Recent sparse multi-view scene reconstruction advances like DUSt3R and MASt3R no longer require camera calibration and camera pose estimation. However, they only process a pair of views at a time to infer pixel-aligned pointmaps. When dealing with more than two views, a combinatorial number of error prone pairwise reconstructions are usually followed by an expensive global optimization, which often fails to rectify the pairwise reconstruction errors. To handle more views, reduce errors, and improve inference time, we propose the fast single-stage feed-forward network MV-DUSt3R. At its core are multi-view decoder blocks which exchange information across any number of views while considering one reference view. To make our method robust to reference view selection, we further propose MV-DUSt3R+, which employs cross-reference-view blocks to fuse information across different reference view choices. To further enable novel view synthesis, we extend both by adding and jointly training Gaussian splatting heads. Experiments on multi-view stereo reconstruction, multi-view pose estimation, and novel view synthesis confirm that our methods improve significantly upon prior art. Code will be released.

The rise of "bedroom producers" has democratized music creation, while challenging producers to objectively evaluate their work. To address this, we present AI TrackMate, an LLM-based music chatbot designed to provide constructive feedback on music productions. By combining LLMs' inherent musical knowledge with direct audio track analysis, AI TrackMate offers production-specific insights, distinguishing it from text-only approaches. Our framework integrates a Music Analysis Module, an LLM-Readable Music Report, and Music Production-Oriented Feedback Instruction, creating a plug-and-play, training-free system compatible with various LLMs and adaptable to future advancements. We demonstrate AI TrackMate's capabilities through an interactive web interface and present findings from a pilot study with a music producer. By bridging AI capabilities with the needs of independent producers, AI TrackMate offers on-demand analytical feedback, potentially supporting the creative process and skill development in music production. This system addresses the growing demand for objective self-assessment tools in the evolving landscape of independent music production.

Artificial intelligence (AI) model creators commonly attach restrictive terms of use to both their models and their outputs. These terms typically prohibit activities ranging from creating competing AI models to spreading disinformation. Often taken at face value, these terms are positioned by companies as key enforceable tools for preventing misuse, particularly in policy dialogs. But are these terms truly meaningful? There are myriad examples where these broad terms are regularly and repeatedly violated. Yet except for some account suspensions on platforms, no model creator has actually tried to enforce these terms with monetary penalties or injunctive relief. This is likely for good reason: we think that the legal enforceability of these licenses is questionable. This Article systematically assesses of the enforceability of AI model terms of use and offers three contributions. First, we pinpoint a key problem: the artifacts that they protect, namely model weights and model outputs, are largely not copyrightable, making it unclear whether there is even anything to be licensed. Second, we examine the problems this creates for other enforcement. Recent doctrinal trends in copyright preemption may further undermine state-law claims, while other legal frameworks like the DMCA and CFAA offer limited recourse. Anti-competitive provisions likely fare even worse than responsible use provisions. Third, we provide recommendations to policymakers. There are compelling reasons for many provisions to be unenforceable: they chill good faith research, constrain competition, and create quasi-copyright ownership where none should exist. There are, of course, downsides: model creators have fewer tools to prevent harmful misuse. But we think the better approach is for statutory provisions, not private fiat, to distinguish between good and bad uses of AI, restricting the latter.

Creativity is the ability to produce novel, useful, and surprising ideas, and has been widely studied as a crucial aspect of human cognition. Machine creativity on the other hand has been a long-standing challenge. With the rise of advanced generative AI, there has been renewed interest and debate regarding AI's creative capabilities. Therefore, it is imperative to revisit the state of creativity in AI and identify key progresses and remaining challenges. In this work, we survey leading works studying the creative capabilities of AI systems, focusing on creative problem-solving, linguistic, artistic, and scientific creativity. Our review suggests that while the latest AI models are largely capable of producing linguistically and artistically creative outputs such as poems, images, and musical pieces, they struggle with tasks that require creative problem-solving, abstract thinking and compositionality and their generations suffer from a lack of diversity, originality, long-range incoherence and hallucinations. We also discuss key questions concerning copyright and authorship issues with generative models. Furthermore, we highlight the need for a comprehensive evaluation of creativity that is process-driven and considers several dimensions of creativity. Finally, we propose future research directions to improve the creativity of AI outputs, drawing inspiration from cognitive science and psychology.

Low-rank matrix factorizations are a class of linear models widely used in various fields such as machine learning, signal processing, and data analysis. These models approximate a matrix as the product of two smaller matrices, where the left matrix captures latent features while the right matrix linearly decomposes the data based on these features. There are many ways to define what makes a component "important." Standard LRMFs, such as the truncated singular value decomposition, focus on minimizing the distance between the original matrix and its low-rank approximation. In this thesis, the notion of "importance" is closely linked to interpretability and uniqueness, which are key to obtaining reliable and meaningful results. This thesis thus focuses on volume-based constraints and regularizations designed to enhance interpretability and uniqueness. We first introduce two new volume-constrained LRMFs designed to enhance these properties. The first assumes that data points are naturally bounded (e.g., movie ratings between 1 and 5 stars) and can be explained by convex combinations of features within the same bounds, allowing them to be interpreted in the same way as the data. The second model is more general, constraining the factors to belong to convex polytopes. Then, two variants of volume-regularized LRMFs are proposed. The first minimizes the volume of the latent features, encouraging them to cluster closely together, while the second maximizes the volume of the decompositions, promoting sparse representations. Across all these models, uniqueness is achieved under the core principle that the factors must be "sufficiently scattered" within their respective feasible sets. Motivated by applications such as blind source separation and missing data imputation, this thesis also proposes efficient algorithms that make these models practical for real-world applications.

In the rapidly evolving field of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring safety is a crucial and widely discussed topic. However, existing works often overlook the geo-diversity of cultural and legal standards across the world. To demonstrate the challenges posed by geo-diverse safety standards, we introduce SafeWorld, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate responses that are not only helpful but also culturally sensitive and legally compliant across diverse global contexts. SafeWorld encompasses 2,342 test user queries, each grounded in high-quality, human-verified cultural norms and legal policies from 50 countries and 493 regions/races. On top of it, we propose a multi-dimensional automatic safety evaluation framework that assesses the contextual appropriateness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of responses. Our evaluations reveal that current LLMs struggle to meet these criteria. To enhance LLMs' alignment with geo-diverse safety standards, we synthesize helpful preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) alignment training. The preference pair construction aims to encourage LLMs to behave appropriately and provide precise references to relevant cultural norms and policies when necessary. Our trained SafeWorldLM outperforms all competing models, including GPT-4o on all three evaluation dimensions by a large margin. Global human evaluators also note a nearly 20% higher winning rate in helpfulness and harmfulness evaluation. Our code and data can be found here: https://github.com/PlusLabNLP/SafeWorld.

Large Language Models are known to capture real-world knowledge, allowing them to excel in many downstream tasks. Despite recent advances, these models are still prone to what are commonly known as hallucinations, causing them to emit unwanted and factually incorrect text. In this work, we propose a novel calibration method that can be used to combat hallucinations. We add a special [IDK] ("I don't know") token to the model's vocabulary and introduce an objective function that shifts probability mass to the [IDK] token for incorrect predictions. This approach allows the model to express uncertainty in its output explicitly. We evaluate our proposed method across multiple model architectures and factual downstream tasks. We find that models trained with our method are able to express uncertainty in places where they would previously make mistakes while suffering only a small loss of encoded knowledge. We further perform extensive ablation studies of multiple variations of our approach and provide a detailed analysis of the precision-recall tradeoff of our method.

Conversational recommendation systems (CRS) leverage contextual information from conversations to generate recommendations but often struggle due to a lack of collaborative filtering (CF) signals, which capture user-item interaction patterns essential for accurate recommendations. We introduce Reddit-ML32M, a dataset that links reddit conversations with interactions on MovieLens 32M, to enrich item representations by leveraging collaborative knowledge and addressing interaction sparsity in conversational datasets. We propose an LLM-based framework that uses Reddit-ML32M to align LLM-generated recommendations with CF embeddings, refining rankings for better performance. We evaluate our framework against three sets of baselines: CF-based recommenders using only interactions from CRS tasks, traditional CRS models, and LLM-based methods relying on conversational context without item representations. Our approach achieves consistent improvements, including a 12.32% increase in Hit Rate and a 9.9% improvement in NDCG, outperforming the best-performing baseline that relies on conversational context but lacks collaborative item representations.

In recent years, the use of large language models (LLMs) for text classification has attracted widespread attention. Despite this, the classification accuracy of LLMs has not yet universally surpassed that of smaller models. LLMs can enhance their performance in text classification through fine-tuning. However, existing data quality research based on LLMs is challenging to apply directly to solve text classification problems. To further improve the performance of LLMs in classification tasks, this paper proposes a data quality enhancement (DQE) method for text classification based on LLMs. This method starts by using a greedy algorithm to select data, dividing the dataset into sampled and unsampled subsets, and then performing fine-tuning of the LLMs using the sampled data. Subsequently, this model is used to predict the outcomes for the unsampled data, categorizing incorrectly predicted data into uncovered, difficult, and noisy data. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the performance of LLMs in text classification tasks and significantly improves training efficiency, saving nearly half of the training time. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance in several open-source classification tasks.

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have facilitated the spread of misinformation, necessitating automated detection systems. This systematic review evaluates 36 studies that apply machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models to detect fake news, spam, and fake accounts on social media. Using the Prediction model Risk Of Bias ASsessment Tool (PROBAST), the review identified key biases across the ML lifecycle: selection bias due to non-representative sampling, inadequate handling of class imbalance, insufficient linguistic preprocessing (e.g., negations), and inconsistent hyperparameter tuning. Although models such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks showed strong potential, over-reliance on accuracy as an evaluation metric in imbalanced data settings was a common flaw. The review highlights the need for improved data preprocessing (e.g., resampling techniques), consistent hyperparameter tuning, and the use of appropriate metrics like precision, recall, F1 score, and AUROC. Addressing these limitations can lead to more reliable and generalizable ML/DL models for detecting deceptive content, ultimately contributing to the reduction of misinformation on social media.