Government
Column: How California helped Trump make English the official national language
It was the spring of 1985, and Californians were waging civic war on behalf of English. Some Monterey Park residents were pushing their City Council to ban Chinese-language business signs. Voters who had passed Proposition 38 a year earlier were waiting for Gov. George Deukmejian to implement the initiative, which required that he ask the federal government to print election material only in English. Hayakawa, one of Proposition 38's co-authors, was preparing for Proposition 63, which would enshrine English as the state's official language, after Whittier-area Assemblymember Frank Hill introduced a bill proposing just that. Tiny Fillmore in Ventura County had already become one of the first cities in the country to go English-official.
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,104
Ukraine's military said it destroyed 46 of 83 Russian drones launched at the country overnight. Another 31 drones were reportedly "lost" and failed to reach their targets. A drone attack on Ukraine's Black Sea port of Odesa damaged energy infrastructure in the area, triggering power and heat supply interruptions in the city, regional Governor Oleh Kiper wrote. Odesa's Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov said the attack knocked out three boiler plants. A Ukrainian drone attack targeted an industrial enterprise in Russia's southern city of Syzran, the governor of the Samara region said on Tuesday, adding that there were no casualties.
Tightly choreographed Two Sessions opens in Beijing as the world order roils
As thousands of delegates from across China arrive in Beijing this week to participate in the annual parliamentary session, there is a barely perceptible shift in the mood in the capital. Though few ordinary Chinese pay much attention to goings-on inside the Great Hall of the People, the imposing 1950s modernist building that flanks the western edge of Tiananmen Square, the ripple effects of this week's conclave can be felt across the city. Extra uniformed personnel have been deployed to stand guard on Beijing's bridges โ lest anyone attempt a stunt inspired by Peng Lifa's protest at Sitong Bridge ahead of the 20th party congress in 2022. Virtual private networks โ apps used to tunnel through the firewall of internet censorship โ slow down, as the authorities try to tighten their grip on the exchange of information with the outside world. It is imperative to the Communist party that the parallel sessions of the "Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference", an advisory body, and the National People's Congress (NPC), China's rubber-stamp parliament, run smoothly.
Weakly-Constrained 4D Var for Downscaling with Uncertainty using Data-Driven Surrogate Models
Dinenis, Philip, Rao, Vishwas, Anitescu, Mihai
Dynamic downscaling typically involves using numerical weather prediction (NWP) solvers to refine coarse data to higher spatial resolutions. Data-driven models such as FourCastNet have emerged as a promising alternative to the traditional NWP models for forecasting. Once these models are trained, they are capable of delivering forecasts in a few seconds, thousands of times faster compared to classical NWP models. However, as the lead times, and, therefore, their forecast window, increase, these models show instability in that they tend to diverge from reality. In this paper, we propose to use data assimilation approaches to stabilize them when used for downscaling tasks. Data assimilation uses information from three different sources, namely an imperfect computational model based on partial differential equations (PDE), from noisy observations, and from an uncertainty-reflecting prior. In this work, when carrying out dynamic downscaling, we replace the computationally expensive PDE-based NWP models with FourCastNet in a ``weak-constrained 4DVar framework" that accounts for the implied model errors. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach for a hurricane-tracking problem; moreover, the 4DVar framework naturally allows the expression and quantification of uncertainty. We demonstrate, using ERA5 data, that our approach performs better than the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and the unstabilized FourCastNet model, both in terms of forecast accuracy and forecast uncertainty.
SuperGPQA: Scaling LLM Evaluation across 285 Graduate Disciplines
Team, M-A-P, Du, Xinrun, Yao, Yifan, Ma, Kaijing, Wang, Bingli, Zheng, Tianyu, Zhu, Kang, Liu, Minghao, Liang, Yiming, Jin, Xiaolong, Wei, Zhenlin, Zheng, Chujie, Deng, Kaixin, Jia, Shian, Jiang, Sichao, Liao, Yiyan, Li, Rui, Li, Qinrui, Li, Sirun, Li, Yizhi, Li, Yunwen, Ma, Dehua, Ni, Yuansheng, Que, Haoran, Wang, Qiyao, Wen, Zhoufutu, Wu, Siwei, Xing, Tianshun, Xu, Ming, Yang, Zhenzhu, Wang, Zekun Moore, Zhou, Junting, Bai, Yuelin, Bu, Xingyuan, Cai, Chenglin, Chen, Liang, Chen, Yifan, Cheng, Chengtuo, Cheng, Tianhao, Ding, Keyi, Huang, Siming, Huang, Yun, Li, Yaoru, Li, Yizhe, Li, Zhaoqun, Liang, Tianhao, Lin, Chengdong, Lin, Hongquan, Ma, Yinghao, Pang, Tianyang, Peng, Zhongyuan, Peng, Zifan, Qi, Qige, Qiu, Shi, Qu, Xingwei, Quan, Shanghaoran, Tan, Yizhou, Wang, Zili, Wang, Chenqing, Wang, Hao, Wang, Yiya, Wang, Yubo, Xu, Jiajun, Yang, Kexin, Yuan, Ruibin, Yue, Yuanhao, Zhan, Tianyang, Zhang, Chun, Zhang, Jinyang, Zhang, Xiyue, Zhang, Xingjian, Zhang, Yue, Zhao, Yongchi, Zheng, Xiangyu, Zhong, Chenghua, Gao, Yang, Li, Zhoujun, Liu, Dayiheng, Liu, Qian, Liu, Tianyu, Ni, Shiwen, Peng, Junran, Qin, Yujia, Su, Wenbo, Wang, Guoyin, Wang, Shi, Yang, Jian, Yang, Min, Cao, Meng, Yue, Xiang, Zhang, Zhaoxiang, Zhou, Wangchunshu, Liu, Jiaheng, Lin, Qunshu, Huang, Wenhao, Zhang, Ge
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in mainstream academic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and computer science. However, human knowledge encompasses over 200 specialized disciplines, far exceeding the scope of existing benchmarks. The capabilities of LLMs in many of these specialized fields-particularly in light industry, agriculture, and service-oriented disciplines-remain inadequately evaluated. To address this gap, we present SuperGPQA, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates graduate-level knowledge and reasoning capabilities across 285 disciplines. Our benchmark employs a novel Human-LLM collaborative filtering mechanism to eliminate trivial or ambiguous questions through iterative refinement based on both LLM responses and expert feedback. Our experimental results reveal significant room for improvement in the performance of current state-of-the-art LLMs across diverse knowledge domains (e.g., the reasoning-focused model DeepSeek-R1 achieved the highest accuracy of 61.82% on SuperGPQA), highlighting the considerable gap between current model capabilities and artificial general intelligence. Additionally, we present comprehensive insights from our management of a large-scale annotation process, involving over 80 expert annotators and an interactive Human-LLM collaborative system, offering valuable methodological guidance for future research initiatives of comparable scope.
ExpertGenQA: Open-ended QA generation in Specialized Domains
Shahgir, Haz Sameen, Lim, Chansong, Chen, Jia, Papalexakis, Evangelos E., Dong, Yue
Generating high-quality question-answer pairs for specialized technical domains remains challenging, with existing approaches facing a tradeoff between leveraging expert examples and achieving topical diversity. We present ExpertGenQA, a protocol that combines few-shot learning with structured topic and style categorization to generate comprehensive domain-specific QA pairs. Using U.S. Federal Railroad Administration documents as a test bed, we demonstrate that ExpertGenQA achieves twice the efficiency of baseline few-shot approaches while maintaining $94.4\%$ topic coverage. Through systematic evaluation, we show that current LLM-based judges and reward models exhibit strong bias toward superficial writing styles rather than content quality. Our analysis using Bloom's Taxonomy reveals that ExpertGenQA better preserves the cognitive complexity distribution of expert-written questions compared to template-based approaches. When used to train retrieval models, our generated queries improve top-1 accuracy by $13.02\%$ over baseline performance, demonstrating their effectiveness for downstream applications in technical domains.
Shifting Power: Leveraging LLMs to Simulate Human Aversion in ABMs of Bilateral Financial Exchanges, A bond market study
Bilateral markets, such as those for government bonds, involve decentralized and opaque transactions between market makers (MMs) and clients, posing significant challenges for traditional modeling approaches. To address these complexities, we introduce TRIBE an agent-based model augmented with a large language model (LLM) to simulate human-like decision-making in trading environments. TRIBE leverages publicly available data and stylized facts to capture realistic trading dynamics, integrating human biases like risk aversion and ambiguity sensitivity into the decision-making processes of agents. Our research yields three key contributions: first, we demonstrate that integrating LLMs into agent-based models to enhance client agency is feasible and enriches the simulation of agent behaviors in complex markets; second, we find that even slight trade aversion encoded within the LLM leads to a complete cessation of trading activity, highlighting the sensitivity of market dynamics to agents' risk profiles; third, we show that incorporating human-like variability shifts power dynamics towards clients and can disproportionately affect the entire system, often resulting in systemic agent collapse across simulations. These findings underscore the emergent properties that arise when introducing stochastic, human-like decision processes, revealing new system behaviors that enhance the realism and complexity of artificial societies.
