Training with backpropagation (BP) in standard deep learning consists of two main steps: a forward pass that maps a data point to its prediction, and a backward pass that propagates the error of this prediction back through the network. This process is highly effective when the goal is to minimize a specific objective function. However, it does not allow training on networks with cyclic or backward connections. This is an obstacle to reaching brain-like capabilities, as the highly complex heterarchical structure of the neural connections in the neocortex are potentially fundamental for its effectiveness. In this paper, we show how predictive coding (PC), a theory of information processing in the cortex, can be used to perform inference and learning on arbitrary graph topologies.

Video Copy Detection (VCD) plays a crucial role in copyright protection and content verification by identifying duplicates and near-duplicates in large-scale video databases. The META AI Challenge on video copy detection provided a benchmark for evaluating state-of-the-art methods, with the Dual-level detection approach emerging as a winning solution. This method integrates Video Editing Detection and Frame Scene Detection to handle adversarial transformations and large datasets efficiently. However, our analysis reveals significant limitations in the VED component, particularly in its ability to handle exact copies. Moreover, Dual-level detection shows vulnerability to temporal attacks. To address it, we propose an improved frame selection strategy based on local maxima of interframe differences, which enhances robustness against adversarial temporal modifications while significantly reducing computational overhead. Our method achieves an increase of 1.4 to 5.8 times in efficiency over the standard 1 FPS approach. Compared to Dual-level detection method, our approach maintains comparable micro-average precision ($\mu$AP) while also demonstrating improved robustness against temporal attacks. Given 56\% reduced representation size and the inference time of more than 2 times faster, our approach is more suitable to real-world resource restriction.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has brought about substantial advancements in the field. One promising direction is the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with structured knowledge-based systems. This approach aims to enhance AI capabilities by combining the generative language understanding of LLMs with the precise knowledge representation of structured systems. This survey explores the synergy between LLMs and knowledge bases, focusing on real-world applications and addressing associated technical, operational, and ethical challenges. Through a comprehensive literature review, the study identifies critical issues and evaluates existing solutions. The paper highlights the benefits of integrating generative AI with knowledge bases, including improved data contextualization, enhanced model accuracy, and better utilization of knowledge resources. The findings provide a detailed overview of the current state of research, identify key gaps, and offer actionable recommendations. These insights contribute to advancing AI technologies and support their practical deployment across various sectors.

The recent advances of deep learning have dramatically changed how machine learning, especially in the domain of natural language processing, can be applied to legal domain. However, this shift to the data-driven approaches calls for larger and more diverse datasets, which are nevertheless still small in number, especially in non-English languages. Here we present the first large-scale benchmark of Korean legal AI datasets, LBOX OPEN, that consists of one legal corpus, two classification tasks, two legal judgement prediction (LJP) tasks, and one summarization task. The legal corpus consists of 147k Korean precedents (259M tokens), of which 63k are sentenced in last 4 years and 96k are from the first and the second level courts in which factual issues are reviewed. The two classification tasks are case names (11.3k) and statutes (2.8k) prediction from the factual description of individual cases.

Associative memory plays an important role in human intelligence and its mechanisms have been linked to attention in machine learning. While the machine learning community's interest in associative memories has recently been rekindled, most work has focused on memory recall ( read) over memory learning ( write). In this paper, we present BayesPCN, a hierarchical associative memory capable of performing continual one-shot memory writes without meta-learning. Moreover, BayesPCN is able to gradually forget past observations ( forget) to free its memory. Experiments show that BayesPCN can recall corrupted i.i.d.

Emerging ethical approaches have attempted to filter pretraining material, but such approaches have been ad hoc and failed to take context into account. We offer an approach to filtering grounded in law, which has directly addressed the tradeoffs in filtering material. First, we gather and make available the Pile of Law, a 256GB (and growing) dataset of open-source English-language legal and administrative data, covering court opinions, contracts, administrative rules, and legislative records. Pretraining on the Pile of Law may help with legal tasks that have the promise to improve access to justice. Second, we distill the legal norms that governments have developed to constrain the inclusion of toxic or private content into actionable lessons for researchers and discuss how our dataset reflects these norms.

