Media
A Machine Learning Approach for MIDI to Guitar Tablature Conversion
Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Maximos, Bastas, Gregoris, Makris, Dimos, Herremans, Dorien, Katsouros, Vassilis, Maragos, Petros
Guitar tablature transcription consists in deducing the string and the fret number on which each note should be played to reproduce the actual musical part. This assignment should lead to playable string-fret combinations throughout the entire track and, in general, preserve parsimonious motion between successive combinations. Throughout the history of guitar playing, specific chord fingerings have been developed across different musical styles that facilitate common idiomatic voicing combinations and motion between them. This paper presents a method for assigning guitar tablature notation to a given MIDI-based musical part (possibly consisting of multiple polyphonic tracks), i.e. no information about guitar-idiomatic expressional characteristics is involved (e.g. bending etc.) The current strategy is based on machine learning and requires a basic assumption about how much fingers can stretch on a fretboard; only standard 6-string guitar tuning is examined. The proposed method also examines the transcription of music pieces that was not meant to be played or could not possibly be played by a guitar (e.g. potentially a symphonic orchestra part), employing a rudimentary method for augmenting musical information and training/testing the system with artificial data. The results present interesting aspects about what the system can achieve when trained on the initial and augmented dataset, showing that the training with augmented data improves the performance even in simple, e.g. monophonic, cases. Results also indicate weaknesses and lead to useful conclusions about possible improvements.
Cognition-of-Thought Elicits Social-Aligned Reasoning in Large Language Models
Zhang, Xuanming, Chen, Yuxuan, Yeh, Samuel, Li, Sharon
Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but can still exhibit harmful behaviors. Current alignment strategies typically embed safety into model weights, making these controls implicit, static, and difficult to modify. This paper introduces Cognition-of-Thought (CooT), a novel decoding-time framework that equips LLMs with an explicit cognitive self-monitoring loop. CooT couples a standard text Generator with a cognitive Perceiver that continuously monitors the unfolding sequence. The Perceiver uses a structured, precedence-based hierarchy of principles (e.g., safety over obedience) to detect potential misalignments as they arise. When violations are flagged, CooT intervenes by rolling back the generation to the point of error and regenerating under injected guidance that combines universal social priors with context-specific warnings. CooT thus transforms alignment from a fixed property into an explicit, dynamic, and auditable process active during inference, allowing for flexible policy updates without retraining the model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and model families confirm that CooT consistently improves safety and social reasoning performance.
A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Negation for NLP and Neural Retrievers
Petcu, Roxana, Bhargav, Samarth, de Rijke, Maarten, Kanoulas, Evangelos
Understanding and solving complex reasoning tasks is vital for addressing the information needs of a user. Although dense neural models learn contextualised embeddings, they still underperform on queries containing negation. To understand this phenomenon, we study negation in both traditional neural information retrieval and LLM-based models. We (1) introduce a taxonomy of negation that derives from philosophical, linguistic, and logical definitions; (2) generate two benchmark datasets that can be used to evaluate the performance of neural information retrieval models and to fine-tune models for a more robust performance on negation; and (3) propose a logic-based classification mechanism that can be used to analyze the performance of retrieval models on existing datasets. Our taxonomy produces a balanced data distribution over negation types, providing a better training setup that leads to faster convergence on the NevIR dataset. Moreover, we propose a classification schema that reveals the coverage of negation types in existing datasets, offering insights into the factors that might affect the generalization of fine-tuned models on negation.
Instagram Is Introducing New Restrictions for Teen Users. Here's What to Know
Instagram Is Introducing New Restrictions for Teen Users. In this photo illustration a 13-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen display on May 21, 2025 in Bath, England. In this photo illustration a 13-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen display on May 21, 2025 in Bath, England. Instagram announced new restrictions for teen accounts on Tuesday amid mounting controversy over safety guidelines for younger users on the social media platform. The photo-sharing app will soon limit content for teens using guidelines similar to those in the film industry for PG-13-rated movies.
The Download: aging clocks, and repairing the internet
Plus: California's AI safety bill has passed into law Wrinkles and gray hairs aside, it can be difficult to know how well--or poorly--someone's body is truly aging. A person who develops age-related diseases earlier in life, or has other biological changes associated with aging, might be considered "biologically older" than a similar-age person who doesn't have those changes. Some 80-year-olds will be weak and frail, while others are fit and active. Over the past decade, scientists have been uncovering new methods of looking at the hidden ways our bodies are aging. And what they've found is changing our understanding of aging itself. Can we repair the internet?
Spot the difference: Apple has rebranded its TV service as part of a 'vibrant new identity' - so, can you see what has changed?
Hamas executes'collaborators' in Gaza as it clings to power amid fears Trump's peace deal is already at risk Internet star who demanded free seats for fat fliers vanished without trace... now the Daily Mail has learned the heartbreaking reason why Donald Trump tells crowds there are world leaders he'doesn't like at ALL' as he teases who they are How Diane Keaton's closest friend helped her to achieve her'lifelong ambition' just months before she died - and the poignant legacy it leaves Kate and Wills' fresh start at their'forever home': Why they have fast-tracked their move to house they will never leave - even when he becomes King'It's Meghan Markle 3.0': Why the duchess has set tongues wagging that she's plotting another Sussex relaunch'as she holds cosy meeting with new editor of US Vogue' Trump's ominous warning to Macron at Egypt summit: 'You will see what is about to happen' Neil Diamond, 84, sang Sweet Caroline and worked with Cher as well as Barbra Streisand... see him now Insiders reveal how reluctant Katy Perry finally gave in to'persistent' Justin Trudeau... as sexy yacht photos get spicy response from his ex-wife Awkward moment Donald Trump asks Giorgia Meloni'You won't be offended if I say you're beautiful, right? Horrors endured by Israel's last 20 hostages: Chained, tortured, and starved. Lindsey Halligan removes senior DOJ official after taking over Virginia US attorney's office Gorgeous Bay Area enclave filled with hippies becomes America's ANGRIEST town over plans for huge affordable housing project MLB fans hail'greatest play in baseball HISTORY' after Dodgers thought they hit grand slam in Brewers game Father launches campaign to become sheriff as he faces murder trial for killing teenage daughter's abuser Spot the difference: Apple has rebranded its TV service as part of a'vibrant new identity' - so, can you see what has changed? But Apple TV+ is no more - as Apple has quietly rebranded its streaming service. 'Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity,' the tech giant explained in the bottom of a press release on the streaming debut of its film, 'F1 The Movie'.
Can we repair the internet?
Can we repair the internet? Three new books propose remedies that run the gamut from government regulation to user responsibility. From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the internet today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures--the intellect behind "net neutrality," a former Meta executive, and the web's own inventor--propose radical approaches to fixing it. But are these luminaries the right people for the job? Though each shows conviction, and even sometimes inventiveness, the solutions they present reveal blind spots.
Samsung rides global AI boom to its biggest profit since 2022
People walk past a large electronic screen showing the Samsung logo at a train station in Seoul on Tuesday. Samsung Electronics has posted its biggest quarterly profit in more than three years, reflecting booming memory chip demand while AI development accelerates globally. South Korea's largest company reported an operating profit of 12.1 trillion won ($8.5 billion) in the September quarter, compared with analysts' projection for 9.70 trillion won, according to a preliminary earnings report released on Tuesday. Revenue climbed to 86 trillion won. The company will provide a full financial statement with net income and divisional breakdowns later this month. The results may bolster confidence among investors betting on the durability of demand for AI servers and memory chips.
TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use
He, Pengfei, Dai, Zhenwei, He, Bing, Liu, Hui, Tang, Xianfeng, Lu, Hanqing, Li, Juanhui, Ding, Jiayuan, Mukherjee, Subhabrata, Wang, Suhang, Xing, Yue, Tang, Jiliang, Dumoulin, Benoit
Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly rely on tool use to complete real-world tasks. While existing works evaluate the LLMs' tool use capability, they largely focus on the final answers yet overlook the detailed tool usage trajectory, i.e., whether tools are selected, parameterized, and ordered correctly. We introduce TRAJECT-Bench, a trajectory-aware benchmark to comprehensively evaluate LLMs' tool use capability through diverse tasks with fine-grained evaluation metrics. TRAJECT-Bench pairs high-fidelity, executable tools across practical domains with tasks grounded in production-style APIs, and synthesizes trajectories that vary in breadth (parallel calls) and depth (interdependent chains). Besides final accuracy, TRAJECT-Bench also reports trajectory-level diagnostics, including tool selection and argument correctness, and dependency/order satisfaction. Analyses reveal failure modes such as similar tool confusion and parameter-blind selection, and scaling behavior with tool diversity and trajectory length where the bottleneck of transiting from short to mid-length trajectories is revealed, offering actionable guidance for LLMs' tool use.
Can Compact Language Models Search Like Agents? Distillation-Guided Policy Optimization for Preserving Agentic RAG Capabilities
Kotoge, Rikuto, Nishimura, Mai, Ma, Jiaxin
Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a dominant post-training approach to elicit agentic RAG behaviors such as search and planning from language models. Despite its success with larger models, applying RL to compact models (e.g., 0.5--1B parameters) presents unique challenges. The compact models exhibit poor initial performance, resulting in sparse rewards and unstable training. To overcome these difficulties, we propose Distillation-Guided Policy Optimization (DGPO), which employs cold-start initialization from teacher demonstrations and continuous teacher guidance during policy optimization. To understand how compact models preserve agentic behavior, we introduce Agentic RAG Capabilities (ARC), a fine-grained metric analyzing reasoning, search coordination, and response synthesis. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that DGPO enables compact models to achieve sophisticated agentic search behaviors, even outperforming the larger teacher model in some cases. DGPO makes agentic RAG feasible in computing resource-constrained environments.