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On Locality of Local Explanation Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

The use of a global population can lead to potentially misleading results when local model behaviour is of interest. Hence we consider the formulation of neighbourhood reference distributions that improve the local interpretability of Shapley values.


Hollywood's SAG Awards announces it will change its name

BBC News

Hollywood's SAG Awards announces it will change its name The Screen Actors Guild Awards, the marquee awards ceremony honouring actors, is getting a new name. Known colloquially as the SAG Awards, the awards show will now be dubbed the Actor Awards presented by Sag-Aftra, the labour union representing US film, television and radio actors. Since the beginning, our statue has been called'The Actor' and we're a show that's entirely about actors, so this new name is a perfect next step in the show's evolution, the show's executive producer said on Friday. The rebrand comes ahead of the 32nd edition of the star-studded ceremony, which is set for 1 March 2026. The award show's executive producer Jon Brockett told the BBC that the name change - which was announced at a board meeting on Friday - gives viewers in more than 190 countries an immediate understanding of who we are and what we're about - a show about actors honouring actors.


What's behind a surge in bear attacks in Japan?

Al Jazeera

A deadly conflict between bears and humans is playing out across Japan, where authorities have deployed the military to protect locals who are using drone-based alert and surveillance systems to track the bears. Since April this year, at least 13 people have been killed and more than 100 have been injured in bear attacks in the country, according to an October report by the Ministry of Environment. The ministry added that the death toll is the highest since Japan began keeping records of bear attacks in 2006. It is also home to Asiatic black bears - also known as Moon bears - which are smaller in size, weighing between 80-200kg (176-440 pounds), and are found on the mainland, which is more densely populated. Both types of bear have been involved in incidents this year, and both are dangerous to humans to varying degrees.


'Astonishingly lethal': BBC reports from site of Russian strike in Kyiv

BBC News

At least six people have been killed in a wave of Russia strikes on Kyiv, which the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has condemned as a heinous attack. The BBC's James Landale visited the scene of one attack in eastern Kyiv where a drone rammed through a block of flats and left six people dead. Several other regions were also targeted. A drone attack on a market at Chornomorsk in the south of the country killed two people. Catherine Connolly has'never believed more' in the spirit of Ireland New Irish President Catherine Connolly says she has been given a powerful mandate to articulate a vision for a new republic.


"Sirāt" Is a Harrowing, Exhilarating Dance of Death

The New Yorker

At one point, Luis assumes that he and Esteban have been abandoned, only to realize, with a start, that their newfound friends are actually circling back to help. In such moments, we grasp the source of the story's mysterious power: a tough-minded understanding that kindness is rare yet persistent, and quite possibly an affront to the laws of nature. "Sirāt" is a chain of defiantly compassionate acts--noble human improbabilities that take on, in retrospect, an air of fatalistic inevitability. Laxe, a restless wanderer himself, knows Morocco well. He shot his first feature, "You All Are Captains" (2011), in Tangier, where he'd spent several years working at a shelter for disadvantaged children. Several of these children appeared in the movie--a formally playful collision of fiction and documentary in which Laxe, also making an appearance, slyly interrogated his European outsider-artist role. Next came "Mimosas" (2016), an elusive, arrestingly gorgeous drama about a caravan bearing a dying sheikh across Morocco's Atlas Mountains to his homeland. The film had the beauty of a travelogue and the opacity of a parable. Its most dynamic character was a fiery Muslim preacher who warned his fellow-travellers not to stray, geographically or morally.




Language Specific Knowledge: Do Models Know Better in X than in English?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Often, multilingual language models are trained with the objective to map semantically similar content (in different languages) in the same latent space. In this paper, we show a nuance in this training objective, and find that by changing the language of the input query, we can improve the question answering ability of language models. Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce the term Language Specific Knowledge (LSK) to denote queries that are best answered in an "expert language" for a given LLM, thereby enhancing its question-answering ability. We introduce the problem of language selection -- for some queries, language models can perform better when queried in languages other than English, sometimes even better in low-resource languages -- and the goal is to select the optimal language for the query. Second, we introduce simple to strong baselines to test this problem. Additionally, as a first-pass solution to this novel problem, we design LSKExtractor to benchmark the language-specific knowledge present in a language model and then exploit it during inference. To test our framework, we employ three datasets that contain knowledge about both cultural and social behavioral norms. Overall, LSKExtractor achieves up to 10% relative improvement across datasets, and is competitive against strong baselines, while being feasible in real-world settings. Broadly, our research contributes to the open-source development (https://github.com/agarwalishika/LSKExtractor/tree/main) of language models that are inclusive and more aligned with the cultural and linguistic contexts in which they are deployed.


Omnilingual ASR: Open-Source Multilingual Speech Recognition for 1600+ Languages

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has advanced in high-resource languages, but most of the world's 7,000+ languages remain unsupported, leaving thousands of long-tail languages behind. Expanding ASR coverage has been costly and limited by architectures that restrict language support, making extension inaccessible to most--all while entangled with ethical concerns when pursued without community collaboration. To transcend these limitations, we introduce Omnilingual ASR, the first large-scale ASR system designed for extensibility. Omnilingual ASR enables communities to introduce unserved languages with only a handful of data samples. It scales self-supervised pre-training to 7B parameters to learn robust speech representations and introduces an encoder-decoder architecture designed for zero-shot generalization, leveraging a LLM-inspired decoder. This capability is grounded in a massive and diverse training corpus; by combining breadth of coverage with linguistic variety, the model learns representations robust enough to adapt to unseen languages. Incorporating public resources with community-sourced recordings gathered through compensated local partnerships, Omnilingual ASR expands coverage to over 1,600 languages, the largest such effort to date--including over 500 never before served by ASR. Automatic evaluations show substantial gains over prior systems, especially in low-resource conditions, and strong generalization. We release Omnilingual ASR as a family of models, from 300M variants for low-power devices to 7B for maximum accuracy. We reflect on the ethical considerations shaping this design and conclude by discussing its societal impact. In particular, we highlight how open-sourcing models and tools can lower barriers for researchers and communities, inviting new forms of participation. Open-source artifacts are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/omnilingual-asr.