Government
ZETAR: Modeling and Computational Design of Strategic and Adaptive Compliance Policies
Compliance management plays an important role in mitigating insider threats. Incentive design is a proactive and non-invasive approach to achieving compliance by aligning an insider's incentive with the defender's security objective, which motivates (rather than commands) an insider to act in the organization's interests. Controlling insiders' incentives for population-level compliance is challenging because they are neither precisely known nor directly controllable. To this end, we develop ZETAR, a zero-trust audit and recommendation framework, to provide a quantitative approach to model insiders' incentives and design customized recommendation policies to improve their compliance. We formulate primal and dual convex programs to compute the optimal bespoke recommendation policies. We create the theoretical underpinning for understanding trust, compliance, and satisfaction, which leads to scoring mechanisms of how compliant and persuadable an insider is. After classifying insiders as malicious, self-interested, or amenable based on their incentive misalignment levels with the defender, we establish bespoke information disclosure principles for these insiders of different incentive categories. We identify the policy separability principle and the set convexity, which enable finite-step algorithms to efficiently learn the Completely Trustworthy (CT) policy set when insiders' incentives are unknown. Finally, we present a case study to corroborate the design. Our results show that ZETAR can well adapt to insiders with different risk and compliance attitudes and significantly improve compliance. Moreover, trustworthy recommendations can provably promote cyber hygiene and insiders' satisfaction.
Lattice Approximations in Wasserstein Space
We consider structured approximation of measures in Wasserstein space $W_p(\mathbb{R}^d)$ for $p\in[1,\infty)$ by discrete and piecewise constant measures based on a scaled Voronoi partition of $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that if a full rank lattice $\Lambda$ is scaled by a factor of $h\in(0,1]$, then approximation of a measure based on the Voronoi partition of $h\Lambda$ is $O(h)$ regardless of $d$ or $p$. We then use a covering argument to show that $N$-term approximations of compactly supported measures is $O(N^{-\frac1d})$ which matches known rates for optimal quantizers and empirical measure approximation in most instances. Finally, we extend these results to noncompactly supported measures with sufficient decay.
There's no easy answer to being a space janitor
Earth's orbit is getting crowded. Last year, a record 2,409 objects were sent to orbit, the bulk of which were satellites settling into the increasingly cluttered region 1,200 miles above our planet's surface known as low Earth orbit. Another 2,000-plus satellites have joined them so far this year, according to the UN's Online Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space. As the presence of artificial objects in orbit grows, so too does the accumulation of debris, or space junk -- and the risk of collisions. Dealing with existing waste and preventing its unchecked growth has become imperative, but it's a problem that doesn't have one simple solution. Currently, the US Department of Defense's Space Surveillance Network tracks more than 25,000 objects larger than 4 inches wide, most of which are concentrated in low Earth orbit, and there are an estimated millions of smaller objects still that are trickier to pinpoint.
The Morning After: Our verdict on Google's Pixel 8 Pro
The reviews keep coming this week. After all the AI tricks, rock-climbing and specification barrage we saw at Google's big Pixel reveal event, how do Google's flagship smartphones stack up? The surprise highlight is AI, using machine learning and its homemade Tensor G3 chip in a tangible and practical way compared to services like ChatGPT or Midjourney. This includes making your photos look better, videos sound better and adds interactive robo-voice panache to call screening. Both devices once again have incredibly capable cameras, with 5x optical zoom on the Pixel 8 Pro (matching the iPhone 15 Pro Max) and new pro controls too.
NASA unveils sample scooped from surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu
A sample of material collected from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu has been found to contain abundant water and carbon, the US space agency NASA said, offering more evidence for a theory that life on Earth was seeded from outer space. The findings were announced on Wednesday as NASA gave the public a first glimpse of what scientists found inside a sealed capsule that was returned to Earth last month after carrying material scooped from the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid's surface by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. "This is the biggest carbon-rich asteroid sample ever returned to Earth," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at a press event at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the first images of black dust and pebbles were revealed. Carbon accounted for almost 5 percent of the sample's total weight, and was present in both organic and mineral form, while the water was locked inside the crystal structure of clay minerals, Nelson said. The findings were made through a preliminary analysis involving scanning the sample with electron microscopy, X-ray computed tomography and more.
Two killed in Russia as debris from downed Ukrainian drone destroys homes
At least two people were killed and two injured when debris from a destroyed Ukrainian drone fell on homes in Russia's Belgorod region, according to a local official. Belgorod regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said early on Thursday that Russian air defences shot down an "aircraft-type" unmanned aerial vehicle as it approached Belgorod city. "To great sorrow, there are dead. Operational services recovered the bodies of two people from the rubble – a man and a woman," Gladkov wrote on the Telegram messaging app. "As a result of falling debris, a private residential building caught fire," Gladkov said, adding later that the falling debris had completely destroyed one residential building, and partially damaged two others.
