Atlantic Ocean
Seamless Underwater Navigation with Limited Doppler Velocity Log Measurements
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) commonly utilize an inertial navigation system (INS) and a Doppler velocity log (DVL) for underwater navigation. To that end, their measurements are integrated through a nonlinear filter such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF). The DVL velocity vector estimate depends on retrieving reflections from the seabed, ensuring that at least three out of its four transmitted acoustic beams return successfully. When fewer than three beams are obtained, the DVL cannot provide a velocity update to bind the navigation solution drift. To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we propose a hybrid neural coupled (HNC) approach for seamless AUV navigation in situations of limited DVL measurements. First, we drive an approach to regress two or three missing DVL beams. Then, those beams, together with the measured beams, are incorporated into the EKF. We examined INS/DVL fusion both in loosely and tightly coupled approaches. Our method was trained and evaluated on recorded data from AUV experiments conducted in the Mediterranean Sea on two different occasions. The results illustrate that our proposed method outperforms the baseline loosely and tightly coupled model-based approaches by an average of 96.15%. It also demonstrates superior performance compared to a model-based beam estimator by an average of 12.41% in terms of velocity accuracy for scenarios involving two or three missing beams. Therefore, we demonstrate that our approach offers seamless AUV navigation in situations of limited beam measurements.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 786
Russia's Ministry of Defence reported Ukrainian drone strikes overnight and into Saturday. It said 26 drones were detected over the Belgorod region, 10 over Bryansk, and eight over Kursk, among several other regions. The strikes killed two people in Russia's Belgorod region, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Saturday. The governors of Kursk, Kaluga and Bryansk, all in western Russia, reported strikes in their regions as well. Ukraine's air force said it shot down a Russian strategic bomber with antiaircraft missiles for the first time since the war began in 2022.
US, Italy agree to coordinate efforts to counter spread of misinformation by foreign governments
As more companies rush to implement AI solutions and software, a growing number of experts are warning that it could result in an explosion of'fake news' and misinformation. The United States and Italy agreed on Wednesday to coordinate efforts to counter the spread of misinformation and fake news articles by foreign governments. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani agreed on the new pact during a meeting on the sidelines of a three-day meeting of Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers on the island of Capri. The U.S. last year released an intelligence assessment sent to more than 100 countries that accused Moscow of using spies, social media and Russian state-run media to erode public faith in the integrity of democratic elections. Last week, Belgium said its prosecutors were probing alleged Russian attempts to influence an upcoming European Parliamentary election.
CMNEE: A Large-Scale Document-Level Event Extraction Dataset based on Open-Source Chinese Military News
Zhu, Mengna, Xu, Zijie, Zeng, Kaisheng, Xiao, Kaiming, Wang, Mao, Ke, Wenjun, Huang, Hongbin
Extracting structured event knowledge, including event triggers and corresponding arguments, from military texts is fundamental to many applications, such as intelligence analysis and decision assistance. However, event extraction in the military field faces the data scarcity problem, which impedes the research of event extraction models in this domain. To alleviate this problem, we propose CMNEE, a large-scale, document-level open-source Chinese Military News Event Extraction dataset. It contains 17,000 documents and 29,223 events, which are all manually annotated based on a pre-defined schema for the military domain including 8 event types and 11 argument role types. We designed a two-stage, multi-turns annotation strategy to ensure the quality of CMNEE and reproduced several state-of-the-art event extraction models with a systematic evaluation. The experimental results on CMNEE fall shorter than those on other domain datasets obviously, which demonstrates that event extraction for military domain poses unique challenges and requires further research efforts. Our code and data can be obtained from https://github.com/Mzzzhu/CMNEE.
SuRe: Summarizing Retrievals using Answer Candidates for Open-domain QA of LLMs
Kim, Jaehyung, Nam, Jaehyun, Mo, Sangwoo, Park, Jongjin, Lee, Sang-Woo, Seo, Minjoon, Ha, Jung-Woo, Shin, Jinwoo
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering (QA) tasks. While incorporating new information with the retrieval of relevant passages is a promising way to improve QA with LLMs, the existing methods often require additional fine-tuning which becomes infeasible with recent LLMs. Augmenting retrieved passages via prompting has the potential to address this limitation, but this direction has been limitedly explored. To this end, we design a simple yet effective framework to enhance open-domain QA (ODQA) with LLMs, based on the summarized retrieval (SuRe). SuRe helps LLMs predict more accurate answers for a given question, which are well-supported by the summarized retrieval that could be viewed as an explicit rationale extracted from the retrieved passages. Specifically, SuRe first constructs summaries of the retrieved passages for each of the multiple answer candidates. Then, SuRe confirms the most plausible answer from the candidate set by evaluating the validity and ranking of the generated summaries. Experimental results on diverse ODQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SuRe, with improvements of up to 4.6% in exact match (EM) and 4.0% in F1 score over standard prompting approaches. SuRe also can be integrated with a broad range of retrieval methods and LLMs. Finally, the generated summaries from SuRe show additional advantages to measure the importance of retrieved passages and serve as more preferred rationales by models and humans.
Delays in US aid leave Ukraine vulnerable to Russian offensives that kill civilians, analysts warn
Video captures the moment and aftermath of what appears to be a drone, allegedly of Ukrainian origin, striking Russian drone production facility. Russian officials claimed that only a worker's dormitory was hit. More civilians died across Ukraine on Sunday as analysts warned that delays in U.S. military assistance would see Kyiv struggle to fight off Russian offensives. One man was killed Sunday after a Russian drone hit the truck he was driving in the Sumy region, the local prosecutor's office said. Elsewhere, a 67-year-old woman was killed after shelling hit an apartment block in the Donetsk region, said Gov. Vadym Filashkin. Officials in the Kharkiv region also said Sunday that they had retrieved the bodies of a 61-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man killed by a Russian strike the previous day.
PRIME: A CyberGIS Platform for Resilience Inference Measurement and Enhancement
Mandal, Debayan, Zou, Dr. Lei, Wilkho, Rohan Singh, Abedin, Joynal, Zhou, Bing, Cai, Dr. Heng, Baig, Dr. Furqan, Gharaibeh, Dr. Nasir, Lam, Dr. Nina
In an era of increased climatic disasters, there is an urgent need to develop reliable frameworks and tools for evaluating and improving community resilience to climatic hazards at multiple geographical and temporal scales. Defining and quantifying resilience in the social domain is relatively subjective due to the intricate interplay of socioeconomic factors with disaster resilience. Meanwhile, there is a lack of computationally rigorous, user-friendly tools that can support customized resilience assessment considering local conditions. This study aims to address these gaps through the power of CyberGIS with three objectives: 1) To develop an empirically validated disaster resilience model - Customized Resilience Inference Measurement designed for multi-scale community resilience assessment and influential socioeconomic factors identification, 2) To implement a Platform for Resilience Inference Measurement and Enhancement module in the CyberGISX platform backed by high-performance computing, 3) To demonstrate the utility of PRIME through a representative study. CRIM generates vulnerability, adaptability, and overall resilience scores derived from empirical hazard parameters. Computationally intensive Machine Learning methods are employed to explain the intricate relationships between these scores and socioeconomic driving factors. PRIME provides a web-based notebook interface guiding users to select study areas, configure parameters, calculate and geo-visualize resilience scores, and interpret socioeconomic factors shaping resilience capacities. A representative study showcases the efficiency of the platform while explaining how the visual results obtained may be interpreted. The essence of this work lies in its comprehensive architecture that encapsulates the requisite data, analytical and geo-visualization functions, and ML models for resilience assessment.
Biden vows G7 response, 'ironclad' US support for Israel after Iran attacks
US President Joe Biden has condemned the Iranian drone attacks on military facilities in Israel, reiterating Washington DC's "ironclad" support and a coordinated Group of Seven (G7) diplomatic response, even as reports started to emerge that he is also seeking to de-escalate the situation. Biden cut short a trip to Delaware and returned to the US capital to meet advisers following the late Saturday night attack, the White House said in a statement. The statement said that US forces and facilities had not been hit, adding that the US helped Israel in taking down "nearly all" of the attacking drones and missiles. The US president also he reiterated the "ironclad" support for Israel's security in a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has had strained relations over Israel's handling of the war in Gaza. "I told him that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks โ sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel," the White House quoted Biden as saying.
An Autoencoder-Based Constellation Design for AirComp in Wireless Federated Learning
Mu, Yujia, Wei, Xizixiang, Shen, Cong
Wireless federated learning (FL) relies on efficient uplink communications to aggregate model updates across distributed edge devices. Over-the-air computation (a.k.a. AirComp) has emerged as a promising approach for addressing the scalability challenge of FL over wireless links with limited communication resources. Unlike conventional methods, AirComp allows multiple edge devices to transmit uplink signals simultaneously, enabling the parameter server to directly decode the average global model. However, existing AirComp solutions are intrinsically analog, while modern wireless systems predominantly adopt digital modulations. Consequently, careful constellation designs are necessary to accurately decode the sum model updates without ambiguity. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end communication system supporting AirComp with digital modulation, aiming to overcome the challenges associated with accurate decoding of the sum signal with constellation designs. We leverage autoencoder network structures and explore the joint optimization of transmitter and receiver components. Our approach fills an important gap in the context of accurately decoding the sum signal in digital modulation-based AirComp, which can advance the deployment of FL in contemporary wireless systems.
Using Explainable AI and Transfer Learning to understand and predict the maintenance of Atlantic blocking with limited observational data
Zhang, Huan, Finkel, Justin, Abbot, Dorian S., Gerber, Edwin P., Weare, Jonathan
Blocking events are an important cause of extreme weather, especially long-lasting blocking events that trap weather systems in place. The duration of blocking events is, however, underestimated in climate models. Explainable Artificial Intelligence are a class of data analysis methods that can help identify physical causes of prolonged blocking events and diagnose model deficiencies. We demonstrate this approach on an idealized quasigeostrophic model developed by Marshall and Molteni (1993). We train a convolutional neural network (CNN), and subsequently, build a sparse predictive model for the persistence of Atlantic blocking, conditioned on an initial high-pressure anomaly. Shapley Additive ExPlanation (SHAP) analysis reveals that high-pressure anomalies in the American Southeast and North Atlantic, separated by a trough over Atlantic Canada, contribute significantly to prediction of sustained blocking events in the Atlantic region. This agrees with previous work that identified precursors in the same regions via wave train analysis. When we apply the same CNN to blockings in the ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis, there is insufficient data to accurately predict persistent blocks. We partially overcome this limitation by pre-training the CNN on the plentiful data of the Marshall-Molteni model, and then using Transfer Learning to achieve better predictions than direct training. SHAP analysis before and after transfer learning allows a comparison between the predictive features in the reanalysis and the quasigeostrophic model, quantifying dynamical biases in the idealized model. This work demonstrates the potential for machine learning methods to extract meaningful precursors of extreme weather events and achieve better prediction using limited observational data.