Speaking behind a podium bearing the Ukrainian state emblem, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his now signature green attire, calls on his soldiers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. The one-minute clip is a deepfake, the term for a sophisticated hoax that uses artificial intelligence to create a phoney image, most commonly fake videos of people. A deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky calling on his soldiers to lay down their weapons was reportedly uploaded to a hacked Ukrainian news website today, per @Shayan86 pic.twitter.com/tXLrYECGY4 What unfolded next was the latest episode in the infowar that has accompanied the Russia-Ukraine conflict, a war being waged across social media platforms, via satellite images of battlefields and on hackers' keyboards. Zelenskiy posted a bona fide response on his Instagram account on Wednesday dismissing the "childish provocation" and telling Russian troops to return home.

Recently, prefix-tuning has gained increasing attention as a parameter-efficient finetuning method for large-scale pretrained language models. The method keeps the pretrained models fixed and only updates the prefix token parameters for each downstream task. Despite being lightweight and modular, prefix-tuning still lacks robustness to textual adversarial attacks. However, most currently developed defense techniques necessitate auxiliary model update and storage, which inevitably hamper the modularity and low storage of prefix-tuning. In this work, we propose a robust prefix-tuning framework that preserves the efficiency and modularity of prefix-tuning. The core idea of our framework is leveraging the layerwise activations of the language model by correctly-classified training data as the standard for additional prefix finetuning. During the test phase, an extra batch-level prefix is tuned for each batch and added to the original prefix for robustness enhancement. Extensive experiments on three text classification benchmarks show that our framework substantially improves robustness over several strong baselines against five textual attacks of different types while maintaining comparable accuracy on clean texts. We also interpret our robust prefix-tuning framework from the optimal control perspective and pose several directions for future research.

A deepfake video depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urging his citizens to surrender amid Ukraine's conflict with Russia circulated on social media and several news websites. The fake video showed a rendering of the Ukrainian president asking his troops to lay down their weapons and surrender to Russia. The footage, which ran about a minute long, was shared widely across online platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, on Wednesday before it was removed. "Earlier today, our teams identified and removed a deepfake video claiming to show President Zelensky issuing a statement he never did. It appeared on a reportedly compromised website and then started showing across the internet," Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta's head of security policy, said in a tweet. Meta is a tech company that owns Facebook and Twitter.

The Javelin, a shoulder-held anti-tank weapon that shoots heat-seeking rockets hurtling towards targets up to 4km (2.5 miles) away, can be controlled by a portable unit that doesn't look much different from a video game console - but can send a metre-long projectile straight through the side or top of an armoured tank.

A Russian "suicide drone" that boasts the ability to identify targets using artificial intelligence has been spotted in images of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Photographs showing what appears to be the KUB-BLA, a type of lethal drone known as a "loitering munition" sold by ZALA Aero, a subsidiary of the Russian arms company Kalashnikov, have appeared on Telegram and Twitter in recent days. The pictures show damaged drones that appear to have either crashed or been shot down. With a wingspan of 1.2 meters, the sleek white drone resembles a small pilotless fighter jet. It is fired from a portable launch, can travel up to 130 kilometers per hour for 30 minutes, and deliberately crashes into a target, detonating a 3-kilo explosive.

On March 2, the Ukraine government's Center for Strategic Communication warned that its enemies might be preparing a "deepfake" video that appeared to show president Volodymyr Zelensky announcing his surrender to Russia's invasion. On Wednesday, that warning appeared prescient. A fake video emerged on Facebook and YouTube in which a strangely motionless version of Zelensky asked Ukrainian troops to lay down their weapons in a voice different from his usual tone. The clip was also posted to Telegram and Russian social network VKontakte, according to the US think tank the Atlantic Council. TV Channel Ukraine 24 said hackers defaced its website with a still from the video and inserted a summary of the fake news into a broadcast's scrolling chyron.

The biggest difference from the games is that "Halo," a show developed by Kyle Killen ("Mind Games," "The Beaver") and Steven Kane ("The Closer," "The Last Ship"), kick-starts immediately with Master Chief navigating an identity crisis. The super soldier's thoughts are bouncing between his role as a duty-bound, RoboCop-like galactic enforcer and becoming a kinder, fuzzier Terminator with a heart of gold. The stimulus for this self-awareness is the show's most contrived plot point, namely Chief's connection with a magical ancient stone, an ever-reliable modern McGuffin. But the consequences of that internal crisis, at least for the first two episodes, also provide the best source of rising tension between Master Chief's dawning sense of righteousness and the borderline fascist government of the United Nations Space Command.

The big picture: Psychedelic drugs have long been touted as possible treatments for mental-health disorders like depression and PTSD. But very little is really known about what these substances actually do to our brains. Understanding how they work could help unlock their potential. A new methodology: Some scientists are using AI to figure it out. A team at McGill University in Montreal used natural language processing to study written "trip reports" of users' experiences with a range of drugs.

Who are the key actors of artificial intelligence (AI) in Quebec? What are the links between the different organizations that constitute the AI research infrastructure? How have academia, politics and economics intermingled in the development of this infrastructure? Based on what promises did the Quebec and Canadian governments invest hundreds of millions of public funds in this infrastructure? This research note attempts to answer these questions.

The Federal Trade Commission has struggled over the years to find ways to combat deceptive digital data practices using its limited set of enforcement options. Now, it's landed on one that could have a big impact on tech companies: algorithmic destruction. And as the agency gets more aggressive on tech by slowly introducing this new type of penalty, applying it in a settlement for the third time in three years could be the charm. In a March 4 settlement order, the agency demanded that WW International -- formerly known as Weight Watchers -- destroy the algorithms or AI models it built using personal information collected through its Kurbo healthy eating app from kids as young as 8 without parental permission. The agency also fined the company $1.5 million and ordered it to delete the illegally harvested data.