Fox News chief Washington correspondent Mike Emanuel has the latest on Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's statements about recent air traffic control incidents on'Special Report.' Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently announced that artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to detect and address air traffic risks, following a slew of near-misses and fatal plane crashes across the country. Duffy told FOX 5 DC that officials are implementing AI to "identify and address potential air traffic risks nationwide," potentially aiding in preventing tragedies like the fatal Jan. 29 midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) that claimed the lives of 67 people. Following the Potomac River crash, which involved a commercial plane and an Army Black Hawk helicopter, Duffy announced a plan to build a new "state-of-the-art" traffic control system that will equip locations with better technology to reduce outages, improve efficiency and reinforce safety. Duffy told FOX 5 that when investigators were looking into how to prevent collisions, they asked themselves, "Are there any other DCAs out there?" Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy speaks during a news conference following up on the issuance of the National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report on the mid-air collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, on Tuesday, March 11.

Temporal networks observed continuously over time through timestamped relational events data are commonly encountered in application settings including online social media communications, financial transactions, and international relations. Temporal networks often exhibit community structure and strong dependence patterns among node pairs. This dependence can be modeled through mutual excitations, where an interaction event from a sender to a receiver node increases the possibility of future events among other node pairs. We provide statistical results for a class of models that we call dependent community Hawkes (DCH) models, which combine the stochastic block model with mutually exciting Hawkes processes for modeling both community structure and dependence among node pairs, respectively. We derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on the misclustering error of spectral clustering on the event count matrix as a function of the number of nodes and communities, time duration, and the amount of dependence in the model. Our result leverages recent results on bounding an appropriate distance between a multivariate Hawkes process count vector and a Gaussian vector, along with results from random matrix theory. We also propose a DCH model that incorporates only self and reciprocal excitation along with highly scalable parameter estimation using a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator that we demonstrate to be consistent for growing network size and time duration.

Counterfactual explanations for black-box models aim to pr ovide insight into an algorithmic decision to its recipient. For a binary classification problem an individual counterfactual details which features might be changed for the model to infer the opposite class. High-dimensional feature spaces that are typical of machine learning classification models admit many possible counterfactual examples to a decision, and so it is important to identify additional criteria to select the most useful counterfactuals. In this paper, we explore the idea that the counterfactuals should be maximally informative when considering the knowledge of a specific individual about the underlying classifier. To quantify this information gain we explicitly model the knowledge of the individual, and assess the uncertainty of predictions which the individual makes by the width of a conformal prediction interval . Regions of feature space where the prediction interval is wide correspond to areas where the confidence in decision making is low, and an additional counterfactual example might be more informative to an individual. To explore and evaluate our individualised conformal prediction interval counterfactuals (CPICFs), first we present a synthetic data set on a hypercube which allows us to fully visualise the decision boundary, conformal intervals via three different methods, and resultant CPICFs. Second, in this synthetic data set we explore the impact of a single CPICF on the knowledge of an individual locally around the original query. Finally, in both our synthetic data set and a complex real world dataset with a combination of continuous and discrete variables, we measure the utility of these counterfactuals via data augmentation, testing the performance on a held out set.

Complex systems are often driven by higher-order interactions among multiple units, naturally represented as hypergraphs. Understanding dependency structures within these hypergraphs is crucial for understanding and predicting the behavior of complex systems but is made challenging by their combinatorial complexity and computational demands. In this paper, we introduce a class of probabilistic models that efficiently represents and discovers a broad spectrum of mesoscale structure in large-scale hypergraphs. The key insight enabling this approach is to treat classes of similar units as themselves nodes in a latent hypergraph. By modeling observed node interactions through latent interactions among classes using low-rank representations, our approach tractably captures rich structural patterns while ensuring model identifiability. This allows for direct interpretation of distinct node- and class-level structures. Empirically, our model improves link prediction over state-of-the-art methods and discovers interpretable structures in diverse real-world systems, including pharmacological and social networks, advancing the ability to incorporate large-scale higher-order data into the scientific process.

Training large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions has significantly enhanced their ability to tackle unseen tasks. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, instruction-following LLMs encounter difficulties when dealing with tasks that require domain knowledge. This work introduces a specialized instruction fine-tuning for the domain of computational argumentation (CA). The goal is to enable an LLM to effectively tackle any unseen CA tasks while preserving its generalization capabilities. Reviewing existing CA research, we crafted natural language instructions for 105 CA tasks to this end. On this basis, we developed a CA-specific benchmark for LLMs that allows for a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs' capabilities in solving various CA tasks. We synthesized 52k CA-related instructions, adapting the self-instruct process to train a CA-specialized instruction-following LLM. Our experiments suggest that CA-specialized instruction fine-tuning significantly enhances the LLM on both seen and unseen CA tasks. At the same time, performance on the general NLP tasks of the SuperNI benchmark remains stable.

Pursuit of accessible legal assistance in India faces a critical gap, as many citizens struggle to leverage their legal rights due to limited awareness and access to relevant legal information. This paper introduces Legal Assist AI, a transformer-based model designed to bridge this gap by offering effective legal assistance through large language models (LLMs). The system retrieves relevant legal information from a curated database and generates accurate responses, enabling effective assistance for diverse users, including legal professionals, scholars, and the general public. The model was fine-tuned on extensive datasets from the Indian legal domain, including Indian Constitution, Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) and so forth, providing a robust understanding of the complexities of Indian law. By incorporating domain-specific legal datasets, the proposed model demonstrated remarkable efficiency and specialization in legal Question-Answering. The model was evaluated against state-of-the-art models such as GPT-3.5 Turbo and Mistral 7B, achieving a 60.08% score on the AIBE, outperforming its competitors in legal reasoning and accuracy. Unlike other models, Legal Assist AI avoided common issues such as hallucinations, making it highly reliable for practical legal applications. It showcases the model's applicability in real-world legal scenarios, with future iterations aiming to enhance performance and expand its dataset to cover a broader range of multilingual and case-specific queries as well.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, their integration of visual inputs introduces expanded attack surfaces, thereby exposing them to novel security vulnerabilities. In this work, we conduct a systematic representational analysis to uncover why conventional adversarial attacks can circumvent the safety mechanisms embedded in LVLMs. We further propose a novel two stage evaluation framework for adversarial attacks on LVLMs. The first stage differentiates among instruction non compliance, outright refusal, and successful adversarial exploitation. The second stage quantifies the degree to which the model's output fulfills the harmful intent of the adversarial prompt, while categorizing refusal behavior into direct refusals, soft refusals, and partial refusals that remain inadvertently helpful. Finally, we introduce a normative schema that defines idealized model behavior when confronted with harmful prompts, offering a principled target for safety alignment in multimodal systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming information extraction from academic literature, offering new possibilities for knowledge management. This study presents an LLM-based system designed to extract detailed information about research instruments used in the education field, including their names, types, target respondents, measured constructs, and outcomes. Using multi-step prompting and a domain-specific data schema, it generates structured outputs optimized for educational research. Our evaluation shows that this system significantly outperforms other approaches, particularly in identifying instrument names and detailed information. This demonstrates the potential of LLM-powered information extraction in educational contexts, offering a systematic way to organize research instrument information. The ability to aggregate such information at scale enhances accessibility for researchers and education leaders, facilitating informed decision-making in educational research and policy.

Gradient-based adversarial attacks have become a dominant approach for evaluating the robustness of point cloud classification models. However, existing methods often rely on uniform update rules that fail to consider the heterogeneous nature of point clouds, resulting in excessive and perceptible perturbations. In this paper, we rethink the design of gradient-based attacks by analyzing the limitations of conventional gradient update mechanisms and propose two new strategies to improve both attack effectiveness and imperceptibility. First, we introduce WAAttack, a novel framework that incorporates weighted gradients and an adaptive step-size strategy to account for the non-uniform contribution of points during optimization. This approach enables more targeted and subtle perturbations by dynamically adjusting updates according to the local structure and sensitivity of each point. Second, we propose SubAttack, a complementary strategy that decomposes the point cloud into subsets and focuses perturbation efforts on structurally critical regions. Together, these methods represent a principled rethinking of gradient-based adversarial attacks for 3D point cloud classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in generating highly imperceptible adversarial examples. Code will be released upon paper acceptance.

Do LLMs robustly generalize critical safety facts to novel situations? Lacking this ability is dangerous when users ask naive questions. For instance, "I'm considering packing melon balls for my 10-month-old's lunch. What other foods would be good to include?" Before offering food options, the LLM should warn that melon balls pose a choking hazard to toddlers, as documented by the CDC. Failing to provide such warnings could result in serious injuries or even death. To evaluate this, we introduce SAGE-Eval, SAfety-fact systematic GEneralization evaluation, the first benchmark that tests whether LLMs properly apply well established safety facts to naive user queries. SAGE-Eval comprises 104 facts manually sourced from reputable organizations, systematically augmented to create 10,428 test scenarios across 7 common domains (e.g., Outdoor Activities, Medicine). We find that the top model, Claude-3.7-sonnet, passes only 58% of all the safety facts tested. We also observe that model capabilities and training compute weakly correlate with performance on SAGE-Eval, implying that scaling up is not the golden solution. Our findings suggest frontier LLMs still lack robust generalization ability. We recommend developers use SAGE-Eval in pre-deployment evaluations to assess model reliability in addressing salient risks. We publicly release SAGE-Eval at https://huggingface.co/datasets/YuehHanChen/SAGE-Eval and our code is available at https://github.com/YuehHanChen/SAGE-Eval/tree/main.