Congress might consider new legislation on artificial intelligence and its effect on elections this year, according to the chair of the House of Representatives' new AI task force. "I do hope that we're going to be able to get started on actually creating and passing some legislation. I think that we're fortunate that there are some things that are very pressing on AI, but there's other things that relate to medium-term and long-term threats that don't need to be acted on immediately," Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., told Fox News Digital in an interview. "But those short-term threats, I think we can mitigate those this year and I'm hopeful that the task force – we'll be able to get that done." Asked to elaborate on short-term legislative goals, Obernolte said, "We have an election coming up – the use of AI to spread myths and disparate information about candidates, I think, is something we should all be able to agree is not only a bad thing for society, but something that could be a threat to people's trust in our democracy."

The purpose of this feasibility study was to examine the potential impact of reading digital interactive e-books on essential skills that support reading comprehension with third-fifth grade students. Students read two e-Books that taught word learning and comprehension monitoring strategies in the service of learning difficult vocabulary and targeted science concepts about hurricanes. We investigated whether specific comprehension strategies including word learning and strategies that supported general reading comprehension, summarization, and question generation, show promise of effectiveness in building vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills in the e-Books. Students were assigned to read one of three versions of each of the e-Books, each version implemented one strategy. The books employed a choose-your-adventure format with embedded comprehension questions that provided students with immediate feedback on their responses. Paired samples t-tests were run to examine pre-to-post differences in learning the targeted vocabulary and science concepts taught in both e-Books. For both e-Books, students demonstrated significant gains in word learning and on the targeted hurricane concepts. Additionally, Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) revealed that no one strategy was more associated with larger gains than the other. Performance on the embedded questions in the books was also associated with greater posttest outcomes for both e-Books. This work discusses important considerations for implementation and future development of e-books that can enhance student engagement and improve reading comprehension.

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a widely used method to tackle incompleteness in knowledge graphs (KGs) by making predictions for missing links. Description-based KGC leverages pre-trained language models to learn entity and relation representations with their names or descriptions, which shows promising results. However, the performance of description-based KGC is still limited by the quality of text and the incomplete structure, as it lacks sufficient entity descriptions and relies solely on relation names, leading to sub-optimal results. To address this issue, we propose MPIKGC, a general framework to compensate for the deficiency of contextualized knowledge and improve KGC by querying large language models (LLMs) from various perspectives, which involves leveraging the reasoning, explanation, and summarization capabilities of LLMs to expand entity descriptions, understand relations, and extract structures, respectively. We conducted extensive evaluation of the effectiveness and improvement of our framework based on four description-based KGC models and four datasets, for both link prediction and triplet classification tasks.

Kurdish, an Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers, is considered a dialect continuum and known for its diversity in language varieties. Previous studies addressing language and speech technology for Kurdish handle it in a monolithic way as a macro-language, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are few resources and tools available. In this paper, we take a step towards developing resources for language and speech technology for varieties of Central Kurdish, creating a corpus by transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. Additionally, we report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification as downstream tasks evaluated on Central Kurdish varieties. Data and models are publicly available under an open license at https://github.com/sinaahmadi/CORDI.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has advanced the benchmark in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, large amounts of labelled training data are required to train LLMs. Furthermore, data annotation and training are computationally expensive and time-consuming. Zero and few-shot learning have recently emerged as viable options for labelling data using large pre-trained models. Hate speech detection in mix-code low-resource languages is an active problem area where the use of LLMs has proven beneficial. In this study, we have compiled a dataset of 100 YouTube comments, and weakly labelled them for coarse and fine-grained misogyny classification in mix-code Hinglish. Weak annotation was applied due to the labor-intensive annotation process. Zero-shot learning, one-shot learning, and few-shot learning and prompting approaches have then been applied to assign labels to the comments and compare them to human-assigned labels. Out of all the approaches, zero-shot classification using the Bidirectional Auto-Regressive Transformers (BART) large model and few-shot prompting using Generative Pre-trained Transformer- 3 (ChatGPT-3) achieve the best results

The massive generation of multimodal fake news exhibits substantial distribution discrepancies, prompting the need for generalized detectors. However, the insulated nature of training within specific domains restricts the capability of classical detectors to obtain open-world facts. In this paper, we propose FakeNewsGPT4, a novel framework that augments Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with forgery-specific knowledge for manipulation reasoning while inheriting extensive world knowledge as complementary. Knowledge augmentation in FakeNewsGPT4 involves acquiring two types of forgery-specific knowledge, i.e., semantic correlation and artifact trace, and merging them into LVLMs. Specifically, we design a multi-level cross-modal reasoning module that establishes interactions across modalities for extracting semantic correlations. Concurrently, a dual-branch fine-grained verification module is presented to comprehend localized details to encode artifact traces. The generated knowledge is translated into refined embeddings compatible with LVLMs. We also incorporate candidate answer heuristics and soft prompts to enhance input informativeness. Extensive experiments on the public benchmark demonstrate that FakeNewsGPT4 achieves superior cross-domain performance compared to previous methods. Code will be available.

Computer makers are taking a page from smartphone developers by releasing foldable laptops. Few laptops genuinely turn heads in our tech-saturated age, but I could see people in my local café trying to figure out what on Earth I was using. Clearly a fair amount of the appeal of the Thinkpad X1 Fold is pose value: as I clipped and unclipped the pen and unfolded the huge bendy screen, I felt like I was in a science fiction movie. With a huge screen standing up vertically from the keyboard, folded in the middle, Lenovo's Thinkpad X1 Fold is definitely not'just another laptop' - and it's just one of a wave of bendy-screen laptops going on sale in coming months. The Thinkpad X1 Fold is an upgraded version of Lenovo's folding PC (the world's first), and is now armed with a huge 16.3-inch OLED screen.

Fox News contributor Mike Pompeo weighs in on Hungary's parliament approving Sweden's bid to join NATO and a resurfaced clip of Russian President Vladimir Putin's warning about NATO expansion on'The Story.' A drone crashed into an apartment building in St. Petersburg Saturday morning, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. The local state news agency said that Ukrainian forces had damaged the apartment building. Two buildings were damaged in St. Petersburg's Krasnogvardeisky district following the alleged attack. Photos from the dilapidated-looking apartment complex showed large craters on the building's exterior.

What constitutes human creativity, and is it possible for computers to exhibit genuine creativity? We argue that achieving human-level intelligence in computers, or so-called Artificial General Intelligence, necessitates attaining also human-level creativity. We contribute to this discussion by developing a statistical representation of human creativity, incorporating prior insights from stochastic theory, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and chaos theory. This highlights the stochastic nature of the human creative process, which includes both a bias guided, random proposal step, and an evaluation step depending on a flexible or transformable bias structure. The acquired representation of human creativity is subsequently used to assess the creativity levels of various contemporary AI systems. Our analysis includes modern AI algorithms such as reinforcement learning, diffusion models, and large language models, addressing to what extent they measure up to human level creativity. We conclude that these technologies currently lack the capability for autonomous creative action at a human level.

Human instance matting aims to estimate an alpha matte for each human instance in an image, which is extremely challenging and has rarely been studied so far. Despite some efforts to use instance segmentation to generate a trimap for each instance and apply trimap-based matting methods, the resulting alpha mattes are often inaccurate due to inaccurate segmentation. In addition, this approach is computationally inefficient due to multiple executions of the matting method. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel End-to-End Human Instance Matting (E2E-HIM) framework for simultaneous multiple instance matting in a more efficient manner. Specifically, a general perception network first extracts image features and decodes instance contexts into latent codes. Then, a united guidance network exploits spatial attention and semantics embedding to generate united semantics guidance, which encodes the locations and semantic correspondences of all instances. Finally, an instance matting network decodes the image features and united semantics guidance to predict all instance-level alpha mattes. In addition, we construct a large-scale human instance matting dataset (HIM-100K) comprising over 100,000 human images with instance alpha matte labels. Experiments on HIM-100K demonstrate the proposed E2E-HIM outperforms the existing methods on human instance matting with 50% lower errors and 5X faster speed (6 instances in a 640X640 image). Experiments on the PPM-100, RWP-636, and P3M datasets demonstrate that E2E-HIM also achieves competitive performance on traditional human matting.