Smart factories leverage advanced technologies to optimize manufacturing processes and enhance efficiency. Implementing worker tracking systems, primarily through camera-based methods, ensures accurate monitoring. However, concerns about worker privacy and technology protection make it necessary to explore alternative approaches. We propose a non-visual, scalable solution using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and ultrasound coordinates. BLE position estimation offers a very low-power and cost-effective solution, as the technology is available on smartphones and is scalable due to the large number of smartphone users, facilitating worker localization and safety protocol transmission. Ultrasound signals provide faster response times and higher accuracy but require custom hardware, increasing costs. To combine the benefits of both modalities, we employ knowledge distillation (KD) from ultrasound signals to BLE RSSI data. Once the student model is trained, the model only takes as inputs the BLE-RSSI data for inference, retaining the advantages of ubiquity and low cost of BLE RSSI. We tested our approach using data from an experiment with twelve participants in a smart factory test bed environment. We obtained an increase of 11.79% in the F1-score compared to the baseline (target model without KD and trained with BLE-RSSI data only).

Social media users drive the spread of misinformation online by sharing posts that include erroneous information or commenting on controversial topics with unsubstantiated arguments often in earnest. Work on echo chambers has suggested that users' perspectives are reinforced through repeated interactions with like-minded peers, promoted by homophily and bias in information diffusion. Building on long-standing interest in the social bases of language and linguistic underpinnings of social behavior, this work explores how conversations around misinformation are mediated through language use. We compare a number of linguistic measures, e.g., in-/out-group cues, readability, and discourse connectives, within and across topics of conversation and user communities. Our findings reveal increased presence of group identity signals and processing fluency within echo chambers during discussions of misinformation. We discuss the specific character of these broader trends across topics and examine contextual influences.

This study explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic evaluation of knowledge graph (KG) completion models. Historically, validating information in KGs has been a challenging task, requiring large-scale human annotation at prohibitive cost. With the emergence of general-purpose generative AI and LLMs, it is now plausible that human-in-the-loop validation could be replaced by a generative agent. We introduce a framework for consistency and validation when using generative models to validate knowledge graphs. Our framework is based upon recent open-source developments for structural and semantic validation of LLM outputs, and upon flexible approaches to fact checking and verification, supported by the capacity to reference external knowledge sources of any kind. The design is easy to adapt and extend, and can be used to verify any kind of graph-structured data through a combination of model-intrinsic knowledge, user-supplied context, and agents capable of external knowledge retrieval.

Machine learning and reinforcement learning are increasingly popular and important fields in the modern age. There are problems that reinforcement learning agents can learn to solve more efficiently and consistently than any human when given enough time to practice. However, modern approaches like Q-learning run into issues when facing certain types of problems. Their approach to solving problems in combination with not using a model of the environment causes them to take longer than is necessary to learn to solve problems that are deterministic in nature. By working without model of the environment, information that is available and help the learning process is ignored. This paper introduces an adapted Q-learning agent called the recursive backwards Q-Learning (RBQL) agent. It solves these types of problems by building a model of its environment as it explores and recursively applying the Q-value update rule to find an optimal policy much quicker than a regular Q-learning agent. This agent is shown to work with the example of finding the fastest path through a maze. Its results are compared to the results of a regular Q-learning agent.

In RAG, the model's knowledge can be updated from documents provided in context. This leads to cases of conflict between the model's parametric knowledge and the contextual information, where the model may not always update its knowledge. Previous work studied knowledge conflicts by creating synthetic documents that contradict the model's correct parametric answers. We present a framework for studying knowledge conflicts in a realistic setup. We update incorrect parametric knowledge using real conflicting documents. This reflects how knowledge conflicts arise in practice. In this realistic scenario, we find that knowledge updates fail less often than previously reported. In cases where the models still fail to update their answers, we find a parametric bias: the incorrect parametric answer appearing in context makes the knowledge update likelier to fail. These results suggest that the factual parametric knowledge of LLMs can negatively influence their reading abilities and behaviors.

Misinformation about climate change poses a significant threat to societal well-being, prompting the urgent need for effective mitigation strategies. However, the rapid proliferation of online misinformation on social media platforms outpaces the ability of fact-checkers to debunk false claims. Automated detection of climate change misinformation offers a promising solution. In this study, we address this gap by developing a two-step hierarchical model, the Augmented CARDS model, specifically designed for detecting contrarian climate claims on Twitter. Furthermore, we apply the Augmented CARDS model to five million climate-themed tweets over a six-month period in 2022. We find that over half of contrarian climate claims on Twitter involve attacks on climate actors or conspiracy theories. Spikes in climate contrarianism coincide with one of four stimuli: political events, natural events, contrarian influencers, or convinced influencers. Implications for automated responses to climate misinformation are discussed.

