We present a critical assessment of Piantadosi's (2023) claim that "Modern language models refute Chomsky's approach to language," focusing on four main points. First, despite the impressive performance and utility of large language models (LLMs), humans achieve their capacity for language after exposure to several orders of magnitude less data. The fact that young children become competent, fluent speakers of their native languages with relatively little exposure to them is the central mystery of language learning to which Chomsky initially drew attention, and LLMs currently show little promise of solving this mystery. Second, what can the artificial reveal about the natural? Put simply, the implications of LLMs for our understanding of the cognitive structures and mechanisms underlying language and its acquisition are like the implications of airplanes for understanding how birds fly. Third, LLMs cannot constitute scientific theories of language for several reasons, not least of which is that scientific theories must provide interpretable explanations, not just predictions. This leads to our final point: to even determine whether the linguistic and cognitive capabilities of LLMs rival those of humans requires explicating what humans' capacities actually are. In other words, it requires a separate theory of language and cognition; generative linguistics provides precisely such a theory. As such, we conclude that generative linguistics as a scientific discipline will remain indispensable throughout the 21st century and beyond.

Prior studies in the automatic classification of voice quality have mainly studied the use of the acoustic speech signal as input. Recently, a few studies have been carried out by jointly using both speech and neck surface accelerometer (NSA) signals as inputs, and by extracting MFCCs and glottal source features. This study examines simultaneously-recorded speech and NSA signals in the classification of voice quality (breathy, modal, and pressed) using features derived from three self-supervised pre-trained models (wav2vec2-BASE, wav2vec2-LARGE, and HuBERT) and using a SVM as well as CNNs as classifiers. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the pre-trained models is compared in feature extraction between glottal source waveforms and raw signal waveforms for both speech and NSA inputs. Using two signal processing methods (quasi-closed phase (QCP) glottal inverse filtering and zero frequency filtering (ZFF)), glottal source waveforms are estimated from both speech and NSA signals. The study has three main goals: (1) to study whether features derived from pre-trained models improve classification accuracy compared to conventional features (spectrogram, mel-spectrogram, MFCCs, i-vector, and x-vector), (2) to investigate which of the two modalities (speech vs. NSA) is more effective in the classification task with pre-trained model-based features, and (3) to evaluate whether the deep learning-based CNN classifier can enhance the classification accuracy in comparison to the SVM classifier. The results revealed that the use of the NSA input showed better classification performance compared to the speech signal. Between the features, the pre-trained model-based features showed better classification accuracies, both for speech and NSA inputs compared to the conventional features. It was also found that the HuBERT features performed better than the wav2vec2-BASE and wav2vec2-LARGE features.

This paper presents "FireFly", a synthetic dataset for ember detection created using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), designed to overcome the current lack of ember-specific training resources. To create the dataset, we present a tool that allows the automated generation of the synthetic labeled dataset with adjustable parameters, enabling data diversity from various environmental conditions, making the dataset both diverse and customizable based on user requirements. We generated a total of 19,273 frames that have been used to evaluate FireFly on four popular object detection models. Further to minimize human intervention, we leveraged a trained model to create a semi-automatic labeling process for real-life ember frames. Moreover, we demonstrated an up to 8.57% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) in real-world wildfire scenarios compared to models trained exclusively on a small real dataset.

Prompt tuning (PT), a parameter-efficient technique that only tunes the additional prompt embeddings while keeping the backbone pre-trained language model (PLM) frozen, has shown promising results in language understanding tasks, especially in low-resource scenarios. However, effective prompt design methods suitable for generation tasks such as summarization are still lacking. At the same time, summarization guided through instructions (discrete prompts) can achieve a desirable double objective of high quality and controllability in summary generation. Towards a goal of strong summarization performance under the triple conditions of parameter-efficiency, data-efficiency, and controllability, we introduce PromptSum, a method combining PT with a multi-task objective and discrete entity prompts for abstractive summarization. Our model achieves competitive ROUGE results on popular abstractive summarization benchmarks coupled with a strong level of controllability through entities, all while only tuning several orders of magnitude less parameters.

