Combinatorial optimization problem (COP) is di ffi cult to solve because of the massive number of local optimal solutions in his solution space. V arious methods have been put forward to smooth the solution space of COPs, including homotopic convex (HC) transformation for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). This paper extends the HC transformation approach to unconstrained binary quadratic programming (UBQP) by proposing a method to construct a unimodal toy UBQP of any size. We theoretically prove the unimodality of the constructed toy UBQP . After that, we apply this unimodal toy UBQP to smooth the original UBQP by using the HC transformation framework and empirically verify the smoothing e ff ects. Subsequently, we introduce an iterative algorithmic framework incorporating HC transformation, referred as landscape smoothing iterated local search (LSILS). Our experimental analyses, conducted on various UBQP instances show the e ffectiveness of LSILS. Furthermore, this paper proposes a parallel cooperative variant of LSILS, denoted as PC-LSILS and apply it to both the UBQP and the TSP . Our experimental findings highlight that PC-LSILS improves the smoothing performance of the HC transformation, and further improves the overall performance of the algorithm. Introduction COPs are a class of problems mainly to find an optimal combination to maximize or minimize some performance metrics with limited resources or subject to some constraints. COPs are typically categorized as NP-hard, for which classical optimization methods struggle to find the optimal solution within a reasonable amount of time and become less applicable. Consequently, researchers usually use heuristics or metaheuristics to find near-optimal solutions within a reasonable amount of time. One of the key challenges associated with solving COPs is the presence of numerous local optima in the solution space, primarily attributable to the rugged and irregular nature of their fitness landscapes. It can be hypothesized that smoothing the landscapes of COPs could significantly facilitate the attainment of the global optima.

The hardness of the Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Program (UBQP) problem is due its rugged landscape. Various algorithms have been proposed for UBQP, including the Landscape Smoothing Iterated Local Search (LSILS). Different from other UBQP algorithms, LSILS tries to smooth the rugged landscape by building a convex combination of the original UBQP and a toy UBQP. In this paper, our study further investigates the impact of smoothing rugged landscapes using different toy UBQP problems, including a toy UBQP with matrix ^Q1 (construct by "+/-1"), a toy UBQP with matrix ^Q2 (construct by "+/-i") and a toy UBQP with matrix ^Q3 (construct randomly). We first assess the landscape flatness of the three toy UBQPs. Subsequently, we test the efficiency of LSILS with different toy UBQPs. Results reveal that the toy UBQP with ^Q1 (construct by "+/-1") exhibits the flattest landscape among the three, while the toy UBQP with ^Q3 (construct randomly) presents the most non-flat landscape. Notably, LSILS using the toy UBQP with ^Q2 (construct by "+/-i") emerges as the most effective, while ^Q3 (construct randomly) has the poorest result. These findings contribute to a detailed understanding of landscape smoothing techniques in optimizing UBQP.

This work defends the 'Whole Hog Thesis': sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are full-blown linguistic and cognitive agents, possessing understanding, beliefs, desires, knowledge, and intentions. We argue against prevailing methodologies in AI philosophy, rejecting starting points based on low-level computational details ('Just an X' fallacy) or pre-existing theories of mind. Instead, we advocate starting with simple, high-level observations of LLM behavior (e.g., answering questions, making suggestions) -- defending this data against charges of metaphor, loose talk, or pretense. From these observations, we employ 'Holistic Network Assumptions' -- plausible connections between mental capacities (e.g., answering implies knowledge, knowledge implies belief, action implies intention) -- to argue for the full suite of cognitive states. We systematically rebut objections based on LLM failures (hallucinations, planning/reasoning errors), arguing these don't preclude agency, often mirroring human fallibility. We address numerous 'Games of Lacks', arguing that LLMs do not lack purported necessary conditions for cognition (e.g., semantic grounding, embodiment, justification, intrinsic intentionality) or that these conditions are not truly necessary, often relying on anti-discriminatory arguments comparing LLMs to diverse human capacities. Our approach is evidential, not functionalist, and deliberately excludes consciousness. We conclude by speculating on the possibility of LLMs possessing 'alien' contents beyond human conceptual schemes.

Hallucinations pose a significant challenge to the reliability of neural models for abstractive summarisation. While automatically generated summaries may be fluent, they often lack faithfulness to the original document. This issue becomes even more pronounced in low-resource settings, such as cross-lingual transfer. With the existing faithful metrics focusing on English, even measuring the extent of this phenomenon in cross-lingual settings is hard. To address this, we first develop a novel metric, mFACT, evaluating the faithfulness of non-English summaries, leveraging translation-based transfer from multiple English faithfulness metrics. We then propose a simple but effective method to reduce hallucinations with a cross-lingual transfer, which weighs the loss of each training example by its faithfulness score. Through extensive experiments in multiple languages, we demonstrate that mFACT is the metric that is most suited to detect hallucinations. Moreover, we find that our proposed loss weighting method drastically increases both performance and faithfulness according to both automatic and human evaluation when compared to strong baselines for cross-lingual transfer such as MAD-X. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/yfqiu-nlp/mfact-summ.

French inventor Frank Zapata grabbed headlines around the world this summer when he flew his hoverboard across the English channel from Pas de Calais, France, to the famous white cliffs of Dover. But Bay Area commuters may soon do Zapata one better by skimming above San Francisco Bay on autonomous, single-passenger drones being developed by a Peninsula start-up company with ties to Google. The automated drones are electrically powered, capable of vertical takeoff and landing, and would fly 10 feet above the water at 20 mph along a pre-determined flight path not subject to passenger controls. The drones' rotors are able to shift from vertical to horizontal alignment for efficient forward movement after takeoff. The company behind all this, three-year-old Kitty Hawk Corp., has personal financial backing from Google founder Larry Page, now CEO of Google's parent, Alphabet, who has long been interested in autonomous forms of transportation.

Phytoplankton plays an important role in marine ecosystem. It is defined as a biological factor to assess marine quality. The identification of phytoplankton species has a high potential for monitoring environmental, climate changes and for evaluating water quality. However, phytoplankton species identification is not an easy task owing to their variability and ambiguity due to thousands of micro and pico-plankton species. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to build a framework for identifying phytoplankton species and to perform a comparison on different features types and classifiers. We propose a new features type extracted from raw signals of phytoplankton species. We then analyze the performance of various classifiers on the proposed features type as well as two other features types for finding the robust one. Through experiments, it is found that Random Forest using the proposed features gives the best classification results with average accuracy up to 98.24%.

Some manufacturers provide benchmarks for individual sensors but we found no benchmarks that take a holistic view of the overall screening procedures and no benchmarks that take operator variability into account. Just adding up resources and manpower used is not an effective way for assessing systems where human decision-making and operator compliance to rules play a vital role. Our aim is to develop a decision support tool (cargo-screening system simulator) that will map the right technology and manpower to the right commodity-threat combination in order to maximise detection rates. In this paper we present our ideas for developing such a system and highlight the research challenges we have identified. Then we introduce our first case study and report on the progress we have made so far. Keywords: port security, cargo screening, modelling and simulation, decision support, detection rate matrix 1. INTRODUCTION The primary goal of cargo screening at sea ports and air ports is to detect human stowaways, conventional, nuclear, chemical and radiological weapons and other potential threats. This is an extremely difficult task due to the sheer volume of cargo being moved through ports between countries. For example in sea freight, 200 million containers are moved through 220 ports around the globe every year; this is 90% of all non bulk sea cargo (Dorndorf, Herbers, Panascia, and Zimmermann 2007). Little is known about the efficiency of current cargo screening processes as few benchmarks exist against which they could be measured (e.g.