Traditional sociological research often relies on human participation, which, though effective, is expensive, challenging to scale, and with ethical concerns. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential to simulate human behavior, enabling the replication of individual responses and facilitating studies on many interdisciplinary studies. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of this field, illustrating the recent progress in simulation driven by LLM-empowered agents. We categorize the simulations into three types: (1) Individual Simulation, which mimics specific individuals or demographic groups; (2) Scenario Simulation, where multiple agents collaborate to achieve goals within specific contexts; and (3) Society Simulation, which models interactions within agent societies to reflect the complexity and variety of real-world dynamics. These simulations follow a progression, ranging from detailed individual modeling to large-scale societal phenomena. We provide a detailed discussion of each simulation type, including the architecture or key components of the simulation, the classification of objectives or scenarios and the evaluation method. Afterward, we summarize commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the trends across these three types of simulation. A repository for the related sources is at {\url{https://github.com/FudanDISC/SocialAgent}}.

Generative AI is reshaping the media landscape, enabling unprecedented capabilities in video creation, personalization, and scalability. This paper presents a comprehensive SWOT analysis of Metas Movie Gen, a cutting-edge generative AI foundation model designed to produce 1080p HD videos with synchronized audio from simple text prompts. We explore its strengths, including high-resolution video generation, precise editing, and seamless audio integration, which make it a transformative tool across industries such as filmmaking, advertising, and education. However, the analysis also addresses limitations, such as constraints on video length and potential biases in generated content, which pose challenges for broader adoption. In addition, we examine the evolving regulatory and ethical considerations surrounding generative AI, focusing on issues like content authenticity, cultural representation, and responsible use. Through comparative insights with leading models like DALL-E and Google Imagen, this paper highlights Movie Gens unique features, such as video personalization and multimodal synthesis, while identifying opportunities for innovation and areas requiring further research. Our findings provide actionable insights for stakeholders, emphasizing both the opportunities and challenges of deploying generative AI in media production. This work aims to guide future advancements in generative AI, ensuring scalability, quality, and ethical integrity in this rapidly evolving field.

It is beyond dispute that the potential benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in military intelligence are considerable. Nevertheless, it remains uncertain precisely how AI can enhance the analysis of military data. The aim of this study is to address this issue. To this end, the AI demonstrator deepCOM was developed in collaboration with the start-up Aleph Alpha. The AI functions include text search, automatic text summarization and Named Entity Recognition (NER). These are evaluated for their added value in military analysis. It is demonstrated that under time pressure, the utilization of AI functions results in assessments clearly superior to that of the control group. Nevertheless, despite the demonstrably superior analysis outcome in the experimental group, no increase in confidence in the accuracy of their own analyses was observed. Finally, the paper identifies the limitations of employing AI in military intelligence, particularly in the context of analyzing ambiguous and contradictory information.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing tasks. However, there is limited research on whether LLMs can accurately simulate user behavior in real-world scenarios, such as social media. This requires models to effectively analyze a user's history and simulate their role. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{FineRob}, a novel fine-grained behavior simulation dataset. We collect the complete behavioral history of 1,866 distinct users across three social media platforms. Each behavior is decomposed into three fine-grained elements: object, type, and content, resulting in 78.6k QA records. Based on FineRob, we identify two dominant reasoning patterns in LLMs' behavior simulation processes and propose the \textbf{OM-CoT} fine-tuning method to enhance the capability. Through comprehensive experiments, we conduct an in-depth analysis of key factors of behavior simulation and also demonstrate the effectiveness of OM-CoT approach\footnote{Code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/linkseed18612254945/FineRob}}

AI-based music generation has progressed significantly in recent years. However, creating symbolic music that is both long-structured and expressive remains a considerable challenge. In this paper, we propose PerceiverS (Segmentation and Scale), a novel architecture designed to address this issue by leveraging both Effective Segmentation and Multi-Scale attention mechanisms. Our approach enhances symbolic music generation by simultaneously learning long-term structural dependencies and short-term expressive details. By combining cross-attention and self-attention in a Multi-Scale setting, PerceiverS captures long-range musical structure while preserving musical diversity. The proposed model has been evaluated using the Maestro dataset and has demonstrated improvements in generating music of conventional length with expressive nuances. The project demos and the generated music samples can be accessed through the link: https://perceivers.github.io

