Media
Why Isn't Relational Learning Taking Over the World?
Artificial intelligence seems to be taking over the world with systems that model pixels, words, and phonemes. The world is arguably made up, not of pixels, words, and phonemes but of entities (objects, things, including events) with properties and relations among them. Surely we should model these, not the perception or description of them. You might suspect that concentrating on modeling words and pixels is because all of the (valuable) data in the world is in terms of text and images. If you look into almost any company you will find their most valuable data is in spreadsheets, databases and other relational formats. These are not the form that are studied in introductory machine learning, but are full of product numbers, student numbers, transaction numbers and other identifiers that can't be interpreted naively as numbers. The field that studies this sort of data has various names including relational learning, statistical relational AI, and many others. This paper explains why relational learning is not taking over the world -- except in a few cases with restricted relations -- and what needs to be done to bring it to it's rightful prominence.
Divide by Question, Conquer by Agent: SPLIT-RAG with Question-Driven Graph Partitioning
Yang, Ruiyi, Xue, Hao, Razzak, Imran, Pan, Shirui, Hacid, Hakim, Salim, Flora D.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems empower large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge, yet struggle with efficiency-accuracy trade-offs when scaling to large knowledge graphs. Existing approaches often rely on monolithic graph retrieval, incurring unnecessary latency for simple queries and fragmented reasoning for complex multi-hop questions. To address these challenges, this paper propose SPLIT-RAG, a multi-agent RAG framework that addresses these limitations with question-driven semantic graph partitioning and collaborative subgraph retrieval. The innovative framework first create Semantic Partitioning of Linked Information, then use the Type-Specialized knowledge base to achieve Multi-Agent RAG. The attribute-aware graph segmentation manages to divide knowledge graphs into semantically coherent subgraphs, ensuring subgraphs align with different query types, while lightweight LLM agents are assigned to partitioned subgraphs, and only relevant partitions are activated during retrieval, thus reduce search space while enhancing efficiency. Finally, a hierarchical merging module resolves inconsistencies across subgraph-derived answers through logical verifications. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates considerable improvements compared to existing approaches.
Do Androids Dream of Unseen Puppeteers? Probing for a Conspiracy Mindset in Large Language Models
Corso, Francesco, Pierri, Francesco, Morales, Gianmarco De Francisci
In this paper, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit conspiratorial tendencies, whether they display sociodemographic biases in this domain, and how easily they can be conditioned into adopting conspiratorial perspectives. Conspiracy beliefs play a central role in the spread of misinformation and in shaping distrust toward institutions, making them a critical testbed for evaluating the social fidelity of LLMs. LLMs are increasingly used as proxies for studying human behavior, yet little is known about whether they reproduce higher-order psychological constructs such as a conspiratorial mindset. To bridge this research gap, we administer validated psychometric surveys measuring conspiracy mindset to multiple models under different prompting and conditioning strategies. Our findings reveal that LLMs show partial agreement with elements of conspiracy belief, and conditioning with socio-demographic attributes produces uneven effects, exposing latent demographic biases. Moreover, targeted prompts can easily shift model responses toward conspiratorial directions, underscoring both the susceptibility of LLMs to manipulation and the potential risks of their deployment in sensitive contexts. These results highlight the importance of critically evaluating the psychological dimensions embedded in LLMs, both to advance computational social science and to inform possible mitigation strategies against harmful uses.
SyMuPe: Affective and Controllable Symbolic Music Performance
Borovik, Ilya, Gavrilev, Dmitrii, Viro, Vladimir
Emotions are fundamental to the creation and perception of music performances. However, achieving human-like expression and emotion through machine learning models for performance rendering remains a challenging task. In this work, we present SyMuPe, a novel framework for developing and training affective and controllable symbolic piano performance models. Our flagship model, PianoFlow, uses conditional flow matching trained to solve diverse multi-mask performance inpainting tasks. By design, it supports both unconditional generation and infilling of music performance features. For training, we use a curated, cleaned dataset of 2,968 hours of aligned musical scores and expressive MIDI performances. For text and emotion control, we integrate a piano performance emotion classifier and tune PianoFlow with the emotion-weighted Flan-T5 text embeddings provided as conditional inputs. Objective and subjective evaluations against transformer-based baselines and existing models show that PianoFlow not only outperforms other approaches, but also achieves performance quality comparable to that of human-recorded and transcribed MIDI samples. For emotion control, we present and analyze samples generated under different text conditioning scenarios. The developed model can be integrated into interactive applications, contributing to the creation of more accessible and engaging music performance systems.
Beyond Citations: Measuring Idea-level Knowledge Diffusion from Research to Journalism and Policy-making
Fan, Yangliu, Buehling, Kilian, Stocker, Volker
Despite the importance of social science knowledge for various stakeholders, measuring its diffusion into different domains remains a challenge. This study uses a novel text-based approach to measure the idea-level diffusion of social science knowledge from the research domain to the journalism and policy-making domains. By doing so, we expand the detection of knowledge diffusion beyond the measurements of direct references. Our study focuses on media effects theories as key research ideas in the field of communication science. Using 72,703 documents (2000-2019) from three domains (i.e., research, journalism, and policy-making) that mention these ideas, we count the mentions of these ideas in each domain, estimate their domain-specific contexts, and track and compare differences across domains and over time. Overall, we find that diffusion patterns and dynamics vary considerably between ideas, with some ideas diffusing between other domains, while others do not. Based on the embedding regression approach, we compare contextualized meanings across domains and find that the distances between research and policy are typically larger than between research and journalism. We also find that ideas largely shift roles across domains - from being the theories themselves in research to sense-making in news to applied, administrative use in policy. Over time, we observe semantic convergence mainly for ideas that are practically oriented. Our results characterize the cross-domain diffusion patterns and dynamics of social science knowledge at the idea level, and we discuss the implications for measuring knowledge diffusion beyond citations.
