Questions within surveys, called survey items, are used in the social sciences to study latent concepts, such as the factors influencing life satisfaction. Instead of using explicit citations, researchers paraphrase the content of the survey items they use in-text. However, this makes it challenging to find survey items of interest when comparing related work. Automatically parsing and linking these implicit mentions to survey items in a knowledge base can provide more fine-grained references. We model this task, called Survey Item Linking (SIL), in two stages: mention detection and entity disambiguation. Due to an imprecise definition of the task, existing datasets used for evaluating the performance for SIL are too small and of low-quality. We argue that latent concepts and survey item mentions should be differentiated. To this end, we create a high-quality and richly annotated dataset consisting of 20,454 English and German sentences. By benchmarking deep learning systems for each of the two stages independently and sequentially, we demonstrate that the task is feasible, but observe that errors propagate from the first stage, leading to a lower overall task performance. Moreover, mentions that require the context of multiple sentences are more challenging to identify for models in the first stage. Modeling the entire context of a document and combining the two stages into an end-to-end system could mitigate these problems in future work, and errors could additionally be reduced by collecting more diverse data and by improving the quality of the knowledge base. The data and code are available at https://github.com/e-tornike/SIL .

Recent advancements in language models (LMs) have sparked growing interest in developing LM agents. While fully autonomous agents could excel in many scenarios, numerous use cases inherently require them to collaborate with humans due to humans' latent preferences, domain expertise, or need for control. To facilitate the study of human-agent collaboration, we present Collaborative Gym (Co-Gym), a general framework enabling asynchronous, tripartite interaction among agents, humans, and task environments. We instantiate Co-Gym with three representative tasks in both simulated and real-world conditions, and propose an evaluation framework that assesses both the collaboration outcomes and processes. Our findings reveal that collaborative agents consistently outperform their fully autonomous counterparts in task performance within those delivered cases, achieving win rates of 86% in Travel Planning, 74% in Tabular Analysis, and 66% in Related Work when evaluated by real users. However, our study also highlights significant challenges in developing collaborative agents, requiring advancements in core aspects of intelligence -- communication capabilities, situational awareness, and balancing autonomy and human control.

Compositional generalization is crucial for artificial intelligence agents to solve complex vision-language reasoning tasks. Neuro-symbolic approaches have demonstrated promise in capturing compositional structures, but they face critical challenges: (a) reliance on predefined predicates for symbolic representations that limit adaptability, (b) difficulty in extracting predicates from raw data, and (c) using non-differentiable operations for combining primitive concepts. To address these issues, we propose NeSyCoCo, a neuro-symbolic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate symbolic representations and map them to differentiable neural computations. NeSyCoCo introduces three innovations: (a) augmenting natural language inputs with dependency structures to enhance the alignment with symbolic representations, (b) employing distributed word representations to link diverse, linguistically motivated logical predicates to neural modules, and (c) using the soft composition of normalized predicate scores to align symbolic and differentiable reasoning. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the ReaSCAN and CLEVR-CoGenT compositional generalization benchmarks and demonstrates robust performance with novel concepts in the CLEVR-SYN benchmark.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced a temporary drone ban in New Jersey, citing'special security reasons.' At least 22 towns in central and northern New Jersey fall under the alert, which is in place until at least January 17. The temporary flight restriction (TFR) areas include parts of Camden, Gloucester City, Winslow Township, Evesham, Hancock's Bridge in Lower Alloways Township in Salem County, Westampton, Burlington, and Hamilton in Mercer County. Flying drones is also banned in Bridgewater, Cedar Grove, North Brunswick, Metuchen, South Brunswick, Edison, Branchburg, Sewaren, Jersey City, Harrison, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Clifton, and Kearny. The FAA warned that'deadly force' could be used against drones that present an'imminent security threat.'

