U.K.'s Starmer escalates threats against X, calls Grok'shameful' U.K.'s prime minister escalated threats against Elon Musk's X, vowing to enforce a law that bans the sexualization of people's images without consent and calling such content generated by Grok disgusting and shameful. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer escalated his threats against Elon Musk's X on Monday, vowing to enforce a law that banned the sexualization of people's images without their consent and calling such content generated by Grok "disgusting and shameful." From this week, the government will enforce the offense established in last year's Data Act, which made the creation of nonconsensual intimate images illegal. Starmer told members of Parliament on Monday, "if X cannot control Grok, we will -- and we'll do it fast because if you profit from harm and abuse, you lose the right to self regulate." Starmer accused X of protecting "abusive users" instead of the women and children whose images have been exploited, describing it as a "total distortion of priorities."

In recent years, researchers have increasingly sought batteries as an efficient and cost-effective solution for energy storage and supply, owing to their high energy density, low cost, and environmental resilience. However, the issue of dendrite growth has emerged as a significant obstacle in battery development. Excessive dendrite growth during charging and discharging processes can lead to battery short-circuiting, degradation of electrochemical performance, reduced cycle life, and abnormal exothermic events. Consequently, understanding the dendrite growth process has become a key challenge for researchers. In this study, we investigated dendrite growth mechanisms in batteries using a combined machine learning approach, specifically a two-dimensional artificial convolutional neural network (CNN) model, along with computational methods. We developed two distinct computer models to predict dendrite growth in batteries. The CNN-1 model employs standard convolutional neural network techniques for dendritic growth prediction, while CNN-2 integrates additional physical parameters to enhance model robustness. Our results demonstrate that CNN-2 significantly enhances prediction accuracy, offering deeper insights into the impact of physical factors on dendritic growth. This improved model effectively captures the dynamic nature of dendrite formation, exhibiting high accuracy and sensitivity. These findings contribute to the advancement of safer and more reliable energy storage systems.

The problem of identifying to which of a given set of classes objects belong is ubiquitous, occurring in many research domains and application areas, including medical diagnosis, financial decision making, online commerce, and national security. But such assignments are rarely completely perfect, and classification errors occur. This means it is necessary to compare classification methods and algorithms to decide which is ``best'' for any particular problem. However, just as there are many different classification methods, so there are many different ways of measuring their performance. It is thus vital to choose a measure of performance which matches the aims of the research or application. This paper is a contribution to the growing literature on the relative merits of different performance measures. Its particular focus is the critical importance of matching the properties of the measure to the aims for which the classification is being made.

In recent years, the deterioration of artificial materials used in structures has become a serious social issue, increasing the importance of inspections. Non-destructive testing is gaining increased demand due to its capability to inspect for defects and deterioration in structures while preserving their functionality. Among these, Laser Ultrasonic Visualization Testing (LUVT) stands out because it allows the visualization of ultrasonic propagation. This makes it visually straightforward to detect defects, thereby enhancing inspection efficiency. With the increasing number of the deterioration structures, challenges such as a shortage of inspectors and increased workload in non-destructive testing have become more apparent. Efforts to address these challenges include exploring automated inspection using machine learning. However, the lack of anomalous data with defects poses a barrier to improving the accuracy of automated inspection through machine learning. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method for automated LUVT inspection using an anomaly detection approach with a diffusion model that can be trained solely on negative examples (defect-free data). We experimentally confirmed that our proposed method improves defect detection and localization compared to general object detection algorithms used previously.

Blocking is a critical step in entity resolution, and the emergence of neural network-based representation models has led to the development of dense blocking as a promising approach for exploring deep semantics in blocking. However, previous advanced self-supervised dense blocking approaches require domain-specific training on the target domain, which limits the benefits and rapid adaptation of these methods. To address this issue, we propose UniBlocker, a dense blocker that is pre-trained on a domain-independent, easily-obtainable tabular corpus using self-supervised contrastive learning. By conducting domain-independent pre-training, UniBlocker can be adapted to various downstream blocking scenarios without requiring domain-specific fine-tuning. To evaluate the universality of our entity blocker, we also construct a new benchmark covering a wide range of blocking tasks from multiple domains and scenarios. Our experiments show that the proposed UniBlocker, without any domain-specific learning, significantly outperforms previous self- and unsupervised dense blocking methods and is comparable and complementary to the state-of-the-art sparse blocking methods.

Deep graph generative modeling has gained enormous attraction in recent years due to its impressive ability to directly learn the underlying hidden graph distribution. Despite their initial success, these techniques, like much of the existing deep generative methods, require a large number of training samples to learn a good model. Unfortunately, large number of training samples may not always be available in scenarios such as drug discovery for rare diseases. At the same time, recent advances in few-shot learning have opened door to applications where available training data is limited. In this work, we introduce the hitherto unexplored paradigm of few-shot graph generative modeling. Towards this, we develop GSHOT, a meta-learning based framework for few-shot labeled graph generative modeling. GSHOT learns to transfer meta-knowledge from similar auxiliary graph datasets. Utilizing these prior experiences, GSHOT quickly adapts to an unseen graph dataset through self-paced fine-tuning. Through extensive experiments on datasets from diverse domains having limited training samples, we establish that GSHOT generates graphs of superior fidelity compared to existing baselines.

In recent years, laser ultrasonic visualization testing (LUVT) has attracted much attention because of its ability to efficiently perform non-contact ultrasonic non-destructive testing.Despite many success reports of deep learning based image analysis for widespread areas, attempts to apply deep learning to defect detection in LUVT images face the difficulty of preparing a large dataset of LUVT images that is too expensive to scale. To compensate for the scarcity of such training data, we propose a data augmentation method that generates artificial LUVT images by simulation and applies a style transfer to simulated LUVT images.The experimental results showed that the effectiveness of data augmentation based on the style-transformed simulated images improved the prediction performance of defects, rather than directly using the raw simulated images for data augmentation.

Integrating the brain structural and functional connectivity features is of great significance in both exploring brain science and analyzing cognitive impairment clinically. However, it remains a challenge to effectively fuse structural and functional features in exploring the brain network. In this paper, a novel brain structure-function fusing-representation learning (BSFL) model is proposed to effectively learn fused representation from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) analysis. Specifically, the decomposition-fusion framework is developed to first decompose the feature space into the union of the uniform and the unique spaces for each modality, and then adaptively fuse the decomposed features to learn MCI-related representation. Moreover, a knowledge-aware transformer module is designed to automatically capture local and global connectivity features throughout the brain. Also, a uniform-unique contrastive loss is further devised to make the decomposition more effective and enhance the complementarity of structural and functional features. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than other competitive methods in predicting and analyzing MCI. More importantly, the proposed model could be a potential tool for reconstructing unified brain networks and predicting abnormal connections during the degenerative processes in MCI.

Understanding users' intentions in e-commerce platforms requires commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we present FolkScope, an intention knowledge graph construction framework to reveal the structure of humans' minds about purchasing items. As commonsense knowledge is usually ineffable and not expressed explicitly, it is challenging to perform information extraction. Thus, we propose a new approach that leverages the generation power of large language models~(LLMs) and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the knowledge graph. LLMs first generate intention assertions via e-commerce-specific prompts to explain shopping behaviors, where the intention can be an open reason or a predicate falling into one of 18 categories aligning with ConceptNet, e.g., IsA, MadeOf, UsedFor, etc. Then we annotate plausibility and typicality labels of sampled intentions as training data in order to populate human judgments to all automatic generations. Last, to structurize the assertions, we propose pattern mining and conceptualization to form more condensed and abstract knowledge. Extensive evaluations and studies demonstrate that our constructed knowledge graph can well model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.

Although numerous clustering algorithms have been developed, many existing methods still leverage k-means technique to detect clusters of data points. However, the performance of k-means heavily depends on the estimation of centers of clusters, which is very difficult to achieve an optimal solution. Another major drawback is that it is sensitive to noise and outlier data. In this paper, from manifold learning perspective, we rethink k-means and present a new clustering algorithm which directly detects clusters of data without mean estimation. Specifically, we construct distance matrix between data points by Butterworth filter such that distance between any two data points in the same clusters equals to a small constant, while increasing the distance between other data pairs from different clusters. To well exploit the complementary information embedded in different views, we leverage the tensor Schatten p-norm regularization on the 3rd-order tensor which consists of indicator matrices of different views. Finally, an efficient alternating algorithm is derived to optimize our model. The constructed sequence was proved to converge to the stationary KKT point. Extensive experimental results indicate the superiority of our proposed method.