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Expanding the WMT24++ Benchmark with Rumantsch Grischun, Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran, Puter, and Vallader

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Romansh language, spoken in Switzerland, has limited resources for machine translation evaluation. In this paper, we present a benchmark for six varieties of Romansh: Rumantsch Grischun, a supra-regional variety, and five regional varieties: Sursilvan, Sutsilvan, Surmiran, Puter, and Vallader. Our reference translations were created by human translators based on the WMT24++ benchmark, which ensures parallelism with more than 55 other languages. An automatic evaluation of existing MT systems and LLMs shows that translation out of Romansh into German is handled relatively well for all the varieties, but translation into Romansh is still challenging.


The Medium Is Not the Message: Deconfounding Document Embeddings via Linear Concept Erasure

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Embedding-based similarity metrics between text sequences can be influenced not just by the content dimensions we most care about, but can also be biased by spurious attributes like the text's source or language. These document confounders cause problems for many applications, but especially those that need to pool texts from different corpora. This paper shows that a debiasing algorithm that removes information about observed confounders from the encoder representations substantially reduces these biases at a minimal computational cost. Document similarity and clustering metrics improve across every embedding variant and task we evaluate -- often dramatically. Interestingly, performance on out-of-distribution benchmarks is not impacted, indicating that the embeddings are not otherwise degraded.


Identities are not Interchangeable: The Problem of Overgeneralization in Fair Machine Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A key value proposition of machine learning is generalizability: the same methods and model architecture should be able to work across different domains and different contexts. While powerful, this generalization can sometimes go too far, and miss the importance of the specifics. In this work, we look at how fair machine learning has often treated as interchangeable the identity axis along which discrimination occurs. In other words, racism is measured and mitigated the same way as sexism, as ableism, as ageism. Disciplines outside of computer science have pointed out both the similarities and differences between these different forms of oppression, and in this work we draw out the implications for fair machine learning. While certainly not all aspects of fair machine learning need to be tailored to the specific form of oppression, there is a pressing need for greater attention to such specificity than is currently evident. Ultimately, context specificity can deepen our understanding of how to build more fair systems, widen our scope to include currently overlooked harms, and, almost paradoxically, also help to narrow our scope and counter the fear of an infinite number of group-specific methods of analysis.


How retirees can stop fake debt collector scams

FOX News

Retirees face growing threats from scammers posing as debt collectors who demand payment through gift cards and refuse to provide written verification of debts.



Were you convinced by the Rapture? You're probably ARROGANT: People who believe in conspiracy theories are 'massively overconfident', study finds

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's daughter Violet emotionally advocates for mask mandates and children with long COVID at United Nations event Jimmy Kimmel weeps while saying he'never intended' to'make light of' Charlie Kirk's death - but DOESN'T apologize as he hits out at Trump If Trump isn't careful, he will end up no better than Biden! This dirty revenge tour must cease... before everyone loses: DAN MCLAUGHLIN Jimmy Kimmel's comeback descends into chaos: Staff turn on host over'sh***y' behavior... as'betrayal rumor' runs rife backstage Charlie Kirk suspect's trans lover has VANISHED: Shaken neighbors share fresh fears... as new photos show abandoned home Jimmy Kimmel's return BLASTED by Roseanne Barr seven years after ABC fired her: 'Double standard' I'm the doctor on the cusp of an autism breakthrough... we're using an everyday $2.50 pill to reverse children's symptoms Dancing with the Stars drama explodes: Cast are'miserable'... concerned family say smiles on screen are FAKE... and producers are forced to issue'warning' The world's best burgers REVEALED - and London bags nearly half of the top ten spots (but number one will surprise you) I was a devout Catholic... until I died. Moment daughter of Trump's would-be assassin Ryan Routh LOSES IT outside of court after father convicted of trying to kill president Sarah Ferguson claims she was trying to protect Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie when she sent apology email to Jeffrey Epstein'as her children come first' The View co-host makes cheeky immigration crack about Kamala Harris' Miami book tour stop SARAH VINE: The striking similarities between Sarah Ferguson and Meghan... and why Fergie's downfall should be a red flag for the Sussexes Chappell Roan'accidentally' reveals derrière onstage: 'I forgot my bottom was just a thong' Kim Kardashian takes a pop at Kanye as she poses topless for Vogue: 'I gained confidence three years ago... before, I always needed to check with someone before making decisions' Were you convinced by the Rapture? You're probably ARROGANT: People who believe in conspiracy theories are'massively overconfident', study finds READ MORE: Devout Christians take drastic action as'The Rapture' approaches Thousands of people around the world woke up yesterday morning hoping it would be their last day on Earth. The'Rapture' was a theory put forward by a South African pastor, claiming that Jesus would return to Earth on September 23, causing his followers to rise into the sky to meet him.



