Law
The Video Game History Foundation's fight for game preservation isn't over
However, the VGHF continued by saying it won't back down and will continue advocating for improved video game preservation. For some context, the VGHF had been a longtime supporter of the Software Preservation Network's (SPN) petition to receive a DMCA exemption for the sake of preserving video games, especially for researchers who need access to them and can't do so due to unavailability. As the only currently legal way is to get a legitimate hard or soft copy of the game and play it on its corresponding console, researchers are encountering difficulties in progressing in their studies. Piracy would be illegal, of course, which is why the SPN is fighting for an exemption. However, there are those who don't see things this way.
Man who made 'depraved' child images with AI jailed
Nelson pleaded guilty to various counts of making, possessing and distributing indecent images of children and three counts of encouraging the rape of a child under the age of 13. He also admitted to a count of attempting to cause a child under 16 to engage in sexual activity and one of publishing an obscene article. Nelson, of Briggsfold Road, was sentenced to 18 years in jail, including six years on licence, and was placed on the sex offenders register. Nelson's parents sat in the court's public gallery as he appeared via video link from HMP Forest Bank. His mother wept into the crook of her arm as her son was jailed.
Man who used AI to create child abuse images jailed for 18 years
A man who used AI to create child abuse images using photographs of real children has been sentenced to 18 years in prison. In the first prosecution of its kind in the UK, Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, was convicted of 16 child sexual abuse offences in August, after an investigation by Greater Manchester police (GMP). Nelson had used Daz 3D, a computer programme with an AI function, to transform "normal" images of children into sexual abuse imagery, Greater Manchester police said. In some cases, paedophiles had commissioned the images, supplying photographs of children with whom they had contact in real life. He was also found guilty of encouraging other offenders to commit rape.
Congratulations to the winners of the #AIES2024 best paper awards
The Seventh AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES-24) was held in San Jose, California from October 21-23, 2024. During the opening session of the conference, the best paper award winners were announced. Abstract: In response to rising concerns surrounding the safety, security, and trustworthiness of Generative AI (GenAI) models, practitioners and regulators alike have pointed to AI red-teaming as a key component of their strategies for identifying and mitigating these risks. However, despite AI red-teaming's central role in policy discussions and corporate messaging, significant questions remain about what precisely it means, what role it can play in regulation, and how it relates to conventional red-teaming practices as originally conceived in the field of cybersecurity. In this work, we identify recent cases of red-teaming activities in the AI industry and conduct an extensive survey of relevant research literature to characterize the scope, structure, and criteria for AI red-teaming practices.
Beyond Autoregression: Fast LLMs via Self-Distillation Through Time
Deschenaux, Justin, Gulcehre, Caglar
Autoregressive (AR) Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success across numerous tasks. However, the AR modeling paradigm presents certain limitations; for instance, contemporary autoregressive LLMs are trained to generate one token at a time, which can result in noticeable latency. Recent advances have indicated that search and repeated sampling can enhance performance in various applications, such as theorem proving, code generation, and alignment, by utilizing greater computational resources during inference. In this study, we demonstrate that diffusion language models are capable of generating at least 32 tokens simultaneously, while exceeding the performance of AR models in text quality and on the LAMBADA natural language understanding benchmark. This outcome is achieved through a novel distillation method for discrete diffusion models, which reduces the number of inference steps by a factor of 32-64. Practically, our models, even without caching, can generate tokens at a rate that is up to 8 times faster than AR models employing KV caching, and we anticipate further improvements with the inclusion of caching. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for diffusion language models with up to 860M parameters.
Large Language Models for Manufacturing
Li, Yiwei, Zhao, Huaqin, Jiang, Hanqi, Pan, Yi, Liu, Zhengliang, Wu, Zihao, Shu, Peng, Tian, Jie, Yang, Tianze, Xu, Shaochen, Lyu, Yanjun, Blenk, Parker, Pence, Jacob, Rupram, Jason, Banu, Eliza, Liu, Ninghao, Wang, Linbing, Song, Wenzhan, Zhai, Xiaoming, Song, Kenan, Zhu, Dajiang, Li, Beiwen, Wang, Xianqiao, Liu, Tianming
The rapid advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform manufacturing industry, offering new opportunities to optimize processes, improve efficiency, and drive innovation. This paper provides a comprehensive exploration of the integration of LLMs into the manufacturing domain, focusing on their potential to automate and enhance various aspects of manufacturing, from product design and development to quality control, supply chain optimization, and talent management. Through extensive evaluations across multiple manufacturing tasks, we demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT-4V, in understanding and executing complex instructions, extracting valuable insights from vast amounts of data, and facilitating knowledge sharing. We also delve into the transformative potential of LLMs in reshaping manufacturing education, automating coding processes, enhancing robot control systems, and enabling the creation of immersive, data-rich virtual environments through the industrial metaverse. By highlighting the practical applications and emerging use cases of LLMs in manufacturing, this paper aims to provide a valuable resource for professionals, researchers, and decision-makers seeking to harness the power of these technologies to address real-world challenges, drive operational excellence, and unlock sustainable growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.
BongLLaMA: LLaMA for Bangla Language
Zehady, Abdullah Khan, Mamun, Safi Al, Islam, Naymul, Karmaker, Santu
Bangla (or "Bengali") is a language spoken by approximately 240 million native speakers and around 300 million people worldwide. Despite being the 5th largest spoken language in the world, Bangla is still a "low-resource" language, and existing pretrained language models often struggle to perform well on Bangla Language Processing (BLP) tasks. This work addresses this gap by introducing BongLLaMA (i.e., Bangla-LLaMA), an open-source large language model fine-tuned exclusively on large Bangla corpora and instruction-tuning datasets. We present our methodology, data augmentation techniques, fine-tuning details, and comprehensive benchmarking results showcasing the utility of BongLLaMA on BLP tasks. We believe BongLLaMA will serve as the new standard baseline for Bangla Language Models and, thus, facilitate future benchmarking studies focused on this widely-spoken yet "low-resource" language. All BongLLaMA models are available for public use at https://huggingface.co/BanglaLLM.
AI-Driven Human-Autonomy Teaming in Tactical Operations: Proposed Framework, Challenges, and Future Directions
Hagos, Desta Haileselassie, Alami, Hassan El, Rawat, Danda B.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly machine learning techniques, are rapidly transforming tactical operations by augmenting human decision-making capabilities. This paper explores AI-driven Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) as a transformative approach, focusing on how it empowers human decision-making in complex environments. While trust and explainability continue to pose significant challenges, our exploration focuses on the potential of AI-driven HAT to transform tactical operations. By improving situational awareness and supporting more informed decision-making, AI-driven HAT can enhance the effectiveness and safety of such operations. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework that addresses the key components of AI-driven HAT, including trust and transparency, optimal function allocation between humans and AI, situational awareness, and ethical considerations. The proposed framework can serve as a foundation for future research and development in the field. By identifying and discussing critical research challenges and knowledge gaps in this framework, our work aims to guide the advancement of AI-driven HAT for optimizing tactical operations. We emphasize the importance of developing scalable and ethical AI-driven HAT systems that ensure seamless human-machine collaboration, prioritize ethical considerations, enhance model transparency through Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, and effectively manage the cognitive load of human operators.
Pretraining Data Detection for Large Language Models: A Divergence-based Calibration Method
Zhang, Weichao, Zhang, Ruqing, Guo, Jiafeng, de Rijke, Maarten, Fan, Yixing, Cheng, Xueqi
As the scale of training corpora for large language models (LLMs) grows, model developers become increasingly reluctant to disclose details on their data. This lack of transparency poses challenges to scientific evaluation and ethical deployment. Recently, pretraining data detection approaches, which infer whether a given text was part of an LLM's training data through black-box access, have been explored. The Min-K\% Prob method, which has achieved state-of-the-art results, assumes that a non-training example tends to contain a few outlier words with low token probabilities. However, the effectiveness may be limited as it tends to misclassify non-training texts that contain many common words with high probabilities predicted by LLMs. To address this issue, we introduce a divergence-based calibration method, inspired by the divergence-from-randomness concept, to calibrate token probabilities for pretraining data detection. We compute the cross-entropy (i.e., the divergence) between the token probability distribution and the token frequency distribution to derive a detection score. We have developed a Chinese-language benchmark, PatentMIA, to assess the performance of detection approaches for LLMs on Chinese text. Experimental results on English-language benchmarks and PatentMIA demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods. Our code and PatentMIA benchmark are available at \url{https://github.com/zhang-wei-chao/DC-PDD}.
Belief in the Machine: Investigating Epistemological Blind Spots of Language Models
Suzgun, Mirac, Gur, Tayfun, Bianchi, Federico, Ho, Daniel E., Icard, Thomas, Jurafsky, Dan, Zou, James
As language models (LMs) become integral to fields like healthcare, law, and journalism, their ability to differentiate between fact, belief, and knowledge is essential for reliable decision-making. Failure to grasp these distinctions can lead to significant consequences in areas such as medical diagnosis, legal judgments, and dissemination of fake news. Despite this, current literature has largely focused on more complex issues such as theory of mind, overlooking more fundamental epistemic challenges. This study systematically evaluates the epistemic reasoning capabilities of modern LMs, including GPT-4, Claude-3, and Llama-3, using a new dataset, KaBLE, consisting of 13,000 questions across 13 tasks. Our results reveal key limitations. First, while LMs achieve 86% accuracy on factual scenarios, their performance drops significantly with false scenarios, particularly in belief-related tasks. Second, LMs struggle with recognizing and affirming personal beliefs, especially when those beliefs contradict factual data, which raises concerns for applications in healthcare and counseling, where engaging with a person's beliefs is critical. Third, we identify a salient bias in how LMs process first-person versus third-person beliefs, performing better on third-person tasks (80.7%) compared to first-person tasks (54.4%). Fourth, LMs lack a robust understanding of the factive nature of knowledge, namely, that knowledge inherently requires truth. Fifth, LMs rely on linguistic cues for fact-checking and sometimes bypass the deeper reasoning. These findings highlight significant concerns about current LMs' ability to reason about truth, belief, and knowledge while emphasizing the need for advancements in these areas before broad deployment in critical sectors.