Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning utilizes two primary techniques, i.e., rule-based and KG-embedding based. The former provides precise inferences, but inferring via concrete rules is not scalable. The latter enables efficient reasoning at the cost of ambiguous inference accuracy. Neuro-symbolic reasoning seeks to amalgamate the advantages of both techniques. The crux of this approach is replacing the predicted existence of all possible triples (i.e., truth scores inferred from rules) with a suitable approximation grounded in embedding representations.

Knowledge graph (KG) reasoning utilizes two primary techniques, i.e., rule-based and KG-embedding based. The former provides precise inferences, but inferring via concrete rules is not scalable. The latter enables efficient reasoning at the cost of ambiguous inference accuracy. Neuro-symbolic reasoning seeks to amalgamate the advantages of both techniques. The crux of this approach is replacing the predicted existence of all possible triples (i.e., truth scores inferred from rules) with a suitable approximation grounded in embedding representations.

Deepfake attacks, malicious manipulation of media containing people, are a serious concern for society. Conventional deepfake detection methods train supervised classifiers to distinguish real media from previously encountered deepfakes. Such techniques can only detect deepfakes similar to those previously seen, but not zeroday (previously unseen) attack types. As current deepfake generation techniques are changing at a breathtaking pace, new attack types are proposed frequently, making this a major issue. Our main observations are that: i) in many effective deepfake attacks, the fake media must be accompanied by false facts i.e. claims about the identity, speech, motion, or appearance of the person. For instance, when impersonating Obama, the attacker explicitly or implicitly claims that the fake media show Obama; ii) current generative techniques cannot perfectly synthesize the false facts claimed by the attacker. We therefore introduce the concept of "fact checking", adapted from fake news detection, for detecting zero-day deepfake attacks. Fact checking verifies that the claimed facts (e.g. Consequently, we introduce FACTOR, a practical recipe for deepfake fact checking and demonstrate its power in critical attack settings: face swapping and audio-visual synthesis. Although it is trainingfree, relies exclusively on off-the-shelf features, is very easy to implement, and does not see any deepfakes, it achieves better than state-of-the-art accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/talreiss/FACTOR. The ability to disseminate large-scale disinformation to undermine scientifically established facts poses an existential risk to humanity and endangers democratic institutions and fundamental human rights. Deepfakes have been universally acknowledged to pose a grave threat to society. Bad actors can use fake information for various malicious purposes, including disinformation, societal polarization, embarrassment, and privacy violations.

Machine learning (ML) models trained on subjective self-report scores struggle to objectively classify pain accurately due to the significant variance between real-time pain experiences and recorded scores afterwards. This study developed two devices for acquisition of real-time, continuous in-session pain scores and gathering of ANS-modulated endodermal activity (EDA).The experiment recruited N = 24 subjects who underwent a post-exercise circulatory occlusion (PECO) with stretch, inducing discomfort. Subject data were stored in a custom pain platform, facilitating extraction of time-domain EDA features and in-session ground truth scores. Moreover, post-experiment visual analog scale (VAS) scores were collected from each subject. Machine learning models, namely Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) and Random Forest (RF), were trained using corresponding objective EDA features combined with in-session scores and post-session scores, respectively. Over a 10-fold cross-validation, the macro-averaged geometric mean score revealed MLP and RF models trained with objective EDA features and in-session scores achieved superior performance (75.9% and 78.3%) compared to models trained with post-session scores (70.3% and 74.6%) respectively. This pioneering study demonstrates that using continuous in-session ground truth scores significantly enhances ML performance in pain intensity characterization, overcoming ground truth sparsity-related issues, data imbalance, and high variance. This study informs future objective-based ML pain system training.

Data-driven offline model-based optimization (MBO) is an established practical approach to black-box computational design problems for which the true objective function is unknown and expensive to query. However, the standard approach which optimizes designs against a learned proxy model of the ground truth objective can suffer from distributional shift. Specifically, in high-dimensional design spaces where valid designs lie on a narrow manifold, the standard approach is susceptible to producing out-of-distribution, invalid designs that "fool" the learned proxy model into outputting a high value. Using an ensemble rather than a single model as the learned proxy can help mitigate distribution shift, but naive formulations for combining gradient information from the ensemble, such as minimum or mean gradient, are still suboptimal and often hampered by non-convergent behavior. In this work, we explore alternate approaches for combining gradient information from the ensemble that are robust to distribution shift without compromising optimality of the produced designs. More specifically, we explore two functions, formulated as convex optimization problems, for combining gradient information: multiple gradient descent algorithm (MGDA) and conflict-averse gradient descent (CAGrad). We evaluate these algorithms on a diverse set of five computational design tasks. We compare performance of ensemble MBO with MGDA and ensemble MBO with CAGrad with three naive baseline algorithms: (a) standard single-model MBO, (b) ensemble MBO with mean gradient, and (c) ensemble MBO with minimum gradient. Our results suggest that MGDA and CAGrad strike a desirable balance between conservatism and optimality and can help robustify data-driven offline MBO without compromising optimality of designs.