Media
Taylor Sheridan's Newest Hit Is the Perfect Show for Our Times
Taylor Sheridan, the most overextended man in television, has done it again. Landman, according to the internal metrics at Paramount, is the most watched original show the streamer has ever had. Remember, Yellowstone proper is on Peacock.) The West Texas–set story, which stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, an all-purpose problem solver for a fictional oil company owned by Monty Miller (Jon Hamm), has also developed a bit more of a critical halo than Sheridan's other TV ventures, popping up on best-of-2024 lists, edging into mainstream discourse via podcasts that typically cover more-prestige fare, and retaining a score of 80 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And the week before Landman wrapped up, this past Sunday night, its lead actor, Billy Bob Thornton, attended the Golden Globes as a nominee for his role in the series.
Los Angeles couple's harrowing escape as Eaton Fire approached their home caught on video doorbell
Jeffrey and Cheryll Ku shared a video recorded on their Ring doorbell showing the terrifying moment the Eaton Fire approached their home. Altadena residents Jeffrey and Cheryll Ku shared harrowing footage of their Jan. The Kus are among Los Angeles residents forced to flee from the wildfires that tore through the city. On social media, the Kus described the experience as "34 minutes of pure terror." "The Eaton fire had just started in the hillside above us and we had to act FAST," Jeffrey Ku wrote in an Instagram post.
British novelists criticise government over AI 'theft'
Kate Mosse and Richard Osman have hit back at Labour's plan to give artificial intelligence companies broad freedoms to mine artistic works for data, saying it could destroy growth in creative fields and amount to theft. It is seen as a way of supercharging the growth of AI companies in the UK. Last month Paul McCartney warned that AI "could just take over", and Kate Bush joined Stephen Fry and Hugh Bonneville in signing a petition warning that the "unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted". Mosse told the Guardian: "Using AI responsibly and well and being a world leader – all of this I agree with. It just cannot be at the expense of the creative industries … It is supporting one type of growth and destroying another part of growth. And it cannot be on the basis of theft of our work."
House DOGE Caucus eyes federal employees, government regulations in new goal-setting memo
Fox News' senior national correspondent William La Jeunesse joins'America's Newsroom' to discuss Congress' history of killing pushes for cost-cutting. FIRST ON FOX: The Congressional Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus is holding its second-ever meeting on Wednesday, where its leaders are expected to unveil a set of "principles" to guide the group in its mission to cut government waste. They outlined eight goals, some practical while others more symbolic, in a bid to ensure the caucus is in sync with the DOGE advisory panel set up by President-elect Donald Trump. "The federal government must serve the interests of taxpayers, and taxpayers are best served by a lean, efficient, transparent, and accountable bureaucracy," the first principle read, according to a draft memo obtained by Fox News Digital. The document also suggested both lofty and smaller-scale goals.
How to use AI to make you look younger - as Tom Hanks defends using the technology in his latest film
From a daily skincare routine to Botox and face lifts, some people will do almost anything to turn back the hands of time. Now, some actors are going one step further and using a controversial technology to digitally'de-age' their appearance. In his latest film, Tom Hanks, 68, and his Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, 58, use AI to play the same couple at different stages in their lives. Hanks says: 'It's a great tool, because the super computing means you do not have to wait for post-production to do the purely technical visual view of it.' There has been growing concern over the use of AI in cinema, with many actors worrying that the technology will force humans out of the film industry.
Google investigated by UK watchdog over search dominance
Google is being investigated by the UK competition watchdog over the impact of its search and advertising practices on consumers, news publishers, businesses and rival search engines. The CMA estimates that search advertising costs the equivalent of nearly 500 for each UK household a year, which could be kept down with effective competition. The watchdog announced on Tuesday it will investigate if Google is blocking competitors from entering the market, and whether it is engaging in "potential exploitative conduct" by the mass collection of consumers' data without informed consent. It will also investigate whether Google is using its position as the pre-eminent search engine to give an unfair advantage to its own shopping and travel services. The investigation will take up to nine months and could result in Google being forced to share the mountains of data it collects with other businesses, or to give publishers greater control over how their content – books, newspaper articles and music – is used, including by Google's fast-growing artificial intelligence systems.
