Government
Action-Minimization Meets Generative Modeling: Efficient Transition Path Sampling with the Onsager-Machlup Functional
Raja, Sanjeev, Šípka, Martin, Psenka, Michael, Kreiman, Tobias, Pavelka, Michal, Krishnapriyan, Aditi S.
Transition path sampling (TPS), which involves finding probable paths connecting two points on an energy landscape, remains a challenge due to the complexity of real-world atomistic systems. Current machine learning approaches use expensive, task-specific, and data-free training procedures, limiting their ability to benefit from high-quality datasets and large-scale pre-trained models. In this work, we address TPS by interpreting candidate paths as trajectories sampled from stochastic dynamics induced by the learned score function of pre-trained generative models, specifically denoising diffusion and flow matching. Under these dynamics, finding high-likelihood transition paths becomes equivalent to minimizing the Onsager-Machlup (OM) action functional. This enables us to repurpose pre-trained generative models for TPS in a zero-shot manner, in contrast with bespoke, task-specific approaches in previous work. We demonstrate our approach on varied molecular systems, obtaining diverse, physically realistic transition pathways and generalizing beyond the pre-trained model's original training dataset. Our method can be easily incorporated into new generative models, making it practically relevant as models continue to scale and improve with increased data availability. Code is available at github.com/ASK-Berkeley/OM-TPS.
Adaptive Anomaly Detection for Identifying Attacks in Cyber-Physical Systems: A Systematic Literature Review
Moriano, Pablo, Hespeler, Steven C., Li, Mingyan, Mahbub, Maria
Modern cyberattacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS) rapidly evolve and cannot be deterred effectively with most current methods which focused on characterizing past threats. Adaptive anomaly detection (AAD) is among the most promising techniques to detect evolving cyberattacks focused on fast data processing and model adaptation. AAD has been researched in the literature extensively; however, to the best of our knowledge, our work is the first systematic literature review (SLR) on the current research within this field. We present a comprehensive SLR, gathering 397 relevant papers and systematically analyzing 65 of them (47 research and 18 survey papers) on AAD in CPS studies from 2013 to 2023 (November). We introduce a novel taxonomy considering attack types, CPS application, learning paradigm, data management, and algorithms. Our analysis indicates, among other findings, that reviewed works focused on a single aspect of adaptation (either data processing or model adaptation) but rarely in both at the same time. We aim to help researchers to advance the state of the art and help practitioners to become familiar with recent progress in this field. We identify the limitations of the state of the art and provide recommendations for future research directions.
NY Real Estate Racial Equity Analysis via Applied Machine Learning
Chalavadi, Sanjana, Pastor, Andrei, Leitch, Terry
This study analyzes tract-level real estate ownership patterns in New York State (NYS) and New York City (NYC) to uncover racial disparities. We use an advanced race/ethnicity imputation model (LSTM+Geo with XGBoost filtering, validated at 89.2% accuracy) to compare the predicted racial composition of property owners to the resident population from census data. We examine both a Full Model (statewide) and a Name-Only LSTM Model (NYC) to assess how incorporating geospatial context affects our predictions and disparity estimates. The results reveal significant inequities: White individuals hold a disproportionate share of properties and property value relative to their population, while Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities are underrepresented as property owners. These disparities are most pronounced in minority-majority neighborhoods, where ownership is predominantly White despite a predominantly non-White population. Corporate ownership (LLCs, trusts, etc.) exacerbates these gaps by reducing owner-occupied opportunities in urban minority communities. We provide a breakdown of ownership vs. population by race for majority-White, -Black, -Hispanic, and -Asian tracts, identify those with extreme ownership disparities, and compare patterns in urban, suburban, and rural contexts. The findings underscore persistent racial inequity in property ownership, reflecting broader historical and socio-economic forces, and highlight the importance of data-driven approaches to address these issues.
Scalable Bayesian Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models via Stochastic Variational Subspace Inference
Samplawski, Colin, Cobb, Adam D., Acharya, Manoj, Kaur, Ramneet, Jha, Susmit
Despite their widespread use, large language models (LLMs) are known to hallucinate incorrect information and be poorly calibrated. This makes the uncertainty quantification of these models of critical importance, especially in high-stakes domains, such as autonomy and healthcare. Prior work has made Bayesian deep learning-based approaches to this problem more tractable by performing inference over the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) parameters of a fine-tuned model. While effective, these approaches struggle to scale to larger LLMs due to requiring further additional parameters compared to LoRA. In this work we present $\textbf{Scala}$ble $\textbf{B}$ayesian $\textbf{L}$ow-Rank Adaptation via Stochastic Variational Subspace Inference (ScalaBL). We perform Bayesian inference in an $r$-dimensional subspace, for LoRA rank $r$. By repurposing the LoRA parameters as projection matrices, we are able to map samples from this subspace into the full weight space of the LLM. This allows us to learn all the parameters of our approach using stochastic variational inference. Despite the low dimensionality of our subspace, we are able to achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art approaches while only requiring ${\sim}1000$ additional parameters. Furthermore, it allows us to scale up to the largest Bayesian LLM to date, with four times as a many base parameters as prior work.
PhishKey: A Novel Centroid-Based Approach for Enhanced Phishing Detection Using Adaptive HTML Component Extraction
Castaño, Felipe, Fidalgo, Eduardo, Alegre, Enrique, Alaiz-Rodríguez, Rocio, Orduna, Raul, Zola, Francesco
Phishing attacks pose a significant cybersecurity threat, evolving rapidly to bypass detection mechanisms and exploit human vulnerabilities. This paper introduces PhishKey to address the challenges of adaptability, robustness, and efficiency. PhishKey is a novel phishing detection method using automatic feature extraction from hybrid sources. PhishKey combines character-level processing with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for URL classification, and a Centroid-Based Key Component Phishing Extractor (CAPE) for HTML content at the word level. CAPE reduces noise and ensures complete sample processing avoiding crop operations on the input data. The predictions from both modules are integrated using a soft-voting ensemble to achieve more accurate and reliable classifications. Experimental evaluations on four state-of-the-art datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PhishKey. It achieves up to 98.70% F1 Score and shows strong resistance to adversarial manipulations such as injection attacks with minimal performance degradation.
