Joe Biden wants the US government to make wider use of artificial intelligence--and to keep commercial AI on a tighter leash. Those are two prominent themes of a sprawling executive order Biden will sign today, which issues dozens of directives for federal agencies to complete within the next year, on topics ranging from national security and immigration to housing and health care. Biden will use the Defense Production Act, a law that can compel businesses to take actions in the interest of national security, to require the makers of large AI models to report key information to the government, including when they are training a new model and what cybersecurity protections they have. That will include disclosing results of so-called red teaming exercises, intended to reveal vulnerabilities in AI models, such as those that can be used to evade controls that prevent malicious use cases such as generating malware. The goal is to monitor the potential threats AI technology can pose to national security, public health, and the economy.

Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. The U.S. and European Union have started exploring how to use artificial intelligence to enhance the oncoming 6G communications technology as Western nations look to stave off competition from China and its own 5G offering. "Up to now, governments have always had access to communications, certainly, but now it's more about treating telecommunications as a critical national security resource," Eric Plam, president of wireless data connection service SIMO Inc., told Fox News Digital. "I think that's why you're starting to see… an arms race in telecommunications. "The primary factions are China, and then EU, plus America, too," he added. "There will be other factions, of course, but they understand the importance of controlling information and controlling the flow of data." The U.S. and EU issued a joint ...

This work presents a deep-learning approach to estimate atmospheric density profiles for use in planetary entry guidance problems. A long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is trained to learn the mapping between measurements available onboard an entry vehicle and the density profile through which it is flying. Measurements include the spherical state representation, Cartesian sensed acceleration components, and a surface-pressure measurement. Training data for the network is initially generated by performing a Monte Carlo analysis of an entry mission at Mars using the fully numerical predictor-corrector guidance (FNPEG) algorithm that utilizes an exponential density model, while the truth density profiles are sampled from MarsGRAM. A curriculum learning procedure is developed to refine the LSTM network's predictions for integration within the FNPEG algorithm. The trained LSTM is capable of both predicting the density profile through which the vehicle will fly and reconstructing the density profile through which it has already flown. The performance of the FNPEG algorithm is assessed for three different density estimation techniques: an exponential model, an exponential model augmented with a first-order fading-memory filter, and the LSTM network. Results demonstrate that using the LSTM model results in superior terminal accuracy compared to the other two techniques when considering both noisy and noiseless measurements.

In this work, we address the NER problem by splitting it into two logical sub-tasks: (1) Span Detection which simply extracts entity mention spans irrespective of entity type; (2) Span Classification which classifies the spans into their entity types. Further, we formulate both sub-tasks as question-answering (QA) problems and produce two leaner models which can be optimized separately for each sub-task. Experiments with four cross-domain datasets demonstrate that this two-step approach is both effective and time efficient. Our system, SplitNER outperforms baselines on OntoNotes5.0, WNUT17 and a cybersecurity dataset and gives on-par performance on BioNLP13CG. In all cases, it achieves a significant reduction in training time compared to its QA baseline counterpart. The effectiveness of our system stems from fine-tuning the BERT model twice, separately for span detection and classification. The source code can be found at https://github.com/c3sr/split-ner.

In the current paper, we present the KG-FRUS dataset, comprised of more than 300,000 US government diplomatic documents encoded in a Knowledge Graph (KG). We leverage the data of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) (available as XML files) to extract information about the documents and the individuals and countries mentioned within them. We use the extracted entities, and associated metadata, to create a graph-based dataset. Further, we supplement the created KG with additional entities and relations from Wikidata. The relations in the KG capture the synergies and dynamics required to study and understand the complex fields of diplomacy, foreign relations, and politics. This goes well beyond a simple collection of documents which neglects the relations between entities in the text. We showcase a range of possibilities of the current dataset by illustrating different approaches to probe the KG. In the paper, we exemplify how to use a query language to answer simple research questions and how to use graph algorithms such as Node2Vec and PageRank, that benefit from the complete graph structure. More importantly, the chosen structure provides total flexibility for continuously expanding and enriching the graph. Our solution is general, so the proposed pipeline for building the KG can encode other original corpora of time-dependent and complex phenomena. Overall, we present a mechanism to create KG databases providing a more versatile representation of time-dependent related text data and a particular application to the all-important FRUS database.

Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced the state-of-the-art in NLP significantly, deploying them for downstream applications is still challenging due to cost, responsiveness, control, or concerns around privacy and security. As such, trainable models are still the preferred option in some cases. However, these models still require human-labeled data for optimal performance, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In order to address this issue, several techniques to reduce human effort involve labeling or generating data using LLMs. Although these methods are effective for certain applications, in practice they encounter difficulties in real-world scenarios. Labeling data requires careful data selection, while generating data necessitates task-specific prompt engineering. In this paper, we propose a unified data creation pipeline that requires only a single formatting example, and which is applicable to a broad range of tasks, including traditionally problematic ones with semantically devoid label spaces. In our experiments we demonstrate that instruction-following LLMs are highly cost-effective data creators, and that models trained with these data exhibit performance better than those trained with human-labeled data (by up to 17.5%) on out-of-distribution evaluation, while maintaining comparable performance on in-distribution tasks. These results have important implications for the robustness of NLP systems deployed in the real-world.

This paper proposes a novel contrastive learning framework, called FOCAL, for extracting comprehensive features from multimodal time-series sensing signals through self-supervised training. Existing multimodal contrastive frameworks mostly rely on the shared information between sensory modalities, but do not explicitly consider the exclusive modality information that could be critical to understanding the underlying sensing physics. Besides, contrastive frameworks for time series have not handled the temporal information locality appropriately. FOCAL solves these challenges by making the following contributions: First, given multimodal time series, it encodes each modality into a factorized latent space consisting of shared features and private features that are orthogonal to each other. The shared space emphasizes feature patterns consistent across sensory modalities through a modal-matching objective. In contrast, the private space extracts modality-exclusive information through a transformation-invariant objective. Second, we propose a temporal structural constraint for modality features, such that the average distance between temporally neighboring samples is no larger than that of temporally distant samples. Extensive evaluations are performed on four multimodal sensing datasets with two backbone encoders and two classifiers to demonstrate the superiority of FOCAL. It consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in downstream tasks with a clear margin, under different ratios of available labels. The code and self-collected dataset are available at https://github.com/tomoyoshki/focal.

Machine learning (ML) technologies are known to be riddled with ethical and operational problems, however, we are witnessing an increasing thrust by businesses to deploy them in sensitive applications. One major issue among many is that ML models do not perform equally well for underrepresented groups. This puts vulnerable populations in an even disadvantaged and unfavorable position. We propose an approach that leverages the power of web search and generative models to alleviate some of the shortcomings of discriminative models. We demonstrate our method on an image classification problem using ImageNet's People Subtree subset, and show that it is effective in enhancing robustness and mitigating bias in certain classes that represent vulnerable populations (e.g., female doctor of color). Our new method is able to (1) identify weak decision boundaries for such classes; (2) construct search queries for Google as well as text for generating images through DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion; and (3) show how these newly captured training samples could alleviate population bias issue. While still improving the model's overall performance considerably, we achieve a significant reduction (77.30\%) in the model's gender accuracy disparity. In addition to these improvements, we observed a notable enhancement in the classifier's decision boundary, as it is characterized by fewer weakspots and an increased separation between classes. Although we showcase our method on vulnerable populations in this study, the proposed technique is extendable to a wide range of problems and domains.

With the rise of Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs) in Chemistry and Biology, new avenues for the design and understanding of therapeutics have opened up to the scientific community. Protein sequences can be modeled as language and can take advantage of recent advances in LLMs, specifically with the abundance of our access to the protein sequence datasets. In this paper, we developed the GPCR-BERT model for understanding the sequential design of G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). GPCRs are the target of over one-third of FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. However, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the relationship between amino acid sequence, ligand selectivity, and conformational motifs (such as NPxxY, CWxP, E/DRY). By utilizing the pre-trained protein model (Prot-Bert) and fine-tuning with prediction tasks of variations in the motifs, we were able to shed light on several relationships between residues in the binding pocket and some of the conserved motifs. To achieve this, we took advantage of attention weights, and hidden states of the model that are interpreted to extract the extent of contributions of amino acids in dictating the type of masked ones. The fine-tuned models demonstrated high accuracy in predicting hidden residues within the motifs. In addition, the analysis of embedding was performed over 3D structures to elucidate the higher-order interactions within the conformations of the receptors.

Despite the remarkable success of deep neural networks in a myriad of settings, several works have demonstrated their overwhelming sensitivity to near-imperceptible perturbations, known as adversarial attacks. On the other hand, prior works have also observed that deep networks can be under-sensitive, wherein large-magnitude perturbations in input space do not induce appreciable changes to network activations. In this work, we study in detail the phenomenon of under-sensitivity in vision models such as CNNs and Transformers, and present techniques to study the geometry and extent of "equi-confidence" level sets of such networks. We propose a Level Set Traversal algorithm that iteratively explores regions of high confidence with respect to the input space using orthogonal components of the local gradients. Given a source image, we use this algorithm to identify inputs that lie in the same equi-confidence level set as the source image despite being perceptually similar to arbitrary images from other classes. We further observe that the source image is linearly connected by a high-confidence path to these inputs, uncovering a star-like structure for level sets of deep networks. Furthermore, we attempt to identify and estimate the extent of these connected higher-dimensional regions over which the model maintains a high degree of confidence. The code for this project is publicly available at this URL.