Government
America's Worst Polluters See a Lifeline in Power-Gobbling AI--and Donald Trump
President Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on July 15, 2025, in Washington, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt watches in reverence.. Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. AI is "not my thing," President Donald Trump admitted during a speech in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. However, the president said during his remarks at the Energy and Innovation Summit, his advisers had told him just how important energy was to the future of AI. "You need double the electric of what we have right now, and maybe even more than that," Trump said, recalling a conversation with "David"--most likely White House AI czar David Sacks, a panelist at the summit. "I said, what, are you kidding? That's double the electric that we have. Take everything we have and double it."
Israel kills 30 in Gaza attacks, using 'drone missiles packed with nails'
At least 30 Palestinians have been killed since dawn across Gaza in Israeli attacks, medical sources have told Al Jazeera, as the besieged and bombarded enclave's decimated health system, overwhelmed by a daily flow of wounded, is forcing doctors to make decisions on who to treat first. In the latest killings on Friday, three people died in an Israeli attack on the Tuffah neighbourhood of eastern Gaza City. Five people were also killed in an Israeli air attack in Jabalia an-Nazla, in northern Gaza. Earlier, an Israeli attack hit tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza – previously designated a so-called "safe zone" – igniting a major fire and killing at least five people, including infants. Al-Mawasi has come under repeated, deadly Israeli fire.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,240
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the US publication The New York Post that he and United States President Donald Trump are considering a deal that involves Washington buying battlefield-tested Ukrainian drones in exchange for Kyiv purchasing weapons from the US. The US has informed Switzerland of delays to the delivery of Patriot air defence systems, the Swiss Defence Ministry said, adding that Washington wants to prioritise delivery of the systems to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy says he and Trump are considering a drone 'mega-deal'
U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy are considering a deal that involves Washington buying battlefield-tested Ukrainian drones in exchange for Kyiv purchasing weapons from the U.S., Zelenskyy said in an interview with the New York Post. Zelenskyy said his latest talks with Trump focused on a deal that would help each country bolster its aerial technology. Ukrainian drones have been able to strike targets as deep as 1,300 kilometers into Russian territory. "The people of America need this technology, and you need to have it in your arsenal," Zelenskyy told the Post in the interview conducted Wednesday. The Ukrainian leader said drones were the key tool that has allowed his country to fight off Russia's invasion for more than three years.
Manipulation Attacks by Misaligned AI: Risk Analysis and Safety Case Framework
Dassanayake, Rishane, Demetroudi, Mario, Walpole, James, Lentati, Lindley, Brown, Jason R., Young, Edward James
Frontier AI systems are rapidly advancing in their capabilities to persuade, deceive, and influence human behaviour, with current models already demonstrating human-level persuasion and strategic deception in specific contexts. Humans are often the weakest link in cybersecurity systems, and a misaligned AI system deployed internally within a frontier company may seek to undermine human oversight by manipulating employees. Despite this growing threat, manipulation attacks have received little attention, and no systematic framework exists for assessing and mitigating these risks. To address this, we provide a detailed explanation of why manipulation attacks are a significant threat and could lead to catastrophic outcomes. Additionally, we present a safety case framework for manipulation risk, structured around three core lines of argument: inability, control, and trustworthiness. For each argument, we specify evidence requirements, evaluation methodologies, and implementation considerations for direct application by AI companies. This paper provides the first systematic methodology for integrating manipulation risk into AI safety governance, offering AI companies a concrete foundation to assess and mitigate these threats before deployment.
Prompt Injection 2.0: Hybrid AI Threats
McHugh, Jeremy, Šekrst, Kristina, Cefalu, Jon
Prompt injection attacks, where malicious input is designed to manipulate AI systems into ignoring their original instructions and following unauthorized commands instead, were first discovered by Preamble, Inc. in May 2022 and responsibly disclosed to OpenAI. Over the last three years, these attacks have remained a critical security threat for LLM-integrated systems. The emergence of agentic AI systems, where LLMs autonomously perform multistep tasks through tools and coordination with other agents, has fundamentally transformed the threat landscape. Modern prompt injection attacks can now combine with traditional cybersecurity exploits to create hybrid threats that systematically evade traditional security controls, but also, like in the case of academic peer reviews, raise serious ethical concerns. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of Prompt Injection 2.0, examining how prompt injections integrate with Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF), and other web security vulnerabilities to bypass traditional security measures. We build upon Preamble's research and mitigation technologies, evaluating them against contemporary threats, including AI worms, multi-agent infections, and hybrid cyber-AI attacks. Our analysis incorporates recent benchmarks that demonstrate how traditional web application firewalls, XSS filters, and CSRF tokens fail against AI-enhanced attacks. We also present architectural solutions that combine prompt isolation, runtime security, and privilege separation with novel threat detection capabilities.
