Fox News correspondent Gillian Turner has the latest on the presidents focus amid calls for an impeachment inquiry on Special Report. The U.S. and U.K. joined more than a dozen countries to unveil a new artifical intelligence agreement aimed at preventing rogue actors from abusing the technology, though not all experts are sold on how useful the pact will be. "This is really more of an agreement of intent than actual substance," Phil Siegel, founder of the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation, told Fox News Digital. Siegel's comments come after what a U.S. official described as the first ever detailed agreement on AI safety was unveiled Sunday, according to a report from Reuters, putting measures in place that are meant to create AI systems that are "secure by design." Vice President Kamala Harris watches President Biden sign an executive order during an AI event at the White House on Oct. 30, 2023.

Historical records of climate fields are often sparse due to missing measurements, especially before the introduction of large-scale satellite missions. Several statistical and model-based methods have been introduced to fill gaps and reconstruct historical records. Here, we employ a recently introduced deep-learning approach based on Fourier convolutions, trained on numerical climate model output, to reconstruct historical climate fields. Using this approach we are able to realistically reconstruct large and irregular areas of missing data, as well as reconstruct known historical events such as strong El Ni\~no and La Ni\~na with very little given information. Our method outperforms the widely used statistical kriging method as well as other recent machine learning approaches. The model generalizes to higher resolutions than the ones it was trained on and can be used on a variety of climate fields. Moreover, it allows inpainting of masks never seen before during the model training.

Discovering new materials is essential to solve challenges in climate change, sustainability and healthcare. A typical task in materials discovery is to search for a material in a database which maximises the value of a function. That function is often expensive to evaluate, and can rely upon a simulation or an experiment. Here, we introduce SyMDis, a sample efficient optimisation method based on symbolic learning, that discovers near-optimal materials in a large database. SyMDis performs comparably to a state-of-the-art optimiser, whilst learning interpretable rules to aid physical and chemical verification. Furthermore, the rules learned by SyMDis generalise to unseen datasets and return high performing candidates in a zero-shot evaluation, which is difficult to achieve with other approaches.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), exemplified by ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other state-of-the-art large language models and diffusion models, holds significant potential for transforming education and enhancing human productivity. While the prevalence of GenAI in education has motivated numerous research initiatives, integrating these technologies within the learning analytics (LA) cycle and their implications for practical interventions remain underexplored. This paper delves into the prospective opportunities and challenges GenAI poses for advancing LA. We present a concise overview of the current GenAI landscape and contextualise its potential roles within Clow's generic framework of the LA cycle. We posit that GenAI can play pivotal roles in analysing unstructured data, generating synthetic learner data, enriching multimodal learner interactions, advancing interactive and explanatory analytics, and facilitating personalisation and adaptive interventions. As the lines blur between learners and GenAI tools, a renewed understanding of learners is needed. Future research can delve deep into frameworks and methodologies that advocate for human-AI collaboration. The LA community can play a pivotal role in capturing data about human and AI contributions and exploring how they can collaborate most effectively. As LA advances, it is essential to consider the pedagogical implications and broader socioeconomic impact of GenAI for ensuring an inclusive future.

Cycles are fundamental elements in graph-structured data and have demonstrated their effectiveness in enhancing graph learning models. To encode such information into a graph learning framework, prior works often extract a summary quantity, ranging from the number of cycles to the more sophisticated persistence diagram summaries. However, more detailed information, such as which edges are encoded in a cycle, has not yet been used in graph neural networks. In this paper, we make one step towards addressing this gap, and propose a structure encoding module, called CycleNet, that encodes cycle information via edge structure encoding in a permutation invariant manner. To efficiently encode the space of all cycles, we start with a cycle basis (i.e., a minimal set of cycles generating the cycle space) which we compute via the kernel of the 1-dimensional Hodge Laplacian of the input graph. To guarantee the encoding is invariant w.r.t. the choice of cycle basis, we encode the cycle information via the orthogonal projector of the cycle basis, which is inspired by BasisNet proposed by Lim et al. We also develop a more efficient variant which however requires that the input graph has a unique shortest cycle basis. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed module, we provide some theoretical understandings of its expressive power. Moreover, we show via a range of experiments that networks enhanced by our CycleNet module perform better in various benchmarks compared to several existing SOTA models.

