Government
N Korea says tested another underwater nuclear attack 'drone'
North Korea has conducted another test of a nuclear-capable underwater attack drone, according to state media. The country tested the so-called Haeil-2 more than a week after it disclosed a new underwater drone system dubbed Haeil-1, which translates to "tsunami" in Korean, and is designed to undertake sneak attacks in enemy waters. Analysts are sceptical about whether the underwater vehicle is ready for deployment but say North Korea is eager to display its diverse weaponry against the United States and South Korea, which have been conducting large-scale military exercises in recent weeks. The latest test took place from April 4 to April 7, state media KCNA reported on Saturday. "The underwater nuclear attack drone Haeil-2 … cruised 1,000km [621 miles] of simulated underwater distance," the agency said, adding that the test warhead was also detonated.
With Security Copilot, Microsoft brings the power of AI to cyberdefense - Stories
March 28, 2023 -- Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday announced it is bringing the next generation of AI to cybersecurity with the launch of Microsoft Security Copilot, giving defenders a much-needed tool to quickly detect and respond to threats and better understand the threat landscape overall. Security Copilot will combine Microsoft's vast threat intelligence footprint with industry-leading expertise to augment the work of security professionals through an easy-to-use AI assistant. "Today the odds remain stacked against cybersecurity professionals. Too often, they fight an asymmetric battle against relentless and sophisticated attackers," said Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president, Microsoft Security. "With Security Copilot, we are shifting the balance of power into our favor. Security Copilot is the first and only generative AI security product enabling defenders to move at the speed and scale of AI." Security Copilot is designed to work seamlessly with security teams, empowering defenders to see what is happening in their environment, learn from existing intelligence, correlate threat activity, and make more informed, efficient decisions at machine speed.
IP rights at top of mind as U.S. Copyright Office offers guidance on AI-generated works
AI tools allow users to generate images, audio, and textual works in response to textual prompts. These tools "learn" how to generate this content by ingesting massive sets of preexisting, human-authored works. How and to what extent the use of AI impacts the ability to secure intellectual property (IP) rights are evolving questions in IP law. Recently, in Thaler v. Vidal2, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court analyzed AI inventorship in view of the U.S. Patent Act – ultimately concluding that the Patent Act unambiguously "requires that inventors must be natural persons; that is, human beings." In Thaler, the AI technology known as "DABUS" used general background knowledge of a technical field to conceive and recognize the utility of inventions without specific guidance from a human being.
Capturing dynamical correlations using implicit neural representations
Chitturi, Sathya, Ji, Zhurun, Petsch, Alexander, Peng, Cheng, Chen, Zhantao, Plumley, Rajan, Dunne, Mike, Mardanya, Sougata, Chowdhury, Sugata, Chen, Hongwei, Bansil, Arun, Feiguin, Adrian, Kolesnikov, Alexander, Prabhakaran, Dharmalingam, Hayden, Stephen, Ratner, Daniel, Jia, Chunjing, Nashed, Youssef, Turner, Joshua
The observation and description of collective excitations in solids is a fundamental issue when seeking to understand the physics of a many-body system. Analysis of these excitations is usually carried out by measuring the dynamical structure factor, S(Q, $\omega$), with inelastic neutron or x-ray scattering techniques and comparing this against a calculated dynamical model. Here, we develop an artificial intelligence framework which combines a neural network trained to mimic simulated data from a model Hamiltonian with automatic differentiation to recover unknown parameters from experimental data. We benchmark this approach on a Linear Spin Wave Theory (LSWT) simulator and advanced inelastic neutron scattering data from the square-lattice spin-1 antiferromagnet La$_2$NiO$_4$. We find that the model predicts the unknown parameters with excellent agreement relative to analytical fitting. In doing so, we illustrate the ability to build and train a differentiable model only once, which then can be applied in real-time to multi-dimensional scattering data, without the need for human-guided peak finding and fitting algorithms. This prototypical approach promises a new technology for this field to automatically detect and refine more advanced models for ordered quantum systems.
High-Fidelity Clothed Avatar Reconstruction from a Single Image
Liao, Tingting, Zhang, Xiaomei, Xiu, Yuliang, Yi, Hongwei, Liu, Xudong, Qi, Guo-Jun, Zhang, Yong, Wang, Xuan, Zhu, Xiangyu, Lei, Zhen
This paper presents a framework for efficient 3D clothed avatar reconstruction. By combining the advantages of the high accuracy of optimization-based methods and the efficiency of learning-based methods, we propose a coarse-to-fine way to realize a high-fidelity clothed avatar reconstruction (CAR) from a single image. At the first stage, we use an implicit model to learn the general shape in the canonical space of a person in a learning-based way, and at the second stage, we refine the surface detail by estimating the non-rigid deformation in the posed space in an optimization way. A hyper-network is utilized to generate a good initialization so that the convergence o f the optimization process is greatly accelerated. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that the proposed CAR successfully produces high-fidelity avatars for arbitrarily clothed humans in real scenes.
