sacramento
Becerra, Hilton offer promises on AI, gas prices, healthcare -- and starkly contrasting views
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Gubernatorial candidates Steve Hilton, left, and Xavier Becerra spoke Tuesday in Sacramento about their plans if elected to lead California. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.
Why California Is Still a Climate Bellwether
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A Woman Was in the US Legally. She Was Deported Anyways
A Woman Was in the US Legally. Marรญa de Jesรบs Estrada Juรกrez was applying for her green card and thought she was doing everything right. Instead, she was arrested and deported to Mexico. Marรญa de Jesรบs Estrada Juรกrez came to the US from Mexico in 1998 at 15 years old. Later, she was a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the policy meant to protect undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors from deportation .
Indictment of ex-Newsom aide hints at feds' probe into state's earlier investigation of video game giant
Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Dana Williamson, Gov. Gavin Newsom's former chief of staff, leaves the Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse in Sacramento after being arrested in a federal public corruption probe involving multiple counts of bank and wire fraud on Wednesday. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Newsom's former chief of staff and two political operatives face federal corruption charges for fraud, including misusing campaign funds for luxury purchases.
Automated Circuit Interpretation via Probe Prompting
Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand neural networks by identifying which learned features mediate specific behaviors. Attribution graphs reveal these feature pathways, but interpreting them requires extensive manual analysis -- a single prompt can take approximately 2 hours for an experienced circuit tracer. We present probe prompting, an automated pipeline that transforms attribution graphs into compact, interpretable subgraphs built from concept-aligned supernodes. Starting from a seed prompt and target logit, we select high-influence features, generate concept-targeted yet context-varying probes, and group features by cross-prompt activation signatures into Semantic, Relationship, and Say-X categories using transparent decision rules. Across five prompts including classic "capitals" circuits, probe-prompted subgraphs preserve high explanatory coverage while compressing complexity (Completeness 0.83, mean across circuits; Replacement 0.54). Compared to geometric clustering baselines, concept-aligned groups exhibit higher behavioral coherence: 2.3x higher peak-token consistency (0.425 vs 0.183) and 5.8x higher activation-pattern similarity (0.762 vs 0.130), despite lower geometric compactness. Entity-swap tests reveal a layerwise hierarchy: early-layer features transfer robustly (64% transfer rate, mean layer 6.3), while late-layer Say-X features specialize for output promotion (mean layer 16.4), supporting a backbone-and-specialization view of transformer computation. We release code (https://github.com/peppinob-ol/attribution-graph-probing), an interactive demo (https://huggingface.co/spaces/Peppinob/attribution-graph-probing), and minimal artifacts enabling immediate reproduction and community adoption.
New Mets pitcher Justin Garza credits video game MLB The Show for helping save career
Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Pitcher Justin Garza was thinking about quitting the game he loved during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as he struggled in the minor leagues. However, as Garza is joining the New York Mets now after a deal with the San Francisco Giants, he credits one thing to saving his career. Boston Red Sox starting pitcher Justin Garza, #63, reacts after giving up a home run to Minnesota Twins designated hitter Byron Buxton during the first inning at Target Field.
ReAgent: Reversible Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Hop QA
Xinjie, Zhao, Gao, Fan, Yang, Rui, Chen, Yingjian, Wang, Yuyang, Zhu, Ying, Tang, Jiacheng, Li, Irene
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved multi-hop question answering (QA) through direct Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, the irreversible nature of CoT leads to error accumulation, making it challenging to correct mistakes in multi-hop reasoning. This paper introduces ReAgent: a Reversible multi-Agent collaborative framework augmented with explicit backtracking mechanisms, enabling reversible multi-hop reasoning. By incorporating text-based retrieval, information aggregation and validation, our system can detect and correct errors mid-reasoning, leading to more robust and interpretable QA outcomes. The framework and experiments serve as a foundation for future work on error-tolerant QA systems. Empirical evaluations across three benchmarks indicate ReAgent's efficacy, yielding average about 6\% improvements against baseline models.
