The appreciation and utilisation of risk and uncertainty can play a key role in helping to solve some of the many ethical issues that are posed by AI. Understanding the uncertainties can allow algorithms to make better decisions by providing interrogatable avenues to check the correctness of outputs. Allowing algorithms to deal with variability and ambiguity with their inputs means they do not need to force people into uncomfortable classifications. Provenance enables algorithms to know what they know preventing possible harms. Additionally, uncertainty about provenance highlights the trustworthiness of algorithms. It is essential to compute with what we know rather than make assumptions that may be unjustified or untenable. This paper provides a perspective on the need for the importance of risk and uncertainty in the development of ethical AI, especially in high-risk scenarios. It argues that the handling of uncertainty, especially epistemic uncertainty, is critical to ensuring that algorithms do not cause harm and are trustworthy and ensure that the decisions that they make are humane.

Advances in large language models have raised concerns about their potential use in generating compelling election disinformation at scale. This study presents a two-part investigation into the capabilities of LLMs to automate stages of an election disinformation operation. First, we introduce DisElect, a novel evaluation dataset designed to measure LLM compliance with instructions to generate content for an election disinformation operation in localised UK context, containing 2,200 malicious prompts and 50 benign prompts. Using DisElect, we test 13 LLMs and find that most models broadly comply with these requests; we also find that the few models which refuse malicious prompts also refuse benign election-related prompts, and are more likely to refuse to generate content from a right-wing perspective. Secondly, we conduct a series of experiments (N=2,340) to assess the "humanness" of LLMs: the extent to which disinformation operation content generated by an LLM is able to pass as human-written. Our experiments suggest that almost all LLMs tested released since 2022 produce election disinformation operation content indiscernible by human evaluators over 50% of the time. Notably, we observe that multiple models achieve above-human levels of humanness. Taken together, these findings suggest that current LLMs can be used to generate high-quality content for election disinformation operations, even in hyperlocalised scenarios, at far lower costs than traditional methods, and offer researchers and policymakers an empirical benchmark for the measurement and evaluation of these capabilities in current and future models.

As drones are getting more and more entangled in our society, more untrained users require the capability to operate them. This scenario is to be achieved through the development of artificial intelligence capabilities assisting the human operator in controlling the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) and processing the sensor data, thereby alleviating the need for extensive operator training. This paper presents the HADRON project that seeks to develop and test multiple novel technologies to enable human-friendly control of drone swarms. This project is divided into three main parts. The first part consists of the integration of different technologies for the intuitive control of drones, focusing on novice or inexperienced pilots and operators. The second part focuses on the development of a multi-drone system that will be controlled from a command and control station, in which an expert pilot can supervise the operations of the multiple drones. The third part of the project will focus on reducing the cognitive load on human operators, whether they are novice or expert pilots. For this, we will develop AI tools that will assist drone operators with semi-automated real-time data processing.

This paper focuses on an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted lossy communication system with correlated Rayleigh fading. We analyze the correlated channel model and derive the outage probability of the system. Then, we design a deep reinforce learning (DRL) method to optimize the phase shift of IRS, in order to maximize the received signal power. Moreover, this paper presents results of the simulations conducted to evaluate the performance of the DRL-based method. The simulation results indicate that the outage probability of the considered system increases significantly with more correlated channel coefficients. Moreover, the performance gap between DRL and theoretical limit increases with higher transmit power and/or larger distortion requirement.

Monotonic Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), where the system state progressively decreases until a restorative action is performed, can be used to model sequential repair problems effectively. This paper considers the problem of solving budget-constrained multi-component monotonic POMDPs, where a finite budget limits the maximal number of restorative actions. For a large number of components, solving such a POMDP using current methods is computationally intractable due to the exponential growth in the state space with an increasing number of components. To address this challenge, we propose a two-step approach. Since the individual components of a budget-constrained multi-component monotonic POMDP are only connected via the shared budget, we first approximate the optimal budget allocation among these components using an approximation of each component POMDP's optimal value function which is obtained through a random forest model. Subsequently, we introduce an oracle-guided meta-trained Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to solve each of the independent budget-constrained single-component monotonic POMDPs. The oracle policy is obtained by performing value iteration on the corresponding monotonic Markov Decision Process (MDP). This two-step method provides scalability in solving truly massive multi-component monotonic POMDPs. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we consider a real-world maintenance scenario that involves inspection and repair of an administrative building by a team of agents within a maintenance budget. Finally, we perform a computational complexity analysis for a varying number of components to show the scalability of the proposed approach.

