Frontier vision-language models (VLMs) have made remarkable improvements in video understanding tasks. However, real-world videos typically exist as continuously evolving data streams (e.g., dynamic scenes captured by wearable glasses), necessitating models to continually adapt to shifting data distributions and novel scenarios. Considering the prohibitive computational costs of fine-tuning models on new tasks, usually, a small subset of parameters is updated while the bulk of the model remains frozen. This poses new challenges to existing continual learning frameworks in the context of large multimodal foundation models, i.e., catastrophic forgetting and update conflict. While the foundation models struggle with parameter-efficient continual learning, the hippocampus in the human brain has evolved highly efficient mechanisms for memory formation and consolidation. Inspired by the rapid Binding and pattern separation mechanisms in the hippocampus, in this work, we propose Bisecle for video-language continual learning, where a multi-directional supervision module is used to capture more cross-modal relationships and a contrastive prompt learning scheme is designed to isolate task-specific knowledge to facilitate efficient memory storage. Binding and separation processes further strengthen the ability of VLMs to retain complex experiences, enabling robust and efficient continual learning in video understanding tasks. We perform a thorough evaluation of the proposed Bisecle, demonstrating its ability to mitigate forgetting and enhance cross-task generalization on several VideoQA benchmarks.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Orcas (Orcinus orca) don't appear to be big fans of yachts, but some of them may be curious about humans themselves. According to a study published on June 30 in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, cetology researchers have confirmed dozens of instances of killer whales intentionally approaching people and offering them food--a behavior they typically reserve for building bonds between orca pods. "Orcas often share food with each other--it's a prosocial activity and a way that they build relationships with each other," Jared Towers, a study lead author and executive director of the British Columbia-based research organization Bay Cetology said in a statement. "That they also share with humans may show their interest in relating to us as well."

While Medical Large Language Models (MedLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in clinical tasks, their ethical safety remains insufficiently explored. This paper introduces $\textbf{MedEthicsQA}$, a comprehensive benchmark comprising $\textbf{5,623}$ multiple-choice questions and $\textbf{5,351}$ open-ended questions for evaluation of medical ethics in LLMs. We systematically establish a hierarchical taxonomy integrating global medical ethical standards. The benchmark encompasses widely used medical datasets, authoritative question banks, and scenarios derived from PubMed literature. Rigorous quality control involving multi-stage filtering and multi-faceted expert validation ensures the reliability of the dataset with a low error rate ($2.72\%$). Evaluation of state-of-the-art MedLLMs exhibit declined performance in answering medical ethics questions compared to their foundation counterparts, elucidating the deficiencies of medical ethics alignment. The dataset, registered under CC BY-NC 4.0 license, is available at https://github.com/JianhuiWei7/MedEthicsQA.

Hierarchical planning is a powerful approach to model long sequences structurally. Aside from considering hierarchies in the temporal structure of music, this paper explores an even more important aspect: concept hierarchy, which involves generating music ideas, transforming them, and ultimately organizing them--across musical time and space--into a complete composition. To this end, we introduce TOMI (Transforming and Organizing Music Ideas) as a novel approach in deep music generation and develop a TOMI-based model via instruction-tuned foundation LLM. Formally, we represent a multi-track composition process via a sparse, four-dimensional space characterized by clips (short audio or MIDI segments), sections (temporal positions), tracks (instrument layers), and transformations (elaboration methods). Our model is capable of generating multi-track electronic music with full-song structure, and we further integrate the TOMI-based model with the REAPER digital audio workstation, enabling interactive human-AI co-creation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach produces higher-quality electronic music with stronger structural coherence compared to baselines.

The proposed UniGuard is the first unified online detection framework capable of simultaneously addressing adversarial examples and backdoor attacks. UniGuard builds upon two key insights: first, both AE and backdoor attacks have to compromise the inference phase, making it possible to tackle them simultaneously during run-time via online detection. Second, an adversarial input, whether a perturbed sample in AE attacks or a trigger-carrying sample in backdoor attacks, exhibits distinctive trajectory signatures from a benign sample as it propagates through the layers of a DL model in forward inference. The propagation trajectory of the adversarial sample must deviate from that of its benign counterpart; otherwise, the adversarial objective cannot be fulfilled. Detecting these trajectory signatures is inherently challenging due to their subtlety; UniGuard overcomes this by treating the propagation trajectory as a time-series signal, leveraging LSTM and spectrum transformation to amplify differences between adversarial and benign trajectories that are subtle in the time domain. UniGuard exceptional efficiency and effectiveness have been extensively validated across various modalities (image, text, and audio) and tasks (classification and regression), ranging from diverse model architectures against a wide range of AE attacks and backdoor attacks, including challenging partial backdoors and dynamic triggers. When compared to SOTA methods, including ContraNet (NDSS 22) specific for AE detection and TED (IEEE SP 24) specific for backdoor detection, UniGuard consistently demonstrates superior performance, even when matched against each method's strengths in addressing their respective threats-each SOTA fails to parts of attack strategies while UniGuard succeeds for all.

