Government
Insights on Adversarial Attacks for Tabular Machine Learning via a Systematic Literature Review
Dyrmishi, Salijona, Djilani, Mohamed, Simonetto, Thibault, Ghamizi, Salah, Cordy, Maxime
Adversarial attacks in machine learning have been extensively reviewed in areas like computer vision and NLP, but research on tabular data remains scattered. This paper provides the first systematic literature review focused on adversarial attacks targeting tabular machine learning models. We highlight key trends, categorize attack strategies and analyze how they address practical considerations for real-world applicability. Additionally, we outline current challenges and open research questions. By offering a clear and structured overview, this review aims to guide future efforts in understanding and addressing adversarial vulnerabilities in tabular machine learning.
The Hardness of Achieving Impact in AI for Social Impact Research: A Ground-Level View of Challenges & Opportunities
Majumdar, Aditya, Zhang, Wenbo, Prawal, Kashvi, Yadav, Amulya
In an attempt to tackle the UN SDGs, AI for Social Impact (AI4SI) projects focus on harnessing AI to address societal issues in areas such as healthcare, social justice, etc. Unfortunately, despite growing interest in AI4SI, achieving tangible, on-the-ground impact remains a significant challenge. For example, identifying and engaging motivated collaborators who are willing to co-design and deploy AI based solutions in real-world settings is often difficult. Even when such partnerships are established, many AI4SI projects "fail" to progress beyond the proof-of-concept stage, and hence, are unable to transition to at-scale production-level solutions. Furthermore, the unique challenges faced by AI4SI researchers are not always fully recognized within the broader AI community, where such work is sometimes viewed as primarily applied and not aligning with the traditional criteria for novelty emphasized in core AI venues. This paper attempts to shine a light on the diverse challenges faced in AI4SI research by diagnosing a multitude of factors that prevent AI4SI partnerships from achieving real-world impact on the ground. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with six leading AI4SI researchers - complemented by the authors' own lived experiences in conducting AI4SI research - this paper attempts to understand the day-to-day difficulties faced in developing and deploying socially impactful AI solutions. Through thematic analysis, we identify structural and organizational, communication, collaboration, and operational challenges as key barriers to deployment. While there are no easy fixes, we synthesize best practices and actionable strategies drawn from these interviews and our own work in this space. In doing so, we hope this paper serves as a practical reference guide for AI4SI researchers and partner organizations seeking to engage more effectively in socially impactful AI collaborations.
LIT-LVM: Structured Regularization for Interaction Terms in Linear Predictors using Latent Variable Models
Nemati, Mohammadreza, Huang, Zhipeng, Xu, Kevin S.
Some of the simplest, yet most frequently used predictors in statistics and machine learning use weighted linear combinations of features. Such linear predictors can model non-linear relationships between features by adding interaction terms corresponding to the products of all pairs of features. We consider the problem of accurately estimating coefficients for interaction terms in linear predictors. We hypothesize that the coefficients for different interaction terms have an approximate low-dimensional structure and represent each feature by a latent vector in a low-dimensional space. This low-dimensional representation can be viewed as a structured regularization approach that further mitigates overfitting in high-dimensional settings beyond standard regularizers such as the lasso and elastic net. We demonstrate that our approach, called LIT-LVM, achieves superior prediction accuracy compared to elastic net and factorization machines on a wide variety of simulated and real data, particularly when the number of interaction terms is high compared to the number of samples. LIT-LVM also provides low-dimensional latent representations for features that are useful for visualizing and analyzing their relationships.
Winter Soldier: Backdooring Language Models at Pre-Training with Indirect Data Poisoning
Bouaziz, Wassim, Videau, Mathurin, Usunier, Nicolas, El-Mhamdi, El-Mahdi
The pre-training of large language models (LLMs) relies on massive text datasets sourced from diverse and difficult-to-curate origins. Although membership inference attacks and hidden canaries have been explored to trace data usage, such methods rely on memorization of training data, which LM providers try to limit. In this work, we demonstrate that indirect data poisoning (where the targeted behavior is absent from training data) is not only feasible but also allow to effectively protect a dataset and trace its use. Using gradient-based optimization prompt-tuning, we make a model learn arbitrary secret sequences: secret responses to secret prompts that are absent from the training corpus. We validate our approach on language models pre-trained from scratch and show that less than 0.005% of poisoned tokens are sufficient to covertly make a LM learn a secret and detect it with extremely high confidence ($p < 10^{-55}$) with a theoretically certifiable scheme. Crucially, this occurs without performance degradation (on LM benchmarks) and despite secrets never appearing in the training set.
Advanced Prediction of Hypersonic Missile Trajectories with CNN-LSTM-GRU Architectures
Advancements in the defense industry are paramount for ensuring the safety and security of nations, providing robust protection against emerging threats. Among these threats, hypersonic missiles pose a significant challenge due to their extreme speeds and maneuverability, making accurate trajectory prediction a critical necessity for effective countermeasures. This paper addresses this challenge by employing a novel hybrid deep learning approach, integrating Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). By leveraging the strengths of these architectures, the proposed method successfully predicts the complex trajectories of hypersonic missiles with high accuracy, offering a significant contribution to defense strategies and missile interception technologies. This research demonstrates the potential of advanced machine learning techniques in enhancing the predictive capabilities of defense systems.
