This study explores human-robot interaction (HRI) based on a mobile robot and YOLO to increase real-time situation awareness and prevent accidents in the workplace. Using object segmentation, we propose an approach that is capable of analyzing these situations in real-time and providing useful information to avoid critical working situations. In the industry, ensuring the safety of workers is paramount, and solutions based on robots and AI can provide a safer environment. For that, we proposed a methodology evaluated with two different YOLO versions (YOLOv8 and YOLOv5) alongside a LoCoBot robot for supervision and to perform the interaction with a user. We show that our proposed approach is capable of navigating a test scenario and issuing alerts via Text-to-Speech when dangerous situations are faced, such as when hardhats and safety vests are not detected. Based on the results gathered, we can conclude that our system is capable of detecting and informing risk situations such as helmet/no helmet and safety vest/no safety vest situations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a new wave of artificial intelligence advancements impacting every scientific field and discipline. They are trained on a simple objective: to predict the next token given the previous context. We live in a world where most of the data around us, e.g., text, audio, and music, has a multi-scale structure associated with it. This paper infuses LLMs with traditional signal processing ideas, namely wavelets, during pre-training to take advantage of the structure. Without adding any extra parameters to a GPT-style LLM architecture in academic setup, we achieve the same pre-training performance almost twice as fast in text, raw audio, and symbolic music. This is achieved by imposing a structure on intermediate embeddings. When trained for the same number of training steps, we achieve significant gains in performance, which is comparable to pre-training a larger neural architecture. Our architecture allows every next token prediction access to intermediate embeddings at different temporal resolutions in every Transformer decoder block. This work will hopefully pave the way for incorporating multi-rate signal processing ideas into traditional LLM pre-training.

When designing a public transportation network in a country, one may want to minimise the sum of travel duration of all inhabitants. This corresponds to a purely utilitarian view and does not involve any fairness consideration, as the resulting network will typically benefit the capital city and/or large central cities while leaving some peripheral cities behind. On the other hand, a more egalitarian view will allow some people to travel between peripheral cities without having to go through a central city. We define a model, propose algorithms for computing solution networks, and report on experiments based on real data.

As MTC networks continue to grow rapidly, managing and optimizing resources has become a crucial challenge for ensuring scalability. Additionally, the low-power/complexity of the MTC devices (MTD) present another challenge in terms of data management and network availability. These factors depend on the limited battery lifetime of the devices and their ability to implement algorithms, making energy efficiency and optimization critical enablers for future MTC networks (Shafiq et al., 2020). Characterizing and modeling MTC traffic is crucial for optimizing wireless IoT networks by tailoring management strategies to specific application needs (Sharma & Wang, 2019, 2018). With this, significant energy savings may be achieved, which is crucial due to the limited battery lifespan inherent in IoT networks, thereby improving network efficiency and scalability Shafiq et al. (2020). This may be enabled by the exploitation of accurate machine learning (ML)-based traffic predictors (Kato et al., 2016). For example, idle channel monitoring is responsible for wasting over half of the energy consumed in these networks (Mughees et al., 2020) while the results in (Ruiz-Guirola et al., 2022) indicated that up to 38% of the consumed energy could be saved by exploiting a prediction method when using sleep modes like wake-up radio or discontinuous reception. Unfortunately, the use of ML requires numerous labeled data obtained from extensive, large-scale dataset (Aldahiri et al., 2021). A significant stage of the ML process is the data analysis, which can be a difficult task.

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to prioritize adherence to user prompts over providing veracious responses, leading to the sycophancy issue. When challenged by users, LLMs tend to admit mistakes and provide inaccurate responses even if they initially provided the correct answer. Recent works propose to employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to mitigate the sycophancy issue, while it typically leads to the degeneration of LLMs' general capability. To address the challenge, we propose a novel supervised pinpoint tuning (SPT), where the region-of-interest modules are tuned for a given objective. Specifically, SPT first reveals and verifies a small percentage (<5%) of the basic modules, which significantly affect a particular behavior of LLMs. i.e., sycophancy. Subsequently, SPT merely fine-tunes these identified modules while freezing the rest. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed SPT, we conduct comprehensive experiments, demonstrating that SPT significantly mitigates the sycophancy issue of LLMs (even better than SFT). Moreover, SPT introduces limited or even no side effects on the general capability of LLMs. Our results shed light on how to precisely, effectively, and efficiently explain and improve the targeted ability of LLMs.

