Former DEA Chief of Operations Ray Donovan joins'America's Newsroom' to discuss Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's warning that cartels are utilizing drones along the southern border. The Mexican army has confirmed that drug cartel-operated bomb-dropping drones have killed soldiers in the western state of Michoacan. Defense Secretary Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval did not provide exact figures on the number of casualties suffered in the attacks, according to the Associated Press. Sandoval stated on Friday that attacks targeted patrol units and included over 260 drone-bomb incidents in 2023 alone. "Our personnel have suffered wounds, and some of our troops have even died" in the attacks, Sandoval said.

Interpretability provides a toolset for understanding how and why neural networks behave in certain ways. However, there is little unity in the field: most studies employ ad-hoc evaluations and do not share theoretical foundations, making it difficult to measure progress and compare the pros and cons of different techniques. Furthermore, while mechanistic understanding is frequently discussed, the basic causal units underlying these mechanisms are often not explicitly defined. In this paper, we propose a perspective on interpretability research grounded in causal mediation analysis. Specifically, we describe the history and current state of interpretability taxonomized according to the types of causal units (mediators) employed, as well as methods used to search over mediators. We discuss the pros and cons of each mediator, providing insights as to when particular kinds of mediators and search methods are most appropriate depending on the goals of a given study. We argue that this framing yields a more cohesive narrative of the field, as well as actionable insights for future work. Specifically, we recommend a focus on discovering new mediators with better trade-offs between human-interpretability and compute-efficiency, and which can uncover more sophisticated abstractions from neural networks than the primarily linear mediators employed in current work. We also argue for more standardized evaluations that enable principled comparisons across mediator types, such that we can better understand when particular causal units are better suited to particular use cases.

Despite large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks, they are still suffering from the factual inconsistency problem called hallucinations. For instance, LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from source article, and prefer to extract information that appears at the beginning and end of the context, especially in long document summarization. Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of LLMs in summarization by impelling them to process the entire article more fairly and faithfully. We present a novel summary generation strategy, namely SliSum, which exploits the ideas of sliding windows and self-consistency. Specifically, SliSum divides the source article into overlapping windows, and utilizes LLM to generate local summaries for the content in the windows. Finally, SliSum aggregates all local summaries using clustering and majority voting algorithm to produce more faithful summary of entire article. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SliSum significantly improves the faithfulness of diverse LLMs including LLaMA-2, Claude-2 and GPT-3.5 in both short and long text summarization, while maintaining their fluency and informativeness and without additional fine-tuning and resources. We further conduct qualitative and quantitative studies to investigate why SliSum works and impacts of hyperparameters in SliSum on performance.

Long-term time series forecasting in centralized environments poses unique challenges regarding data privacy, communication overhead, and scalability. To address these challenges, we propose FedTime, a federated large language model (LLM) tailored for long-range time series prediction. Specifically, we introduce a federated pre-trained LLM with fine-tuning and alignment strategies. Prior to the learning process, we employ K-means clustering to partition edge devices or clients into distinct clusters, thereby facilitating more focused model training. We also incorporate channel independence and patching to better preserve local semantic information, ensuring that important contextual details are retained while minimizing the risk of information loss. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our FedTime model through extensive experiments on various real-world forecasting benchmarks, showcasing substantial improvements over recent approaches. In addition, we demonstrate the efficiency of FedTime in streamlining resource usage, resulting in reduced communication overhead.

