Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) are crucial ways to avoid unnecessary maintenance for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and improve system reliability. Predicting the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is one of the most challenging tasks for PHM. Existing methods require prior knowledge about the system, contrived assumptions, or temporal mining to model the life cycles of machine equipment/devices, resulting in diminished accuracy and limited applicability in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a Bi-directional Adversarial network with Covariate Encoding for machine Remaining Useful Life (BACE-RUL) prediction, which only adopts sensor measurements from the current life cycle to predict RUL rather than relying on previous consecutive cycle recordings. The current sensor measurements of mechanical devices are encoded to a conditional space to better understand the implicit inner mechanical status. The predictor is trained as a conditional generative network with the encoded sensor measurements as its conditions. Various experiments on several real-world datasets, including the turbofan aircraft engine dataset and the dataset collected from degradation experiments of Li-Ion battery cells, show that the proposed model is a general framework and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

As frontier models become more capable, the community has attempted to evaluate their ability to enable cyberattacks. Performing a comprehensive evaluation and prioritizing defenses are crucial tasks in preparing for AGI safely. However, current cyber evaluation efforts are ad-hoc, with no systematic reasoning about the various phases of attacks, and do not provide a steer on how to use targeted defenses. In this work, we propose a novel approach to AI cyber capability evaluation that (1) examines the end-to-end attack chain, (2) helps to identify gaps in the evaluation of AI threats, and (3) helps defenders prioritize targeted mitigations and conduct AI-enabled adversary emulation to support red teaming. To achieve these goals, we propose adapting existing cyberattack chain frameworks to AI systems. We analyze over 12,000 instances of real-world attempts to use AI in cyberattacks catalogued by Google's Threat Intelligence Group. Using this analysis, we curate a representative collection of seven cyberattack chain archetypes and conduct a bottleneck analysis to identify areas of potential AI-driven cost disruption. Our evaluation benchmark consists of 50 new challenges spanning different phases of cyberattacks. Based on this, we devise targeted cybersecurity model evaluations, report on the potential for AI to amplify offensive cyber capabilities across specific attack phases, and conclude with recommendations on prioritizing defenses. In all, we consider this to be the most comprehensive AI cyber risk evaluation framework published so far.

The growing demand for computational power is driven by advancements in deep learning, the increasing need for big data processing, and the requirements of scientific simulations for academic and research purposes. Developing countries like Nepal often struggle with the resources needed to invest in new and better hardware for these purposes. However, optimizing and building on existing technology can still meet these computing demands effectively. To address these needs, we built a cluster using four NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 GPUs. The cluster consists of four nodes: one master node that controls and manages the entire cluster, and three compute nodes dedicated to processing tasks. The master node is equipped with all necessary software for package management, resource scheduling, and deployment, such as Anaconda and Slurm. In addition, a Network File Storage (NFS) system was integrated to provide the additional storage required by the cluster. Given that the cluster is accessible via ssh by a public domain address, which poses significant cybersecurity risks, we implemented fail2ban to mitigate brute force attacks and enhance security. Despite the continuous challenges encountered during the design and implementation process, this project demonstrates how powerful computational clusters can be built to handle resource-intensive tasks in various demanding fields.

The rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in digital platforms used by youth has created significant challenges related to privacy, autonomy, and data protection. While AI-driven personalization offers enhanced user experiences, it often operates without clear ethical boundaries, leaving young users vulnerable to data exploitation and algorithmic biases. This paper presents a call to action for ethical AI governance, advocating for a structured framework that ensures youth-centred privacy protections, transparent data practices, and regulatory oversight. We outline key areas requiring urgent intervention, including algorithmic transparency, privacy education, parental data-sharing ethics, and accountability measures. Through this approach, we seek to empower youth with greater control over their digital identities and propose actionable strategies for policymakers, AI developers, and educators to build a fairer and more accountable AI ecosystem.

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) has sparked significant debate over balancing the interests of creative rightsholders and AI developers. As GenAI models are trained on vast datasets that often include copyrighted material, questions around fair compensation and proper attribution have become increasingly urgent. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a framework called \emph{Content ARCs} (Authenticity, Rights, Compensation). By combining open standards for provenance and dynamic licensing with data attribution, and decentralized technologies, Content ARCs create a mechanism for managing rights and compensating creators for using their work in AI training. We characterize several nascent works in the AI data licensing space within Content ARCs and identify where challenges remain to fully implement the end-to-end framework.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are leading a new technological revolution as one of the most promising research streams toward artificial general intelligence. The scaling of these models, accomplished by increasing the number of parameters and the magnitude of the training datasets, has been linked to various so-called emergent abilities that were previously unobserved. These emergent abilities, ranging from advanced reasoning and in-context learning to coding and problem-solving, have sparked an intense scientific debate: Are they truly emergent, or do they simply depend on external factors, such as training dynamics, the type of problems, or the chosen metric? What underlying mechanism causes them? Despite their transformative potential, emergent abilities remain poorly understood, leading to misconceptions about their definition, nature, predictability, and implications. In this work, we shed light on emergent abilities by conducting a comprehensive review of the phenomenon, addressing both its scientific underpinnings and real-world consequences. We first critically analyze existing definitions, exposing inconsistencies in conceptualizing emergent abilities. We then explore the conditions under which these abilities appear, evaluating the role of scaling laws, task complexity, pre-training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. Our review extends beyond traditional LLMs and includes Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which leverage reinforcement learning and inference-time search to amplify reasoning and self-reflection. However, emergence is not inherently positive. As AI systems gain autonomous reasoning capabilities, they also develop harmful behaviors, including deception, manipulation, and reward hacking. We highlight growing concerns about safety and governance, emphasizing the need for better evaluation frameworks and regulatory oversight.