In-Simulation Testing of Deep Learning Vision Models in Autonomous Robotic Manipulators
Humeniuk, Dmytro, Braiek, Houssem Ben, Reid, Thomas, Khomh, Foutse
Testing autonomous robotic manipulators is challenging due to the complex software interactions between vision and control components. A crucial element of modern robotic manipulators is the deep learning based object detection model. The creation and assessment of this model requires real world data, which can be hard to label and collect, especially when the hardware setup is not available. The current techniques primarily focus on using synthetic data to train deep neural networks (DDNs) and identifying failures through offline or online simulation-based testing. However, the process of exploiting the identified failures to uncover design flaws early on, and leveraging the optimized DNN within the simulation to accelerate the engineering of the DNN for real-world tasks remains unclear. To address these challenges, we propose the MARTENS (Manipulator Robot Testing and Enhancement in Simulation) framework, which integrates a photorealistic NVIDIA Isaac Sim simulator with evolutionary search to identify critical scenarios aiming at improving the deep learning vision model and uncovering system design flaws. Evaluation of two industrial case studies demonstrated that MARTENS effectively reveals robotic manipulator system failures, detecting 25 % to 50 % more failures with greater diversity compared to random test generation. The model trained and repaired using the MARTENS approach achieved mean average precision (mAP) scores of 0.91 and 0.82 on real-world images with no prior retraining. Further fine-tuning on real-world images for a few epochs (less than 10) increased the mAP to 0.95 and 0.89 for the first and second use cases, respectively. In contrast, a model trained solely on real-world data achieved mAPs of 0.8 and 0.75 for use case 1 and use case 2 after more than 25 epochs.
Proof Automation with Large Language Models
Lu, Minghai, Delaware, Benjamin, Zhang, Tianyi
Interactive theorem provers such as Coq are powerful tools to formally guarantee the correctness of software. However, using these tools requires significant manual effort and expertise. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automatically generating informal proofs in natural language, they are less effective at generating formal proofs in interactive theorem provers. In this paper, we conduct a formative study to identify common mistakes made by LLMs when asked to generate formal proofs. By analyzing 520 proof generation errors made by GPT-3.5, we found that GPT-3.5 often identified the correct high-level structure of a proof, but struggled to get the lower-level details correct. Based on this insight, we propose PALM, a novel generate-then-repair approach that first prompts an LLM to generate an initial proof and then leverages targeted symbolic methods to iteratively repair low-level problems. We evaluate PALM on a large dataset that includes more than 10K theorems. Our results show that PALM significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, successfully proving 76.6% to 180.4% more theorems. Moreover, PALM proves 1270 theorems beyond the reach of existing approaches. We also demonstrate the generalizability of PALM across different LLMs.
Efficient Detection of Toxic Prompts in Large Language Models
Liu, Yi, Yu, Junzhe, Sun, Huijia, Shi, Ling, Deng, Gelei, Chen, Yuqi, Liu, Yang
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini have significantly advanced natural language processing, enabling various applications such as chatbots and automated content generation. However, these models can be exploited by malicious individuals who craft toxic prompts to elicit harmful or unethical responses. These individuals often employ jailbreaking techniques to bypass safety mechanisms, highlighting the need for robust toxic prompt detection methods. Existing detection techniques, both blackbox and whitebox, face challenges related to the diversity of toxic prompts, scalability, and computational efficiency. In response, we propose ToxicDetector, a lightweight greybox method designed to efficiently detect toxic prompts in LLMs. ToxicDetector leverages LLMs to create toxic concept prompts, uses embedding vectors to form feature vectors, and employs a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) classifier for prompt classification. Our evaluation on various versions of the LLama models, Gemma-2, and multiple datasets demonstrates that ToxicDetector achieves a high accuracy of 96.39\% and a low false positive rate of 2.00\%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, ToxicDetector's processing time of 0.0780 seconds per prompt makes it highly suitable for real-time applications. ToxicDetector achieves high accuracy, efficiency, and scalability, making it a practical method for toxic prompt detection in LLMs.