This one caught my attention. As regular readers may know, I've done a lot of reporting over the years on the origins of the data that is used to train AI systems. My story "Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop" was the first to reveal how Meta used contractors in Kenya, some earning as little as 1.50 per hour, to remove content from their platforms--content that would later be used in attempts to train AI systems to do that job automatically. I also broke the news that OpenAI used workers from the same outsourcing company to detoxify ChatGPT. In both cases, workers said the labor left them with diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Though the underlying fields associated with vector-valued environmental data are continuous, observations themselves are discrete. For example, climate models typically output grid-based representations of wind fields or ocean currents, and these are often downscaled to a discrete set of points. By treating the area of interest as a two-dimensional manifold that can be represented as a triangular mesh and embedded in Euclidean space, this work shows that discrete intrinsic Gaussian processes for vector-valued data can be developed from discrete differential operators defined with respect to a mesh. These Gaussian processes account for the geometry and curvature of the manifold whilst also providing a flexible and practical formulation that can be readily applied to any two-dimensional mesh. We show that these models can capture harmonic flows, incorporate boundary conditions, and model non-stationary data. Finally, we apply these models to downscaling stationary and non-stationary gridded wind data on the globe, and to inference of ocean currents from sparse observations in bounded domains.

Among these methods, the generalized method of moments (GMM) improves the statistical efficiency of MM by weighting the moments appropriately. However, the computational complexity and storage complexity of MM and GMM grow exponentially with the dimension, making these methods impractical for high-dimensional data or when higher-order moments are required. Such computational bottlenecks are more severe in GMM since it additionally requires estimating a large weighting matrix. To overcome these bottlenecks, we propose the diagonally-weighted GMM (DGMM), which achieves a balance among statistical efficiency, computational complexity, and numerical stability. We apply DGMM to study the parameter estimation problem for weakly separated heteroscedastic low-rank Gaussian mixtures and design a computationally efficient and numerically stable algorithm that obtains the DGMM estimator without explicitly computing or storing the moment tensors. We implement the proposed algorithm and empirically validate the advantages of DGMM: in numerical studies, DGMM attains smaller estimation errors while requiring substantially shorter runtime than MM and GMM. The code and data will be available upon publication at https://github.com/liu-lzhang/dgmm. Key words.

Group fairness is important to consider in tensor decomposition to prevent discrimination based on social grounds such as gender or age. Although few works have studied group fairness in tensor decomposition, they suffer from performance degradation. To address this, we propose STAFF(Sparse Tensor Augmentation For Fairness) to improve group fairness by minimizing the gap in completion errors of different groups while reducing the overall tensor completion error. Our main idea is to augment a tensor with augmented entities including sufficient observed entries to mitigate imbalance and group bias in the sparse tensor. We evaluate \method on tensor completion with various datasets under conventional and deep learning-based tensor models. STAFF consistently shows the best trade-off between completion error and group fairness; at most, it yields 36% lower MSE and 59% lower MADE than the second-best baseline.

Automated voice calls with health information are a proven method for disseminating maternal and child health information among beneficiaries and are deployed in several programs around the world. However, these programs often suffer from beneficiary dropoffs and poor engagement. In previous work, through real-world trials, we showed that an AI model, specifically a restless bandit model, could identify beneficiaries who would benefit most from live service call interventions, preventing dropoffs and boosting engagement. However, one key question has remained open so far: does such improved listenership via AI-targeted interventions translate into beneficiaries' improved knowledge and health behaviors? We present a first study that shows not only listenership improvements due to AI interventions, but also simultaneously links these improvements to health behavior changes. Specifically, we demonstrate that AI-scheduled interventions, which enhance listenership, lead to statistically significant improvements in beneficiaries' health behaviors such as taking iron or calcium supplements in the postnatal period, as well as understanding of critical health topics during pregnancy and infancy. This underscores the potential of AI to drive meaningful improvements in maternal and child health.

