Spotify is going through something right now. On Monday morning, the industry-defining audio streaming service announced that it would be hiking its Premium subscription prices for users in the United States, effective next month. The individual plan is rising by 1, the Duo plan by 2, and the family subscription by 3. These shifts arrive almost a year after Spotify raised U.S. subscription rates for the first time ever, upping the individual plan to 10.99 a month to match with competitors' price points. That increase was meant to mollify music-industry executives (who demanded better royalty payouts) and investors (who demanded that Spotify squeeze out regular profits).

Charles Yeh's battle with disinformation in Taiwan began with a bowl of beef noodles. Nine years ago, the Taiwanese engineer was at a restaurant with his family when his mother-in-law started picking the green onions out of her food. Asked what she was doing, she explained that onions can harm your liver. She knew this, she said, because she had received text messages telling her so. Yeh was puzzled by this. His family had always happily eaten green onions.

Trend filtering simplifies complex time series data by applying smoothness to filter out noise while emphasizing proximity to the original data. However, existing trend filtering methods fail to reflect abrupt changes in the trend due to `approximateness,' resulting in constant smoothness. This approximateness uniformly filters out the tail distribution of time series data, characterized by extreme values, including both abrupt changes and noise. In this paper, we propose Trend Point Detection formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), a novel approach to identifying essential points that should be reflected in the trend, departing from approximations. We term these essential points as Dynamic Trend Points (DTPs) and extract trends by interpolating them. To identify DTPs, we utilize Reinforcement Learning (RL) within a discrete action space and a forecasting sum-of-squares loss function as a reward, referred to as the Dynamic Trend Filtering network (DTF-net). DTF-net integrates flexible noise filtering, preserving critical original subsequences while removing noise as required for other subsequences. We demonstrate that DTF-net excels at capturing abrupt changes compared to other trend filtering algorithms and enhances forecasting performance, as abrupt changes are predicted rather than smoothed out.

Lumina-T2X is a nascent family of Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers that establishes a unified framework for transforming noise into various modalities, such as images and videos, conditioned on text instructions. Despite its promising capabilities, Lumina-T2X still encounters challenges including training instability, slow inference, and extrapolation artifacts. In this paper, we present Lumina-Next, an improved version of Lumina-T2X, showcasing stronger generation performance with increased training and inference efficiency. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of the Flag-DiT architecture and identify several suboptimal components, which we address by introducing the Next-DiT architecture with 3D RoPE and sandwich normalizations. To enable better resolution extrapolation, we thoroughly compare different context extrapolation methods applied to text-to-image generation with 3D RoPE, and propose Frequency- and Time-Aware Scaled RoPE tailored for diffusion transformers. Additionally, we introduced a sigmoid time discretization schedule to reduce sampling steps in solving the Flow ODE and the Context Drop method to merge redundant visual tokens for faster network evaluation, effectively boosting the overall sampling speed. Thanks to these improvements, Lumina-Next not only improves the quality and efficiency of basic text-to-image generation but also demonstrates superior resolution extrapolation capabilities and multilingual generation using decoder-based LLMs as the text encoder, all in a zero-shot manner. To further validate Lumina-Next as a versatile generative framework, we instantiate it on diverse tasks including visual recognition, multi-view, audio, music, and point cloud generation, showcasing strong performance across these domains. By releasing all codes and model weights, we aim to advance the development of next-generation generative AI capable of universal modeling.

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has attracted widespread interest to develop role-playing conversational agents personalized to the characteristics and styles of different speakers to enhance their abilities to perform both general and special purpose dialogue tasks. However, the ability to personalize the generated utterances to speakers, whether conducted by human or LLM, has not been well studied. To bridge this gap, our study introduces a novel evaluation challenge: speaker verification in agent-generated conversations, which aimed to verify whether two sets of utterances originate from the same speaker. To this end, we assemble a large dataset collection encompassing thousands of speakers and their utterances. We also develop and evaluate speaker verification models under experiment setups. We further utilize the speaker verification models to evaluate the personalization abilities of LLM-based role-playing models. Comprehensive experiments suggest that the current role-playing models fail in accurately mimicking speakers, primarily due to their inherent linguistic characteristics.

