Media
"Mickey 17" Is a Science-Fiction Adventure of Multiple Unwieldy Thrills
The last time someone groped Robert Pattinson aboard a spaceship, to the best of my knowledge, was in Claire Denis's 2018 movie, "High Life." The groper was a lowlife--a deranged doctor, bent on harvesting astronaut semen for pernicious procreative ends. Pattinson's character, a self-declared celibate, was unconscious and unconsenting. The assault took place on the grottiest of vessels, manned by violent criminals who had been banished into deep space. The movie was a hell of a dark trip, but Pattinson, among the most consistently adventurous actors of his generation, kept you tethered to the story with an almost gravitational force.
Simon Cowell warns AI 'shouldn't be able to steal' human talent
The'America's Got Talent' judge tells Fox News Digital why he doesn't like artificial intelligence technology in songwriting. Simon Cowell wants to see artists protected against AI. The "America's Got Talent" judge wrote commentary in The Daily Mail this week criticizing potential changes to U.K. law that would allow companies to use any online material to train AI models unless they explicitly opt out. Cowell warned that the livelihood of artists was at risk of "being wiped out." "The thought that anyone would believe they have the right to blindly give this country's creative ideas away โ for nothing โ is just wrong," he said.
OpenAI launches Sora video generation tool in UK amid copyright row
San Francisco-based OpenAI is making Sora available to UK users who pay for ChatGPT. The tool stunned film-makers when it was revealed last year, with the film and TV mogul Tyler Perry pausing an 800m ( 634m) expansion of his Atlanta studio complex after saying the tool might make building sets or travelling to locations unnecessary. It was launched in the US publicly in December. Users are able to make videos on Sora by typing in simple prompts such as asking for a shot of people walking through "beautiful, snowy Tokyo city" where "gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes". OpenAI announced the UK release as it released examples of Sora's use by artists from across the UK and mainland Europe, where the tool is also being released on Friday. Josephine Miller, a 25-year-old British digital artist, created a two-minute video of models wearing bioluminescent fauna and said the tool would "open a lot more doors for younger creatives".
An Empirical Analysis of LLMs for Countering Misinformation
Proma, Adiba Mahbub, Pate, Neeley, Druckman, James, Ghoshal, Gourab, He, Hangfeng, Hoque, Ehsan
While Large Language Models (LLMs) can amplify online misinformation, they also show promise in tackling misinformation. In this paper, we empirically study the capabilities of three LLMs -- ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude -- in countering political misinformation. We implement a two-step, chain-of-thought prompting approach, where models first identify credible sources for a given claim and then generate persuasive responses. Our findings suggest that models struggle to ground their responses in real news sources, and tend to prefer citing left-leaning sources. We also observe varying degrees of response diversity among models. Our findings highlight concerns about using LLMs for fact-checking through only prompt-engineering, emphasizing the need for more robust guardrails. Our results have implications for both researchers and non-technical users.
Decoupling Content and Expression: Two-Dimensional Detection of AI-Generated Text
Bao, Guangsheng, Rong, Lihua, Zhao, Yanbin, Zhou, Qiji, Zhang, Yue
The wide usage of LLMs raises critical requirements on detecting AI participation in texts. Existing studies investigate these detections in scattered contexts, leaving a systematic and unified approach unexplored. In this paper, we present HART, a hierarchical framework of AI risk levels, each corresponding to a detection task. To address these tasks, we propose a novel 2D Detection Method, decoupling a text into content and language expression. Our findings show that content is resistant to surface-level changes, which can serve as a key feature for detection. Experiments demonstrate that 2D method significantly outperforms existing detectors, achieving an AUROC improvement from 0.705 to 0.849 for level-2 detection and from 0.807 to 0.886 for RAID. We release our data and code at https://github.com/baoguangsheng/truth-mirror.
