The increasing proliferation of misinformation and its alarming impact have motivated both industry and academia to develop approaches for misinformation detection and fact checking. Recent advances on large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks, but whether and how LLMs could help with misinformation detection remains relatively underexplored. Most of existing state-of-the-art approaches either do not consider evidence and solely focus on claim related features or assume the evidence to be provided. Few approaches consider evidence retrieval as part of the misinformation detection but rely on fine-tuning models. In this paper, we investigate the potential of LLMs for misinformation detection in a zero-shot setting. We incorporate an evidence retrieval component into the process as it is crucial to gather pertinent information from various sources to detect the veracity of claims. To this end, we propose a novel re-ranking approach for multimodal evidence retrieval using both LLMs and large vision-language models (LVLM). The retrieved evidence samples (images and texts) serve as the input for an LVLM-based approach for multimodal fact verification (LVLM4FV). To enable a fair evaluation, we address the issue of incomplete ground truth for evidence samples in an existing evidence retrieval dataset by annotating a more complete set of evidence samples for both image and text retrieval. Our experimental results on two datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in both evidence retrieval and fact verification tasks and also better generalization capability across dataset compared to the supervised baseline.

Multilingual code-switching research is often hindered by the lack and linguistically biased status of available datasets. To expand language representation, we synthesize code-switching data by replacing intonation units detected through PSST, a speech segmentation model fine-tuned from OpenAI's Whisper, using a speech-to-text translation dataset, CoVoST 2. With our dataset, CoVoSwitch, spanning 13 languages, we evaluate the code-switching translation performance of two multilingual translation models, M2M-100 418M and NLLB-200 600M. We reveal that the inclusion of code-switching units results in higher translation performance than monolingual settings and that models are better at code-switching translation into English than non-English. Further, low-resource languages gain most from integration of code-switched units when translating into English but much less when translating into non-English. Translations into low-resource languages also perform worse than even raw code-switched inputs. We find that systems excel at copying English tokens but struggle with non-English tokens, that the off-target problem in monolingual settings is also relevant in code-switching settings, and that models hallucinate in code-switching translation by introducing words absent in both of the original source sentences. CoVoSwitch and code are available at https://github.com/sophiayk20/covoswitch.

This research investigates whether OpenAI's GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model, can accurately classify the political bias of news sources based solely on their URLs. Given the subjective nature of political labels, third-party bias ratings like those from Ad Fontes Media, AllSides, and Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) are often used in research to analyze news source diversity. This study aims to determine if GPT-4 can replicate these human ratings on a seven-degree scale ("far-left" to "far-right"). The analysis compares GPT-4's classifications against MBFC's, and controls for website popularity using Open PageRank scores. Findings reveal a high correlation ($\text{Spearman's } \rho = .89$, $n = 5,877$, $p < 0.001$) between GPT-4's and MBFC's ratings, indicating the model's potential reliability. However, GPT-4 abstained from classifying approximately $\frac{2}{3}$ of the dataset, particularly less popular and less biased sources. The study also identifies a slight leftward skew in GPT-4's classifications compared to MBFC's. The analysis suggests that while GPT-4 can be a scalable, cost-effective tool for political bias classification of news websites, but its use should complement human judgment to mitigate biases. Further research is recommended to explore the model's performance across different settings, languages, and additional datasets.

The Vision of Autonomic Computing (ACV), proposed over two decades ago, envisions computing systems that self-manage akin to biological organisms, adapting seamlessly to changing environments. Despite decades of research, achieving ACV remains challenging due to the dynamic and complex nature of modern computing systems. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising solutions to these challenges by leveraging their extensive knowledge, language understanding, and task automation capabilities. This paper explores the feasibility of realizing ACV through an LLM-based multi-agent framework for microservice management. We introduce a five-level taxonomy for autonomous service maintenance and present an online evaluation benchmark based on the Sock Shop microservice demo project to assess our framework's performance. Our findings demonstrate significant progress towards achieving Level 3 autonomy, highlighting the effectiveness of LLMs in detecting and resolving issues within microservice architectures. This study contributes to advancing autonomic computing by pioneering the integration of LLMs into microservice management frameworks, paving the way for more adaptive and self-managing computing systems. The code will be made available at https://aka.ms/ACV-LLM.

