Indian Ocean
US Navy official says Iranian attacks in Middle East 'have the attention of everyone'
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Iranian attacks in the waterways of the Middle East and elsewhere in the region "have the attention of everyone" as tensions rise over Tehran's advancing nuclear program, the head of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet said Tuesday. Vice Adm. Brad Cooper also told The Associated Press that he's seen a rise in what he described as Iran's "malign activities" in the region over his two years leading the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. While Cooper pointed to recent seizures of weapons by American and allied forces in the region as a success, he acknowledged that Iran has been able to carry out drone attacks targeting shipping in the Mideast and other assaults in the region.
What happens before and after: Multi-Event Commonsense in Event Coreference Resolution
Ravi, Sahithya, Tanner, Chris, Ng, Raymond, Shwartz, Vered
Event coreference models cluster event mentions pertaining to the same real-world event. Recent models rely on contextualized representations to recognize coreference among lexically or contextually similar mentions. However, models typically fail to leverage commonsense inferences, which is particularly limiting for resolving lexically-divergent mentions. We propose a model that extends event mentions with temporal commonsense inferences. Given a complex sentence with multiple events, e.g., "The man killed his wife and got arrested", with the target event "arrested", our model generates plausible events that happen before the target event - such as "the police arrived", and after it, such as "he was sentenced". We show that incorporating such inferences into an existing event coreference model improves its performance, and we analyze the coreferences in which such temporal knowledge is required.
Towards Fine-Grained Information: Identifying the Type and Location of Translation Errors
Bao, Keqin, Wan, Yu, Liu, Dayiheng, Yang, Baosong, Lei, Wenqiang, He, Xiangnan, Wong, Derek F., Xie, Jun
Fine-grained information on translation errors is helpful for the translation evaluation community. Existing approaches can not synchronously consider error position and type, failing to integrate the error information of both. In this paper, we propose Fine-Grained Translation Error Detection (FG-TED) task, aiming at identifying both the position and the type of translation errors on given source-hypothesis sentence pairs. Besides, we build an FG-TED model to predict the \textbf{addition} and \textbf{omission} errors -- two typical translation accuracy errors. First, we use a word-level classification paradigm to form our model and use the shortcut learning reduction to relieve the influence of monolingual features. Besides, we construct synthetic datasets for model training, and relieve the disagreement of data labeling in authoritative datasets, making the experimental benchmark concordant. Experiments show that our model can identify both error type and position concurrently, and gives state-of-the-art results on the restored dataset. Our model also delivers more reliable predictions on low-resource and transfer scenarios than existing baselines. The related datasets and the source code will be released in the future.
A Generative Adversarial Network for Climate Tipping Point Discovery (TIP-GAN)
Sleeman, Jennifer, Chung, David, Gnanadesikan, Anand, Brett, Jay, Kevrekidis, Yannis, Hughes, Marisa, Haine, Thomas, Pradal, Marie-Aude, Gelderloos, Renske, Ashcraft, Chace, Tang, Caroline, Saksena, Anshu, White, Larry
We propose a new Tipping Point Generative Adversarial Network (TIP-GAN) for better characterizing potential climate tipping points in Earth system models. We describe an adversarial game to explore the parameter space of these models, detect upcoming tipping points, and discover the drivers of tipping points. In this setup, a set of generators learn to construct model configurations that will invoke a climate tipping point. The discriminator learns to identify which generators are generating each model configuration and whether a given configuration will lead to a tipping point. The discriminator is trained using an oracle (a surrogate climate model) to test if a generated model configuration leads to a tipping point or not. We demonstrate the application of this GAN to invoke the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). We share experimental results of modifying the loss functions and the number of generators to exploit the area of uncertainty in model state space near a climate tipping point. In addition, we show that our trained discriminator can predict AMOC collapse with a high degree of accuracy without the use of the oracle. This approach could generalize to other tipping points, and could augment climate modeling research by directing users interested in studying tipping points to parameter sets likely to induce said tipping points in their computationally intensive climate models.
Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Zhang, Zhuosheng, Zhang, Aston, Li, Mu, Zhao, Hai, Karypis, George, Smola, Alex
Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex reasoning by leveraging chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to generate intermediate reasoning chains as the rationale to infer the answer. However, existing CoT studies have focused on the language modality. We propose Multimodal-CoT that incorporates language (text) and vision (images) modalities into a two-stage framework that separates rationale generation and answer inference. In this way, answer inference can leverage better generated rationales that are based on multimodal information. With Multimodal-CoT, our model under 1 billion parameters outperforms the previous state-of-the-art LLM (GPT-3.5) by 16 percentage points (75.17%->91.68% accuracy) on the ScienceQA benchmark and even surpasses human performance. Code is publicly available available at https://github.com/amazon-science/mm-cot.
