Law
FUIA: Model Inversion Attack against Federated Unlearning
With the introduction of regulations related to the ``right to be forgotten", federated learning (FL) is facing new privacy compliance challenges. To address these challenges, researchers have proposed federated unlearning (FU). However, existing FU research has primarily focused on improving the efficiency of unlearning, with less attention paid to the potential privacy vulnerabilities inherent in these methods. To address this gap, we draw inspiration from gradient inversion attacks in FL and propose the federated unlearning inversion attack (FUIA). The FUIA is specifically designed for the three types of FU (sample unlearning, client unlearning, and class unlearning), aiming to provide a comprehensive analysis of the privacy leakage risks associated with FU. In FUIA, the server acts as an honest-but-curious attacker, recording and exploiting the model differences before and after unlearning to expose the features and labels of forgotten data. FUIA significantly leaks the privacy of forgotten data and can target all types of FU. This attack contradicts the goal of FU to eliminate specific data influence, instead exploiting its vulnerabilities to recover forgotten data and expose its privacy flaws. Extensive experimental results show that FUIA can effectively reveal the private information of forgotten data. To mitigate this privacy leakage, we also explore two potential defense methods, although these come at the cost of reduced unlearning effectiveness and the usability of the unlearned model.
Google will still have to break up its business, the Justice Department said
Google will have to break up its business, the Justice Department said in a filing, upholding the previous administration's proposal after a federal judge ruled last year that the company illegally abused a monopoly over the search industry. As The Washington Post and The New York Times have reported, the Justice Department reiterated in a new filing that Google will have to sell the Chrome browser. When the DOJ argued for its sale last year, it said that selling Chrome "will permanently stop Google's control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet." The Justice Department also kept a Biden-era proposal that seeks to ban Google from paying companies like Apple, other smartphone manufacturers and Mozilla to make its search engine the default on their phones and browsers. It did remove a previous proposal that would compel Google to sell its stakes in AI startups, however, after Anthropic told the government that it needs the company's money to continue operating. Instead of banning AI investments altogether, the government wants to require the company to notify federal and state officials before making investments in artificial intelligence.
DAVID MARCUS: Andrew Tate is the woke Left's misogynist Frankenstein
The Tate brothers left the Sunshine State Thursday ahead of an expected court appearance in Romania, but influencer and former MMA fighter Andrew Tate says he'll be back. Andrew Tate is back in America, forcing us to confront his perverse messaging to a subset of America's young men. But what we really need to come to grips with are the social conditions in our culture that created an opening for this men's rights Frankenstein. Tate, 38, is a former professional kickboxer facing sex trafficking charges in Romania, serious enough that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis insists the podcast star is not welcome in the Sunshine State, where he landed earlier this week; the Florida attorney general is now investigating Tate and his brother Tristan. ANDREW TATE SAYS HE PLANS TO LIVE IN FLORIDA DESPITE'HEE HAW' OVER RETURN TO US SOIL Tate made a fortune off of a "webcam model" (read: porn) business, then began selling online courses ostensibly teaching alienated boys and young men how to become alpha males.
Decoding the Black Box: Integrating Moral Imagination with Technical AI Governance
This paper examines the intricate interplay among AI safety, security, and governance by integrating technical systems engineering with principles of moral imagination and ethical philosophy. Drawing on foundational insights from Weapons of Math Destruction and Thinking in Systems alongside contemporary debates in AI ethics, we develop a comprehensive multi-dimensional framework designed to regulate AI technologies deployed in high-stakes domains such as defense, finance, healthcare, and education. Our approach combines rigorous technical analysis, quantitative risk assessment, and normative evaluation to expose systemic vulnerabilities inherent in opaque, black-box models. Detailed case studies, including analyses of Microsoft Tay (2016) and the UK A-Level Grading Algorithm (2020), demonstrate how security lapses, bias amplification, and lack of accountability can precipitate cascading failures that undermine public trust. We conclude by outlining targeted strategies for enhancing AI resilience through adaptive regulatory mechanisms, robust security protocols, and interdisciplinary oversight, thereby advancing the state of the art in ethical and technical AI governance.
MARRO: Multi-headed Attention for Rhetorical Role Labeling in Legal Documents
Bambroo, Purbid, Adhikary, Subinay, Bhattacharya, Paheli, Chakraborty, Abhijnan, Ghosh, Saptarshi, Ghosh, Kripabandhu
Identification of rhetorical roles like facts, arguments, and final judgments is central to understanding a legal case document and can lend power to other downstream tasks like legal case summarization and judgment prediction. However, there are several challenges to this task. Legal documents are often unstructured and contain a specialized vocabulary, making it hard for conventional transformer models to understand them. Additionally, these documents run into several pages, which makes it difficult for neural models to capture the entire context at once. Lastly, there is a dearth of annotated legal documents to train deep learning models. Previous state-of-the-art approaches for this task have focused on using neural models like BiLSTM-CRF or have explored different embedding techniques to achieve decent results. While such techniques have shown that better embedding can result in improved model performance, not many models have focused on utilizing attention for learning better embeddings in sentences of a document. Additionally, it has been recently shown that advanced techniques like multi-task learning can help the models learn better representations, thereby improving performance. In this paper, we combine these two aspects by proposing a novel family of multi-task learning-based models for rhetorical role labeling, named MARRO, that uses transformer-inspired multi-headed attention. Using label shift as an auxiliary task, we show that models from the MARRO family achieve state-of-the-art results on two labeled datasets for rhetorical role labeling, from the Indian and UK Supreme Courts.