Trustworthy Machine Learning
Mucsányi, Bálint, Kirchhof, Michael, Nguyen, Elisa, Rubinstein, Alexander, Oh, Seong Joon
As machine learning technology gets applied to actual products and solutions, new challenges have emerged. Models unexpectedly fail to generalize to small changes in the distribution, tend to be confident on novel data they have never seen, or cannot communicate the rationale behind their decisions effectively with the end users. Collectively, we face a trustworthiness issue with the current machine learning technology. This textbook on Trustworthy Machine Learning (TML) covers a theoretical and technical background of four key topics in TML: Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Explainability, Uncertainty Quantification, and Evaluation of Trustworthiness. We discuss important classical and contemporary research papers of the aforementioned fields and uncover and connect their underlying intuitions. The book evolved from the homonymous course at the University of T\"ubingen, first offered in the Winter Semester of 2022/23. It is meant to be a stand-alone product accompanied by code snippets and various pointers to further sources on topics of TML. The dedicated website of the book is https://trustworthyml.io/.
Answering Unseen Questions With Smaller Language Models Using Rationale Generation and Dense Retrieval
Hartill, Tim, Benavides-Prado, Diana, Witbrock, Michael, Riddle, Patricia J.
When provided with sufficient explanatory context, smaller Language Models have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability on challenging short-answer question-answering tasks where the questions are unseen in training. We evaluate two methods for further improvement in this setting. Both methods focus on combining rationales generated by a larger Language Model with longer contexts created from a multi-hop dense retrieval system. The first method ($\textit{RR}$) involves training a Rationale Ranking model to score both generated rationales and retrieved contexts with respect to relevance and truthfulness. We then use the scores to derive combined contexts from both knowledge sources using a number of combinatory strategies. For the second method ($\textit{RATD}$) we utilise retrieval-augmented training datasets developed by Hartill et al. 2023 to train a smaller Reasoning model such that it becomes proficient at utilising relevant information from longer text sequences that may be only partially evidential and frequently contain many irrelevant sentences. We find that both methods significantly improve results. Our single best Reasoning model materially improves upon strong comparable prior baselines for unseen evaluation datasets (StrategyQA 58.9 $\rightarrow$ 61.7 acc., CommonsenseQA 63.6 $\rightarrow$ 72.7 acc., ARC-DA 31.6 $\rightarrow$ 52.1 F1, IIRC 25.5 $\rightarrow$ 27.3 F1) and a version utilising our prior knowledge of each type of question in selecting a context combination strategy does even better. Our proposed models also generally outperform direct prompts against much larger models (BLOOM 175B and StableVicuna 13B) in both few-shot chain-of-thought and standard few-shot settings.
Sensory Manipulation as a Countermeasure to Robot Teleoperation Delays: System and Evidence
Du, Jing, Vann, William, Zhou, Tianyu, Ye, Yang, Zhu, Qi
In the field of robotics, robot teleoperation for remote or hazardous environments has become increasingly vital. A major challenge is the lag between command and action, negatively affecting operator awareness, performance, and mental strain. Even with advanced technology, mitigating these delays, especially in long-distance operations, remains challenging. Current solutions largely focus on machine-based adjustments. Yet, there's a gap in using human perceptions to improve the teleoperation experience. This paper presents a unique method of sensory manipulation to help humans adapt to such delays. Drawing from motor learning principles, it suggests that modifying sensory stimuli can lessen the perception of these delays. Instead of introducing new skills, the approach uses existing motor coordination knowledge. The aim is to minimize the need for extensive training or complex automation. A study with 41 participants explored the effects of altered haptic cues in delayed teleoperations. These cues were sourced from advanced physics engines and robot sensors. Results highlighted benefits like reduced task time and improved perceptions of visual delays. Real-time haptic feedback significantly contributed to reduced mental strain and increased confidence. This research emphasizes human adaptation as a key element in robot teleoperation, advocating for improved teleoperation efficiency via swift human adaptation, rather than solely optimizing robots for delay adjustment.
A Flexible and Efficient Temporal Logic Tool for Python: PyTeLo
Cardona, Gustavo A., Leahy, Kevin, Mann, Makai, Vasile, Cristian-Ioan
Temporal logic is an important tool for specifying complex behaviors of systems. It can be used to define properties for verification and monitoring, as well as goals for synthesis tools, allowing users to specify rich missions and tasks. Some of the most popular temporal logics include Metric Temporal Logic (MTL), Signal Temporal Logic (STL), and weighted STL (wSTL), which also allow the definition of timing constraints. In this work, we introduce PyTeLo, a modular and versatile Python-based software that facilitates working with temporal logic languages, specifically MTL, STL, and wSTL. Applying PyTeLo requires only a string representation of the temporal logic specification and, optionally, the dynamics of the system of interest. Next, PyTeLo reads the specification using an ANTLR-generated parser and generates an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) that captures the structure of the formula. For synthesis, the AST serves to recursively encode the specification into a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) that is solved using a commercial solver such as Gurobi. We describe the architecture and capabilities of PyTeLo and provide example applications highlighting its adaptability and extensibility for various research problems.