Deep neural networks are becoming increasingly pervasive in academia and industry, matching and surpassing human performance on a wide variety of fields and related tasks. However, just as humans, even the largest artificial neural networks make mistakes, and once-correct predictions can become invalid as the world progresses in time. Augmenting datasets with samples that account for mistakes or up-to-date information has become a common workaround in practical applications. However, the well-known phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting poses a challenge in achieving precise changes in the implicitly memorized knowledge of neural network parameters, often requiring a full model re-training to achieve desired behaviors. That is expensive, unreliable, and incompatible with the current trend of large self-supervised pre-training, making it necessary to find more efficient and effective methods for adapting neural network models to changing data. To address this need, knowledge editing is emerging as a novel area of research that aims to enable reliable, data-efficient, and fast changes to a pre-trained target model, without affecting model behaviors on previously learned tasks. In this survey, we provide a brief review of this recent artificial intelligence field of research. We first introduce the problem of editing neural networks, formalize it in a common framework and differentiate it from more notorious branches of research such as continuous learning. Next, we provide a review of the most relevant knowledge editing approaches and datasets proposed so far, grouping works under four different families: regularization techniques, meta-learning, direct model editing, and architectural strategies. Finally, we outline some intersections with other fields of research and potential directions for future works.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed both the academic and industrial landscapes due to their remarkable capacity to understand, analyze, and generate texts based on their vast knowledge and reasoning ability. Nevertheless, one major drawback of LLMs is their substantial computational cost for pre-training due to their unprecedented amounts of parameters. The disadvantage is exacerbated when new knowledge frequently needs to be introduced into the pre-trained model. Therefore, it is imperative to develop effective and efficient techniques to update pre-trained LLMs. Traditional methods encode new knowledge in pre-trained LLMs through direct fine-tuning. However, naively re-training LLMs can be computationally intensive and risks degenerating valuable pre-trained knowledge irrelevant to the update in the model. Recently, Knowledge-based Model Editing (KME) has attracted increasing attention, which aims to precisely modify the LLMs to incorporate specific knowledge, without negatively influencing other irrelevant knowledge. In this survey, we aim to provide a comprehensive and in-depth overview of recent advances in the field of KME. We first introduce a general formulation of KME to encompass different KME strategies. Afterward, we provide an innovative taxonomy of KME techniques based on how the new knowledge is introduced into pre-trained LLMs, and investigate existing KME strategies while analyzing key insights, advantages, and limitations of methods from each category. Moreover, representative metrics, datasets, and applications of KME are introduced accordingly. Finally, we provide an in-depth analysis regarding the practicality and remaining challenges of KME and suggest promising research directions for further advancement in this field.

Large language models (LLMs) can be used to serve as agents to simulate human behaviors, given the powerful ability to understand human instructions and provide high-quality generated texts. Such ability stimulates us to wonder whether LLMs can simulate a person in a higher form than simple human behaviors. Therefore, we aim to train an agent with the profile, experience, and emotional states of a specific person instead of using limited prompts to instruct ChatGPT API. In this work, we introduce Character-LLM that teach LLMs to act as specific people such as Beethoven, Queen Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, etc. Our method focuses on editing profiles as experiences of a certain character and training models to be personal simulacra with these experiences. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we build a test playground that interviews trained agents and evaluates whether the agents \textit{memorize} their characters and experiences. Experimental results show interesting observations that help build future simulacra of humankind.

While federated learning is promising for privacy-preserving collaborative learning without revealing local data, it remains vulnerable to white-box attacks and struggles to adapt to heterogeneous clients. Federated distillation (FD), built upon knowledge distillation--an effective technique for transferring knowledge from a teacher model to student models--emerges as an alternative paradigm, which provides enhanced privacy guarantees and addresses model heterogeneity. Nevertheless, challenges arise due to variations in local data distributions and the absence of a well-trained teacher model, which leads to misleading and ambiguous knowledge sharing that significantly degrades model performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a selective knowledge sharing mechanism for FD, termed Selective-FD. It includes client-side selectors and a server-side selector to accurately and precisely identify knowledge from local and ensemble predictions, respectively. Empirical studies, backed by theoretical insights, demonstrate that our approach enhances the generalization capabilities of the FD framework and consistently outperforms baseline methods.

