By the end of 2023, nearly half of all internet traffic was bots, found a study by United States cybersecurity company Imperva. Bad bots reached their highest levels recorded by Imperva, making up 34 percent of internet traffic, while good bots made up the remaining 15 percent. This was partly due to the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) for generating text and images. According to Baydoun, the pro-Israeli bots they found mainly aim to sow doubt and confusion about a pro-Palestinian narrative rather than to make social media users trust them instead. Bot armies - thousands to millions of malicious bots - are used in large-scale disinformation campaigns to sway public opinion.

We propose a new framework for algorithmic stability in the context of multiclass classification. In practice, classification algorithms often operate by first assigning a continuous score (for instance, an estimated probability) to each possible label, then taking the maximizer -- i.e., selecting the class that has the highest score. A drawback of this type of approach is that it is inherently unstable, meaning that it is very sensitive to slight perturbations of the training data, since taking the maximizer is discontinuous. Motivated by this challenge, we propose a pipeline for constructing stable classifiers from data, using bagging (i.e., resampling and averaging) to produce stable continuous scores, and then using a stable relaxation of argmax, which we call the "inflated argmax," to convert these scores to a set of candidate labels. The resulting stability guarantee places no distributional assumptions on the data, does not depend on the number of classes or dimensionality of the covariates, and holds for any base classifier. Using a common benchmark data set, we demonstrate that the inflated argmax provides necessary protection against unstable classifiers, without loss of accuracy.

Public data ecosystems (PDEs) represent complex socio-technical systems crucial for optimizing data use in the public sector and outside it. Recognizing their multifaceted nature, previous research pro-posed a six-generation Evolutionary Model of Public Data Ecosystems (EMPDE). Designed as a result of a systematic literature review on the topic spanning three decade, this model, while theoretically robust, necessitates empirical validation to enhance its practical applicability. This study addresses this gap by validating the theoretical model through a real-life examination in five European countries - Latvia, Serbia, Czech Republic, Spain, and Poland. This empirical validation provides insights into PDEs dynamics and variations of implementations across contexts, particularly focusing on the 6th generation of forward-looking PDE generation named "Intelligent Public Data Generation" that represents a paradigm shift driven by emerging technologies such as cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing tools, Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLM) with potential to contribute to both automation and augmentation of business processes within these ecosystems. By transcending their traditional status as a mere component, evolving into both an actor and a stakeholder simultaneously, these technologies catalyze innovation and progress, enhancing PDE management strategies to align with societal, regulatory, and technical imperatives in the digital era.

Safety and trustworthiness are indispensable requirements for real-world applications of AI systems using large language models (LLMs). This paper formulates human value alignment as an optimization problem of the language model policy to maximize reward under a safety constraint, and then proposes an algorithm, Stepwise Alignment for Constrained Policy Optimization (SACPO). One key idea behind SACPO, supported by theory, is that the optimal policy incorporating reward and safety can be directly obtained from a reward-aligned policy. Building on this key idea, SACPO aligns LLMs step-wise with each metric while leveraging simple yet powerful alignment algorithms such as direct preference optimization (DPO). SACPO offers several advantages, including simplicity, stability, computational efficiency, and flexibility of algorithms and datasets. Under mild assumptions, our theoretical analysis provides the upper bounds on optimality and safety constraint violation. Our experimental results show that SACPO can fine-tune Alpaca-7B better than the state-of-the-art method in terms of both helpfulness and harmlessness.

We generalize active learning to address real-world settings with concrete prediction targets where sampling is restricted to an accessible region of the domain, while prediction targets may lie outside this region. We analyze a family of decision rules that sample adaptively to minimize uncertainty about prediction targets. We are the first to show, under general regularity assumptions, that such decision rules converge uniformly to the smallest possible uncertainty obtainable from the accessible data. We demonstrate their strong sample efficiency in two key applications: Active few-shot fine-tuning of large neural networks and safe Bayesian optimization, where they improve significantly upon the state-of-the-art.

The correct interpretation of breast density is important in the assessment of breast cancer risk. AI has been shown capable of accurately predicting breast density, however, due to the differences in imaging characteristics across mammography systems, models built using data from one system do not generalize well to other systems. Though federated learning (FL) has emerged as a way to improve the generalizability of AI without the need to share data, the best way to preserve features from all training data during FL is an active area of research. To explore FL methodology, the breast density classification FL challenge was hosted in partnership with the American College of Radiology, Harvard Medical School's Mass General Brigham, University of Colorado, NVIDIA, and the National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute. Challenge participants were able to submit docker containers capable of implementing FL on three simulated medical facilities, each containing a unique large mammography dataset. The breast density FL challenge ran from June 15 to September 5, 2022, attracting seven finalists from around the world. The winning FL submission reached a linear kappa score of 0.653 on the challenge test data and 0.413 on an external testing dataset, scoring comparably to a model trained on the same data in a central location.