Key Point Analysis (KPA) aims for quantitative summarization that provides key points (KPs) as succinct textual summaries and quantities measuring their prevalence. KPA studies for arguments and reviews have been reported in the literature. A majority of KPA studies for reviews adopt supervised learning to extract short sentences as KPs before matching KPs to review comments for quantification of KP prevalence. Recent abstractive approaches still generate KPs based on sentences, often leading to KPs with overlapping and hallucinated opinions, and inaccurate quantification. In this paper, we propose Prompted Aspect Key Point Analysis (PAKPA) for quantitative review summarization. PAKPA employs aspect sentiment analysis and prompted in-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate and quantify KPs grounded in aspects for business entities, which achieves faithful KPs with accurate quantification, and removes the need for large amounts of annotated data for supervised training. Experiments on the popular review dataset Yelp and the aspect-oriented review summarization dataset SPACE show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/antangrocket1312/PAKPA

The Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien, for example, operates two dozen manufacturing and processing facilities spread across the globe and nearly 2,000 retail stores in the Americas and Australia. To collect underutilized data from its industrial operations, and gain greater visibility into its supply chain, the company relies on a combination of cloud technology and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities. "A digital supply chain connects us from grower to manufacturer, providing visibility throughout the value chain," says Adam Lorenz, senior director for strategic fleet and indirect procurement at Nutrien. This visibility is critical when it comes to navigating the company's supply chain challenges, which include seasonal demands, weather dependencies, manufacturing capabilities, and product availability. The company requires real-time visibility into its fleets, for example, to identify the location of assets, see where products are moving, and determine inventory requirements.

A one-stop portal for victims to report AI deepfakes to police should be established, the federal police union has said, lamenting that police were forced to "cobble together" laws to charge the first person to face prosecution for spreading deepfake images of womenlast year. The attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, introduced legislation in parliament in June that will create a new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using artificial intelligence or other forms of technology. The Australian Federation Police Association (Afpa) supports the bill, arguing in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry that the current law is too difficult for officers to use. They pointed to the case of a man who was arrested and charged in October last year for allegedly sending deepfake imagery to Brisbane schools and sporting associations. The eSafety commissioner separately launched proceedings against the man over his failure to remove "intimate images" of several prominent Australians last year from a deepfake pornography website.

This paper introduces LLAssist, an open-source tool designed to streamline literature reviews in academic research. In an era of exponential growth in scientific publications, researchers face mounting challenges in efficiently processing vast volumes of literature. LLAssist addresses this issue by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to automate key aspects of the review process. Specifically, it extracts important information from research articles and evaluates their relevance to user-defined research questions. The goal of LLAssist is to significantly reduce the time and effort required for comprehensive literature reviews, allowing researchers to focus more on analyzing and synthesizing information rather than on initial screening tasks. By automating parts of the literature review workflow, LLAssist aims to help researchers manage the growing volume of academic publications more efficiently.

The multi-agent spatial coverage control problem encompasses a broad research domain, dealing with both dynamic and static deployment strategies, discrete-task assignments, and spatial distribution-matching deployment. Coverage control may involve the deployment of a finite number of agents or a continuum through centralized or decentralized, locally-interacting schemes. All these problems can be solved via a different taxonomy of deployment algorithms for multiple agents. Depending on the application scenario, these problems involve from purely discrete descriptions of tasks (finite loads) and agents (finite resources), to a mixture of discrete and continuous elements, to fully continuous descriptions of the same. Yet, it is possible to find common features that underline all the above formulations, which we aim to illustrate here. By doing so, we aim to point the reader to novel references related to these problems. The short article outline is the following: Static coverage via concurrent area partitioning and assignment; Static coverage as a discrete task assignment; and Continuum task assignment for large-scale swarms.

Deep convolutional neural networks have made significant breakthroughs in medical image classification, under the assumption that training samples from all classes are simultaneously available. However, in real-world medical scenarios, there's a common need to continuously learn about new diseases, leading to the emerging field of class incremental learning (CIL) in the medical domain. Typically, CIL suffers from catastrophic forgetting when trained on new classes. This phenomenon is mainly caused by the imbalance between old and new classes, and it becomes even more challenging with imbalanced medical datasets. In this work, we introduce two simple yet effective plug-in methods to mitigate the adverse effects of the imbalance. First, we propose a CIL-balanced classification loss to mitigate the classifier bias toward majority classes via logit adjustment. Second, we propose a distribution margin loss that not only alleviates the inter-class overlap in embedding space but also enforces the intra-class compactness. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method with extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (CCH5000, HAM10000, and EyePACS). The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods.