Long video understanding is a significant and ongoing challenge in the intersection of multimedia and artificial intelligence. Employing large language models (LLMs) for comprehending video becomes an emerging and promising method. However, this approach incurs high computational costs due to the extensive array of video tokens, experiences reduced visual clarity as a consequence of token aggregation, and confronts challenges arising from irrelevant visual tokens while answering video-related questions. To alleviate these issues, we present an Interactive Visual Adapter (IVA) within LLMs, designed to enhance interaction with fine-grained visual elements. Specifically, we first transform long videos into temporal video tokens via leveraging a visual encoder alongside a pretrained causal transformer, then feed them into LLMs with the video instructions. Subsequently, we integrated IVA, which contains a lightweight temporal frame selector and a spatial feature interactor, within the internal blocks of LLMs to capture instruction-aware and fine-grained visual signals. Consequently, the proposed video-LLM facilitates a comprehensive understanding of long video content through appropriate long video modeling and precise visual interactions. We conducted extensive experiments on nine video understanding benchmarks and experimental results show that our interactive visual adapter significantly improves the performance of video LLMs on long video QA tasks. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of IVA in long and short video understandings.

Social media platforms are hubs for multimodal information exchange, encompassing text, images, and videos, making it challenging for machines to comprehend the information or emotions associated with interactions in online spaces. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as a promising solution to address these challenges, yet struggle with accurately interpreting human emotions and complex contents like misinformation. This paper introduces MM-Soc, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate MLLMs' understanding of multimodal social media content. MM-Soc compiles prominent multimodal datasets and incorporates a novel large-scale YouTube tagging dataset, targeting a range of tasks from misinformation detection, hate speech detection, and social context generation. Through our exhaustive evaluation on ten size-variants of four open-source MLLMs, we have identified significant performance disparities, highlighting the need for advancements in models' social understanding capabilities. Our analysis reveals that, in a zero-shot setting, various types of MLLMs generally exhibit difficulties in handling social media tasks. However, MLLMs demonstrate performance improvements post fine-tuning, suggesting potential pathways for improvement.

Automated essay scoring (AES) is a useful tool in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing education, offering real-time essay scores for students and instructors. However, previous AES models were trained on essays and scores irrelevant to the practical scenarios of EFL writing education and usually provided a single holistic score due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we release DREsS, a large-scale, standard dataset for rubric-based automated essay scoring. DREsS comprises three sub-datasets: DREsS_New, DREsS_Std., and DREsS_CASE. We collect DREsS_New, a real-classroom dataset with 1.7K essays authored by EFL undergraduate students and scored by English education experts. We also standardize existing rubric-based essay scoring datasets as DREsS_Std. We suggest CASE, a corruption-based augmentation strategy for essays, which generates 20K synthetic samples of DREsS_CASE and improves the baseline results by 45.44%. DREsS will enable further research to provide a more accurate and practical AES system for EFL writing education.

Advances in graph machine learning (ML) have been driven by applications in chemistry as graphs have remained the most expressive representations of molecules. While early graph ML methods focused primarily on small organic molecules, recently, the scope of graph ML has expanded to include inorganic materials. Modelling the periodicity and symmetry of inorganic crystalline materials poses unique challenges, which existing graph ML methods are unable to address. Moving to inorganic nanomaterials increases complexity as the scale of number of nodes within each graph can be broad ($10$ to $10^5$). The bulk of existing graph ML focuses on characterising molecules and materials by predicting target properties with graphs as input. However, the most exciting applications of graph ML will be in their generative capabilities, which is currently not at par with other domains such as images or text. We invite the graph ML community to address these open challenges by presenting two new chemically-informed large-scale inorganic (CHILI) nanomaterials datasets: A medium-scale dataset (with overall >6M nodes, >49M edges) of mono-metallic oxide nanomaterials generated from 12 selected crystal types (CHILI-3K) and a large-scale dataset (with overall >183M nodes, >1.2B edges) of nanomaterials generated from experimentally determined crystal structures (CHILI-100K). We define 11 property prediction tasks and 6 structure prediction tasks, which are of special interest for nanomaterial research. We benchmark the performance of a wide array of baseline methods and use these benchmarking results to highlight areas which need future work. To the best of our knowledge, CHILI-3K and CHILI-100K are the first open-source nanomaterial datasets of this scale -- both on the individual graph level and of the dataset as a whole -- and the only nanomaterials datasets with high structural and elemental diversity.

Former Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller joined'Fox & Friends' to discuss the latest on the escalation in the Middle East as the U.S. continues to strike Iranian proxies. Despite a month of U.S.-led airstrikes, Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels remain capable of launching significant attacks -- just this week, they seriously damaged a ship in a crucial strait and apparently downed an American drone worth tens of millions of dollars. The continued assaults by the Houthis on shipping through the crucial Red Sea corridor -- the Bab el-Mandeb Strait -- against the backdrop of Israel's war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip underscore the challenges in trying to stop the guerrilla-style attacks that have seen them hold onto Yemen's capital and much of the war-ravaged country's north since 2014. Meanwhile, the campaign has boosted the rebels' standing in the Arab world, despite their own human rights abuses in a yearslong stalemated war with several of America's allies in the region. And the longer their attacks go on, analysts warn the greater the risk that disruptions to international shipping will begin to weigh down on the global economy.

