Without the ability to estimate and benchmark AI capability advancements, organizations are left to respond to each change reactively, impeding their ability to build viable mid and long-term strategies. This paper explores the recent growth of forecasting, a political science tool that uses explicit assumptions and quantitative estimation that leads to improved prediction accuracy. Done at the collective level, forecasting can identify and verify talent, enable leaders to build better models of AI advancements and improve inputs into design policy. Successful approaches to forecasting and case studies are examined, revealing a subclass of "superforecasters" who outperform 98% of the population and whose insights will be most reliable. Finally, techniques behind successful forecasting are outlined, including Phillip Tetlock's "Ten Commandments." To adapt to a quickly changing technology landscape, designers and policymakers should consider forecasting as a first line of defense.

Representation learning, by training deep neural networks as feature extractors to generate compact embedding vectors from images, is a fundamental component in computer vision. Metric learning, a kind of representation learning using supervised data, has been widely applied to image recognition, clustering, and retrieval [Schroff et al., 2015; Weinberger and Saul, 2009; Weyand et al., 2020]. Machine learning models have the capacity to memorize training data [Carlini et al., 2019, 2021], leading to privacy risks when the models are deployed. Privacy risk can also be audited by membership inference attacks [Carlini et al., 2022; Shokri et al., 2017], i.e. detecting whether certain data was used to train a model and potentially exposing users' usage behaviors. Defending against such risks is a critical responsibility when training on privacy-sensitive data. Differential Privacy (DP) [Dwork et al., 2006] is an extensively used quantifiable measurement of privacy risk, now generally accepted as a standard notion of privacy in both industry and government [Apple Privacy Team, 2017; Ding et al., 2017; McMahan and Thakurta, 2022; US Census Bureau, 2021]. Applied to machine learning, DP requires a training procedure with explicit randomness, and guarantees that the distribution over output models is quantifiably similar given a certain scope of change to the training dataset. A DP guarantee with respect to the change of a single arbitrary training example is known as example-level DP, which provides plausible deniability (in the binary hypothesis testing sense of [Kairouz et al., 2015]) that any single example (e.g., image) occurred The first two authors contributed equally.

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common type of age-related dementia, affecting 6.2 million people aged 65 or older according to CDC data. It is commonly agreed that discovering an effective AD diagnosis biomarker could have enormous public health benefits, potentially preventing or delaying up to 40% of dementia cases. Tau neurofibrillary tangles are the primary driver of downstream neurodegeneration and subsequent cognitive impairment in AD, resulting in structural deformations such as hippocampal atrophy that can be observed in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Objective: To build a surface-based model to 1) detect differences between APOE subgroups in patterns of tau deposition and hippocampal atrophy, and 2) use the extracted surface-based features to predict cognitive decline. Methods: Using data obtained from different institutions, we develop a surface-based federated Chow test model to study the synergistic effects of APOE, a previously reported significant risk factor of AD, and tau on hippocampal surface morphometry. Results: We illustrate that the APOE-specific morphometry features correlate with AD progression and better predict future AD conversion than other MRI biomarkers. For example, a strong association between atrophy and abnormal tau was identified in hippocampal subregion cornu ammonis 1 (CA1 subfield) and subiculum in e4 homozygote cohort. Conclusion: Our model allows for identifying MRI biomarkers for AD and cognitive decline prediction and may uncover a corner of the neural mechanism of the influence of APOE and tau deposition on hippocampal morphology.

AI systems may be better thought of as peers than as tools. This paper explores applications of augmented collective intelligence (ACI) beneficial to collaborative ideation. Design considerations are offered for an experiment that evaluates the performance of hybrid human- AI collectives. The investigation described combines humans and large language models (LLMs) to ideate on increasingly complex topics. A promising real-time collection tool called Polis is examined to facilitate ACI, including case studies from citizen engagement projects in Taiwan and Bowling Green, Kentucky. The authors discuss three challenges to consider when designing an ACI experiment: topic selection, participant selection, and evaluation of results. The paper concludes that researchers should address these challenges to conduct empirical studies of ACI in collaborative ideation.

Classification has been the focal point of research on adversarial attacks, but only a few works investigate methods suited to denser prediction tasks, such as semantic segmentation. The methods proposed in these works do not accurately solve the adversarial segmentation problem and, therefore, overestimate the size of the perturbations required to fool models. Here, we propose a white-box attack for these models based on a proximal splitting to produce adversarial perturbations with much smaller $\ell_\infty$ norms. Our attack can handle large numbers of constraints within a nonconvex minimization framework via an Augmented Lagrangian approach, coupled with adaptive constraint scaling and masking strategies. We demonstrate that our attack significantly outperforms previously proposed ones, as well as classification attacks that we adapted for segmentation, providing a first comprehensive benchmark for this dense task.

