Media
'I would never use AI': Americans detail how much they use artificial intelligence in their daily lives
Texas residents share how familiar they are with artificial intelligence on a scale from one to 10 and detailed how much they use it each day. AUSTIN, Texas โ Americans in the Lone Star state shared how familiar they are with artifical intelligence and how much they use the rapidly evolving technology. "I like to use ChatGPT just for stupid questions that I have or just to mess around or something like that," Gabriel, of Austin, told Fox News. AI has rapidly evolved in recent months, with tools like ChatGPT becoming more accessible and easier to use for the broader public. But the majority of people who spoke with Fox News said they didn't use AI technologies in their daily lives.
Artificial general intelligence in the wrong hands could do 'really dangerous stuff,' experts warn
AGI, while powerful, could have negative consequences, warned Diveplane CEO Mike Capps and Liberty Blockchain CCO Christopher Alexander. Artificial general intelligence โ the kind of AI that has capabilities similar to humans โ may be far off and offer new opportunities, but experts warn it could be potentially dangerous, and have drastic implications for white-collar workers. "I'm about as excited about AGI as I am about nuclear fission," Diveplane CEO Dr. Michael Capps told Fox News Digital. "It's really amazing what we can do with it, it can power our society, but in the wrong hands, it can do some really dangerous stuff." While there is no one definition of AGI, a 2020 report from consulting giant McKinsey said such a machine would need to master human-like skills, such as fine motor skills and natural language processing.
Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology
The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.
M4: Multi-generator, Multi-domain, and Multi-lingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection
Wang, Yuxia, Mansurov, Jonibek, Ivanov, Petar, Su, Jinyan, Shelmanov, Artem, Tsvigun, Akim, Whitehouse, Chenxi, Afzal, Osama Mohammed, Mahmoud, Tarek, Aji, Alham Fikri, Nakov, Preslav
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability to generate fluent responses to a wide variety of user queries, but this has also resulted in concerns regarding the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, educational, and academic context. In this work, we aim to develop automatic systems to identify machine-generated text and to detect potential misuse. We first introduce a large-scale benchmark M4, which is multi-generator, multi-domain, and multi-lingual corpus for machine-generated text detection. Using the dataset, we experiment with a number of methods and we show that it is challenging for detectors to generalize well on unseen examples if they are either from different domains or are generated by different large language models. In such cases, detectors tend to misclassify machine-generated text as human-written. These results show that the problem is far from solved and there is a lot of room for improvement. We believe that our dataset M4, which covers different generators, domains and languages, will enable future research towards more robust approaches for this pressing societal problem. The M4 dataset is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4.
AlignSTS: Speech-to-Singing Conversion via Cross-Modal Alignment
Li, Ruiqi, Huang, Rongjie, Zhang, Lichao, Liu, Jinglin, Zhao, Zhou
The speech-to-singing (STS) voice conversion task aims to generate singing samples corresponding to speech recordings while facing a major challenge: the alignment between the target (singing) pitch contour and the source (speech) content is difficult to learn in a text-free situation. This paper proposes AlignSTS, an STS model based on explicit cross-modal alignment, which views speech variance such as pitch and content as different modalities. Inspired by the mechanism of how humans will sing the lyrics to the melody, AlignSTS: 1) adopts a novel rhythm adaptor to predict the target rhythm representation to bridge the modality gap between content and pitch, where the rhythm representation is computed in a simple yet effective way and is quantized into a discrete space; and 2) uses the predicted rhythm representation to re-align the content based on cross-attention and conducts a cross-modal fusion for re-synthesize. Extensive experiments show that AlignSTS achieves superior performance in terms of both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at https://alignsts.github.io.
#REVAL: a semantic evaluation framework for hashtag recommendation
Alsini, Areej, Huynh, Du Q., Datta, Amitava
Automatic evaluation of hashtag recommendation models is a fundamental task in many online social network systems. In the traditional evaluation method, the recommended hashtags from an algorithm are firstly compared with the ground truth hashtags for exact correspondences. The number of exact matches is then used to calculate the hit rate, hit ratio, precision, recall, or F1-score. This way of evaluating hashtag similarities is inadequate as it ignores the semantic correlation between the recommended and ground truth hashtags. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel semantic evaluation framework for hashtag recommendation, called #REval. This framework includes an internal module referred to as BERTag, which automatically learns the hashtag embeddings. We investigate on how the #REval framework performs under different word embedding methods and different numbers of synonyms and hashtags in the recommendation using our proposed #REval-hit-ratio measure. Our experiments of the proposed framework on three large datasets show that #REval gave more meaningful hashtag synonyms for hashtag recommendation evaluation. Our analysis also highlights the sensitivity of the framework to the word embedding technique, with #REval based on BERTag more superior over #REval based on FastText and Word2Vec.
Identifying Informational Sources in News Articles
Spangher, Alexander, Peng, Nanyun, May, Jonathan, Ferrara, Emilio
News articles are driven by the informational sources journalists use in reporting. Modeling when, how and why sources get used together in stories can help us better understand the information we consume and even help journalists with the task of producing it. In this work, we take steps toward this goal by constructing the largest and widest-ranging annotated dataset, to date, of informational sources used in news writing. We show that our dataset can be used to train high-performing models for information detection and source attribution. We further introduce a novel task, source prediction, to study the compositionality of sources in news articles. We show good performance on this task, which we argue is an important proof for narrative science exploring the internal structure of news articles and aiding in planning-based language generation, and an important step towards a source-recommendation system to aid journalists.
Instructions as Backdoors: Backdoor Vulnerabilities of Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models
Xu, Jiashu, Ma, Mingyu Derek, Wang, Fei, Xiao, Chaowei, Chen, Muhao
Instruction-tuned models are trained on crowdsourcing datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. However, in this work we raise security concerns about this training paradigm. Our studies demonstrate that an attacker can inject backdoors by issuing very few malicious instructions among thousands of gathered data and control model behavior through data poisoning, without even the need of modifying data instances or labels themselves. Through such instruction attacks, the attacker can achieve over 90% attack success rate across four commonly used NLP datasets, and cause persistent backdoors that are easily transferred to 15 diverse datasets zero-shot. In this way, the attacker can directly apply poisoned instructions designed for one dataset on many other datasets. Moreover, the poisoned model cannot be cured by continual learning. Lastly, instruction attacks show resistance to existing inference-time defense. These findings highlight the need for more robust defenses against data poisoning attacks in instructiontuning models and underscore the importance of ensuring data quality in instruction crowdsourcing.
Decomposing Complex Queries for Tip-of-the-tongue Retrieval
Lin, Kevin, Lo, Kyle, Gonzalez, Joseph E., Klein, Dan
When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs -- complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). This retrieval setting, called tip of the tongue (TOT), is especially challenging for models heavily reliant on lexical and semantic overlap between query and document text. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query into individual clues, routing those as sub-queries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. This approach allows us to take advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorportating query decompositions into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 7% relative again for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.
Music Representing Corpus Virtual: An Open Sourced Library for Explorative Music Generation, Sound Design, and Instrument Creation with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Music Representing Corpus Virtual (MRCV) is an open source software suite designed to explore the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Music Generation, Sound Design, and Virtual Instrument Creation (MGSDIC). The software is accessible to users of varying levels of experience, with an emphasis on providing an explorative approach to MGSDIC. The main aim of MRCV is to facilitate creativity, allowing users to customize input datasets for training the neural networks, and offering a range of options for each neural network (thoroughly documented in the Github Wiki). The software suite is designed to be accessible to musicians, audio professionals, sound designers, and composers, regardless of their prior experience in AI or ML. The documentation is prepared in such a way as to abstract technical details, thereby making it easy to understand. The software is open source, meaning users can contribute to its development, and the community can collectively benefit from the insights and experience of other users.