Law
Elon Musk's xAI Sues Apple and OpenAI Over App Store Rankings
Elon Musk's xAI filed a lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI on Monday, accusing the companies of behaving like monopolies and claiming Apple deprioritized ChatGPT rivals like Grok in the App Store. "This is a tale of two monopolists joining forces to ensure their continued dominance in a world rapidly driven by the most powerful technology humanity has ever created: artificial intelligence," the lawsuit alleges. "Working in tandem, Defendants Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing." Grok is currently ranked third in the App Store for free productivity apps--behind only ChatGPT and Gmail. The'uncensored' chatbot is also integrated into Musk's social platform X, which is the number one free news app in the App Store.
Do AI Companies Actually Care About America?
In early May, Sam Altman traveled to Washington to tell a story about America. Appearing before a Senate committee, Altman described how he came of age as the internet took off, how he stayed up late in his family's attic and learned to code on products that were invented in the United States--a personal computer, its silicon chips and accompanying software. That early experience with the "spirit of American innovation," Altman told the senators, put him on a path to found OpenAI, launch ChatGPT, and set off the AI boom. "I think America is just an incredible and special thing," he said, "and it will not only be the place where the AI revolution happens but all the revolutions after." Altman's written testimony, which was submitted to the Senate, added an important asterisk that he did not speak aloud that day.
Closer to Reality: Practical Semi-Supervised Federated Learning for Foundation Model Adaptation
Sun, Guangyu, Li, Jingtao, Zhuang, Weiming, Chen, Chen, Chen, Chen, Lyu, Lingjuan
Foundation models (FMs) exhibit remarkable generalization but require adaptation to downstream tasks, particularly in privacy-sensitive applications. Due to data privacy regulations, cloud-based FMs cannot directly access private edge data, limiting their adaptation. Federated learning (FL) provides a privacy-aware alternative, but existing FL approaches overlook the constraints imposed by edge devices -- namely, limited computational resources and the scarcity of labeled data. To address these challenges, we introduce Practical Semi-Supervised Federated Learning (PSSFL), where edge devices hold only unlabeled, low-resolution data, while the server has limited labeled, high-resolution data. In this setting, we propose the Federated Mixture of Experts (FedMox), a novel framework that enhances FM adaptation in FL. FedMox tackles computational and resolution mismatch challenges via a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture, employing a spatial router to align features across resolutions and a Soft-Mixture strategy to stabilize semi-supervised learning. We take object detection as a case study, and experiments on real-world autonomous driving datasets demonstrate that FedMox effectively adapts FMs under PSSFL, significantly improving performance with constrained memory costs on edge devices. Our work paves the way for scalable and privacy-preserving FM adaptation in federated scenarios.
Transfer Learning via Lexical Relatedness: A Sarcasm and Hate Speech Case Study
Cabrera, Angelly, Lei, Linus, Ortega, Antonio
--Detecting hate speech in non-direct forms, such as irony, sarcasm, and innuendos, remains a persistent challenge for social networks. Although sarcasm and hate speech are regarded as distinct expressions, our work explores whether integrating sarcasm as a pre-training step improves implicit hate speech detection and, by extension, explicit hate speech detection. Incorporating samples from ETHOS, Sarcasm on Reddit, and Implicit Hate Corpus, we devised two training strategies to compare the effectiveness of sarcasm pre-training on a CNN+LSTM and BERT+BiLSTM model. The first strategy is a single-step training approach, where a model trained only on sarcasm is then tested on hate speech. The second strategy uses sequential transfer learning to fine-tune models for sarcasm, implicit hate, and explicit hate. Our results show that sarcasm pre-training improved the BERT+BiLSTM's recall by 9.7%, AUC by 7.8%, and F1-score by 6% on ETHOS. On the Implicit Hate Corpus, precision increased by 7.8% when tested only on implicit samples. By incorporating sarcasm into the training process, we show that models can more effectively detect both implicit and explicit hate. Note: This paper contains offensive and derogatory language shown only for demonstration. A key challenge in specialized machine learning is the lack of sufficient data for a given task.
SafeSpace: An Integrated Web Application for Digital Safety and Emotional Well-being
Fatmi, Kayenat, Abbas, Mohammad
In the digital era, individuals are increasingly exposed to online harms such as toxicity, manipulation, and grooming, which often pose emotional and safety risks. Existing systems for detecting abusive content or issuing safety alerts operate in isolation and rarely combine digital safety with emotional well-being. In this paper, we present SafeSpace, a unified web application that integrates three modules: (1) toxicity detection in chats and screenshots using NLP models and Google's Perspective API, (2) a configurable safety ping system that issues emergency alerts with the user's live location (longitude and latitude) via SMTP-based emails when check-ins are missed or SOS alerts are manually triggered, and (3) a reflective questionnaire that evaluates relationship health and emotional resilience. The system employs Firebase for alert management and a modular architecture designed for usability, privacy, and scalability. The experimental evaluation shows 93% precision in toxicity detection, 100% reliability in safety alerts under emulator tests, and 92% alignment between automated and manual questionnaire scoring. SafeSpace, implemented as a web application, demonstrates the feasibility of integrating detection, protection, and reflection within a single platform, with future deployment envisioned as a mobile application for broader accessibility.
What makes an entity salient in discourse?
