By 2030, Artificial Intelligence could be looking after our elderly, making films and teaching lessons -- or it could have wiped out the human race. These are the wildly different predictions from eight AI experts from the US and UK, who predict how the technology may change our lives within the next decade. It comes amid growing calls for regulators to put the lid on the development of AI, amid fears that it could lead to waves of job losses and render us obsolete. AI technology could become so good that it will start to generate entire films within a day, predicts New York-based writer of Apple TV Sci-fi series Silo Mr Howey. Speaking to DailyMail.com, he said it was only a matter of time before AI tools were capable of making films. 'I've had access to alpha versions of art generators for a few years now, and I've watched how quickly they go from very rough approximations to photo-realism so good that you can't distinguish the AI art from photography,' he said.

Keir Starmer should pledge £11bn towards building "BritGPT" and a national artificial intelligence (AI) cloud in the next Labour manifesto or risk the UK falling ever further into dependence on American tech companies, an affiliated thinktank has said. Labour for the Long Term, which campaigns within the party for it to adopt "long-termist" policies that mitigate dangers such as pandemics, climate breakdown, and AI extinction, argues in a report that the £1bn pledged by the government in the 2023 budget is not enough to protect Britain's future independence. The report calls for the creation of BritGPT, a homemade system with a remit to focus on market failures rather than simply trying to compete with Silicon Valley to build the biggest models. "Private profit-seeking companies aren't going to invest enough in'AI for good' or AI safety, so the UK government should step in to correct this market failure and provide more public goods – such as medical research, clean energy research, and AI safety research," it said. They suggested some of the budget could even come out of Labour's £28bn annual "climate investment pledge" as a result.

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying systems. Traditional transfer learning methods propose to use prior knowledge of the system behavior to devise a gradual or immediate data-driven transformation of the control policy obtained through RL. Such transformation is usually computed by estimating the performance of previous control policies based on measurements recently collected from the system. However, such retrospective measures have debatable utility with no guarantees of positive transfer in most cases. Instead, we propose a model-based transformation, such that when actions from a control policy are applied to the target system, a positive transfer is achieved. The transformation can be used as an initialization for the reinforcement learning process to converge to a new optimum. We validate the performance of our approach through four benchmark examples. We demonstrate that our approach is more sample-efficient than fine-tuning with reinforcement learning alone and achieves comparable performance to linear-quadratic-regulators and model-predictive control when an accurate linear model is known in the three cases. If an accurate model is not known, we empirically show that the proposed approach still guarantees positive transfer with jump-start improvement.

As deep learning gains popularity in modelling dynamical systems, we expose an underappreciated misunderstanding relevant to modelling dynamics on networks. Strongly influenced by graph neural networks, latent vertex embeddings are naturally adopted in many neural dynamical network models. However, we show that embeddings tend to induce a model that fits observations well but simultaneously has incorrect dynamical behaviours. Recognising that previous studies narrowly focus on short-term predictions during the transient phase of a flow, we propose three tests for correct long-term behaviour, and illustrate how an embedding-based dynamical model fails these tests, and analyse the causes, particularly through the lens of topological conjugacy. In doing so, we show that the difficulties can be avoided by not using embedding. We propose a simple embedding-free alternative based on parametrising two additive vector-field components. Through extensive experiments, we verify that the proposed model can reliably recover a broad class of dynamics on different network topologies from time series data.

A real-world text corpus sometimes comprises not only text documents but also semantic links between them (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic network are linked by citations and co-authorships). Text documents and semantic connections form a text-rich network, which empowers a wide range of downstream tasks such as classification and retrieval. However, pretraining methods for such structures are still lacking, making it difficult to build one generic model that can be adapted to various tasks on text-rich networks. Current pretraining objectives, such as masked language modeling, purely model texts and do not take inter-document structure information into consideration. To this end, we propose our PretrAining on TexT-Rich NetwOrk framework Patton. Patton includes two pretraining strategies: network-contextualized masked language modeling and masked node prediction, to capture the inherent dependency between textual attributes and network structure. We conduct experiments on four downstream tasks in five datasets from both academic and e-commerce domains, where Patton outperforms baselines significantly and consistently.

The article deals with anomaly detection of Juniper router logs. Abnormal Juniper router logs include logs that are usually different from the normal operation, and they often reflect the abnormal operation of router devices. To prevent router devices from being damaged and help administrator to grasp the situation of error quickly, detecting abnormal operation soon is very important. In this work, we present a new way to get important features from log data of Juniper router devices and use machine learning method (basing on One-Class SVM model) for anomaly detection. One-Class SVM model requires some knowledge and comprehension about logs of Juniper router devices so that it can analyze, interpret, and test the knowledge ac-quired. We collect log data from a lot of real Juniper router devices and clas-sify them based on our knowledge. Before these logs are used for training and testing the One-Class SVM model, the feature extraction phase for these data was carried out. Finally, with the proposed method, the system errors of the routers were dectected quickly and accurately. This may help our com-pany to reduce the operation cost for the router systems.

Power systems dominated by renewable energy encounter frequently large, random disturbances, and a critical challenge faced in power-system management is how to anticipate accurately whether the perturbed systems will return to the functional state after the transient or collapse. Whereas model-based studies show that the key to addressing the challenge lies in the attracting basins of the functional and dysfunctional states in the phase space, the finding of the attracting basins for realistic power systems remains a challenge, as accurate models describing the system dynamics are generally unavailable. Here we propose a new machine learning technique, namely balanced reservoir computing, to infer the attracting basins of a typical power system based on measured data. Specifically, trained by the time series of a handful of perturbation events, we demonstrate that the trained machine can predict accurately whether the system will return to the functional state in response to a large, random perturbation, thereby reconstructing the attracting basin of the functional state. The working mechanism of the new machine is analyzed, and it is revealed that the success of the new machine is attributed to the good balance between the echo and fading properties of the reservoir network; the effect of noisy signals on the prediction performance is also investigated, and a stochastic-resonance-like phenomenon is observed. Finally, we demonstrate that the new technique can be also utilized to infer the attracting basins of coexisting attractors in typical chaotic systems.

Offloading computation to nearby edge/fog computing nodes, including the ones carried by moving vehicles, e.g., vehicular fog nodes (VFN), has proved to be a promising approach for enabling low-latency and compute-intensive mobility applications, such as cooperative and autonomous driving. This work considers vehicular fog computing scenarios where the clients of computation offloading services try to minimize their own costs while deciding which VFNs to offload their tasks. We focus on decentralized multi-agent decision-making in a repeated unknown game where each agent, e.g., service client, can observe only its own action and realized cost. In other words, each agent is unaware of the game composition or even the existence of opponents. We apply a completely uncoupled learning rule to generalize the decentralized decision-making algorithm presented in \cite{Cho2021} for the multi-agent case. The multi-agent solution proposed in this work can capture the unknown offloading cost variations susceptive to resource congestion under an adversarial framework where each agent may take implicit cost estimation and suitable resource choice adapting to the dynamics associated with volatile supply and demand. According to the evaluation via simulation, this work reveals that such individual perturbations for robustness to uncertainty and adaptation to dynamicity ensure a certain level of optimality in terms of social welfare, e.g., converging the actual sequence of play with unknown and asymmetric attributes and lowering the correspondent cost in social welfare due to the self-interested behaviors of agents.

We present an effective framework for improving the breakdown point of robust regression algorithms. Robust regression has attracted widespread attention due to the ubiquity of outliers, which significantly affect the estimation results. However, many existing robust least-squares regression algorithms suffer from a low breakdown point, as they become stuck around local optima when facing severe attacks. By expanding on the previous work, we propose a novel framework that enhances the breakdown point of these algorithms by inserting a prior distribution in each iteration step, and adjusting the prior distribution according to historical information. We apply this framework to a specific algorithm and derive the consistent robust regression algorithm with iterative local search (CORALS). The relationship between CORALS and momentum gradient descent is described, and a detailed proof of the theoretical convergence of CORALS is presented. Finally, we demonstrate that the breakdown point of CORALS is indeed higher than that of the algorithm from which it is derived. We apply the proposed framework to other robust algorithms, and show that the improved algorithms achieve better results than the original algorithms, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Data-driven approaches for material discovery and design have been accelerated by emerging efforts in machine learning. However, general representations of crystals to explore the vast material search space remain limited. We introduce a material discovery framework that uses natural language embeddings derived from language models as representations of compositional and structural features. The discovery framework consists of a joint scheme that first recalls relevant candidates, and next ranks the candidates based on multiple target properties. The contextual knowledge encoded in language representations conveys information about material properties and structures, enabling both representational similarity analysis for recall, and multi-task learning to share information across related properties. By applying the framework to thermoelectrics, we demonstrate diversified recommendations of prototype structures and identify under-studied high-performance material spaces. The recommended materials are corroborated by first-principles calculations and experiments, revealing novel materials with potential high performance. Our framework provides a task-agnostic means for effective material recommendation and can be applied to various material systems.