Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various real-world tasks. However, they often struggle to fully comprehend and effectively utilize their input contexts, resulting in responses that are unfaithful or hallucinated. This difficulty increases for contexts that are long or contain distracting information, which can divert LLMs from fully capturing essential evidence. To address this issue, many works use prompting to help LLMs utilize contextual information more faithfully. For instance, iterative prompting highlights key information in two steps that first ask the LLM to identify important pieces of context and then derive answers accordingly. However, prompting methods are constrained to highlighting key information implicitly in token space, which is often insufficient to fully steer the model's attention. To improve model faithfulness more reliably, we propose AutoPASTA, a method that automatically identifies key contextual information and explicitly highlights it by steering an LLM's attention scores. Like prompting, AutoPASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Our experiments on open-book QA demonstrate that AutoPASTA effectively enables models to grasp essential contextual information, leading to substantially improved model faithfulness and performance, e.g., an average improvement of 7.95% for LLAMA3-70B-Instruct. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/QingruZhang/AutoPASTA .

AI fairness measurements, including tests for equal treatment, often take the form of disaggregated evaluations of AI systems. Such measurements are an important part of Responsible AI operations. These measurements compare system performance across demographic groups or sub-populations and typically require member-level demographic signals such as gender, race, ethnicity, and location. However, sensitive member-level demographic attributes like race and ethnicity can be challenging to obtain and use due to platform choices, legal constraints, and cultural norms. In this paper, we focus on the task of enabling AI fairness measurements on race/ethnicity for \emph{U.S. LinkedIn members} in a privacy-preserving manner. We present the Privacy-Preserving Probabilistic Race/Ethnicity Estimation (PPRE) method for performing this task. PPRE combines the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) model, a sparse LinkedIn survey sample of self-reported demographics, and privacy-enhancing technologies like secure two-party computation and differential privacy to enable meaningful fairness measurements while preserving member privacy. We provide details of the PPRE method and its privacy guarantees. We then illustrate sample measurement operations. We conclude with a review of open research and engineering challenges for expanding our privacy-preserving fairness measurement capabilities.

Debiasing is often challenging due to computational costs, data constraints, and potential degradation of multi-task language capabilities. This work introduces a novel approach utilizing ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data, aiming to enhance the debiasing of LLMs. We propose two strategies: Targeted Prompting, which provides effective debiasing for known biases but necessitates prior specification of bias in question; and General Prompting, which, while slightly less effective, offers debiasing across various categories. We leverage resource-efficient LLM debiasing using adapter tuning and compare the effectiveness of our synthetic data to existing debiasing datasets. Our results reveal that: (1) ChatGPT can efficiently produce high-quality training data for debiasing other LLMs; (2) data produced via our approach surpasses existing datasets in debiasing performance while also preserving internal knowledge of a pre-trained LLM; and (3) synthetic data exhibits generalizability across categories, effectively mitigating various biases, including intersectional ones. These findings underscore the potential of synthetic data in advancing the fairness of LLMs with minimal retraining cost.

The influence of textures on machine learning models has been an ongoing investigation, specifically in texture bias/learning, interpretability, and robustness. However, due to the lack of large and diverse texture data available, the findings in these works have been limited, as more comprehensive evaluations have not been feasible. Image generative models are able to provide data creation at scale, but utilizing these models for texture synthesis has been unexplored and poses additional challenges both in creating accurate texture images and validating those images. In this work, we introduce an extensible methodology and corresponding new dataset for generating high-quality, diverse texture images capable of supporting a broad set of texture-based tasks. Our pipeline consists of: (1) developing prompts from a range of descriptors to serve as input to text-to-image models, (2) adopting and adapting Stable Diffusion pipelines to generate and filter the corresponding images, and (3) further filtering down to the highest quality images. Through this, we create the Prompted Textures Dataset (PTD), a dataset of 362,880 texture images that span 56 textures. During the process of generating images, we find that NSFW safety filters in image generation pipelines are highly sensitive to texture (and flag up to 60\% of our texture images), uncovering a potential bias in these models and presenting unique challenges when working with texture data. Through both standard metrics and a human evaluation, we find that our dataset is high quality and diverse.

Contrary to on-road autonomous navigation, off-road autonomy is complicated by various factors ranging from sensing challenges to terrain variability. In such a milieu, data-driven approaches have been commonly employed to capture intricate vehicle-environment interactions effectively. However, the success of data-driven methods depends crucially on the quality and quantity of data, which can be compromised by large variability in off-road environments. To address these concerns, we present a novel workflow to recreate the exact vehicle and its target operating conditions digitally for domain-specific data generation. This enables us to effectively model off-road vehicle dynamics from simulation data using the Koopman operator theory, and employ the obtained models for local motion planning and optimal vehicle control. The capabilities of the proposed methodology are demonstrated through an autonomous navigation problem of a 1:5 scale vehicle, where a terrain-informed planner is employed for global mission planning. Results indicate a substantial improvement in off-road navigation performance with the proposed algorithm (5.84x) and underscore the efficacy of digital twinning in terms of improving the sample efficiency (3.2x) and reducing the sim2real gap (5.2%).

