Behavioral health conditions, which include mental health and substance use disorders, are the leading disease burden in the United States. Peer-run behavioral health organizations (PROs) critically assist individuals facing these conditions by combining mental health services with assistance for needs such as income, employment, and housing. However, limited funds and staffing make it difficult for PROs to address all service user needs. To assist peer providers at PROs with their day-to-day tasks, we introduce PeerCoPilot, a large language model (LLM)-powered assistant that helps peer providers create wellness plans, construct step-by-step goals, and locate organizational resources to support these goals. PeerCoPilot ensures information reliability through a retrieval-augmented generation pipeline backed by a large database of over 1,300 vetted resources. We conducted human evaluations with 15 peer providers and 6 service users and found that over 90% of users supported using PeerCoPilot. Moreover, we demonstrated that PeerCoPilot provides more reliable and specific information than a baseline LLM. PeerCoPilot is now used by a group of 5-10 peer providers at CSPNJ, a large behavioral health organization serving over 10,000 service users, and we are actively expanding PeerCoPilot's use.

Frontier AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), hold increasing influence over the epistemology of human users. Such influence can reinforce prevailing societal values, potentially contributing to the lock-in of misguided moral beliefs and, consequently, the perpetuation of problematic moral practices on a broad scale. We introduce progress alignment as a technical solution to mitigate this imminent risk. Progress alignment algorithms learn to emulate the mechanics of human moral progress, thereby addressing the susceptibility of existing alignment methods to contemporary moral blindspots.

Frontier AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), hold increasing influence over the epistemology of human users. Such influence can reinforce prevailing societal values, potentially contributing to the lock-in of misguided moral beliefs and, consequently, the perpetuation of problematic moral practices on a broad scale. We introduce progress alignment as a technical solution to mitigate this imminent risk. Progress alignment algorithms learn to emulate the mechanics of human moral progress, thereby addressing the susceptibility of existing alignment methods to contemporary moral blindspots.

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently struggle to sequentially add new memories and integrate new knowledge. These limitations contrast with the human ability to continuously learn from new experiences and acquire knowledge throughout life. Most existing approaches add memories either through large context windows or external memory buffers (e.g., Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and studies on knowledge injection rarely test scenarios resembling everyday life events. In this work, we introduce a continual learning framework, Memory Embedded in Gated LLMs (MEGa), which injects event memories directly into the weights of LLMs. Each memory is stored in a dedicated set of gated low-rank weights. During inference, a gating mechanism activates relevant memory weights by matching query embeddings to stored memory embeddings. This enables the model to both recall entire memories and answer related questions. On two datasets - fictional characters and Wikipedia events - MEGa outperforms baseline approaches in mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Our model draws inspiration from the complementary memory system of the human brain.

Frontier AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), hold increasing influence over the epistemology of human users. Such influence can reinforce prevailing societal values, potentially contributing to the lock-in of misguided moral beliefs and, consequently, the perpetuation of problematic moral practices on a broad scale. We introduce progress alignment as a technical solution to mitigate this imminent risk. Progress alignment algorithms learn to emulate the mechanics of human moral progress, thereby addressing the susceptibility of existing alignment methods to contemporary moral blindspots. To empower research in progress alignment, we introduce ProgressGym, an experimental framework allowing the learning of moral progress mechanics from history, in order to facilitate future progress in real-world moral decisions. Leveraging 9 centuries of historical text and 18 historical LLMs, ProgressGym enables codification of real-world progress alignment challenges into concrete benchmarks. Specifically, we introduce three core challenges: tracking evolving values (PG-Follow), preemptively anticipating moral progress (PG-Predict), and regulating the feedback loop between human and AI value shifts (PG-Coevolve). Alignment methods without a temporal dimension are inapplicable to these tasks. In response, we present lifelong and extrapolative algorithms as baseline methods of progress alignment, and build an open leaderboard soliciting novel algorithms and challenges. The framework and the leaderboard are available at https://github.com/PKU-Alignment/ProgressGym and https://huggingface.co/spaces/PKU-Alignment/ProgressGym-LeaderBoard respectively.

News captioning task aims to generate sentences by describing named entities or concrete events for an image with its news article. Existing methods have achieved remarkable results by relying on the large-scale pre-trained models, which primarily focus on the correlations between the input news content and the output predictions. However, the news captioning requires adhering to some fundamental rules of news reporting, such as accurately describing the individuals and actions associated with the event. In this paper, we propose the rule-driven news captioning method, which can generate image descriptions following designated rule signal. Specifically, we first design the news-aware semantic rule for the descriptions. This rule incorporates the primary action depicted in the image (e.g., "performing") and the roles played by named entities involved in the action (e.g., "Agent" and "Place"). Second, we inject this semantic rule into the large-scale pre-trained model, BART, with the prefix-tuning strategy, where multiple encoder layers are embedded with news-aware semantic rule. Finally, we can effectively guide BART to generate news sentences that comply with the designated rule. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets (i.e., GoodNews and NYTimes800k) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shining. "I wish I could talk in Technicolor," she said. And, at another point, "I can see the molecules. Were some families maybe--oh, I don't know--eating meat loaf on TV trays as they watched this nice lady undergo her mind-bending, molecule-revealing journey through inner space? Did they switch to "Father Knows Best" or "The Perry Como Show" afterward? One of the feats that the historian Benjamin Breen pulls off in his lively and engrossing new book, "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" (Grand Central), is to make a cultural moment like the anonymous woman's televised trip seem less incongruous, if no less ...

The centuries-old process of releasing defendants on bail, long the province of judicial discretion, is getting a major assist -- courtesy of artificial intelligence. In late August, Hercules Shepherd Jr. walked up to the stand in a Cleveland courtroom, dressed in an orange jumpsuit. Two nights earlier, an officer had arrested him at a traffic stop with a small bag of cocaine, and he was about to be arraigned. Judge Jimmy Jackson Jr. looked at Shepherd, then down at a computer-generated score on the front of the 18-year-old's case file. The scores marked Shepherd as a prime candidate for pretrial release with low bail.