Fox News medical contributor Dr. Marc Siegel joins'Fox & Friends' to discuss the benefits of artificial intelligence in the medical industry if used with caution. Artificial intelligence systems are modeled after the human brain, but a new branch of research at Columbia University in New York is examining whether developments in AI might contain clues as to how living brains work and how their function might be improved. Columbia was one of seven universities that the National Science Foundation designated as a new national AI research institute, and the $20 million it received will boost the school's AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence (ARNI). The goal is to conduct research "connecting the major progress made in AI systems to the revolution in our understanding of the brain." Richard Zemel, professor of computer science at Columbia, told Fox News Digital that the ambition is to bring together top AI and neuroscience researchers together in a cross-training exercise that can benefit AI systems and people.

Fox News correspondent Grady Trimble has the latest on fears the technology will spiral out of control on "Special Report." Artificial intelligence can't bring back the dead, but it may be able to simulate speaking to a lost loved one in an effort to help humans through the grieving process. The high-tech revamp of the traditional seance comes amid the wild growth of large language models, a form of AI that is trained on copious amounts of text. ChatGPT's release year has sparked discussion on how far the tech can go as the chatbot mimics human conversation and answers prompts from humans. Jarren Rocks, product designer and manager at the Los Angeles-based software development company AE Studio, is working on a program called Seance AI, which will allow people to talk with a chatbot that mimics their dead loved ones.

The rapid growth of web pages and the increasing complexity of their structure poses a challenge for web mining models. Web mining models are required to understand the semi-structured web pages, particularly when little is known about the subject or template of a new page. Current methods migrate language models to the web mining by embedding the XML source code into the transformer or encoding the rendered layout with graph neural networks. However, these approaches do not take into account the relationships between text nodes within and across pages. In this paper, we propose a new approach, ReXMiner, for zero-shot relation extraction in web mining. ReXMiner encodes the shortest relative paths in the Document Object Model (DOM) tree which is a more accurate and efficient signal for key-value pair extraction within a web page. It also incorporates the popularity of each text node by counting the occurrence of the same text node across different web pages. We use the contrastive learning to address the issue of sparsity in relation extraction. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that our method, ReXMiner, outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the task of zero-shot relation extraction in web mining.

On social networks, algorithmic personalization drives users into filter bubbles where they rarely see content that deviates from their interests. We present a model for content curation and personalization that avoids filter bubbles, along with algorithmic guarantees and nearly matching lower bounds. In our model, the platform interacts with $n$ users over $T$ timesteps, choosing content for each user from $k$ categories. The platform receives stochastic rewards as in a multi-arm bandit. To avoid filter bubbles, we draw on the intuition that if some users are shown some category of content, then all users should see at least a small amount of that content. We first analyze a naive formalization of this intuition and show it has unintended consequences: it leads to ``tyranny of the majority'' with the burden of diversification borne disproportionately by those with minority interests. This leads us to our model which distributes this burden more equitably. We require that the probability any user is shown a particular type of content is at least $\gamma$ times the average probability all users are shown that type of content. Full personalization corresponds to $\gamma = 0$ and complete homogenization corresponds to $\gamma = 1$; hence, $\gamma$ encodes a hard cap on the level of personalization. We also analyze additional formulations where the platform can exceed its cap but pays a penalty proportional to its constraint violation. We provide algorithmic guarantees for optimizing recommendations subject to these constraints. These include nearly matching upper and lower bounds for the entire range of $\gamma \in [0,1]$ showing that the reward of a multi-agent variant of UCB is nearly optimal. Using real-world preference data, we empirically verify that under our model, users share the burden of diversification with only minor utility loss under our constraints.

Contrast consistency, the ability of a model to make consistently correct predictions in the presence of perturbations, is an essential aspect in NLP. While studied in tasks such as sentiment analysis and reading comprehension, it remains unexplored in open-domain question answering (OpenQA) due to the difficulty of collecting perturbed questions that satisfy factuality requirements. In this work, we collect minimally edited questions as challenging contrast sets to evaluate OpenQA models. Our collection approach combines both human annotation and large language model generation. We find that the widely used dense passage retriever (DPR) performs poorly on our contrast sets, despite fitting the training set well and performing competitively on standard test sets. To address this issue, we introduce a simple and effective query-side contrastive loss with the aid of data augmentation to improve DPR training. Our experiments on the contrast sets demonstrate that DPR's contrast consistency is improved without sacrificing its accuracy on the standard test sets.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, fine-tuning these models often necessitates substantial supervision, which can be expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised method called LanguageModel Self-Improvement by Reinforcement Learning Contemplation (SIRLC) that improves LLMs without reliance on external labels. Our approach is grounded in the observation that it is simpler for language models to assess text quality than to generate text. Building on this insight, SIRLC assigns LLMs dual roles as both student and teacher. As a student, the LLM generates answers to unlabeled questions, while as a teacher, it evaluates the generated text and assigns scores accordingly. The model parameters are updated using reinforcement learning to maximize the evaluation score. We demonstrate that SIRLC can be applied to various NLP tasks, such as reasoning problems, text generation, and machine translation. Our experiments show that SIRLC effectively improves LLM performance without external supervision, resulting in a 5.6% increase in answering accuracy for reasoning tasks and a rise in BERTScore from 0.82 to 0.86 for translation tasks. Furthermore, SIRLC can be applied to models of different sizes, showcasing its broad applicability.

Recent embedding-based methods have achieved great successes on exploiting entity alignment from knowledge graph (KG) embeddings of multiple modals. In this paper, we study embedding-based entity alignment (EEA) from a perspective of generative models. We show that EEA is a special problem where the main objective is analogous to that in a typical generative model, based on which we theoretically prove the effectiveness of the recently developed generative adversarial network (GAN)-based EEA methods. We then reveal that their incomplete objective limits the capacity on both entity alignment and entity synthesis (i.e., generating new entities). We mitigate this problem by introducing a generative EEA (abbr., GEEA) framework with the proposed mutual variational autoencoder (M-VAE) as the generative model. M-VAE can convert an entity from one KG to another and generate new entities from random noise vectors. We demonstrate the power of GEEA with theoretical analysis and empirical experiments on both entity alignment and entity synthesis tasks.

Propaganda is a form of communication intended to influence the opinions and the mindset of the public to promote a particular agenda. With the rise of social media, propaganda has spread rapidly, leading to the need for automatic propaganda detection systems. Most work on propaganda detection has focused on high-resource languages, such as English, and little effort has been made to detect propaganda for low-resource languages. Yet, it is common to find a mix of multiple languages in social media communication, a phenomenon known as code-switching. Code-switching combines different languages within the same text, which poses a challenge for automatic systems. With this in mind, here we propose the novel task of detecting propaganda techniques in code-switched text. To support this task, we create a corpus of 1,030 texts code-switching between English and Roman Urdu, annotated with 20 propaganda techniques, which we make publicly available. We perform a number of experiments contrasting different experimental setups, and we find that it is important to model the multilinguality directly (rather than using translation) as well as to use the right fine-tuning strategy. The code and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/propaganda-codeswitched-text

Immersion plays a vital role when designing cinematic creations, yet the difficulty in immersive shooting prevents designers to create satisfactory outputs. In this work, we analyze the specific components that contribute to cinematographic immersion considering spatial, emotional, and aesthetic level, while these components are then combined into a high-level evaluation mechanism. Guided by such a immersion mechanism, we propose a GAN-based camera control system that is able to generate actor-driven camera movements in the 3D virtual environment to obtain immersive film sequences. The proposed encoder-decoder architecture in the generation flow transfers character motion into camera trajectory conditioned on an emotion factor. This ensures spatial and emotional immersion by performing actor-camera synchronization physically and psychologically. The emotional immersion is further strengthened by incorporating regularization that controls camera shakiness for expressing different mental statuses. To achieve aesthetic immersion, we make effort to improve aesthetic frame compositions by modifying the synthesized camera trajectory. Based on a self-supervised adjustor, the adjusted camera placements can project the character to the appropriate on-frame locations following aesthetic rules. The experimental results indicate that our proposed camera control system can efficiently offer immersive cinematic videos, both quantitatively and qualitatively, based on a fine-grained immersive shooting. Live examples are shown in the supplementary video.

With the recent appearance of LLMs in practical settings, having methods that can effectively detect factual inconsistencies is crucial to reduce the propagation of misinformation and improve trust in model outputs. When testing on existing factual consistency benchmarks, we find that a few large language models (LLMs) perform competitively on classification benchmarks for factual inconsistency detection compared to traditional non-LLM methods. However, a closer analysis reveals that most LLMs fail on more complex formulations of the task and exposes issues with existing evaluation benchmarks, affecting evaluation precision. To address this, we propose a new protocol for inconsistency detection benchmark creation and implement it in a 10-domain benchmark called SummEdits. This new benchmark is 20 times more cost-effective per sample than previous benchmarks and highly reproducible, as we estimate inter-annotator agreement at about 0.9. Most LLMs struggle on SummEdits, with performance close to random chance. The best-performing model, GPT-4, is still 8\% below estimated human performance, highlighting the gaps in LLMs' ability to reason about facts and detect inconsistencies when they occur.