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NeuralMOVES: A lightweight and microscopic vehicle emission estimation model based on reverse engineering and surrogate learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This significant contribution makes it a critical sector for climate change mitigation, as reducing emissions from transportation is essential for achieving global climate goals. The sector's transformation through electrification, automation, and intelligent infrastructure offers promising avenues for substantial emissions reductions (Sciarretta et al., 2020; International Energy Agency, 2023; McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, 2023). However, the success of these innovations is critically dependent on the availability of suitable and accurate emission estimation models to guide the design and deployment of new technologies. Motor Vehicle Emission Simulation (MOVES) (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2022), one of the most well-established emission estimation models, serves as the official and state-of-the-art emission estimation model in the U.S., provided, enforced, and maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Despite its technical certification, MOVES' processing and software is tailored for two specific governmental uses: State Implementation Plans and Conformity Analyses U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (2021), which are for states to achieve and maintain air quality standards; and its use beyond trained practitioners and these specific analyses poses two main limitations. First, a steep learning curve, computational demands, and complex inputs make it difficult for researchers and practitioners to use. In particular, MOVES has rigid input requirements, including a combination of toggle-based settings within its GUI and structured input files in specific formats. Second, MOVES is tailored for macroscopic analysis and is unsuitable for microscopic applications, such as control and optimization, which commonly require second-by-second emission calculations for individual actions and vehicles.


When One LLM Drools, Multi-LLM Collaboration Rules

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This position paper argues that in many realistic (i.e., complex, contextualized, subjective) scenarios, one LLM is not enough to produce a reliable output. We challenge the status quo of relying solely on a single general-purpose LLM and argue for multi-LLM collaboration to better represent the extensive diversity of data, skills, and people. We first posit that a single LLM underrepresents real-world data distributions, heterogeneous skills, and pluralistic populations, and that such representation gaps cannot be trivially patched by further training a single LLM. We then organize existing multi-LLM collaboration methods into a hierarchy, based on the level of access and information exchange, ranging from API-level, text-level, logit-level, to weight-level collaboration. Based on these methods, we highlight how multi-LLM collaboration addresses challenges that a single LLM struggles with, such as reliability, democratization, and pluralism. Finally, we identify the limitations of existing multi-LLM methods and motivate future work. We envision multi-LLM collaboration as an essential path toward compositional intelligence and collaborative AI development.


A Classification System Approach in Predicting Chinese Censorship

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper is dedicated to using a classifier to predict whether a Weibo post would be censored under the Chinese internet. Through randomized sampling from \citeauthor{Fu2021} and Chinese tokenizing strategies, we constructed a cleaned Chinese phrase dataset with binary censorship markings. Utilizing various probability-based information retrieval methods on the data, we were able to derive 4 logistic regression models for classification. Furthermore, we experimented with pre-trained transformers to perform similar classification tasks. After evaluating both the macro-F1 and ROC-AUC metrics, we concluded that the Fined-Tuned BERT model exceeds other strategies in performance.


Leveraging Reasoning with Guidelines to Elicit and Utilize Knowledge for Enhancing Safety Alignment

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Training safe LLMs is one of the most critical research challenge. However, the commonly used method, Refusal Training (RT), struggles to generalize against various OOD jailbreaking attacks. Many safety training methods have been proposed to address this issue. While they offer valuable insights, we aim to complement this line of research by investigating whether OOD attacks truly exceed the capability of RT model. Conducting evaluation with BoN, we observe significant improvements on generalization as N increases. This underscores that the model possesses sufficient safety-related latent knowledge, but RT fails to consistently elicit this knowledge when addressing OOD attacks. Further analysis based on domain adaptation reveals that training with direct refusal causes model to rely on superficial shortcuts, resulting in learning of non-robust representation mappings. Based on our findings, we propose training model to perform safety reasoning for each query. Reasoning supervision encourages model to perform more computations, explicitly eliciting and using latent knowledge through reasoning. To achieve this, we synthesize reasoning supervision based on pre-guidelines, training the model to reason in alignment with them, thereby effectively eliciting and utilizing latent knowledge from diverse perspectives. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves generalization performance against OOD attacks.


Sea-cret Agents: Maritime Abduction for Region Generation to Expose Dark Vessel Trajectories

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Bad actors in the maritime industry engage in illegal behaviors after disabling their vessel's automatic identification system (AIS) - which makes finding such vessels difficult for analysts. Machine learning approaches only succeed in identifying the locations of these ``dark vessels'' in the immediate future. This work leverages ideas from the literature on abductive inference applied to locating adversarial agents to solve the problem. Specifically, we combine concepts from abduction, logic programming, and rule learning to create an efficient method that approaches full recall of dark vessels while requiring less search area than machine learning methods. We provide a logic-based paradigm for reasoning about maritime vessels, an abductive inference query method, an automatically extracted rule-based behavior model methodology, and a thorough suite of experiments.


