The COVID-19 pandemic has influenced virtually all aspects of our lives. Across the world, countries have applied various mitigation strategies for the epidemic, based on social, political, and technological instruments. We postulate that one should {identify the relevant requirements} before committing to a particular mitigation strategy. One way to achieve it is through an overview of what is considered relevant by the general public, and referred to in the media. To this end, we have collected a number of news clips that mention the possible goals and requirements for a mitigation strategy. The snippets are sorted thematically into several categories, such as health-related goals, social and political impact, civil rights, ethical requirements, and so on. In a forthcoming companion paper, we will present a digest of the requirements, derived from the news clips, and a preliminary take on their formal specification.
Foundation Models (FMs) such as GPT-4 encoded with vast knowledge and powerful emergent abilities have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing and computer vision tasks. Grounding FMs by adapting them to domain-specific tasks or augmenting them with domain-specific knowledge enables us to exploit the full potential of FMs. However, grounding FMs faces several challenges, stemming primarily from constrained computing resources, data privacy, model heterogeneity, and model ownership. Federated Transfer Learning (FTL), the combination of federated learning and transfer learning, provides promising solutions to address these challenges. In recent years, the need for grounding FMs leveraging FTL, coined FTL-FM, has arisen strongly in both academia and industry. Motivated by the strong growth in FTL-FM research and the potential impact of FTL-FM on industrial applications, we propose an FTL-FM framework that formulates problems of grounding FMs in the federated learning setting, construct a detailed taxonomy based on the FTL-FM framework to categorize state-of-the-art FTL-FM works, and comprehensively overview FTL-FM works based on the proposed taxonomy. We also establish correspondences between FTL-FM and conventional phases of adapting FM so that FM practitioners can align their research works with FTL-FM. In addition, we overview advanced efficiency-improving and privacy-preserving techniques because efficiency and privacy are critical concerns in FTL-FM. Last, we discuss opportunities and future research directions of FTL-FM.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) display versatile functionality, they continue to generate harmful, biased, and toxic content, as demonstrated by the prevalence of human-designed jailbreaks. In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM. TAP utilizes an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts using tree-of-thoughts reasoning until one of the generated prompts jailbreaks the target. Crucially, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks. Using tree-of-thought reasoning allows TAP to navigate a large search space of prompts and pruning reduces the total number of queries sent to the target. In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for more than 80% of the prompts using only a small number of queries. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box method for generating jailbreaks.
Noise: an enemy to be dealt with and a major factor limiting communication system performance. However, what if there is gold in that garbage? In conventional engineering, our focus is primarily on eliminating, suppressing, combating, or even ignoring noise and its detrimental impacts. Conversely, could we exploit it similarly to biology, which utilizes noise-alike carrier signals to convey information? In this context, the utilization of noise, or noise-alike signals in general, has been put forward as a means to realize unconditionally secure communication systems in the future. In this tutorial article, we begin by tracing the origins of thermal noise-based communication and highlighting one of its significant applications for ensuring unconditionally secure networks: the Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) secure key exchange scheme. We then delve into the inherent challenges tied to secure communication and discuss the imperative need for physics-based key distribution schemes in pursuit of unconditional security. Concurrently, we provide a concise overview of quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes and draw comparisons with their KLJN-based counterparts. Finally, extending beyond wired communication loops, we explore the transmission of noise signals over-the-air and evaluate their potential for stealth and secure wireless communication systems.
While policy optimization algorithms have played an important role in recent empirical success of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the existing theoretical understanding of policy optimization remains rather limited -- they are either restricted to tabular MDPs or suffer from highly suboptimal sample complexity, especial in online RL where exploration is necessary. This paper proposes a simple efficient policy optimization framework -- Optimistic NPG for online RL. Optimistic NPG can be viewed as a simple combination of the classic natural policy gradient (NPG) algorithm [Kakade, 2001] with optimistic policy evaluation subroutines to encourage exploration. For $d$-dimensional linear MDPs, Optimistic NPG is computationally efficient, and learns an $\varepsilon$-optimal policy within $\tilde{O}(d^2/\varepsilon^3)$ samples, which is the first computationally efficient algorithm whose sample complexity has the optimal dimension dependence $\tilde{\Theta}(d^2)$. It also improves over state-of-the-art results of policy optimization algorithms [Zanette et al., 2021] by a factor of $d$. In the realm of general function approximation, which subsumes linear MDPs, Optimistic NPG, to our best knowledge, stands as the first policy optimization algorithm that achieves polynomial sample complexity for learning near-optimal policies.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become popular, there emerged an important trend of using multimodality to augment the LLMs' generation ability, which enables LLMs to better interact with the world. However, there lacks a unified perception of at which stage and how to incorporate different modalities. In this survey, we review methods that assist and augment generative models by retrieving multimodal knowledge, whose formats range from images, codes, tables, graphs, to audio. Such methods offer a promising solution to important concerns such as factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness. By providing an in-depth review, this survey is expected to provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the methods' applications and encourage them to adapt existing techniques to the fast-growing field of LLMs.
Social relationships in the digital sphere are becoming more usual and frequent, and they constitute a very important aspect for all of us. {Violent interactions in this sphere are very frequent, and have serious effects on the victims}. Within this global scenario, there is one kind of digital violence that is becoming really worrying: sexism against women. Sexist comments that are publicly posted in social media (newspaper comments, social networks, etc.), usually obtain a lot of attention and become viral, with consequent damage to the persons involved. In this paper, we introduce an anti-sexism alert system, based on natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI), that analyzes any public post, and decides if it could be considered a sexist comment or not. Additionally, this system also works on analyzing all the public comments linked to any multimedia content (piece of news, video, tweet, etc.) and decides, using a color-based system similar to traffic lights, if there is sexism in the global set of posts. We have created a labeled data set in Spanish, since the majority of studies focus on English, to train our system, which offers a very good performance after the validation experiments.
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely disrupted the retail landscape and has accelerated the adoption of innovative technologies. A striking example relates to the proliferation of online grocery orders and the technology deployed to facilitate such logistics. In fact, for many retailers, this disruption was a wake-up call after which they started recognizing the power of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we discuss the opportunities that AI can offer to retailers in the new normal retail landscape. Some of the techniques described have been applied at scale to adapt previously deployed AI models, whereas in other instances, fresh solutions needed to be developed to help retailers cope with recent disruptions, such as unexpected panic buying, retraining predictive models, and leveraging online-offline synergies.
This article presents the affordances that Generative Artificial Intelligence can have in disinformation context, one of the major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluation of the phenomena whilst discussing open challenges.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
Commonsense knowledge and commonsense reasoning are some of the main bottlenecks in machine intelligence. In the NLP community, many benchmark datasets and tasks have been created to address commonsense reasoning for language understanding. These tasks are designed to assess machines' ability to acquire and learn commonsense knowledge in order to reason and understand natural language text. As these tasks become instrumental and a driving force for commonsense research, this paper aims to provide an overview of existing tasks and benchmarks, knowledge resources, and learning and inference approaches toward commonsense reasoning for natural language understanding. Through this, our goal is to support a better understanding of the state of the art, its limitations, and future challenges.