On Improvisation and Open-Endedness: Insights for Experiential AI
Improvisation--the art of spontaneous creation that unfolds moment-to-moment without a scripted outcome--requires practitioners to continuously sense, adapt, and create anew. It is a fundamental mode of human creativity spanning music, dance, and everyday life. The open-ended nature of improvisation produces a stream of novel, unrepeatable moments--an aspect highly valued in artistic creativity. In parallel, open-endedness (OE)--a system's capacity for unbounded novelty and endless "interestingness"--is exemplified in natural or cultural evolution and has been considered "the last grand challenge" in artificial life (ALife). The rise of generative AI now raises the question in computational creativity (CC) research: What makes a "good" improvisation for AI? Can AI learn to improvise in a genuinely open-ended way? In this work-in-progress paper, we report insights from in-depth interviews with 6 experts in improvisation across dance, music, and contact improvisation. We draw systemic connections between human improvisa-tional arts and the design of future experiential AI agents that could improvise alone or alongside humans--or even with other AI agents--embodying qualities of improvisation drawn from practice: active listening (umwelt and awareness), being in the time (mindfulness and ephemerality), embracing the unknown (source of randomness and serendipity), non-judgmental flow (acceptance and dynamical stability, balancing structure and surprise (unpredictable criticality at edge of chaos), imaginative metaphor (synaesthesia and planning), empathy, trust, boundary, and care (mutual theory of mind), and playfulness and intrinsic motivation (maintaining interestingness).
FaStfact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs
Wan, Yingjia, Tan, Haochen, Zhu, Xiao, Zhou, Xinyu, Li, Zhiwei, Lv, Qingsong, Sun, Changxuan, Zeng, Jiaqi, Xu, Yi, Lu, Jianqiao, Liu, Yinhong, Guo, Zhijiang
Evaluating the factuality of long-form generations from Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging due to efficiency bottlenecks and reliability concerns. Prior efforts attempt this by decomposing text into claims, searching for evidence, and verifying claims, but suffer from critical drawbacks: (1) inefficiency due to overcomplicated pipeline components, and (2) ineffectiveness stemming from inaccurate claim sets and insufficient evidence. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{FaStfact}, an evaluation framework that achieves the highest alignment with human evaluation and time/token efficiency among existing baselines. FaStfact first employs chunk-level claim extraction integrated with confidence-based pre-verification, significantly reducing the time and token cost while ensuring reliability. For searching and verification, it collects document-level evidence from crawled web-pages and selectively retrieves it during verification. Extensive experiments based on an annotated benchmark \textbf{FaStfact-Bench} demonstrate the reliability of FaStfact in both efficiently and effectively evaluating long-form factuality. Code, benchmark data, and annotation interface tool are available at https://github.com/Yingjia-Wan/FaStfact.
Live Music Models
Lyria Team, null, Caillon, Antoine, McWilliams, Brian, Tarakajian, Cassie, Simon, Ian, Manco, Ilaria, Engel, Jesse, Constant, Noah, Li, Yunpeng, Denk, Timo I., Lalama, Alberto, Agostinelli, Andrea, Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna, Manilow, Ethan, Brower, George, Erdogan, Hakan, Lei, Heidi, Rolnick, Itai, Grishchenko, Ivan, Orsini, Manu, Kastelic, Matej, Zuluaga, Mauricio, Verzetti, Mauro, Dooley, Michael, Skopek, Ondrej, Ferrer, Rafael, Petridis, Savvas, Borsos, Zalán, Oord, Äaron van den, Eck, Douglas, Collins, Eli, Baldridge, Jason, Hume, Tom, Donahue, Chris, Han, Kehang, Roberts, Adam
We introduce a new class of generative models for music called live music models that produce a continuous stream of music in real-time with synchronized user control. We release Magenta RealTime, an open-weights live music model that can be steered using text or audio prompts to control acoustic style. On automatic metrics of music quality, Magenta RealTime outperforms other open-weights music generation models, despite using fewer parameters and offering first-of-its-kind live generation capabilities. We also release Lyria RealTime, an API-based model with extended controls, offering access to our most powerful model with wide prompt coverage. These models demonstrate a new paradigm for AI-assisted music creation that emphasizes human-in-the-loop interaction for live music performance.
Dense SAE Latents Are Features, Not Bugs
Sun, Xiaoqing, Stolfo, Alessandro, Engels, Joshua, Wu, Ben, Rajamanoharan, Senthooran, Sachan, Mrinmaya, Tegmark, Max
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are designed to extract interpretable features from language models by enforcing a sparsity constraint. Ideally, training an SAE would yield latents that are both sparse and semantically meaningful. However, many SAE latents activate frequently (i.e., are \emph{dense}), raising concerns that they may be undesirable artifacts of the training procedure. In this work, we systematically investigate the geometry, function, and origin of dense latents and show that they are not only persistent but often reflect meaningful model representations. We first demonstrate that dense latents tend to form antipodal pairs that reconstruct specific directions in the residual stream, and that ablating their subspace suppresses the emergence of new dense features in retrained SAEs -- suggesting that high density features are an intrinsic property of the residual space. We then introduce a taxonomy of dense latents, identifying classes tied to position tracking, context binding, entropy regulation, letter-specific output signals, part-of-speech, and principal component reconstruction. Finally, we analyze how these features evolve across layers, revealing a shift from structural features in early layers, to semantic features in mid layers, and finally to output-oriented signals in the last layers of the model. Our findings indicate that dense latents serve functional roles in language model computation and should not be dismissed as training noise.
Astronauts stranded in space over fears return capsule suffered damage from an unknown object
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