The rapid expansion of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models has raised growing concerns regarding their potential misuse in creating harmful or misleading content. In this paper, we introduce MACE, a finetuning framework for the task of mass concept erasure. This task aims to prevent models from generating images that embody unwanted concepts when prompted. Existing concept erasure methods are typically restricted to handling fewer than five concepts simultaneously and struggle to find a balance between erasing concept synonyms (generality) and maintaining unrelated concepts (specificity). In contrast, MACE differs by successfully scaling the erasure scope up to 100 concepts and by achieving an effective balance between generality and specificity. This is achieved by leveraging closed-form cross-attention refinement along with LoRA finetuning, collectively eliminating the information of undesirable concepts. Furthermore, MACE integrates multiple LoRAs without mutual interference. We conduct extensive evaluations of MACE against prior methods across four different tasks: object erasure, celebrity erasure, explicit content erasure, and artistic style erasure. Our results reveal that MACE surpasses prior methods in all evaluated tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Shilin-LU/MACE.

The Seattle ebike company Rad Power Bikes has announced four new ebike models, all of which have the very important distinction of being unlikely to have their batteries suddenly burst into flames. The company says its new Safe Shield Batteries--which come standard on all four new bikes--have been certified at UL-2271, an industry standard ranking for battery safety. That means the batteries on these models of Rad Power's bikes won't be nearly as susceptible to the kinds of battery fires that have been plaguing low-end ebikes and scooters and have led to injuries and nearly 20 deaths in the US. Rad Power had 30,000 of its RadWagon 4 ebikes recalled in 2022 due to misaligned tires, an issue the company has apologized for and says it has fixed. There's been one reported case of a Rad Power bike catching fire, but other than that the company hasn't contributed to the wave of cheap ebike battery fires.

Despite advancements in on-topic dialogue systems, effectively managing topic shifts within dialogues remains a persistent challenge, largely attributed to the limited availability of training datasets. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Passage to Dialogue (MP2D), a data generation framework that automatically creates conversational question-answering datasets with natural topic transitions. By leveraging the relationships between entities in a knowledge graph, MP2D maps the flow of topics within a dialogue, effectively mirroring the dynamics of human conversation. It retrieves relevant passages corresponding to the topics and transforms them into dialogues through the passage-to-dialogue method. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate MP2D's efficacy in generating dialogue with natural topic shifts. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel benchmark for topic shift dialogues, TS-WikiDialog. Utilizing the dataset, we demonstrate that even Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to handle topic shifts in dialogue effectively, and we showcase the performance improvements of models trained on datasets generated by MP2D across diverse topic shift dialogue tasks.

Content creators increasingly utilize generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and various blogging sites to produce imaginative images, AI-generated videos, and articles using Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its growing popularity, there remains an underexplored area concerning the specific domains where AI-generated content is being applied, and the methodologies content creators employ with Gen-AI tools during the creation process. This study initially explores this emerging area through a qualitative analysis of 68 YouTube videos demonstrating Gen-AI usage. Our research focuses on identifying the content domains, the variety of tools used, the activities performed, and the nature of the final products generated by Gen-AI in the context of user-generated content.

Analytical database providers (e.g., Redshift, Databricks, BigQuery) have rapidly added support for invoking Large Language Models (LLMs) through native user-defined functions (UDFs) to help users perform natural language tasks, such as classification, entity extraction, and translation, inside analytical workloads. For instance, an analyst might want to extract customer sentiments on millions of product reviews. However, LLM inference is highly expensive in both computational and economic terms: for example, an NVIDIA L4 GPU running Llama2-7B can only process 6 KB of text per second. In this paper, we explore how to optimize LLM inference for analytical workloads that invoke LLMs within relational queries. We show that relational queries present novel opportunities for accelerating LLM inference, including reordering rows to maximize key-value (KV) cache reuse within the LLM inference engine, reordering columns within a row to further increase cache reuse, and deduplicating redundant inference requests. We implement these optimizations in Apache Spark, with vLLM as the model serving backend and achieve up to 4.4x improvement in end-to-end latency on a benchmark of diverse LLM-based queries on real datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to explicitly address the problem of optimizing LLM invocations within SQL queries.

