The Academy said its new language around eligibility for films made using generative AI tools was recommended by its Science and Technology Council. Under further rule changes announced on Monday, Academy members must now watch all nominated films in each category in order to be able to take part in the final round of voting, which decides upon winners. The use of AI in film became a hot topic after Adrian Brody took home the award for Best Actor for his role in The Brutalist at this year's Oscars ceremony in March. The movie used generative AI to improve the actor's accent when he spoke Hungarian. It then emerged similar voice-cloning technology was used to enhance singing voices in the Oscar-winning musical Emilia Perez.

We give new results for problems in computational and statistical machine learning using tools from high-dimensional geometry and probability. We break up our treatment into two parts. In Part I, we focus on computational considerations in optimization. Specifically, we give new algorithms for approximating convex polytopes in a stream, sparsification and robust least squares regression, and dueling optimization. In Part II, we give new statistical guarantees for data science problems. In particular, we formulate a new model in which we analyze statistical properties of backdoor data poisoning attacks, and we study the robustness of graph clustering algorithms to ``helpful'' misspecification.

Learning music theory not only has practical benefits for musicians to write, perform, understand, and express music better, but also for both non-musicians to improve critical thinking, math analytical skills, and music appreciation. However, current external tools applicable for learning music theory through writing when human instruction is unavailable are either limited in feedback, lacking a written modality, or assuming already strong familiarity of music theory concepts. In this paper, we describe Maestoso, an educational tool for novice learners to learn music theory through sketching practice of quizzed music structures. Maestoso first automatically recognizes students' sketched input of quizzed concepts, then relies on existing sketch and gesture recognition techniques to automatically recognize the input, and finally generates instructor-emulated feedback. From our evaluations, we demonstrate that Maestoso performs reasonably well on recognizing music structure elements and that novice students can comfortably grasp introductory music theory in a single session.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to generate answers with citations from source documents containing "ground truth", thereby reducing system hallucinations. A crucial factor in RAG evaluation is "support", whether the information in the cited documents supports the answer. To this end, we conducted a large-scale comparative study of 45 participant submissions on 36 topics to the TREC 2024 RAG Track, comparing an automatic LLM judge (GPT-4o) against human judges for support assessment. We considered two conditions: (1) fully manual assessments from scratch and (2) manual assessments with post-editing of LLM predictions. Our results indicate that for 56% of the manual from-scratch assessments, human and GPT-4o predictions match perfectly (on a three-level scale), increasing to 72% in the manual with post-editing condition. Furthermore, by carefully analyzing the disagreements in an unbiased study, we found that an independent human judge correlates better with GPT-4o than a human judge, suggesting that LLM judges can be a reliable alternative for support assessment. To conclude, we provide a qualitative analysis of human and GPT-4o errors to help guide future iterations of support assessment.

The rapid development of social media has significantly reshaped the dynamics of public opinion, resulting in complex interactions that traditional models fail to effectively capture. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative approach that integrates multi-dimensional Hawkes processes with Graph Neural Network, modeling opinion propagation dynamics among nodes in a social network while considering the intricate hierarchical relationships between comments. The extended multi-dimensional Hawkes process captures the hierarchical structure, multi-dimensional interactions, and mutual influences across different topics, forming a complex propagation network. Moreover, recognizing the lack of high-quality datasets capable of comprehensively capturing the evolution of public opinion dynamics, we introduce a new dataset, VISTA. It includes 159 trending topics, corresponding to 47,207 posts, 327,015 second-level comments, and 29,578 third-level comments, covering diverse domains such as politics, entertainment, sports, health, and medicine. The dataset is annotated with detailed sentiment labels across 11 categories and clearly defined hierarchical relationships. When combined with our method, it offers strong interpretability by linking sentiment propagation to the comment hierarchy and temporal evolution. Our approach provides a robust baseline for future research.

