Media
Mapping Violence: Developing an Extensive Framework to Build a Bangla Sectarian Expression Dataset from Social Media Interactions
Tasnim, Nazia, Gupta, Sujan Sen, Shihab, Md. Istiak Hossain, Juee, Fatiha Islam, Tahsin, Arunima, Ghum, Pritom, Fatema, Kanij, Haque, Marshia, Farzana, Wasema, Nasir, Prionti, KhudaBukhsh, Ashique, Sadeque, Farig, Sushmit, Asif
Communal violence in online forums has become extremely prevalent in South Asia, where many communities of different cultures coexist and share resources. These societies exhibit a phenomenon characterized by strong bonds within their own groups and animosity towards others, leading to conflicts that frequently escalate into violent confrontations. To address this issue, we have developed the first comprehensive framework for the automatic detection of communal violence markers in online Bangla content accompanying the largest collection (13K raw sentences) of social media interactions that fall under the definition of four major violence class and their 16 coarse expressions. Our workflow introduces a 7-step expert annotation process incorporating insights from social scientists, linguists, and psychologists. By presenting data statistics and benchmarking performance using this dataset, we have determined that, aside from the category of Non-communal violence, Religio-communal violence is particularly pervasive in Bangla text. Moreover, we have substantiated the effectiveness of fine-tuning language models in identifying violent comments by conducting preliminary benchmarking on the state-of-the-art Bangla deep learning model.
TeClass: A Human-Annotated Relevance-based Headline Classification and Generation Dataset for Telugu
Kanumolu, Gopichand, Madasu, Lokesh, Surange, Nirmal, Shrivastava, Manish
News headline generation is a crucial task in increasing productivity for both the readers and producers of news. This task can easily be aided by automated News headline-generation models. However, the presence of irrelevant headlines in scraped news articles results in sub-optimal performance of generation models. We propose that relevance-based headline classification can greatly aid the task of generating relevant headlines. Relevance-based headline classification involves categorizing news headlines based on their relevance to the corresponding news articles. While this task is well-established in English, it remains under-explored in low-resource languages like Telugu due to a lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we present TeClass, the first-ever human-annotated Telugu news headline classification dataset, containing 78,534 annotations across 26,178 article-headline pairs. We experiment with various baseline models and provide a comprehensive analysis of their results. We further demonstrate the impact of this work by fine-tuning various headline generation models using TeClass dataset. The headlines generated by the models fine-tuned on highly relevant article-headline pairs, showed about a 5 point increment in the ROUGE-L scores. To encourage future research, the annotated dataset as well as the annotation guidelines will be made publicly available.
Inductive-Deductive Strategy Reuse for Multi-Turn Instructional Dialogues
Ou, Jiao, Wu, Jiayu, Liu, Che, Zhang, Fuzheng, Zhang, Di, Gai, Kun
Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations requires high-quality instructional dialogues, which can be achieved by raising diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions that deepen interactions. Existing methods target instructions from real instruction dialogues as a learning goal and fine-tune a user simulator for posing instructions. However, the user simulator struggles to implicitly model complex dialogue flows and pose high-quality instructions. In this paper, we take inspiration from the cognitive abilities inherent in human learning and propose the explicit modeling of complex dialogue flows through instructional strategy reuse. Specifically, we first induce high-level strategies from various real instruction dialogues. These strategies are applied to new dialogue scenarios deductively, where the instructional strategies facilitate high-quality instructions. Experimental results show that our method can generate diverse, in-depth, and insightful instructions for a given dialogue history. The constructed multi-turn instructional dialogues can outperform competitive baselines on the downstream chat model.
em Fallout /em Is the Biggest Hit in Months. The Secret to Its Success? It Started With a Lousy Story.
There's a moment in the new hit Amazon Prime Video series Fallout where the sunny protagonist, having emerged from her underground commune into a postapocalyptic hellscape, tries to convince a bloodthirsty mutant to follow the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I expected the mutant--or Ghoul, to be more precise--to shoot back some nihilistic platitude in return, maybe a slang-ified version of a Thomas Hobbes quote. Instead, we get a perfect line: "Yeah, well, the wasteland's got its own golden rule," he replies. "'Thou shalt get sidetracked by bullshit every goddamn time.'" That rejoinder distills what makes Fallout, both the video game series and its television adaptation, so great. After all, getting sidetracked by bullshit is what Fallout has always been about.
Amazon debuts a generative AI-powered playlist feature
Amazon Music is joining Spotify in starting to offer a generative AI-powered playlist feature. For now, Maestro is available in beta to a small number of Amazon Music users in the US on iOS and Android. Folks who are included in the beta will see Maestro on the home screen after they update to the latest version of the app. They can also access the tool by tapping the plus button to create a new playlist. The idea is to use natural language prompts to create any kind of playlist imaginable.
North Korea to put Chinese surveillance cameras in schools and workplaces to monitor citizens, report says
Fox News correspondent Stephanie Bennett joins'Fox News Live' to break down recent evidence tying missile fragments in Russian attacks to North Korea. North Korea is putting surveillance cameras in schools and workplaces and collecting fingerprints, photographs and other biometric information from its citizens in a technology-driven push to monitor its population even more closely, a report said Tuesday. The state's growing use of digital surveillance tools, which combine equipment imported from China with domestically developed software, threatens to erase many of the small spaces North Koreans have left to engage in private business activities, access foreign media and secretly criticize their government, the researchers wrote. But the isolated country's digital ambitions have to contend with poor electricity supplies and low network connectivity. Those challenges, and a history of reliance on human methods of spying on its citizens, mean that digital surveillance isn't yet as pervasive as in China, according to the report, published by the North Korea-focused website 38 North. The study's findings align with widely held views that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is stepping up efforts to tighten the state's control of its citizens and promote loyalty to his regime.
How I Use the Internet, According to Nineties Action Movies
An illustration of a large envelope fills the screen--I've received a new e-mail, my first in weeks. I click on the middle of the envelope and a note opens in size thirty-six font. It's a top-secret assignment for me, a renegade ex-C.I.A. agent who can kick higher than anyone else in the agency. "Looks like this old dog is heading back to the pound," I growl, and close the e-mail by turning off my entire computer. I pull up a digitized photo on the screen.
Netflix true crime documentary may have used AI-generated images of a real person
Netflix has been accused of using AI-manipulated imagery in the true crime documentary What Jennifer Did, Futurism has reported. Several photos show typical signs of AI trickery, including mangled hands, strange artifacts and more. If accurate, the report raises serious questions about the use of such images in documentaries, particularly since the person depicted is currently in prison awaiting retrial. In one egregious image, the left hand of the documentary's subject Jennifer Pan is particularly mangled, while another image shows a strange gap in her cheek. Netflix has yet to acknowledge the report, but the images show clear signs of manipulation and were never labeled as AI-generated. The AI may be generating the imagery based on real photos of Pan, as PetaPixel suggested.
TV100: A TV Series Dataset that Pre-Trained CLIP Has Not Seen
Zhou, Da-Wei, Qi, Zhi-Hong, Ye, Han-Jia, Zhan, De-Chuan
The era of pre-trained models has ushered in a wealth of new insights for the machine learning community. Among the myriad of questions that arise, one of paramount importance is: 'Do pre-trained models possess comprehensive knowledge?' This paper seeks to address this crucial inquiry. In line with our objective, we have made publicly available a novel dataset comprised of images from TV series released post-2021. This dataset holds significant potential for use in various research areas, including the evaluation of incremental learning, novel class discovery, and long-tailed learning, among others. Project page: https://tv-100.github.io/
Unveiling the Misuse Potential of Base Large Language Models via In-Context Learning
Wang, Xiao, Chen, Tianze, Yang, Xianjun, Zhang, Qi, Zhao, Xun, Lin, Dahua
The open-sourcing of large language models (LLMs) accelerates application development, innovation, and scientific progress. This includes both base models, which are pre-trained on extensive datasets without alignment, and aligned models, deliberately designed to align with ethical standards and human values. Contrary to the prevalent assumption that the inherent instruction-following limitations of base LLMs serve as a safeguard against misuse, our investigation exposes a critical oversight in this belief. By deploying carefully designed demonstrations, our research demonstrates that base LLMs could effectively interpret and execute malicious instructions. To systematically assess these risks, we introduce a novel set of risk evaluation metrics. Empirical results reveal that the outputs from base LLMs can exhibit risk levels on par with those of models fine-tuned for malicious purposes. This vulnerability, requiring neither specialized knowledge nor training, can be manipulated by almost anyone, highlighting the substantial risk and the critical need for immediate attention to the base LLMs' security protocols.