The problems of online hate speech and cyberbullying have significantly worsened since the increase in popularity of social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter (X). Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have proven to provide a great advantage in automatic filtering such toxic content. Women are disproportionately more likely to be victims of online abuse. However, there appears to be a lack of studies that tackle misogyny detection in under-resourced languages. In this short paper, we present a novel dataset of YouTube comments in mix-code Hinglish collected from YouTube videos which have been weak labelled as `Misogynistic' and `Non-misogynistic'. Pre-processing and Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) techniques have been applied on the dataset to gain insights on its characteristics. The process has provided a better understanding of the dataset through sentiment scores, word clouds, etc.

Target-oriented proactive dialogue systems aim to lead conversations from a dialogue context toward a pre-determined target, such as making recommendations on designated items or introducing new specific topics. To this end, it is critical for such dialogue systems to plan reasonable actions to drive the conversation proactively, and meanwhile, to plan appropriate topics to move the conversation forward to the target topic smoothly. In this work, we mainly focus on effective dialogue planning for target-oriented dialogue generation. Inspired by decision-making theories in cognitive science, we propose a novel target-constrained bidirectional planning (TRIP) approach, which plans an appropriate dialogue path by looking ahead and looking back. By formulating the planning as a generation task, our TRIP bidirectionally generates a dialogue path consisting of a sequence of pairs using two Transformer decoders. They are expected to supervise each other and converge on consistent actions and topics by minimizing the decision gap and contrastive generation of targets. Moreover, we propose a target-constrained decoding algorithm with a bidirectional agreement to better control the planning process. Subsequently, we adopt the planned dialogue paths to guide dialogue generation in a pipeline manner, where we explore two variants: prompt-based generation and plan-controlled generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging dialogue datasets, which are re-purposed for exploring target-oriented dialogue. Our automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly outperform various baseline models.

Is it just me, or has this Oscar season lasted five years? Maybe it's because the Barbenheimer phenomenon has been with us since the summer. Or maybe we've just heard one too many times that Bradley Cooper spent half a decade learning how to conduct for "Maestro." Whether you are a casual observer or an Oscar completist who is now cramming in a few more animated shorts, it all ends Sunday, with the ninety-sixth Academy Awards. Much is already known, or widely assumed: we're likely to hear the word "Oppenheimer" several times, Da'Vine Joy Randolph ("The Holdovers") is a shoo-in for Best Supporting Actress, and Jimmy Kimmel will be back to poke fun at Hollywood and move things along.

Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) equipped with high-quality cameras have revolutionized the field of inspections by providing efficient and cost-effective means of conducting surveys. The use of autonomous inspection is becoming more widespread in a variety of contexts, yet it is still challenging to acquire the best inspection information autonomously. In situations where objects may block a robot's view, it is necessary to use reasoning to determine the optimal points for collecting data. Although researchers have explored cloud-based applications to store inspection data, these applications may not operate optimally under network constraints, and parsing these datasets can be manually intensive. Instead, there is an emerging requirement for AMRs to autonomously capture the most informative views efficiently. To address this challenge, we present an autonomous Next-Best-View (NBV) framework that maximizes the inspection information while reducing the number of pictures needed during operations. The framework consists of a formalized evaluation metric using ray-tracing and Gaussian process interpolation to estimate information reward based on the current understanding of the partially-known environment. A derivative-free optimization (DFO) method is used to sample candidate views in the environment and identify the NBV point. The proposed approach's effectiveness is shown by comparing it with existing methods and further validated through simulations and experiments with various vehicles.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance in various applications, yet their evaluation remains a critical issue. Existing hallucination benchmarks are either static or lack adjustable complexity for thorough analysis. We contend that utilizing existing relational databases is a promising approach for constructing benchmarks due to their accurate knowledge description via functional dependencies. We propose ERBench to automatically convert any relational database into a benchmark based on the entity-relationship (ER) model. Our key idea is to construct questions using the database schema, records, and functional dependencies such that they can be automatically verified. In addition, we use foreign key constraints to join relations and construct multihop questions, which can be arbitrarily complex and used to debug the intermediate answers of LLMs. Finally, ERBench supports continuous evaluation, multimodal questions, and various prompt engineering techniques. In our experiments, we construct an LLM benchmark using databases of multiple domains and make an extensive comparison of contemporary LLMs. We observe that better LLMs like GPT-4 can handle a larger variety of question types, but are by no means perfect. Also, correct answers do not necessarily imply correct rationales, which is an important evaluation that ERBench does better than other benchmarks for various question types. Code is available at https: //github.com/DILAB-KAIST/ERBench.