Speaker identification using voice recordings leverages unique acoustic features, but this approach fails when only textual data is available. Few approaches have attempted to tackle the problem of identifying speakers solely from text, and the existing ones have primarily relied on traditional methods. In this work, we explore the use of fuzzy fingerprints from large pre-trained models to improve text-based speaker identification. We integrate speaker-specific tokens and context-aware modeling, demonstrating that conversational context significantly boosts accuracy, reaching 70.6% on the Friends dataset and 67.7% on the Big Bang Theory dataset. Additionally, we show that fuzzy fingerprints can approximate full fine-tuning performance with fewer hidden units, offering improved interpretability. Finally, we analyze ambiguous utterances and propose a mechanism to detect speaker-agnostic lines. Our findings highlight key challenges and provide insights for future improvements in text-based speaker identification.

The performance of OCR has improved with the evolution of AI technology. As OCR continues to broaden its range of applications, the increased likelihood of interference introduced by various usage environments can prevent it from achieving its inherent performance. This results in reduced recognition accuracy under certain conditions, and makes the quality control of recognition devices more challenging. Therefore, to ensure that users can properly utilize OCR, we compiled the real-world external disturbance factors that cause performance degradation, along with the resulting image degradation phenomena, into an external disturbance factor table and, by also indicating how to make use of it, organized them into guidelines.

The rapid spread of misinformation, driven by digital media and AI-generated content, has made automatic claim verification essential. Traditional methods, which depend on expert-annotated evidence, are labor-intensive and not scalable. Although recent automated systems have improved, they still struggle with complex claims that require nuanced reasoning. To address this, we propose CRAVE, a Conflicting Reasoning Approach for explainable claim VErification, that verify the complex claims based on the conflicting rationales reasoned by large language models (LLMs). Specifically, CRAVE introduces a three-module framework. Ambiguity Elimination enchanced Evidence Retrieval module performs ambiguity elimination and entity-based search to gather relevant evidence related to claim verification from external sources like Wikipedia. Conflicting Perspective Reasoning and Preliminary Judgment module with LLMs adopts LLMs to reason rationales with conflicting stances about claim verification from retrieved evidence across four dimensions, i.e., direct evidence, semantic relationships, linguistic patterns, and logical reasoning and make a preliminary judgment. Finally, Small Language Model (SLM) based Judge module is fine-tuned to make use of preliminary judgment from LLMs to assess the confidence of the conflicting rationales and make a final authenticity judgment. This methodology allows CRAVE to capture subtle inconsistencies in complex claims, improving both the accuracy and transparency of claim verification. Extensive experiments on two public claim verification datasets demonstrate that our CRAVE model achieves much better performance than state-of-the-art methods and exhibits a superior capacity for finding relevant evidence and explaining the model predictions. The code is provided at https://github.com/8zym/CRAVE.

While hallucinations of large language models could been alleviated through retrieval-augmented generation and citation generation, how the model utilizes internal knowledge is still opaque, and the trustworthiness of its generated answers remains questionable. In this work, we introduce Context-Prior Augmented Citation Generation task, requiring models to generate citations considering both external and internal knowledge while providing trustworthy references, with 5 evaluation metrics focusing on 3 aspects: answer helpfulness, citation faithfulness, and trustworthiness. We introduce RAEL, the paradigm for our task, and also design INTRALIGN, an integrated method containing customary data generation and an alignment algorithm. Our experimental results show that our method achieves a better cross-scenario performance with regard to other baselines. Our extended experiments further reveal that retrieval quality, question types, and model knowledge have considerable influence on the trustworthiness in citation generation.

In the field of natural language processing (NLP), the capability to infer and reason about causality is increasingly recognized as a critical component of intelligent systems. Despite the recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) (Radford et al., 2019; Devlin et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2022; OpenAI, 2023; Ignat et al., 2024, inter alia), a key question still remains: Can these models understand and reason about causality? This is a critical skill before we can trust AI agents to be integrated into decision-making systems. Moreover, even if LLMs succeed at some extent of reasoning, they still lack transparency of how their decisions are made, forming a strong need for interpretabil-ity (Luo and Specia, 2024; Räuker et al., 2023; Zou et al., 2023). T o bridge the gap, this thesis explores various facets of causal reasoning in LLMs. W e present a series of studies that collectively advance the knowledge of how well these models perform causal reasoning (Part I), how their decisions are made (Part II), how causality among learning variables influences NLP tasks (Part III), and how causality and NLP can together analyze social problems (Part IV). Below we introduce an overview of the four parts and their corresponding chapters.