Invisible watermarks safeguard images' copyright by embedding hidden messages only detectable by owners. They also prevent people from misusing images, especially those generated by AI models. We propose a family of regeneration attacks to remove these invisible watermarks. The proposed attack method first adds random noise to an image to destroy the watermark and then reconstructs the image. This approach is flexible and can be instantiated with many existing image-denoising algorithms and pre-trained generative models such as diffusion models. Through formal proofs and empirical results, we show that all invisible watermarks are vulnerable to the proposed attack. For a particularly resilient watermark, RivaGAN, regeneration attacks remove 93-99% of the invisible watermarks while the baseline attacks remove no more than 3%. However, if we do not require the watermarked image to look the same as the original one, watermarks that keep the image semantically similar can be an alternative defense against our attack. Our finding underscores the need for a shift in research/industry emphasis from invisible watermarks to semantically similar ones. Code is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/WatermarkAttacker.

Variational inference has recently emerged as a popular alternative to the classical Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) in large-scale Bayesian inference. The core idea is to trade statistical accuracy for computational efficiency. In this work, we study these statistical and computational trade-offs in variational inference via a case study in inferential model selection. Focusing on Gaussian inferential models (or variational approximating families) with diagonal plus low-rank precision matrices, we initiate a theoretical study of the trade-offs in two aspects, Bayesian posterior inference error and frequentist uncertainty quantification error. From the Bayesian posterior inference perspective, we characterize the error of the variational posterior relative to the exact posterior. We prove that, given a fixed computation budget, a lower-rank inferential model produces variational posteriors with a higher statistical approximation error, but a lower computational error; it reduces variance in stochastic optimization and, in turn, accelerates convergence. From the frequentist uncertainty quantification perspective, we consider the precision matrix of the variational posterior as an uncertainty estimate, which involves an additional statistical error originating from the sampling uncertainty of the data. As a consequence, for small datasets, the inferential model need not be full-rank to achieve optimal estimation error (even with unlimited computation budget).

Between a cascade of indictments against former US president Donald Trump, a tumultuous 2024 election season (in which Trump is a main character), and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence, 2024 is shaping up to be a complete nightmare. At the center of it will be a rise in personalized disinformation. Not only will there be more BS to sift through thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Google's Bard, but the disinformation will likely be more effective, and even tailored to target specific groups with frightening consequences. Of course, some of this could be fixed with new regulations. But the US Congress still hasn't figured out how to tackle privacy, and regulating AI will only be more difficult.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. After the regrettable incidents on the island (the old island), the Doctor kept a low profile. Many thought he was dead. There was safety in that once. Now the greater safety is in being known. What plans he had, back in the day! If only … but no, this is just the sort of negative spiral his therapist has warned him about. He has remade himself as an altruist, a philanthropist, and he means for his efforts to have maximum impact.

A Russian tanker was damaged in a Ukrainian drone attack in the Kerch Strait, briefly halting traffic on the strategic bridge linking Crimea to Russia on Saturday, a day after one of Moscow's warships was hit in the Black Sea. The number of attacks in the Black Sea has increased from both sides since Moscow exited a deal last month that had allowed Ukrainian grain exports via the shipping hub during the conflict between the two countries. The Russian tanker SIG was hit around 11:20 p.m. Friday south of the Kerch Strait, Russia's Federal Agency for Sea and Inland Water Transport said.

Recent increase in wildfires worldwide has led to the need for real-time fire nowcasting. Physics-driven models, such as cellular automata and computational fluid dynamics can provide high-fidelity fire spread simulations but they are computationally expensive and time-consuming. Much effort has been put into developing machine learning models for fire prediction. However, these models are often region-specific and require a substantial quantity of simulation data for training purpose. This results in a significant amount of computational effort for different ecoregions. In this work, a generative model is proposed using a three-dimensional Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders to generate spatial-temporal sequences of unseen wildfire burned areas in a given ecoregion. The model is tested in the ecoregion of a recent massive wildfire event in California, known as the Chimney fire. Numerical results show that the model succeed in generating coherent and structured fire scenarios, taking into account the impact from geophysical variables, such as vegetation and slope. Generated data are also used to train a surrogate model for predicting wildfire dissemination, which has been tested on both simulation data and the real Chimney fire event.