Group recommendation over social media streams has attracted significant attention due to its wide applications in domains such as e-commerce, entertainment, and online news broadcasting. By leveraging social connections and group behaviours, group recommendation (GR) aims to provide more accurate and engaging content to a set of users rather than individuals. Recently, influence-aware GR has emerged as a promising direction, as it considers the impact of social influence on group decision-making. In earlier work, we proposed Influence-aware Group Recommendation (IGR) to solve this task. However, this task remains challenging due to three key factors: the large and ever-growing scale of social graphs, the inherently dynamic nature of influence propagation within user groups, and the high computational overhead of real-time group-item matching. To tackle these issues, we propose an Enhanced Influence-aware Group Recommendation (EIGR) framework. First, we introduce a Graph Extraction-based Sampling (GES) strategy to minimise redundancy across multiple temporal social graphs and effectively capture the evolving dynamics of both groups and items. Second, we design a novel DYnamic Independent Cascade (DYIC) model to predict how influence propagates over time across social items and user groups. Finally, we develop a two-level hash-based User Group Index (UG-Index) to efficiently organise user groups and enable real-time recommendation generation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework, EIGR, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency.

In this study we introduce a novel energy functional for long-sequence memory, building upon the framework of dense Hopfield networks which achieves exponential storage capacity through higher-order interactions. Building upon earlier work on long-sequence Hopfield memory models, we propose a temporal kernal $K(m, k)$ to incorporate temporal dependencies, enabling efficient sequential retrieval of patterns over extended sequences. We demonstrate the successful application of this technique for the storage and sequential retrieval of movies frames which are well suited for this because of the high dimensional vectors that make up each frame creating enough variation between even sequential frames in the high dimensional space. The technique has applications in modern transformer architectures, including efficient long-sequence modeling, memory augmentation, improved attention with temporal bias, and enhanced handling of long-term dependencies in time-series data. Our model offers a promising approach to address the limitations of transformers in long-context tasks, with potential implications for natural language processing, forecasting, and beyond.

There is justifiable interest in leveraging conversational AI (CAI) for health across the majority world, but to be effective, CAI must respond appropriately within cultur ally and linguistically diverse context s . Therefore, we need ways to address the fact that current LLMs exclude many lived experience s globally . Various advances are underway which focus on top - down approaches and increas ing training data . In this paper, we aim to complement these with a bottom - up locally - grounded approach based on qualitative data collected during participatory workshops in Latin America. Our goal is to construct a rich and human - centred understanding o f: a) potential areas of cultural misalignment in digital health; b) regional perspectives on chatbots for health and c) strategies for creating culturally - appropriate CAI; with a focus on the understudied Latin American context . Our findings show that academic boundaries on notions of cultur e lose meaning at the ground level and technologies will need to engage with a broad er framework; one that encapsulates the way economics, politics, geogr aphy and local logistics are entangled in cultural experience. To this end, we introduce a framework for ' Pluriversal Conversational AI for H ealth ' which allows for the possibility that more relationality and tolerance, rather than just more data, may be called for .

Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) have transformed the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling parameter-efficient updates. However, their widespread adoption remains limited by the reliance on GPU-based training. In this work, we propose a theoretically grounded approach to LoRA fine-tuning designed specifically for users with limited computational resources, particularly those restricted to standard laptop CPUs. Our method learns a meta-operator that maps any input dataset, represented as a probability distribution, to a set of LoRA weights by leveraging a large bank of pre-trained adapters for the Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 model. Instead of performing new gradient-based updates, our pipeline constructs adapters via lightweight combinations of existing LoRAs directly on CPU. While the resulting adapters do not match the performance of GPU-trained counterparts, they consistently outperform the base Mistral model on downstream tasks, offering a practical and accessible alternative to traditional GPU-based fine-tuning.