US condemns Russian use of Iranian drones in Ukraine
American defense officials on Tuesday sought to dispel any doubt that Iran is supplying drones for Russia's war in Ukraine, releasing photos and analysis of unmanned aircraft deployed in the conflict to demonstrate Tehran's involvement. During a briefing in London, analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency displayed photos of drones that attacked Ukraine alongside images of those previously traced to Iran. A comparison of design details such as tail fins, nose cones and landing gear shows that the weapons used in Ukraine are "indistinguishable" from Shahed-131 and -136 attack drones and Mohajer 6 unmanned aerial vehicles used in the Middle East. The effort to "show the homework'' is intended to help persuade governments or international agencies of Tehran's involvement. Iran has said it supplied a "small number" of drones to Russia before the invasion of Ukraine but has denied providing any more since troops crossed the border last February. The evidence proves otherwise, an official from the Defense Intelligence Agency said while speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information. "Iran is a partner in the conflict with Russia,'' the official said.
Dark solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates: a dataset for many-body physics research
Fritsch, Amilson R., Guo, Shangjie, Koh, Sophia M., Spielman, I. B., Zwolak, Justyna P.
We establish a dataset of over $1.6\times10^4$ experimental images of Bose--Einstein condensates containing solitonic excitations to enable machine learning (ML) for many-body physics research. About $33~\%$ of this dataset has manually assigned and carefully curated labels. The remainder is automatically labeled using SolDet -- an implementation of a physics-informed ML data analysis framework -- consisting of a convolutional-neural-network-based classifier and OD as well as a statistically motivated physics-informed classifier and a quality metric. This technical note constitutes the definitive reference of the dataset, providing an opportunity for the data science community to develop more sophisticated analysis tools, to further understand nonlinear many-body physics, and even advance cold atom experiments.
PiC: A Phrase-in-Context Dataset for Phrase Understanding and Semantic Search
Pham, Thang M., Yoon, Seunghyun, Bui, Trung, Nguyen, Anh
While contextualized word embeddings have been a de-facto standard, learning contextualized phrase embeddings is less explored and being hindered by the lack of a human-annotated benchmark that tests machine understanding of phrase semantics given a context sentence or paragraph (instead of phrases alone). To fill this gap, we propose PiC -- a dataset of ~28K of noun phrases accompanied by their contextual Wikipedia pages and a suite of three tasks for training and evaluating phrase embeddings. Training on PiC improves ranking models' accuracy and remarkably pushes span-selection (SS) models (i.e., predicting the start and end index of the target phrase) near-human accuracy, which is 95% Exact Match (EM) on semantic search given a query phrase and a passage. Interestingly, we find evidence that such impressive performance is because the SS models learn to better capture the common meaning of a phrase regardless of its actual context. SotA models perform poorly in distinguishing two senses of the same phrase in two contexts (~60% EM) and in estimating the similarity between two different phrases in the same context (~70% EM).
Iran Says It Thwarted a Drone Attack on a Munitions Facility
But some Telegram channels, including that of Sepah Cyberi, which is affiliated with Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, accused Israel and its agents inside the county of being behind the attack and warned "experience has shown that Iran will retaliate." "Wait for rogue drones hitting Zionist oil tankers," its posting said. Iran and Israel have been engaged in a shadow war on land, sea, air and in cyberspace for the past three years, with Israel carrying out strikes on Iranian military and nuclear facilities and assassinating scientists and a senior military official. During the tenure of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Israel also started targeting Iranian defense and military officials and key infrastructure. Mr. Bennett called it the "octopus doctrine" of striking inside Iran to damage its capacity to arm proxy militias in the region hostile to the Jewish state.
Explainable deep learning for insights in El Ni\~no and river flows
Liu, Yumin, Duffy, Kate, Dy, Jennifer G., Ganguly, Auroop R.
The El Ni\~no Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a semi-periodic fluctuation in sea surface temperature (SST) over the tropical central and eastern Pacific Ocean that influences interannual variability in regional hydrology across the world through long-range dependence or teleconnections. Recent research has demonstrated the value of Deep Learning (DL) methods for improving ENSO prediction as well as Complex Networks (CN) for understanding teleconnections. However, gaps in predictive understanding of ENSO-driven river flows include the black box nature of DL, the use of simple ENSO indices to describe a complex phenomenon and translating DL-based ENSO predictions to river flow predictions. Here we show that eXplainable DL (XDL) methods, based on saliency maps, can extract interpretable predictive information contained in global SST and discover SST information regions and dependence structures relevant for river flows which, in tandem with climate network constructions, enable improved predictive understanding. Our results reveal additional information content in global SST beyond ENSO indices, develop understanding of how SSTs influence river flows, and generate improved river flow prediction, including uncertainty estimation. Observations, reanalysis data, and earth system model simulations are used to demonstrate the value of the XDL-CN based methods for future interannual and decadal scale climate projections.