Parents might have once cautioned against speaking to strangers on the internet. But dating apps are now one of the most common ways for couples around the world to meet. Matching with strangers still has its drawbacks, including the risk of being'catfished'. But help is at hand, as Tinder has launched new verification tools in the UK and US that let users scan their passport or driving licence to confirm their identity. 'Giving users more confidence that their matches are authentic is one of the most valuable things we can do for our users,' said Rory Kozoll, SVP Product Integrity at Tinder.

Significant strides have been made in natural language tasks, largely attributed to the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs). These models, pre-trained on extensive and diverse corpora, have become increasingly capable of comprehending the intricacies of language. Despite the abundance of LLMs for many high-resource languages, the availability of such models remains limited for European Portuguese. We introduce Gl\'orIA, a robust European Portuguese decoder LLM. To pre-train Gl\'orIA, we assembled a comprehensive PT-PT text corpus comprising 35 billion tokens from various sources. We present our pre-training methodology, followed by an assessment of the model's effectiveness on multiple downstream tasks. Additionally, to evaluate our models' language modeling capabilities, we introduce CALAME-PT (Context-Aware LAnguage Modeling Evaluation for Portuguese), the first Portuguese zero-shot language-modeling benchmark. Evaluation shows that Gl\'orIA significantly outperforms existing open PT decoder models in language modeling and that it can generate sound, knowledge-rich, and coherent PT-PT text. The model also exhibits strong potential for various downstream tasks.

As supervised fine-tuning of pre-trained models within NLP applications increases in popularity, larger corpora of annotated data are required, especially with increasing parameter counts in large language models. Active learning, which attempts to mine and annotate unlabeled instances to improve model performance maximally fast, is a common choice for reducing the annotation cost; however, most methods typically ignore class imbalance and either assume access to initial annotated data or require multiple rounds of active learning selection before improving rare classes. We present STENCIL, which utilizes a set of text exemplars and the recently proposed submodular mutual information to select a set of weakly labeled rare-class instances that are then strongly labeled by an annotator. We show that STENCIL improves overall accuracy by $10\%-24\%$ and rare-class F-1 score by $17\%-40\%$ on multiple text classification datasets over common active learning methods within the class-imbalanced cold-start setting.

The introduction of Vec2Text, a technique for inverting text embeddings, has raised serious privacy concerns within dense retrieval systems utilizing text embeddings, including those provided by OpenAI and Cohere. This threat comes from the ability for a malicious attacker with access to text embeddings to reconstruct the original text. In this paper, we investigate various aspects of embedding models that could influence the recoverability of text using Vec2Text. Our exploration involves factors such as distance metrics, pooling functions, bottleneck pre-training, training with noise addition, embedding quantization, and embedding dimensions -- aspects not previously addressed in the original Vec2Text paper. Through a thorough analysis of these factors, our aim is to gain a deeper understanding of the critical elements impacting the trade-offs between text recoverability and retrieval effectiveness in dense retrieval systems. This analysis provides valuable insights for practitioners involved in designing privacy-aware dense retrieval systems. Additionally, we propose a straightforward fix for embedding transformation that ensures equal ranking effectiveness while mitigating the risk of text recoverability. Furthermore, we extend the application of Vec2Text to the separate task of corpus poisoning, where, theoretically, Vec2Text presents a more potent threat compared to previous attack methods. Notably, Vec2Text does not require access to the dense retriever's model parameters and can efficiently generate numerous adversarial passages. In summary, this study highlights the potential threat posed by Vec2Text to existing dense retrieval systems, while also presenting effective methods to patch and strengthen such systems against such risks.

With the exponential growth of the life science literature, biomedical text mining (BTM) has become an essential technology for accelerating the extraction of insights from publications. Identifying named entities (e.g., diseases, drugs, or genes) in texts and their linkage to reference knowledge bases are crucial steps in BTM pipelines to enable information aggregation from different documents. However, tools for these two steps are rarely applied in the same context in which they were developed. Instead, they are applied in the wild, i.e., on application-dependent text collections different from those used for the tools' training, varying, e.g., in focus, genre, style, and text type. This raises the question of whether the reported performance of BTM tools can be trusted for downstream applications. Here, we report on the results of a carefully designed cross-corpus benchmark for named entity extraction, where tools were applied systematically to corpora not used during their training. Based on a survey of 28 published systems, we selected five for an in-depth analysis on three publicly available corpora encompassing four different entity types. Comparison between tools results in a mixed picture and shows that, in a cross-corpus setting, the performance is significantly lower than the one reported in an in-corpus setting. HunFlair2 showed the best performance on average, being closely followed by PubTator. Our results indicate that users of BTM tools should expect diminishing performances when applying them in the wild compared to original publications and show that further research is necessary to make BTM tools more robust.