Adversarial examples pose a significant challenge to deep neural networks (DNNs) across both image and text domains, with the intent to degrade model performance through meticulously altered inputs. Adversarial texts, however, are distinct from adversarial images due to their requirement for semantic similarity and the discrete nature of the textual contents. This study delves into the concept of human suspiciousness, a quality distinct from the traditional focus on imperceptibility found in image-based adversarial examples. Unlike images, where adversarial changes are meant to be indistinguishable to the human eye, textual adversarial content must often remain undetected or non-suspicious to human readers, even when the text's purpose is to deceive NLP systems or bypass filters. In this research, we expand the study of human suspiciousness by analyzing how individuals perceive adversarial texts. We gather and publish a novel dataset of Likert-scale human evaluations on the suspiciousness of adversarial sentences, crafted by four widely used adversarial attack methods and assess their correlation with the human ability to detect machine-generated alterations. Additionally, we develop a regression-based model to quantify suspiciousness and establish a baseline for future research in reducing the suspiciousness in adversarial text generation. We also demonstrate how the regressor-generated suspicious scores can be incorporated into adversarial generation methods to produce texts that are less likely to be perceived as computer-generated. We make our human suspiciousness annotated data and our code available.

LLMs are increasingly being used in workflows involving generating content to be consumed by humans (e.g., marketing) and also in directly interacting with humans (e.g., through chatbots). The development of such systems that are capable of generating verifiably persuasive messages presents both opportunities and challenges for society. On the one hand, such systems could positively impact domains like advertising and social good, such as addressing drug addiction, and on the other, they could be misused for spreading misinformation and shaping political opinions. To channel LLMs' impact on society, we need to develop systems to measure and benchmark their persuasiveness. With this motivation, we introduce PersuasionBench and PersuasionArena, the first large-scale benchmark and arena containing a battery of tasks to measure the persuasion ability of generative models automatically. We investigate to what extent LLMs know and leverage linguistic patterns that can help them generate more persuasive language. Our findings indicate that the persuasiveness of LLMs correlates positively with model size, but smaller models can also be made to have a higher persuasiveness than much larger models. Notably, targeted training using synthetic and natural datasets significantly enhances smaller models' persuasive capabilities, challenging scale-dependent assumptions. Our findings carry key implications for both model developers and policymakers. For instance, while the EU AI Act and California's SB-1047 aim to regulate AI models based on the number of floating point operations, we demonstrate that simple metrics like this alone fail to capture the full scope of AI's societal impact. We invite the community to explore and contribute to PersuasionArena and PersuasionBench, available at https://bit.ly/measure-persuasion, to advance our understanding of AI-driven persuasion and its societal implications.

We introduce Functional Group-Aware Representations for Small Molecules (FARM), a novel foundation model designed to bridge the gap between SMILES, natural language, and molecular graphs. The key innovation of FARM lies in its functional group-aware tokenization, which directly incorporates functional group information into the representations. This strategic reduction in tokenization granularity is intentionally aligned with key drivers of functional properties (i.e., functional groups), enhancing the model's understanding of chemical language. By expanding the chemical lexicon, FARM more effectively bridges SMILES and natural language, ultimately advancing the model's capacity to predict molecular properties. FARM also represents molecules from two perspectives: by using masked language modeling to capture atom-level features and by employing graph neural networks to encode the whole molecule topology. We rigorously evaluate FARM on the MoleculeNet dataset, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance on 10 out of 12 tasks. These results highlight FARM's potential to improve molecular representation learning, with promising applications in drug discovery and pharmaceutical research. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative tool in accelerating scientific discovery, particularly in drug development. However, one of the central challenges in this field is the scarcity of large labeled datasets required for traditional supervised learning methods. This has shifted the focus towards self-supervised pre-trained models that can extract meaningful patterns from vast amounts of unlabeled molecular data (Shen & Nicolaou, 2019). As a result, the development of robust foundation models for molecular representations is now more critical than ever. Despite significant advancements in other domains, such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, there is still no dominant foundation model tailored to molecular representation in drug discovery (Zhang et al., 2023b). This paper begins to address this pressing gap by introducing an innovative approach that leverages functional group (FG)-aware tokenization in the context of both sequence-based and graph-based molecular representations.

Attacks against the Internet of Things (IoT) are rising as devices, applications, and interactions become more networked and integrated. The increase in cyber-attacks that target IoT networks poses a considerable vulnerability and threat to the privacy, security, functionality, and availability of critical systems, which leads to operational disruptions, financial losses, identity thefts, and data breaches. To efficiently secure IoT devices, real-time detection of intrusion systems is critical, especially those using machine learning to identify threats and mitigate risks and vulnerabilities. This paper investigates the latest research on machine learning-based intrusion detection strategies for IoT security, concentrating on real-time responsiveness, detection accuracy, and algorithm efficiency. Key studies were reviewed from all well-known academic databases, and a taxonomy was provided for the existing approaches. This review also highlights existing research gaps and outlines the limitations of current IoT security frameworks to offer practical insights for future research directions and developments.

Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) are widely recognized for their ability to create fully interpretable machine learning models for tabular data. Traditionally, training GAMs involves iterative learning algorithms, such as splines, boosted trees, or neural networks, which refine the additive components through repeated error reduction. In this paper, we introduce GAMformer, the first method to leverage in-context learning to estimate shape functions of a GAM in a single forward pass, representing a significant departure from the conventional iterative approaches to GAM fitting. Building on previous research applying in-context learning to tabular data, we exclusively use complex, synthetic data to train GAMformer, yet find it extrapolates well to real-world data. Our experiments show that GAMformer performs on par with other leading GAMs across various classification benchmarks while generating highly interpretable shape functions. The growing importance of interpretability in machine learning is evident, especially in areas where transparency, fairness, and accountability are critical (Barocas and Selbst, 2016; Rudin et al., 2022). Interpretable models are essential for building trust between humans and AI systems by allowing users to understand the reasoning behind the model's predictions and decisions (Ribeiro et al., 2016). This is crucial in safety-critical fields like healthcare, where incorrect or biased decisions can have severe consequences (Caruana et al., 2015). Additionally, interpretability is vital for regulatory compliance in sectors like finance and hiring, where explaining and justifying model outcomes is necessary (Arun et al., 2016; Dattner et al., 2019). Interpretable models also help detect and mitigate bias by revealing the factors influencing predictions, ensuring fair and unbiased decisions across different population groups (Mehrabi et al., 2021). Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) have proven a popular choice for interpretable modeling due to their high accuracy and interpretability. In GAMs, the target variable is expressed as a sum of non-linearly transformed features.

Pig butchering, the crypto-based scammer scourge that has pulled in an estimated 75 billion from victims globally, is spreading beyond its roots in Southeast Asia, with operations proliferating across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Africa. The UK's National Crime Agency disclosed new details about the identities of the Russian ransomware group known as Evil Corp--as well as the group's ties to Russian intelligence agencies and even its direct participation in espionage operations targeting NATO allies. A WIRED investigation revealed how car-mounted automatic license plate reader cameras are capturing far more than just license plates, including campaign yard signs, bumper stickers, and other politically sensitive text, all examples of how a system for tracking vehicles threatens to become a broader surveillance tool. In other news, ICE signed a 2 million contract with Paragon Solutions, a known vendor of spyware including the hacking tool Graphite. And the Pentagon is increasingly adopting handheld controllers for weapons systems in an effort provide more intuitive interfaces to soldiers who have grown up playing Xbox and PlayStation consoles.

The Kremlin on Friday accused Ukrainian authorities of playing with fire, a day after Russian forces said they had intercepted a Ukrainian drone near the Kursk nuclear plant and some news outlets reported a fire had broken out several miles away. Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Heorhiy Tykhyi denied that his country had fired weapons at or near the plant.

As a powerful and rapidly advancing dual-use technology, AI offers both immense benefits and worrisome risks. In response, governing bodies around the world are developing a range of regulatory AI laws and policies. This paper compares three distinct approaches taken by the EU, China and the US. Within the US, we explore AI regulation at both the federal and state level, with a focus on California's pending Senate Bill 1047. Each regulatory system reflects distinct cultural, political and economic perspectives. Each also highlights differing regional perspectives on regulatory risk-benefit tradeoffs, with divergent judgments on the balance between safety versus innovation and cooperation versus competition. Finally, differences between regulatory frameworks reflect contrastive stances in regards to trust in centralized authority versus trust in a more decentralized free market of self-interested stakeholders. Taken together, these varied approaches to AI innovation and regulation influence each other, the broader international community, and the future of AI regulation.

Humans perform visual perception at multiple levels, including low-level object recognition and high-level semantic interpretation such as behavior understanding. Subtle differences in low-level details can lead to substantial changes in high-level perception. For example, substituting the shopping bag held by a person with a gun suggests violent behavior, implying criminal or violent activity. Despite significant advancements in various multimodal tasks, Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) remain unexplored in their capabilities to conduct such multi-level visual perceptions. To investigate the perception gap between LVLMs and humans, we introduce MVP-Bench, the first visual-language benchmark systematically evaluating both low- and high-level visual perception of LVLMs. We construct MVP-Bench across natural and synthetic images to investigate how manipulated content influences model perception. Using MVP-Bench, we diagnose the visual perception of 10 open-source and 2 closed-source LVLMs, showing that high-level perception tasks significantly challenge existing LVLMs. The state-of-the-art GPT-4o only achieves an accuracy of $56\%$ on Yes/No questions, compared with $74\%$ in low-level scenarios. Furthermore, the performance gap between natural and manipulated images indicates that current LVLMs do not generalize in understanding the visual semantics of synthetic images as humans do. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/GuanzhenLi/MVP-Bench.

Incorporating a priori physics knowledge into machine learning leads to more robust and interpretable algorithms. In this work, we combine deep learning techniques and classic numerical methods for differential equations to solve two challenging problems in dynamical systems theory: dynamics discovery and parameter estimation. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on a suite of test problems exhibiting oscillatory and chaotic dynamics. When comparing the performance of various numerical schemes, such as the Runge-Kutta and linear multistep families of methods, we observe promising results in predicting the system dynamics and estimating physical parameters, given appropriate choices of spatial and temporal discretization schemes and numerical method orders.