Deriving a representative model using value function-based methods from the perspective of preference disaggregation has emerged as a prominent and growing topic in multi-criteria sorting (MCS) problems. A noteworthy observation is that many existing approaches to learning a representative model for MCS problems traditionally assume the monotonicity of criteria, which may not always align with the complexities found in real-world MCS scenarios. Consequently, this paper proposes some approaches to learning a representative model for MCS problems with non-monotonic criteria through the integration of the threshold-based value-driven sorting procedure. To do so, we first define some transformation functions to map the marginal values and category thresholds into a UTA-like functional space. Subsequently, we construct constraint sets to model non-monotonic criteria in MCS problems and develop optimization models to check and rectify the inconsistency of the decision maker's assignment example preference information. By simultaneously considering the complexity and discriminative power of the models, two distinct lexicographic optimization-based approaches are developed to derive a representative model for MCS problems with non-monotonic criteria. Eventually, we offer an illustrative example and conduct comprehensive simulation experiments to elaborate the feasibility and validity of the proposed approaches.

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant progress in the field of music generation, driving innovation in music creation and applications. This paper provides a systematic review of the latest research advancements in AI music generation, covering key technologies, models, datasets, evaluation methods, and their practical applications across various fields. The main contributions of this review include: (1) presenting a comprehensive summary framework that systematically categorizes and compares different technological approaches, including symbolic generation, audio generation, and hybrid models, helping readers better understand the full spectrum of technologies in the field; (2) offering an extensive survey of current literature, covering emerging topics such as multimodal datasets and emotion expression evaluation, providing a broad reference for related research; (3) conducting a detailed analysis of the practical impact of AI music generation in various application domains, particularly in real-time interaction and interdisciplinary applications, offering new perspectives and insights; (4) summarizing the existing challenges and limitations of music quality evaluation methods and proposing potential future research directions, aiming to promote the standardization and broader adoption of evaluation techniques. Through these innovative summaries and analyses, this paper serves as a comprehensive reference tool for researchers and practitioners in AI music generation, while also outlining future directions for the field.

Overcoming the limited context limitations in early-generation LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been a reliable solution for context-based answer generation in the past. Recently, the emergence of long-context LLMs allows the models to incorporate much longer text sequences, making RAG less attractive. Recent studies show that long-context LLMs significantly outperform RAG in long-context applications. Unlike the existing works favoring the long-context LLM over RAG, we argue that the extremely long context in LLMs suffers from a diminished focus on relevant information and leads to potential degradation in answer quality. This paper revisits the RAG in long-context answer generation. We propose an order-preserve retrieval-augmented generation (OP-RAG) mechanism, which significantly improves the performance of RAG for long-context question-answer applications. With OP-RAG, as the number of retrieved chunks increases, the answer quality initially rises, and then declines, forming an inverted U-shaped curve. There exist sweet points where OP-RAG could achieve higher answer quality with much less tokens than long-context LLM taking the whole context as input. Extensive experiments on public benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our OP-RAG.

Generative AI has drawn significant attention from stakeholders in higher education. As it introduces new opportunities for personalized learning and tutoring support, it simultaneously poses challenges to academic integrity and leads to ethical issues. Consequently, governing responsible AI usage within higher education institutions (HEIs) becomes increasingly important. Leading universities have already published guidelines on Generative AI, with most attempting to embrace this technology responsibly. This study provides a new perspective by focusing on strategies for responsible AI governance as demonstrated in these guidelines. Through a case study of 14 prestigious universities in the United States, we identified the multi-unit governance of AI, the role-specific governance of AI, and the academic characteristics of AI governance from their AI guidelines. The strengths and potential limitations of these strategies and characteristics are discussed. The findings offer practical implications for guiding responsible AI usage in HEIs and beyond.

This paper presents rerankers, a Python library which provides an easy-to-use interface to the most commonly used re-ranking approaches. Re-ranking is an integral component of many retrieval pipelines; however, there exist numerous approaches to it, relying on different implementation methods. rerankers unifies these methods into a single user-friendly interface, allowing practitioners and researchers alike to explore different methods while only changing a single line of Python code. Moreover ,rerankers ensures that its implementations are done with the fewest dependencies possible, and re-uses the original implementation whenever possible, guaranteeing that our simplified interface results in no performance degradation compared to more complex ones. The full source code and list of supported models are updated regularly and available at https://github.com/answerdotai/rerankers.