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The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being Cringe

WIRED

When it comes to online dating, Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, isn't all too worried about whether his fellow dating app users will find him attractive. Rather, his biggest fear is that he might come off as "cringey." "You can get away with being ugly," Wolfram says. "But being cringey is just like--that's a character that's imprinted on you." Since he first joined Hinge at 18, he has worked hard to scrub his profile of sincerity.


Boys, ages 7 and 9, seen in armed standoff receiving assistance from deputies

FOX News

Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office released video of a February incident involving two young boys with a gun. A New Mexico sheriff's office is defending its decision not to arrest two young boys, ages 7 and 9, seen in drone footage in an armed standoff with deputies. Video released Thursday by the Bernalillo County Sheriff's Office (BCSO) shows the two boys dressed in Minecraft and Star Wars-themed pajamas standing behind a covered air-conditioning unit and carrying a loaded handgun. In the nearly six minutes of footage shared, the children are seen looking around as if they are trying to avoid detection and capture. Eventually, the boys are surrounded and detained by deputies.


REVEALED: The UFO sightings taken seriously by the US government

Daily Mail - Science & tech

A'flame in the sky,' eerie red glowing objects and swarms of UFOs over military bases are just some of the many sightings that have gravely concerned the US government. There are dozens of unsolved cases going back to the 1960s that occurred over nuclear missile installations, Navy ships and a desert in New Mexico. The FBI, CIA, and other government branches have spent years looking into these reports, but have yet to determine what the objects were and where they came from. One report in 2019 detailed how'drones' appeared over Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Kansas as locals reported spying a mothership hanging in the sky. In just the last few months, the skies over New Jersey were filled with unidentified aircraft and drones that required a formal response from both the Biden and Trump presidencies.


Optimistic Verifiable Training by Controlling Hardware Nondeterminism

Neural Information Processing Systems

The increasing compute demands of AI systems have led to the emergence of services that train models on behalf of clients lacking necessary resources. However, ensuring correctness of training and guarding against potential training-time attacks, such as data poisoning and backdoors, poses challenges. Existing works on verifiable training largely fall into two classes: proof-based systems, which are difficult to scale, and "optimistic" methods that consider a third-party auditor who can replicate the training process and contest the trainer. A key challenge with the latter is that nondeterminism between GPU types during training prevents exact replication of the training process, resulting in schemes that are non-robust. We propose a method that combines training in a higher precision than the target, rounding after intermediate computations, and sharing rounding decisions based on an adaptive thresholding procedure, to successfully control for nondeterminism. Across three different NVIDIA GPUs (A40, Titan XP, RTX 2080 Ti), we achieve exact training replication at FP32 precision for both full-training and fine-tuning of ResNet-50 (23M) and GPT-2 (117M) models.


Safe On-Orbit Dislodging of Deployable Structures via Robust Adaptive MPC

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper proposes a novel robust adaptive model predictive controller for on-orbit dislodging. We consider the scenario where a servicer, equipped with a robot arm, must dislodge a client, a time-varying system composed of an underpowered jammed solar panel with a hybrid hinge system on a space station. Our approach leverages online set-membership identification to reduce the uncertainty to provide robust safety guarantees during dislodging despite bounded disturbances while balancing exploration and exploitation effectively in the parameter space. The feasibility of the developed robust adaptive MPC method is also examined through dislodging simulations and hardware experiments in zero-gravity and gravity environments, respectively. In addition, the advantages of our method are shown through comparison experiments with several state-of-the-art control schemes for both accuracy of parameter estimation and control performance.


Making the unmodulated pyramid wavefront sensor smart II. First on-sky demonstration of extreme adaptive optics with deep learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Pyramid wavefront sensors (PWFSs) are the preferred choice for current and future extreme adaptive optics (XAO) systems. Almost all instruments use the PWFS in its modulated form to mitigate its limited linearity range. However, this modulation comes at the cost of a reduction in sensitivity, a blindness to petal-piston modes, and a limit to the sensor's ability to operate at high speeds. Therefore, there is strong interest to use the PWFS without modulation, which can be enabled with nonlinear reconstructors. Here, we present the first on-sky demonstration of XAO with an unmodulated PWFS using a nonlinear reconstructor based on convolutional neural networks. We discuss the real-time implementation on the Magellan Adaptive Optics eXtreme (MagAO-X) instrument using the optimized TensorRT framework and show that inference is fast enough to run the control loop at >2 kHz frequencies. Our on-sky results demonstrate a successful closed-loop operation using a model calibrated with internal source data that delivers stable and robust correction under varying conditions. Performance analysis reveals that our smart PWFS achieves nearly the same Strehl ratio as the highly optimized modulated PWFS under favorable conditions on bright stars. Notably, we observe an improvement in performance on a fainter star under the influence of strong winds. These findings confirm the feasibility of using the PWFS in its unmodulated form and highlight its potential for next-generation instruments. Future efforts will focus on achieving even higher control loop frequencies (>3 kHz), optimizing the calibration procedures, and testing its performance on fainter stars, where more gain is expected for the unmodulated PWFS compared to its modulated counterpart.


