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Reports of the Workshops Held at the 2024 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Interactive AI Magazine

Moreover, the program committee comprised researchers from 12 countries across five continents. The workshop featured six keynote speakers, oral sessions, poster sessions, a panel discussion, and a networking lunch. Of the 20 submitted papers, six were selected for oral and poster presentation, and an additional nine were selected for poster presentation only. The acceptance rate was, therefore, 75%. All accepted papers are published in the open-access workshop's proceedings at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3649/.


The Download: Nick Clegg on electoral misinformation, and AI's carbon footprint

MIT Technology Review

Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company's president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday. "The interesting thing so far--I stress, so far--is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is]," said Clegg during an interview at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As voters will head to polls this year in more than 50 countries, experts have raised the alarm over AI-generated political disinformation and the prospect that malicious actors will use generative AI and social media to interfere with elections. And even well-resourced tech giants like Meta are struggling to keep up. How generative AI is boosting the spread of disinformation and propaganda.


Colorado the First State to Move Ahead With Attempt to Regulate AI's Role in American Life

TIME - Tech

The first attempts to regulate artificial intelligence programs that play a hidden role in hiring, housing and medical decisions for millions of Americans are facing pressure from all sides and floundering in statehouses nationwide. Only one of seven bills aimed at preventing AI's penchant to discriminate when making consequential decisions -- including who gets hired, money for a home or medical care -- has passed. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis hesitantly signed the bill on Friday. Colorado's bill and those that faltered in Washington, Connecticut and elsewhere faced battles on many fronts, including between civil rights groups and the tech industry, and lawmakers wary of wading into a technology few yet understand and governors worried about being the odd-state-out and spooking AI startups. Polis signed Colorado's bill "with reservations," saying in an statement he was wary of regulations dousing AI innovation.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 818

Al Jazeera

At least seven people were hurt after a Russian attack on the northeastern town of Chuhuiv in the Kharkiv region with S-400 missiles. The attack damaged a kindergarten building and a private home, according to the regional police. Russian drones struck energy facilities in Ukraine cutting power to more than 500,000 people in the northern Sumy region, according to regional authorities. The attacks targeted the cities of Shostka and Konotop, northeast of Kyiv and near the Russian border.


Seven hours in Geneva hotel highlight U.S.-China struggle on AI

The Japan Times

For seven hours at a Geneva hotel earlier this month, top U.S. and Chinese officials locked into talks on collectively managing their biggest fears around artificial intelligence -- while keeping up a cutthroat competition to dominate technology that promises to reshape the global economy. Their meeting marked the first government discussions on AI between the U.S. and China, with roughly nine officials from each side stressing a shared desire to prevent nightmare scenarios like a computer-triggered nuclear war. One ironic deviation from the script: The coffee machine at the venue broke as they discussed far more advanced technology.


Impact of Non-Standard Unicode Characters on Security and Comprehension in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The advancement of large language models has significantly improved natural language processing. However, challenges such as jailbreaks (prompt injections that cause an LLM to follow instructions contrary to its intended use), hallucinations (generating incorrect or misleading information), and comprehension errors remain prevalent. In this report, we present a comparative analysis of the performance of fifteen distinct models, with each model undergoing a standardized test comprising 38 queries across three key metrics: jailbreaks, hallucinations, and comprehension errors. The models are assessed based on the total occurrences of jailbreaks, hallucinations, and comprehension errors. Our work exposes these models' inherent vulnerabilities and challenges the notion of human-level language comprehension of these models. We have empirically analysed the impact of non-standard Unicode characters on LLMs and their safeguarding mechanisms on the best-performing LLMs, including GPT-4, Gemini 1.5 Pro, LlaMA-3-70B, and Claude 3 Opus. By incorporating alphanumeric symbols from Unicode outside the standard Latin block and variants of characters in other languages, we observed a reduction in the efficacy of guardrails implemented through Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback (RLHF). Consequently, these models exhibit heightened vulnerability to content policy breaches and prompt leakage. Our study also suggests a need to incorporate non-standard Unicode text in LLM training data to enhance the capabilities of these models.


ReachBot Field Tests in a Mojave Desert Lava Tube as a Martian Analog

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

ReachBot is a robot concept for the planetary exploration of caves and lava tubes, which are often inaccessible with traditional robot locomotion methods. It uses extendable booms as appendages, with grippers mounted at the end, to grasp irregular rock surfaces and traverse these difficult terrains. We have built a partial ReachBot prototype consisting of a single boom and gripper, mounted on a tripod. We present the details on the design and field test of this partial ReachBot prototype in a lava tube in the Mojave Desert. The technical requirements of the field testing, implementation details, and grasp performance results are discussed. The planning and preparation of the field test and lessons learned are also given.


The Dual Imperative: Innovation and Regulation in the AI Era

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article addresses the societal costs associated with the lack of regulation in Artificial Intelligence and proposes a framework combining innovation and regulation. Over fifty years of AI research, catalyzed by declining computing costs and the proliferation of data, have propelled AI into the mainstream, promising significant economic benefits. Yet, this rapid adoption underscores risks, from bias amplification and labor disruptions to existential threats posed by autonomous systems. The discourse is polarized between "accelerationists," advocating for unfettered technological advancement, and "doomers," calling for a slowdown to prevent dystopian outcomes. This piece advocates for a middle path that leverages technical innovation and smart regulation to maximize AI's potential benefits while minimizing its risks, offering a pragmatic approach to the responsible progress of AI technology. Technical invention beyond today's most capable foundation models is needed to contain catastrophic risks. Regulation is required to create incentives for this research while addressing current issues.


MoGU: A Framework for Enhancing Safety of Open-Sourced LLMs While Preserving Their Usability

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in various applications. As their usage grows, concerns regarding their safety are rising, especially in maintaining harmless responses when faced with malicious instructions. Many defense strategies have been developed to enhance the safety of LLMs. However, our research finds that existing defense strategies lead LLMs to predominantly adopt a rejection-oriented stance, thereby diminishing the usability of their responses to benign instructions. To solve this problem, we introduce the MoGU framework, designed to enhance LLMs' safety while preserving their usability. Our MoGU framework transforms the base LLM into two variants: the usable LLM and the safe LLM, and further employs dynamic routing to balance their contribution. When encountering malicious instructions, the router will assign a higher weight to the safe LLM to ensure that responses are harmless. Conversely, for benign instructions, the router prioritizes the usable LLM, facilitating usable and helpful responses. On various open-sourced LLMs, we compare multiple defense strategies to verify the superiority of our MoGU framework. Besides, our analysis provides key insights into the effectiveness of MoGU and verifies that our designed routing mechanism can effectively balance the contribution of each variant by assigning weights. Our work released the safer Llama2, Vicuna, Falcon, Dolphin, and Baichuan2.


HippoRAG: Neurobiologically Inspired Long-Term Memory for Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In order to thrive in hostile and ever-changing natural environments, mammalian brains evolved to store large amounts of knowledge about the world and continually integrate new information while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Despite the impressive accomplishments, large language models (LLMs), even with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), still struggle to efficiently and effectively integrate a large amount of new experiences after pre-training. In this work, we introduce HippoRAG, a novel retrieval framework inspired by the hippocampal indexing theory of human long-term memory to enable deeper and more efficient knowledge integration over new experiences. HippoRAG synergistically orchestrates LLMs, knowledge graphs, and the Personalized PageRank algorithm to mimic the different roles of neocortex and hippocampus in human memory. We compare HippoRAG with existing RAG methods on multi-hop question answering and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods remarkably, by up to 20%. Single-step retrieval with HippoRAG achieves comparable or better performance than iterative retrieval like IRCoT while being 10-30 times cheaper and 6-13 times faster, and integrating HippoRAG into IRCoT brings further substantial gains. Finally, we show that our method can tackle new types of scenarios that are out of reach of existing methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/HippoRAG.