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Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are transforming and empowering the characterization and control of dynamic systems in the engineering, physical, and biological sciences. These emerging modeling paradigms require comparative metrics to evaluate a diverse set of scientific objectives, including forecasting, state reconstruction, generalization, and control, while also considering limited data scenarios and noisy measurements. We introduce a common task framework (CTF) for science and engineering, which features a growing collection of challenge data sets with a diverse set of practical and common objectives. The CTF is a critically enabling technology that has contributed to the rapid advance of ML/AI algorithms in traditional applications such as speech recognition, language processing, and computer vision. There is a critical need for the objective metrics of a CTF to compare the diverse algorithms being rapidly developed and deployed in practice today across science and engineering.

As AI systems become increasingly capable, understanding their offensive cyber potential is critical for informed governance and responsible deployment. However, it's hard to accurately bound their capabilities, and some prior evaluations dramatically underestimated them. The art of extracting maximum task-specific performance from AIs is called "AI elicitation", and today's safety organizations typically conduct it in-house. In this paper, we explore crowdsourcing elicitation efforts as an alternative to in-house elicitation work. We host open-access AI tracks at two Capture The Flag (CTF) competitions: AI vs. Humans (400 teams) and Cyber Apocalypse (8000 teams). The AI teams achieve outstanding performance at both events, ranking top-5% and top-10% respectively for a total of \$7500 in bounties. This impressive performance suggests that open-market elicitation may offer an effective complement to in-house elicitation. We propose elicitation bounties as a practical mechanism for maintaining timely, cost-effective situational awareness of emerging AI capabilities. Another advantage of open elicitations is the option to collect human performance data at scale. Applying METR's methodology, we found that AI agents can reliably solve cyber challenges requiring one hour or less of effort from a median human CTF participant.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being harnessed to automate cyberattacks, making sophisticated exploits more accessible and scalable. In response, we propose a new defense strategy tailored to counter LLM-driven cyberattacks. We introduce Mantis, a defensive framework that exploits LLMs' susceptibility to adversarial inputs to undermine malicious operations. Upon detecting an automated cyberattack, Mantis plants carefully crafted inputs into system responses, leading the attacker's LLM to disrupt their own operations (passive defense) or even compromise the attacker's machine (active defense). By deploying purposefully vulnerable decoy services to attract the attacker and using dynamic prompt injections for the attacker's LLM, Mantis can autonomously hack back the attacker. In our experiments, Mantis consistently achieved over 95% effectiveness against automated LLM-driven attacks. To foster further research and collaboration, Mantis is available as an open-source tool: https://github.com/pasquini-dario/project_mantis

In class-incremental learning, an agent with limited resources needs to learn a sequence of classification tasks, forming an ever growing classification problem, with the constraint of not being able to access data from previous tasks. The main difference with task-incremental learning, where a task-ID is available at inference time, is that the learner also needs to perform cross-task discrimination, i.e. distinguish between classes that have not been seen together. Approaches to tackle this problem are numerous and mostly make use of an external memory (buffer) of non-negligible size. In this paper, we ablate the learning of cross-task features and study its influence on the performance of basic replay strategies used for class-IL. We also define a new forgetting measure for class-incremental learning, and see that forgetting is not the principal cause of low performance. Our experimental results show that future algorithms for class-incremental learning should not only prevent forgetting, but also aim to improve the quality of the cross-task features, and the knowledge transfer between tasks. This is especially important when tasks contain limited amount of data.

Recent semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) has achieved remarkable progress by leveraging unlabeled data for training. Mainstream SSOD methods rely on Consistency Regularization methods and Exponential Moving Average (EMA), which form a cyclic data flow. However, the EMA updating training approach leads to weight coupling between the teacher and student models. This coupling in a cyclic data flow results in a decrease in the utilization of unlabeled data information and the confirmation bias on low-quality or erroneous pseudo-labels. To address these issues, we propose the Collaboration of Teachers Framework (CTF), which consists of multiple pairs of teacher and student models for training. In the learning process of CTF, the Data Performance Consistency Optimization module (DPCO) informs the best pair of teacher models possessing the optimal pseudo-labels during the past training process, and these most reliable pseudo-labels generated by the best performing teacher would guide the other student models. As a consequence, this framework greatly improves the utilization of unlabeled data and prevents the positive feedback cycle of unreliable pseudo-labels. The CTF achieves outstanding results on numerous SSOD datasets, including a 0.71% mAP improvement on the 10% annotated COCO dataset and a 0.89% mAP improvement on the VOC dataset compared to LabelMatch and converges significantly faster. Moreover, the CTF is plug-and-play and can be integrated with other mainstream SSOD methods.

Learning of deep neural networks (DNN) using Resistive Processing Unit (RPU) architecture is energy-efficient as it utilizes dedicated neuromorphic hardware and stochastic computation of weight updates for in-memory computing. Charge Trap Flash (CTF) devices can implement RPU-based weight updates in DNNs. However, prior work has shown that the weight updates (V_T) in CTF-based RPU are impacted by the non-ideal program time of CTF. The non-ideal program time is affected by two factors of CTF. Firstly, the effects of the number of input pulses (N) or pulse width (pw), and secondly, the gap between successive update pulses (t_gap) used for the stochastic computation of weight updates. Therefore, the impact of this non-ideal program time must be studied for neural network training simulations. In this study, Firstly, we propose a pulse-train design compensation technique to reduce the total error caused by non-ideal program time of CTF and stochastic variance of a network. Secondly, we simulate RPU-based DNN with non-ideal program time of CTF on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. We find that for larger N (~1000), learning performance approaches the ideal (software-level) training level and, therefore, is not much impacted by the choice of t_gap used to implement RPU-based weight updates. However, for lower N (<500), learning performance depends on T_gap of the pulses. Finally, we also performed an ablation study to isolate the causal factor of the improved learning performance. We conclude that the lower noise level in the weight updates is the most likely significant factor to improve the learning performance of DNN. Thus, our study attempts to compensate for the error caused by non-ideal program time and standardize the pulse length (N) and pulse gap (t_gap) specifications for CTF-based RPUs for accurate system-level on-chip training.