White House spokesman for Oversight and Investigation Ian Sams addresses the findings in special counsel Robert Hur's report on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. White House Counsel's Office spokesperson Ian Sams expressed frustration at negative media coverage of President Biden after a controversial report called into question his mental sharpness and ability to serve as president. In the letter first reported on by CNN, Sams admits that "covering the report is challenging" because it is "nearly 400 pages long" and "not straightforward." Sams also claimed that Special Counsel Robert Hur's report, which called Biden a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory", was "wrong and inappropriate personal comments have distracted from due attention to the substance." WH COUNSEL SPOKESMAN SURPRISED BY REPORTER QUESTIONING CREDENTIALS, ASKING FOR BOSS: 'SHOULD I BE OFFENDED?' White House Counsel's Office spokesperson Ian Sams expressed frustration at negative media coverage of President Biden after a controversial report called into question his mental sharpness and ability to serve as president.

So that can have a number of effects. It can cause people to distrust the sources of information they are getting, to dissuade them or confuse them in terms of exercising their right to vote. To incite violence, certainly that's something that we are worried, about and to just generally sow distrust and potentially chaos.

Dating expert Cher Gopman shares how to find love in the new year on'Fox & Friends.' Being single on Valentine's Day can be annoying for some people -- but so can dating. And at a time when online dating is the new norm, experts say there are easier ways to drum up love without swiping for it. Dr. Susan Albersis, a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told Fox News Digital in a statement that online dating is a "double-edged sword." "On one hand, it creates wonderful connections," she said. "The downside is that it can often bruise your self-esteem."

Brian Cox and Robin Ince go to the Large Hadron Collider in search of the Higgs boson. Brian Cox and Robin Ince journey through the asteroid belt and beyond to chat space rocks. Brian Cox and Robin Ince conjure up scientific explanations for magical goings on. Brian Cox and Robin Ince are challenged by Jo Brand to explain quantum physics. Brian Cox and Robin Ince peer review Hollywood movies set in space.

The problem of repairing inconsistent knowledge bases has a long history within the communities of database theory and knowledge representation and reasoning, especially from the perspective of structured data. However, as the data available in real-world domains becomes more complex and interconnected, the need naturally arises for developing new types of repositories, representation languages, and semantics, to allow for more suitable ways to query and reason about it. Graph databases provide an effective way to represent relationships among semi-structured data, and allow processing and querying these connections efficiently. In this work, we focus on the problem of computing prioritized repairs over graph databases with data values, using a notion of consistency based on Reg-GXPath expressions as integrity constraints. We present several preference criteria based on the standard subset repair semantics, incorporating weights, multisets, and set-based priority levels. We study the most common repairing tasks, showing that it is possible to maintain the same computational complexity as in the case where no preference criterion is available for exploitation. To complete the picture, we explore the complexity of consistent query answering in this setting and obtain tight lower and upper bounds for all the preference criteria introduced.

Designing seamless, frictionless user experiences has long been a dominant trend in both applied behavioral science and artificial intelligence (AI), in which the goal of making desirable actions easy and efficient informs efforts to minimize friction in user experiences. However, in some settings, friction can be genuinely beneficial, such as the insertion of deliberate delays to increase reflection, preventing individuals from resorting to automatic or biased behaviors, and enhancing opportunities for unexpected discoveries. More recently, the popularization and availability of AI on a widespread scale has only increased the need to examine how friction can help or hinder users of AI; it also suggests a need to consider how positive friction can benefit AI practitioners, both during development processes (e.g., working with diverse teams) and to inform how AI is designed into offerings. This paper first proposes a "positive friction" model that can help characterize how friction is currently beneficial in user and developer experiences with AI, diagnose the potential need for friction where it may not yet exist in these contexts, and inform how positive friction can be used to generate solutions, especially as advances in AI continue to be progress and new opportunities emerge. It then explores this model in the context of AI users and developers by proposing the value of taking a hybrid "AI+human" lens, and concludes by suggesting questions for further exploration.

Controllable music generation plays a vital role in human-AI music co-creation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating high-quality music, their focus on autoregressive generation limits their utility in music editing tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method. This approach enables autoregressive language models to seamlessly address music inpainting tasks. Additionally, our PEFT method integrates frame-level content-based controls, facilitating track-conditioned music refinement and score-conditioned music arrangement. We apply this method to fine-tune MusicGen, a leading autoregressive music generation model. Our experiments demonstrate promising results across multiple music editing tasks, offering more flexible controls for future AI-driven music editing tools. A demo page\footnote{\url{https://kikyo-16.github.io/AIR/}.} showcasing our work and source codes\footnote{\url{https://github.com/Kikyo-16/airgen}.} are available online.

Over the recent years, research and development in adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms for live video streaming have been successful in improving users' quality of experience (QoE) by reducing latency to near real-time levels while delivering higher bitrate videos with minimal rebuffering time. However, the QoE models used by these ABR algorithms do not take into account that a large portion of live video streaming clients use mobile devices where a higher bitrate does not necessarily translate into higher perceived quality. Ignoring perceived quality results in playing videos at higher bitrates without a significant increase in perceptual video quality and becomes a burden for battery-constrained mobile devices due to higher energy consumption. In this paper, we propose LL-GABR, a deep reinforcement learning approach that models the QoE using perceived video quality instead of bitrate and uses energy consumption along with other metrics like latency, rebuffering events, and smoothness. LL-GABR makes no assumptions about the underlying video, environment, or network settings and can operate flexibly on different video titles, each having a different bitrate encoding ladder without additional re-training, unlike existing learning-based ABRs. Trace-driven experimental results show that LL-GABR outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by up to 44% in terms of perceptual QoE and a 73% increase in energy efficiency as a result of reducing net energy consumption by 11%.

With the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) in numerous applications, the challenge of factuality and the propensity for hallucinations raises significant concerns. To address this issue, particularly in retrieval-augmented in-context learning, we introduce the hierarchical graph of thoughts (HGOT), a structured, multi-layered graph approach designed to enhance the retrieval of pertinent passages during in-context learning. The framework utilizes the emergent planning capabilities of LLMs, employing the divide-and-conquer strategy to break down complex queries into manageable sub-queries. It refines self-consistency majority voting for answer selection, which incorporates the recently proposed citation recall and precision metrics to assess the quality of thoughts, linking an answer's credibility intrinsically to the thought's quality. This methodology introduces a weighted system in majority voting, prioritizing answers based on the citation quality of their thoughts. Additionally, we propose a scoring mechanism for evaluating retrieved passages, considering factors such as citation frequency and quality, self-consistency confidence, and the retrieval module's ranking. Experiments reveal that HGOT outperforms other retrieval-augmented in-context learning methods, including Demonstrate-Search-Predict (DSP), ReAct, Self-Ask, and Retrieve-then-Read on different datasets by as much as $7\%$, demonstrating its efficacy in enhancing the factuality of LLMs.

We present PECMAE, an interpretable model for music audio classification based on prototype learning. Our model is based on a previous method, APNet, which jointly learns an autoencoder and a prototypical network. Instead, we propose to decouple both training processes. This enables us to leverage existing self-supervised autoencoders pre-trained on much larger data (EnCodecMAE), providing representations with better generalization. APNet allows prototypes' reconstruction to waveforms for interpretability relying on the nearest training data samples. In contrast, we explore using a diffusion decoder that allows reconstruction without such dependency. We evaluate our method on datasets for music instrument classification (Medley-Solos-DB) and genre recognition (GTZAN and a larger in-house dataset), the latter being a more challenging task not addressed with prototypical networks before. We find that the prototype-based models preserve most of the performance achieved with the autoencoder embeddings, while the sonification of prototypes benefits understanding the behavior of the classifier.