 446 annotations for long-form QA pairs across six features: Assertive, Cautious, Optimistic, Specific, Clear, and Relevant . These features are carefully selected to encompass the key attributes that reflect the tone of the answers provided during QA sessions across different domains. Our findings are that the best-performing Pre-trained Language Model (PLM), RoBERTa-base, has similar weighted F1 scores to Llama-3-70b-Chat on features with lower subjectivity, such as Relevant and Clear, with a mean difference of 2 .


OSIL: Learning Offline Safe Imitation Policies with Safety Inferred from Non-preferred Trajectories

Burnwal, Returaj, Bhatt, Nirav Pravinbhai, Ravindran, Balaraman

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This work addresses the problem of offline safe imitation learning (IL), where the goal is to learn safe and reward-maximizing policies from demonstrations that do not have per-timestep safety cost or reward information. In many real-world domains, online learning in the environment can be risky, and specifying accurate safety costs can be difficult. However, it is often feasible to collect trajectories that reflect undesirable or unsafe behavior, implicitly conveying what the agent should avoid. We refer to these as non-preferred trajectories. We propose a novel offline safe IL algorithm, OSIL, that infers safety from non-preferred demonstrations. We formulate safe policy learning as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). Instead of relying on explicit safety cost and reward annotations, OSIL reformulates the CMDP problem by deriving a lower bound on reward maximizing objective and learning a cost model that estimates the likelihood of non-preferred behavior. Our approach allows agents to learn safe and reward-maximizing behavior entirely from offline demonstrations. We empirically demonstrate that our approach can learn safer policies that satisfy cost constraints without degrading the reward performance, thus outperforming several baselines.



offbetweenSpatial

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural network (NN) models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on several image tasks overthelastfewyears.



Deep Recurrent Optimal Stopping

Neural Information Processing Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving Markovian optimal stopping problems. However, a ready extension of DNN-based methods to non-Markovian settings requires significant state and parameter space expansion, manifesting the curse of dimensionality.


KAN-AFT: An Interpretable Nonlinear Survival Model Integrating Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks with Accelerated Failure Time Analysis

Jose, Mebin, Francis, Jisha, Kattumannil, Sudheesh Kumar

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Survival analysis relies fundamentally on the semi-parametric Cox Proportional Hazards (CoxPH) model and the parametric Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model. CoxPH assumes constant hazard ratios, often failing to capture real-world dynamics, while traditional AFT models are limited by rigid distributional assumptions. Although deep learning models like DeepAFT address these constraints by improving predictive accuracy and handling censoring, they inherit the significant challenge of black-box interpretability. The recent introduction of CoxKAN demonstrated the successful integration of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), a novel architecture that yields highly accurate and interpretable symbolic representations, within the CoxPH framework. Motivated by the interpretability gains of CoxKAN, we introduce KAN-AFT (Kolmogorov Arnold Network-based AFT), the first framework to apply KANs to the AFT model. Our primary contributions include: (i) a principled AFT-KAN formulation, (ii) robust optimization strategies for right-censored observations (e.g., Buckley-James and IPCW), and (iii) an interpretability pipeline that converts the learned spline functions into closed-form symbolic equations for survival time. Empirical results on multiple datasets confirm that KAN-AFT achieves performance comparable to or better than DeepAFT, while uniquely providing transparent, symbolic models of the survival process.