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Researchers asked AI to show a typical Australian dad: he was white and had an iguana Tama Leaver and Suzanne Srdarov for the Conversation

The Guardian

Big tech company hype sells generative artificial intelligence (AI) as intelligent, creative, desirable, inevitable and about to radically reshape the future in many ways. Published by Oxford University Press, our new research on how generative AI depicts Australian themes directly challenges this perception. We found when generative AIs produce images of Australia and Australians, these outputs are riddled with bias. They reproduce sexist and racist caricatures more at home in the country's imagined monocultural past. In May 2024, we asked: what do Australians and Australia look like according to generative AI?


Legal Zero-Days: A Novel Risk Vector for Advanced AI Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce the concept of "Legal Zero-Days" as a novel risk vector for advanced AI systems. Legal Zero-Days are previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in legal frameworks that, when exploited, can cause immediate and significant societal disruption without requiring litigation or other processes before impact. We present a risk model for identifying and evaluating these vulnerabilities, demonstrating their potential to bypass safeguards or impede government responses to AI incidents. Using the 2017 Australian dual citizenship crisis as a case study, we illustrate how seemingly minor legal oversights can lead to large-scale governance disruption. We develop a methodology for creating "legal puzzles" as evaluation instruments for assessing AI systems' capabilities to discover such vulnerabilities. Our findings suggest that while current AI models may not reliably find impactful Legal Zero-Days, future systems may develop this capability, presenting both risks and opportunities for improving legal robustness. This work contributes to the broader effort to identify and mitigate previously unrecognized risks from frontier AI systems.


A Hierarchical IDS for Zero-Day Attack Detection in Internet of Medical Things Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

--The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has been emerging as the main driver for the healthcare revolution. These networks typically include resource-constrained, heterogeneous devices such as wearable sensors, smart pills, and implantable devices, making them vulnerable to diverse cyberattacks, e.g., denial-of-service, ransomware, data hijacking, and spoofing attacks. T o mitigate these risks, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) are critical for monitoring and securing patients' medical devices. However, traditional centralized IDSs may not be suitable for IoMT due to inherent limitations such as delays in response time, privacy concerns, and increased security vulnerabilities. Specifically, centralized IDS architectures require every sensor to transmit its data to a central server, potentially causing significant delays or even disrupting network operations in densely populated areas. On the other hand, executing an IDS on IoMT devices is generally infeasible due to the lack of computational capacity. Even if some lightweight IDS components can be deployed in these devices, they must wait for the centralized IDS to provide updated models, otherwise, they will be vulnerable to zero-day attacks, posing significant risks to patient health and data security. T o address these challenges, we propose a novel multi-level IoMT IDS framework that can not only detect zero-day attacks but also differentiate between known and unknown attacks. In particular, the first layer, namely the near Edge, filters network traffic at coarse level (i.e., attack or not), by leveraging meta-learning or One Class Classification (OCC) based on the usfAD algorithm. Then, the deeper layers (e.g., far Edge and Cloud) will determine whether the attack is known or unknown, as well as the detailed type of attack. The experimental results on the latest IoMT dataset CICIoMT2024 show that our proposed solution achieves high performance, i.e., 99.77% accuracy and 97.8% F1-score. Notably, the first layer, using either meta-learning or usfAD-based OCC, can detect zero-day attacks with high accuracy without requiring new datasets of these attacks, making our approach highly applicable for the IoMT environment. Furthermore, the meta-learning approach requires less than 1% of the dataset to achieve high performance in attack detection. HE Internet of Things (IoT) represents a transformative concept where interconnected devices equipped with sensors collect, analyze, and interact with the physical environment, creating networks that serve diverse applications. The authors are with the School of Information Technology, Crown Institute of Higher Education, Australia.


From Surface to Semantics: Semantic Structure Parsing for Table-Centric Document Analysis

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Documents are core carriers of information and knowl-edge, with broad applications in finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Tables, as the main medium for structured data, encapsulate key information and are among the most critical document components. Existing studies largely focus on surface-level tasks such as layout analysis, table detection, and data extraction, lacking deep semantic parsing of tables and their contextual associations. This limits advanced tasks like cross-paragraph data interpretation and context-consistent analysis. To address this, we propose DOTABLER, a table-centric semantic document parsing framework designed to uncover deep semantic links between tables and their context. DOTABLER leverages a custom dataset and domain-specific fine-tuning of pre-trained models, integrating a complete parsing pipeline to identify context segments semantically tied to tables. Built on this semantic understanding, DOTABLER implements two core functionalities: table-centric document structure parsing and domain-specific table retrieval, delivering comprehensive table-anchored semantic analysis and precise extraction of semantically relevant tables. Evaluated on nearly 4,000 pages with over 1,000 tables from real-world PDFs, DOTABLER achieves over 90% Precision and F1 scores, demonstrating superior performance in table-context semantic analysis and deep document parsing compared to advanced models such as GPT-4o.