Robots operating in close proximity to humans rely heavily on human trust to successfully complete their tasks. But what are the real outcomes when this trust is violated? Self-defense law provides a framework for analyzing tangible failure scenarios that can inform the design of robots and their algorithms. Studying self-defense is particularly important for ground robots since they operate within public environments, where they can pose a legitimate threat to the safety of nearby humans. Moreover, even if ground robots can guarantee human safety, the perception of a physical threat is sufficient to justify human self-defense against robots. In this paper, we synthesize works in law, engineering, and social science to present four actionable recommendations for how the robotics community can craft robots to mitigate the likelihood of self-defense situations arising. We establish how current U.S. self-defense law can justify a human protecting themselves against a robot, discuss the current literature on human attitudes toward robots, and analyze methods that have been produced to allow robots to operate close to humans. Finally, we present hypothetical scenarios that underscore how current robot navigation methods can fail to sufficiently consider self-defense concerns and the need for the recommendations to guide improvements in the field.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to advance rapidly, it becomes increasingly important to consider AI's ethical and societal implications. In this paper, we present a bottom-up mapping of the current state of research at the intersection of Human-Centered AI, Ethical, and Responsible AI (HCER-AI) by thematically reviewing and analyzing 164 research papers from leading conferences in ethical, social, and human factors of AI: AIES, CHI, CSCW, and FAccT. The ongoing research in HCER-AI places emphasis on governance, fairness, and explainability. These conferences, however, concentrate on specific themes rather than encompassing all aspects. While AIES has fewer papers on HCER-AI, it emphasizes governance and rarely publishes papers about privacy, security, and human flourishing. FAccT publishes more on governance and lacks papers on privacy, security, and human flourishing. CHI and CSCW, as more established conferences, have a broader research portfolio. We find that the current emphasis on governance and fairness in AI research may not adequately address the potential unforeseen and unknown implications of AI. Therefore, we recommend that future research should expand its scope and diversify resources to prepare for these potential consequences. This could involve exploring additional areas such as privacy, security, human flourishing, and explainability.

Despite the growing success of diffusion models in continuous-valued domains (e.g., images), similar efforts for discrete domains such as text have yet to match the performance of autoregressive language models. In this work, we present SSD-LM -- a diffusion-based language model with two key design choices. First, SSD-LM is semi-autoregressive, iteratively generating blocks of text, allowing for flexible output length at decoding time while enabling local bidirectional context updates. Second, it is simplex-based, performing diffusion on the natural vocabulary space rather than a learned latent space, allowing us to incorporate classifier guidance and modular control using off-the-shelf classifiers without any adaptation. We evaluate SSD-LM on unconstrained text generation benchmarks, and show that it matches or outperforms strong autoregressive GPT-2 models across standard quality and diversity metrics, while vastly outperforming diffusion-based baselines. On controlled text generation, SSD-LM also outperforms competitive baselines, with an extra advantage in modularity.

The increasing size of input graphs for graph neural networks (GNNs) highlights the demand for using multi-GPU platforms. However, existing multi-GPU GNN systems optimize the computation and communication individually based on the conventional practice of scaling dense DNNs. For irregularly sparse and fine-grained GNN workloads, such solutions miss the opportunity to jointly schedule/optimize the computation and communication operations for high-performance delivery. To this end, we propose MGG, a novel system design to accelerate full-graph GNNs on multi-GPU platforms. The core of MGG is its novel dynamic software pipeline to facilitate fine-grained computation-communication overlapping within a GPU kernel. Specifically, MGG introduces GNN-tailored pipeline construction and GPU-aware pipeline mapping to facilitate workload balancing and operation overlapping. MGG also incorporates an intelligent runtime design with analytical modeling and optimization heuristics to dynamically improve the execution performance. Extensive evaluation reveals that MGG outperforms state-of-the-art full-graph GNN systems across various settings: on average 4.41X, 4.81X, and 10.83X faster than DGL, MGG-UVM, and ROC, respectively.

The dominant framework for off-policy multi-goal reinforcement learning involves estimating goal conditioned Q-value function. When learning to achieve multiple goals, data efficiency is intimately connected with the generalization of the Q-function to new goals. The de-facto paradigm is to approximate Q(s, a, g) using monolithic neural networks. To improve the generalization of the Q-function, we propose a bilinear decomposition that represents the Q-value via a low-rank approximation in the form of a dot product between two vector fields. The first vector field, f(s, a), captures the environment's local dynamics at the state s; whereas the second component, {\phi}(s, g), captures the global relationship between the current state and the goal. We show that our bilinear decomposition scheme substantially improves data efficiency, and has superior transfer to out-of-distribution goals compared to prior methods. Empirical evidence is provided on the simulated Fetch robot task-suite and dexterous manipulation with a Shadow hand.

