Media
The HD Chromecast with Google TV is on sale for only 20
If you watch movies and TV on a 1080p screen, the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) provides a rock-solid streaming experience on the cheap. This is the HD version of Engadget's top choice for streaming devices. Today, Amazon has it for 10 off, letting you pick up the HDR10-capable streaming stick for only 20, nearly a record-low price. If you have a 4K television, you're better off with the more expensive model designed for higher-res displays. But for HD screens, this model is hard to beat. It offers the same terrific user experience as the high-end model, only less expensive and downscaled for 1080p.
US, Italy agree to coordinate efforts to counter spread of misinformation by foreign governments
As more companies rush to implement AI solutions and software, a growing number of experts are warning that it could result in an explosion of'fake news' and misinformation. The United States and Italy agreed on Wednesday to coordinate efforts to counter the spread of misinformation and fake news articles by foreign governments. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani agreed on the new pact during a meeting on the sidelines of a three-day meeting of Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers on the island of Capri. The U.S. last year released an intelligence assessment sent to more than 100 countries that accused Moscow of using spies, social media and Russian state-run media to erode public faith in the integrity of democratic elections. Last week, Belgium said its prosecutors were probing alleged Russian attempts to influence an upcoming European Parliamentary election.
HalluciBot: Is There No Such Thing as a Bad Question?
Hallucination continues to be one of the most critical challenges in the institutional adoption journey of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this context, an overwhelming number of studies have focused on analyzing the post-generation phase - refining outputs via feedback, analyzing logit output values, or deriving clues via the outputs' artifacts. We propose HalluciBot, a model that predicts the probability of hallucination $\textbf{before generation}$, for any query imposed to an LLM. In essence, HalluciBot does not invoke any generation during inference. To derive empirical evidence for HalluciBot, we employ a Multi-Agent Monte Carlo Simulation using a Query Perturbator to craft $n$ variations per query at train time. The construction of our Query Perturbator is motivated by our introduction of a new definition of hallucination - $\textit{truthful hallucination}$. Our training methodology generated 2,219,022 estimates for a training corpus of 369,837 queries, spanning 13 diverse datasets and 3 question-answering scenarios. HalluciBot predicts both binary and multi-class probabilities of hallucination, enabling a means to judge the query's quality with regards to its propensity to hallucinate. Therefore, HalluciBot paves the way to revise or cancel a query before generation and the ensuing computational waste. Moreover, it provides a lucid means to measure user accountability for hallucinatory queries.
Exploring the landscape of large language models: Foundations, techniques, and challenges
Moradi, Milad, Yan, Ke, Colwell, David, Samwald, Matthias, Asgari, Rhona
Additionally, it explores how LLMs can be more closely aligned with human preferences through innovative reinforcement learning frameworks and other novel methods that incorporate human feedback. The article also examines the emerging technique of retrieval augmented generation, integrating external knowledge into LLMs. The ethical dimensions of LLM deployment are discussed, underscoring the need for mindful and responsible application. Concluding with a perspective on future research trajectories, this review offers a succinct yet comprehensive overview of the current state and emerging trends in the evolving landscape of LLMs, serving as an insightful guide for both researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence.
Claim Check-Worthiness Detection: How Well do LLMs Grasp Annotation Guidelines?
The increasing threat of disinformation calls for automating parts of the fact-checking pipeline. Identifying text segments requiring fact-checking is known as claim detection (CD) and claim check-worthiness detection (CW), the latter incorporating complex domain-specific criteria of worthiness and often framed as a ranking task. Zero- and few-shot LLM prompting is an attractive option for both tasks, as it bypasses the need for labeled datasets and allows verbalized claim and worthiness criteria to be directly used for prompting. We evaluate the LLMs' predictive and calibration accuracy on five CD/CW datasets from diverse domains, each utilizing a different worthiness criterion. We investigate two key aspects: (1) how best to distill factuality and worthiness criteria into a prompt and (2) what amount of context to provide for each claim. To this end, we experiment with varying the level of prompt verbosity and the amount of contextual information provided to the model. Our results show that optimal prompt verbosity is domain-dependent, adding context does not improve performance, and confidence scores can be directly used to produce reliable check-worthiness rankings.
