Ukraine's military said Russia launched a barrage of 147 attack drones against Ukraine overnight. Out of this, the Ukrainian Air Force reported shooting down 83, while 59 did not reach their targets. Several storage facilities and private residences were reported damaged. The Caspian Pipeline Consortium said that Ukrainian drones hit one of its major oil pipelines in southern Russia's Kropotkinskaya pumping station in the Krasnodar region, affecting supply from neighbouring Kazakhstan. Ukraine's Security Service claimed responsibility for the attack on the oil pipeline and said that Moscow's Ilsky oil refinery in Krasnodar was also hit, with at least 20 explosions heard in the area.

In our increasingly interconnected world, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) play a crucial role in industries like healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing by combining physical processes with computing power. These systems, however, face many challenges, especially regarding security and system faults. Anomalies in CPS may indicate unexpected problems, from sensor malfunctions to cyber-attacks, and must be detected to prevent failures that can cause harm or disrupt services. This paper provides an overview of the different ways researchers have approached anomaly detection in CPS. We categorize and compare methods like machine learning, deep learning, mathematical models, invariant, and hybrid techniques. Our goal is to help readers understand the strengths and weaknesses of these methods and how they can be used to create safer, more reliable CPS. By identifying the gaps in current solutions, we aim to encourage future research that will make CPS more secure and adaptive in our increasingly automated world.

Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on social media. Grounded in qualitative social science research, we identify seven concepts evoked in immigration discourse (e.g. "water" or "vermin"). We propose and evaluate a novel technique that leverages both word-level and document-level signals to measure metaphor with respect to these concepts. We then study the relationship between metaphor, political ideology, and user engagement in 400K US tweets about immigration. While conservatives tend to use dehumanizing metaphors more than liberals, this effect varies widely across concepts. Moreover, creature-related metaphor is associated with more retweets, especially for liberal authors. Our work highlights the potential for computational methods to complement qualitative approaches in understanding subtle and implicit language in political discourse.

Investigating value alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) based on cultural context has become a critical area of research. However, similar biases have not been extensively explored in large vision-language models (VLMs). As the scale of multimodal models continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to assess whether images can serve as reliable proxies for culture and how these values are embedded through the integration of both visual and textual data. In this paper, we conduct a thorough evaluation of multimodal model at different scales, focusing on their alignment with cultural values. Our findings reveal that, much like LLMs, VLMs exhibit sensitivity to cultural values, but their performance in aligning with these values is highly context-dependent. While VLMs show potential in improving value understanding through the use of images, this alignment varies significantly across contexts highlighting the complexities and underexplored challenges in the alignment of multimodal models.

AI systems often exhibit political bias, influencing users' opinions and decision-making. While political neutrality-defined as the absence of bias-is often seen as an ideal solution for fairness and safety, this position paper argues that true political neutrality is neither feasible nor universally desirable due to its subjective nature and the biases inherent in AI training data, algorithms, and user interactions. However, inspired by Joseph Raz's philosophical insight that "neutrality [...] can be a matter of degree" (Raz, 1986), we argue that striving for some neutrality remains essential for promoting balanced AI interactions and mitigating user manipulation. Therefore, we use the term "approximation" of political neutrality to shift the focus from unattainable absolutes to achievable, practical proxies. We propose eight techniques for approximating neutrality across three levels of conceptualizing AI, examining their trade-offs and implementation strategies. In addition, we explore two concrete applications of these approximations to illustrate their practicality. Finally, we assess our framework on current large language models (LLMs) at the output level, providing a demonstration of how it can be evaluated. This work seeks to advance nuanced discussions of political neutrality in AI and promote the development of responsible, aligned language models.

Simulation-based approaches to microstructure generation can suffer from a variety of limitations, such as high memory usage, long computational times, and difficulties in generating complex geometries. Generative machine learning models present a way around these issues, but they have previously been limited by the fixed size of their generation area. We present a new microstructure generation methodology leveraging advances in inpainting using denoising diffusion models to overcome this generation area limitation. We show that microstructures generated with the presented methodology are statistically similar to grain structures generated with a kinetic Monte Carlo simulator, SPPARKS.* These authors contributed equally to this work.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) make driving decisions without human intervention. Therefore, ensuring AVs' dependability is critical. Despite significant research and development in AV development, their dependability assurance remains a significant challenge due to the complexity and unpredictability of their operating environments. Scenario-based testing evaluates AVs under various driving scenarios, but the unlimited number of potential scenarios highlights the importance of identifying critical scenarios that can violate safety or functional requirements. Such requirements are inherently interdependent and need to be tested simultaneously. To this end, we propose MOEQT, a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)-based approach to generate critical scenarios that simultaneously test interdependent safety and functional requirements. MOEQT adapts Envelope Q-learning as the MORL algorithm, which dynamically adapts multi-objective weights to balance the relative importance between multiple objectives. MOEQT generates critical scenarios to violate multiple requirements through dynamically interacting with the AV environment, ensuring comprehensive AV testing. We evaluate MOEQT using an advanced end-to-end AV controller and a high-fidelity simulator and compare MOEQT with two baselines: a random strategy and a single-objective RL with a weighted reward function. Our evaluation results show that MOEQT achieved an overall better performance in identifying critical scenarios for violating multiple requirements than the baselines.

Abstract--Large language models (LLMs) face the challenge of hallucinations - outputs that seem coherent but are actually incorrect. A particularly damaging type is fact-conflicting hallucination (FCH), where generated content contradicts established facts. Addressing FCH presents three main challenges: 1) Automatically constructing and maintaining large-scale benchmark datasets is difficult and resource-intensive; 2) Generating complex and efficient test cases that the LLM has not been trained on - especially those involving intricate temporal features - is challenging, yet crucial for eliciting hallucinations; and 3) Validating the reasoning behind LLM outputs is inherently difficult, particularly with complex logical relationships, as it requires transparency in the model's decision-making process. LLMs are tested using these cases through template-based prompts, which require them to generate both answers and reasoning steps. T o validate the reasoning, we propose two semantic-aware oracles that compare the semantic structure of LLM outputs to the ground truths. Key insights reveal that LLMs struggle with out-of-distribution knowledge and logical reasoning. These findings highlight the importance of continued efforts to detect and mitigate hallucinations in LLMs. Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, demonstrating impressive text generation and comprehension capabilities with diverse applications. However, despite their growing use, LLMs face significant security and privacy challenges [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], which affect their overall effectiveness and reliability . A critical issue is the phenomenon of hallucination, where LLMs generate outputs that are coherent but factually incorrect or irrelevant. This tendency to produce misleading information compromises the safety and usability of LLM-based systems. This paper focuses on fact-conflicting hallucina tion (FCH), the most prominent form of hallucination in LLMs. FCH occurs when LLMs generate content that directly contradicts established facts. For instance, as illustrated in Figure 1, an LLM incorrectly asserts that " Haruki Murakami won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 ", whereas the fact is that "Haruki Murakami has not won the Nobel Prize, though he has received numerous other literary awards ". Such inaccuracies can significantly lead to user confusion and undermine the trust and reliability that are crucial for LLM applications. N. Li, K. Wang, and H. Wang are with Huazhong University of Science and T echnology, China. Song is with the National University of Singapore, Singapore. Li is with the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit explanations for beliefs from agents. This likely stems from the fact that standard Bayesian models make assumptions (like conditional independence of signals) that preempt the need for explanations, in order to show efficient information aggregation. A natural justification for the value of explanations is that agents' beliefs tend to be drawn from overlapping sources of information, so agents' belief reports do not reveal all that needs to be known. Indeed, this work argues that rationales-explanations of an agent's private information-lead to more efficient aggregation by allowing agents to efficiently identify what information they share and what information is new. Building on this model of rationales, we present a novel 'deliberation mechanism' to elicit rationales from agents in which truthful reporting of beliefs and rationales is a perfect Bayesian equilibrium.

This paper presents the development of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based fighter jet agent within a customized Pygame simulation environment, designed to solve multi-objective tasks via deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The jet's primary objectives include efficiently navigating the environment, reaching a target, and selectively engaging or evading an enemy. A reward function balances these goals while optimized hyperparameters enhance learning efficiency. Results show more than 80\% task completion rate, demonstrating effective decision-making. To enhance transparency, the jet's action choices are analyzed by comparing the rewards of the actual chosen action (factual action) with those of alternate actions (counterfactual actions), providing insights into the decision-making rationale. This study illustrates DRL's potential for multi-objective problem-solving with explainable AI. Project page is available at: \href{https://github.com/swatikar95/Autonomous-Fighter-Jet-Navigation-and-Combat}{Project GitHub Link}.