Methods for image-to-video generation have achieved impressive, photo-realistic quality. However, adjusting specific elements in generated videos, such as object motion or camera movement, is often a tedious process of trial and error, e.g., involving re-generating videos with different random seeds. Recent techniques address this issue by fine-tuning a pre-trained model to follow conditioning signals, such as bounding boxes or point trajectories. Yet, this fine-tuning procedure can be computationally expensive, and it requires datasets with annotated object motion, which can be difficult to procure. In this work, we introduce SG-I2V, a framework for controllable image-to-video generation that is self-guided$\unicode{x2013}$offering zero-shot control by relying solely on the knowledge present in a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model without the need for fine-tuning or external knowledge. Our zero-shot method outperforms unsupervised baselines while significantly narrowing down the performance gap with supervised models in terms of visual quality and motion fidelity.

The development of vision-language and generative models has significantly advanced text-guided image editing, which seeks the \textit{preservation} of core elements in the source image while implementing \textit{modifications} based on the target text. However, existing metrics have a \textbf{context-blindness} problem, indiscriminately applying the same evaluation criteria on completely different pairs of source image and target text, biasing towards either modification or preservation. Directional CLIP similarity, the only metric that considers both source image and target text, is also biased towards modification aspects and attends to irrelevant editing regions of the image. We propose \texttt{AugCLIP}, a \textbf{context-aware} metric that adaptively coordinates preservation and modification aspects, depending on the specific context of a given source image and target text. This is done by deriving the CLIP representation of an ideally edited image, that preserves the source image with necessary modifications to align with target text. More specifically, using a multi-modal large language model, \texttt{AugCLIP} augments the textual descriptions of the source and target, then calculates a modification vector through a hyperplane that separates source and target attributes in CLIP space. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, encompassing a diverse range of editing scenarios, show that \texttt{AugCLIP} aligns remarkably well with human evaluation standards, outperforming existing metrics. The code will be open-sourced for community use.

Zack Snyder doesn't seem to be all that worried about AI disrupting the filmmaking world, bringing scores of novices to the fold. At WIRED's The Big Interview event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the director told managing editor Hemal Jhaveri that "every single person has a pretty good movie camera on their phone and yet we don't have--right this second, anyway--millions of awesome movies being uploaded out of peoples' pockets." That doesn't mean he thinks Hollywood creatives can avoid AI altogether. "Educating yourself and understanding what it can and can't do is important right now, especially where it exists in image-making and storytelling," Snyder said. "You have to understand what it is and what it's not capable of, and you have to be able to use it as a tool as opposed to standing on the sidelines with your hands on your hips."

Despite fears that artificial intelligence (AI) could influence the outcome of elections around the world, the United States technology giant Meta said it detected little impact across its platforms this year. That was in part due to defensive measures designed to prevent coordinated networks of accounts, or bots, from grabbing attention on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg told reporters on Tuesday. "I don't think the use of generative AI was a particularly effective tool for them to evade our trip wires," Clegg said of actors behind coordinated disinformation campaigns. In 2024, Meta says it ran several election operations centres around the world to monitor content issues, including during elections in the US, Bangladesh, Brazil, France, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Most of the covert influence operations it has disrupted in recent years were carried out by actors from Russia, Iran and China, Clegg said, adding that Meta took down about 20 "covert influence operations" on its platform this year.

AI-generated content played a much smaller role in global election misinformation than what many officials and researchers had feared, according to a new analysis from Meta. In an update on its efforts to safeguard dozens of elections in 2024, the company said that AI content made up only a fraction of election-related misinformation that was caught and labeled by its fact checkers. "During the election period in the major elections listed above, ratings on AI content related to elections, politics and social topics represented less than 1% of all fact-checked misinformation," the company shared in a blog post, referring to elections in the US, UK, Bangladesh, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, France, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil, as well as the EU's Parliamentary elections. The update comes after numerous government officials and researchers for months raised the alarm about the role generative AI could play in supercharging election misinformation in a year when more than 2 billion people were expected to go to the polls. But those fears largely did not play out -- at least on Meta's platforms -- according to the company's President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg.