Adoption of AI by criminal entities across traditional and emerging financial crime paradigms has been a disturbing recent trend. Particularly concerning is the proliferation of generative AI, which has empowered criminal activities ranging from sophisticated phishing schemes to the creation of hard-to-detect deep fakes, and to advanced spoofing attacks to biometric authentication systems. The exploitation of AI by criminal purposes continues to escalate, presenting an unprecedented challenge. AI adoption causes an increasingly complex landscape of fraud typologies intertwined with cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Overall, GenAI has a transformative effect on financial crimes and fraud. According to some estimates, GenAI will quadruple the fraud losses by 2027 with a staggering annual growth rate of over 30% [27]. As crime patterns become more intricate, personalized, and elusive, deploying effective defensive AI strategies becomes indispensable. However, several challenges hinder the necessary progress of AI-based fincrime detection systems. This paper examines the latest trends in AI/ML-driven financial crimes and detection systems. It underscores the urgent need for developing agile AI defenses that can effectively counteract the rapidly emerging threats. It also aims to highlight the need for cooperation across the financial services industry to tackle the GenAI induced crime waves.

Integrating hyperscale AI into national defense modeling and simulation (M&S) is crucial for enhancing strategic and operational capabilities. We explore how hyperscale AI can revolutionize defense M\&S by providing unprecedented accuracy, speed, and the ability to simulate complex scenarios. Countries such as the United States and China are at the forefront of adopting these technologies and are experiencing varying degrees of success. Maximizing the potential of hyperscale AI necessitates addressing critical challenges, such as closed networks, long-tail data, complex decision-making, and a shortage of experts. Future directions emphasize the adoption of domestic foundation models, the investment in various GPUs / NPUs, the utilization of big tech services, and the use of open source software. These initiatives will enhance national security, maintain competitive advantages, and promote broader technological and economic progress. With this blueprint, the Republic of Korea can strengthen its defense capabilities and stay ahead of the emerging threats of modern warfare.

Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages often-discarded language model heads. By employing these components via a mutual information maximization strategy, our approach helps maintain prior knowledge from the pre-trained backbone and strategically aligns the primary classification head, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their wealth of knowledge, in addressing FCRE challenges. Our comprehensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for future work.

Social dynamics in close human interactions pose significant challenges for Human Mesh Estimation (HME), particularly due to the complexity of physical contacts and the scarcity of training data. Addressing these challenges, we introduce a novel data generation method that utilizes Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to annotate contact maps which guide test-time optimization to produce paired image and pseudo-ground truth meshes. This methodology not only alleviates the annotation burden but also enables the assembly of a comprehensive dataset specifically tailored for close interactions in HME. Our Ask Pose Unite (APU) dataset, comprising over 6.2k human mesh pairs in contact covering diverse interaction types, is curated from images depicting naturalistic person-to-person scenes. We empirically show that using our dataset to train a diffusion-based contact prior, used as guidance during optimization, improves mesh estimation on unseen interactions. Our work addresses longstanding challenges of data scarcity for close interactions in HME enhancing the field's capabilities of handling complex interaction scenarios.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are essential for contextual understanding of both visual and textual information. However, their vulnerability to adversarially manipulated inputs presents significant risks, leading to compromised outputs and raising concerns about the reliability in VLM-integrated applications. Detecting these malicious prompts is thus crucial for maintaining trust in VLM generations. A major challenge in developing a safeguarding prompt classifier is the lack of a large amount of labeled benign and malicious data. To address the issue, we introduce VLMGuard, a novel learning framework that leverages the unlabeled user prompts in the wild for malicious prompt detection. These unlabeled prompts, which naturally arise when VLMs are deployed in the open world, consist of both benign and malicious information. To harness the unlabeled data, we present an automated maliciousness estimation score for distinguishing between benign and malicious samples within this unlabeled mixture, thereby enabling the training of a binary prompt classifier on top. Notably, our framework does not require extra human annotations, offering strong flexibility and practicality for real-world applications. Extensive experiment shows VLMGuard achieves superior detection results, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Disclaimer: This paper may contain offensive examples; reader discretion is advised.