Reducing wealth inequality and increasing utility are critical issues. This study reveals the effects of redistribution and consumption morals on wealth inequality and utility. To this end, we present a novel approach that couples the dynamic model of capital, consumption, and utility in macroeconomics with the interaction model of joint business and redistribution in econophysics. With this approach, we calculate the capital (wealth), the utility based on consumption, and the Gini index of these inequality using redistribution and consumption thresholds as moral parameters. The results show that: under-redistribution and waste exacerbate inequality; conversely, over-redistribution and stinginess reduce utility; and a balanced moderate moral leads to achieve both reduced inequality and increased utility. These findings provide renewed economic and numerical support for the moral importance known from philosophy, anthropology, and religion. The revival of redistribution and consumption morals should promote the transformation to a human mutual-aid economy, as indicated by philosopher and anthropologist, instead of the capitalist economy that has produced the current inequality. The practical challenge is to implement bottom-up social business, on a foothold of worker coops and platform cooperatives as a community against the state and the market, with moral consensus and its operation.

Modern power grids are undergoing significant changes driven by information and communication technologies (ICTs), and evolving into smart grids with higher efficiency and lower operation cost. Using ICTs, however, comes with an inevitable side effect that makes the power system more vulnerable to cyber attacks. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning-based framework to detect and identify various types of cyber attacks. Different from existing approaches, the proposed framework does not rely on large amounts of well-curated labeled data but makes use of the massive unlabeled data in the wild which are easily accessible. Specifically, the proposed framework adopts the BERT model from the natural language processing domain and learns generalizable and effective representations from the unlabeled sensing data, which capture the distinctive patterns of different attacks. Using the learned representations, together with a very small amount of labeled data, we can train a task-specific classifier to detect various types of cyber attacks. Meanwhile, real-world training datasets are usually imbalanced, i.e., there are only a limited number of data samples containing attacks. In order to cope with such data imbalance, we propose a new loss function, separate mean error (SME), which pays equal attention to the large and small categories to better train the model. Experiment results in a 5-area power grid system with 37 buses demonstrate the superior performance of our framework over existing approaches, especially when a very limited portion of labeled data are available, e.g., as low as 0.002\%. We believe such a framework can be easily adopted to detect a variety of cyber attacks in other power grid scenarios.

Transportation mode share analysis is important to various real-world transportation tasks as it helps researchers understand the travel behaviors and choices of passengers. A typical example is the prediction of communities' travel mode share by accounting for their sociodemographics like age, income, etc., and travel modes' attributes (e.g. travel cost and time). However, there exist only limited efforts in integrating the structure of the urban built environment, e.g., road networks, into the mode share models to capture the impacts of the built environment. This task usually requires manual feature engineering or prior knowledge of the urban design features. In this study, we propose deep hybrid models (DHM), which directly combine road networks and sociodemographic features as inputs for travel mode share analysis. Using graph embedding (GE) techniques, we enhance travel demand models with a more powerful representation of urban structures. In experiments of mode share prediction in Chicago, results demonstrate that DHM can provide valuable spatial insights into the sociodemographic structure, improving the performance of travel demand models in estimating different mode shares at the city level. Specifically, DHM improves the results by more than 20\% while retaining the interpretation power of the choice models, demonstrating its superiority in interpretability, prediction accuracy, and geographical insights.

While large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in various applications, they often struggle with hallucinations, especially in scenarios that require deep and responsible reasoning. These issues could be partially mitigate by integrating external knowledge graphs (KG) in LLM reasoning. However, the method of their incorporation is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-exploration interactive method, FiDelis to handle intermediate steps of reasoning grounded by KGs. Specifically, we propose Path-RAG module for recalling useful intermediate knowledge from KG for LLM reasoning. We incorporate the logic and common-sense reasoning of LLMs and topological connectivity of KGs into the knowledge retrieval process, which provides more accurate recalling performance. Furthermore, we propose to leverage deductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs as a better criterion to automatically guide the reasoning process in a stepwise and generalizable manner. Deductive verification serve as precise indicators for when to cease further reasoning, thus avoiding misleading the chains of reasoning and unnecessary computation. Extensive experiments show that our method, as a training-free method with lower computational cost and better generality outperforms the existing strong baselines in three benchmarks.