Rep. Nancy Mace spoke with Fox News Digital on Friday to preview her upcoming House Oversight subcommittee hearing on AI deepfakes. One of the sad truths of American life is that sexual material tends to be on the cutting edge of technology. This probably dates back to Gutenberg, but more recently we've seen it with VCRs and then streaming video. And now, artificial intelligence images called deepfakes are hitting the news the same way but are sure to become an issue in all future conflicts and elections. In the latest case, New Jersey teen girls were victimized by artificially created, sexualized images.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a quickly evolving research field rooted in operations research and behavioural psychology, with potential applications extending across various domains, including robotics. This thesis delineates the background of modern Reinforcement Learning (RL), starting with the framework constituted by the Markov decision processes, Markov properties, goals and rewards, agent-environment interactions, and policies. We explain the main types of algorithms commonly used in RL, including value-based, policy gradient, and actor-critic methods, with a special emphasis on DQN, A2C and PPO. We then give a short literature review on some widely adopted frameworks for implementing RL algorithms and environments. Subsequently, we present Bidimensional Gripper Environment (BGE), a virtual simulator based on the Pymunk physics engine we developed to analyse top-down bidimensional object manipulation. The methodology section frames our agent-environment interaction as a Markov decision process, such that we can apply our RL algorithms. We list various goal formulation strategies, including reward shaping and curriculum learning. We also employ different steps of observation preprocessing to reduce the computational workload required. In the experimental phase, we run through a series of scenarios of increasing difficulty. We start with a simple static scenario and then gradually increase the amount of stochasticity. Whenever the agents show difficulty in learning, we counteract by increasing the degree of reward shaping and curriculum learning. These experiments demonstrate the substantial limitations and pitfalls of model-free algorithms under changing dynamics. In conclusion, we present a summary of our findings and remarks. We then outline potential future work to improve our methodology and possibly expand to real-world systems.

Generative AI models for music and the arts in general are increasingly complex and hard to understand. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) seeks to make complex and opaque AI models such as neural networks more understandable to people. One approach to making generative AI models more understandable is to impose a small number of semantically meaningful attributes on generative AI models. This paper contributes a systematic examination of the impact that different combinations of Variational Auto-Encoder models (MeasureVAE and AdversarialVAE), configurations of latent space in the AI model (from 4 to 256 latent dimensions), and training datasets (Irish folk, Turkish folk, Classical, and pop) have on music generation performance when 2 or 4 meaningful musical attributes are imposed on the generative model. To date there have been no systematic comparisons of such models at this level of combinatorial detail. Our findings show that MeasureVAE has better reconstruction performance than AdversarialVAE which has better musical attribute independence. Results demonstrate that MeasureVAE was able to generate music across music genres with interpretable musical dimensions of control, and performs best with low complexity music such a pop and rock. We recommend that a 32 or 64 latent dimensional space is optimal for 4 regularised dimensions when using MeasureVAE to generate music across genres. Our results are the first detailed comparisons of configurations of state-of-the-art generative AI models for music and can be used to help select and configure AI models, musical features, and datasets for more understandable generation of music.

I spent most of the summer sifting through topics, including patents, blood diamonds and police brutality. None of them really stuck. However, on September 16, 2021 I sent Dr. White this email: " In a shocking turn of events, I have found another thing I would like to research. I would like to see if Twitter "coverage" of a publicly traded stock or related phrase ("google" and "search engine") can predict the daily returns of the stock, or changes in the highs/lows/volume of trades. The theory here being that investors' valuation of a stock may be reinforced or informed based on their perception of how others think about the companies (sort of like herd behavior) or their familiarity with the firm in general. If there is an effect, I would particularly like to examine whether this effect has gotten stronger during corona times, as many journalists are claiming that now that everyone is sitting at home with their commission-free trading apps like RobinHood, there are tons of amateur investors in the scene, who may be prone to "window shopping" for hot stocks that make the news.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are central to a multitude of applications but struggle with significant risks, notably in generating harmful content and biases. Drawing an analogy to the human psyche's conflict between evolutionary survival instincts and societal norm adherence elucidated in Freud's psychoanalysis theory, we argue that LLMs suffer a similar fundamental conflict, arising between their inherent desire for syntactic and semantic continuity, established during the pre-training phase, and the post-training alignment with human values. This conflict renders LLMs vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein intensifying the models' desire for continuity can circumvent alignment efforts, resulting in the generation of harmful information. Through a series of experiments, we first validated the existence of the desire for continuity in LLMs, and further devised a straightforward yet powerful technique, such as incomplete sentences, negative priming, and cognitive dissonance scenarios, to demonstrate that even advanced LLMs struggle to prevent the generation of harmful information. In summary, our study uncovers the root of LLMs' vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks, hereby questioning the efficacy of solely relying on sophisticated alignment methods, and further advocates for a new training idea that integrates modal concepts alongside traditional amodal concepts, aiming to endow LLMs with a more nuanced understanding of real-world contexts and ethical considerations.

