Media
Pennsylvania man convicted of using drone to help hunters find deer carcasses
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A Pennsylvania man who uses drones to try to locate wounded deer shot by hunters so they can retrieve their carcasses has been convicted of violating state hunting laws. Joshua Wingenroth, 35, of Downingtown, plans to appeal the verdicts handed down Thursday by Lancaster County District Judge Raymond Sheller. The case apparently marked the first time anyone has been cited and tried in Pennsylvania for using a drone to recover a dead game animal and it hinged on whether Wingenroth was involved in hunting as defined by state law.
Intelligent Director: An Automatic Framework for Dynamic Visual Composition using ChatGPT
Zheng, Sixiao, Huo, Jingyang, Wang, Yu, Fu, Yanwei
With the rise of short video platforms represented by TikTok, the trend of users expressing their creativity through photos and videos has increased dramatically. However, ordinary users lack the professional skills to produce high-quality videos using professional creation software. To meet the demand for intelligent and user-friendly video creation tools, we propose the Dynamic Visual Composition (DVC) task, an interesting and challenging task that aims to automatically integrate various media elements based on user requirements and create storytelling videos. We propose an Intelligent Director framework, utilizing LENS to generate descriptions for images and video frames and combining ChatGPT to generate coherent captions while recommending appropriate music names. Then, the best-matched music is obtained through music retrieval. Then, materials such as captions, images, videos, and music are integrated to seamlessly synthesize the video. Finally, we apply AnimeGANv2 for style transfer. We construct UCF101-DVC and Personal Album datasets and verified the effectiveness of our framework in solving DVC through qualitative and quantitative comparisons, along with user studies, demonstrating its substantial potential.
GreenLLaMA: A Framework for Detoxification with Explanations
Khondaker, Md Tawkat Islam, Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad, Lakshmanan, Laks V. S.
Prior works on detoxification are scattered in the sense that they do not cover all aspects of detoxification needed in a real-world scenario. Notably, prior works restrict the task of developing detoxification models to only a seen subset of platforms, leaving the question of how the models would perform on unseen platforms unexplored. Additionally, these works do not address non-detoxifiability, a phenomenon whereby the toxic text cannot be detoxified without altering the meaning. We propose GreenLLaMA, the first comprehensive end-to-end detoxification framework, which attempts to alleviate the aforementioned limitations. We first introduce a cross-platform pseudo-parallel corpus applying multi-step data processing and generation strategies leveraging ChatGPT. We then train a suite of detoxification models with our cross-platform corpus. We show that our detoxification models outperform the SoTA model trained with human-annotated parallel corpus. We further introduce explanation to promote transparency and trustworthiness. GreenLLaMA additionally offers a unique paraphrase detector especially dedicated for the detoxification task to tackle the non-detoxifiable cases. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our cross-platform corpus and the robustness of GreenLLaMA against adversarial toxicity.
Colombia to send deep-water expedition to explore 300-year-old shipwreck thought to hold treasure
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Colombia's government on Friday announced plans for a deep-water expedition to explore the mythical galleon San José, sunk in the 18th century in the country's northern Caribbean and believed to contain cargo valued at billions of dollars. It is the first phase of a scientific research into deep waters that aims at collecting information to determine which pieces are suitable and possible to extract. The wreckage is 600 meters deep in the sea.
Tyler Perry halts 800m studio expansion after being shocked by AI
Tyler Perry has paused an 800m ( 630m) expansion of his Atlanta studio complex after the release of OpenAI's video generator Sora and warned that "a lot of jobs" in the film industry will be lost to artificial intelligence. The US film and TV mogul said he was in the process of adding 12 sound stages to his studio but has halted those plans indefinitely after he saw demonstrations of Sora and its "shocking" capabilities. "All of that is currently and indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I'm seeing," Perry said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. "I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of what it's able to do. The AI tool was launched on 15 February – with limited access to a few researchers and video creators – and caused widespread astonishment with its ability to produce realistic footage a minute long from simple text prompts. Perry, whose successes include the Madea film series, said Sora's achievements meant he would no longer have to travel to locations or build a set: "I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me." Demonstrations released by OpenAI, the developer of the groundbreaking ChatGPT chatbot, show photorealistic scenes in response to prompts such as asking for a shot of people walking through "beautiful, snowy Tokyo city" where "gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes". Sora can create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions. Perry said the breakthroughs presented by Sora would affect a range of jobs throughout the film industry, including those of actors, editors, sound specialists and transportation crew. He said: "I am very, very concerned that in the near future, a lot of jobs are going to be lost.
Language-Based User Profiles for Recommendation
Zhou, Joyce, Dai, Yijia, Joachims, Thorsten
Most conventional recommendation methods (e.g., matrix factorization) represent user profiles as high-dimensional vectors. Unfortunately, these vectors lack interpretability and steerability, and often perform poorly in cold-start settings. To address these shortcomings, we explore the use of user profiles that are represented as human-readable text. We propose the Language-based Factorization Model (LFM), which is essentially an encoder/decoder model where both the encoder and the decoder are large language models (LLMs). The encoder LLM generates a compact natural-language profile of the user's interests from the user's rating history. The decoder LLM uses this summary profile to complete predictive downstream tasks. We evaluate our LFM approach on the MovieLens dataset, comparing it against matrix factorization and an LLM model that directly predicts from the user's rating history. In cold-start settings, we find that our method can have higher accuracy than matrix factorization. Furthermore, we find that generating a compact and human-readable summary often performs comparably with or better than direct LLM prediction, while enjoying better interpretability and shorter model input length. Our results motivate a number of future research directions and potential improvements.
Repetition Improves Language Model Embeddings
Springer, Jacob Mitchell, Kotha, Suhas, Fried, Daniel, Neubig, Graham, Raghunathan, Aditi
Recent approaches to improving the extraction of text embeddings from autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have largely focused on improvements to data, backbone pretrained language models, or improving task-differentiation via instructions. In this work, we address an architectural limitation of autoregressive models: token embeddings cannot contain information from tokens that appear later in the input. To address this limitation, we propose a simple approach, "echo embeddings," in which we repeat the input twice in context and extract embeddings from the second occurrence. We show that echo embeddings of early tokens can encode information about later tokens, allowing us to maximally leverage high-quality LLMs for embeddings. On the MTEB leaderboard, echo embeddings improve over classical embeddings by over 9% zero-shot and by around 0.7% when fine-tuned. Echo embeddings with a Mistral-7B model achieve state-of-the-art compared to prior open source models that do not leverage synthetic fine-tuning data.
Faithful Temporal Question Answering over Heterogeneous Sources
Jia, Zhen, Christmann, Philipp, Weikum, Gerhard
Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.
Toward Fully Self-Supervised Multi-Pitch Estimation
Cwitkowitz, Frank, Duan, Zhiyao
Multi-pitch estimation is a decades-long research problem involving the detection of pitch activity associated with concurrent musical events within multi-instrument mixtures. Supervised learning techniques have demonstrated solid performance on more narrow characterizations of the task, but suffer from limitations concerning the shortage of large-scale and diverse polyphonic music datasets with multi-pitch annotations. We present a suite of self-supervised learning objectives for multi-pitch estimation, which encourage the concentration of support around harmonics, invariance to timbral transformations, and equivariance to geometric transformations. These objectives are sufficient to train an entirely convolutional autoencoder to produce multi-pitch salience-grams directly, without any fine-tuning. Despite training exclusively on a collection of synthetic single-note audio samples, our fully self-supervised framework generalizes to polyphonic music mixtures, and achieves performance comparable to supervised models trained on conventional multi-pitch datasets.