EditGAN: High-Precision Semantic Image Editing
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have recently found applications in image editing. However, most GAN-based image editing methods often require large-scale datasets with semantic segmentation annotations for training, only provide high-level control, or merely interpolate between different images. Here, we propose EditGAN, a novel method for high-quality, high-precision semantic image editing, allowing users to edit images by modifying their highly detailed part segmentation masks, e.g., drawing a new mask for the headlight of a car. EditGAN builds on a GAN framework that jointly models images and their semantic segmentation, requiring only a handful of labeled examples – making it a scalable tool for editing. Specifically, we embed an image into the GAN's latent space and perform conditional latent code optimization according to the segmentation edit, which effectively also modifies the image.
HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them
Ravichander, Abhilasha, Ghela, Shrusti, Wadden, David, Choi, Yejin
Despite their impressive ability to generate high-quality and fluent text, generative large language models (LLMs) also produce hallucinations: statements that are misaligned with established world knowledge or provided input context. However, measuring hallucination can be challenging, as having humans verify model generations on-the-fly is both expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we release HALoGEN, a comprehensive hallucination benchmark consisting of: (1) 10,923 prompts for generative models spanning nine domains including programming, scientific attribution, and summarization, and (2) automatic high-precision verifiers for each use case that decompose LLM generations into atomic units, and verify each unit against a high-quality knowledge source. We use this framework to evaluate ~150,000 generations from 14 language models, finding that even the best-performing models are riddled with hallucinations (sometimes up to 86% of generated atomic facts depending on the domain). We further define a novel error classification for LLM hallucinations based on whether they likely stem from incorrect recollection of training data (Type A errors), or incorrect knowledge in training data (Type B errors), or are fabrication (Type C errors). We hope our framework provides a foundation to enable the principled study of why generative models hallucinate, and advances the development of trustworthy large language models.
Tarsier2: Advancing Large Vision-Language Models from Detailed Video Description to Comprehensive Video Understanding
Yuan, Liping, Wang, Jiawei, Sun, Haomiao, Zhang, Yuchen, Lin, Yuan
We introduce Tarsier2, a state-of-the-art large vision-language model (LVLM) designed for generating detailed and accurate video descriptions, while also exhibiting superior general video understanding capabilities. Tarsier2 achieves significant advancements through three key upgrades: (1) Scaling pre-training data from 11M to 40M video-text pairs, enriching both volume and diversity; (2) Performing fine-grained temporal alignment during supervised fine-tuning; (3) Using model-based sampling to automatically construct preference data and applying DPO training for optimization. Extensive experiments show that Tarsier2-7B consistently outperforms leading proprietary models, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, in detailed video description tasks. On the DREAM-1K benchmark, Tarsier2-7B improves F1 by 2.8\% over GPT-4o and 5.8\% over Gemini-1.5-Pro. In human side-by-side evaluations, Tarsier2-7B shows a +8.6\% performance advantage over GPT-4o and +24.9\% over Gemini-1.5-Pro. Tarsier2-7B also sets new state-of-the-art results across 15 public benchmarks, spanning tasks such as video question-answering, video grounding, hallucination test, and embodied question-answering, demonstrating its versatility as a robust generalist vision-language model.
MiniRAG: Towards Extremely Simple Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Fan, Tianyu, Wang, Jingyuan, Ren, Xubin, Huang, Chao
In on-device Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, the limitations of device computational capabilities and data privacy restrict the use of powerful models, such as large language models and advanced text embedding models, necessitating reliance on smaller alternatives. Consequently, currently used pipelines heavily rely on LLMs for a comprehensive understanding of text semantics when computing embedding similarity for retrieval, facing significant challenges. These smaller models often struggle to capture the precise semantic nuances within lengthy texts, complicating accurate matching. To tackle these challenges, it is essential to: i) Reduce the complexity of input content for generation, ensuring that semantic information is clear and concise; ii) Shorten the length of input content for smaller language models, facilitating improved comprehension and retrieval accuracy. Additionally, employing effective graph indexing structures can help mitigate performance deficiencies in semantic matching, thereby enhancing the overall retrieval process. In MiniRAG, we propose a Graph-based Knowledge Retrieval mechanism that effectively leverages the semantic-aware heterogeneous graph G constructed during the indexing phase, in conjunction with lightweight text embeddings, to achieve efficient knowledge retrieval. By employing a graph-based search design, we aim to ease the burden on precise semantic matching with large language models. This approach facilitates the acquisition of rich and accurate textual content at a low computational cost, thereby enhancing the ability of language models to generate precise responses.