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. They enable fine-grained evaluations of model aspects that would otherwise go unnoticed in standard evaluation datasets, but they do not address the problem of how to fix the failure cases. Previous work has explored functionality learning by fine-tuning models on suite data. While this improves performance on seen functionalities, it often does not generalize to unseen ones and can harm general performance. This paper analyses a fine-tuning-free approach to functionality learning. For each functionality in a suite, we generate a specification instruction that encodes it. We combine the obtained specification instructions to create specification-augmented prompts, which we feed to language models pre-trained on natural instruction data to generate suite predictions. A core aspect of our analysis is to measure the effect that including a set of specifications has on a held-out set of unseen, qualitatively different specifications. Our experiments across four tasks and models ranging from 80M to 175B parameters show that smaller models struggle to follow specification instructions. However, larger models (> 3B params.) can benefit from specifications and even generalize desirable behaviors across functionalities.

There has been an explosion in interest in machine learning (ML) in recent years due to its applications to science and engineering. However, as ML techniques have advanced, tools for explaining and visualizing novel ML algorithms have lagged behind. Animation has been shown to be a powerful tool for making engaging visualizations of systems that dynamically change over time, which makes it well suited to the task of communicating ML algorithms. However, the current approach to animating ML algorithms is to handcraft applications that highlight specific algorithms or use complex generalized animation software. We developed ManimML, an open-source Python library for easily generating animations of ML algorithms directly from code. We sought to leverage ML practitioners' preexisting knowledge of programming rather than requiring them to learn complex animation software. ManimML has a familiar syntax for specifying neural networks that mimics popular deep learning frameworks like Pytorch. A user can take a preexisting neural network architecture and easily write a specification for an animation in ManimML, which will then automatically compose animations for different components of the system into a final animation of the entire neural network. ManimML is open source and available at https://github.com/helblazer811/ManimML.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating human-like texts, which may potentially revolutionize the finance industry. However, existing LLMs often fall short in the financial field, which is mainly attributed to the disparities between general text data and financial text data. Unfortunately, there is only a limited number of financial text datasets available, and BloombergGPT, the first financial LLM (FinLLM), is close-sourced (only the training logs were released). In light of this, we aim to democratize Internet-scale financial data for LLMs, which is an open challenge due to diverse data sources, low signal-to-noise ratio, and high time-validity. To address the challenges, we introduce an open-sourced and data-centric framework, Financial Generative Pre-trained Transformer (FinGPT), that automates the collection and curation of real-time financial data from 34 diverse sources on the Internet, providing researchers and practitioners with accessible and transparent resources to develop their FinLLMs. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective strategy for fine-tuning FinLLM using the inherent feedback from the market, dubbed Reinforcement Learning with Stock Prices (RLSP). We also adopt the Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA, QLoRA) method that enables users to customize their own FinLLMs from general-purpose LLMs at a low cost. Finally, we showcase several FinGPT applications, including robo-advisor, sentiment analysis for algorithmic trading, and low-code development. FinGPT aims to democratize FinLLMs, stimulate innovation, and unlock new opportunities in open finance. The codes have been open-sourced.

On Monday, the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, held a members-only webinar to discuss the contract the union tentatively agreed upon last week with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). If ratified, the contract will officially end the longest labor strike in the guild's history. For many in the industry, artificial intelligence was one of the strike's most contentious, fear-inducing components. Over the weekend, SAG released details of their agreed AI terms, an expansive set of protections that require consent and compensation for all actors, regardless of status. With this agreement, SAG has gone substantially further than the Directors Guild of America (DGA) or the Writers Guild of America (WGA), who preceded them in coming to terms with the AMPTP.

With that sentence, written by the journalist Samantha Cole for the tech site Motherboard in December, 2017, a queasy new chapter in our cultural history opened. A programmer calling himself "deepfakes" told Cole that he'd used artificial intelligence to insert Gadot's face into a pornographic video. And he'd made others: clips altered to feature Aubrey Plaza, Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, and Taylor Swift. Porn, as a Times headline once proclaimed, is the "low-slung engine of progress." It can be credited with the rapid spread of VCRs, cable, and the Internet--and with several important Web technologies.