One common approach to solve multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) problems is to extend conventional Q-learning by using vector Q-values in combination with a utility function. However issues can arise with this approach in the context of stochastic environments, particularly when optimising for the Scalarised Expected Reward (SER) criterion. This paper extends prior research, providing a detailed examination of the factors influencing the frequency with which value-based MORL Q-learning algorithms learn the SER-optimal policy for an environment with stochastic state transitions. We empirically examine several variations of the core multi-objective Q-learning algorithm as well as reward engineering approaches, and demonstrate the limitations of these methods. In particular, we highlight the critical impact of the noisy Q-value estimates issue on the stability and convergence of these algorithms.

Short Text Classification (STC) is crucial for processing and comprehending the brief but substantial content prevalent on contemporary digital platforms. The STC encounters difficulties in grasping semantic and syntactic intricacies, an issue that is apparent in traditional pre-trained language models. Although Graph Convolutional Networks enhance performance by integrating external knowledge bases, these methods are limited by the quality and extent of the knowledge applied. Recently, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly improved the performance of complex reasoning tasks. However, some studies have highlighted the limitations of their application in fundamental NLP tasks. Consequently, this study sought to employ CoT to investigate the capabilities of LLMs in STC tasks. This study introduces Quartet Logic: A Four-Step Reasoning (QLFR) framework. This framework primarily incorporates Syntactic and Semantic Enrichment CoT, effectively decomposing the STC task into four distinct steps: (i) essential concept identification, (ii) common-sense knowledge retrieval, (iii) text rewriting, and (iv) classification. This elicits the inherent knowledge and abilities of LLMs to address the challenges in STC. Surprisingly, we found that QLFR can also improve the performance of smaller models. Therefore, we developed a CoT-Driven Multi-task learning (QLFR-CML) method to facilitate the knowledge transfer from LLMs to smaller models. Extensive experimentation across six short-text benchmarks validated the efficacy of the proposed methods. Notably, QLFR achieved state-of-the-art performance on all datasets, with significant improvements, particularly on the Ohsumed and TagMyNews datasets.

Despite increasing awareness and research around fake news, there is still a significant need for datasets that specifically target racial slurs and biases within North American political speeches. This is particulary important in the context of upcoming North American elections. This study introduces a comprehensive dataset that illuminates these critical aspects of misinformation. To develop this fake news dataset, we scraped and built a corpus of 40,000 news articles about political discourses in North America. A portion of this dataset (4000) was then carefully annotated, using a blend of advanced language models and human verification methods. We have made both these datasets openly available to the research community and have conducted benchmarking on the annotated data to demonstrate its utility. We release the best-performing language model along with data. We encourage researchers and developers to make use of this dataset and contribute to this ongoing initiative.

Researchers have developed an AI robot that can take on physical tasks. You've probably heard of AI winning against humans in games like chess and GO that require intellect. AI is good at crunching numbers and finding patterns. That's something humans are supposed to be better at, right? CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK VIDEO TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER Researchers at ETH Zurich have created an AI robot with the task of learning how to play the popular wooden labyrinth maze game.

Tsumugi-nen is an online entertainer that streams content daily to her over 73,000 subscribers on YouTube, using a virtual avatar of herself. She is a popular VTuber -- short for virtual YouTuber -- in Japan. Except, she doesn't quite match that description 100%. She's actually an artificial intelligence-generated talent developed and managed by 29-year-old Hayato Akedo and his AI talent agency, Pictoria.

AI expert Marva Bailer explains how the average person has more access than ever to create deepfakes of celebrities even though there are laws in place. With the writers and actors strikes in the past and a new year just beginning, Hollywood executives are still pondering the future of artificial intelligence in entertainment. In a roundtable interview with the Los Angeles Times, several executives weighed in with their concerns about the technology. Jonathan Glickman, founder and CEO of Panoramic Media Co., said that at the moment "I don't think it's really going to affect the writing process very much for the near future, just because the quality is so far below anything that an audience would stand for." However, while creativity may be hard to duplicate, certain behind-the-scenes jobs that are somewhere between technical and creative could be affected.

