One person has been killed and others wounded in a Ukrainian drone attack on a ferry at port in southern Russia, the regional governor has said. Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev said the ferry had caught fire at Port Kavkaz but there was no risk of it spreading. The port lies a few kilometres from the Kerch bridge, which enables road and rail travel between Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014. "Unfortunately there are injured and dead among the crew and port staff," Mr Kondratyev said. He added that emergency services were on the scene.

Russia downed 25 Ukrainian drones overnight, the Ministry of Defence in Moscow said on Tuesday. At least 21 UAVs were "intercepted and destroyed" in Crimea, two over the Bryansk region, and another two over the Belgorod region. Russia also said that it shot down 85 Ukrainian drones the previous day, including 47 in the region of Rostov. Authorities in the Russian Black Sea town of Tuapse in the Krasnodar region said that debris from one downed drone sparked a fire at an oil refinery and killed one person. Russia has announced that starting Tuesday, it will restrict entry to 14 areas in Belgorod, which have been subject to heavy attacks.

The European AI Act is a new, legally binding instrument that will enforce certain requirements on the development and use of AI technology potentially affecting people in Europe. It can be expected that the stipulations of the Act, in turn, are going to affect the work of many software engineers, software testers, data engineers, and other professionals across the IT sector in Europe and beyond. The 113 articles, 180 recitals, and 13 annexes that make up the Act cover 144 pages. This paper aims at providing an aid for navigating the Act from the perspective of some professional in the software domain, termed "the working programmer", who feels the need to know about the stipulations of the Act.

The risk of harmful content generated by large language models (LLMs) becomes a critical concern. This paper presents a systematic study on assessing and improving LLMs' capability to perform the task of \textbf{course-correction}, \ie, the model can steer away from generating harmful content autonomously. To start with, we introduce the \textsc{C$^2$-Eval} benchmark for quantitative assessment and analyze 10 popular LLMs, revealing varying proficiency of current safety-tuned LLMs in course-correction. To improve, we propose fine-tuning LLMs with preference learning, emphasizing the preference for timely course-correction. Using an automated pipeline, we create \textsc{C$^2$-Syn}, a synthetic dataset with 750K pairwise preferences, to teach models the concept of timely course-correction through data-driven preference learning. Experiments on 2 LLMs, \textsc{Llama2-Chat 7B} and \textsc{Qwen2 7B}, show that our method effectively enhances course-correction skills without affecting general performance. Additionally, it effectively improves LLMs' safety, particularly in resisting jailbreak attacks.

The vast majority of materials science knowledge exists in unstructured natural language, yet structured data is crucial for innovative and systematic materials design. Traditionally, the field has relied on manual curation and partial automation for data extraction for specific use cases. The advent of large language models (LLMs) represents a significant shift, potentially enabling efficient extraction of structured, actionable data from unstructured text by non-experts. While applying LLMs to materials science data extraction presents unique challenges, domain knowledge offers opportunities to guide and validate LLM outputs. This review provides a comprehensive overview of LLM-based structured data extraction in materials science, synthesizing current knowledge and outlining future directions. We address the lack of standardized guidelines and present frameworks for leveraging the synergy between LLMs and materials science expertise. This work serves as a foundational resource for researchers aiming to harness LLMs for data-driven materials research. The insights presented here could significantly enhance how researchers across disciplines access and utilize scientific information, potentially accelerating the development of novel materials for critical societal needs.

Vision-language artificial intelligence models (VLMs) possess medical knowledge and can be employed in healthcare in numerous ways, including as image interpreters, virtual scribes, and general decision support systems. However, here, we demonstrate that current VLMs applied to medical tasks exhibit a fundamental security flaw: they can be attacked by prompt injection attacks, which can be used to output harmful information just by interacting with the VLM, without any access to its parameters. We performed a quantitative study to evaluate the vulnerabilities to these attacks in four state of the art VLMs which have been proposed to be of utility in healthcare: Claude 3 Opus, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Reka Core, and GPT-4o. Using a set of N=297 attacks, we show that all of these models are susceptible. Specifically, we show that embedding sub-visual prompts in medical imaging data can cause the model to provide harmful output, and that these prompts are non-obvious to human observers. Thus, our study demonstrates a key vulnerability in medical VLMs which should be mitigated before widespread clinical adoption.

Text style transfer (TST) is an important task in controllable text generation, which aims to control selected attributes of language use, such as politeness, formality, or sentiment, without altering the style-independent content of the text. The field has received considerable research attention in recent years and has already been covered in several reviews, but the focus has mostly been on the development of new algorithms and learning from different types of data (supervised, unsupervised, out-of-domain, etc.) and not so much on the application side. However, TST-related technologies are gradually reaching a production- and deployment-ready level, and therefore, the inclusion of the application perspective in TST research becomes crucial. Similarly, the often overlooked ethical considerations of TST technology have become a pressing issue. This paper presents a comprehensive review of TST applications that have been researched over the years, using both traditional linguistic approaches and more recent deep learning methods. We discuss current challenges, future research directions, and ethical implications of TST applications in text generation. By providing a holistic overview of the landscape of TST applications, we hope to stimulate further research and contribute to a better understanding of the potential as well as ethical considerations associated with TST.

Despite the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs), their training recipes -- model architecture, pre-training data and optimization algorithm -- are often very similar. This naturally raises the question of the similarity among the resulting models. In this paper, we propose a novel setting, imaginary question answering (IQA), to better understand model similarity. In IQA, we ask one model to generate purely imaginary questions (e.g., on completely made-up concepts in physics) and prompt another model to answer. Surprisingly, despite the total fictionality of these questions, all models can answer each other's questions with remarkable success, suggesting a "shared imagination space" in which these models operate during such hallucinations. We conduct a series of investigations into this phenomenon and discuss implications on model homogeneity, hallucination, and computational creativity.

We present ALT (ALignment with Textual feedback), an approach that aligns language models with user preferences expressed in text. We argue that text offers greater expressiveness, enabling users to provide richer feedback than simple comparative preferences and this richer feedback can lead to more efficient and effective alignment. ALT aligns the model by conditioning its generation on the textual feedback. Our method relies solely on language modeling techniques and requires minimal hyper-parameter tuning, though it still presents the main benefits of RL-based alignment algorithms and can effectively learn from textual feedback. We explore the efficacy and efficiency of textual feedback across different tasks such as toxicity reduction, summarization, and dialog response generation. We find that ALT outperforms PPO for the task of toxicity reduction while being able to match its performance on summarization with only 20% of the samples. We also explore how ALT can be used with feedback provided by an existing LLM where we explore an LLM providing constrained and unconstrained textual feedback. We also outline future directions to align models with natural language feedback.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide agile and safe solutions to communication relay networks, offering improved throughput. However, their modeling and control present challenges, and real-world deployment is hindered by the gap between simulation and reality. Moreover, enhancing situational awareness is critical. Several works in the literature proposed integrating UAV operation with immersive digital technologies, such as Digital Twin (DT) and Extended Reality (XR), to address these challenges. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of current research and developments involving immersive digital technologies for UAVs, including the latest advancements and emerging trends. We also explore the integration of DT and XR with Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms to create more intelligent, adaptive, and responsive UAV systems. Finally, we provide discussions, identify gaps in current research, and suggest future directions for studying the application of immersive technologies in UAVs, fostering further innovation and development in this field. We envision the fusion of DTs with XR will transform how UAVs operate, offering tools that enhance visualization, improve decision-making, and enable effective collaboration.