LLMBind: A Unified Modality-Task Integration Framework
Zhu, Bin, Ning, Munan, Jin, Peng, Lin, Bin, Huang, Jinfa, Song, Qi, Zhang, Junwu, Tang, Zhenyu, Pan, Mingjun, Zhou, Xing, Yuan, Li
In the multi-modal domain, the dependence of various models on specific input formats leads to user confusion and hinders progress. To address this challenge, we introduce \textbf{LLMBind}, a novel framework designed to unify a diverse array of multi-modal tasks. By harnessing a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Model (LLM), LLMBind processes multi-modal inputs and generates task-specific tokens, enabling the invocation of corresponding models to accomplish tasks. This unique approach empowers LLMBind to interpret inputs and generate outputs across various modalities, including image, text, video, and audio. Furthermore, we have constructed an interaction dataset comprising 400k instructions, which unlocks the ability of LLMBind for interactive visual generation and editing tasks. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that LLMBind achieves very superior performance across diverse tasks and outperforms existing models in user evaluations conducted in real-world scenarios. Moreover, the adaptability of LLMBind allows for seamless integration with the latest models and extension to new modality tasks, highlighting its potential to serve as a unified AI agent for modeling universal modalities.
Ethical-Lens: Curbing Malicious Usages of Open-Source Text-to-Image Models
Cai, Yuzhu, Yin, Sheng, Wei, Yuxi, Xu, Chenxin, Mao, Weibo, Juefei-Xu, Felix, Chen, Siheng, Wang, Yanfeng
The burgeoning landscape of text-to-image models, exemplified by innovations such as Midjourney and DALLE 3, has revolutionized content creation across diverse sectors. However, these advancements bring forth critical ethical concerns, particularly with the misuse of open-source models to generate content that violates societal norms. Addressing this, we introduce Ethical-Lens, a framework designed to facilitate the value-aligned usage of text-to-image tools without necessitating internal model revision. Ethical-Lens ensures value alignment in text-to-image models across toxicity and bias dimensions by refining user commands and rectifying model outputs. Systematic evaluation metrics, combining GPT4-V, HEIM, and FairFace scores, assess alignment capability. Our experiments reveal that Ethical-Lens enhances alignment capabilities to levels comparable with or superior to commercial models like DALLE 3, ensuring user-generated content adheres to ethical standards while maintaining image quality. This study indicates the potential of Ethical-Lens to ensure the sustainable development of open-source text-to-image tools and their beneficial integration into society. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuzhu-cai/Ethical-Lens.
Lazy Diffusion Transformer for Interactive Image Editing
Nitzan, Yotam, Wu, Zongze, Zhang, Richard, Shechtman, Eli, Cohen-Or, Daniel, Park, Taesung, Gharbi, Michaรซl
We introduce a novel diffusion transformer, LazyDiffusion, that generates partial image updates efficiently. Our approach targets interactive image editing applications in which, starting from a blank canvas or an image, a user specifies a sequence of localized image modifications using binary masks and text prompts. Our generator operates in two phases. First, a context encoder processes the current canvas and user mask to produce a compact global context tailored to the region to generate. Second, conditioned on this context, a diffusion-based transformer decoder synthesizes the masked pixels in a "lazy" fashion, i.e., it only generates the masked region. This contrasts with previous works that either regenerate the full canvas, wasting time and computation, or confine processing to a tight rectangular crop around the mask, ignoring the global image context altogether. Our decoder's runtime scales with the mask size, which is typically small, while our encoder introduces negligible overhead. We demonstrate that our approach is competitive with state-of-the-art inpainting methods in terms of quality and fidelity while providing a 10x speedup for typical user interactions, where the editing mask represents 10% of the image.
Boston Dynamics reveals new 'terrifying' Atlas robot after retiring legendary humanoid known for dancing and parkour
Boston Dynamics has unveiled a new version of its Atlas humanoid robot, showing its creepy movements that make it look like something out of a sci-fi horror movie. The Massachusetts-based robotics company shared a video of the latest humanoid, showing it pulling its leg behind its heads to stand up - in a way that the public said'looked like something out of The Exorcist.' This new version boasts joints that let the machine bend and move in ways that the human body can't - unlike the original, rigid Atlas that was famous for dancing and doing parkour. The company also plans to sell the latest humanoid robot, but the price has yet to be disclosed, and it is set to begin its first job at Hyundai's factories next year. Boston Dynamics announced the new version of its humanoid robot Atlas, featuring a ring light as its face.
Fox News AI Newsletter: Doctor's groundbreaking surgery
Rodriguez detailed that the MARS system gives surgeons "two extra arms" for instrument control, as well as camera stability. SURGICAL'REVOLUTION': Surgeon and CEO Dr. Alberto Rodriguez conducted the first-ever augmented reality (AR) abdominal surgery March 11 in Santiago, Chile. 'SCARY' SCHOOL TREND: Multiple Los Angeles-area school districts have investigated instances of "inappropriate," artificial intelligence-generated images of students circulating online and in text messages in recent months. AI IN PDF: Adobe announced that its new Acrobat artificial intelligence assistant will be available to Acrobat and Reader users starting on Tuesday. POTHOLE HEALER: Tech firm Robotiz3d is developing three technologies as part of its Autonomous Road Repair System.