Government
Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance
Qorib, Muhammad Reza, Hu, Qisheng, Ng, Hwee Tou
Given news articles about an entity, such as a public figure or organization, timeline summarization (TLS) involves generating a timeline that summarizes the key events about the entity. However, the TLS task is too underspecified, since what is of interest to each reader may vary, and hence there is not a single ideal or optimal timeline. In this paper, we introduce a novel task, called Constrained Timeline Summarization (CTLS), where a timeline is generated in which all events in the timeline meet some constraint. An example of a constrained timeline concerns the legal battles of Tiger Woods, where only events related to his legal problems are selected to appear in the timeline. We collected a new human-verified dataset of constrained timelines involving 47 entities and 5 constraints per entity. We propose an approach that employs a large language model (LLM) to summarize news articles according to a specified constraint and cluster them to identify key events to include in a constrained timeline. In addition, we propose a novel self-reflection method during summary generation, demonstrating that this approach successfully leads to improved performance.
Emerging Microelectronic Materials by Design: Navigating Combinatorial Design Space with Scarce and Dispersed Data
Zhang, Hengrui, Georgescu, Alexandru B., Yerramilli, Suraj, Karpovich, Christopher, Apley, Daniel W., Olivetti, Elsa A., Rondinelli, James M., Chen, Wei
The increasing demands of sustainable energy, electronics, and biomedical applications call for next-generation functional materials with unprecedented properties. Of particular interest are emerging materials that display exceptional physical properties, making them promising candidates in energy-efficient microelectronic devices. As the conventional Edisonian approach becomes significantly outpaced by growing societal needs, emerging computational modeling and machine learning (ML) methods are employed for the rational design of materials. However, the complex physical mechanisms, cost of first-principles calculations, and the dispersity and scarcity of data pose challenges to both physics-based and data-driven materials modeling. Moreover, the combinatorial composition-structure design space is high-dimensional and often disjoint, making design optimization nontrivial. In this Account, we review a team effort toward establishing a framework that integrates data-driven and physics-based methods to address these challenges and accelerate materials design. We begin by presenting our integrated materials design framework and its three components in a general context. We then provide an example of applying this materials design framework to metal-insulator transition (MIT) materials, a specific type of emerging materials with practical importance in next-generation memory technologies. We identify multiple new materials which may display this property and propose pathways for their synthesis. Finally, we identify some outstanding challenges in data-driven materials design, such as materials data quality issues and property-performance mismatch. We seek to raise awareness of these overlooked issues hindering materials design, thus stimulating efforts toward developing methods to mitigate the gaps.
Russia's Putin pledges 'destruction' on Ukraine after Kazan drone attack
Russian President Vladimir Putin has pledged retaliation after Ukrainian drones struck residential buildings in the city of Kazan in Russia's Tatarstan region. Putin made the comments via videolink on Sunday while addressing the local leader of Tatarstan in a road-opening ceremony. "Whoever, and however much they try to destroy, they will face many times more destruction themselves and will regret what they are trying to do in our country," Putin said. On Saturday morning, six Ukrainian drones hit residential buildings in Kazan and a seventh struck an industrial facility. No injuries from the attack were officially reported, while media reports indicated that three people suffered cuts from shattered window glass.
Opinion: California and other states are rushing to regulate AI. This is what they're missing
The Constitution shouldn't be rewritten for every new communications technology. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this long-standing principle during its most recent term in applying the 1st Amendment to social media. The late Justice Antonin Scalia articulated it persuasively in 2011, noting that "whatever the challenges of applying the Constitution to ever-advancing technology, the basic principles of freedom of speech and the press … do not vary." These principles should be front of mind for congressional Republicans and David Sacks, Trump's recently chosen artificial intelligence czar, as they make policy on that emerging technology. The 1st Amendment standards that apply to older communications technologies must also apply to artificial intelligence, particularly as it stands to play an increasingly significant role in human expression and learning.
Mystery drones could be identified faster using new detection tool, but FAA lacks resources
As drone sightings over New Jersey continue to raise questions, a new tool could bring answers about the source of these flying vehicles -- if the government could get it off the ground. Earlier this year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began requiring all unmanned aircraft systems to be equipped with Remote ID technology, which makes every equipped drone uniquely identifiable to authorities, like a license plate on a car. The FAA announced that it would provide a database that could be accessed by local law enforcement, but nearly one year later, local authorities still can't get into it themselves. "The FAA is working on developing Remote ID data sharing capabilities for law enforcement so they can have access to FAA registration information," the agency said in a statement to Fox News Digital. A sign marks the entrance to the FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 7. (J.