Clustering is a core task in machine learning with wide-ranging applications in data mining and pattern recognition. However, its unsupervised nature makes it inherently challenging. Many existing clustering algorithms suffer from critical limitations: they often require careful parameter tuning, exhibit high computational complexity, lack interpretability, or yield suboptimal accuracy, especially when applied to large-scale datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel clustering approach based on meta-learning. Our approach eliminates the need for parameter optimization while achieving accuracy that outperforms state-of-the-art clustering techniques. The proposed technique leverages a few pre-clustered samples to guide the clustering process for the entire dataset in a single forward pass. Specifically, we employ a pre-trained Prior-Data Fitted Transformer Network (PFN) to perform clustering. The algorithm computes attention between the pre-clustered samples and the unclustered samples, allowing it to infer cluster assignments for the entire dataset based on the learned relation. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that, given just a few pre-clustered examples, the model can generalize to accurately cluster the rest of the dataset. Experiments on challenging benchmark datasets show that our approach can successfully cluster well-separated data without any pre-clustered samples, and significantly improves performance when a few clustered samples are provided. We show that our approach is superior to the state-of-the-art techniques. These results highlight the effectiveness and scalability of our approach, positioning it as a promising alternative to existing clustering techniques.

Continuously recognizing sign gestures and converting them to glosses plays a key role in bridging the gap between the hearing and hearing-impaired communities. This involves recognizing and interpreting the hands, face, and body gestures of the signer, which pose a challenge as it involves a combination of all these features. Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) methods rely on multistage pipelines that first extract visual features, then align variable-length sequences with target glosses using CTC or HMM-based approaches. However, these alignment-based methods suffer from error propagation across stages, overfitting, and struggle with vocabulary scalability due to the intermediate gloss representation bottleneck. T o address these limitations, we propose AutoSign, an autore-gressive decoder-only transformer that directly translates pose sequences to natural language text, bypassing traditional alignment mechanisms entirely. The use of this decoder-only approach allows the model to directly map between the features and the glosses without the need for CTC loss while also directly learning the textual dependencies in the glosses. Our approach incorporates a temporal compression module using 1D CNNs to efficiently process pose sequences, followed by AraGPT2, a pre-trained Arabic decoder, to generate text (glosses). Through comprehensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that hand and body gestures provide the most discriminative features for signer-independent CSLR. By eliminating the multi-stage pipeline, AutoSign achieves substantial improvements on the Isharah-1000 dataset, achieving an improvement of up to 6.1% in WER score compared to the best existing method.

One of the goals of fairness research in NLP is to measure and mitigate stereotypical biases that are propagated by NLP systems. However, such work tends to focus on single axes of bias (most often gender) and the English language. Addressing these limitations, we contribute the first study of multilingual intersecting country and gender biases, with a focus on occupation recommendations generated by large language models. We construct a benchmark of prompts in English, Spanish and German, where we systematically vary country and gender, using 25 countries and four pronoun sets. Then, we evaluate a suite of 5 Llama-based models on this benchmark, finding that LLMs encode significant gender and country biases. Notably, we find that even when models show parity for gender or country individually, intersectional occupational biases based on both country and gender persist. We also show that the prompting language significantly affects bias, and instruction-tuned models consistently demonstrate the lowest and most stable levels of bias. Our findings highlight the need for fairness researchers to use intersectional and multilingual lenses in their work.

Former Israeli Amb. to the U.S. Michael Oren discusses Iran's nuclear capabilities and negotiations with Hamas to release more hostages on'Fox Report.' The idea that Middle East peace cannot and should not advance without a formal agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is outdated and demonstrably untrue. Indeed, it has done little but exacerbate conflict over the last 30 years and undermine U.S. interests in the region. They provide a new paradigm for peace between Israel and all of its neighbors, including the Palestinians. President Donald Trump obviously deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for breaking with the failed Oslo peace process paradigm still sanctified by legacy media and a bipartisan community of foreign policy elites, and for building new bridges of mutually-beneficial cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Training recommender systems for next-item recommendation often requires unique embeddings to be learned for each item, which may take up most of the trainable parameters for a model. Shared embeddings, such as using content information, can reduce the number of distinct embeddings to be stored in memory. This allows for a more lightweight model; correspondingly, model complexity can be increased due to having fewer embeddings to store in memory. We show the benefit of using shared content-based features ('semantic IDs') in improving recommendation accuracy and diversity, while reducing model size, for two music recommendation datasets, including an online A/B test on a music streaming service.