Government
Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 525
The Russian military said anti-aircraft units thwarted a Ukrainian "terrorist attack" and downed drones targeting Moscow, but that one drone struck a high-rise tower that was hit earlier in the week. Russia said it had repelled an overnight Ukrainian drone attack aimed at its patrol boats in the Black Sea. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told the Reuters news agency that Kyiv did not attack and would not attack civilian vessels in the Black Sea, calling Russian claims "fictitious". Drones struck populated areas in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, destroying two floors of a college dormitory, according to local officials. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said there had been three separate attacks on Ukraine's second-largest city.
Sampling binary sparse coding QUBO models using a spiking neuromorphic processor
Henke, Kyle, Pelofske, Elijah, Hahn, Georg, Kenyon, Garrett T.
We consider the problem of computing a sparse binary representation of an image. To be precise, given an image and an overcomplete, non-orthonormal basis, we aim to find a sparse binary vector indicating the minimal set of basis vectors that when added together best reconstruct the given input. We formulate this problem with an $L_2$ loss on the reconstruction error, and an $L_0$ (or, equivalently, an $L_1$) loss on the binary vector enforcing sparsity. This yields a so-called Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) problem, whose solution is generally NP-hard to find. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, the method of unsupervised and unnormalized dictionary feature learning for a desired sparsity level to best match the data is presented. Second, the binary sparse coding problem is then solved on the Loihi 1 neuromorphic chip by the use of stochastic networks of neurons to traverse the non-convex energy landscape. The solutions are benchmarked against the classical heuristic simulated annealing. We demonstrate neuromorphic computing is suitable for sampling low energy solutions of binary sparse coding QUBO models, and although Loihi 1 is capable of sampling very sparse solutions of the QUBO models, there needs to be improvement in the implementation in order to be competitive with simulated annealing.
Machine Learning Small Molecule Properties in Drug Discovery
Schapin, Nikolai, Majewski, Maciej, Varela, Alejandro, Arroniz, Carlos, De Fabritiis, Gianni
Machine learning (ML) is a promising approach for predicting small molecule properties in drug discovery. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of various ML methods introduced for this purpose in recent years. We review a wide range of properties, including binding affinities, solubility, and ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity). We discuss existing popular datasets and molecular descriptors and embeddings, such as chemical fingerprints and graph-based neural networks. We highlight also challenges of predicting and optimizing multiple properties during hit-to-lead and lead optimization stages of drug discovery and explore briefly possible multi-objective optimization techniques that can be used to balance diverse properties while optimizing lead candidates. Finally, techniques to provide an understanding of model predictions, especially for critical decision-making in drug discovery are assessed. Overall, this review provides insights into the landscape of ML models for small molecule property predictions in drug discovery. So far, there are multiple diverse approaches, but their performances are often comparable. Neural networks, while more flexible, do not always outperform simpler models. This shows that the availability of high-quality training data remains crucial for training accurate models and there is a need for standardized benchmarks, additional performance metrics, and best practices to enable richer comparisons between the different techniques and models that can shed a better light on the differences between the many techniques.
Dual Governance: The intersection of centralized regulation and crowdsourced safety mechanisms for Generative AI
Ghosh, Avijit, Lakshmi, Dhanya
Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen mainstream adoption lately, especially in the form of consumer-facing, open-ended, text and image generating models. However, the use of such systems raises significant ethical and safety concerns, including privacy violations, misinformation and intellectual property theft. The potential for generative AI to displace human creativity and livelihoods has also been under intense scrutiny. To mitigate these risks, there is an urgent need of policies and regulations responsible and ethical development in the field of generative AI. Existing and proposed centralized regulations by governments to rein in AI face criticisms such as not having sufficient clarity or uniformity, lack of interoperability across lines of jurisdictions, restricting innovation, and hindering free market competition. Decentralized protections via crowdsourced safety tools and mechanisms are a potential alternative. However, they have clear deficiencies in terms of lack of adequacy of oversight and difficulty of enforcement of ethical and safety standards, and are thus not enough by themselves as a regulation mechanism. We propose a marriage of these two strategies via a framework we call Dual Governance. This framework proposes a cooperative synergy between centralized government regulations in a U.S. specific context and safety mechanisms developed by the community to protect stakeholders from the harms of generative AI. By implementing the Dual Governance framework, we posit that innovation and creativity can be promoted while ensuring safe and ethical deployment of generative AI.
AI-Enhanced Data Processing and Discovery Crowd Sourcing for Meteor Shower Mapping
Ganju, Siddha, Hatua, Amartya, Jenniskens, Peter, Krishna, Sahyadri, Ren, Chicheng, Ambardar, Surya
The Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project, funded by NASA starting in 2010, aims to map our meteor showers by triangulating meteor trajectories detected in low-light video cameras from multiple locations across 16 countries in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Its mission is to validate, discover, and predict the upcoming returns of meteor showers. Our research aimed to streamline the data processing by implementing an automated cloud-based AI-enabled pipeline and improve the data visualization to improve the rate of discoveries by involving the public in monitoring the meteor detections. This article describes the process of automating the data ingestion, processing, and insight generation using an interpretable Active Learning and AI pipeline. This work also describes the development of an interactive web portal (the NASA Meteor Shower portal) to facilitate the visualization of meteor radiant maps. To date, CAMS has discovered over 200 new meteor showers and has validated dozens of previously reported showers.