This study investigates the application of large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with Chain-of-Though (CoT)in the automatic scoring of student-written responses to science assessments. We focused on overcoming the challenges of accessibility, technical complexity, and lack of explainability that have previously limited the use of automatic assessment tools among researchers and educators. We used a testing dataset comprising six assessment tasks (three binomial and three trinomial) with 1,650 student responses. We employed six prompt engineering strategies, combining zero-shot or few-shot learning with CoT, either alone or alongside item stem and scoring rubrics. Results indicated that few-shot (acc = .67) outperformed zero-shot learning (acc = .60), with 12.6\% increase. CoT, when used without item stem and scoring rubrics, did not significantly affect scoring accuracy (acc = .60). However, CoT prompting paired with contextual item stems and rubrics proved to be a significant contributor to scoring accuracy (13.44\% increase for zero-shot; 3.7\% increase for few-shot). Using a novel approach PPEAS, we found a more balanced accuracy across different proficiency categories, highlighting the importance of domain-specific reasoning in enhancing the effectiveness of LLMs in scoring tasks. Additionally, we also found that GPT-4 demonstrated superior performance over GPT-3.5 in various scoring tasks, showing 8.64\% difference. The study revealed that the single-call strategy with GPT-4, particularly using greedy sampling, outperformed other approaches, including ensemble voting strategies. This study demonstrates the potential of LLMs in facilitating automatic scoring, emphasizing that CoT enhances accuracy, particularly when used with item stem and scoring rubrics.

Text-to-video (T2V) models have shown remarkable capabilities in generating diverse videos. However, they struggle to produce user-desired stylized videos due to (i) text's inherent clumsiness in expressing specific styles and (ii) the generally degraded style fidelity. To address these challenges, we introduce StyleCrafter, a generic method that enhances pre-trained T2V models with a style control adapter, enabling video generation in any style by providing a reference image. Considering the scarcity of stylized video datasets, we propose to first train a style control adapter using style-rich image datasets, then transfer the learned stylization ability to video generation through a tailor-made finetuning paradigm. To promote content-style disentanglement, we remove style descriptions from the text prompt and extract style information solely from the reference image using a decoupling learning strategy. Additionally, we design a scale-adaptive fusion module to balance the influences of text-based content features and image-based style features, which helps generalization across various text and style combinations. StyleCrafter efficiently generates high-quality stylized videos that align with the content of the texts and resemble the style of the reference images. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is more flexible and efficient than existing competitors.

Academic challenges comprise effective means for (i) advancing the state of the art, (ii) putting in the spotlight of a scientific community specific topics and problems, as well as (iii) closing the gap for under represented communities in terms of accessing and participating in the shaping of research fields. Competitions can be traced back for centuries and their achievements have had great influence in our modern world. Recently, they (re)gained popularity, with the overwhelming amounts of data that is being generated in different domains, as well as the need of pushing the barriers of existing methods, and available tools to handle such data. This chapter provides a survey of academic challenges in the context of machine learning and related fields. We review the most influential competitions in the last few years and analyze challenges per area of knowledge. The aims of scientific challenges, their goals, major achievements and expectations for the next few years are reviewed.

Recent advancements in image and video generation models have seen tremendous progress, with existing models able to synthesize highly complex images [26, 27, 28, 30, 6] or videos [37, 31, 2, 15, 12] given textual descriptions. Outside of generating purely novel content, these models have shown to be powerful tools in achieving advanced image and video editing capabilities for downstream content creation. Given a source video, a caption of the source video, and an editing textual prompt, a video editing method should produce a new video that is aligned with the provided editing prompt while retaining faithfulness to all other non-edited characteristics of the original source video. Video edit types can be broadly split into two main categories of spatial and temporal edits. Spatial edits generally consist of image-based edits extended to video, such as editing a video in the style of Van Gogh, inserting an object into the scene, or changing the background. Due to the added temporal dimension in video, we can also change the underlying motion of the object, such as making a panda play in a pile of ribbons, or replacing apricots in a video with apples and making them fall off a tree (see Figure 1).

Vision-language pre-training and instruction tuning have demonstrated general-purpose capabilities in 2D visual reasoning tasks by aligning visual encoders with state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce a simple, yet effective, cross-modality framework built atop frozen LLMs that allows the integration of various modalities without extensive modality-specific customization. To facilitate instruction-modality fine-tuning, we collect high-quality instruction tuning data in an automatic and scalable manner, composed of 24K QA samples for audio and 250K QA samples for 3D. Leveraging instruction-aware representations, our model performs comparably with leading-edge counterparts without the need of extensive modality-specific pre-training or customization. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates cross-modal reasoning abilities across two or more input modalities, despite each modality projection being trained individually. To study the model's cross-modal abilities, we contribute a novel Discriminative Cross-modal Reasoning (DisCRn) evaluation task, comprising 9K audio-video QA samples and 28K image-3D QA samples that require the model to reason discriminatively across disparate input modalities.