The AI Pentad, the CHARME$^{2}$D Model, and an Assessment of Current-State AI Regulation
Gao, Di Kevin, Mittal, Sudip, Wu, Jiming, Du, Hongwei, Chen, Jingdao, Rahimi, Shahram
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made remarkable progress in the past few years with AI-enabled applications beginning to permeate every aspect of our society. Despite the widespread consensus on the need to regulate AI, there remains a lack of a unified approach to framing, developing, and assessing AI regulations. Many of the existing methods take a value-based approach, for example, accountability, fairness, free from bias, transparency, and trust. However, these methods often face challenges at the outset due to disagreements in academia over the subjective nature of these definitions. This paper aims to establish a unifying model for AI regulation from the perspective of core AI components. We first introduce the AI Pentad, which comprises the five essential components of AI: humans and organizations, algorithms, data, computing, and energy. We then review AI regulatory enablers, including AI registration and disclosure, AI monitoring, and AI enforcement mechanisms. Subsequently, we present the CHARME$^{2}$D Model to explore further the relationship between the AI Pentad and AI regulatory enablers. Finally, we apply the CHARME$^{2}$D model to assess AI regulatory efforts in the European Union (EU), China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. This comparative evaluation offers insights for future legislative work in the AI domain.
Learning to Unlearn while Retaining: Combating Gradient Conflicts in Machine Unlearning
Machine Unlearning has recently garnered significant attention, aiming to selectively remove knowledge associated with specific data while preserving the model's performance on the remaining data. A fundamental challenge in this process is balancing effective unlearning with knowledge retention, as naive optimization of these competing objectives can lead to conflicting gradients, hindering convergence and degrading overall performance. To address this issue, we propose Learning to Unlearn while Retaining, aimed to mitigate gradient conflicts between unlearning and retention objectives. Our approach strategically avoids conflicts through an implicit gradient regularization mechanism that emerges naturally within the proposed framework. This prevents conflicting gradients between unlearning and retention, leading to effective unlearning while preserving the model's utility. We validate our approach across both discriminative and generative tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in achieving unlearning without compromising performance on remaining data. Our results highlight the advantages of avoiding such gradient conflicts, outperforming existing methods that fail to account for these interactions.
A Survey on Post-training of Large Language Models
Tie, Guiyao, Zhao, Zeli, Song, Dingjie, Wei, Fuyang, Zhou, Rong, Dai, Yurou, Yin, Wen, Yang, Zhejian, Yan, Jiangyue, Su, Yao, Dai, Zhenhan, Xie, Yifeng, Cao, Yihan, Sun, Lichao, Zhou, Pan, He, Lifang, Chen, Hechang, Zhang, Yu, Wen, Qingsong, Liu, Tianming, Gong, Neil Zhenqiang, Tang, Jiliang, Xiong, Caiming, Ji, Heng, Yu, Philip S., Gao, Jianfeng
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has fundamentally transformed natural language processing, making them indispensable across domains ranging from conversational systems to scientific exploration. However, their pre-trained architectures often reveal limitations in specialized contexts, including restricted reasoning capacities, ethical uncertainties, and suboptimal domain-specific performance. These challenges necessitate advanced post-training language models (PoLMs) to address these shortcomings, such as OpenAI-o1/o3 and DeepSeek-R1 (collectively known as Large Reasoning Models, or LRMs). This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of PoLMs, systematically tracing their evolution across five core paradigms: Fine-tuning, which enhances task-specific accuracy; Alignment, which ensures alignment with human preferences; Reasoning, which advances multi-step inference despite challenges in reward design; Efficiency, which optimizes resource utilization amidst increasing complexity; and Integration and Adaptation, which extend capabilities across diverse modalities while addressing coherence issues. Charting progress from ChatGPT's foundational alignment strategies to DeepSeek-R1's innovative reasoning advancements, we illustrate how PoLMs leverage datasets to mitigate biases, deepen reasoning capabilities, and enhance domain adaptability. Our contributions include a pioneering synthesis of PoLM evolution, a structured taxonomy categorizing techniques and datasets, and a strategic agenda emphasizing the role of LRMs in improving reasoning proficiency and domain flexibility. As the first survey of its scope, this work consolidates recent PoLM advancements and establishes a rigorous intellectual framework for future research, fostering the development of LLMs that excel in precision, ethical robustness, and versatility across scientific and societal applications.
Detecting Offensive Memes with Social Biases in Singapore Context Using Multimodal Large Language Models
Yuxuan, Cao, Jiayang, Wu, Chuen, Alistair Cheong Liang, Guanrong, Bryan Shan, Jen, Theodore Lee Chong, Shen, Sherman Chann Zhi
Traditional online content moderation systems struggle to classify modern multimodal means of communication, such as memes, a highly nuanced and information-dense medium. This task is especially hard in a culturally diverse society like Singapore, where low-resource languages are used and extensive knowledge on local context is needed to interpret online content. We curate a large collection of 112K memes labeled by GPT-4V for fine-tuning a VLM to classify offensive memes in Singapore context. We show the effectiveness of fine-tuned VLMs on our dataset, and propose a pipeline containing OCR, translation and a 7-billion parameter-class VLM. Our solutions reach 80.62% accuracy and 0.8192 AUROC on a held-out test set, and can greatly aid human in moderating online contents. The dataset, code, and model weights have been open-sourced at https://github.com/aliencaocao/vlm-for-memes-aisg.
The DOJ Still Wants Google to Sell Off Chrome
The US Department of Justice wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its final remedy proposal in a landmark antitrust case. The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must "promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve." It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine. The DOJ also demands that Google provide prior notification of any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads. However, the company no longer has to divest its artificial intelligence investments, which was part of an initial set of recommendations issued by the plaintiffs last November.