The increasing deployment of AI models in critical applications has exposed them to significant risks from adversarial attacks. While adversarial vulnerabilities in 2D vision models have been extensively studied, the threat landscape for 3D generative models, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), remains underexplored. This work introduces \textit{AdvIRL}, a novel framework for crafting adversarial NeRF models using Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (Instant-NGP) and Reinforcement Learning. Unlike prior methods, \textit{AdvIRL} generates adversarial noise that remains robust under diverse 3D transformations, including rotations and scaling, enabling effective black-box attacks in real-world scenarios. Our approach is validated across a wide range of scenes, from small objects (e.g., bananas) to large environments (e.g., lighthouses). Notably, targeted attacks achieved high-confidence misclassifications, such as labeling a banana as a slug and a truck as a cannon, demonstrating the practical risks posed by adversarial NeRFs. Beyond attacking, \textit{AdvIRL}-generated adversarial models can serve as adversarial training data to enhance the robustness of vision systems. The implementation of \textit{AdvIRL} is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/Tommy-Nguyen-cpu/AdvIRL/tree/MultiView-Clean}, ensuring reproducibility and facilitating future research.

This paper explores the concept of reflexive actuation, examining how robots may leverage both internal and external stimuli to trigger changes in the motion, performance, or physical characteristics of the robot, such as its size, shape, or configuration, and so on. These changes themselves may in turn be sequentially re-used as input to drive further adaptations. Drawing inspiration from biological systems, where reflexes are an essential component of the response to environmental changes, reflexive actuation is critical to enable robots to adapt to diverse situations and perform complex tasks. The underlying principles of reflexive actuation are analyzed, with examples provided from existing implementations such as contact-sensitive reflexive arms, physical counters, and their applications. The paper also outlines future directions and challenges for advancing this research area, emphasizing its significance in the development of adaptive, responsive robotic systems.

Preservation of the Nasca geoglyphs at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Peru is urgent as natural and human impact accelerates. More frequent weather extremes such as flashfloods threaten Nasca artifacts. We demonstrate that runoff models based on (sub-)meter scale, LiDAR-derived digital elevation data can highlight AI-detected geoglyphs that are in danger of erosion. We recommend measures of mitigation to protect the famous "lizard", "tree", and "hand" geoglyphs located close by, or even cut by the Pan-American Highway.

This paper presents a novel universal perturbation method for generating robust multi-view adversarial examples in 3D object recognition. Unlike conventional attacks limited to single views, our approach operates on multiple 2D images, offering a practical and scalable solution for enhancing model scalability and robustness. This generalizable method bridges the gap between 2D perturbations and 3D-like attack capabilities, making it suitable for real-world applications. Existing adversarial attacks may become ineffective when images undergo transformations like changes in lighting, camera position, or natural deformations. We address this challenge by crafting a single universal noise perturbation applicable to various object views. Experiments on diverse rendered 3D objects demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The universal perturbation successfully identified a single adversarial noise for each given set of 3D object renders from multiple poses and viewpoints. Compared to single-view attacks, our universal attacks lower classification confidence across multiple viewing angles, especially at low noise levels. A sample implementation is made available at https://github.com/memoatwit/UniversalPerturbation.

Large Language Model (LLM) based Generative AI systems have seen significant progress in recent years. Integrating a knowledge retrieval architecture allows for seamless integration of private data into publicly available Generative AI systems using pre-trained LLM without requiring additional model fine-tuning. Moreover, Retrieval-Centric Generation (RCG) approach, a promising future research direction that explicitly separates roles of LLMs and retrievers in context interpretation and knowledge memorization, potentially leads to more Figure 1: Retrieval-Centric Generation (RCG) approach efficient implementation. SimplyRetrieve is an presents an innovative concept that leverages the mutually open-source tool with the goal of providing beneficial interaction between LLMs and retrievers a localized, lightweight, and user-friendly interface for more efficient context interpretation and knowledge to these sophisticated advancements to memorization. Increased clarity in role-separation between the machine learning community. SimplyRetrieve context interpretation and knowledge memorization features a GUI and API based RCG platform, can potentially boost the performance of generative assisted by a Private Knowledge Base AI systems.