Trust, Experience, and Innovation: Key Factors Shaping American Attitudes About AI
Palm, Risa, Kingsland, Justin, Bolsen, Toby
Key variables associated with the direction and intensity of concern include prior experience using a large language model such as ChatGPT, general trust in science, adherence to the precautionary principle versus support for unrestricted innovation, and demographic factors such as gender. By analyzing these relationships, the paper provides valuable insights into the American public's response to AI that are particularly important in the development of policy to regulate or further encourage its development. Key words: artificial intelligence, survey research, public opinion, precautionary principle, ChatGPT Introduction Artificial intelligence is defined as "a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions that impact real or virtual environments" (National Artificial Intelligence Act of 2020, H.R. 6216). According to this definition, AI systems leverage both machine and human inputs to (a) perceive real and virtual environments, (b) transform these perceptions into models through automated analysis, and (c) use these models to generate options for information or action. Currently, AI is employed in a range of applications including mapping technologies, handwriting recognition for mail sorting, spam filtering, language translation, financial trading, and more.
Intolerable Risk Threshold Recommendations for Artificial Intelligence
Raman, Deepika, Madkour, Nada, Murphy, Evan R., Jackson, Krystal, Newman, Jessica
Frontier AI models -- highly capable foundation models at the cutting edge of AI development -- may pose severe risks to public safety, human rights, economic stability, and societal value in the coming years. These risks could arise from deliberate adversarial misuse, system failures, unintended cascading effects, or simultaneous failures across multiple models. In response to such risks, at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, 16 global AI industry organizations signed the Frontier AI Safety Commitments, and 27 nations and the EU issued a declaration on their intent to define these thresholds. To fulfill these commitments, organizations must determine and disclose ``thresholds at which severe risks posed by a model or system, unless adequately mitigated, would be deemed intolerable.'' To assist in setting and operationalizing intolerable risk thresholds, we outline key principles and considerations; for example, to aim for ``good, not perfect'' thresholds in the face of limited data on rapidly advancing AI capabilities and consequently evolving risks. We also propose specific threshold recommendations, including some detailed case studies, for a subset of risks across eight risk categories: (1) Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Weapons, (2) Cyber Attacks, (3) Model Autonomy, (4) Persuasion and Manipulation, (5) Deception, (6) Toxicity, (7) Discrimination, and (8) Socioeconomic Disruption. Our goal is to serve as a starting point or supplementary resource for policymakers and industry leaders, encouraging proactive risk management that prioritizes preventing intolerable risks (ex ante) rather than merely mitigating them after they occur (ex post).
Active operator learning with predictive uncertainty quantification for partial differential equations
Winovich, Nick, Daneker, Mitchell, Lu, Lu, Lin, Guang
In this work, we develop a method for uncertainty quantification in deep operator networks (DeepONets) using predictive uncertainty estimates calibrated to model errors observed during training. The uncertainty framework operates using a single network, in contrast to existing ensemble approaches, and introduces minimal overhead during training and inference. We also introduce an optimized implementation for DeepONet inference (reducing evaluation times by a factor of five) to provide models well-suited for real-time applications. We evaluate the uncertainty-equipped models on a series of partial differential equation (PDE) problems, and show that the model predictions are unbiased, non-skewed, and accurately reproduce solutions to the PDEs. To assess how well the models generalize, we evaluate the network predictions and uncertainty estimates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution test datasets. We find the predictive uncertainties accurately reflect the observed model errors over a range of problems with varying complexity; simpler out-of-distribution examples are assigned low uncertainty estimates, consistent with the observed errors, while more complex out-of-distribution examples are properly assigned higher uncertainties. We also provide a statistical analysis of the predictive uncertainties and verify that these estimates are well-aligned with the observed error distributions at the tail-end of training. Finally, we demonstrate how predictive uncertainties can be used within an active learning framework to yield improvements in accuracy and data-efficiency for outer-loop optimization procedures.