Covering Cracks in Content Moderation: Delexicalized Distant Supervision for Illicit Drug Jargon Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In light of rising drug-related concerns and the increasing role of social media, sales and discussions of illicit drugs have become commonplace online. Social media platforms hosting user-generated content must therefore perform content moderation, which is a difficult task due to the vast amount of jargon used in drug discussions. Previous works on drug jargon detection were limited to extracting a list of terms, but these approaches have fundamental problems in practical application. First, they are trivially evaded using word substitutions. Second, they cannot distinguish whether euphemistic terms such as "pot" or "crack" are being used as drugs or in their benign meanings. We argue that drug content moderation should be done using contexts rather than relying on a banlist. However, manually annotated datasets for training such a task are not only expensive but also prone to becoming obsolete. We present JEDIS, a framework for detecting illicit drug jargon terms by analyzing their contexts. JEDIS utilizes a novel approach that combines distant supervision and delexicalization, which allows JEDIS to be trained without human-labeled data while being robust to new terms and euphemisms. Experiments on two manually annotated datasets show JEDIS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art word-based baselines in terms of F1-score and detection coverage in drug jargon detection. We also conduct qualitative analysis that demonstrates JEDIS is robust against pitfalls faced by existing approaches.


Ensemble Knowledge Distillation for Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are a promising tool to accelerate atomistic simulations and molecular property prediction. The quality of MLIPs strongly depends on the quantity of available training data as well as the quantum chemistry (QC) level of theory used to generate that data. Datasets generated with high-fidelity QC methods, such as coupled cluster, are typically restricted to small molecules and may be missing energy gradients. With this limited quantity of data, it is often difficult to train good MLIP models. We present an ensemble knowledge distillation (EKD) method to improve MLIP accuracy when trained to energy-only datasets. In our EKD approach, first, multiple teacher models are trained to QC energies and then used to generate atomic forces for all configurations in the dataset. Next, a student MLIP is trained to both QC energies and to ensemble-averaged forces generated by the teacher models. We apply this workflow on the ANI-1ccx dataset which consists of organic molecules with configuration energies computed at the coupled cluster level of theory. The resulting student MLIPs achieve new state-of-the-art accuracy on the out-of-sample COMP6 benchmark and improved stability for molecular dynamics simulations. The EKD approach for MLIP is broadly applicable for chemical, biomolecular and materials science simulations.


PertEval: Unveiling Real Knowledge Capacity of LLMs with Knowledge-Invariant Perturbations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Expert-designed close-ended benchmarks are indispensable in assessing the knowledge capacity of large language models (LLMs). Despite their widespread use, concerns have mounted regarding their reliability due to limited test scenarios and an unavoidable risk of data contamination. To rectify this, we present PertEval, a toolkit devised for in-depth probing of LLMs' knowledge capacity through knowledge-invariant perturbations. These perturbations employ human-like restatement techniques to generate on-the-fly test samples from static benchmarks, meticulously retaining knowledge-critical content while altering irrelevant details. Our toolkit further includes a suite of response consistency analyses that compare performance on raw vs. perturbed test sets to precisely assess LLMs' genuine knowledge capacity.


FACTS&EVIDENCE: An Interactive Tool for Transparent Fine-Grained Factual Verification of Machine-Generated Text

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the widespread consumption of AI-generated content, there has been an increased focus on developing automated tools to verify the factual accuracy of such content. However, prior research and tools developed for fact verification treat it as a binary classification or a linear regression problem. Although this is a useful mechanism as part of automatic guardrails in systems, we argue that such tools lack transparency in the prediction reasoning and diversity in source evidence to provide a trustworthy user experience. We develop Facts&Evidence - an interactive and transparent tool for user-driven verification of complex text. The tool facilitates the intricate decision-making involved in fact-verification, presenting its users a breakdown of complex input texts to visualize the credibility of individual claims along with an explanation of model decisions and attribution to multiple, diverse evidence sources. Facts&Evidence aims to empower consumers of machine-generated text and give them agency to understand, verify, selectively trust and use such text.