In this work, we introduce a new approach to processing complex-valued data using DNNs consisting of parallel real-valued subnetworks with coupled outputs. Our proposed class of architectures, referred to as Steinmetz Neural Networks, leverages multi-view learning to construct more interpretable representations within the latent space. Subsequently, we present the Analytic Neural Network, which implements a consistency penalty that encourages analytic signal representations in the Steinmetz neural network's latent space. This penalty enforces a deterministic and orthogonal relationship between the real and imaginary components. Utilizing an information-theoretic construction, we demonstrate that the upper bound on the generalization error posited by the analytic neural network is lower than that of the general class of Steinmetz neural networks. Our numerical experiments demonstrate the improved performance and robustness to additive noise, afforded by our proposed networks on benchmark datasets and synthetic examples.

Deep learning provides powerful methods to impute structured information from large-scale, unstructured text and image datasets. For example, economists might wish to detect the presence of economic activity in satellite images, or to measure the topics or entities mentioned in social media, the congressional record, or firm filings. This review introduces deep neural networks, covering methods such as classifiers, regression models, generative AI, and embedding models. Applications include classification, document digitization, record linkage, and methods for data exploration in massive scale text and image corpora. When suitable methods are used, deep learning models can be cheap to tune and can scale affordably to problems involving millions or billions of data points.. The review is accompanied by a companion website, EconDL, with user-friendly demo notebooks, software resources, and a knowledge base that provides technical details and additional applications.

Following 11 years of defence cooperation and millions of dollars spent on maintaining military bases, the United States officially pulled its troops out of Niger this week in a surprise divorce that experts are calling a "blow" to Washington's ambitions for influence in the troubled Sahel region of West Africa. Once-close relations between the two countries saw the US establish large, expensive military bases from which it launched surveillance drones in Niger to monitor myriad armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS). However, those ties collapsed in March when Niger's military government, which seized power in July 2023, cancelled a decade-long security agreement and told the US, which was pushing for a transition to civilian rule, to remove its 1,100 military personnel stationed there by September 15. For months, the US has failed to either fully align with or outright oppose the ruling military, analysts say. On the one hand, Washington seemed ready to maintain defence relations with the new ruling power, but on the other, it felt compelled to denounce the coup and pause aid to Niger.

This paper examines the integration of AI's carbon footprint into the risk management frameworks (RMFs) of the banking sector, emphasising its importance in aligning with sustainability goals and regulatory requirements. As AI becomes increasingly central to banking operations, its energy-intensive processes contribute significantly to carbon emissions, posing environmental, regulatory, and reputational risks. Regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the Prudential Regulation Authority's SS1/23 are driving banks to incorporate environmental considerations into their AI model governance. Recent advancements in AI research, like the Open Mixture-of-Experts (OLMoE) framework and the Agentic RAG framework, offer more efficient and dynamic AI models, reducing their carbon footprint without compromising performance. Using these technological examples, the paper outlines a structured approach for banks to identify, assess, and mitigate AI's carbon footprint within their RMFs, including adopting energy-efficient models, utilising green cloud computing, and implementing lifecycle management.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge is leading the development of robots capable of mapping underground mines and tunnels up to 8km in length and identify objects and people. Developing these autonomous abilities paves the way for future planetary cave and surface exploration missions. The Co-STAR team, competing in this challenge, is developing a hybrid aerial-ground vehicle, known as the Rollocopter. The current design of this vehicle is a drone with wheels attached. This allows for the vehicle to roll, actuated by the propellers, and fly only when necessary, hence benefiting from the reduced power consumption of the ground mode and the enhanced mobility of the aerial mode. This thesis focuses on the development and increased robustness of the local planning architecture for the Rollocopter. The first development of thesis is a local planner capable of collision avoidance. The local planning node provides the basic functionality required for the vehicle to navigate autonomously. The next stage was augmenting this with the ability to plan more reliably without localisation. This was then integrated with a hybrid mobility mode capable of rolling and flying to exploit power and mobility benefits of the respective configurations. A traversability analysis algorithm as well as determining the terrain that the vehicle is able to traverse is in the late stages of development for informing the decisions of the hybrid planner. A simulator was developed to test the planning algorithms and improve the robustness of the vehicle to different environments. The results presented in this thesis are related to the mobility of the rollocopter and the range of environments that the vehicle is capable of traversing. Videos are included in which the vehicle successfully navigates through dust-ridden tunnels, horizontal mazes, and areas with rough terrain.