To advance automated detection of extreme weather events, which are increasing in frequency and intensity with climate change, we explore modifications to a novel light-weight Context Guided convolutional neural network architecture trained for semantic segmentation of tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers in climate data. Our primary focus is on tropical cyclones, the most destructive weather events, for which current models show limited performance. We investigate feature engineering, data augmentation, learning rate modifications, alternative loss functions, and architectural changes. In contrast to previous approaches optimizing for intersection over union, we specifically seek to improve recall to penalize under-counting and prioritize identification of tropical cyclones. We report success through the use of weighted loss functions to counter class imbalance for these rare events. We conclude with directions for future research on extreme weather events detection, a crucial task for prediction, mitigation, and equitable adaptation to the impacts of climate change.

Debatepedia is a publicly available dataset consisting of arguments and counter-arguments on controversial topics that has been widely used for the single-document query-focused abstractive summarization task in recent years. However, it has been recently found that this dataset is limited by noise and even most queries in this dataset do not have any relevance to the respective document. In this paper, we present a methodology for cleaning the Debatepedia dataset by leveraging the generative power of large language models to make it suitable for query-focused abstractive summarization. More specifically, we harness the language generation capabilities of ChatGPT to regenerate its queries. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ChatGPT annotated version of the Debatepedia dataset using several benchmark summarization models and demonstrate that the newly annotated version of Debatepedia outperforms the original dataset in terms of both query relevance as well as summary generation quality. We will make this annotated and cleaned version of the dataset publicly available.

Freely available and easy-to-use audio editing tools make it straightforward to perform audio splicing. Convincing forgeries can be created by combining various speech samples from the same person. Detection of such splices is important both in the public sector when considering misinformation, and in a legal context to verify the integrity of evidence. Unfortunately, most existing detection algorithms for audio splicing use handcrafted features and make specific assumptions. However, criminal investigators are often faced with audio samples from unconstrained sources with unknown characteristics, which raises the need for more generally applicable methods. With this work, we aim to take a first step towards unconstrained audio splicing detection to address this need. We simulate various attack scenarios in the form of post-processing operations that may disguise splicing. We propose a Transformer sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) network for splicing detection and localization. Our extensive evaluation shows that the proposed method outperforms existing dedicated approaches for splicing detection [3, 10] as well as the general-purpose networks EfficientNet [28] and RegNet [25].

The performance of neural network-based speech enhancement systems is primarily influenced by the model architecture, whereas training times and computational resource utilization are primarily affected by training parameters such as the batch size. Since noisy and reverberant speech mixtures can have different duration, a batching strategy is required to handle variable size inputs during training, in particular for state-of-the-art end-to-end systems. Such strategies usually strive for a compromise between zero-padding and data randomization, and can be combined with a dynamic batch size for a more consistent amount of data in each batch. However, the effect of these strategies on resource utilization and more importantly network performance is not well documented. This paper systematically investigates the effect of different batching strategies and batch sizes on the training statistics and speech enhancement performance of a Conv-TasNet, evaluated in both matched and mismatched conditions. We find that using a small batch size during training improves performance in both conditions for all batching strategies. Moreover, using sorted or bucket batching with a dynamic batch size allows for reduced training time and GPU memory usage while achieving similar performance compared to random batching with a fixed batch size.

Storm surge is a major natural hazard in coastal regions, responsible both for significant property damage and loss of life. Accurate, efficient models of storm surge are needed both to assess long-term risk and to guide emergency management decisions. While high-fidelity regional- and global-ocean circulation models such as the ADvanced CIRCulation (ADCIRC) model can accurately predict storm surge, they are very computationally expensive. Here we develop a novel surrogate model for peak storm surge prediction based on a multi-stage approach. In the first stage, points are classified as inundated or not. In the second, the level of inundation is predicted . Additionally, we propose a new formulation of the surrogate problem in which storm surge is predicted independently for each point. This allows for predictions to be made directly for locations not present in the training data, and significantly reduces the number of model parameters. We demonstrate our modeling framework on two study areas: the Texas coast and the northern portion of the Alaskan coast. For Texas, the model is trained with a database of 446 synthetic hurricanes. The model is able to accurately match ADCIRC predictions on a test set of synthetic storms. We further present a test of the model on Hurricanes Ike (2008) and Harvey (2017). For Alaska, the model is trained on a dataset of 109 historical surge events. We test the surrogate model on actual surge events including the recent Typhoon Merbok (2022) that take place after the events in the training data. For both datasets, the surrogate model achieves similar performance to ADCIRC on real events when compared to observational data. In both cases, the surrogate models are many orders of magnitude faster than ADCIRC.