Topic modeling is a powerful technique to discover hidden topics and patterns within a collection of documents without prior knowledge. Traditional topic modeling and clustering-based techniques encounter challenges in capturing contextual semantic information. This study introduces an innovative end-to-end semantic-driven topic modeling technique for the topic extraction process, utilizing advanced word and document embeddings combined with a powerful clustering algorithm. This semantic-driven approach represents a significant advancement in topic modeling methodologies. It leverages contextual semantic information to extract coherent and meaningful topics. Specifically, our model generates document embeddings using pre-trained transformer-based language models, reduces the dimensions of the embeddings, clusters the embeddings based on semantic similarity, and generates coherent topics for each cluster. Compared to ChatGPT and traditional topic modeling algorithms, our model provides more coherent and meaningful topics.

In this paper, we introduce Robi Butler, a novel household robotic system that enables multimodal interactions with remote users. Building on the advanced communication interfaces, Robi Butler allows users to monitor the robot's status, send text or voice instructions, and select target objects by hand pointing. At the core of our system is a high-level behavior module, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), that interprets multimodal instructions to generate action plans. These plans are composed of a set of open vocabulary primitives supported by Vision Language Models (VLMs) that handle both text and pointing queries. The integration of the above components allows Robi Butler to ground remote multimodal instructions in the real-world home environment in a zero-shot manner. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of this system using a variety of daily household tasks that involve remote users giving multimodal instructions. Additionally, we conducted a user study to analyze how multimodal interactions affect efficiency and user experience during remote human-robot interaction and discuss the potential improvements.

Modern QA systems entail retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate and trustworthy responses. However, the inherent gap between user queries and relevant documents hinders precise matching. Motivated by our conical distribution hypothesis, which posits that potential queries and documents form a cone-like structure in the embedding space, we introduce QAEncoder, a training-free approach to bridge this gap. Specifically, QAEncoder estimates the expectation of potential queries in the embedding space as a robust surrogate for the document embedding, and attaches document fingerprints to effectively distinguish these embeddings. Extensive experiments on fourteen embedding models across six languages and eight datasets validate QAEncoder's alignment capability, which offers a plug-and-play solution that seamlessly integrates with existing RAG architectures and training-based methods.

We design a distributed feedback optimization strategy, embedded into a modular ROS 2 control architecture, which allows a team of heterogeneous robots to cooperatively monitor and encircle a target while patrolling points of interest. Relying on the aggregative feedback optimization framework, we handle multi-robot dynamics while minimizing a global performance index depending on both microscopic (e.g., the location of single robots) and macroscopic variables (e.g., the spatial distribution of the team). The proposed distributed policy allows the robots to cooperatively address the global problem by employing only local measurements and neighboring data exchanges. These exchanges are performed through an asynchronous communication protocol ruled by locally-verifiable triggering conditions. We formally prove that our strategy steers the robots to a set of configurations representing stationary points of the considered optimization problem. The effectiveness and scalability of the overall strategy are tested via Monte Carlo campaigns of realistic Webots ROS 2 virtual experiments. Finally, the applicability of our solution is shown with real experiments on ground and aerial robots.

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to follow directions, but this introduces a vulnerability to blindly comply with user requests even if they generate wrong information. In medicine, this could accelerate the generation of misinformation that impacts human well-being. Objectives/Methods: We analyzed compliance to requests to generate misleading content about medications in settings where models know the request is illogical. We investigated whether in-context directions and instruction-tuning of LLMs to prioritize logical reasoning over compliance reduced misinformation risk. Results: While all frontier LLMs complied with misinformation requests, both prompt-based and parameter-based approaches can improve the detection of logic flaws in requests and prevent the dissemination of medical misinformation. Conclusion: Shifting LLMs to prioritize logic over compliance could reduce risks of exploitation for medical misinformation.