Follow the Soldiers with Optimized Single-Shot Multibox Detection and Reinforcement Learning
Hossain, Jumman, Momtaz, Maliha
Nowadays, autonomous cars are gaining traction due to their numerous potential applications on battlefields and in resolving a variety of other real-world challenges. The main goal of our project is to build an autonomous system using DeepRacer which will follow a specific person (for our project, a soldier) when they will be moving in any direction. Two main components to accomplish this project is an optimized Single-Shot Multibox Detection (SSD) object detection model and a Reinforcement Learning (RL) model. We accomplished the task using SSD Lite instead of SSD and at the end, compared the results among SSD, SSD with Neural Computing Stick (NCS), and SSD Lite. Experimental results show that SSD Lite gives better performance among these three techniques and exhibits a considerable boost in inference speed (~2-3 times) without compromising accuracy.
Towards Detecting Harmful Agendas in News Articles
Subbiah, Melanie, Bhattacharjee, Amrita, Hua, Yilun, Kumarage, Tharindu, Liu, Huan, McKeown, Kathleen
Manipulated news online is a growing problem which necessitates the use of automated systems to curtail its spread. We argue that while misinformation and disinformation detection have been studied, there has been a lack of investment in the important open challenge of detecting harmful agendas in news articles; identifying harmful agendas is critical to flag news campaigns with the greatest potential for real world harm. Moreover, due to real concerns around censorship, harmful agenda detectors must be interpretable to be effective. In this work, we propose this new task and release a dataset, NewsAgendas, of annotated news articles for agenda identification. We show how interpretable systems can be effective on this task and demonstrate that they can perform comparably to black-box models.
Emergent Analogical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Webb, Taylor, Holyoak, Keith J., Lu, Hongjing
The recent advent of large language models has reinvigorated debate over whether human cognitive capacities might emerge in such generic models given sufficient training data. Of particular interest is the ability of these models to reason about novel problems zero-shot, without any direct training. In human cognition, this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy. Here, we performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (the text-davinci-003 variant of GPT-3) on a range of analogical tasks, including a non-visual matrix reasoning task based on the rule structure of Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings; preliminary tests of GPT-4 indicated even better performance. Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems.
Automatic Emergency Dust-Free solution on-board International Space Station with Bi-GRU (AED-ISS)
Hou, Po-Han, Lin, Wei-Chih, Hou, Hong-Chun, Huang, Yu-Hao, Shue, Jih-Hong
With a rising attention for the issue of PM2.5 or PM0.3, particulate matters have become not only a potential threat to both the environment and human, but also a harming existence to instruments onboard International Space Station (ISS). Our team is aiming to relate various concentration of particulate matters to magnetic fields, humidity, acceleration, temperature, pressure and CO2 concentration. Our goal is to establish an early warning system (EWS), which is able to forecast the levels of particulate matters and provides ample reaction time for astronauts to protect their instruments in some experiments or increase the accuracy of the measurements; In addition, the constructed model can be further developed into a prototype of a remote-sensing smoke alarm for applications related to fires. In this article, we will implement the Bi-GRU (Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit) algorithms that collect data for past 90 minutes and predict the levels of particulates which over 2.5 micrometer per 0.1 liter for the next 1 minute, which is classified as an early warning
Improve Event Extraction via Self-Training with Gradient Guidance
Xu, Zhiyang, Lee, Jay-Yoon, Huang, Lifu
Data scarcity has been the main factor that hinders the progress of event extraction. To overcome this issue, we propose a Self-Training with Feedback (STF) framework that leverages the large-scale unlabeled data and acquires feedback for each new event prediction from the unlabeled data by comparing it to the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) graph of the same sentence. Specifically, STF consists of (1) a base event extraction model trained on existing event annotations and then applied to large-scale unlabeled corpora to predict new event mentions as pseudo training samples, and (2) a novel scoring model that takes in each new predicted event trigger, an argument, its argument role, as well as their paths in the AMR graph to estimate a compatibility score indicating the correctness of the pseudo label. The compatibility scores further act as feedback to encourage or discourage the model learning on the pseudo labels during self-training. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets, including ACE05-E, ACE05-E+, and ERE, demonstrate the effectiveness of the STF framework on event extraction, especially event argument extraction, with significant performance gain over the base event extraction models and strong baselines. Our experimental analysis further shows that STF is a generic framework as it can be applied to improve most, if not all, event extraction models by leveraging large-scale unlabeled data, even when high-quality AMR graph annotations are not available.