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When Autonomy Breaks: The Hidden Existential Risk of AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI risks are typically framed around physical threats to humanity, a loss of control or an accidental error causing humanity's extinction. However, I argue in line with the gradual disempowerment thesis, that there is an underappreciated risk in the slow and irrevocable decline of human autonomy. As AI starts to outcompete humans in various areas of life, a tipping point will be reached where it no longer makes sense to rely on human decision-making, creativity, social care or even leadership. What may follow is a process of gradual de-skilling, where we lose skills that we currently take for granted. Traditionally, it is argued that AI will gain human skills over time, and that these skills are innate and immutable in humans. By contrast, I argue that humans may lose such skills as critical thinking, decision-making and even social care in an AGI world. The biggest threat to humanity is therefore not that machines will become more like humans, but that humans will become more like machines.


MNT-TNN: Spatiotemporal Traffic Data Imputation via Compact Multimode Nonlinear Transform-based Tensor Nuclear Norm

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Imputation of random or non-random missing data is a long-standing research topic and a crucial application for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). However, with the advent of modern communication technologies such as Global Satellite Navigation Systems (GNSS), traffic data collection has outpaced traditional methods, introducing new challenges in random missing value imputation and increasing demands for spatiotemporal dependency modelings. To address these issues, we propose a novel spatiotemporal traffic imputation method, Multimode Nonlinear Transformed Tensor Nuclear Norm (MNT-TNN), grounded in the Transform-based Tensor Nuclear Norm (TTNN) optimization framework which exhibits efficient mathematical representations and theoretical guarantees for the recovery of random missing values. Specifically, we strictly extend the single-mode transform in TTNN to a multimode transform with nonlinear activation, effectively capturing the intrinsic multimode spatiotemporal correlations and low-rankness of the traffic tensor, represented as location $\times$ location $\times$ time. To solve the nonconvex optimization problem, we design a proximal alternating minimization (PAM) algorithm with theoretical convergence guarantees. We suggest an Augmented Transform-based Tensor Nuclear Norm Families (ATTNNs) framework to enhance the imputation results of TTNN techniques, especially at very high miss rates. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that our proposed MNT-TNN and ATTNNs can outperform the compared state-of-the-art imputation methods, completing the benchmark of random missing traffic value imputation.


DATAWEAVER: Authoring Data-Driven Narratives through the Integrated Composition of Visualization and Text

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data-driven storytelling has gained prominence in journalism and other data reporting fields. However, the process of creating these stories remains challenging, often requiring the integration of effective visualizations with compelling narratives to form a cohesive, interactive presentation. To help streamline this process, we present an integrated authoring framework and system, DataWeaver, that supports both visualization-to-text and text-to-visualization composition. DataWeaver enables users to create data narratives anchored to data facts derived from "call-out" interactions, i.e., user-initiated highlights of visualization elements that prompt relevant narrative content. In addition to this "vis-to-text" composition, DataWeaver also supports a "text-initiated" approach, generating relevant interactive visualizations from existing narratives. Key findings from an evaluation with 13 participants highlighted the utility and usability of DataWeaver and the effectiveness of its integrated authoring framework. The evaluation also revealed opportunities to enhance the framework by refining filtering mechanisms and visualization recommendations and better support authoring creativity by introducing advanced customization options.


Historical Ink: Exploring Large Language Models for Irony Detection in 19th-Century Spanish

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This study explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to enhance datasets and improve irony detection in 19th-century Latin American newspapers. Two strategies were employed to evaluate the efficacy of BERT and GPT-4o models in capturing the subtle nuances nature of irony, through both multi-class and binary classification tasks. First, we implemented dataset enhancements focused on enriching emotional and contextual cues; however, these showed limited impact on historical language analysis. The second strategy, a semi-automated annotation process, effectively addressed class imbalance and augmented the dataset with high-quality annotations. Despite the challenges posed by the complexity of irony, this work contributes to the advancement of sentiment analysis through two key contributions: introducing a new historical Spanish dataset tagged for sentiment analysis and irony detection, and proposing a semi-automated annotation methodology where human expertise is crucial for refining LLMs results, enriched by incorporating historical and cultural contexts as core features.


AnnoPage Dataset: Dataset of Non-Textual Elements in Documents with Fine-Grained Categorization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce the AnnoPage Dataset, a novel collection of 7 550 pages from historical documents, primarily in Czech and German, spanning from 1485 to the present, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The dataset is designed to support research in document layout analysis and object detection. Each page is annotated with axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) representing elements of 25 categories of non-textual elements, such as images, maps, decorative elements, or charts, following the Czech Methodology of image document processing. The annotations were created by expert librarians to ensure accuracy and consistency. The dataset also incorporates pages from multiple, mainly historical, document datasets to enhance variability and maintain continuity. The dataset is divided into development and test subsets, with the test set carefully selected to maintain the category distribution. We provide baseline results using YOLO and DETR object detectors, offering a reference point for future research.


A Self-Supervised Learning of a Foundation Model for Analog Layout Design Automation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose a UNet-based foundation model and its self-supervised learning method to address two key challenges: 1) lack of qualified annotated analog layout data, and 2) excessive variety in analog layout design tasks. For self-supervised learning, we propose random patch sampling and random masking techniques automatically to obtain enough training data from a small unannotated layout dataset. The obtained data are greatly augmented, less biased, equally sized, and contain enough information for excessive varieties of qualified layout patterns. By pre-training with the obtained data, the proposed foundation model can learn implicit general knowledge on layout patterns so that it can be fine-tuned for various downstream layout tasks with small task-specific datasets. Fine-tuning provides an efficient and consolidated methodology for diverse downstream tasks, reducing the enormous human effort to develop a model per task separately. In experiments, the foundation model was pre-trained using 324,000 samples obtained from 6 silicon-proved manually designed analog circuits, then it was fine-tuned for the five example downstream tasks: generating contacts, vias, dummy fingers, N-wells, and metal routings. The fine-tuned models successfully performed these tasks for more than one thousand unseen layout inputs, generating DRC/LVS-clean layouts for 96.6% of samples. Compared with training the model from scratch for the metal routing task, fine-tuning required only 1/8 of the data to achieve the same dice score of 0.95. With the same data, fine-tuning achieved a 90% lower validation loss and a 40% higher benchmark score than training from scratch.


LOCATEdit: Graph Laplacian Optimized Cross Attention for Localized Text-Guided Image Editing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

T ext-guided image editing aims to modify specific regions of an image according to natural language instructions while maintaining the general structure and the background fidelity. Existing methods utilize masks derived from cross-attention maps generated from diffusion models to identify the target regions for modification. However, since cross-attention mechanisms focus on semantic relevance, they struggle to maintain the image integrity. As a result, these methods often lack spatial consistency, leading to editing artifacts and distortions. In this work, we address these limitations and introduce LOCATEdit, which enhances cross-attention maps through a graph-based approach utilizing self-attention-derived patch relationships to maintain smooth, coherent attention across image regions, ensuring that alterations are limited to the designated items while retaining the surrounding structure. LOCATEdit consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines on PIE-Bench, demonstrating its state-of-the-art performance and effectiveness on various editing tasks.


Fox News 'Antisemitism Exposed' Newsletter: Does 'AI' stand for 'anti-Israel'?

FOX News

UPenn Wharton School Associate Professor Ethan Mollick weighs in on the Biden White House's new guidelines for artificial intelligence in the workplace on'Fox News Live.' Fox News' "Antisemitism Exposed" newsletter brings you stories on the rising anti-Jewish prejudice across the U.S. and the world. IN TODAY'S NEWSLETTER: - ADL issues'urgent call' alleging anti-Israel bias in 4 AI large language models - Georgetown grad student accused of spreading Hamas propaganda - Israeli hostages' families sue Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia organizers as alleged'Hamas' propaganda arm' The ADL's report found that virtually all artifical intelligence tools displayed a built-in bias against Israel and Jews. TOP STORY: A new report from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) shows anti-Jewish and anti-Israel biases among AI large language models. The organization used thousands of AI queries to find "a concerning inability to accurately reject antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories." Additionally, every LLM except GPT showed bias regarding Jewish conspiracy theories and even more bias against Israel than Jews, the ADL said.


MemInsight: Autonomous Memory Augmentation for LLM Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language model (LLM) agents have evolved to intelligently process information, make decisions, and interact with users or tools. A key capability is the integration of long-term memory capabilities, enabling these agents to draw upon historical interactions and knowledge. However, the growing memory size and need for semantic structuring pose significant challenges. In this work, we propose an autonomous memory augmentation approach, MemInsight, to enhance semantic data representation and retrieval mechanisms. By leveraging autonomous augmentation to historical interactions, LLM agents are shown to deliver more accurate and contextualized responses. We empirically validate the efficacy of our proposed approach in three task scenarios; conversational recommendation, question answering and event summarization. On the LLM-REDIAL dataset, MemInsight boosts persuasiveness of recommendations by up to 14%. Moreover, it outperforms a RAG baseline by 34% in recall for LoCoMo retrieval. Our empirical results show the potential of MemInsight to enhance the contextual performance of LLM agents across multiple tasks.


Tune It Up: Music Genre Transfer and Prediction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep generative models have been used in style transfer tasks for images. In this study, we adapt and improve CycleGAN model to perform music style transfer on Jazz and Classic genres. By doing so, we aim to easily generate new songs, cover music to different music genres and reduce the arrangements needed in those processes. We train and use music genre classifier to assess the performance of the transfer models. To that end, we obtain 87.7% accuracy with Multi-layer Perceptron algorithm. To improve our style transfer baseline, we add auxiliary discriminators and triplet loss to our model. According to our experiments, we obtain the best accuracies as 69.4% in Jazz to Classic task and 39.3% in Classic to Jazz task with our developed genre classifier. We also run a subjective experiment and results of it show that the overall performance of our transfer model is good and it manages to conserve melody of inputs on the transferred outputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/ fidansamet/tune-it-up