Sir Keir set the G7 growth target in early 2023, more than a year before his party returned to power at July's general election. Earlier this month, he announced an additional target to improve living standards, leading to some accusations he was moving the goalposts on what he wanted his government to be judged by. But in his first appearance before the liaison committee of senior MPs since entering Downing Street, Sir Keir insisted he was still committed to getting the UK growing faster other G7 members, which include the US, Germany and Japan, by 2029. When it was pointed out to him that economic forecasts suggested this was not going to happen, he said they had not taken some future policy changes into account. He cited a rise to the legal minimum wage, announced at October's Budget, as an example of how ministers were boosting living standards.

In a joint statement, bodies representing thousands of creatives dismissed the proposal made by ministers on Tuesday that would allow companies such as Open AI, Google and Meta to train their AI systems on published works unless their owners actively opt out. The coalition includes the British Phonographic Industry, the Independent Society of Musicians, the Motion Picture Association and the Society of Authors as well as Mumsnet, the Guardian, Financial Times, Telegraph, Getty Images, the Daily Mail Group and Newsquest. Their intervention comes a day after the technology and culture minister Chris Bryant told parliament the proposed system, subject to a 10-week consultation, would "improve access to content by AI developers, whilst allowing rights holders to control how their content is used for AI training". The Conservative chair of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, Caroline Dinenage, alleged the government had "fully drunk the Kool-Aid on AI". But Bryant told MPs: "If we were to adopt a too tight a regime based on proactive, explicit permission, the danger is that international developers would continue to train their models using UK content accessed overseas, but may not be able to deploy them in the UK … this could significantly disadvantage sectors across our economy, including the creative industries, and sweep the rug from underneath British AI developers."

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) spending bill has just been release and it grants DJI a year's grace before it's potentially banned in the US, The Verge reported. It was expected that DJI and rival Autel could be banned by the end of 2024 because of the Countering CCP Drones Act provision. However, the bill gives DJI an extra year to prove to an "appropriate national security agency" that its products don't pose a national security risk in the US. Failing that, the bill authorizes the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to place DJI's drones on its covered list for 2026, meaning retailers would no longer be able to import them. It also means that the products (including drones and cameras like the Osmo Pocket 3) would be prohibited from connecting to US networks, and their internal radios would no longer be authorized by the FCC.

North Korean soldiers began to go home in body bags over the weekend, as they fought alongside Russians in large numbers for the first time. "Today, we already have preliminary data that the Russians have begun to use North Korean soldiers in their assaults. A significant number of them," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday. Ukraine's military intelligence (GUR) reported the North Koreans were embedded with Russian Marines and Airborne troops – elite units – in the Russian region of Kursk, which Ukraine has counter-invaded. "At one of the positions in the Kursk region, the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea- DPRK] army soldiers were effectively'covered' with [First Person View] drones," the GUR said in a statement, estimating combined losses of Russians and North Koreans at 200 on the first day of engagement.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over parts of New Jersey following an influx of sightings in recent weeks. The notice, which expires Jan. 17, 2025, said drone operations in support of national defense, homeland security, law enforcement, firefighting, search and rescue or disaster response missions are not included in the restrictions. Commercial drone operations are allowed with a valid statement of work, but there must be an approved special governmental interest airspace waiver and all applicable FAA regulations must be followed. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said the White House, and more broadly the U.S. government, does not seem concerned about the increased sightings in New Jersey and other northeastern states. "Look, I'm the speaker of the House. I have the exact same frustrations that you do and all of us do. We don't have the answers. The administration is not providing them," Johnson said in a Fox News appearance.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. What's wrong with these darn institutions, and why does nobody trust them? That's the question lurking behind every postmortem about why Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election and what they could do to start winning future ones. The thinking goes like this: Donald Trump, as a political figure, represents blowing up the status quo; Trump won and the incumbent vice president lost; ergo, a majority of voters are unhappy with the people and groups responsible for the status quo. But the evidence that residents of the United States don't trust their institutions goes beyond election results.