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Bureaucrats shouldn't impose global AI policy at 'fancy, high-level' meetings, expert warns
GOP Rep. Nancy Mace spoke exclusively with Fox News Digital about her thoughts on the rapidly advancing AI sector as Congress races to get ahead of the burgeoning technology. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's announcement that he is working with European partners to outline a voluntary artificial intelligence (AI) conduct code has left some experts concerned about how the government plans to handle such delicate policies in the future. "A lot of us believe that this should be done through legal institutions, through democratic institutions and not simply as a side agreement at a trade meeting between governments and industry," Marc Rotenberg, executive director at the Center for AI and Digital Policy, told Fox News Digital. "I don't think that's good for the public," Rotenberg stressed. "I think the public has a right to expect that whatever these decisions will be for artificial intelligence, they'll be made through political institutions and not just at these fancy high-level meetings."
AI threat landscape could include automated propaganda bots, sophisticated email attacks: Security experts
As more companies rush to implement AI solutions and software, a growing number of experts are warning that it could result in an explosion of'fake news' and misinformation. Artificial intelligence (AI) will become a "fundamental game changer" throughout the world, enabling scalable disinformation campaigns and online scams, but global cyber-cooperation and traditional security hygiene should provide significant protection for companies and individuals, according to experts. Center for a New American Security CEO Richard Fontaine told Fox News Digital that until now, humans have primarily created disinformation. While it may have been propagated through digital means, it was not made through digital means. But these new AI applications could now allow a government to propagate and originate disinformation at scale.
Pre-computed memory or on-the-fly encoding? A hybrid approach to retrieval augmentation makes the most of your compute
de Jong, Michiel, Zemlyanskiy, Yury, FitzGerald, Nicholas, Ainslie, Joshua, Sanghai, Sumit, Sha, Fei, Cohen, William
Retrieval-augmented language models such as Fusion-in-Decoder are powerful, setting the state of the art on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks. However, they are also expensive, due to the need to encode a large number of retrieved passages. Some work avoids this cost by pre-encoding a text corpus into a memory and retrieving dense representations directly. However, pre-encoding memory incurs a severe quality penalty as the memory representations are not conditioned on the current input. We propose LUMEN, a hybrid between these two extremes, pre-computing the majority of the retrieval representation and completing the encoding on the fly using a live encoder that is conditioned on the question and fine-tuned for the task. We show that LUMEN significantly outperforms pure memory on multiple question-answering tasks while being much cheaper than FiD, and outperforms both for any given compute budget. Moreover, the advantage of LUMEN over FiD increases with model size.
Visual Question Answering: A Survey on Techniques and Common Trends in Recent Literature
de Faria, Ana Cláudia Akemi Matsuki, Bastos, Felype de Castro, da Silva, José Victor Nogueira Alves, Fabris, Vitor Lopes, Uchoa, Valeska de Sousa, Neto, Décio Gonçalves de Aguiar, Santos, Claudio Filipi Goncalves dos
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a multi-disciplinary artificial intelligence research problem that has attracted the attention of researchers from computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge representation, and other machine learning communities. To solve that question, VQA is a task of generating natural language answers when a question in natural language is asked related to an image. In recent years, visual question answering as a result of the flourish in this field, datasets, metrics, and models have been proposed, and the scope of research has been expanded. Although artificial intelligence has solved several different problems, such as image classification and natural language processing (NLP), it is hard to model a problem which needs different types of data. For instance, mixing computer vision with NLP to retrieve some information about an image from a question has tricked researchers for several years.
BKinD-3D: Self-Supervised 3D Keypoint Discovery from Multi-View Videos
Sun, Jennifer J., Karashchuk, Lili, Dravid, Amil, Ryou, Serim, Fereidooni, Sonia, Tuthill, John, Katsaggelos, Aggelos, Brunton, Bingni W., Gkioxari, Georgia, Kennedy, Ann, Yue, Yisong, Perona, Pietro
Quantifying motion in 3D is important for studying the behavior of humans and other animals, but manual pose annotations are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Self-supervised keypoint discovery is a promising strategy for estimating 3D poses without annotations. However, current keypoint discovery approaches commonly process single 2D views and do not operate in the 3D space. We propose a new method to perform self-supervised keypoint discovery in 3D from multi-view videos of behaving agents, without any keypoint or bounding box supervision in 2D or 3D. Our method, BKinD-3D, uses an encoder-decoder architecture with a 3D volumetric heatmap, trained to reconstruct spatiotemporal differences across multiple views, in addition to joint length constraints on a learned 3D skeleton of the subject. In this way, we discover keypoints without requiring manual supervision in videos of humans and rats, demonstrating the potential of 3D keypoint discovery for studying behavior.
Maximum Entropy on Erroneous Predictions (MEEP): Improving model calibration for medical image segmentation
Larrazabal, Agostina, Martinez, Cesar, Dolz, Jose, Ferrante, Enzo
Modern deep neural networks achieved remarkable progress in medical image segmentation tasks. However, it has recently been observed that they tend to produce overconfident estimates, even in situations of high uncertainty, leading to poorly calibrated and unreliable models. In this work we introduce Maximum Entropy on Erroneous Predictions (MEEP), a training strategy for segmentation networks which selectively penalizes overconfident predictions, focusing only on misclassified pixels. Our method is agnostic to the neural architecture, does not increase model complexity and can be coupled with multiple segmentation loss functions. We benchmark the proposed strategy in two challenging segmentation tasks: white matter hyperintensity lesions in magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the brain, and atrial segmentation in cardiac MRI. The experimental results demonstrate that coupling MEEP with standard segmentation losses leads to improvements not only in terms of model calibration, but also in segmentation quality.
Improving Adversarial Robustness of DEQs with Explicit Regulations Along the Neural Dynamics
Yang, Zonghan, Li, Peng, Pang, Tianyu, Liu, Yang
Deep equilibrium (DEQ) models replace the multiple-layer stacking of conventional deep networks with a fixed-point iteration of a single-layer transformation. Having been demonstrated to be competitive in a variety of real-world scenarios, the adversarial robustness of general DEQs becomes increasingly crucial for their reliable deployment. Existing works improve the robustness of general DEQ models with the widely-used adversarial training (AT) framework, but they fail to exploit the structural uniquenesses of DEQ models. To this end, we interpret DEQs through the lens of neural dynamics and find that AT under-regulates intermediate states. Besides, the intermediate states typically provide predictions with a high prediction entropy. Informed by the correlation between the entropy of dynamical systems and their stability properties, we propose reducing prediction entropy by progressively updating inputs along the neural dynamics. During AT, we also utilize random intermediate states to compute the loss function. Our methods regulate the neural dynamics of DEQ models in this manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods substantially increase the robustness of DEQ models and even outperform the strong deep network baselines.
Optimal Control for Articulated Soft Robots
Chhatoi, Saroj Prasad, Pierallini, Michele, Angelini, Franco, Mastalli, Carlos, Garabini, Manolo
Soft robots can execute tasks with safer interactions. However, control techniques that can effectively exploit the systems' capabilities are still missing. Differential dynamic programming (DDP) has emerged as a promising tool for achieving highly dynamic tasks. But most of the literature deals with applying DDP to articulated soft robots by using numerical differentiation, in addition to using pure feed-forward control to perform explosive tasks. Further, underactuated compliant robots are known to be difficult to control and the use of DDP-based algorithms to control them is not yet addressed. We propose an efficient DDP-based algorithm for trajectory optimization of articulated soft robots that can optimize the state trajectory, input torques, and stiffness profile. We provide an efficient method to compute the forward dynamics and the analytical derivatives of series elastic actuators (SEA)/variable stiffness actuators (VSA) and underactuated compliant robots. We present a state-feedback controller that uses locally optimal feedback policies obtained from DDP. We show through simulations and experiments that the use of feedback is crucial in improving the performance and stabilization properties of various tasks. We also show that the proposed method can be used to plan and control underactuated compliant robots, with varying degrees of underactuation effectively.
Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles Part II: Perception and Planning
Chen, Long, Teng, Siyu, Li, Bai, Na, Xiaoxiang, Li, Yuchen, Li, Zixuan, Wang, Jinjun, Cao, Dongpu, Zheng, Nanning, Wang, Fei-Yue
Growing interest in autonomous driving (AD) and intelligent vehicles (IVs) is fueled by their promise for enhanced safety, efficiency, and economic benefits. While previous surveys have captured progress in this field, a comprehensive and forward-looking summary is needed. Our work fills this gap through three distinct articles. The first part, a "Survey of Surveys" (SoS), outlines the history, surveys, ethics, and future directions of AD and IV technologies. The second part, "Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles Part I: Control, Computing System Design, Communication, HD Map, Testing, and Human Behaviors" delves into the development of control, computing system, communication, HD map, testing, and human behaviors in IVs. This part, the third part, reviews perception and planning in the context of IVs. Aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of the latest advancements in AD and IVs, this work caters to both newcomers and seasoned researchers. By integrating the SoS and Part I, we offer unique insights and strive to serve as a bridge between past achievements and future possibilities in this dynamic field.
Guided scenarios with simulated expert personae: a remarkable strategy to perform cognitive work
Large language models (LLMs) trained on a substantial corpus of human knowledge and literature productively work with a large array of facts from that corpus. Surprisingly, they are also able to re-create the behaviors of personae that are captured within the corpus. By forming teams of simulated personae, supplying contexts that set the stage, and providing gentle prompts, one can move through scenarios that elicit expert behavior to perform meaningful cognitive work. The power of this strategy is demonstrated with two examples, one attacking factuality of LLM responses and the other reproducing a very recently published result in quantum optics.