Memes have evolved as a prevalent medium for diverse communication, ranging from humour to propaganda. With the rising popularity of image-focused content, there is a growing need to explore its potential harm from different aspects. Previous studies have analyzed memes in closed settings - detecting harm, applying semantic labels, and offering natural language explanations. To extend this research, we introduce MemeMQA, a multimodal question-answering framework aiming to solicit accurate responses to structured questions while providing coherent explanations. We curate MemeMQACorpus, a new dataset featuring 1,880 questions related to 1,122 memes with corresponding answer-explanation pairs. We further propose ARSENAL, a novel two-stage multimodal framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to address MemeMQA. We benchmark MemeMQA using competitive baselines and demonstrate its superiority - ~18% enhanced answer prediction accuracy and distinct text generation lead across various metrics measuring lexical and semantic alignment over the best baseline. We analyze ARSENAL's robustness through diversification of question-set, confounder-based evaluation regarding MemeMQA's generalizability, and modality-specific assessment, enhancing our understanding of meme interpretation in the multimodal communication landscape.

The stand-up comic told Fox News Digital he thinks live entertainment will always exist, but he has used the new technology in his personal life. "I don't know how it's going to affect stand-up comedy," Maniscalco said of AI. "I guess we haven't really seen that yet. I haven't been so on the pulse of AI going, 'Oh, wow.' I mean, I know my wife has used it to redesign our kitchen, what our kitchen might look like if we remodeled it, which is really cool to see." He said he thinks "live entertainment will always be around, but who knows … 20 years from now, I might be talking to you, and you might be going, 'Wow, you never saw AI coming.' I'd be like, 'Yeah, now I'm unemployed.'"

Reddit Inc. forged a partnership with OpenAI that will bring its content to the chatbot ChatGPT and other products, while also helping the social media company add new artificial intelligence features to its forums. Shares of Reddit, which had their initial public offering in March, jumped as much as 15% in late trading following the announcement. The agreement "will enable OpenAI's AI tools to better understand and showcase Reddit content, especially on recent topics," the companies said Thursday in a joint statement. The deal allows OpenAI to display Reddit's content and train AI systems on its partner's data. Reddit will also offer its users new AI-based tools built on models created by OpenAI, which will place ads on its partner's site.

Subtitling plays a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of audiovisual content and encompasses three primary subtasks: translating spoken dialogue, segmenting translations into concise textual units, and estimating timestamps that govern their on-screen duration. Past attempts to automate this process rely, to varying degrees, on automatic transcripts, employed diversely for the three subtasks. In response to the acknowledged limitations associated with this reliance on transcripts, recent research has shifted towards transcription-free solutions for translation and segmentation, leaving the direct generation of timestamps as uncharted territory. To fill this gap, we introduce the first direct model capable of producing automatic subtitles, entirely eliminating any dependence on intermediate transcripts also for timestamp prediction. Experimental results, backed by manual evaluation, showcase our solution's new state-of-the-art performance across multiple language pairs and diverse conditions.

We developed machine learning approaches for data-driven trellis-based soft symbol detection in coded transmission over intersymbol interference (ISI) channels in presence of bursty impulsive noise (IN), for example encountered in wireless digital broadcasting systems and vehicular communications. This enabled us to obtain optimized detectors based on the Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) algorithm while circumventing the use of full channel state information (CSI) for computing likelihoods and trellis state transition probabilities. First, we extended the application of the neural network (NN)-aided BCJR, recently proposed for ISI channels with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Although suitable for estimating likelihoods via labeling of transmission sequences, the BCJR-NN method does not provide a framework for learning the trellis state transitions. In addition to detection over the joint ISI and IN states we also focused on another scenario where trellis transitions are not trivial: detection for the ISI channel with AWGN with inaccurate knowledge of the channel memory at the receiver. Without access to the accurate state transition matrix, the BCJR- NN performance significantly degrades in both settings. To this end, we devised an alternative approach for data-driven BCJR detection based on the unsupervised learning of a hidden Markov model (HMM). The BCJR-HMM allowed us to optimize both the likelihood function and the state transition matrix without labeling. Moreover, we demonstrated the viability of a hybrid NN and HMM BCJR detection where NN is used for learning the likelihoods, while the state transitions are optimized via HMM. While reducing the required prior channel knowledge, the examined data-driven detectors with learned trellis state transitions achieve bit error rates close to the optimal full CSI-based BCJR, significantly outperforming detection with inaccurate CSI.

The high volume and rapid evolution of content on social media present major challenges for studying the stance of social media users. In this work, we develop a two stage stance labeling method that utilizes the user-hashtag bipartite graph and the user-user interaction graph. In the first stage, a simple and efficient heuristic for stance labeling uses the user-hashtag bipartite graph to iteratively update the stance association of user and hashtag nodes via a label propagation mechanism. This set of soft labels is then integrated with the user-user interaction graph to train a graph neural network (GNN) model using semi-supervised learning. We evaluate this method on two large-scale datasets containing tweets related to climate change from June 2021 to June 2022 and gun control from January 2022 to January 2023. Our experiments demonstrate that enriching text-based embeddings of users with network information from the user interaction graph using our semi-supervised GNN method outperforms both classifiers trained on user textual embeddings and zero-shot classification using LLMs such as GPT4. We discuss the need for integrating nuanced understanding from social science with the scalability of computational methods to better understand how polarization on social media occurs for divisive issues such as climate change and gun control.

With impressive achievements made, artificial intelligence is on the path forward to artificial general intelligence. Sora, developed by OpenAI, which is capable of minute-level world-simulative abilities can be considered as a milestone on this developmental path. However, despite its notable successes, Sora still encounters various obstacles that need to be resolved. In this survey, we embark from the perspective of disassembling Sora in text-to-video generation, and conducting a comprehensive review of literature, trying to answer the question, \textit{From Sora What We Can See}. Specifically, after basic preliminaries regarding the general algorithms are introduced, the literature is categorized from three mutually perpendicular dimensions: evolutionary generators, excellent pursuit, and realistic panorama. Subsequently, the widely used datasets and metrics are organized in detail. Last but more importantly, we identify several challenges and open problems in this domain and propose potential future directions for research and development.

The European legislature has proposed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) to regulate platforms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) products. We review to what extent third-party audits are part of both laws and to what extent access to models and data is provided. By considering the value of third-party audits and third-party data access in an audit ecosystem, we identify a regulatory gap in that the Artificial Intelligence Act does not provide access to data for researchers and civil society. Our contributions to the literature include: (1) Defining an AI audit ecosystem that incorporates compliance and oversight. (2) Highlighting a regulatory gap within the DSA and AIA regulatory framework, preventing the establishment of an AI audit ecosystem. (3) Emphasizing that third-party audits by research and civil society must be part of that ecosystem and demand that the AIA include data and model access for certain AI products. We call for the DSA to provide NGOs and investigative journalists with data access to platforms by delegated acts and for adaptions and amendments of the AIA to provide third-party audits and data and model access at least for high-risk systems to close the regulatory gap. Regulations modeled after European Union AI regulations should enable data access and third-party audits, fostering an AI audit ecosystem that promotes compliance and oversight mechanisms.

Diaspora communities are disproportionately impacted by off-the-radar misinformation and often neglected by mainstream fact-checking efforts, creating a critical need to scale-up efforts of nascent fact-checking initiatives. In this paper we present SynDy, a framework for Synthetic Dynamic Dataset Generation to leverage the capabilities of the largest frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) to train local, specialized language models. To the best of our knowledge, SynDy is the first paper utilizing LLMs to create fine-grained synthetic labels for tasks of direct relevance to misinformation mitigation, namely Claim Matching, Topical Clustering, and Claim Relationship Classification. SynDy utilizes LLMs and social media queries to automatically generate distantly-supervised, topically-focused datasets with synthetic labels on these three tasks, providing essential tools to scale up human-led fact-checking at a fraction of the cost of human-annotated data. Training on SynDy's generated labels shows improvement over a standard baseline and is not significantly worse compared to training on human labels (which may be infeasible to acquire). SynDy is being integrated into Meedan's chatbot tiplines that are used by over 50 organizations, serve over 230K users annually, and automatically distribute human-written fact-checks via messaging apps such as WhatsApp. SynDy will also be integrated into our deployed Co-Insights toolkit, enabling low-resource organizations to launch tiplines for their communities. Finally, we envision SynDy enabling additional fact-checking tools such as matching new misinformation claims to high-quality explainers on common misinformation topics.

Large Language Models (LLMS) have increasingly become central to generating content with potential societal impacts. Notably, these models have demonstrated capabilities for generating content that could be deemed harmful. To mitigate these risks, researchers have adopted safety training techniques to align model outputs with societal values to curb the generation of malicious content. However, the phenomenon of "jailbreaking", where carefully crafted prompts elicit harmful responses from models, persists as a significant challenge. This research conducts a comprehensive analysis of existing studies on jailbreaking LLMs and their defense techniques. We meticulously investigate nine attack techniques and seven defense techniques applied across three distinct language models: Vicuna, LLama, and GPT-3.5 Turbo. We aim to evaluate the effectiveness of these attack and defense techniques. Our findings reveal that existing white-box attacks underperform compared to universal techniques and that including special tokens in the input significantly affects the likelihood of successful attacks. This research highlights the need to concentrate on the security facets of LLMs. Additionally, we contribute to the field by releasing our datasets and testing framework, aiming to foster further research into LLM security. We believe these contributions will facilitate the exploration of security measures within this domain.