State-of-the-art deep Q-learning methods update Q-values using state transition tuples sampled from the experience replay buffer. This strategy often uniformly and randomly samples or prioritizes data sampling based on measures such as the temporal difference (TD) error. Such sampling strategies can be inefficient at learning Q-function because a state's Q-value depends on the Q-value of successor states. If the data sampling strategy ignores the precision of the Q-value estimate of the next state, it can lead to useless and often incorrect updates to the Q-values. To mitigate this issue, we organize the agent's experience into a graph that explicitly tracks the dependency between Q-values of states. Each edge in the graph represents a transition between two states by executing a single action. We perform value backups via a breadth-first search starting from that expands vertices in the graph starting from the set of terminal states and successively moving backward. We empirically show that our method is substantially more data-efficient than several baselines on a diverse range of goal-reaching tasks. Notably, the proposed method also outperforms baselines that consume more batches of training experience and operates from high-dimensional observational data such as images.

In recent years, a number of process-based anomaly detection schemes for Industrial Control Systems were proposed. In this work, we provide the first systematic analysis of such schemes, and introduce a taxonomy of properties that are verified by those detection systems. We then present a novel general framework to generate adversarial spoofing signals that violate physical properties of the system, and use the framework to analyze four anomaly detectors published at top security conferences. We find that three of those detectors are susceptible to a number of adversarial manipulations (e.g., spoofing with precomputed patterns), which we call Synthetic Sensor Spoofing and one is resilient against our attacks. We investigate the root of its resilience and demonstrate that it comes from the properties that we introduced. Our attacks reduce the Recall (True Positive Rate) of the attacked schemes making them not able to correctly detect anomalies. Thus, the vulnerabilities we discovered in the anomaly detectors show that (despite an original good detection performance), those detectors are not able to reliably learn physical properties of the system. Even attacks that prior work was expected to be resilient against (based on verified properties) were found to be successful. We argue that our findings demonstrate the need for both more complete attacks in datasets, and more critical analysis of process-based anomaly detectors. We plan to release our implementation as open-source, together with an extension of two public datasets with a set of Synthetic Sensor Spoofing attacks as generated by our framework.

Since March, Congress has held at least 10 hearings about A.I. across eight different committees or subcommittees. The Senate Judiciary Committee grilled the CEO of OpenAI, the Senate Armed Services Committee explored A.I. and defense, and the House Science Committee wanted to know about the latest A.I. innovations. In other words, it's been a bit of a mess--largely because, unlike agriculture, financial services, and other crucial areas of American life, technology doesn't have a committee dedicated solely to its regulation. Even committees like the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology or the Senate Judiciary's Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law do not have exclusive jurisdiction over tech. As a result, several different committees are throwing spaghetti against the wall in a real-time demonstration that Congress is simply not structured or resourced to do its job on A.I., or the other technologies that are shaping its constituents' lives.

The wars of the tomorrow will not be fought with mushroom clouds but with devastating cyber attacks unleashed by'quantum computers,' experts have predicted. Former soldiers and intelligence agents revealed this ominous future to DailyMail.com, These range from quantum computers millions of times more powerful than the machines used today to robotic exoskeletons, which will give soldiers superhuman strength, and AI-controlled drones that will kill without human input. Augmented reality will offer soldiers and pilots'superhuman' senses Virtual reality and augmented reality will allow soldiers to'see through' drones or pilot robotic vehicles, with augmented reality'heads-up displays' (HUDs) overlaying the view of pilots and soldiers. Adam Seamons, Information Security Manager, GRC International Group, said, Technologies like VR have already been used for many years to train both military and commercial pilots, along with other expensive hardware such as armor vehicles and tanks.

A farmer in Niger tends to a tree sprout growing among his millet crop.Tony Rinaudo/World Vision Australia This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For decades, there have been reports of the deforestation in Africa. And they are true--the continent's forests are disappearing, lost mainly to expanding agriculture, logging, and charcoal-making. Maybe not, according to new satellite data analyzed by artificial intelligence and a growing body of on-the-ground studies. This new research is finding ever more trees outside forests, many of them nurtured by farmers and sprouting on their previously treeless fields.