The construction of large open knowledge bases (OKBs) is integral to many knowledge-driven applications on the world wide web such as web search. However, noun phrases and relational phrases in OKBs often suffer from redundancy and ambiguity, which calls for the investigation on OKB canonicalization. Current solutions address OKB canonicalization by devising advanced clustering algorithms and using knowledge graph embedding (KGE) to further facilitate the canonicalization process. Nevertheless, these works fail to fully exploit the synergy between clustering and KGE learning, and the methods designed for these subtasks are sub-optimal. To this end, we put forward a multi-task learning framework, namely MulCanon, to tackle OKB canonicalization. In addition, diffusion model is used in the soft clustering process to improve the noun phrase representations with neighboring information, which can lead to more accurate representations. MulCanon unifies the learning objectives of these sub-tasks, and adopts a two-stage multi-task learning paradigm for training. A thorough experimental study on popular OKB canonicalization benchmarks validates that MulCanon can achieve competitive canonicalization results.

Text-to-video diffusion models enable the generation of high-quality videos that follow text instructions, making it easy to create diverse and individual content. However, existing approaches mostly focus on high-quality short video generation (typically 16 or 24 frames), ending up with hard-cuts when naively extended to the case of long video synthesis. To overcome these limitations, we introduce StreamingT2V, an autoregressive approach for long video generation of 80, 240, 600, 1200 or more frames with smooth transitions. The key components are:(i) a short-term memory block called conditional attention module (CAM), which conditions the current generation on the features extracted from the previous chunk via an attentional mechanism, leading to consistent chunk transitions, (ii) a long-term memory block called appearance preservation module, which extracts high-level scene and object features from the first video chunk to prevent the model from forgetting the initial scene, and (iii) a randomized blending approach that enables to apply a video enhancer autoregressively for infinitely long videos without inconsistencies between chunks. Experiments show that StreamingT2V generates high motion amount. In contrast, all competing image-to-video methods are prone to video stagnation when applied naively in an autoregressive manner. Thus, we propose with StreamingT2V a high-quality seamless text-to-long video generator that outperforms competitors with consistency and motion. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/StreamingT2V

General purpose AI, such as ChatGPT, seems to have lowered the barriers for the public to use AI and harness its power. However, the governance and development of AI still remain in the hands of a few, and the pace of development is accelerating without proper assessment of risks. As a first step towards democratic governance and risk assessment of AI, we introduce Particip-AI, a framework to gather current and future AI use cases and their harms and benefits from non-expert public. Our framework allows us to study more nuanced and detailed public opinions on AI through collecting use cases, surfacing diverse harms through risk assessment under alternate scenarios (i.e., developing and not developing a use case), and illuminating tensions over AI development through making a concluding choice on its development. To showcase the promise of our framework towards guiding democratic AI, we gather responses from 295 demographically diverse participants. We find that participants' responses emphasize applications for personal life and society, contrasting with most current AI development's business focus. This shows the value of surfacing diverse harms that are complementary to expert assessments. Furthermore, we found that perceived impact of not developing use cases predicted participants' judgements of whether AI use cases should be developed, and highlighted lay users' concerns of techno-solutionism. We conclude with a discussion on how frameworks like Particip-AI can further guide democratic AI governance and regulation.

Abstract Like electoral systems, decision-making methods are also vulnerable to manipulation by decision-makers. The ability to effectively defend against such threats can only come from thoroughly understanding the manipulation mechanisms. In the presented article, we show two algorithms that can be used to launch a manipulation attack. They allow for equating the weights of two selected alternatives in the pairwise comparison method and, consequently, choosing a leader. The theoretical considerations are accompanied by a Monte Carlo simulation showing the relationship between the size of the PC matrix, the degree of inconsistency, and the ease of manipulation. This work is a continuation of our previous research published in the paper (Szybowski et al., 2023)

Despite its technological breakthroughs, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research has limited success in producing the {\em effective explanations} needed by users. In order to improve XAI systems' usability, practical interpretability, and efficacy for real users, the emerging area of {\em Explainable Interfaces} (EIs) focuses on the user interface and user experience design aspects of XAI. This paper presents a systematic survey of 53 publications to identify current trends in human-XAI interaction and promising directions for EI design and development. This is among the first systematic survey of EI research.

