TikTok user and travel agent Taylor Moore shared details of her plane ride next to Taylor Swift's dad, including his proud papa moments and approval of Travis Kelce. The Beatles, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are facing off at the 2025 Grammy Awards. On Friday, the Recording Academy released its full list of Grammy nominations, and the Beatles earned their first nod since 1997 for their latest song, "Now and Then." The Fab Four also earned a nomination for the same song in the best rock performance category. The Beatles' last new song, the AI-assisted "Now and Then," was released in 2023.

Apple's even tinier Mac mini is here -- with M4 power. It won't shock you to hear the M4 Pro is very fast, but the Mac mini comes with 16 gigs of RAM as standard too. The base Mac mini has an M4 chip sports a 10-core CPU (four high-performance cores and six high efficiency), a 10-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. For 1,399, you can bump up to the dramatically more powerful M4 Pro chip (like our review unit), featuring a 14-core CPU (10 high-performance and four high efficiency) and 20-core GPU. Its Geekbench 6 and Cinebench scores still beat most of the computers we've tested this year, and its GPU is fast enough for solid 1080p 60 fps gameplay.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their capacity to process long contexts. However, effectively utilizing this long context remains a challenge due to the issue of distraction, where irrelevant information dominates lengthy contexts, causing LLMs to lose focus on the most relevant segments. To address this, we propose a novel training method that enhances LLMs' ability to discern relevant information through a unique combination of retrieval-based data augmentation and contrastive learning. Specifically, during fine-tuning with long contexts, we employ a retriever to extract the most relevant segments, serving as augmented inputs. We then introduce an auxiliary contrastive learning objective to explicitly ensure that outputs from the original context and the retrieved sub-context are closely aligned. Extensive experiments on long single-document and multi-document QA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Multimodal foundation models, such as Gemini and ChatGPT, have revolutionized human-machine interactions by seamlessly integrating various forms of data. Developing a universal spoken language model that comprehends a wide range of natural language instructions is critical for bridging communication gaps and facilitating more intuitive interactions. However, the absence of a comprehensive evaluation benchmark poses a significant challenge. We present Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2, an open and evolving benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of instruction-based universal speech models. Building upon the first generation, this second version incorporates 125 new tasks contributed collaboratively by the global research community, expanding the benchmark to a total of 180 tasks, making it the largest benchmark for speech and audio evaluation. While the first generation of Dynamic-SUPERB was limited to classification tasks, Dynamic-SUPERB Phase-2 broadens its evaluation capabilities by introducing a wide array of novel and diverse tasks, including regression and sequence generation, across speech, music, and environmental audio. Evaluation results indicate that none of the models performed well universally. SALMONN-13B excelled in English ASR, while WavLLM demonstrated high accuracy in emotion recognition, but current models still require further innovations to handle a broader range of tasks. We will soon open-source all task data and the evaluation pipeline.

Separating disinformation from fact on the web has long challenged both the search and the reasoning powers of humans. We show that the reasoning power of large language models (LLMs) and the retrieval power of modern search engines can be combined to automate this process and explainably verify claims. We integrate LLMs and search under a multi-hop evidence pursuit strategy. This strategy generates an initial question based on an input claim using a sequence to sequence model, searches and formulates an answer to the question, and iteratively generates follow-up questions to pursue the evidence that is missing using an LLM. We demonstrate our system on the FEVER 2024 (AVeriTeC) shared task. Compared to a strategy of generating all the questions at once, our method obtains .045 higher label accuracy and .155 higher AVeriTeC score (evaluating the adequacy of the evidence). Through ablations, we show the importance of various design choices, such as the question generation method, medium-sized context, reasoning with one document at a time, adding metadata, paraphrasing, reducing the problem to two classes, and reconsidering the final verdict. Our submitted system achieves .510 AVeriTeC score on the dev set and .477 AVeriTeC score on the test set.

Large Language Models (LLMs), with gradually improving reading comprehension and reasoning capabilities, are being applied to a range of complex language tasks, including the automatic generation of language data for various purposes. However, research on applying LLMs for automatic data generation in low-resource languages like Vietnamese is still underdeveloped and lacks comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs for automatic data generation for the Vietnamese fact-checking task, which faces significant data limitations. Specifically, we focus on fact-checking data where claims are synthesized from multiple evidence sentences to assess the information synthesis capabilities of LLMs. We develop an automatic data construction process using simple prompt techniques on LLMs and explore several methods to improve the quality of the generated data. To evaluate the quality of the data generated by LLMs, we conduct both manual quality assessments and performance evaluations using language models. Experimental results and manual evaluations illustrate that while the quality of the generated data has significantly improved through fine-tuning techniques, LLMs still cannot match the data quality produced by humans.

This study examines how fake news affects social media users across a range of age groups and how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can help reduce the spread of false information. The paper evaluates various machine learning models for their efficacy in identifying and categorizing fake news and examines current trends in the spread of fake news, including deepfake technology. The study assesses four models using a Kaggle dataset: Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks, and Logistic Regression. The results show that SVM and neural networks perform better than other models, with accuracies of 93.29% and 93.69%, respectively. The study also emphasises how people in the elder age group diminished capacity for critical analysis of news content makes them more susceptible to disinformation. Natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning approaches have the potential to improve the accuracy of false news detection. Biases in AI and ML models and difficulties in identifying information generated by AI continue to be major problems in spite of the developments. The study recommends that datasets be expanded to encompass a wider range of languages and that detection algorithms be continuously improved to keep up with the latest advancements in disinformation tactics. In order to combat fake news and promote an informed and resilient society, this study emphasizes the value of cooperative efforts between AI researchers, social media platforms, and governments.

Political misinformation poses significant challenges to democratic processes, shaping public opinion and trust in media. Manual fact-checking methods face issues of scalability and annotator bias, while machine learning models require large, costly labelled datasets. This study investigates the use of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as reliable annotators for detecting political factuality in news articles. Using open-source LLMs, we create a politically diverse dataset, labelled for bias through LLM-generated annotations. These annotations are validated by human experts and further evaluated by LLM-based judges to assess the accuracy and reliability of the annotations. Our approach offers a scalable and robust alternative to traditional fact-checking, enhancing transparency and public trust in media.

The proliferation of Internet memes in the age of social media necessitates effective identification of harmful ones. Due to the dynamic nature of memes, existing data-driven models may struggle in low-resource scenarios where only a few labeled examples are available. In this paper, we propose an agency-driven framework for low-resource harmful meme detection, employing both outward and inward analysis with few-shot annotated samples. Inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on multimodal reasoning, we first retrieve relative memes with annotations to leverage label information as auxiliary signals for the LMM agent. Then, we elicit knowledge-revising behavior within the LMM agent to derive well-generalized insights into meme harmfulness. By combining these strategies, our approach enables dialectical reasoning over intricate and implicit harm-indicative patterns. Extensive experiments conducted on three meme datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on the low-resource harmful meme detection task.

Diffusion models have been proven highly effective at generating high-quality images. However, as these models grow larger, they require significantly more memory and suffer from higher latency, posing substantial challenges for deployment. In this work, we aim to accelerate diffusion models by quantizing their weights and activations to 4 bits. At such an aggressive level, both weights and activations are highly sensitive, where conventional post-training quantization methods for large language models like smoothing become insufficient. To overcome this limitation, we propose SVDQuant, a new 4-bit quantization paradigm. Different from smoothing which redistributes outliers between weights and activations, our approach absorbs these outliers using a low-rank branch. We first consolidate the outliers by shifting them from activations to weights, then employ a high-precision low-rank branch to take in the weight outliers with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). This process eases the quantization on both sides. However, na\"{\i}vely running the low-rank branch independently incurs significant overhead due to extra data movement of activations, negating the quantization speedup. To address this, we co-design an inference engine Nunchaku that fuses the kernels of the low-rank branch into those of the low-bit branch to cut off redundant memory access. It can also seamlessly support off-the-shelf low-rank adapters (LoRAs) without the need for re-quantization. Extensive experiments on SDXL, PixArt-$\Sigma$, and FLUX.1 validate the effectiveness of SVDQuant in preserving image quality. We reduce the memory usage for the 12B FLUX.1 models by 3.5$\times$, achieving 3.0$\times$ speedup over the 4-bit weight-only quantized baseline on the 16GB laptop 4090 GPU, paving the way for more interactive applications on PCs. Our quantization library and inference engine are open-sourced.