Enhancing LLM Tool Use with High-quality Instruction Data from Knowledge Graph
Wang, Jingwei, Zhang, Zai, Qian, Hao, Gan, Chunjing, Hu, Binbin, Liu, Ziqi, Zhang, Zhiqiang, Zhou, Jun, Shi, Bin, Dong, Bo
Teaching large language models (LLMs) to use tools is crucial for improving their problem-solving abilities and expanding their applications. However, effectively using tools is challenging because it requires a deep understanding of tool functionalities and user intentions. Previous methods relied mainly on LLMs to generate instruction data, but the quality of these data was often insufficient. In this paper, we propose a new method that uses knowledge graphs to generate high-quality instruction data for LLMs. Knowledge graphs are manually curated datasets rich in semantic information. We begin by extracting various query pathways from a given knowledge graph, which are transformed into a broad spectrum of user queries. We then translate the relationships between entities into actionable tools and parse the pathways of each query into detailed solution steps, thereby creating high-quality instruction data. Our experiments show that fine-tuning on just a small sample of this synthetic data can significantly improve the tool utilization and overall capabilities of LLMs.
TRIDENT: Tri-Modal Molecular Representation Learning with Taxonomic Annotations and Local Correspondence
Jiang, Feng, Prakash, Mangal, Ma, Hehuan, Deng, Jianyuan, Guo, Yuzhi, Mollaysa, Amina, Mansi, Tommaso, Liao, Rui, Huang, Junzhou
Molecular property prediction aims to learn representations that map chemical structures to functional properties. While multimodal learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm to learn molecular representations, prior works have largely overlooked textual and taxonomic information of molecules for representation learning. We introduce TRIDENT, a novel framework that integrates molecular SMILES, textual descriptions, and taxonomic functional annotations to learn rich molecular representations. To achieve this, we curate a comprehensive dataset of molecule-text pairs with structured, multi-level functional annotations. Instead of relying on conventional contrastive loss, TRIDENT employs a volume-based alignment objective to jointly align tri-modal features at the global level, enabling soft, geometry-aware alignment across modalities. Additionally, TRIDENT introduces a novel local alignment objective that captures detailed relationships between molecular substructures and their corresponding sub-textual descriptions. A momentum-based mechanism dynamically balances global and local alignment, enabling the model to learn both broad functional semantics and fine-grained structure-function mappings. TRIDENT achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 downstream tasks, demonstrating the value of combining SMILES, textual, and taxonomic functional annotations for molecular property prediction.
MultiFinRAG: An Optimized Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Framework for Financial Question Answering
Gondhalekar, Chinmay, Patel, Urjitkumar, Yeh, Fang-Chun
Financial documents--such as 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and investor presentations--span hundreds of pages and combine diverse modalities, including dense narrative text, structured tables, and complex figures. Answering questions over such content often requires joint reasoning across modalities, which strains traditional large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines due to token limitations, layout loss, and fragmented cross-modal context. We introduce MultiFinRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework purpose-built for financial QA. MultiFinRAG first performs multimodal extraction by grouping table and figure images into batches and sending them to a lightweight, quantized open-source multimodal LLM, which produces both structured JSON outputs and concise textual summaries. These outputs, along with narrative text, are embedded and indexed with modality-aware similarity thresholds for precise retrieval. A tiered fallback strategy then dynamically escalates from text-only to text+table+image contexts when necessary, enabling cross-modal reasoning while reducing irrelevant context. Despite running on commodity hardware, MultiFinRAG achieves 19 percentage points higher accuracy than ChatGPT-4o (free-tier) on complex financial QA tasks involving text, tables, images, and combined multimodal reasoning.
Prepared, not paranoid: What you need to know to protect yourself from a possible terror attack
Former FBI special agent Nicole Parker joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss why the U.S. is on'high alert' for Iranian threats inside the country after U.S. airstrikes on three nuclear sites. In times like this, you hear the concern from your neighbors. You talk about it with people at the gym. It's the topic of conversation over morning coffee -- from small towns to big cities -- "Are we going to see an increase in terror attacks here at home?" Now, there are news that Iranian "sleeper cells" pose a dangerous threat. Such cells could carry out attacks on U.S. citizens in retaliation for recent military operations in Iran, it's understandable that Americans are feeling concerned for their safety here at home.
How Israel launched attacks from inside Iran to sow chaos during war
Gilan, Iran – The Israeli military used hundreds of fighter jets, armed drones and refuelling planes to attack Iran during its 12-day war backed by the United States, but it was also heavily assisted by operations launched from deep within Iranian soil. Just hours after the Israeli army and Mossad spy agency started their attacks before dawn on June 13, they released footage that appeared to have been recorded at night from undisclosed locations inside Iran. One grainy video showed Mossad operatives, camouflaged and wearing tactical gear including night-vision goggles, crouched in what looked like desert terrain, deploying weapons that aimed to destroy Iran's air defence systems to help pave the way for incoming attack aircraft. Others showed projectiles, with mounted cameras, descending to slam into Iranian missile defence batteries, as well as ballistic missile platforms. The projectiles appeared to be Spike missiles – relatively small, precision-guided anti-armour missiles that can be programmed to fly to targets that are out of their line of sight.