Video Wire Inpainting (VWI) is a prominent application in video inpainting, aimed at flawlessly removing wires in films or TV series, offering significant time and labor savings compared to manual frame-by-frame removal. However, wire removal poses greater challenges due to the wires being longer and slimmer than objects typically targeted in general video inpainting tasks, and often intersecting with people and background objects irregularly, which adds complexity to the inpainting process. Recognizing the limitations posed by existing video wire datasets, which are characterized by their small size, poor quality, and limited variety of scenes, we introduce a new VWI dataset with a novel mask generation strategy, namely Wire Removal Video Dataset 2 (WRV2) and Pseudo Wire-Shaped (PWS) Masks. WRV2 dataset comprises over 4,000 videos with an average length of 80 frames, designed to facilitate the development and efficacy of inpainting models. Building upon this, our research proposes the Redundancy-Aware Transformer (Raformer) method that addresses the unique challenges of wire removal in video inpainting. Unlike conventional approaches that indiscriminately process all frame patches, Raformer employs a novel strategy to selectively bypass redundant parts, such as static background segments devoid of valuable information for inpainting. At the core of Raformer is the Redundancy-Aware Attention (RAA) module, which isolates and accentuates essential content through a coarse-grained, window-based attention mechanism. This is complemented by a Soft Feature Alignment (SFA) module, which refines these features and achieves end-to-end feature alignment. Extensive experiments on both the traditional video inpainting datasets and our proposed WRV2 dataset demonstrate that Raformer outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

The use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve relevant information from an external knowledge source enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions over private and/or previously unseen document collections. However, RAG fails on global questions directed at an entire text corpus, such as "What are the main themes in the dataset?", since this is inherently a query-focused summarization (QFS) task, rather than an explicit retrieval task. Prior QFS methods, meanwhile, fail to scale to the quantities of text indexed by typical RAG systems. To combine the strengths of these contrasting methods, we propose a Graph RAG approach to question answering over private text corpora that scales with both the generality of user questions and the quantity of source text to be indexed. Our approach uses an LLM to build a graph-based text index in two stages: first to derive an entity knowledge graph from the source documents, then to pregenerate community summaries for all groups of closely-related entities. Given a question, each community summary is used to generate a partial response, before all partial responses are again summarized in a final response to the user. For a class of global sensemaking questions over datasets in the 1 million token range, we show that Graph RAG leads to substantial improvements over a na\"ive RAG baseline for both the comprehensiveness and diversity of generated answers. An open-source, Python-based implementation of both global and local Graph RAG approaches is forthcoming at https://aka.ms/graphrag.

Short- and long-term outcomes of an algorithm often differ, with damaging downstream effects. A known example is a click-bait algorithm, which may increase short-term clicks but damage long-term user engagement. A possible solution to estimate the long-term outcome is to run an online experiment or A/B test for the potential algorithms, but it takes months or even longer to observe the long-term outcomes of interest, making the algorithm selection process unacceptably slow. This work thus studies the problem of feasibly yet accurately estimating the long-term outcome of an algorithm using only historical and short-term experiment data. Existing approaches to this problem either need a restrictive assumption about the short-term outcomes called surrogacy or cannot effectively use short-term outcomes, which is inefficient. Therefore, we propose a new framework called Long-term Off-Policy Evaluation (LOPE), which is based on reward function decomposition. LOPE works under a more relaxed assumption than surrogacy and effectively leverages short-term rewards to substantially reduce the variance. Synthetic experiments show that LOPE outperforms existing approaches particularly when surrogacy is severely violated and the long-term reward is noisy. In addition, real-world experiments on large-scale A/B test data collected on a music streaming platform show that LOPE can estimate the long-term outcome of actual algorithms more accurately than existing feasible methods.

Captchas are becoming more difficult to solve and there's a reason why - bots are outsmarting you. The'I'm not a robot' prompt originally made the users copy a series of letters and numbers or identify all the buses in a series of images that were often difficult to get wrong. But new versions that ask users to select the objects that are the same shape or click on the non-aquatic animal. Captchas are puzzles that are used to safeguard websites from nefarious bots, and used to pose a simple'copy the text' question but have now evolved to ask people to solve brain-teasing questions. Captcha puzzles (pictured) can include anything from matching a puzzle piece to the opened slot to copying a series of numbers and letters.