Causal mediation analysis can unpack the black box of causality and is therefore a powerful tool for disentangling causal pathways in biomedical and social sciences, and also for evaluating machine learning fairness. To reduce bias for estimating Natural Direct and Indirect Effects in mediation analysis, we propose a new method called DeepMed that uses deep neural networks (DNNs) to cross-fit the infinite-dimensional nuisance functions in the efficient influence functions. We obtain novel theoretical results that our DeepMed method (1) can achieve semiparametric efficiency bound without imposing sparsity constraints on the DNN architecture and (2) can adapt to certain low dimensional structures of the nuisance functions, significantly advancing the existing literature on DNN-based semiparametric causal inference. Extensive synthetic experiments are conducted to support our findings and also expose the gap between theory and practice. As a proof of concept, we apply DeepMed to analyze two real datasets on machine learning fairness and reach conclusions consistent with previous findings.

Criminal justice is an increasingly important application domain for machine learning and algorithmic fairness, as predictive tools are becoming widely used in police, courts, and prison systems worldwide. A few relevant benchmarks have received significant attention, e.g., the COMPAS dataset, often without proper consideration of the domain context. To raise awareness of publicly available criminal justice datasets and encourage their responsible use, we conduct a survey, consider contexts, highlight potential uses, and identify gaps and limitations. We provide datasheets for 15 datasets and upload them to a public repository. We compare the datasets across several dimensions, including size, coverage of the population, and potential use, highlighting concerns.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise for advancing legal practice by automating complex tasks and improving access to justice. However, their adoption is limited by concerns over client confidentiality, especially when lawyers include sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in prompts, risking unauthorized data exposure. To mitigate this, we introduce LegalGuardian, a lightweight, privacy-preserving framework tailored for lawyers using LLM-based tools. LegalGuardian employs Named Entity Recognition (NER) techniques and local LLMs to mask and unmask confidential PII within prompts, safeguarding sensitive data before any external interaction. We detail its development and assess its effectiveness using a synthetic prompt library in immigration law scenarios. Comparing traditional NER models with one-shot prompted local LLM, we find that LegalGuardian achieves a F1-score of 93% with GLiNER and 97% with Qwen2.5-14B in PII detection. Semantic similarity analysis confirms that the framework maintains high fidelity in outputs, ensuring robust utility of LLM-based tools. Our findings indicate that legal professionals can harness advanced AI technologies without compromising client confidentiality or the quality of legal documents.

We present Fanar, a platform for Arabic-centric multimodal generative AI systems, that supports language, speech and image generation tasks. At the heart of Fanar are Fanar Star and Fanar Prime, two highly capable Arabic Large Language Models (LLMs) that are best in the class on well established benchmarks for similar sized models. Fanar Star is a 7B (billion) parameter model that was trained from scratch on nearly 1 trillion clean and deduplicated Arabic, English and Code tokens. Fanar Prime is a 9B parameter model continually trained on the Gemma-2 9B base model on the same 1 trillion token set. Both models are concurrently deployed and designed to address different types of prompts transparently routed through a custom-built orchestrator. The Fanar platform provides many other capabilities including a customized Islamic Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system for handling religious prompts, a Recency RAG for summarizing information about current or recent events that have occurred after the pre-training data cut-off date. The platform provides additional cognitive capabilities including in-house bilingual speech recognition that supports multiple Arabic dialects, voice and image generation that is fine-tuned to better reflect regional characteristics. Finally, Fanar provides an attribution service that can be used to verify the authenticity of fact based generated content. The design, development, and implementation of Fanar was entirely undertaken at Hamad Bin Khalifa University's Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and was sponsored by Qatar's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to enable sovereign AI technology development.