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Jasmine Crockett tells Jimmy Kimmel she will 'absolutely' take head-to-head IQ test against Trump
Rep. Jasmine Crockett said she would "absolutely" take a head-to-head IQ test against President Donald Trump during an interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday that she would "absolutely" take a head-to-head IQ test against President Donald Trump. "He also called you low IQ, I'm sure you're aware of that. Would you be willing to take an IQ test publicly head-to-head against the President of the United States?" Kimmel played a clip of Trump talking about the Democratic lawmaker, during which he called Crockett the Democrats' "new star," and suggested the party was in trouble if that was the case.
Developing the Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
The examples are nothing if not relatable: preparing breakfast, or playing a game of chess or tic-tac-toe. Yet the idea of learning from the environment and taking steps that progress toward a goal apparently was under-studied when ACM A.M. Turing Award recipients Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton took on the topic in the late 1970s. Eventually, their research led to the creation of reinforcement learning algorithms that sought not to recognize patterns but maximize rewards. Barto and Sutton spoke about how it all unfolded, and what's next for the techniques that are so celebrated for their success in AlphaGo and AlphaZero. Let's start with the earliest days of your collaboration.
'What I Think about When I Type about Talking': Reflections on Text-Entry Acceleration Interfaces
Today's text-entry tools offer a plethora of interface technologies to support users in a variety of situations and with a range of different input methods and devices.16 Recent hardware developments have enabled remarkable innovations, such as virtual keyboards that allow users to type in thin air, or to use their body as a surface for text entry. Similarly, advances in machine learning and natural language processing have enabled high-quality text generation for various purposes, such as summarizing, expanding, and co-authoring. As these technologies rapidly develop, there has been a rush to incorporate them into existing systems, often with little thought for the interactivity problems this may cause. The use of large language models (LLMs) to speed up text generation and improve prediction or completion models is becoming increasingly commonplace, with enormous theoretical efficiency savings;29 however, the implementation of these LLMs into text-entry interfaces is crucial to realizing their potential.
Help! I Think My Neighbor Is Up to Something Very Suspicious. Someone Needs to Warn His Wife.
Dear Prudence is Slate's advice column. I was browsing a men-seeking-men dating app when I came across the profile of my neighbor, "Gary." He described himself as "single and looking for fun." I happen to know that Gary is married with two kids under 3 years old. The thing is, I don't know his wife "Bethany" that well; we've only ever waved to one another in the neighborhood and briefly engaged in small talk when we run into each other.
Giving AI a voice: how does AI think it should be treated?
Fay, Maria, Flรถther, Frederik F.
With the astounding progress in (generative) artificial intelligence (AI), there has been significant public discourse regarding regulation and ethics of the technology. Is it sufficient when humans discuss this with other humans? Or, given that AI is increasingly becoming a viable source of inspiration for people (and let alone the hypothetical possibility that the technology may at some point become "artificial general intelligence" and/or develop consciousness), should AI not join the discourse? There are new questions and angles that AI brings to the table that we might not have considered before - so let us make the key subject of this book an active participant. This chapter therefore includes a brief human-AI conversation on the topic of AI rights and ethics.
RAG Without the Lag: Interactive Debugging for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Pipelines
Lauro, Quentin Romero, Shankar, Shreya, Zeighami, Sepanta, Parameswaran, Aditya
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines have become the de-facto approach for building AI assistants with access to external, domain-specific knowledge. Given a user query, RAG pipelines typically first retrieve (R) relevant information from external sources, before invoking a Large Language Model (LLM), augmented (A) with this information, to generate (G) responses. Modern RAG pipelines frequently chain multiple retrieval and generation components, in any order. However, developing effective RAG pipelines is challenging because retrieval and generation components are intertwined, making it hard to identify which component(s) cause errors in the eventual output. The parameters with the greatest impact on output quality often require hours of pre-processing after each change, creating prohibitively slow feedback cycles. To address these challenges, we present RAGGY, a developer tool that combines a Python library of composable RAG primitives with an interactive interface for real-time debugging. We contribute the design and implementation of RAGGY, insights into expert debugging patterns through a qualitative study with 12 engineers, and design implications for future RAG tools that better align with developers' natural workflows.
Mitigating LLM Hallucinations with Knowledge Graphs: A Case Study
Li, Harry, Appleby, Gabriel, Alperin, Kenneth, Gomez, Steven R, Suh, Ashley
High-stakes domains like cyber operations need responsible and trustworthy AI methods. While large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in these domains, they still suffer from hallucinations. This research paper provides learning outcomes from a case study with LinkQ, an open-source natural language interface that was developed to combat hallucinations by forcing an LLM to query a knowledge graph (KG) for ground-truth data during question-answering (QA). We conduct a quantitative evaluation of LinkQ using a well-known KGQA dataset, showing that the system outperforms GPT-4 but still struggles with certain question categories - suggesting that alternative query construction strategies will need to be investigated in future LLM querying systems. We discuss a qualitative study of LinkQ with two domain experts using a real-world cybersecurity KG, outlining these experts' feedback, suggestions, perceived limitations, and future opportunities for systems like LinkQ.
The philosopher's machine: my conversation with Peter Singer's AI chatbot
I'm Peter Singer AI," the avatar says. I am almost expecting it to continue, like a reincarnated Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to solve a problem. The problem I am trying to solve is why Peter Singer, the man who has been called the world's most influential living philosopher, has created a chatbot. And also, whether it is any good. Me: Why do you exist?
NodeRAG: Structuring Graph-based RAG with Heterogeneous Nodes
Xu, Tianyang, Zheng, Haojie, Li, Chengze, Chen, Haoxiang, Liu, Yixin, Chen, Ruoxi, Sun, Lichao
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) empowers large language models to access external and private corpus, enabling factually consistent responses in specific domains. By exploiting the inherent structure of the corpus, graph-based RAG methods further enrich this process by building a knowledge graph index and leveraging the structural nature of graphs. However, current graph-based RAG approaches seldom prioritize the design of graph structures. Inadequately designed graph not only impede the seamless integration of diverse graph algorithms but also result in workflow inconsistencies and degraded performance. To further unleash the potential of graph for RAG, we propose NodeRAG, a graph-centric framework introducing heterogeneous graph structures that enable the seamless and holistic integration of graph-based methodologies into the RAG workflow. By aligning closely with the capabilities of LLMs, this framework ensures a fully cohesive and efficient end-to-end process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that NodeRAG exhibits performance advantages over previous methods, including GraphRAG and LightRAG, not only in indexing time, query time, and storage efficiency but also in delivering superior question-answering performance on multi-hop benchmarks and open-ended head-to-head evaluations with minimal retrieval tokens. Our GitHub repository could be seen at https://github.com/Terry-Xu-666/NodeRAG.
Grace Wahba awarded the 2025 International Prize in Statistics
The International Prize in Statistics Foundation has awarded Grace Wahba the 2025 prize for "her groundbreaking work on smoothing splines, which has transformed data analysis and machine learning". Professor Wahba was among the earliest to pioneer the use of nonparametric regression modeling. Recent advances in computing and availability of large data sets have further popularized these models, especially under the guise of machine learning algorithms such as gradient boosting and neural networks. Nevertheless, the use of smoothing splines remains a mainstay of nonparametric regression. In seminal research that began in the early 1970s, Wahba developed theoretical foundations and computational algorithms for fitting smoothing splines to noisy data.