This paper proposes a methodology for exploring how linguistic behaviour on social media can be used to explore societal reactions to important events such as those that transpired during the SARS CoV2 pandemic. In particular, where spatial and temporal aspects of events are important features. Our methodology consists of grounding spatial-temporal categories in tweet usage trends using time-series analysis and clustering. Salient terms in each category were then identified through qualitative comparative analysis based on scaled f-scores aggregated into hand-coded categories. To exemplify this approach, we conducted a case study on the first wave of the coronavirus in Italy. We used our proposed methodology to explore existing psychological observations which claimed that physical distance from events affects what is communicated about them. We confirmed these findings by showing that the epicentre of the disease and peripheral regions correspond to clear time-series clusters and that those living in the epicentre of the SARS CoV2 outbreak were more focused on solidarity and policy than those from more peripheral regions. Furthermore, we also found that temporal categories corresponded closely to policy changes during the handling of the pandemic.

Recent end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often utilize a Transformer-based acoustic encoder that generates embedding at a high frame rate. However, this design is inefficient, particularly for long speech signals due to the quadratic computation of self-attention. To address this, we propose a new method, Adjacent Token Merging (A-ToMe), which gradually combines adjacent tokens with high similarity scores between their key values. In this way, the total time step could be reduced, and the inference of both the encoder and joint network is accelerated. Experiments on LibriSpeech show that our method can reduce 57% of tokens and improve the inference speed on GPU by 70% without any notable loss of accuracy. Additionally, we demonstrate that A-ToMe is also an effective solution to reduce tokens in long-form ASR, where the input speech consists of multiple utterances.

We investigate the role of attention and memory in complex reasoning tasks. We analyze Transformer-based self-attention as a model and extend it with memory. By studying a synthetic visual reasoning test, we refine the taxonomy of reasoning tasks. Incorporating self-attention with ResNet50, we enhance feature maps using feature-based and spatial attention, achieving efficient solving of challenging visual reasoning tasks. Our findings contribute to understanding the attentional needs of SVRT tasks. Additionally, we propose GAMR, a cognitive architecture combining attention and memory, inspired by active vision theory. GAMR outperforms other architectures in sample efficiency, robustness, and compositionality, and shows zero-shot generalization on new reasoning tasks.

In this paper, both empirically and theoretically, we show that several AI-text detectors are not reliable in practical scenarios. Empirically, we show that paraphrasing attacks, where a light paraphraser is applied on top of a large language model (LLM), can break a whole range of detectors, including ones using watermarking schemes as well as neural network-based detectors and zero-shot classifiers. Our experiments demonstrate that retrieval-based detectors, designed to evade paraphrasing attacks, are still vulnerable to recursive paraphrasing. We then provide a theoretical impossibility result indicating that as language models become more sophisticated and better at emulating human text, the performance of even the best-possible detector decreases. For a sufficiently advanced language model seeking to imitate human text, even the best-possible detector may only perform marginally better than a random classifier. Our result is general enough to capture specific scenarios such as particular writing styles, clever prompt design, or text paraphrasing. We also extend the impossibility result to include the case where pseudorandom number generators are used for AI-text generation instead of true randomness. We show that the same result holds with a negligible correction term for all polynomial-time computable detectors. Finally, we show that even LLMs protected by watermarking schemes can be vulnerable against spoofing attacks where adversarial humans can infer hidden LLM text signatures and add them to human-generated text to be detected as text generated by the LLMs, potentially causing reputational damage to their developers. We believe these results can open an honest conversation in the community regarding the ethical and reliable use of AI-generated text.

Abstract--Grasping small objects surrounded by unstable or non-rigid material plays a crucial role in applications such as surgery, harvesting, construction, disaster recovery, and assisted feeding. This task is especially difficult when fine manipulation is required in the presence of sensor noise and perception errors; errors inevitably trigger dynamic motion, which is challenging to model precisely. Circumventing the difficulty to build accurate models for contacts and dynamics, data-driven methods like reinforcement learning (RL) can optimize task performance via trial and error, reducing the need for accurate models of contacts and dynamics. Applying RL methods to real robots, however, has been hindered by factors such as prohibitively high sample complexity or the high training infrastructure cost for providing resets on hardware. This work presents CherryBot, an RL system that uses chopsticks for fine manipulation that surpasses human reactiveness for some dynamic grasping tasks. By integrating imprecise simulators, suboptimal demonstrations and external state estimation, we study how to make a realworld robot learning system sample efficient and general while reducing the human effort required for supervision. Our system shows continual improvement through 30 minutes of real-world interaction: through reactive retry, it achieves an almost 100% success rate on the demanding task of using chopsticks to grasp small objects swinging in the air. We demonstrate the reactiveness, robustness and generalizability of CherryBot to varying object shapes and dynamics (e.g., external disturbances However, this research investigates a more universal solution: assuming that fine manipulation is required, inaccuracy is How can we automate the task of picking cherries from a unavoidable and real-time reaction is necessary, can we enable tree branch that is blowing in the wind, causing the branch dynamic fine grasping without stable support? An ideal agent to shake and the cherries to tremble? This scenario is an should be: example of fine grasping without rigid-surface support, and its challenges are two-fold.

Daily images may convey abstract meanings that require us to memorize and infer profound information from them. To encourage such human-like reasoning, in this work, we teach machines to predict where and when it was taken rather than performing basic tasks like traditional segmentation or classification. Inspired by Horn's QR theory, we designed a novel QR-CLIP model consisting of two components: 1) the Quantity module first retrospects more open-world knowledge as the candidate language inputs; 2) the Relevance module carefully estimates vision and language cues and infers the location and time. Experiments show our QR-CLIP's effectiveness, and it outperforms the previous SOTA on each task by an average of about 10% and 130% relative lift in terms of location and time reasoning. This study lays a technical foundation for location and time reasoning and suggests that effectively introducing open-world knowledge is one of the panaceas for the tasks.

Automated news credibility and fact-checking at scale require accurately predicting news factuality and media bias. This paper introduces a large sentence-level dataset, titled "FactNews", composed of 6,191 sentences expertly annotated according to factuality and media bias definitions proposed by AllSides. We use FactNews to assess the overall reliability of news sources, by formulating two text classification problems for predicting sentence-level factuality of news reporting and bias of media outlets. Our experiments demonstrate that biased sentences present a higher number of words compared to factual sentences, besides having a predominance of emotions. Hence, the fine-grained analysis of subjectivity and impartiality of news articles provided promising results for predicting the reliability of media outlets. Finally, due to the severity of fake news and political polarization in Brazil, and the lack of research for Portuguese, both dataset and baseline were proposed for Brazilian Portuguese.

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We present a dataset and classifier for detecting the language of white supremacist extremism, a growing issue in online hate speech. Our weakly supervised classifier is trained on large datasets of text from explicitly white supremacist domains paired with neutral and anti-racist data from similar domains. We demonstrate that this approach improves generalization performance to new domains. Incorporating anti-racist texts as counterexamples to white supremacist language mitigates bias.