Nowadays an ever-growing concerning phenomenon, the emergence of algorithmic biases that can lead to unfair models, emerges. Several debiasing approaches have been proposed in the realm of deep learning, employing more or less sophisticated approaches to discourage these models from massively employing these biases. However, a question emerges: is this extra complexity really necessary? Is a vanilla-trained model already embodying some ``unbiased sub-networks'' that can be used in isolation and propose a solution without relying on the algorithmic biases? In this work, we show that such a sub-network typically exists, and can be extracted from a vanilla-trained model without requiring additional training. We further validate that such specific architecture is incapable of learning a specific bias, suggesting that there are possible architectural countermeasures to the problem of biases in deep neural networks.

Deep learning-based image generation has seen significant advancements with diffusion models, notably improving the quality of generated images. Despite these developments, generating images with unseen characteristics beneficial for downstream tasks has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, we propose Style-Extracting Diffusion Models, featuring two conditioning mechanisms. Specifically, we utilize 1) a style conditioning mechanism which allows to inject style information of previously unseen images during image generation and 2) a content conditioning which can be targeted to a downstream task, e.g., layout for segmentation. We introduce a trainable style encoder to extract style information from images, and an aggregation block that merges style information from multiple style inputs. This architecture enables the generation of images with unseen styles in a zero-shot manner, by leveraging styles from unseen images, resulting in more diverse generations. In this work, we use the image layout as target condition and first show the capability of our method on a natural image dataset as a proof-of-concept. We further demonstrate its versatility in histopathology, where we combine prior knowledge about tissue composition and unannotated data to create diverse synthetic images with known layouts. This allows us to generate additional synthetic data to train a segmentation network in a semi-supervised fashion. We verify the added value of the generated images by showing improved segmentation results and lower performance variability between patients when synthetic images are included during segmentation training. Our code will be made publicly available at [LINK].

Social media platforms are online fora where users engage in discussions, share content, and build connections. This review explores the dynamics of social interactions, user-generated contents, and biases within the context of social media analysis (analyzing works that use the tools offered by complex network analysis and natural language processing) through the lens of three key points of view: online debates, online support, and human-AI interactions. On the one hand, we delineate the phenomenon of online debates, where polarization, misinformation, and echo chamber formation often proliferate, driven by algorithmic biases and extreme mechanisms of homophily. On the other hand, we explore the emergence of online support groups through users' self-disclosure and social support mechanisms. Online debates and support mechanisms present a duality of both perils and possibilities within social media; perils of segregated communities and polarized debates, and possibilities of empathy narratives and self-help groups. This dichotomy also extends to a third perspective: users' reliance on AI-generated content, such as the ones produced by Large Language Models, which can manifest both human biases hidden in training sets and non-human biases that emerge from their artificial neural architectures. Analyzing interdisciplinary approaches, we aim to deepen the understanding of the complex interplay between social interactions, user-generated content, and biases within the realm of social media ecosystems.

A critical bottleneck limiting imitation learning in robotics is the lack of data. This problem is more severe in mobile manipulation, where collecting demonstrations is harder than in stationary manipulation due to the lack of available and easy-to-use teleoperation interfaces. In this work, we demonstrate TeleMoMa, a general and modular interface for whole-body teleoperation of mobile manipulators. TeleMoMa unifies multiple human interfaces including RGB and depth cameras, virtual reality controllers, keyboard, joysticks, etc., and any combination thereof. In its more accessible version, TeleMoMa works using simply vision (e.g., an RGB-D camera), lowering the entry bar for humans to provide mobile manipulation demonstrations. We demonstrate the versatility of TeleMoMa by teleoperating several existing mobile manipulators - PAL Tiago++, Toyota HSR, and Fetch - in simulation and the real world. We demonstrate the quality of the demonstrations collected with TeleMoMa by training imitation learning policies for mobile manipulation tasks involving synchronized whole-body motion. Finally, we also show that TeleMoMa's teleoperation channel enables teleoperation on site, looking at the robot, or remote, sending commands and observations through a computer network, and perform user studies to evaluate how easy it is for novice users to learn to collect demonstrations with different combinations of human interfaces enabled by our system. We hope TeleMoMa becomes a helpful tool for the community enabling researchers to collect whole-body mobile manipulation demonstrations. For more information and video results, https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/telemoma-web.

After a relaxing weekend away, Guillermo Ibarrola was walking out of a train station in Argentina's capital when police arrested him and accused him of a robbery committed hundreds of miles away in a place he had never visited. "It was a nightmare," Ibarrola told local media after the 2019 incident, which rights campaigners say highlights the risks of using facial recognition systems to survey populations. The system of 300 cameras linked to a national crime database -- dubbed Buenos Aires' Big Brother -- was suspended two years ago after a court found it may have been used to collect data on journalists, politicians and human rights activists, and ruled it unconstitutional.