Engineering Carbon Credits Towards A Responsible FinTech Era: The Practices, Implications, and Future
Zeng, Qingwen, Xu, Hanlin, Xu, Nanjun, Salim, Flora, Gao, Junbin, Chen, Huaming
Carbon emissions significantly contribute to climate change, and carbon credits have emerged as a key tool for mitigating environmental damage and helping organizations manage their carbon footprint. Despite their growing importance across sectors, fully leveraging carbon credits remains challenging. This study explores engineering practices and fintech solutions to enhance carbon emission management. We first review the negative impacts of carbon emission non-disclosure, revealing its adverse effects on financial stability and market value. Organizations are encouraged to actively manage emissions and disclose relevant data to mitigate risks. Next, we analyze factors influencing carbon prices and review advanced prediction algorithms that optimize carbon credit purchasing strategies, reducing costs and improving efficiency. Additionally, we examine corporate carbon emission prediction models, which offer accurate performance assessments and aid in planning future carbon credit needs. By integrating carbon price and emission predictions, we propose research directions, including corporate carbon management cost forecasting. This study provides a foundation for future quantitative research on the financial and market impacts of carbon management practices and is the first systematic review focusing on computing solutions and engineering practices for carbon credits.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Distributional Language Statistics: Persuasion and Deception with Large Language Models
Jones, Cameron R., Bergen, Benjamin K.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate content that is as persuasive as human-written text and appear capable of selectively producing deceptive outputs. These capabilities raise concerns about potential misuse and unintended consequences as these systems become more widely deployed. This review synthesizes recent empirical work examining LLMs' capacity and proclivity for persuasion and deception, analyzes theoretical risks that could arise from these capabilities, and evaluates proposed mitigations. While current persuasive effects are relatively small, various mechanisms could increase their impact, including fine-tuning, multimodality, and social factors. We outline key open questions for future research, including how persuasive AI systems might become, whether truth enjoys an inherent advantage over falsehoods, and how effective different mitigation strategies may be in practice.
A Lorentz-Equivariant Transformer for All of the LHC
Brehmer, Johann, Bresó, Víctor, de Haan, Pim, Plehn, Tilman, Qu, Huilin, Spinner, Jonas, Thaler, Jesse
We show that the Lorentz-Equivariant Geometric Algebra Transformer (L-GATr) yields state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of machine learning tasks at the Large Hadron Collider. L-GATr represents data in a geometric algebra over space-time and is equivariant under Lorentz transformations. The underlying architecture is a versatile and scalable transformer, which is able to break symmetries if needed. We demonstrate the power of L-GATr for amplitude regression and jet classification, and then benchmark it as the first Lorentz-equivariant generative network. For all three LHC tasks, we find significant improvements over previous architectures.
Interactive Classification Metrics: A graphical application to build robust intuition for classification model evaluation
Brown, David H., Chicco, Davide
Machine learning continues to grow in popularity in academia, in industry, and is increasingly used in other fields. However, most of the common metrics used to evaluate even simple binary classification models have shortcomings that are neither immediately obvious nor consistently taught to practitioners. Here we present Interactive Classification Metrics (ICM), an application to visualize and explore the relationships between different evaluation metrics. The user changes the distribution statistics and explores corresponding changes across a suite of evaluation metrics. The interactive, graphical nature of this tool emphasizes the tradeoffs of each metric without the overhead of data wrangling and model training. The goals of this application are: (1) to aid practitioners in the ever-expanding machine learning field to choose the most appropriate evaluation metrics for their classification problem; (2) to promote careful attention to interpretation that is required even in the simplest scenarios like binary classification. Our application is publicly available for free under the MIT license as a Python package on PyPI at https://pypi.org/project/interactive-classification-metrics and on GitHub at https://github.com/davhbrown/interactive_classification_metrics.
Cannot or Should Not? Automatic Analysis of Refusal Composition in IFT/RLHF Datasets and Refusal Behavior of Black-Box LLMs
von Recum, Alexander, Schnabl, Christoph, Hollbeck, Gabor, Alberti, Silas, Blinde, Philip, von Hagen, Marvin
Refusals - instances where large language models (LLMs) decline or fail to fully execute user instructions - are crucial for both AI safety and AI capabilities and the reduction of hallucinations in particular. These behaviors are learned during post-training, especially in instruction fine-tuning (IFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, existing taxonomies and evaluation datasets for refusals are inadequate, often focusing solely on should-not-related (instead of cannot-related) categories, and lacking tools for auditing refusal content in black-box LLM outputs. We present a comprehensive framework for classifying LLM refusals: (a) a taxonomy of 16 refusal categories, (b) a human-annotated dataset of over 8,600 instances from publicly available IFT and RLHF datasets, (c) a synthetic dataset with 8,000 examples for each refusal category, and (d) classifiers trained for refusal classification. Our work enables precise auditing of refusal behaviors in black-box LLMs and automatic analyses of refusal patterns in large IFT and RLHF datasets. This facilitates the strategic adjustment of LLM refusals, contributing to the development of more safe and reliable LLMs.