Clustering algorithms may unintentionally propagate or intensify existing disparities, leading to unfair representations or biased decision-making. Current fair clustering methods rely on notions of fairness that do not capture any information on the underlying causal mechanisms. We show that optimising for non-causal fairness notions can paradoxically induce direct discriminatory effects from a causal standpoint. We present a clustering approach that incorporates causal fairness metrics to provide a more nuanced approach to fairness in unsupervised learning. Our approach enables the specification of the causal fairness metrics that should be minimised. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology using datasets known to harbour unfair biases.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan accused the Federal Trade Commissions Lina Khan of "harassing" Twitter since Elon Musks takeover. A Biden administration agency has quietly leaned on a web of technology and antitrust advocacy groups funded by George Soros and other progressive billionaires for critical policy and enforcement roles, Fox News Digital has learned. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), tasked with protecting consumers, has previously faced criticism over its "revolving door" with regulated industries. Now, it has not only relied on a handful of groups for their expertise but has pulled individuals from a network funded by the same small collection of affluent Democrat donors for crucial government positions. It's the latest illustration of how the Biden administration has counted on outside organizations that receive considerable funding from progressive benefactors.

It's a perennial debate: whether American tech companies are contributing to government control of the internet in China. But long before Apple ceded control of local user data to the state or Microsoft was found to have partnered with a Chinese military-run university on artificial-intelligence research, there was Yahoo. Back in the early 2000s, Yahoo was operating a popular search engine and email service in China, and it was one of the first tech companies to be found sharing user information with the Chinese government, leading to the imprisonment of a number of Chinese citizens. The ensuing attention and subsequent lawsuit against Yahoo from the families of two political prisoners landed a big blow against the company. All this probably seems like a lifetime ago, but my colleague Eileen Guo has found that the consequences of Yahoo's actions are still very much felt today.

Recent publications explore AI biases in detecting objects and people in the environment. However, there is no research tackling how AI examines nature. This case study presents a pioneering exploration into the AI attitudes (ecocentric, anthropocentric and antipathetic) toward nature. Experiments with a Large Language Model (LLM) and an image captioning algorithm demonstrate the presence of anthropocentric biases in AI. Moreover, to delve deeper into these biases and Human-Nature-AI interaction, we conducted a real-life experiment in which participants underwent an immersive de-anthropocentric experience in a forest and subsequently engaged with ChatGPT to co-create narratives. By creating fictional AI chatbot characters with ecocentric attributes, emotions and views, we successfully amplified ecocentric exchanges. We encountered some difficulties, mainly that participants deviated from narrative co-creation to short dialogues and questions and answers, possibly due to the novelty of interacting with LLMs. To solve this problem, we recommend providing preliminary guidelines on interacting with LLMs and allowing participants to get familiar with the technology. We plan to repeat this experiment in various countries and forests to expand our corpus of ecocentric materials.

In the contemporary interconnected world, the concept of cultural responsibility occupies paramount importance. As the lines between nations become less distinct, it is incumbent upon individuals, communities, and institutions to assume the responsibility of safeguarding and valuing the landscape of diverse cultures that constitute our global society. This paper explores the socio-cultural and ethical challenges stemming from the implementation of AI algorithms and highlights the necessity for their culturally responsive development. It also offers recommendations on essential elements required to enhance AI systems' adaptability to meet the demands of contemporary multicultural societies. The paper highlights the need for further multidisciplinary research to create AI models that effectively address these challenges. It also advocates the significance of AI enculturation and underlines the importance of regulatory measures to promote cultural responsibility in AI systems.

The protection of sensitive data becomes more vital, as data increases in value and potency. Furthermore, the pressure increases from regulators and society on model developers to make their Artificial Intelligence (AI) models non-discriminatory. To boot, there is a need for interpretable, transparent AI models for high-stakes tasks. In general, measuring the fairness of any AI model requires the sensitive attributes of the individuals in the dataset, thus raising privacy concerns. In this work, the trade-offs between fairness, privacy and interpretability are further explored. We specifically examine the Statistical Parity (SP) of Decision Trees (DTs) with Differential Privacy (DP), that are each popular methods in their respective subfield. We propose a novel method, dubbed Privacy-Aware Fairness Estimation of Rules (PAFER), that can estimate SP in a DP-aware manner for DTs. DP, making use of a third-party legal entity that securely holds this sensitive data, guarantees privacy by adding noise to the sensitive data. We experimentally compare several DP mechanisms. We show that using the Laplacian mechanism, the method is able to estimate SP with low error while guaranteeing the privacy of the individuals in the dataset with high certainty. We further show experimentally and theoretically that the method performs better for DTs that humans generally find easier to interpret.