In the largest survey of its kind, 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues gave predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model. If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10% by 2027, and 50% by 2047. The latter estimate is 13 years earlier than that reached in a similar survey we conducted only one year earlier [Grace et al., 2022]. However, the chance of all human occupations becoming fully automatable was forecast to reach 10% by 2037, and 50% as late as 2116 (compared to 2164 in the 2022 survey). Most respondents expressed substantial uncertainty about the long-term value of AI progress: While 68.3% thought good outcomes from superhuman AI are more likely than bad, of these net optimists 48% gave at least a 5% chance of extremely bad outcomes such as human extinction, and 59% of net pessimists gave 5% or more to extremely good outcomes. Between 38% and 51% of respondents gave at least a 10% chance to advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction. More than half suggested that "substantial" or "extreme" concern is warranted about six different AI-related scenarios, including misinformation, authoritarian control, and inequality. There was disagreement about whether faster or slower AI progress would be better for the future of humanity. However, there was broad agreement that research aimed at minimizing potential risks from AI systems ought to be prioritized more.

In times of emergency, crisis response agencies need to quickly and accurately assess the situation on the ground in order to deploy relevant services and resources. However, authorities often have to make decisions based on limited information, as data on affected regions can be scarce until local response services can provide first-hand reports. Fortunately, the widespread availability of smartphones with high-quality cameras has made citizen journalism through social media a valuable source of information for crisis responders. However, analyzing the large volume of images posted by citizens requires more time and effort than is typically available. To address this issue, this paper proposes the use of state-of-the-art deep neural models for automatic image classification/tagging, specifically by adapting transformer-based architectures for crisis image classification (CrisisViT). We leverage the new Incidents1M crisis image dataset to develop a range of new transformer-based image classification models. Through experimentation over the standard Crisis image benchmark dataset, we demonstrate that the CrisisViT models significantly outperform previous approaches in emergency type, image relevance, humanitarian category, and damage severity classification. Additionally, we show that the new Incidents1M dataset can further augment the CrisisViT models resulting in an additional 1.25% absolute accuracy gain.

This paper presents our recent initiatives to foster the discoverability of new releases on the music streaming service Deezer. After introducing our search and recommendation features dedicated to new releases, we outline our shift from editorial to personalized release suggestions using cold start embeddings and contextual bandits. Backed by online experiments, we discuss the advantages of this shift in terms of recommendation quality and exposure of new releases on the service. Note: This short article presents a work that has been accepted for oral presentation as an "Industry Talk" at the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024).

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is a challenging task that requires segmenting novel object categories at inference time. Recent studies have explored vision-language pre-training to handle this task, but suffer from unrealistic assumptions in practical scenarios, i.e., low-quality textual category names. For example, this paradigm assumes that new textual categories will be accurately and completely provided, and exist in lexicons during pre-training. However, exceptions often happen when encountering ambiguity for brief or incomplete names, new words that are not present in the pre-trained lexicons, and difficult-to-describe categories for users. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel attribute decomposition-aggregation framework, AttrSeg, inspired by human cognition in understanding new concepts. Specifically, in the decomposition stage, we decouple class names into diverse attribute descriptions to complement semantic contexts from multiple perspectives. Two attribute construction strategies are designed: using large language models for common categories, and involving manually labeling for human-invented categories. In the aggregation stage, we group diverse attributes into an integrated global description, to form a discriminative classifier that distinguishes the target object from others. One hierarchical aggregation architecture is further proposed to achieve multi-level aggregations, leveraging the meticulously designed clustering module. The final results are obtained by computing the similarity between aggregated attributes and images embeddings. To evaluate the effectiveness, we annotate three types of datasets with attribute descriptions, and conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies. The results show the superior performance of attribute decomposition-aggregation.