Government
ASAP-MO:Advanced Situational Awareness and Perception for Mission-critical Operations
Vannini, Veronica, Dubois, William, Gamache, Olivier, Fortin, Jean-Michel, Samson, Nicolas, Daum, Effie, Pomerleau, François, Brotherton, Edith
Deploying robotic missions can be challenging due to the complexity of controlling robots with multiple degrees of freedom, fusing diverse sensory inputs, and managing communication delays and interferences. In nuclear inspection, robots can be crucial in assessing environments where human presence is limited, requiring precise teleoperation and coordination. Teleoperation requires extensive training, as operators must process multiple outputs while ensuring safe interaction with critical assets. These challenges are amplified when operating a fleet of heterogeneous robots across multiple environments, as each robot may have distinct control interfaces, sensory systems, and operational constraints. Efficient coordination in such settings remains an open problem. This paper presents a field report on how we integrated robot fleet capabilities - including mapping, localization, and telecommunication - toward a joint mission. We simulated a nuclear inspection scenario for exposed areas, using lights to represent a radiation source. We deployed two Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) tasked with mapping indoor and outdoor environments while remotely controlled from a single base station. Despite having distinct operational goals, the robots produced a unified map output, demonstrating the feasibility of coordinated multi-robot missions. Our results highlight key operational challenges and provide insights into improving adaptability and situational awareness in remote robotic deployments.
Web(er) of Hate: A Survey on How Hate Speech Is Typed
Wang, Luna, Caines, Andrew, Hutchings, Alice
The curation of hate speech datasets involves complex design decisions that balance competing priorities. This paper critically examines these methodological choices in a diverse range of datasets, highlighting common themes and practices, and their implications for dataset reliability. Drawing on Max Weber's notion of ideal types, we argue for a reflexive approach in dataset creation, urging researchers to acknowledge their own value judgments during dataset construction, fostering transparency and methodological rigour.
JETHICS: Japanese Ethics Understanding Evaluation Dataset
Takeshita, Masashi, Rzepka, Rafal
In this work, we propose JETHICS, a Japanese dataset for evaluating ethics understanding of AI models. JETHICS contains 78K examples and is built by following the construction methods of the existing English ETHICS dataset. It includes four categories based normative theories and concepts from ethics and political philosophy; and one representing commonsense morality. Our evaluation experiments on non-proprietary large language models (LLMs) and on GPT-4o reveal that even GPT-4o achieves only an average score of about 0.7, while the best-performing Japanese LLM attains around 0.5, indicating a relatively large room for improvement in current LLMs.
Human-Centered Shared Autonomy for Motor Planning, Learning, and Control Applications
Farhadi, MH, Rabiee, Ali, Ghafoori, Sima, Cetera, Anna, Xu, Wei, Abiri, Reza
With recent advancements in AI and computational tools, intelligent paradigms have emerged to enhance fields like shared autonomy and human-machine teaming in healthcare. Advanced AI algorithms (e.g., reinforcement learning) can autonomously make decisions to achieve planning and motion goals. However, in healthcare, where human intent is crucial, fully independent machine decisions may not be ideal. This chapter presents a comprehensive review of human-centered shared autonomy AI frameworks, focusing on upper limb biosignal-based machine interfaces and associated motor control systems, including computer cursors, robotic arms, and planar platforms. We examine motor planning, learning (rehabilitation), and control, covering conceptual foundations of human-machine teaming in reach-and-grasp tasks and analyzing both theoretical and practical implementations. Each section explores how human and machine inputs can be blended for shared autonomy in healthcare applications. Topics include human factors, biosignal processing for intent detection, shared autonomy in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), rehabilitation, assistive robotics, and Large Language Models (LLMs) as the next frontier. We propose adaptive shared autonomy AI as a high-performance paradigm for collaborative human-AI systems, identify key implementation challenges, and outline future directions, particularly regarding AI reasoning agents. This analysis aims to bridge neuroscientific insights with robotics to create more intuitive, effective, and ethical human-machine teaming frameworks.