Large Language Models (LLMs) may portray discrimination towards certain individuals, especially those characterized by multiple attributes (aka intersectional bias). Discovering intersectional bias in LLMs is challenging, as it involves complex inputs on multiple attributes (e.g. race and gender). To address this challenge, we propose HInter, a test technique that synergistically combines mutation analysis, dependency parsing and metamorphic oracles to automatically detect intersectional bias in LLMs. HInter generates test inputs by systematically mutating sentences using multiple mutations, validates inputs via a dependency invariant and detects biases by checking the LLM response on the original and mutated sentences. We evaluate HInter using six LLM architectures and 18 LLM models (GPT3.5, Llama2, BERT, etc) and find that 14.61% of the inputs generated by HInter expose intersectional bias. Results also show that our dependency invariant reduces false positives (incorrect test inputs) by an order of magnitude. Finally, we observed that 16.62% of intersectional bias errors are hidden, meaning that their corresponding atomic cases do not trigger biases. Overall, this work emphasize the importance of testing LLMs for intersectional bias.

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase performance on standard benchmarks, this may partly be due to overfitting effects, which would confound an understanding of their true capability. In this work, we scrutinize the robustness of reward models and the extent of such overfitting. We build **reWordBench**, which systematically transforms reward model inputs in meaning- or ranking-preserving ways. We show that state-of-the-art reward models suffer from substantial performance degradation even with minor input transformations, sometimes dropping to significantly below-random accuracy, suggesting brittleness. To improve reward model robustness, we propose to explicitly train them to assign similar scores to paraphrases, and find that this approach also improves robustness to other distinct kinds of transformations. For example, our robust reward model reduces such degradation by roughly half for the Chat Hard subset in RewardBench. Furthermore, when used in alignment, our robust reward models demonstrate better utility and lead to higher-quality outputs, winning in up to 59% of instances against a standardly trained RM.

Test-time training (TTT) methods explicitly update the weights of a model to adapt to the specific test instance, and they have found success in a variety of settings, including most recently language modeling and reasoning. To demystify this success, we investigate a gradient-based TTT algorithm for in-context learning, where we train a transformer model on the in-context demonstrations provided in the test prompt. Specifically, we provide a comprehensive theoretical characterization of linear transformers when the update rule is a single gradient step. Our theory (i) delineates the role of alignment between pretraining distribution and target task, (ii) demystifies how TTT can alleviate distribution shift, and (iii) quantifies the sample complexity of TTT including how it can significantly reduce the eventual sample size required for in-context learning. As our empirical contribution, we study the benefits of TTT for TabPFN, a tabular foundation model. In line with our theory, we demonstrate that TTT significantly reduces the required sample size for tabular classification (3 to 5 times fewer) unlocking substantial inference efficiency with a negligible training cost.

How can we rely on an end-to-end autonomous vehicle's complex decision-making system during deployment? One common solution is to have a ``fallback layer'' that checks the planned trajectory for rule violations and replaces it with a pre-defined safe action if necessary. Another approach involves adjusting the planner's decisions to minimize a pre-defined ``cost function'' using additional system predictions such as road layouts and detected obstacles. However, these pre-programmed rules or cost functions cannot learn and improve with new training data, often resulting in overly conservative behaviors. In this work, we propose Centaur (Cluster Entropy for Test-time trAining using Uncertainty) which updates a planner's behavior via test-time training, without relying on hand-engineered rules or cost functions. Instead, we measure and minimize the uncertainty in the planner's decisions. For this, we develop a novel uncertainty measure, called Cluster Entropy, which is simple, interpretable, and compatible with state-of-the-art planning algorithms. Using data collected at prior test-time time-steps, we perform an update to the model's parameters using a gradient that minimizes the Cluster Entropy. With only this sole gradient update prior to inference, Centaur exhibits significant improvements, ranking first on the navtest leaderboard with notable gains in safety-critical metrics such as time to collision. To provide detailed insights on a per-scenario basis, we also introduce navsafe, a challenging new benchmark, which highlights previously undiscovered failure modes of driving models.