Event cameras are advantageous for tasks that require vision sensors with low-latency and sparse output responses. However, the development of deep network algorithms using event cameras has been slow because of the lack of large labelled event camera datasets for network training. This paper reports a method for creating new labelled event datasets by using a text-to-X model, where X is one or multiple output modalities, in the case of this work, events. Our proposed text-to-events model produces synthetic event frames directly from text prompts. It uses an autoencoder which is trained to produce sparse event frames representing event camera outputs. By combining the pretrained autoencoder with a diffusion model architecture, the new text-to-events model is able to generate smooth synthetic event streams of moving objects. The autoencoder was first trained on an event camera dataset of diverse scenes. In the combined training with the diffusion model, the DVS gesture dataset was used. We demonstrate that the model can generate realistic event sequences of human gestures prompted by different text statements. The classification accuracy of the generated sequences, using a classifier trained on the real dataset, ranges between 42% to 92%, depending on the gesture group. The results demonstrate the capability of this method in synthesizing event datasets.

Health-related misinformation on social networks can lead to poor decision-making and real-world dangers. Such misinformation often misrepresents scientific publications and cites them as "proof" to gain perceived credibility. To effectively counter such claims automatically, a system must explain how the claim was falsely derived from the cited publication. Current methods for automated fact-checking or fallacy detection neglect to assess the (mis)used evidence in relation to misinformation claims, which is required to detect the mismatch between them. To address this gap, we introduce Missci, a novel argumentation theoretical model for fallacious reasoning together with a new dataset for real-world misinformation detection that misrepresents biomedical publications. Unlike previous fallacy detection datasets, Missci (i) focuses on implicit fallacies between the relevant content of the cited publication and the inaccurate claim, and (ii) requires models to verbalize the fallacious reasoning in addition to classifying it. We present Missci as a dataset to test the critical reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), that are required to reconstruct real-world fallacious arguments, in a zero-shot setting. We evaluate two representative LLMs and the impact of different levels of detail about the fallacy classes provided to the LLM via prompts. Our experiments and human evaluation show promising results for GPT 4, while also demonstrating the difficulty of this task.

Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to mine and transfer users' sequential preferences across different domains to alleviate the long-standing cold-start issue. Traditional CDSR models capture collaborative information through user and item modeling while overlooking valuable semantic information. Recently, Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated powerful semantic reasoning capabilities, motivating us to introduce them to better capture semantic information. However, introducing LLMs to CDSR is non-trivial due to two crucial issues: seamless information integration and domain-specific generation. To this end, we propose a novel framework named URLLM, which aims to improve the CDSR performance by exploring the User Retrieval approach and domain grounding on LLM simultaneously. Specifically, we first present a novel dual-graph sequential model to capture the diverse information, along with an alignment and contrastive learning method to facilitate domain knowledge transfer. Subsequently, a user retrieve-generation model is adopted to seamlessly integrate the structural information into LLM, fully harnessing its emergent inferencing ability. Furthermore, we propose a domain-specific strategy and a refinement module to prevent out-of-domain generation. Extensive experiments on Amazon demonstrated the information integration and domain-specific generation ability of URLLM in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/TingJShen/URLLM

Task-oriented queries (e.g., one-shot queries to play videos, order food, or call a taxi) are crucial for assessing the quality of virtual assistants, chatbots, and other large language model (LLM)-based services. However, a standard benchmark for task-oriented queries is not yet available, as existing benchmarks in the relevant NLP (Natural Language Processing) fields have primarily focused on task-oriented dialogues. Thus, we present a new methodology for efficiently generating the Task-oriented Queries Benchmark (ToQB) using existing task-oriented dialogue datasets and an LLM service. Our methodology involves formulating the underlying NLP task to summarize the original intent of a speaker in each dialogue, detailing the key steps to perform the devised NLP task using an LLM service, and outlining a framework for automating a major part of the benchmark generation process. Through a case study encompassing three domains (i.e., two single-task domains and one multi-task domain), we demonstrate how to customize the LLM prompts (e.g., omitting system utterances or speaker labels) for those three domains and characterize the generated task-oriented queries. The generated ToQB dataset is made available to the public. We further discuss new domains that can be added to ToQB by community contributors and its practical applications.

We propose a new large synthetic hand pose estimation dataset, Hi5, and a novel inexpensive method for collecting high-quality synthetic data that requires no human annotation or validation. Leveraging recent advancements in computer graphics, high-fidelity 3D hand models with diverse genders and skin colors, and dynamic environments and camera movements, our data synthesis pipeline allows precise control over data diversity and representation, ensuring robust and fair model training. We generate a dataset with 583,000 images with accurate pose annotation using a single consumer PC that closely represents real-world variability. Pose estimation models trained with Hi5 perform competitively on real-hand benchmarks while surpassing models trained with real data when tested on occlusions and perturbations. Our experiments show promising results for synthetic data as a viable solution for data representation problems in real datasets. Overall, this paper provides a promising new approach to synthetic data creation and annotation that can reduce costs and increase the diversity and quality of data for hand pose estimation.