Africa
InfoDeepSeek: Benchmarking Agentic Information Seeking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Xi, Yunjia, Lin, Jianghao, Zhu, Menghui, Xiao, Yongzhao, Ou, Zhuoying, Liu, Jiaqi, Wan, Tong, Chen, Bo, Liu, Weiwen, Wang, Yasheng, Tang, Ruiming, Zhang, Weinan, Yu, Yong
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by grounding responses with retrieved information. As an emerging paradigm, Agentic RAG further enhances this process by introducing autonomous LLM agents into the information seeking process. However, existing benchmarks fall short in evaluating such systems, as they are confined to a static retrieval environment with a fixed, limited corpus} and simple queries that fail to elicit agentic behavior. Moreover, their evaluation protocols assess information seeking effectiveness by pre-defined gold sets of documents, making them unsuitable for the open-ended and dynamic nature of real-world web environments. To bridge this gap, we present InfoDeepSeek, a new benchmark with challenging questions designed for assessing agentic information seeking in real-world, dynamic web environments. We propose a systematic methodology for constructing challenging queries satisfying the criteria of determinacy, difficulty, and diversity. Based on this, we develop the first evaluation framework tailored to dynamic agentic information seeking, including fine-grained metrics about the accuracy, utility, and compactness of information seeking outcomes. Through extensive experiments across LLMs, search engines, and question types, InfoDeepSeek reveals nuanced agent behaviors and offers actionable insights for future research.
WildLive: Near Real-time Visual Wildlife Tracking onboard UAVs
Dat, Nguyen Ngoc, Richardson, Tom, Watson, Matthew, Meier, Kilian, Kline, Jenna, Reid, Sid, Maalouf, Guy, Hine, Duncan, Mirmehdi, Majid, Burghardt, Tilo
Live tracking of wildlife via high-resolution video processing directly onboard drones is widely unexplored and most existing solutions rely on streaming video to ground stations to support navigation. Yet, both autonomous animal-reactive flight control beyond visual line of sight and/or mission-specific individual and behaviour recognition tasks rely to some degree on this capability. In response, we introduce WildLive - a near real-time animal detection and tracking framework for high-resolution imagery running directly onboard uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). The system performs multi-animal detection and tracking at 17.81fps for HD and 7.53fps on 4K video streams suitable for operation during higher altitude flights to minimise animal disturbance. Our system is optimised for Jetson Orin AGX onboard hardware. It integrates the efficiency of sparse optical flow tracking and mission-specific sampling with device-optimised and proven YOLO-driven object detection and segmentation techniques. Essentially, computational resource is focused onto spatio-temporal regions of high uncertainty to significantly improve UAV processing speeds. Alongside, we introduce our WildLive dataset, which comprises 200K+ annotated animal instances across 19K+ frames from 4K UAV videos collected at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. All frames contain ground truth bounding boxes, segmentation masks, as well as individual tracklets and tracking point trajectories. We compare our system against current object tracking approaches including OC-SORT, ByteTrack, and SORT. Our multi-animal tracking experiments with onboard hardware confirm that near real-time high-resolution wildlife tracking is possible on UAVs whilst maintaining high accuracy levels as needed for future navigational and mission-specific animal-centric operational autonomy. Our materials are available at: https://dat-nguyenvn.github.io/WildLive/
Trump reverses course on Middle East tech policy, but will it be enough to counter China?
National security and military analyst Dr. Rebecca Grant joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss President Donald Trump's historic business-focused trip to the Middle East and why a Trump-Putin meeting could be essential for peace in Ukraine. President Donald Trump secured 2 trillion worth of deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE during his trip to the Middle East last week in what some have argued is a move to counter China's influence in the region. While China has increasingly bolstered its commercial ties with top Middle Eastern nations who have remained steadfast in their refusal to pick sides amid growing geopolitical tension between Washington and Beijing, Trump may have taken steps to give the U.S. an edge over its chief competitor. But concern has mounted after Trump reversed a Biden-era policy โ which banned the sale of AI-capable chips to the UAE and Saudi Arabia โ that highly coveted U.S. technologies could potentially fall into the hands of Chinese companies, and in extension, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). U.S. President Donald Trump walks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman during a welcoming ceremony in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 13, 2025.
ICYM2I: The illusion of multimodal informativeness under missingness
Choi, Young Sang, Jeanselme, Vincent, Elias, Pierre, Joshi, Shalmali
Multimodal learning is of continued interest in artificial intelligence-based applications, motivated by the potential information gain from combining different types of data. However, modalities collected and curated during development may differ from the modalities available at deployment due to multiple factors including cost, hardware failure, or -- as we argue in this work -- the perceived informativeness of a given modality. Na{รฏ}ve estimation of the information gain associated with including an additional modality without accounting for missingness may result in improper estimates of that modality's value in downstream tasks. Our work formalizes the problem of missingness in multimodal learning and demonstrates the biases resulting from ignoring this process. To address this issue, we introduce ICYM2I (In Case You Multimodal Missed It), a framework for the evaluation of predictive performance and information gain under missingness through inverse probability weighting-based correction. We demonstrate the importance of the proposed adjustment to estimate information gain under missingness on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world medical datasets.
Incremental Sequence Classification with Temporal Consistency
Maystre, Lucas, Barello, Gabriel, Berariu, Tudor, Cambray, Aleix, Dolga, Rares, Gonzalez, Alvaro Ortega, Nica, Andrei, Barber, David
We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporal-difference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a temporal-consistency condition that successive predictions should satisfy. We leverage this condition to develop a novel loss function for training incremental sequence classifiers. Through a concrete example, we demonstrate that optimizing this loss can offer substantial gains in data efficiency. We apply our method to text classification tasks and show that it improves predictive accuracy over competing approaches on several benchmark datasets. We further evaluate our approach on the task of verifying large language model generations for correctness in grade-school math problems. Our results show that models trained with our method are better able to distinguish promising generations from unpromising ones after observing only a few tokens.
Two-way Evidence self-Alignment based Dual-Gated Reasoning Enhancement
Zhang, Kexin, Chen, Junlan, Li, Daifeng, Zhang, Yuxuan, Feng, Yangyang, Deng, Bowen, Chen, Weixu
Large language models (LLMs) encounter difficulties in knowledge-intensive multi-step reasoning (KIMSR) tasks. One challenge is how to effectively extract and represent rationale evidence. The current methods often extract semantically relevant but logically irrelevant evidence, resulting in flawed reasoning and inaccurate responses. We propose a two-way evidence self-alignment (TW-ESA) module, which utilizes the mutual alignment between strict reasoning and LLM reasoning to enhance its understanding of the causal logic of evidence, thereby addressing the first challenge. Another challenge is how to utilize the rationale evidence and LLM's intrinsic knowledge for accurate reasoning when the evidence contains uncertainty. We propose a dual-gated reasoning enhancement (DGR) module to gradually fuse useful knowledge of LLM within strict reasoning, which can enable the model to perform accurate reasoning by focusing on causal elements in the evidence and exhibit greater robustness. The two modules are collaboratively trained in a unified framework ESA-DGR. Extensive experiments on three diverse and challenging KIMSR datasets reveal that ESA-DGR significantly surpasses state-of-the-art LLM-based fine-tuning methods, with remarkable average improvements of 4% in exact match (EM) and 5% in F1 score. The implementation code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ESA-DGR-2BF8.
Researchers question reliability of Abbott's rapid malaria tests
The World Health Organization (WHO) has sent an internal memo about potential problems with a major company's malaria tests after scientists reported issues with test sensitivity and warned it could delay patients' access to critical treatment. Abbott's Bioline rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) for malaria are used by health workers around the world, particularly in remote areas where lab techniques such as microscopy and DNA detection aren't available. Investigations at several institutions in Southeast Asia suggest at least some of these RDTs fail to detect infections or show faint test lines for some positive cases. Daniel Ngamije Madandi, director of WHO's Global Malaria Programme (GMP), issued the memo to WHO's six regional offices on 30 April. It lists 11 "affected" lots from two Abbott RDTs--Pf/Pv and Pf/Pan--that were associated with "faint lines and false negative results" in reports from "multiple research groups." The memo follows a public notice by WHO in March that warned of reports of faint lines in malaria RDTs without mentioning particular brands or products.
A United Arab Emirates Lab Announces Frontier AI Projects--and a New Outpost in Silicon Valley
A United Arab Emirates (UAE) academic lab today launched an artificial intelligence world model and agent, two large language models (LLMs) and a new research center in Silicon Valley as it ramps up its investment in the cutting-edge field. The UAE's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) revealed an AI world model called PAN, which can be used to build physically realistic simulations for testing and honing the performance of AI agents. Eric Xing, President and Professor of MBZUAI and a leading AI researcher, revealed the models and lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California today. The UAE has made big investments in AI in recent years under the guidance of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the nation's tech-savvy national security advisor and younger brother of president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Xing says the UAE's new center in Sunnyvale, California, will help the nation tap into the world's most concentrated source of AI knowledge and talent.
EmoHopeSpeech: An Annotated Dataset of Emotions and Hope Speech in English and Arabic
Zaghouani, Wajdi, Biswas, Md. Rafiul
This research introduces a bilingual dataset comprising 23,456 entries for Arabic and 10,036 entries for English, annotated for emotions and hope speech, addressing the scarcity of multi-emotion (Emotion and hope) datasets. The dataset provides comprehensive annotations capturing emotion intensity, complexity, and causes, alongside detailed classifications and subcategories for hope speech. To ensure annotation reliability, Fleiss' Kappa was employed, revealing 0.75-0.85 agreement among annotators both for Arabic and English language. The evaluation metrics (micro-F1-Score=0.67) obtained from the baseline model (i.e., using a machine learning model) validate that the data annotations are worthy. This dataset offers a valuable resource for advancing natural language processing in underrepresented languages, fostering better cross-linguistic analysis of emotions and hope speech.
Soft Prompts for Evaluation: Measuring Conditional Distance of Capabilities
To help evaluate and understand the latent capabilities of language models, this paper introduces an approach using optimized input embeddings, or 'soft prompts,' as a metric of conditional distance between a model and a target behavior. The technique aims to facilitate latent capability discovery as a part of automated red teaming/evaluation suites and to provide quantitative feedback about the accessibility of potentially concerning behaviors in a way that may scale to powerful future models, including those which may otherwise be capable of deceptive alignment. An evaluation framework using soft prompts is demonstrated in natural language, chess, and pathfinding, and the technique is extended with generalized conditional soft prompts to aid in constructing task evaluations.