Government
Biden hands China big win with military deal, experts say: 'Incredibly poor decision'
House Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on the Department of Defense using artifical intelligence. President Biden is set to strike a deal with China that would limit the use of artifical intelligence in nuclear weapons. Biden is to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco, where the two leaders are expected to also sign an agreement to limit AI's use in military applications, according to a report from Business Insider. According to the report, Biden and Xi will agree to limit AI use in the systems that control and deploy nuclear weapons as well as the technology's use in autonomous weapon systems such as drones. US MILITARY NEEDS AI VEHICLES, WEAPON SYSTEMS TO BE'SUPERIOR' GLOBAL FORCE: EXPERTS President Biden shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping as they meet on the sidelines of the G20 leaders summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Nov. 14, 2022.
Artificial Intelligence for Science in Quantum, Atomistic, and Continuum Systems
Zhang, Xuan, Wang, Limei, Helwig, Jacob, Luo, Youzhi, Fu, Cong, Xie, Yaochen, Liu, Meng, Lin, Yuchao, Xu, Zhao, Yan, Keqiang, Adams, Keir, Weiler, Maurice, Li, Xiner, Fu, Tianfan, Wang, Yucheng, Yu, Haiyang, Xie, YuQing, Fu, Xiang, Strasser, Alex, Xu, Shenglong, Liu, Yi, Du, Yuanqi, Saxton, Alexandra, Ling, Hongyi, Lawrence, Hannah, Stärk, Hannes, Gui, Shurui, Edwards, Carl, Gao, Nicholas, Ladera, Adriana, Wu, Tailin, Hofgard, Elyssa F., Tehrani, Aria Mansouri, Wang, Rui, Daigavane, Ameya, Bohde, Montgomery, Kurtin, Jerry, Huang, Qian, Phung, Tuong, Xu, Minkai, Joshi, Chaitanya K., Mathis, Simon V., Azizzadenesheli, Kamyar, Fang, Ada, Aspuru-Guzik, Alán, Bekkers, Erik, Bronstein, Michael, Zitnik, Marinka, Anandkumar, Anima, Ermon, Stefano, Liò, Pietro, Yu, Rose, Günnemann, Stephan, Leskovec, Jure, Ji, Heng, Sun, Jimeng, Barzilay, Regina, Jaakkola, Tommi, Coley, Connor W., Qian, Xiaoning, Qian, Xiaofeng, Smidt, Tess, Ji, Shuiwang
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are fueling a new paradigm of discoveries in natural sciences. Today, AI has started to advance natural sciences by improving, accelerating, and enabling our understanding of natural phenomena at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, giving rise to a new area of research known as AI for science (AI4Science). Being an emerging research paradigm, AI4Science is unique in that it is an enormous and highly interdisciplinary area. Thus, a unified and technical treatment of this field is needed yet challenging. This work aims to provide a technically thorough account of a subarea of AI4Science; namely, AI for quantum, atomistic, and continuum systems. These areas aim at understanding the physical world from the subatomic (wavefunctions and electron density), atomic (molecules, proteins, materials, and interactions), to macro (fluids, climate, and subsurface) scales and form an important subarea of AI4Science. A unique advantage of focusing on these areas is that they largely share a common set of challenges, thereby allowing a unified and foundational treatment. A key common challenge is how to capture physics first principles, especially symmetries, in natural systems by deep learning methods. We provide an in-depth yet intuitive account of techniques to achieve equivariance to symmetry transformations. We also discuss other common technical challenges, including explainability, out-of-distribution generalization, knowledge transfer with foundation and large language models, and uncertainty quantification. To facilitate learning and education, we provide categorized lists of resources that we found to be useful. We strive to be thorough and unified and hope this initial effort may trigger more community interests and efforts to further advance AI4Science.
