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Houthis and government trade attacks as Yemen slides back to full-scale war
Government forces have carried out dozens of attacks on Houthi positions across Yemen in the past 24 hours, the latest sign that a return to full-scale war in Yemen may be approaching. In the past day, government forces have carried out 81 attacks on Houthi positions that led to the "neutralisation" of a number of Houthi fighters and field commanders, government spokesperson Majed Abdullah al-Nuzaili said Thursday. They "successfully" hit a target at Najran airport and an Aramco facility in the province, Saree said. There was no immediate confirmation of the attacks from Saudi Arabia. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which supports the Houthis, warned on Thursday that Saudi Arabia would be "unable to contain" the Houthis as the rebels ramp up attacks on the kingdom.
Canadian province sues OpenAI over alleged ChatGPT-linked shooting warnings
The Canadian province of British Columbia is preparing to sue OpenAI, alleging the US company failed to alert police after its staff internally flagged violent ChatGPT conversations linked to the person responsible for February's Tumbler Ridge mass shooting . Attorney General Niki Sharma announced Tuesday that the province has hired legal teams in British Columbia and California to "explore all legal avenues to hold OpenAI and its decision-makers accountable for its documented failure to notify law enforcement regarding explicit, flagged threats made by the perpetrator on the company's ChatGPT platform." The move stems from the February 10 attack in the remote mountain community of Tumbler Ridge, where authorities say 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killed their mother and half-brother before going to the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School and opening fire. Five children between the ages of 11 and 13 and one educator were killed at the school. Twenty-seven other people were wounded before Van Rootselaar died from what police described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Twelve killed in China fireworks shop blast during Lunar New Year
An explosion at a fireworks shop in central China's Hubei province has killed at least 12 people, state media reported, marking the second deadly blast linked to fireworks as the country celebrates the Lunar New Year . The explosion tore through the shop in Xiangyang on Wednesday afternoon. Officials said five children and seven adults died in the explosion. The victims included the shop owner and customers who had been buying fireworks for holiday celebrations. Some had travelled from other areas to visit relatives during the festive period .
A Doubly Robust Machine Learning Approach for Disentangling Treatment Effect Heterogeneity with Functional Outcomes
Salmaso, Filippo, Testa, Lorenzo, Chiaromonte, Francesca
Causal inference is paramount for understanding the effects of interventions, yet extracting personalized insights from increasingly complex data remains a significant challenge for modern machine learning. This is the case, in particular, when considering functional outcomes observed over a continuous domain (e.g., time, or space). Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects, known as CATE, has emerged as a crucial tool for personalized decision-making, but existing meta-learning frameworks are largely limited to scalar outcomes, failing to provide satisfying results in scientific applications that leverage the rich, continuous information encoded in functional data. Here, we introduce FOCaL (Functional Outcome Causal Learning), a novel, doubly robust meta-learner specifically engineered to estimate a functional heterogeneous treatment effect (F-CATE). FOCaL integrates advanced functional regression techniques for both outcome modeling and functional pseudo-outcome reconstruction, thereby enabling the direct and robust estimation of F-CATE. We provide a rigorous theoretical derivation of FOCaL, demonstrate its performance and robustness compared to existing non-robust functional methods through comprehensive simulation studies, and illustrate its practical utility on diverse real-world functional datasets. FOCaL advances the capabilities of machine intelligence to infer nuanced, individualized causal effects from complex data, paving the way for more precise and trustworthy AI systems in personalized medicine, adaptive policy design, and fundamental scientific discovery.
Modular Deep-Learning-Based Early Warning System for Deadly Heatwave Prediction
Xu, Shangqing, Zhao, Zhiyuan, Sharma, Megha, Martín-Olalla, José María, Rodríguez, Alexander, Wellenius, Gregory A., Prakash, B. Aditya
Severe heatwaves in urban areas significantly threaten public health, calling for establishing early warning strategies. Despite predicting occurrence of heatwaves and attributing historical mortality, predicting an incoming deadly heatwave remains a challenge due to the difficulty in defining and estimating heat-related mortality. Furthermore, establishing an early warning system imposes additional requirements, including data availability, spatial and temporal robustness, and decision costs. To address these challenges, we propose DeepTherm, a modular early warning system for deadly heatwave prediction without requiring heat-related mortality history. By highlighting the flexibility of deep learning, DeepTherm employs a dual-prediction pipeline, disentangling baseline mortality in the absence of heatwaves and other irregular events from all-cause mortality. We evaluated DeepTherm on real-world data across Spain. Results demonstrate consistent, robust, and accurate performance across diverse regions, time periods, and population groups while allowing trade-off between missed alarms and false alarms.
Beyond Chains: Bridging Large Language Models and Knowledge Bases in Complex Question Answering
Zhu, Yihua, Liu, Qianying, Aizawa, Akiko, Shimodaira, Hidetoshi
Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions using structured knowledge from KBs. While LLM-only approaches offer generalization, they suffer from outdated knowledge, hallucinations, and lack of transparency. Chain-based KG-RAG methods address these issues by incorporating external KBs, but are limited to simple chain-structured questions due to the absence of planning and logical structuring. Inspired by semantic parsing methods, we propose PDRR: a four-stage framework consisting of Predict, Decompose, Retrieve, and Reason. Our method first predicts the question type and decomposes the question into structured triples. Then retrieves relevant information from KBs and guides the LLM as an agent to reason over and complete the decomposed triples. Experimental results demonstrate that PDRR consistently outperforms existing methods across various LLM backbones and achieves superior performance on both chain-structured and non-chain complex questions.
'Extremely rare' Roman tomb discovered in Germany
'Extremely rare' Roman tomb discovered in Germany No riches or remains are inside--but it probably wasn't tomb raiders. This stone circle was part of a Roman burial mound called a tumulus. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In 15 BCE, the Romans invaded parts of Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. The region would eventually become the province of Raetia, but it was not valued for its economic resources.