Government
CDC investigating fake Botox injections: 'Serious and sometimes fatal'
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Fake Botox is on the CDC's radar. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced on Friday that it is investigating reports of "a few botulism-like illnesses in several states resulting from botulinum toxin injections (commonly called'Botox') administered in non-medical settings," the agency said in a statement. "We are coordinating a multi-state outbreak investigation," the agency added.
Inside Israel's Bombing Campaign in Gaza
Since the war began in Gaza, more than six months ago, the Israeli magazine 972 has published some of the most penetrating reporting on the Israel Defense Forces' conduct. In November, 972, along with the Hebrew publication Local Call, found that the I.D.F. had expanded the number of "legitimate" military targets, leading to a huge increase in civilian casualties. Then earlier this month, 972 and Local Call released a long feature called "Lavender: The AI Machine Directing Israel's Bombing Spree in Gaza." The story revealed how the Israeli military had used the program to identify suspected militants, which in practice meant that tens of thousands of Palestinians had their homes marked as legitimate targets for bombing, with minimal human oversight. The I.D.F. also said that, according to its rules, "analysts must conduct independent examinations" to verify the identification of targets.
Russia destroys one of Ukraine's largest power plants, damaging energy infrastructure
Video captures the moment and aftermath of what appears to be a drone, allegedly of Ukrainian origin, striking Russian drone production facility. Russian officials claimed that only a worker's dormitory was hit. A massive missile and drone attack destroyed one of Ukraine's largest power plants and damaged others, officials said Thursday, part of a renewed Russian campaign targeting energy infrastructure. The Trypilska plant, which was the biggest energy supplier for the Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions, was struck numerous times, destroying the transformer, turbines and generators and leaving the plant ablaze. As the first drone approached, workers hid in a shelter, saving their lives, said Andrii Gota, chairman of the supervisory board of the state company that runs the plant, Centrenergo.
LLMSat: A Large Language Model-Based Goal-Oriented Agent for Autonomous Space Exploration
As spacecraft journey further from Earth with more complex missions, systems of greater autonomy and onboard intelligence are called for. Reducing reliance on human-based mission control becomes increasingly critical if we are to increase our rate of solar-system-wide exploration. Recent work has explored AI-based goal-oriented systems to increase the level of autonomy in mission execution. These systems make use of symbolic reasoning managers to make inferences from the state of a spacecraft and a handcrafted knowledge base, enabling autonomous generation of tasks and re-planning. Such systems have proven to be successful in controlled cases, but they are difficult to implement as they require human-crafted ontological models to allow the spacecraft to understand the world. Reinforcement learning has been applied to train robotic agents to pursue a goal. A new architecture for autonomy is called for. This work explores the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) as the high-level control system of a spacecraft. Using a systems engineering approach, this work presents the design and development of an agentic spacecraft controller by leveraging an LLM as a reasoning engine, to evaluate the utility of such an architecture in achieving higher levels of spacecraft autonomy. A series of deep space mission scenarios simulated within the popular game engine Kerbal Space Program (KSP) are used as case studies to evaluate the implementation against the requirements. It is shown the reasoning and planning abilities of present-day LLMs do not scale well as the complexity of a mission increases, but this can be alleviated with adequate prompting frameworks and strategic selection of the agent's level of authority over the host spacecraft. This research evaluates the potential of LLMs in augmenting autonomous decision-making systems for future robotic space applications.
Evaluating the Quality of Answers in Political Q&A Sessions with Large Language Models
Alvarez, R. Michael, Morrier, Jacob
This paper presents a new approach to evaluating the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We propose to measure an answer's quality based on the degree to which it allows us to infer the initial question accurately. This conception of answer quality inherently reflects their relevance to initial questions. Drawing parallels with semantic search, we argue that this measurement approach can be operationalized by fine-tuning a large language model on the observed corpus of questions and answers without additional labeled data. We showcase our measurement approach within the context of the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our approach yields valuable insights into the correlates of the quality of answers in the Question Period. We find that answer quality varies significantly based on the party affiliation of the members of Parliament asking the questions and uncover a meaningful correlation between answer quality and the topics of the questions.
Enhancing Fairness and Performance in Machine Learning Models: A Multi-Task Learning Approach with Monte-Carlo Dropout and Pareto Optimality
The term bias was first introduced in the machine learning domain by Tom Mitchell in his 1980 paper titled "The need for biases in learning generalizations" Mitchell [1980]. The concept of bias refers to giving importance to particular features to improve generalization. This general idea of bias in machine learning is positive and necessary for models to perform, eliminating the risk of hyper-focusing on specific samples over others. On the contrary, bias can also be negative in machine learning. Negative bias can be defined as an inaccurate assumption made by a machine learning algorithm that is systematically or historically prejudiced against certain groups of people Zanna et al. [2022]. Decisions made by these biased algorithms could cause adverse effects on particular social groups, for example, those defined by sex, race, age, marital status, handicaps, etc., when used to make autonomous decisions in life-changing cases such as health, hiring, education, criminal sentencing, etc. Negative bias can be introduced into the machine pipeline in two main ways, through the data or the algorithm itself Blanzeisky and Cunningham [2021]. Bias due to data, also known as a negative legacy Cunningham and Delany [2021], Kamishima et al. [2012], can be caused by an imbalance in the representation of different population categories
The Path To Autonomous Cyber Defense
Oesch, Sean, Austria, Phillipe, Chaulagain, Amul, Weber, Brian, Watson, Cory, Dixson, Matthew, Sadovnik, Amir
Abstract---Defenders are overwhelmed by the number and scale of attacks against their networks.This problem will only be exacerbated as attackers leverage artificial intelligence to automate their workflows. We propose a path to autonomous cyber agents able to augment defenders by automating critical steps in the cyber defense life cycle. To avoid being overwhelmed, and complexity. The deep neural nets in order to generalize well across creation of autonomous cyber defense agents is one states. By leveraging deep RL, DeepMind has trained promising approach to automate operations and prevent reinforcement learning algorithms to defeat expert human cyber defenders from being overwhelmed.
Multimodal Attack Detection for Action Recognition Models
Adversarial machine learning attacks on video action recognition models is a growing research area and many effective attacks were introduced in recent years. These attacks show that action recognition models can be breached in many ways. Hence using these models in practice raises significant security concerns. However, there are very few works which focus on defending against or detecting attacks. In this work, we propose a novel universal detection method which is compatible with any action recognition model. In our extensive experiments, we show that our method consistently detects various attacks against different target models with high true positive rates while satisfying very low false positive rates. Tested against four state-of-the-art attacks targeting four action recognition models, the proposed detector achieves an average AUC of 0.911 over 16 test cases while the best performance achieved by the existing detectors is 0.645 average AUC. This 41.2% improvement is enabled by the robustness of the proposed detector to varying attack methods and target models. The lowest AUC achieved by our detector across the 16 test cases is 0.837 while the competing detector's performance drops as low as 0.211. We also show that the proposed detector is robust to varying attack strengths. In addition, we analyze our method's real-time performance with different hardware setups to demonstrate its potential as a practical defense mechanism.
AdapterSwap: Continuous Training of LLMs with Data Removal and Access-Control Guarantees
Fleshman, William, Khan, Aleem, Marone, Marc, Van Durme, Benjamin
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of completing knowledge intensive tasks by recalling information from a static pretraining corpus. Here we are concerned with LLMs in the context of evolving data requirements. For instance: batches of new data that are introduced periodically; subsets of data with user-based access controls; or requirements on dynamic removal of documents with guarantees that associated knowledge cannot be recalled. We wish to satisfy these requirements while at the same time ensuring a model does not forget old information when new data becomes available. To address these issues, we introduce AdapterSwap, a training and inference scheme that organizes knowledge from a data collection into a set of low-rank adapters, which are dynamically composed during inference. Our experiments demonstrate AdapterSwap's ability to support efficient continual learning, while also enabling organizations to have fine-grained control over data access and deletion.