In clinical treatment, identifying potential adverse reactions of drugs can help assist doctors in making medication decisions. In response to the problems in previous studies that features are high-dimensional and sparse, independent prediction models need to be constructed for each adverse reaction of drugs, and the prediction accuracy is low, this paper develops an adverse drug reaction prediction model based on knowledge graph embedding and deep learning, which can predict experimental results. Unified prediction of adverse drug reactions covered. Knowledge graph embedding technology can fuse the associated information between drugs and alleviate the shortcomings of high-dimensional sparsity in feature matrices, and the efficient training capabilities of deep learning can improve the prediction accuracy of the model. This article builds an adverse drug reaction knowledge graph based on drug feature data; by analyzing the embedding effect of the knowledge graph under different embedding strategies, the best embedding strategy is selected to obtain sample vectors; and then a convolutional neural network model is constructed to predict adverse reactions. The results show that under the DistMult embedding model and 400-dimensional embedding strategy, the convolutional neural network model has the best prediction effect; the average accuracy, F_1 score, recall rate and area under the curve of repeated experiments are better than the methods reported in the literature. The obtained prediction model has good prediction accuracy and stability, and can provide an effective reference for later safe medication guidance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in executing tasks based on natural language queries. However, these models, trained on curated datasets, inherently embody biases ranging from racial to national and gender biases. It remains uncertain whether these biases impact the performance of LLMs for certain tasks. In this study, we investigate the political biases of LLMs within the stance classification task, specifically examining whether these models exhibit a tendency to more accurately classify politically-charged stances. Utilizing three datasets, seven LLMs, and four distinct prompting schemes, we analyze the performance of LLMs on politically oriented statements and targets. Our findings reveal a statistically significant difference in the performance of LLMs across various politically oriented stance classification tasks. Furthermore, we observe that this difference primarily manifests at the dataset level, with models and prompting schemes showing statistically similar performances across different stance classification datasets. Lastly, we observe that when there is greater ambiguity in the target the statement is directed towards, LLMs have poorer stance classification accuracy. Code & Dataset: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12938478

It is challenging to scale time series forecasting models such that they forecast accurately for multiple distinct domains and datasets, all with potentially different underlying collection procedures (e.g., sample resolution), patterns (e.g., periodicity), and prediction requirements (e.g., reconstruction vs. forecasting). We call this general task universal forecasting. Existing methods usually assume that input data is regularly sampled, and they forecast to pre-determined horizons, resulting in failure to generalise outside of the scope of their training. We propose the DAM - a neural model that takes randomly sampled histories and outputs an adjustable basis composition as a continuous function of time for forecasting to non-fixed horizons. It involves three key components: (1) a flexible approach for using randomly sampled histories from a long-tail distribution, that enables an efficient global perspective of the underlying temporal dynamics while retaining focus on the recent history; (2) a transformer backbone that is trained on these actively sampled histories to produce, as representational output, (3) the basis coefficients of a continuous function of time. We show that a single univariate DAM, trained on 25 time series datasets, either outperformed or closely matched existing SoTA models at multivariate long-term forecasting across 18 datasets, including 8 held-out for zero-shot transfer, even though these models were trained to specialise for each dataset-horizon combination. This single DAM excels at zero-shot transfer and very-long-term forecasting, performs well at imputation, is interpretable via basis function composition and attention, can be tuned for different inference-cost requirements, is robust to missing and irregularly sampled data {by design}.

In the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, time series forecasting plays a pivotal role across various domains such as finance, healthcare, and weather. However, the task of selecting the most suitable forecasting method for a given dataset is a complex task due to the diversity of data patterns and characteristics. This research aims to address this challenge by proposing a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating and ranking time series forecasting methods across a wide range of datasets. This study investigates the comparative performance of many methods from two prominent time series forecasting frameworks, AutoGluon-Timeseries, and sktime to shed light on their applicability in different real-world scenarios. This research contributes to the field of time series forecasting by providing a robust benchmarking methodology, and facilitating informed decision-making when choosing forecasting methods for achieving optimal prediction.

As the world turned digital, people were quick to drop their Sunday papers and pick up their smartphones for news. Advertisers followed suit as digital platforms became more valuable real estate than print newspapers, leaving California news outlets desperate to find ways to stay profitable and relevant. News outlets must spend at least 70% of the received funds on their staff. A second bill being considered by California lawmakers, Senate Bill 1327, would charge Amazon, Meta and Google a "data extraction mitigation fee" for data they collect from users. The funds would go toward supporting local newsrooms.

This paper comprehensively reviews recent advances in underwater acoustic signal denoising, an area critical for improving the reliability and clarity of underwater communication and monitoring systems. Despite significant progress in the field, the complex nature of underwater environments poses unique challenges that complicate the denoising process. We begin by outlining the fundamental challenges associated with underwater acoustic signal processing, including signal attenuation, noise variability, and the impact of environmental factors. The review then systematically categorizes and discusses various denoising algorithms, such as conventional, decomposition-based, and learning-based techniques, highlighting their applications, advantages, and limitations. Evaluation metrics and experimental datasets are also reviewed. The paper concludes with a list of open questions and recommendations for future research directions, emphasizing the need for developing more robust denoising techniques that can adapt to the dynamic underwater acoustic environment.