A novel concept for Titan robotic exploration based on soft morphing aerial robots
Ruiz, Fernando, Arrue, Begona, Ollero, Anibal
This work introduces a novel approach for Titan exploration based on soft morphing aerial robots leveraging the use of flexible adaptive materials. The controlled deformation of the multirotor arms, actuated by a combination of a pneumatic system and a tendon mechanism, provides the explorer robot with the ability to perform full-body perching and land on rocky, irregular, or uneven terrains, thus unlocking new exploration horizons. In addition, after landing, they can be used for efficient sampling as tendon-driven continuum manipulators, with the pneumatic system drawing in the samples. The proposed arms enable the drone to cover long distances in Titan's atmosphere efficiently, by directing rotor thrust without rotating the body, reducing the aerodynamic drag. Given that the exploration concept is envisioned as a rotorcraft planetary lander, the robot's folding features enable over a 30$\%$ reduction in the hypersonic aeroshell's diameter. Building on this folding capability, the arms can morph partially in flight to navigate tight spaces. As for propulsion, the rotor design, justified through CFD simulations, utilizes a ducted fan configuration tailored for Titan's high Reynolds numbers. The rotors are integrated within the robot's deformable materials, facilitating smooth interactions with the environment. The research spotlights exploration simulations in the Gazebo environment, focusing on the Sotra-Patera cryovolcano region, a location with potential to clarify Titan's unique methane cycle and its Earth-like features. This work addresses one of the primary challenges of the concept by testing the behavior of small-scale deformable arms under conditions mimicking those of Titan. Groundbreaking experiments with liquid nitrogen at cryogenic temperatures were conducted on various materials, with Teflon (PTFE) at low infill rates (15-30%) emerging as a promising option.
How Well Do Large Language Models Truly Ground?
Lee, Hyunji, Joo, Sejune, Kim, Chaeeun, Jang, Joel, Kim, Doyoung, On, Kyoung-Woon, Seo, Minjoon
Reliance on the inherent knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) can cause issues such as hallucinations, lack of control, and difficulties in integrating variable knowledge. To mitigate this, LLMs can be probed to generate responses by grounding on external context, often given as input (knowledge-augmented models). Yet, previous research is often confined to a narrow view of the term "grounding", often only focusing on whether the response contains the correct answer or not, which does not ensure the reliability of the entire response. To address this limitation, we introduce a strict definition of grounding: a model is considered truly grounded when its responses (1) fully utilize necessary knowledge from the provided context, and (2) don't exceed the knowledge within the contexts. We introduce a new dataset and a grounding metric to assess this new definition and perform experiments across 13 LLMs of different sizes and training methods to provide insights into the factors that influence grounding performance. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of how to improve grounding capabilities and suggest an area of improvement toward more reliable and controllable LLM applications.
Token Prediction as Implicit Classification to Identify LLM-Generated Text
Chen, Yutian, Kang, Hao, Zhai, Vivian, Li, Liangze, Singh, Rita, Raj, Bhiksha
This paper introduces a novel approach for identifying the possible large language models (LLMs) involved in text generation. Instead of adding an additional classification layer to a base LM, we reframe the classification task as a next-token prediction task and directly fine-tune the base LM to perform it. We utilize the Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model as the backbone for our experiments. We compared our approach to the more direct approach of utilizing hidden states for classification. Evaluation shows the exceptional performance of our method in the text classification task, highlighting its simplicity and efficiency. Furthermore, interpretability studies on the features extracted by our model reveal its ability to differentiate distinctive writing styles among various LLMs even in the absence of an explicit classifier. We also collected a dataset named OpenLLMText, containing approximately 340k text samples from human and LLMs, including GPT3.5, PaLM, LLaMA, and GPT2.
Towards Publicly Accountable Frontier LLMs: Building an External Scrutiny Ecosystem under the ASPIRE Framework
Anderljung, Markus, Smith, Everett Thornton, O'Brien, Joe, Soder, Lisa, Bucknall, Benjamin, Bluemke, Emma, Schuett, Jonas, Trager, Robert, Strahm, Lacey, Chowdhury, Rumman
With the increasing integration of frontier large language models (LLMs) into society and the economy, decisions related to their training, deployment, and use have far-reaching implications. These decisions should not be left solely in the hands of frontier LLM developers. LLM users, civil society and policymakers need trustworthy sources of information to steer such decisions for the better. Involving outside actors in the evaluation of these systems - what we term "external scrutiny" - via red-teaming, auditing, and external researcher access, offers a solution. Though there are encouraging signs of increasing external scrutiny of frontier LLMs, its success is not assured. In this paper, we survey six requirements for effective external scrutiny of frontier AI systems and organize them under the ASPIRE framework: Access, Searching attitude, Proportionality to the risks, Independence, Resources, and Expertise. We then illustrate how external scrutiny might function throughout the AI lifecycle and offer recommendations to policymakers.
Memory Augmented Language Models through Mixture of Word Experts
Santos, Cicero Nogueira dos, Lee-Thorp, James, Noble, Isaac, Chang, Chung-Ching, Uthus, David
Scaling up the number of parameters of language models has proven to be an effective approach to improve performance. For dense models, increasing model size proportionally increases the model's computation footprint. In this work, we seek to aggressively decouple learning capacity and FLOPs through Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) style models with large knowledge-rich vocabulary based routing functions and experts. Our proposed approach, dubbed Mixture of Word Experts (MoWE), can be seen as a memory augmented model, where a large set of word-specific experts play the role of a sparse memory. We demonstrate that MoWE performs significantly better than the T5 family of models with similar number of FLOPs in a variety of NLP tasks. Additionally, MoWE outperforms regular MoE models on knowledge intensive tasks and has similar performance to more complex memory augmented approaches that often require to invoke custom mechanisms to search the sparse memory.
Think While You Write: Hypothesis Verification Promotes Faithful Knowledge-to-Text Generation
Qiu, Yifu, Embar, Varun, Cohen, Shay B., Han, Benjamin
Neural knowledge-to-text generation models often struggle to faithfully generate descriptions for the input facts: they may produce hallucinations that contradict the given facts, or describe facts not present in the input. To reduce hallucinations, we propose a novel decoding method, TWEAK (Think While Effectively Articulating Knowledge). TWEAK treats the generated sequences at each decoding step and its future sequences as hypotheses, and ranks each generation candidate based on how well their corresponding hypotheses support the input facts using a Hypothesis Verification Model (HVM). We first demonstrate the effectiveness of TWEAK by using a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model as the HVM and report improved faithfulness with minimal impact on the quality. We then replace the NLI model with our task-specific HVM trained with a first-of-a-kind dataset, FATE (Fact-Aligned Textual Entailment), which pairs input facts with their faithful and hallucinated descriptions with the hallucinated spans marked. The new HVM improves the faithfulness and the quality further and runs faster. Overall the best TWEAK variants improve on average 2.22/7.17 points on faithfulness measured by FactKB over WebNLG and TekGen/GenWiki, respectively, with only 0.14/0.32 points degradation on quality measured by BERTScore over the same datasets. Since TWEAK is a decoding-only approach, it can be integrated with any neural generative model without retraining.
Lexical Repetitions Lead to Rote Learning: Unveiling the Impact of Lexical Overlap in Train and Test Reference Summaries
Choubey, Prafulla Kumar, Fabbri, Alexander R., Xiong, Caiming, Wu, Chien-Sheng
Ideal summarization models should generalize to novel summary-worthy content without remembering reference training summaries by rote. However, a single average performance score on the entire test set is inadequate in determining such model competencies. We propose a fine-grained evaluation protocol by partitioning a test set based on the lexical similarity of reference test summaries with training summaries. We observe up to a 5x (1.2x) difference in ROUGE-2 (entity recall) scores between the subsets with the lowest and highest similarity. Next, we show that such training repetitions also make a model vulnerable to rote learning, reproducing data artifacts such as factual errors, especially when reference test summaries are lexically close to training summaries. Consequently, we propose to limit lexical repetitions in training summaries during both supervised fine-tuning and likelihood calibration stages to improve the performance on novel test cases while retaining average performance. Our automatic and human evaluations on novel test subsets and recent news articles show that limiting lexical repetitions in training summaries can prevent rote learning and improve generalization.
HAL 9000: Skynet's Risk Manager
Freitas, Tadeu, Neto, Mário, Dutra, Inês, Soares, João, Correia, Manuel, Martins, Rolando
Intrusion Tolerant Systems (ITSs) are a necessary component for cyber-services/infrastructures. Additionally, as cyberattacks follow a multi-domain attack surface, a similar defensive approach should be applied, namely, the use of an evolving multi-disciplinary solution that combines ITS, cybersecurity and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the increased popularity of AI solutions, due to Big Data use-case scenarios and decision support and automation scenarios, new opportunities to apply Machine Learning (ML) algorithms have emerged, namely ITS empowerment. Using ML algorithms, an ITS can augment its intrusion tolerance capability, by learning from previous attacks and from known vulnerabilities. As such, this work's contribution is twofold: (1) an ITS architecture (Skynet) based on the state-of-the-art and incorporates new components to increase its intrusion tolerance capability and its adaptability to new adversaries; (2) an improved Risk Manager design that leverages AI to improve ITSs by automatically assessing OS risks to intrusions, and advise with safer configurations. One of the reasons that intrusions are successful is due to bad configurations or slow adaptability to new threats. This can be caused by the dependency that systems have for human intervention. One of the characteristics in Skynet and HAL 9000 design is the removal of human intervention. Being fully automatized lowers the chance of successful intrusions caused by human error. Our experiments using Skynet, shows that HAL is able to choose 15% safer configurations than the state-of-the-art risk manager.