Entities in discourse vary broadly in salience: main participants, objects and locations are noticeable and memorable, while tangential ones are less important and quickly forgotten, raising questions about how humans signal and infer relative salience. Using a graded operationalization of salience based on summary-worthiness in multiple summaries of a discourse, this paper explores data from 24 spoken and written genres of English to extract a multifactorial complex of overt and implicit linguistic cues, such as recurring subjecthood or definiteness, discourse relations and hierarchy across utterances, as well as pragmatic functional inferences based on genre and communicative intent. Tackling the question 'how is the degree of salience expressed for each and every entity mentioned?' our results show that while previous approaches to salience all correlate with our salience scores to some extent, no single generalization is without exceptions, and the phenomenon cuts across all levels of linguistic representation.
ChatGPT-generated texts show authorship traits that identify them as non-human
Dentella, Vittoria, Huang, Weihang, Mansi, Silvia Angela, Grieve, Jack, Leivada, Evelina
Large Language Models can emulate different writing styles, ranging from composing poetry that appears indistinguishable from that of famous poets to using slan g that can convince people that they are chatting with a human online . While differences in style may not always be visible to the untrained eye, we can generally distinguish the writing of different people, like a linguistic fingerprint. This work examines whether a language model can also be linked to a specific fingerprint . Through stylometric and multidimensional register analys e s, w e compare human - authored and model - authored texts from different registers. We find that the model can successfully adapt its style depending on whether it is prompted to produce a Wikipedia entry vs. a college essay, but not in a way that makes it indistinguishable from human s . Concretely, the model shows more limited variation when producing outputs in different registers. O ur results suggest that the model prefers nouns to verbs, thus showing a distinct linguistic backbone from humans, who tend to anchor language in the highly grammaticalized dimensions of tense, aspect, and mood . It is possible that the more complex domains of grammar reflect a mode of thought unique to humans, thus acting as a litmus test for Artificial Intelligence. 2 Introduction Scholars from different disciplines have been addressing the question of what makes us human for centuries. For Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, the answer is language, for "no matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest". H uman language is both flexible and constrained at the same time, and this is why the Turing Test, described as a litmus test for Artificial Intelligence [ Shieber 199 4, French 200 0], is linked to achieving a level of conversational proficiency that is highly complex, akin to that of a human [ Turing 1950 ] . Human language is flexible in the sense that we all make different choices when conversing. Every human is thought t o have a distinct linguistic fingerprint called idiolect [ Halliday et al. 196 4, Coulthard 2004 ] . This idiolect, which can be defined as an individual's unique use of linguistic forms (including lexical choices, collocations and fixed expressions, punctuation patterns, misspellings, and grammatical style), is critical for authorship attribution in a range of situations: from identifying that a poem with dashes, elliptical syntax, and unconventional capitalization is more likely authored by Emily Dickinson and not by William Shakespeare, to pinning down a person of interest in the course of a criminal investigation, as happened in the Unabomber case .
GLARE: Agentic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Prediction
Yang, Xinyu, Deng, Chenlong, Dou, Zhicheng
Legal judgment prediction (LJP) has become increasingly important in the legal field. In this paper, we identify that existing large language models (LLMs) have significant problems of insufficient reasoning due to a lack of legal knowledge. Therefore, we introduce GLARE, an agentic legal reasoning framework that dynamically acquires key legal knowledge by invoking different modules, thereby improving the breadth and depth of reasoning. Experiments conducted on the real-world dataset verify the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, the reasoning chain generated during the analysis process can increase interpretability and provide the possibility for practical applications.
MizanQA: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Moroccan Legal Question Answering
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly propelled progress in natural language processing (NLP). However, their effectiveness in specialized, low-resource domains-such as Arabic legal contexts-remains limited. This paper introduces MizanQA (pronounced Mizan, meaning "scale" in Arabic, a universal symbol of justice), a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on Moroccan legal question answering (QA) tasks, characterised by rich linguistic and legal complexity. The dataset draws on Modern Standard Arabic, Islamic Maliki jurisprudence, Moroccan customary law, and French legal influences. Comprising over 1,700 multiple-choice questions, including multi-answer formats, MizanQA captures the nuances of authentic legal reasoning. Benchmarking experiments with multilingual and Arabic-focused LLMs reveal substantial performance gaps, highlighting the need for tailored evaluation metrics and culturally grounded, domain-specific LLM development.
JaParaPat: A Large-Scale Japanese-English Parallel Patent Application Corpus
Nagata, Masaaki, Chousa, Katsuki, Yasuda, Norihito
We constructed JaParaPat (Japanese-English Parallel Patent Application Corpus), a bilingual corpus of more than 300 million Japanese-English sentence pairs from patent applications published in Japan and the United States from 2000 to 2021. We obtained the publication of unexamined patent applications from the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We also obtained patent family information from the DOCDB, that is a bibliographic database maintained by the European Patent Office (EPO). We extracted approximately 1.4M Japanese-English document pairs, which are translations of each other based on the patent families, and extracted about 350M sentence pairs from the document pairs using a translation-based sentence alignment method whose initial translation model is bootstrapped from a dictionary-based sentence alignment method. We experimentally improved the accuracy of the patent translations by 20 bleu points by adding more than 300M sentence pairs obtained from patent applications to 22M sentence pairs obtained from the web.