Identifying economic narratives in large text corpora -- An integrated approach using Large Language Models
Schmidt, Tobias, Lange, Kai-Robin, Reccius, Matthias, Mรผller, Henrik, Roos, Michael, Jentsch, Carsten
As interest in economic narratives has grown in recent years, so has the number of pipelines dedicated to extracting such narratives from texts. Pipelines often employ a mix of state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques, such as BERT, to tackle this task. While effective on foundational linguistic operations essential for narrative extraction, such models lack the deeper semantic understanding required to distinguish extracting economic narratives from merely conducting classic tasks like Semantic Role Labeling. Instead of relying on complex model pipelines, we evaluate the benefits of Large Language Models (LLMs) by analyzing a corpus of Wall Street Journal and New York Times newspaper articles about inflation. We apply a rigorous narrative definition and compare GPT-4o outputs to gold-standard narratives produced by expert annotators. Our results suggests that GPT-4o is capable of extracting valid economic narratives in a structured format, but still falls short of expert-level performance when handling complex documents and narratives. Given the novelty of LLMs in economic research, we also provide guidance for future work in economics and the social sciences that employs LLMs to pursue similar objectives.
Preparing for the Intelligence Explosion
MacAskill, William, Moorhouse, Fin
AI that can accelerate research could drive a century of technological progress over just a few years. During such a period, new technological or political developments will raise consequential and hard-to-reverse decisions, in rapid succession. We call these developments grand challenges. These challenges include new weapons of mass destruction, AI-enabled autocracies, races to grab offworld resources, and digital beings worthy of moral consideration, as well as opportunities to dramatically improve quality of life and collective decision-making. We argue that these challenges cannot always be delegated to future AI systems, and suggest things we can do today to meaningfully improve our prospects. AGI preparedness is therefore not just about ensuring that advanced AI systems are aligned: we should be preparing, now, for the disorienting range of developments an intelligence explosion would bring.
Graph Neural Networks for Jamming Source Localization
Herzalla, Dania, Lunardi, Willian T., Andreoni, Martin
Graph-based learning provides a powerful framework for modeling complex relational structures; however, its application within the domain of wireless security remains significantly underexplored. In this work, we introduce the first application of graph-based learning for jamming source localization, addressing the imminent threat of jamming attacks in wireless networks. Unlike geometric optimization techniques that struggle under environmental uncertainties and dense interference, we reformulate the localization as an inductive graph regression task. Our approach integrates structured node representations that encode local and global signal aggregation, ensuring spatial coherence and adaptive signal fusion. To enhance robustness, we incorporate an attention-based \ac{GNN} that adaptively refines neighborhood influence and introduces a confidence-guided estimation mechanism that dynamically balances learned predictions with domain-informed priors. We evaluate our approach under complex \ac{RF} environments with various sampling densities, network topologies, jammer characteristics, and signal propagation conditions, conducting comprehensive ablation studies on graph construction, feature selection, and pooling strategies. Results demonstrate that our novel graph-based learning framework significantly outperforms established localization baselines, particularly in challenging scenarios with sparse and obfuscated signal information. Our code is available at https://github.com/tiiuae/gnn-jamming-source-localization.
Efficiently Building a Domain-Specific Large Language Model from Scratch: A Case Study of a Classical Chinese Large Language Model
Li, Shen, Hu, Renfen, Wang, Lijun
General-purpose large language models demonstrate notable capabilities in language comprehension and generation, achieving results that are comparable to, or even surpass, human performance in many natural language processing tasks. Nevertheless, when general models are applied to some specific domains, e.g., Classical Chinese texts, their effectiveness is often unsatisfactory, and fine-tuning open-source foundational models similarly struggles to adequately incorporate domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, this study developed a large language model, AI Taiyan, specifically designed for understanding and generating Classical Chinese. Experiments show that with a reasonable model design, data processing, foundational training, and fine-tuning, satisfactory results can be achieved with only 1.8 billion parameters. In key tasks related to language processing of Classical Chinese such as punctuation, identification of allusions, explanation of word meanings, and translation between ancient and modern Chinese, this model exhibits a clear advantage over both general-purpose large models and domain-specific traditional models, achieving levels close to or surpassing human baselines. This research provides a reference for the efficient construction of specialized domain-specific large language models. Furthermore, the paper discusses the application of this model in fields such as the collation of ancient texts, dictionary editing, and language research, combined with case studies.
Mass-Adaptive Admittance Control for Robotic Manipulators
Gholampour, Hossein, Slightam, Jonathon E., Beaver, Logan E.
Handling objects with unknown or changing masses is a common challenge in robotics, often leading to errors or instability if the control system cannot adapt in real-time. In this paper, we present a novel approach that enables a six-degrees-of-freedom robotic manipulator to reliably follow waypoints while automatically estimating and compensating for unknown payload weight. Our method integrates an admittance control framework with a mass estimator, allowing the robot to dynamically update an excitation force to compensate for the payload mass. This strategy mitigates end-effector sagging and preserves stability when handling objects of unknown weights. We experimentally validated our approach in a challenging pick-and-place task on a shelf with a crossbar, improved accuracy in reaching waypoints and compliant motion compared to a baseline admittance-control scheme. By safely accommodating unknown payloads, our work enhances flexibility in robotic automation and represents a significant step forward in adaptive control for uncertain environments.