This study presents an exploratory evaluation of Music Generation Systems (MGS) within contemporary music production workflows by examining eight open-source systems. The evaluation framework combines technical insights with practical experimentation through criteria specifically designed to investigate the practical and creative affordances of the systems within the iterative, non-linear nature of music production. Employing a single-evaluator methodology as a preliminary phase, this research adopts a mixed approach utilizing qualitative methods to form hypotheses subsequently assessed through quantitative metrics. The selected systems represent architectural diversity across both symbolic and audio-based music generation approaches, spanning composition, arrangement, and sound design tasks. The investigation addresses limitations of current MGS in music production, challenges and opportunities for workflow integration, and development potential as collaborative tools while maintaining artistic authenticity. Findings reveal these systems function primarily as complementary tools enhancing rather than replacing human expertise. They exhibit limitations in maintaining thematic and structural coherence that emphasize the indispensable role of human creativity in tasks demanding emotional depth and complex decision-making. This study contributes a structured evaluation framework that considers the iterative nature of music creation. It identifies methodological refinements necessary for subsequent comprehensive evaluations and determines viable areas for AI integration as collaborative tools in creative workflows. The research provides empirically-grounded insights to guide future development in the field.

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. men's national team is vying for the coveted CONCACAF Gold Cup winners trophy. But, as the USMNT prepared for Wednesday's semifinal match against Guatemala, a flying object caused a disruption at the team's training grounds. An unidentified party was believed to have been operating what appeared to be a drone in the vicinity of the team's training facility in St. Louis, CBS Sports reported.

Google DeepMind has introduced a powerful on-device version of its Gemini Robotics AI. This new system allows robots to complete complex tasks without relying on a cloud connection. Known as Gemini Robotics On-Device, the model brings Gemini's advanced reasoning and control capabilities directly into physical robots. It is designed for fast, reliable performance in places with poor or no internet connectivity, making it ideal for real-world, latency-sensitive environments. Unlike its cloud-connected predecessor, this version runs entirely on the robot itself.

When we think about what makes an audiobook memorable, it's always the most human moments: a catch in the throat when tears are near, or words spoken through a real smile. A Melbourne actor and audiobook narrator, Annabelle Tudor, says it's the instinct we have as storytellers that makes narration such a primal, and precious, skill. "The voice betrays how we're feeling really easily," she says. But as an art form it may be under threat. In May the Amazon-owned audiobook provider Audible announced it would allow authors and publishers to choose from more than 100 voices created by artificial intelligence to narrate audiobooks in English, Spanish, French and Italian, with AI translation of audiobooks expected to be available later in the year – news that was met with criticism and curiosity across the publishing industry.

Developing a single foundation model with the capability to excel across diverse tasks has been a long-standing objective in the field of artificial intelligence. As the wave of general-purpose foundation models sweeps across various domains, their influence has significantly extended to the field of recommendation systems. While recent efforts have explored recommendation foundation models for various generative tasks, they often overlook crucial embedding tasks and struggle with the complexities of multi-task learning, including knowledge sharing & conflict resolution, and convergence speed inconsistencies. To address these limitations, we introduce RecFound, a generative representational learning framework for recommendation foundation models. We construct the first comprehensive dataset for recommendation foundation models covering both generative and embedding tasks across diverse scenarios. Based on this dataset, we propose a novel multi-task training scheme featuring a Task-wise Mixture of Low-rank Experts (TMoLE) to handle knowledge sharing & conflict, a Step-wise Convergence-oriented Sample Scheduler (S2Sched) to address inconsistent convergence, and a Model Merge module to balance the performance across tasks. Experiments demonstrate that RecFound achieves state-of-the-art performance across various recommendation tasks, outperforming existing baselines.

We introduce Nirantar, a comprehensive framework for evaluating continual learning (CL) in multilingual and multi-domain ASR. Designed to reflect real-world CL challenges, Nirantar leverages data collected incrementally across 22 languages and 208 districts in India through natural episodes. This enables evaluation across Language-Incremental (LIL), Domain-Incremental (DIL), and the novel Language-Incremental Domain-Incremental Learning (LIDIL) scenarios. Unlike prior work that relies on simulated episodes, Nirantar presents dynamic, non-uniform language and domain shifts, making it an ideal testbed for CL research. With 3250 hours of human-transcribed speech, including 1720 hours newly introduced in this work, our framework enables systematic benchmarking of CL methods. We evaluate existing approaches and demonstrate that no single method performs consistently well, underscoring the need for more robust CL strategies.