Government
NHS hopes new artificial intelligence software will be able to spot damage in heart scans in seconds
Artificial intelligence software is poised to drastically slash NHS cardiology waiting lists and give heart patients a faster diagnosis. The program can carry out complicated measurements in less than a minute that normally take doctors about 20 minutes. Patients with heart problems usually undergo MRI scans to determine how enlarged the chambers of the organ are – a sign that it is under strain – and whether they will need invasive surgery or can be treated with medication. The scan captures about ten different images of the heart, each from a slightly different angle, to create a full picture. Doctors then have to print out these scans and painstakingly measure the size of the chambers by physically drawing on them.
AI-armed cyberattacks may get lethal in next 5 years, warns report
"Although AI-generated content has been used for social engineering purposes, AI techniques designed to direct campaigns, perform attack steps, or control malware logic have still not been observed in the wild, said Andy Patel WithSecure intelligence researcher. Such "techniques will be first developed by well-resourced, highly-skilled adversaries, such as nation-state groups." The paper examined current trends and advancements in AI, cyberattacks, and areas where the two intersect, suggesting early adoption and evolution of preventative measures were key to overcoming the threats. "After new AI techniques are developed by sophisticated adversaries, some will likely trickle down to less-skilled adversaries and become more prevalent in the threat landscape," stated Patel. The authors claim that it is safe to assert that AI-based hacks are now extremely uncommon and mostly used for social engineering purposes.
Russian Tank Commander Deliberately Attacks Other Moscow Soldiers; Shows Rivalry Among Putin Allies
A Russian tank commander deliberately attacked his comrades after getting into an argument on the battlefield, according to an investigative report. The tank commander, whose identity was not revealed, drove his T-90 tank toward a group of Russian national guard troops following an argument. He then fired at the checkpoint and blew it up. The event, which happened in the Zaporizhzhia region over the summer, was recounted to The New York Times by Russian drone operator Fidar Khubaev. "Those types of things happen there," Khubaev told the outlet, adding that he escaped from the war in the fall.
Safe Control with Learned Certificates: A Survey of Neural Lyapunov, Barrier, and Contraction methods
Dawson, Charles, Gao, Sicun, Fan, Chuchu
Learning-enabled control systems have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems in robotics, but this performance comes at the cost of reduced transparency and lack of guarantees on the safety or stability of the learned controllers. In recent years, new techniques have emerged to provide these guarantees by learning certificates alongside control policies -- these certificates provide concise, data-driven proofs that guarantee the safety and stability of the learned control system. These methods not only allow the user to verify the safety of a learned controller but also provide supervision during training, allowing safety and stability requirements to influence the training process itself. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of this rapidly developing field of certificate learning. We hope that this paper will serve as an accessible introduction to the theory and practice of certificate learning, both to those who wish to apply these tools to practical robotics problems and to those who wish to dive more deeply into the theory of learning for control.
Video Segmentation Learning Using Cascade Residual Convolutional Neural Network
Santos, Daniel F. S., Pires, Rafael G., Colombo, Danilo, Papa, João P.
Video segmentation consists of a frame-by-frame selection process of meaningful areas related to foreground moving objects. Some applications include traffic monitoring, human tracking, action recognition, efficient video surveillance, and anomaly detection. In these applications, it is not rare to face challenges such as abrupt changes in weather conditions, illumination issues, shadows, subtle dynamic background motions, and also camouflage effects. In this work, we address such shortcomings by proposing a novel deep learning video segmentation approach that incorporates residual information into the foreground detection learning process. The main goal is to provide a method capable of generating an accurate foreground detection given a grayscale video. Experiments conducted on the Change Detection 2014 and on the private dataset PetrobrasROUTES from Petrobras support the effectiveness of the proposed approach concerning some state-of-the-art video segmentation techniques, with overall F-measures of $\mathbf{0.9535}$ and $\mathbf{0.9636}$ in the Change Detection 2014 and PetrobrasROUTES datasets, respectively. Such a result places the proposed technique amongst the top 3 state-of-the-art video segmentation methods, besides comprising approximately seven times less parameters than its top one counterpart.
Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic for Robotic Arm Control
Acuto, Alberto, Barillà, Paola, Bozzolo, Ludovico, Conterno, Matteo, Pavese, Mattia, Policicchio, Antonio
Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for real-world applications, mainly because of two common issues of this learning paradigm: the exploration strategy and the slow learning speed, sometimes known as "the curse of dimensionality". This work aims at exploring and assessing the advantages of the application of Quantum Computing to one of the state-of-art Reinforcement Learning techniques for continuous control - namely Soft Actor-Critic. Specifically, the performance of a Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic on the movement of a virtual robotic arm has been investigated by means of digital simulations of quantum circuits. A quantum advantage over the classical algorithm has been found in terms of a significant decrease in the amount of required parameters for satisfactory model training, paving the way for further promising developments.
Multi-head Uncertainty Inference for Adversarial Attack Detection
Yang, Yuqi, Yang, Songyun, Si, Jiyang Xie. Zhongwei, Guo, Kai, Zhang, Ke, Liang, Kongming
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are sensitive and susceptible to tiny perturbation by adversarial attacks which causes erroneous predictions. Various methods, including adversarial defense and uncertainty inference (UI), have been developed in recent years to overcome the adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a multi-head uncertainty inference (MH-UI) framework for detecting adversarial attack examples. We adopt a multi-head architecture with multiple prediction heads (i.e., classifiers) to obtain predictions from different depths in the DNNs and introduce shallow information for the UI. Using independent heads at different depths, the normalized predictions are assumed to follow the same Dirichlet distribution, and we estimate distribution parameter of it by moment matching. Cognitive uncertainty brought by the adversarial attacks will be reflected and amplified on the distribution. Experimental results show that the proposed MH-UI framework can outperform all the referred UI methods in the adversarial attack detection task with different settings.
Hidden Poison: Machine Unlearning Enables Camouflaged Poisoning Attacks
Di, Jimmy Z., Douglas, Jack, Acharya, Jayadev, Kamath, Gautam, Sekhari, Ayush
We introduce camouflaged data poisoning attacks, a new attack vector that arises in the context of machine unlearning and other settings when model retraining may be induced. An adversary first adds a few carefully crafted points to the training dataset such that the impact on the model's predictions is minimal. The adversary subsequently triggers a request to remove a subset of the introduced points at which point the attack is unleashed and the model's predictions are negatively affected. In particular, we consider clean-label targeted attacks (in which the goal is to cause the model to misclassify a specific test point) on datasets including CIFAR-10, Imagenette, and Imagewoof. This attack is realized by constructing camouflage datapoints that mask the effect of a poisoned dataset.
Contextual-Lexicon Approach for Abusive Language Detection
Vargas, Francielle, de Góes, Fabiana Rodrigues, Carvalho, Isabelle, Benevenuto, Fabrício, Pardo, Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro
Since a lexicon-based approach is more elegant scientifically, explaining the solution components and being easier to generalize to other applications, this paper provides a new approach for offensive language and hate speech detection on social media. Our approach embodies a lexicon of implicit and explicit offensive and swearing expressions annotated with contextual information. Due to the severity of the social media abusive comments in Brazil, and the lack of research in Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese is the language used to validate the models. Nevertheless, our method may be applied to any other language. The conducted experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, outperforming the current baseline methods for the Portuguese language.
What do you MEME? Generating Explanations for Visual Semantic Role Labelling in Memes
Sharma, Shivam, Agarwal, Siddhant, Suresh, Tharun, Nakov, Preslav, Akhtar, Md. Shad, Chakraborty, Tanmoy
Memes are powerful means for effective communication on social media. Their effortless amalgamation of viral visuals and compelling messages can have far-reaching implications with proper marketing. Previous research on memes has primarily focused on characterizing their affective spectrum and detecting whether the meme's message insinuates any intended harm, such as hate, offense, racism, etc. However, memes often use abstraction, which can be elusive. Here, we introduce a novel task - EXCLAIM, generating explanations for visual semantic role labeling in memes. To this end, we curate ExHVV, a novel dataset that offers natural language explanations of connotative roles for three types of entities - heroes, villains, and victims, encompassing 4,680 entities present in 3K memes. We also benchmark ExHVV with several strong unimodal and multimodal baselines. Moreover, we posit LUMEN, a novel multimodal, multi-task learning framework that endeavors to address EXCLAIM optimally by jointly learning to predict the correct semantic roles and correspondingly to generate suitable natural language explanations. LUMEN distinctly outperforms the best baseline across 18 standard natural language generation evaluation metrics. Our systematic evaluation and analyses demonstrate that characteristic multimodal cues required for adjudicating semantic roles are also helpful for generating suitable explanations.