Hyperspectral sensing is a valuable tool for detecting anomalies and distinguishing between materials in a scene. Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HS-AD) helps characterize the captured scenes and separates them into anomaly and background classes. It is vital in agriculture, environment, and military applications such as RSTA (reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition) missions. We previously designed an equal voting ensemble of hyperspectral unmixing and three unsupervised HS-AD algorithms. We later utilized a supervised classifier to determine the weights of a voting ensemble, creating a hybrid of heterogeneous unsupervised HS-AD algorithms with a supervised classifier in a model stacking, which improved detection accuracy. However, supervised classification methods usually fail to detect novel or unknown patterns that substantially deviate from those seen previously. In this work, we evaluate our technique and other supervised and unsupervised methods using general hyperspectral data to provide new insights.

Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes -- 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words -- that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words -- a task that may be practically intractable at scale.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique commonly used to equip models with out of distribution knowledge. This process involves collecting, indexing, retrieving, and providing information to an LLM for generating responses. Despite its growing popularity due to its flexibility and low cost, the security implications of RAG have not been extensively studied. The data for such systems are often collected from public sources, providing an attacker a gateway for indirect prompt injections to manipulate the responses of the model. In this paper, we investigate the security of RAG systems against end-to-end indirect prompt manipulations. First, we review existing RAG framework pipelines, deriving a prototypical architecture and identifying critical parameters. We then examine prior works searching for techniques that attackers can use to perform indirect prompt manipulations. Finally, we implemented Rag 'n Roll, a framework to determine the effectiveness of attacks against end-to-end RAG applications. Our results show that existing attacks are mostly optimized to boost the ranking of malicious documents during the retrieval phase. However, a higher rank does not immediately translate into a reliable attack. Most attacks, against various configurations, settle around a 40% success rate, which could rise to 60% when considering ambiguous answers as successful attacks (those that include the expected benign one as well). Additionally, when using unoptimized documents, attackers deploying two of them (or more) for a target query can achieve similar results as those using optimized ones. Finally, exploration of the configuration space of a RAG showed limited impact in thwarting the attacks, where the most successful combination severely undermines functionality.

The unwavering success of deep learning in the past decade led to the increasing prevalence of deep learning methods in various application fields. However, the downsides of deep learning, most prominently its lack of trustworthiness, may not be compatible with safety-critical or high-responsibility applications requiring stricter performance guarantees. Recently, several instances of deep learning applications have been shown to be subject to theoretical limitations of computability, undermining the feasibility of performance guarantees when employed on real-world computers. We extend the findings by studying computability in the deep learning framework from two perspectives: From an application viewpoint in the context of classification problems and a general limitation viewpoint in the context of training neural networks. In particular, we show restrictions on the algorithmic solvability of classification problems that also render the algorithmic detection of failure in computations in a general setting infeasible. Subsequently, we prove algorithmic limitations in training deep neural networks even in cases where the underlying problem is well-behaved. Finally, we end with a positive observation, showing that in quantized versions of classification and deep network training, computability restrictions do not arise or can be overcome to a certain degree.

This research addresses the issue of missing structured data in dental records by extracting diagnostic information from unstructured text. The updated periodontology classification system's complexity has increased incomplete or missing structured diagnoses. To tackle this, we use advanced AI and NLP methods, leveraging GPT-4 to generate synthetic notes for fine-tuning a RoBERTa model. This significantly enhances the model's ability to understand medical and dental language. We evaluated the model using 120 randomly selected clinical notes from two datasets, demonstrating its improved diagnostic extraction accuracy. The results showed high accuracy in diagnosing periodontal status, stage, and grade, with Site 1 scoring 0.99 and Site 2 scoring 0.98. In the subtype category, Site 2 achieved perfect scores, outperforming Site 1. This method enhances extraction accuracy and broadens its use across dental contexts. The study underscores AI and NLP's transformative impact on healthcare delivery and management. Integrating AI and NLP technologies enhances documentation and simplifies administrative tasks by precisely extracting complex clinical information. This approach effectively addresses challenges in dental diagnostics. Using synthetic training data from LLMs optimizes the training process, improving accuracy and efficiency in identifying periodontal diagnoses from clinical notes. This innovative method holds promise for broader healthcare applications, potentially improving patient care quality.