Predicting the Silent Majority on Graphs: Knowledge Transferable Graph Neural Network
Bi, Wendong, Xu, Bingbing, Sun, Xiaoqian, Xu, Li, Shen, Huawei, Cheng, Xueqi
Graphs consisting of vocal nodes ("the vocal minority") and silent nodes ("the silent majority"), namely VS-Graph, are ubiquitous in the real world. The vocal nodes tend to have abundant features and labels. In contrast, silent nodes only have incomplete features and rare labels, e.g., the description and political tendency of politicians (vocal) are abundant while not for ordinary people (silent) on the twitter's social network. Predicting the silent majority remains a crucial yet challenging problem. However, most existing message-passing based GNNs assume that all nodes belong to the same domain, without considering the missing features and distribution-shift between domains, leading to poor ability to deal with VS-Graph. To combat the above challenges, we propose Knowledge Transferable Graph Neural Network (KT-GNN), which models distribution shifts during message passing and representation learning by transferring knowledge from vocal nodes to silent nodes. Specifically, we design the domain-adapted "feature completion and message passing mechanism" for node representation learning while preserving domain difference. And a knowledge transferable classifier based on KL-divergence is followed. Comprehensive experiments on real-world scenarios (i.e., company financial risk assessment and political elections) demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Our source code has been open sourced.
Robust Deep Learning Models Against Semantic-Preserving Adversarial Attack
Gao, Dashan, Zhao, Yunce, Yao, Yinghua, Zhang, Zeqi, Mao, Bifei, Yao, Xin
Deep learning models can be fooled by small $l_p$-norm adversarial perturbations and natural perturbations in terms of attributes. Although the robustness against each perturbation has been explored, it remains a challenge to address the robustness against joint perturbations effectively. In this paper, we study the robustness of deep learning models against joint perturbations by proposing a novel attack mechanism named Semantic-Preserving Adversarial (SPA) attack, which can then be used to enhance adversarial training. Specifically, we introduce an attribute manipulator to generate natural and human-comprehensible perturbations and a noise generator to generate diverse adversarial noises. Based on such combined noises, we optimize both the attribute value and the diversity variable to generate jointly-perturbed samples. For robust training, we adversarially train the deep learning model against the generated joint perturbations. Empirical results on four benchmarks show that the SPA attack causes a larger performance decline with small $l_{\infty}$ norm-ball constraints compared to existing approaches. Furthermore, our SPA-enhanced training outperforms existing defense methods against such joint perturbations.
TSFool: Crafting Highly-imperceptible Adversarial Time Series through Multi-objective Black-box Attack to Fool RNN Classifiers
Wang, Yanyun, Du, Dehui, Liu, Yuanhao
Neural network (NN) classifiers are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Although the existing gradient-based attacks achieve state-of-the-art performance in feed-forward NNs and image recognition tasks, they do not perform as well on time series classification with recurrent neural network (RNN) models. This is because the cyclical structure of RNN prevents direct model differentiation and the visual sensitivity of time series data to perturbations challenges the traditional local optimization objective of the adversarial attack. In this paper, a black-box method called TSFool is proposed to efficiently craft highly-imperceptible adversarial time series for RNN classifiers. We propose a novel global optimization objective named Camouflage Coefficient to consider the imperceptibility of adversarial samples from the perspective of class distribution, and accordingly refine the adversarial attack as a multi-objective optimization problem to enhance the perturbation quality. To get rid of the dependence on gradient information, we also propose a new idea that introduces a representation model for RNN to capture deeply embedded vulnerable samples having otherness between their features and latent manifold, based on which the optimization solution can be heuristically approximated. Experiments on 10 UCR datasets are conducted to confirm that TSFool averagely outperforms existing methods with a 46.3% higher attack success rate, 87.4% smaller perturbation and 25.6% better Camouflage Coefficient at a similar time cost.
MphayaNER: Named Entity Recognition for Tshivenda
Mbuvha, Rendani, Adelani, David I., Mutavhatsindi, Tendani, Rakhuhu, Tshimangadzo, Mauda, Aluwani, Maumela, Tshifhiwa Joshua, Masindi, Andisani, Rananga, Seani, Marivate, Vukosi, Marwala, Tshilidzi
Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a vital role in various Natural Language Processing tasks such as information retrieval, text classification, and question answering. However, NER can be challenging, especially in low-resource languages with limited annotated datasets and tools. This paper adds to the effort of addressing these challenges by introducing MphayaNER, the first Tshivenda NER corpus in the news domain. We establish NER baselines by \textit{fine-tuning} state-of-the-art models on MphayaNER. The study also explores zero-shot transfer between Tshivenda and other related Bantu languages, with chiShona and Kiswahili showing the best results. Augmenting MphayaNER with chiShona data was also found to improve model performance significantly. Both MphayaNER and the baseline models are made publicly available.
Artificial Intelligence: Should the government step in? Americans weigh in
Americans shared whether or not they believe the government should regulate Artificial Intelligence amid the technology's rapid, and ongoing, advancement. AUSTIN, Texas – The majority of Americans who spoke with Fox News said the government should stay out of regulating artificial intelligence technologies. "Keep the government out of regulating things," a Fort Worth resident told Fox News. "They regulate too many things already." Brian similarly opposed state regulation of the technology.