Private Minimum Hellinger Distance Estimation via Hellinger Distance Differential Privacy

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Objective functions based on Hellinger distance yield robust and efficient estimators of model parameters. Motivated by privacy and regulatory requirements encountered in contemporary applications, we derive in this paper \emph{private minimum Hellinger distance estimators}. The estimators satisfy a new privacy constraint, namely, Hellinger differential privacy, while retaining the robustness and efficiency properties. We demonstrate that Hellinger differential privacy shares several features of standard differential privacy while allowing for sharper inference. Additionally, for computational purposes, we also develop Hellinger differentially private gradient descent and Newton-Raphson algorithms. We illustrate the behavior of our estimators in finite samples using numerical experiments and verify that they retain robustness properties under gross-error contamination.


The ML Supply Chain in the Era of Software 2.0: Lessons Learned from Hugging Face

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The last decade has seen widespread adoption of Machine Learning (ML) components in software systems. This has occurred in nearly every domain, from natural language processing to computer vision. These ML components range from relatively simple neural networks to complex and resource-intensive large language models. However, despite this widespread adoption, little is known about the supply chain relationships that produce these models, which can have implications for compliance and security. In this work, we conduct an extensive analysis of 760,460 models and 175,000 datasets mined from the popular model-sharing site Hugging Face. First, we evaluate the current state of documentation in the Hugging Face supply chain, report real-world examples of shortcomings, and offer actionable suggestions for improvement. Next, we analyze the underlying structure of the extant supply chain. Finally, we explore the current licensing landscape against what was reported in prior work and discuss the unique challenges posed in this domain. Our results motivate multiple research avenues, including the need for better license management for ML models/datasets, better support for model documentation, and automated inconsistency checking and validation. We make our research infrastructure and dataset available to facilitate future research.


The Cake that is Intelligence and Who Gets to Bake it: An AI Analogy and its Implications for Participation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In a widely popular analogy by Turing Award Laureate Yann LeCun, machine intelligence has been compared to cake --where unsupervised learning forms the base, supervised learning adds the icing, and reinforcement learning is the cherry on top. We expand this "cake that is intelligence" analogy from a simple structural metaphor to the full life-cycle of AI systems, extending it to sourcing of ingredients (data), conception of recipes (instructions), the baking process (training), and the tasting and selling of the cake (evaluation and distribution). Leveraging our re-conceptualization, we describe each step's entailed social ramifications and how they are bounded by statistical assumptions within machine learning. Whereas these technical foundations and social impacts are deeply intertwined, they are often studied in isolation, creating barriers that restrict meaningful participation. Our re-conceptualization paves the way to bridge this gap by mapping where technical foundations interact with social outcomes, highlighting opportunities for cross-disciplinary dialogue. Finally, we conclude with actionable recommendations at each stage of the metaphorical AI cake's life-cycle, empowering prospective AI practitioners, users, and researchers, with increased awareness and ability to engage in broader AI discourse.


Realistic Image-to-Image Machine Unlearning via Decoupling and Knowledge Retention

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine Unlearning allows participants to remove their data from a trained machine learning model in order to preserve their privacy, and security. However, the machine unlearning literature for generative models is rather limited. The literature for image-to-image generative model (I2I model) considers minimizing the distance between Gaussian noise and the output of I2I model for forget samples as machine unlearning. However, we argue that the machine learning model performs fairly well on unseen data i.e., a retrained model will be able to catch generic patterns in the data and hence will not generate an output which is equivalent to Gaussian noise. In this paper, we consider that the model after unlearning should treat forget samples as out-of-distribution (OOD) data, i.e., the unlearned model should no longer recognize or encode the specific patterns found in the forget samples. To achieve this, we propose a framework which decouples the model parameters with gradient ascent, ensuring that forget samples are OOD for unlearned model with theoretical guarantee. We also provide $(\epsilon, \delta)$-unlearning guarantee for model updates with gradient ascent. The unlearned model is further fine-tuned on the remaining samples to maintain its performance. We also propose an attack model to ensure that the unlearned model has effectively removed the influence of forget samples. Extensive empirical evaluation on two large-scale datasets, ImageNet-1K and Places365 highlights the superiority of our approach. To show comparable performance with retrained model, we also show the comparison of a simple AutoEncoder on various baselines on CIFAR-10 dataset.


Speak Easy: Eliciting Harmful Jailbreaks from LLMs with Simple Interactions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite extensive safety alignment efforts, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that elicit harmful behavior. While existing studies predominantly focus on attack methods that require technical expertise, two critical questions remain underexplored: (1) Are jailbroken responses truly useful in enabling average users to carry out harmful actions? (2) Do safety vulnerabilities exist in more common, simple human-LLM interactions? In this paper, we demonstrate that LLM responses most effectively facilitate harmful actions when they are both actionable and informative--two attributes easily elicited in multi-step, multilingual interactions. Using this insight, we propose HarmScore, a jailbreak metric that measures how effectively an LLM response enables harmful actions, and Speak Easy, a simple multi-step, multilingual attack framework. Notably, by incorporating Speak Easy into direct request and jailbreak baselines, we see an average absolute increase of 0.319 in Attack Success Rate and 0.426 in HarmScore in both open-source and proprietary LLMs across four safety benchmarks. Our work reveals a critical yet often overlooked vulnerability: Malicious users can easily exploit common interaction patterns for harmful intentions.