Word embeddings have become essential components in various information retrieval and natural language processing tasks, such as ranking, document classification, and question answering. However, despite their widespread use, traditional word embedding models present a limitation in their static nature, which hampers their ability to adapt to the constantly evolving language patterns that emerge in sources such as social media and the web (e.g., new hashtags or brand names). To overcome this problem, incremental word embedding algorithms are introduced, capable of dynamically updating word representations in response to new language patterns and processing continuous data streams. This paper presents RiverText, a Python library for training and evaluating incremental word embeddings from text data streams. Our tool is a resource for the information retrieval and natural language processing communities that work with word embeddings in streaming scenarios, such as analyzing social media. The library implements different incremental word embedding techniques, such as Skip-gram, Continuous Bag of Words, and Word Context Matrix, in a standardized framework. In addition, it uses PyTorch as its backend for neural network training. We have implemented a module that adapts existing intrinsic static word embedding evaluation tasks for word similarity and word categorization to a streaming setting. Finally, we compare the implemented methods with different hyperparameter settings and discuss the results. Our open-source library is available at https://github.com/dccuchile/rivertext.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides, extending their applications to dialogue systems, automated content creation, and domain-specific advisory tasks. However, as their use grows, concerns have emerged regarding their reliability in simulating complex decision-making behavior, such as risky decision-making, where a single choice can lead to multiple outcomes. This study investigates the ability of LLMs to simulate risky decision-making scenarios. We compare model-generated decisions with actual human responses in a series of lottery-based tasks, using transportation stated preference survey data from participants in Sydney, Dhaka, Hong Kong, and Nanjing. Demographic inputs were provided to two LLMs -- ChatGPT 4o and ChatGPT o1-mini -- which were tasked with predicting individual choices. Risk preferences were analyzed using the Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) framework. Results show that both models exhibit more risk-averse behavior than human participants, with o1-mini aligning more closely with observed human decisions. Further analysis of multilingual data from Nanjing and Hong Kong indicates that model predictions in Chinese deviate more from actual responses compared to English, suggesting that prompt language may influence simulation performance. These findings highlight both the promise and the current limitations of LLMs in replicating human-like risk behavior, particularly in linguistic and cultural settings.

Distributivity is a well-established and extensively studied notion in lattice theory. In the context of data analysis, particularly within Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), lattices are often observed to exhibit a high degree of distributivity. However, no standardized measure exists to quantify this property. In this paper, we introduce the notion of rises in (concept) lattices as a means to assess distributivity. Rises capture how the number of attributes or objects in covering concepts change within the concept lattice. We show that a lattice is distributive if and only if no non-unit rises occur. Furthermore, we relate rises to the classical notion of meet- and join distributivity. We observe that concept lattices from real-world data are to a high degree join-distributive, but much less meet-distributive. We additionally study how join-distributivity manifests on the level of ordered sets.

Active learning (AL) has demonstrated remarkable potential in reducing the annotation effort required for training machine learning models. However, despite the surging popularity of natural language generation (NLG) tasks in recent years, the application of AL to NLG has been limited. In this paper, we introduce Active Text Generation (ATGen) - a comprehensive framework that bridges AL with text generation tasks, enabling the application of state-of-the-art AL strategies to NLG. Our framework simplifies AL-empowered annotation in NLG tasks using both human annotators and automatic annotation agents based on large language models (LLMs). The framework supports LLMs deployed as services, such as ChatGPT and Claude, or operated on-premises. Furthermore, ATGen provides a unified platform for smooth implementation and benchmarking of novel AL strategies tailored to NLG tasks. Finally, we present evaluation results for state-of-the-art AL strategies across diverse settings and multiple text generation tasks. We show that ATGen reduces both the effort of human annotators and costs associated with API calls to LLM-based annotation agents. The code of the framework is available on GitHub under the MIT license. The video presentation is available at http://atgen-video.nlpresearch.group

Predictive modeling on tabular data is the cornerstone of many real-world applications. Although gradient boosting machines and some recent deep models achieve strong performance on tabular data, they often lack interpretability. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities to generate human-like reasoning and explanations, but remain under-performed for tabular data prediction. In this paper, we propose a new approach that leverages reasoning-based LLMs, trained using reinforcement learning, to perform more accurate and explainable predictions on tabular data. Our method introduces custom reward functions that guide the model not only toward better prediction accuracy but also toward human-understandable reasons for its predictions. The proposed method is evaluated on financial benchmark datasets and compared against established LLMs.