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A medieval Scot rocked a 20-carat gold dental bridge

Popular Science

It probably looked as cool as you think. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Gold ligature surrounding the left central incisor and the right lateral incisor on the mandible of an adult male buried in the East Kirk of the parish church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, Scotland. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Today, extensive tooth repair or replacement often requires the installation of a dental bridge made from durable resin and metal.


Revealed: The UK streets with the slowest broadband - so, is YOUR road on the list?

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Broncos quarterback Bo Nix suffers broken ankle in win over Bills as he's ruled out of NFL playoffs Ilhan Omar is under investigation for her skyrocketing wealth... as she berates reporters for questioning her about'fraud' Trump puts $1 BILLION price tag on membership for his new'UN replacement'... and the president'will control ALL the money' Iconic '90s femme fatale Men In Black star hasn't been seen in 16 years... now the Daily Mail reveals distressing truth behind her disappearance Investigator reveals hidden clues in Ellen Greenberg's crime scene photos that PROVE bride-to-be was brutally murdered Trump's Greenland tariff squeeze detonates Europe trade deal as NATO is pushed to breaking point Nicole Kidman's subtle but devastating digs at Keith Urban revealed... as insiders claim country star has MOVED IN with new squeeze Infectious disease expert reveals viruses to worry about as'super flu' overwhelms US... including one that could put the world'on cusp of a pandemic' The'marry me' sex move that'll make even the most commitment-phobic of men beg to see you again... and it worked for THREE of my friends Jane Fonda, 88, is pushed in wheelchair at airport after Reiner murders left her'reeling' Criminal investigation launched into Renee Good's wife for'impeding' ICE agents before shooting CBS News's star anchor caught on tape caving to Trump's demands as president issues blunt two-word warning over interview'edits' A-list pop star is unrecognizable in Saturday Night Live cameo... can YOU guess who she is? Devastated Princess Eugenie has'cut off all contact' with disgraced father Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor over Epstein scandal NFL fans fume Bills-Broncos was'rigged' as controversial late call sparks debate: 'Completely scripted' Secrets of one of America's oldest grocery stores that shuns self-checkouts and welcomes rich and famous customers Ansel Elgort becomes first time dad as he's seen carrying newborn baby in New York Secret ranking of NFL WAGs revealed: From a'jealous' ex-cheerleader to the'annoying queen'... meet the stunning sideline spouses raking in MILLIONS Read Melissa Gilbert's begging letter in defense of husband Timothy Busfield as she claims West Wing star is'honorable and compassionate' despite child sex allegations Revealed: The UK streets with the slowest broadband - so, is YOUR road on the list? You might feel like your home's internet connection is painfully slow, but experts have now revealed which neighbourhoods really have Britain's worst broadband. New research conducted by Broadband Genie compiled over 145,000 speed tests from users across the UK to find Britain's slowest streets. And it is bad news for the residents of Heol-Y-Fedw in Port Talbot, who face download speeds of 0.81 megabytes per second, the slowest of any street in the UK.


Pushdown Reward Machines for Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reward machines (RMs) are automata structures that encode (non-Markovian) reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL). RMs can reward any behaviour representable in regular languages and, when paired with RL algorithms that exploit RM structure, have been shown to significantly improve sample efficiency in many domains. In this work, we present pushdown reward machines (pdRMs), an extension of reward machines based on deterministic pushdown automata. pdRMs can recognise and reward temporally extended behaviours representable in deterministic context-free languages, making them more expressive than reward machines. We introduce two variants of pdRM-based policies, one which has access to the entire stack of the pdRM, and one which can only access the top $k$ symbols (for a given constant $k$) of the stack. We propose a procedure to check when the two kinds of policies (for a given environment, pdRM, and constant $k$) achieve the same optimal state values. We then provide theoretical results establishing the expressive power of pdRMs, and space complexity results for the proposed learning problems. Lastly, we propose an approach for off-policy RL algorithms that exploits counterfactual experiences with pdRMs. We conclude by providing experimental results showing how agents can be trained to perform tasks representable in deterministic context-free languages using pdRMs.


Are LLMs Empathetic to All? Investigating the Influence of Multi-Demographic Personas on a Model's Empathy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to converse naturally is empowered by their ability to empathetically understand and respond to their users. However, emotional experiences are shaped by demographic and cultural contexts. This raises an important question: Can LLMs demonstrate equitable empathy across diverse user groups? We propose a framework to investigate how LLMs' cognitive and affective empathy vary across user personas defined by intersecting demographic attributes. Our study introduces a novel intersectional analysis spanning 315 unique personas, constructed from combinations of age, culture, and gender, across four LLMs. Results show that attributes profoundly shape a model's empathetic responses. Interestingly, we see that adding multiple attributes at once can attenuate and reverse expected empathy patterns. We show that they broadly reflect real-world empathetic trends, with notable misalignments for certain groups, such as those from Confucian culture. We complement our quantitative findings with qualitative insights to uncover model behaviour patterns across different demographic groups. Our findings highlight the importance of designing empathy-aware LLMs that account for demographic diversity to promote more inclusive and equitable model behaviour.


Investigating the Capabilities and Limitations of Machine Learning for Identifying Bias in English Language Data with Information and Heritage Professionals

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite numerous efforts to mitigate their biases, ML systems continue to harm already-marginalized people. While predominant ML approaches assume bias can be removed and fair models can be created, we show that these are not always possible, nor desirable, goals. We reframe the problem of ML bias by creating models to identify biased language, drawing attention to a dataset's biases rather than trying to remove them. Then, through a workshop, we evaluated the models for a specific use case: workflows of information and heritage professionals. Our findings demonstrate the limitations of ML for identifying bias due to its contextual nature, the way in which approaches to mitigating it can simultaneously privilege and oppress different communities, and its inevitability. We demonstrate the need to expand ML approaches to bias and fairness, providing a mixed-methods approach to investigating the feasibility of removing bias or achieving fairness in a given ML use case.


COMI-LINGUA: Expert Annotated Large-Scale Dataset for Multitask NLP in Hindi-English Code-Mixing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid growth of digital communication has driven the widespread use of code-mixing, particularly Hindi-English, in multilingual communities. Existing datasets often focus on romanized text, have limited scope, or rely on synthetic data, which fails to capture realworld language nuances. Human annotations are crucial for assessing the naturalness and acceptability of code-mixed text. To address these challenges, We introduce COMI-LINGUA, the largest manually annotated dataset for code-mixed text, comprising 100,970 instances evaluated by three expert annotators in both Devanagari and Roman scripts. The dataset supports five fundamental NLP tasks: Language Identification, Matrix Language Identification, Part-of-Speech Tagging, Named Entity Recognition, and Translation. We evaluate LLMs on these tasks using COMILINGUA, revealing limitations in current multilingual modeling strategies and emphasizing the need for improved code-mixed text processing capabilities. COMI-LINGUA is publically availabe at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LingoIITGN/COMI-LINGUA.


Natural Language Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This article provides a brief overview of the field of Natural Language Generation. The term Natural Language Generation (NLG), in its broadest definition, refers to the study of systems that verbalize some form of information through natural language. That information could be stored in a large database or knowledge graph (in data-to-text applications), but NLG researchers may also study summarisation (text-to-text) or image captioning (image-to-text), for example. As a subfield of Natural Language Processing, NLG is closely related to other sub-disciplines such as Machine Translation (MT) and Dialog Systems. Some NLG researchers exclude MT from their definition of the field, since there is no content selection involved where the system has to determine what to say. Conversely, dialog systems do not typically fall under the header of Natural Language Generation since NLG is just one component of dialog systems (the others being Natural Language Understanding and Dialog Management). However, with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs), different subfields of Natural Language Processing have converged on similar methodologies for the production of natural language and the evaluation of automatically generated text.


Can one size fit all?: Measuring Failure in Multi-Document Summarization Domain Transfer

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS) is the task of automatically summarizing information in multiple documents, from news articles to conversations with multiple speakers. The training approaches for current MDS models can be grouped into four approaches: end-to-end with special pre-training ("direct"), chunk-then-summarize, extract-then-summarize, and inference with GPT-style models. In this work, we evaluate MDS models across training approaches, domains, and dimensions (reference similarity, quality, and factuality), to analyze how and why models trained on one domain can fail to summarize documents from another (News, Science, and Conversation) in the zero-shot domain transfer setting. We define domain-transfer "failure" as a decrease in factuality, higher deviation from the target, and a general decrease in summary quality. In addition to exploring domain transfer for MDS models, we examine potential issues with applying popular summarization metrics out-of-the-box.


Automated Planning for Optimal Data Pipeline Instantiation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data pipeline frameworks provide abstractions for implementing sequences of data-intensive transformation operators, automating the deployment and execution of such transformations in a cluster. Deploying a data pipeline, however, requires computing resources to be allocated in a data center, ideally minimizing the overhead for communicating data and executing operators in the pipeline while considering each operator's execution requirements. In this paper, we model the problem of optimal data pipeline deployment as planning with action costs, where we propose heuristics aiming to minimize total execution time. Experimental results indicate that the heuristics can outperform the baseline deployment and that a heuristic based on connections outperforms other strategies.


SEAP: Training-free Sparse Expert Activation Pruning Unlock the Brainpower of Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models have achieved remarkable success across various natural language processing tasks, yet their high computational cost during inference remains a major bottleneck. This paper introduces Sparse Expert Activation Pruning (SEAP), a training-free pruning method that selectively retains task-relevant parameters to reduce inference overhead. Inspired by the clustering patterns of hidden states and activations in LLMs, SEAP identifies task-specific expert activation patterns and prunes the model while preserving task performance and enhancing computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that SEAP significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining competitive accuracy. Notably, at 50% pruning, SEAP surpasses both WandA and FLAP by over 20%, and at 20% pruning, it incurs only a 2.2% performance drop compared to the dense model. These findings highlight SEAP's scalability and effectiveness, making it a promising approach for optimizing large-scale LLMs.