Guillermo del Toro Hopes He's Dead Before AI Art Goes Mainstream The director tells WIRED the real Victor Frankensteins are tyrannical politicians and Silicon Valley tech bros. Guillermo del Toro attends the Headline Gala screening of Netflix's during the 69th BFI London Film Festival. Guillermo del Toro loves a challenge. Nothing the 61-year-old director does could be termed "half-assed," and each of his movies is planned, scripted, and storyboarded with immense attention to detail. Such discipline is evident in, his adaptation of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. It's a movie del Toro has been trying to make for years, and it shows. The elaborate sets and costumes--as well as some embellishing of Shelley's story--could only be the work of someone as connected as he is with his source material.

In Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," a Vast Vision Gets Netflixed Down to Size The latest reanimation of Mary Shelley's classic tale, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, is a labyrinthine tour of a filmmaker's career-long obsessions. Earlier this year, Quentin Tarantino, when asked to parse the high points of his filmography in an interview, described the two-part "Kill Bill" (2003-04) as "the movie I was born to make." He added, "I think'Inglourious Basterds' is my masterpiece, but'Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood' is my favorite." Might these be distinctions without a difference? I'm generally wary of artistic-birthright narratives, not least because a filmmaker of remarkable talent, consistent vision, and good fortune might well wind up with multiple candidates for the honor.

Understanding how urban environments are perceived in terms of safety is crucial for urban planning and policymaking. Traditional methods like surveys are limited by high cost, required time, and scalability issues. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), specifically Llava 1.6 7B, as a novel approach to assess safety perceptions of urban spaces using street-view images. In addition, the research investigated how this task is affected by different socio-demographic perspectives, simulated by the model through Persona-based prompts. Without additional fine-tuning, the model achieved an average F1-score of 59.21% in classifying urban scenarios as safe or unsafe, identifying three key drivers of perceived unsafety: isolation, physical decay, and urban infrastructural challenges. Moreover, incorporating Persona-based prompts revealed significant variations in safety perceptions across the socio-demographic groups of age, gender, and nationality. Elder and female Personas consistently perceive higher levels of unsafety than younger or male Personas. Similarly, nationality-specific differences were evident in the proportion of unsafe classifications ranging from 19.71% in Singapore to 40.15% in Botswana. Notably, the model's default configuration aligned most closely with a middle-aged, male Persona. These findings highlight the potential of LMMs as a scalable and cost-effective alternative to traditional methods for urban safety perceptions. While the sensitivity of these models to socio-demographic factors underscores the need for thoughtful deployment, their ability to provide nuanced perspectives makes them a promising tool for AI-driven urban planning.

William Phelps was at work when he got the call from the FBI that he had to return home at once. It was December 2023 and his wife, Aurora Phelps, was in big trouble, something to do with a fraud scheme. About a dozen agents turned his apartment upside down looking for evidence in their case, and William Phelps wouldn't see his wife again. That is, until this week, when William came to learn the scope of the allegations against his wife. According to federal prosecutors, Aurora was the perpetrator of a deadly romance scam, connecting with older men on the internet, then drugging them and stealing from their bank accounts.

Can we improve machine translation (MT) with LLMs by rewriting their inputs automatically? Users commonly rely on the intuition that well-written text is easier to translate when using off-the-shelf MT systems. LLMs can rewrite text in many ways but in the context of MT, these capabilities have been primarily exploited to rewrite outputs via post-editing. We present an empirical study of 21 input rewriting methods with 3 open-weight LLMs for translating from English into 6 target languages. We show that text simplification is the most effective MT-agnostic rewrite strategy and that it can be improved further when using quality estimation to assess translatability. Human evaluation further confirms that simplified rewrites and their MT outputs both largely preserve the original meaning of the source and MT. These results suggest LLM-assisted input rewriting as a promising direction for improving translations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance across various Data-to-Text Generation (DTG) tasks. However, generating factually consistent text in DTG remains challenging for LLMs. Despite this, in-depth evaluations of LLM factual consistency for DTG remain missing in the current literature. This paper addresses this gap by providing an extensive evaluation of factual consistency in LLMs for DTG. Our evaluation covers five widely used DTG datasets (E2E, ViGGo, WikiTableText, DART, and WebNLG) and five prominent LLM families (T5, BART, OPT, BLOOM, and Llama 2). To ensure a thorough evaluation of factual consistency, we use four state-of-the-art automatic metrics and include essential human assessments. Our extensive evaluations reveals three key findings regarding factual consistency in LLMs for DTG. First, Llama 2 often excels in generating factually consistent text, although smaller models like T5 and BART can achieve strong factual consistency on larger, lexically less-diverse datasets. Second, the average rate of change (AROC) indicates that increasing model size (number of model trainable parameters) generally enhances factual consistency of LLMs in DTG. Third, we observe that source-reference divergence (i.e., when the reference text diverges semantically from the source) typically reduces the factual consistency of LLMs in DTG.

Pneumonia is a respiratory infection caused by bacteria, fungi, or viruses. It affects many people, particularly those in developing or underdeveloped nations with high pollution levels, unhygienic living conditions, overcrowding, and insufficient medical infrastructure. Pneumonia can cause pleural effusion, where fluids fill the lungs, leading to respiratory difficulty. Early diagnosis is crucial to ensure effective treatment and increase survival rates. Chest X-ray imaging is the most commonly used method for diagnosing pneumonia. However, visual examination of chest X-rays can be difficult and subjective. In this study, we have developed a computer-aided diagnosis system for automatic pneumonia detection using chest X-ray images. We have used DenseNet-121 and ResNet50 as the backbone for the binary class (pneumonia and normal) and multi-class (bacterial pneumonia, viral pneumonia, and normal) classification tasks, respectively. We have also implemented a channel-specific spatial attention mechanism, called Fuzzy Channel Selective Spatial Attention Module (FCSSAM), to highlight the specific spatial regions of relevant channels while removing the irrelevant channels of the extracted features by the backbone. We evaluated the proposed approach on a publicly available chest X-ray dataset, using binary and multi-class classification setups. Our proposed method achieves accuracy rates of 97.15\% and 79.79\% for the binary and multi-class classification setups, respectively. The results of our proposed method are superior to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code of the proposed model will be available at: https://github.com/AyushRoy2001/FA-Net.

Computational historical linguistics seeks to systematically understand processes of sound change, including during periods at which little to no formal recording of language is attested. At the same time, few computational resources exist which deeply explore phonological and morphological connections between proto-languages and their descendants. This is particularly true for the family of Italic languages. To assist historical linguists in the study of Italic sound change, we introduce the Proto-Italic to Latin (PILA) dataset, which consists of roughly 3,000 pairs of forms from Proto-Italic and Latin. We provide a detailed description of how our dataset was created and organized. Then, we exhibit PILA's value in two ways. First, we present baseline results for PILA on a pair of traditional computational historical linguistics tasks. Second, we demonstrate PILA's capability for enhancing other historical-linguistic datasets through a dataset compatibility study.

Quantum kernels hold great promise for offering computational advantages over classical learners, with the effectiveness of these kernels closely tied to the design of the quantum feature map. However, the challenge of designing effective quantum feature maps for real-world datasets, particularly in the absence of sufficient prior information, remains a significant obstacle. In this study, we present a data-driven approach that automates the design of problem-specific quantum feature maps. Our approach leverages feature-selection techniques to handle high-dimensional data on near-term quantum machines with limited qubits, and incorporates a deep neural predictor to efficiently evaluate the performance of various candidate quantum kernels. Through extensive numerical simulations on different datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposal over prior methods, especially for the capability of eliminating the kernel concentration issue and identifying the feature map with prediction advantages. Our work not only unlocks the potential of quantum kernels for enhancing real-world tasks but also highlights the substantial role of deep learning in advancing quantum machine learning.

Question answering on tabular data (a.k.a TableQA), which aims at generating answers to questions grounded on a provided table, has gained significant attention recently. Prior work primarily produces concise factual responses through information extraction from individual or limited table cells, lacking the ability to reason across diverse table cells. Yet, the realm of free-form TableQA, which demands intricate strategies for selecting relevant table cells and the sophisticated integration and inference of discrete data fragments, remains mostly unexplored. To this end, this paper proposes a generalized three-stage approach: Table-to- Graph conversion and cell localizing, external knowledge retrieval, and the fusion of table and text (called TAG-QA), to address the challenge of inferring long free-form answers in generative TableQA. In particular, TAG-QA (1) locates relevant table cells using a graph neural network to gather intersecting cells between relevant rows and columns, (2) leverages external knowledge from Wikipedia, and (3) generates answers by integrating both tabular data and natural linguistic information. Experiments showcase the superior capabilities of TAG-QA in generating sentences that are both faithful and coherent, particularly when compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, TAG-QA surpasses the robust pipeline-based baseline TAPAS by 17% and 14% in terms of BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively. Furthermore, TAG-QA outperforms the end-to-end model T5 by 16% and 12% on BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively.