The rise of misinformation underscores the need for scalable and reliable fact-checking solutions. Large language models (LLMs) hold promise in automating fact verification, yet their effectiveness across global contexts remains uncertain. We systematically evaluate nine established LLMs across multiple categories (open/closed-source, multiple sizes, diverse architectures, reasoning-based) using 5,000 claims previously assessed by 174 professional fact-checking organizations across 47 languages. Our methodology tests model generalizability on claims postdating training cutoffs and four prompting strategies mirroring both citizen and professional fact-checker interactions, with over 240,000 human annotations as ground truth. Findings reveal a concerning pattern resembling the Dunning-Kruger effect: smaller, accessible models show high confidence despite lower accuracy, while larger models demonstrate higher accuracy but lower confidence. This risks systemic bias in information verification, as resource-constrained organizations typically use smaller models. Performance gaps are most pronounced for non-English languages and claims originating from the Global South, threatening to widen existing information inequalities. These results establish a multilingual benchmark for future research and provide an evidence base for policy aimed at ensuring equitable access to trustworthy, AI-assisted fact-checking.

We propose Delta Velocity Rectified Flow (DVRF), a novel inversion-free, path-aware editing framework within rectified flow models for text-to-image editing. DVRF is a distillation-based method that explicitly models the discrepancy between the source and target velocity fields in order to mitigate over-smoothing artifacts rampant in prior distillation sampling approaches. We further introduce a time-dependent shift term to push noisy latents closer to the target trajectory, enhancing the alignment with the target distribution. We theoretically demonstrate that when this shift is disabled, DVRF reduces to Delta Denoising Score, thereby bridging score-based diffusion optimization and velocity-based rectified-flow optimization. Moreover, when the shift term follows a linear schedule under rectified-flow dynamics, DVRF generalizes the Inversion-free method FlowEdit and provides a principled theoretical interpretation for it. Experimental results indicate that DVRF achieves superior editing quality, fidelity, and controllability while requiring no architectural modifications, making it efficient and broadly applicable to text-to-image editing tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/DeltaVelocityRectifiedFlow.

Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable success across diverse applications but remain susceptible to spurious, concept-driven correlations that impair robustness and fairness. In this work, we introduce CURE, a novel and lightweight framework that systematically disentangles and suppresses conceptual shortcuts while preserving essential content information. Our method first extracts concept-irrelevant representations via a dedicated content extractor reinforced by a reversal network, ensuring minimal loss of task-relevant information. A subsequent controllable debiasing module employs contrastive learning to finely adjust the influence of residual conceptual cues, enabling the model to either diminish harmful biases or harness beneficial correlations as appropriate for the target task. Evaluated on the IMDB and Yelp datasets using three pre-trained architectures, CURE achieves an absolute improvement of +10 points in F1 score on IMDB and +2 points on Yelp, while introducing minimal computational overhead. Our approach establishes a flexible, unsupervised blueprint for combating conceptual biases, paving the way for more reliable and fair language understanding systems.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex tasks but faces two key limitations: a lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and lower reasoning performance from natural language prompts compared with code prompts. To address these issues, we propose CoT-RAG, a novel reasoning framework with three key designs: (i) Knowledge Graph-driven CoT Generation, featuring knowledge graphs to modulate reasoning chain generation of LLMs, thereby enhancing reasoning credibility; (ii) Learnable Knowledge Case-aware RAG, which incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) into knowledge graphs to retrieve relevant sub-cases and sub-descriptions, providing LLMs with learnable information; (iii) Pseudo Program Prompting Execution, which promotes greater logical rigor by guiding LLMs to execute reasoning tasks as pseudo-programs. Evaluations on nine public datasets spanning three reasoning tasks reveal significant accuracy gains-ranging from 4.0% to 44.3%-over state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, tests on four domain-specific datasets demonstrate exceptional accuracy and efficient execution, underscoring its practical applicability and scalability. Our code and data are available at https: //github.com/hustlfy123/CoT-RAG.

RELATED WORKS Hand-Eye Calibration: Hand-eye calibration is a well-established problem in robotics that aims to estimate the relative pose between a camera and a robot's end-effector. It is typically addressed by capturing a series of images of a known calibration pattern (e.g., a checkerboard) using a camera rigidly mounted on the robot hand, and using both the images and the corresponding robot poses to compute the camera's extrinsic parameters. Different mathematical formulations exist for solving hand-eye calibration; a widely adopted approach involves solving the equation AX = XB, where X is the unknown rigid transformation describing the pose of the camera with respect to the robot, while A and B denote the relative motions of the end-effector (from robot kinematics) and the camera (from pattern observations), respectively [31], [36]-[38]. Several other approaches were proposed: Shah [39] formulated a closed-form solution for the hand-eye problem by using an algorithm based on Singular V alue Decomposition (SVD) and the Kronecker product to solve for rotation and translation separately, while Li et al. [40] used dual quaternions to solve them simultaneously overcoming the limitations of the Kronecker product. Wang et al. [23] extended hand-eye calibration to multi-camera setups by incorporating a common reference frame but required an external motion capture system, limiting its applicability to small setups. Andreff and Heller [41], [42] proposed two similar hand-eye calibration methods that leverage the Structure-from-Motion (SfM) paradigm to estimate camera motion and introduce a formulation for hand-eye calibration that includes a factor to metrically scale camera poses.

The multimodal nature of music performance has driven increasing interest in data beyond the audio domain within the music information retrieval (MIR) community. This paper introduces PianoVAM, a comprehensive piano performance dataset that includes videos, audio, MIDI, hand landmarks, fingering labels, and rich metadata. The dataset was recorded using a Disklavier piano, capturing audio and MIDI from amateur pianists during their daily practice sessions, alongside synchronized top-view videos in realistic and varied performance conditions. Hand landmarks and fingering labels were extracted using a pretrained hand pose estimation model and a semi-automated fingering annotation algorithm. We discuss the challenges encountered during data collection and the alignment process across different modalities. Additionally, we describe our fingering annotation method based on hand landmarks extracted from videos. Finally, we present benchmarking results for both audio-only and audio-visual piano transcription using the PianoVAM dataset and discuss additional potential applications.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged as a critical tool for interpreting the predictions of complex deep learning models. While XAI has been increasingly applied in various domains within acoustics, its use in bioacoustics, which involves analyzing audio signals from living organisms, remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the vocalizations of a bird species with strong geographic variation throughout its range in North America. Audio recordings were converted into spectrogram images and used to train a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for classification, achieving an accuracy of 94.8\%. To interpret the model's predictions, we applied both model-agnostic (LIME, SHAP) and model-specific (DeepLIFT, Grad-CAM) XAI techniques. These techniques produced different but complementary explanations, and when their explanations were considered together, they provided more complete and interpretable insights into the model's decision-making. This work highlights the importance of using a combination of XAI techniques to improve trust and interoperability, not only in broader acoustics signal analysis but also argues for broader applicability in different domain specific tasks.

As humans delegate more tasks and decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), we risk losing control of our individual and collective futures. Relatively simple algorithmic systems already steer human decision-making, such as social media feed algorithms that lead people to unintentionally and absent-mindedly scroll through engagement-optimized content. In this paper, we develop the idea of human agency by integrating philosophical and scientific theories of agency with AI-assisted evaluation methods: using large language models (LLMs) to simulate and validate user queries and to evaluate AI responses. We develop HumanAgencyBench (HAB), a scalable and adaptive benchmark with six dimensions of human agency based on typical AI use cases. HAB measures the tendency of an AI assistant or agent to Ask Clarifying Questions, Avoid Value Manipulation, Correct Misinformation, Defer Important Decisions, Encourage Learning, and Maintain Social Boundaries. We find low-to-moderate agency support in contemporary LLM-based assistants and substantial variation across system developers and dimensions. For example, while Anthropic LLMs most support human agency overall, they are the least supportive LLMs in terms of Avoid Value Manipulation. Agency support does not appear to consistently result from increasing LLM capabilities or instruction-following behavior (e.g., RLHF), and we encourage a shift towards more robust safety and alignment targets.

Despite its significance, the underwater world remains largely overlooked as a result of the challenging conditions that hinder traditional research methods. Historically, the study of marine ecosystems relied on labor intensive research [1], which provided limited data and had a high error margin. In recent years, advances in autonomous and remotely operated vehicles (AUVs and ROVs) have revolutionized underwater exploration. These technologies, equipped with object detection systems, now allow real-time monitoring, which includes capturing images of marine organisms, environmental conditions, and even assessing biodiversity [2], [3]. However, the quality of images and videos captured underwater remains a significant obstacle. Light absorption, scattering, and water-related distortions, such as haze and color shifts [4], create noisy low-contrast images, further compounded by complex underwater backgrounds and camera motion. These challenges call for advanced detection techniques capable of accurately identifying and localizing objects despite underwater noise. Efficient underwater object detection (UOD) is crucial for a variety of marine applications, including biodiversity monitoring, conservation efforts, and resource management.

Audio and music generation systems have been remarkably developed in the music information retrieval (MIR) research field. The advancement of these technologies raises copyright concerns, as ownership and authorship of AI-generated music (AIGM) remain unclear. Also, it can be difficult to determine whether a piece was generated by AI or composed by humans clearly. To address these challenges, we aim to improve the accuracy of AIGM detection by analyzing the structural patterns of music segments. Specifically, to extract musical features from short audio clips, we integrated various pre-trained models, including self-supervised learning (SSL) models or an audio effect encoder, each within our suggested transformer-based framework. Furthermore, for long audio, we developed a segment transformer that divides music into segments and learns inter-segment relationships. We used the FakeMusicCaps and SONICS datasets, achieving high accuracy in both the short-audio and full-audio detection experiments. These findings suggest that integrating segment-level musical features into long-range temporal analysis can effectively enhance both the performance and robustness of AIGM detection systems.