SMART: Relation-Aware Learning of Geometric Representations for Knowledge Graphs
Amouzouvi, Kossi, Song, Bowen, Coletta, Andrea, Bellomarini, Luigi, Lehmann, Jens, Vahdati, Sahar
Knowledge graph representation learning approaches provide a mapping between symbolic knowledge in the form of triples in a knowledge graph (KG) and their feature vectors. Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models often represent relations in a KG as geometric transformations. Most state-of-the-art (SOTA) KGE models are derived from elementary geometric transformations (EGTs), such as translation, scaling, rotation, and reflection, or their combinations. These geometric transformations enable the models to effectively preserve specific structural and relational patterns of the KG. However, the current use of EGTs by KGEs remains insufficient without considering relation-specific transformations. Although recent models attempted to address this problem by ensembling SOTA baseline models in different ways, only a single or composite version of geometric transformations are used by such baselines to represent all the relations. In this paper, we propose a framework that evaluates how well each relation fits with different geometric transformations. Based on this ranking, the model can: (1) assign the best-matching transformation to each relation, or (2) use majority voting to choose one transformation type to apply across all relations. That is, the model learns a single relation-specific EGT in low dimensional vector space through an attention mechanism. Furthermore, we use the correlation between relations and EGTs, which are learned in a low dimension, for relation embeddings in a high dimensional vector space. The effectiveness of our models is demonstrated through comprehensive evaluations on three benchmark KGs as well as a real-world financial KG, witnessing a performance comparable to leading models
A Semi-Supervised Learning Method for the Identification of Bad Exposures in Large Imaging Surveys
Luo, Yufeng, Myers, Adam D., Drlica-Wagner, Alex, Dematties, Dario, Borchani, Salma, Valdes, Frank, Dey, Arjun, Schlegel, David, Zhou, Rongpu, Team, DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys
As the data volume of astronomical imaging surveys rapidly increases, traditional methods for image anomaly detection, such as visual inspection by human experts, are becoming impractical. We introduce a machine-learning-based approach to detect poor-quality exposures in large imaging surveys, with a focus on the DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) in regions of low extinction (i.e., $E(B-V)<0.04$). Our semi-supervised pipeline integrates a vision transformer (ViT), trained via self-supervised learning (SSL), with a k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classifier. We train and validate our pipeline using a small set of labeled exposures observed by surveys with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). A clustering-space analysis of where our pipeline places images labeled in ``good'' and ``bad'' categories suggests that our approach can efficiently and accurately determine the quality of exposures. Applied to new imaging being reduced for DECaLS Data Release 11, our pipeline identifies 780 problematic exposures, which we subsequently verify through visual inspection. Being highly efficient and adaptable, our method offers a scalable solution for quality control in other large imaging surveys.
TransEvalnia: Reasoning-based Evaluation and Ranking of Translations
Sproat, Richard, Zhao, Tianyu, Jones, Llion
We present TransEvalnia, a prompting-based translation evaluation and ranking system that uses reasoning in performing its evaluations and ranking. This system presents fine-grained evaluations based on a subset of the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (https://themqm.org/), returns an assessment of which translation it deems the best, and provides numerical scores for the various dimensions and for the overall translation. We show that TransEvalnia performs as well as or better than the state-of-the-art MT-Ranker (Moosa et al. 2024) on our own English-Japanese data as well as several language pairs from various WMT shared tasks. Using Anthropic's Claude-3.5-Sonnet and Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct as the evaluation LLMs, we show that the evaluations returned are deemed highly acceptable to human raters, and that the scores assigned to the translations by Sonnet, as well as other LLMs, correlate well with scores assigned by the human raters. We also note the sensitivity of our system -- as well as MT-Ranker -- to the order in which the translations are presented, and we propose methods to address this position bias. All data, including the system's evaluation and reasoning, human assessments, as well as code is released.
FORTRESS: Function-composition Optimized Real-Time Resilient Structural Segmentation via Kolmogorov-Arnold Enhanced Spatial Attention Networks
Thrainer, Christina, Ferdaus, Md Meftahul, Abdelguerfi, Mahdi, Guetl, Christian, Sloan, Steven, Niles, Kendall N., Pathak, Ken
Automated structural defect segmentation in civil infrastructure faces a critical challenge: achieving high accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency for real-time deployment. This paper presents FORTRESS (Function-composition Optimized Real-Time Resilient Structural Segmentation), a new architecture that balances accuracy and speed by using a special method that combines depthwise separable convolutions with adaptive Kolmogorov-Arnold Network integration. FORTRESS incorporates three key innovations: a systematic depthwise separable convolution framework achieving a 3.6x parameter reduction per layer, adaptive TiKAN integration that selectively applies function composition transformations only when computationally beneficial, and multi-scale attention fusion combining spatial, channel, and KAN-enhanced features across decoder levels. The architecture achieves remarkable efficiency gains with 91% parameter reduction (31M to 2.9M), 91% computational complexity reduction (13.7 to 1.17 GFLOPs), and 3x inference speed improvement while delivering superior segmentation performance. Evaluation on benchmark infrastructure datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art results with an F1- score of 0.771 and a mean IoU of 0.677, significantly outperforming existing methods including U-Net, SA-UNet, and U- KAN. The dual optimization strategy proves essential for optimal performance, establishing FORTRESS as a robust solution for practical structural defect segmentation in resource-constrained environments where both accuracy and computational efficiency are paramount. Comprehensive architectural specifications are provided in the Supplemental Material. Source code is available at URL: https://github.com/faeyelab/fortress-paper-code.