Scalar inferences (SI) are a signature example of how humans interpret language based on unspoken alternatives. While empirical studies have demonstrated that human SI rates are highly variable -- both within instances of a single scale, and across different scales -- there have been few proposals that quantitatively explain both cross- and within-scale variation. Furthermore, while it is generally assumed that SIs arise through reasoning about unspoken alternatives, it remains debated whether humans reason about alternatives as linguistic forms, or at the level of concepts. Here, we test a shared mechanism explaining SI rates within and across scales: context-driven expectations about the unspoken alternatives. Using neural language models to approximate human predictive distributions, we find that SI rates are captured by the expectedness of the strong scalemate as an alternative. Crucially, however, expectedness robustly predicts cross-scale variation only under a meaning-based view of alternatives. Our results suggest that pragmatic inferences arise from context-driven expectations over alternatives, and these expectations operate at the level of concepts.

Automated Driving Systems (ADS) open up a new domain for the automotive industry and offer new possibilities for future transportation with higher efficiency and comfortable experiences. However, autonomous driving under adverse weather conditions has been the problem that keeps autonomous vehicles (AVs) from going to level 4 or higher autonomy for a long time. This paper assesses the influences and challenges that weather brings to ADS sensors in an analytic and statistical way, and surveys the solutions against inclement weather conditions. State-of-the-art techniques on perception enhancement with regard to each kind of weather are thoroughly reported. External auxiliary solutions, weather conditions coverage in currently available datasets, simulators, and experimental facilities with weather chambers are distinctly sorted out. Additionally, potential future ADS sensors candidates and approaches beyond common senses are provided. By looking into all kinds of major weather problems the autonomous driving field is currently facing, and reviewing both hardware and computer science solutions in recent years, this survey points out the main moving trends of adverse weather problems in autonomous driving, i.e., advanced sensor fusions, more sophisticated networks, and V2X & IoT technologies; and also the limitations brought by emerging 1550 nm LiDARs. In general, this work contributes a holistic overview of the obstacles and directions of ADS development in terms of adverse weather driving conditions.

In recent years, neural models learned through self-supervised pretraining on large scale multilingual text or speech data have exhibited promising results for underresourced languages, especially when a relatively large amount of data from related language(s) is available. While the technology has a potential for facilitating tasks carried out in language documentation projects, such as speech transcription, pretraining a multilingual model from scratch for every new language would be highly impractical. We investigate the possibility for adapting an existing multilingual wav2vec 2.0 model for a new language, focusing on actual fieldwork data from a critically endangered tongue: Ainu. Specifically, we (i) examine the feasibility of leveraging data from similar languages also in fine-tuning; (ii) verify whether the model's performance can be improved by further pretraining on target language data. Our results show that continued pretraining is the most effective method to adapt a wav2vec 2.0 model for a new language and leads to considerable reduction in error rates. Furthermore, we find that if a model pretrained on a related speech variety or an unrelated language with similar phonological characteristics is available, multilingual fine-tuning using additional data from that language can have positive impact on speech recognition performance when there is very little labeled data in the target language.

This paper is our attempt at answering a twofold question covering the areas of ethics and authorship analysis. Firstly, since the methods used for performing authorship analysis imply that an author can be recognized by the content he or she creates, we were interested in finding out whether it would be possible for an author identification system to correctly attribute works to authors if in the course of years they have undergone a major psychological transition. Secondly, and from the point of view of the evolution of an author's ethical values, we checked what it would mean if the authorship attribution system encounters difficulties in detecting single authorship. We set out to answer those questions through performing a binary authorship analysis task using a text classifier based on a pre-trained transformer model and a baseline method relying on conventional similarity metrics. For the test set, we chose works of Arata Osada, a Japanese educator and specialist in the history of education, with half of them being books written before the World War II and another half in the 1950s, in between which he underwent a transformation in terms of political opinions. As a result, we were able to confirm that in the case of texts authored by Arata Osada in a time span of more than 10 years, while the classification accuracy drops by a large margin and is substantially lower than for texts by other non-fiction writers, confidence scores of the predictions remain at a similar level as in the case of a shorter time span, indicating that the classifier was in many instances tricked into deciding that texts written over a time span of multiple years were actually written by two different people, which in turn leads us to believe that such a change can affect authorship analysis, and that historical events have great impact on a person's ethical outlook as expressed in their writings.

Archaeologists in Yamagata, Japan said they have discovered a cluster of enormous, ancient geoglyphs in Southern Peru. The discovery was made with the help of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology. A research group at Yamagata University identified 143 new geoglyphs etched into the desert terrains of Nazca in southern Peru. The giant land art pieces, known as the Nazca Lines, depict human-like figures and a variety of animals including birds, fish, snakes, foxes, felines, and camelids. Many can only be identified from the air due to their large size.