Adversarial Attacks and Detection in Visual Place Recognition for Safer Robot Navigation
Malone, Connor, Claxton, Owen, Shames, Iman, Milford, Michael
-- Stand-alone Visual Place Recognition (VPR) systems have little defence against a well-designed adversarial attack, which can lead to disastrous consequences when deployed for robot navigation. We then propose how to close the loop between VPR, an Adversarial Attack Detector (AAD), and active navigation decisions by demonstrating the performance benefit of simulated AADs in a novel experiment paradigm - which we detail for the robotics community to use as a system framework. In the proposed experiment paradigm, we see the addition of AADs across a range of detection accuracies can improve performance over baseline; demonstrating a significant improvement - such as a 50% reduction in the mean along-track localization error - can be achieved with True Positive and False Positive detection rates of only 75% and up to 25% respectively. We examine a variety of metrics including: Along-Track Error, Percentage of Time Attacked, Percentage of Time in an'Unsafe' State, and Longest Continuous Time Under Attack. Expanding further on these results, we provide the first investigation into the efficacy of the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) adversarial attack for VPR. The analysis in this work highlights the need for AADs in real-world systems for trustworthy navigation, and informs quantitative requirements for system design. Although the impact of adversity in Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is widely understood, with state-of-the-art models offering increasing levels of robustness [1]-[4], the effects of adversarial attacks remain under-explored. Adversarial attacks generally refer to perturbations made to signals or input data by adversaries, with the goal of forcing the output of a system to be incorrect [5]. There has been a significant amount of work researching their effects on perception tasks such as image classification and object detection [5]-[9], yet they have not been widely investigated in the context of VPR. Adversarial attacks on perception systems vary depending on the level of access and information available to an attacker, including digital, physical-world, subtle, or overt attacks [5].
Reranking-based Generation for Unbiased Perspective Summarization
Ri, Narutatsu, Deas, Nicholas, McKeown, Kathleen
Generating unbiased summaries in real-world settings such as political perspective summarization remains a crucial application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, existing evaluation frameworks rely on traditional metrics for measuring key attributes such as coverage and faithfulness without verifying their applicability, and efforts to develop improved summarizers are still nascent. We address these gaps by (1) identifying reliable metrics for measuring perspective summary quality, and (2) investigating the efficacy of LLM-based methods beyond zero-shot inference. Namely, we build a test set for benchmarking metric reliability using human annotations and show that traditional metrics underperform compared to language model-based metrics, which prove to be strong evaluators. Using these metrics, we show that reranking-based methods yield strong results, and preference tuning with synthetically generated and reranking-labeled data further boosts performance. Our findings aim to contribute to the reliable evaluation and development of perspective summarization methods.
Finance Language Model Evaluation (FLaME)
Matlin, Glenn, Okamoto, Mika, Pardawala, Huzaifa, Yang, Yang, Chava, Sudheer
Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities with core Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The effectiveness of LMs for highly specialized knowledge-intensive tasks in finance remains difficult to assess due to major gaps in the methodologies of existing evaluation frameworks, which have caused an erroneous belief in a far lower bound of LMs' performance on common Finance NLP (FinNLP) tasks. To demonstrate the potential of LMs for these FinNLP tasks, we present the first holistic benchmarking suite for Financial Language Model Evaluation (FLaME). We are the first research paper to comprehensively study LMs against 'reasoning-reinforced' LMs, with an empirical study of 23 foundation LMs over 20 core NLP tasks in finance. We open-source our framework software along with all data and results.
AI-based modular warning machine for risk identification in proximity healthcare
Razzetta, Chiara, Noei, Shahryar, Barbarossa, Federico, Spairani, Edoardo, Roascio, Monica, Barbi, Elisa, Ciacci, Giulia, Sommariva, Sara, Guastavino, Sabrina, Piana, Michele, Lenge, Matteo, Arnulfo, Gabriele, Magenes, Giovanni, Maranesi, Elvira, Amabili, Giulio, Massone, Anna Maria, Benvenuto, Federico, Jurman, Giuseppe, Sona, Diego, Campi, Cristina
"DHEAL-COM - Digital Health Solutions in Community Medicine" is a research and technology project funded by the Italian Department of Health for the development of digital solutions of interest in proximity healthcare. The activity within the DHEAL-COM framework allows scientists to gather a notable amount of multi-modal data whose interpretation can be performed by means of machine learning algorithms. The present study illustrates a general automated pipeline made of numerous unsupervised and supervised methods that can ingest such data, provide predictive results, and facilitate model interpretations via feature identification.
Israel says it killed Iran's military coordinator with Hamas
The IDF said it had killed Izadi in a strike on an apartment in Qom, south of Tehran, in the early hours of Saturday. He had been in charge of the Palestine Corps of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps's (IRGC) Quds Force, responsible for handling ties with the Palestinian armed groups. He was reportedly instrumental in arming and financing Hamas, and had been responsible for military co-ordination between senior IRGC commanders and Hamas leaders, the IDF said. In April 2024, Izadi narrowly survived an Israeli air strike targeting the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria - an attack that killed several high-ranking Quds Force commanders. Israel later on Saturday also claimed to have killed another Quds Force commander, Behnam Shahriyari in a drone strike as he was travelling in a car through western Iran.
What Lt. Col. Boz and Big Tech's Enlisted Execs Will Do in the Army
When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It's very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth's company. But it indeed was true. Boz is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth. The other newly commissioned officers include Kevin Weil, OpenAI's head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of research now advising Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.