LogicGuard: Improving Embodied LLM agents through Temporal Logic based Critics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in zero-shot and single step reasoning and decision making problems, but in long horizon sequential planning tasks, their errors compound, often leading to unreliable or inefficient behavior. We introduce LogicGuard, a modular actor-critic architecture in which an LLM actor is guided by a trajectory level LLM critic that communicates through Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). Our setup combines the reasoning strengths of language models with the guarantees of formal logic. The actor selects high-level actions from natural language observations, while the critic analyzes full trajectories and proposes new LTL constraints that shield the actor from future unsafe or inefficient behavior. LogicGuard supports both fixed safety rules and adaptive, learned constraints, and is model-agnostic: any LLM-based planner can serve as the actor, with LogicGuard acting as a logic-generating wrapper. We formalize planning as graph traversal under symbolic constraints, allowing LogicGuard to analyze failed or suboptimal trajectories and generate new temporal logic rules that improve future behavior. To demonstrate generality, we evaluate LogicGuard across two distinct settings: short-horizon general tasks and long-horizon specialist tasks. On the Behavior benchmark of 100 household tasks, LogicGuard increases task completion rates by 25% over a baseline InnerMonologue planner. On the Minecraft diamond-mining task, which is long-horizon and requires multiple interdependent subgoals, LogicGuard improves both efficiency and safety compared to SayCan and InnerMonologue. These results show that enabling LLMs to supervise each other through temporal logic yields more reliable, efficient and safe decision-making for both embodied agents.


Are Vision-Language Models Safe in the Wild? A Meme-Based Benchmark Study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Rapid deployment of vision-language models (VLMs) magnifies safety risks, yet most evaluations rely on artificial images. This study asks: How safe are current VLMs when confronted with meme images that ordinary users share? To investigate this question, we introduce MemeSafetyBench, a 50,430-instance benchmark pairing real meme images with both harmful and benign instructions. Using a comprehensive safety taxonomy and LLM-based instruction generation, we assess multiple VLMs across single and multi-turn interactions. We investigate how real-world memes influence harmful outputs, the mitigating effects of conversational context, and the relationship between model scale and safety metrics. Our findings demonstrate that VLMs are more vulnerable to meme-based harmful prompts than to synthetic or typographic images. Memes significantly increase harmful responses and decrease refusals compared to text-only inputs. Though multi-turn interactions provide partial mitigation, elevated vulnerability persists. These results highlight the need for ecologically valid evaluations and stronger safety mechanisms. MemeSafetyBench is publicly available at https://github.com/oneonlee/Meme-Safety-Bench.


Can Global XAI Methods Reveal Injected Bias in LLMs? SHAP vs Rule Extraction vs RuleSHAP

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) can amplify misinformation, undermining societal goals like the UN SDGs. We study three documented drivers of misinformation (valence framing, information overload, and oversimplification) which are often shaped by one's default beliefs. Building on evidence that LLMs encode such defaults (e.g., "joy is positive," "math is complex") and can act as "bags of heuristics," we ask: can general belief-driven heuristics behind misinformative behaviour be recovered from LLMs as clear rules? A key obstacle is that global rule-extraction methods in explainable AI (XAI) are built for numerical inputs/outputs, not text. We address this by eliciting global LLM beliefs and mapping them to numerical scores via statistically reliable abstractions, thereby enabling off-the-shelf global XAI to detect belief-related heuristics in LLMs. To obtain ground truth, we hard-code bias-inducing nonlinear heuristics of increasing complexity (univariate, conjunctive, nonconvex) into popular LLMs (ChatGPT and Llama) via system instructions. This way, we find that RuleFit under-detects non-univariate biases, while global SHAP better approximates conjunctive ones but does not yield actionable rules. To bridge this gap, we propose RuleSHAP, a rule-extraction algorithm that couples global SHAP-value aggregations with rule induction to better capture non-univariate bias, improving heuristics detection over RuleFit by +94% (MRR@1) on average. Our results provide a practical pathway for revealing belief-driven biases in LLMs.