Steering Large Language Model Activations in Sparse Spaces
Bayat, Reza, Rahimi-Kalahroudi, Ali, Pezeshki, Mohammad, Chandar, Sarath, Vincent, Pascal
A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior work in dense activation spaces struggles with superposition, wherein multiple features become entangled, limiting interpretability and precise control. In contrast, sparse representations provide an untapped opportunity for more interpretable behavior modulation. In this work, we introduce sparse activation steering (SAS), a method that leverages sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to steer LLM behavior in sparse spaces. By isolating behavior-specific features through a contrastive prompt-pairing approach, we define a set of features that can selectively reinforce or suppress behaviors. Experiments on Gemma 2 LLMs show that SAS vectors enable nuanced behavioral modulation and finer-grained control. Furthermore, scaling SAEs improves monosemanticity of SAS vectors, suggesting more reliable and interpretable interventions.
InspireMusic: Integrating Super Resolution and Large Language Model for High-Fidelity Long-Form Music Generation
Zhang, Chong, Ma, Yukun, Chen, Qian, Wang, Wen, Zhao, Shengkui, Pan, Zexu, Wang, Hao, Ni, Chongjia, Nguyen, Trung Hieu, Zhou, Kun, Jiang, Yidi, Tan, Chaohong, Gao, Zhifu, Du, Zhihao, Ma, Bin
We introduce InspireMusic, a framework integrated super resolution and large language model for high-fidelity long-form music generation. A unified framework generates high-fidelity music, songs, and audio, which incorporates an autoregressive transformer with a super-resolution flow-matching model. This framework enables the controllable generation of high-fidelity long-form music at a higher sampling rate from both text and audio prompts. Our model differs from previous approaches, as we utilize an audio tokenizer with one codebook that contains richer semantic information, thereby reducing training costs and enhancing efficiency. This combination enables us to achieve high-quality audio generation with long-form coherence of up to $8$ minutes. Then, an autoregressive transformer model based on Qwen 2.5 predicts audio tokens. Next, we employ a super-resolution flow-matching model to generate high-sampling rate audio with fine-grained details learned from an acoustic codec model. Comprehensive experiments show that the InspireMusic-1.5B-Long model has a comparable performance to recent top-tier open-source systems, including MusicGen and Stable Audio 2.0, on subjective and objective evaluations. The code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/FunAudioLLM/InspireMusic.
ReaLJam: Real-Time Human-AI Music Jamming with Reinforcement Learning-Tuned Transformers
Scarlatos, Alexander, Wu, Yusong, Simon, Ian, Roberts, Adam, Cooijmans, Tim, Jaques, Natasha, Tarakajian, Cassie, Huang, Cheng-Zhi Anna
Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have created models capable of high-quality musical content generation. However, little consideration is given to how to use these models for real-time or cooperative jamming musical applications because of crucial required features: low latency, the ability to communicate planned actions, and the ability to adapt to user input in real-time. To support these needs, we introduce ReaLJam, an interface and protocol for live musical jamming sessions between a human and a Transformer-based AI agent trained with reinforcement learning. We enable real-time interactions using the concept of anticipation, where the agent continually predicts how the performance will unfold and visually conveys its plan to the user. We conduct a user study where experienced musicians jam in real-time with the agent through ReaLJam. Our results demonstrate that ReaLJam enables enjoyable and musically interesting sessions, and we uncover important takeaways for future work.
Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs
Zhao, Weixiang, Hu, Yulin, Deng, Yang, Guo, Jiahe, Sui, Xingyu, Han, Xinyang, Zhang, An, Zhao, Yanyan, Qin, Bing, Chua, Tat-Seng, Liu, Ting
Role-playing enables large language models (LLMs) to engage users in immersive and personalized interactions, but it also introduces significant safety risks. Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, particularly for villainous characters. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive assessment of role-play fine-tuning risks by training 95 role-specific LLMs using RoleBench. Our experiments reveal that role-play fine-tuning leads to a noticeable decline in safety performance, with safety risks varying based on character traits. To tackle this challenge, we propose Safety-Aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT), a novel method designed to balance role-playing capabilities and safety. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct, Gemma-2-9B-it, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct demonstrate that SaRFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings. Our findings highlight the necessity of role-adaptive safety measures and provide insights into mitigating role-specific safety risks in role-playing LLMs.
Regional climate projections using a deep-learning-based model-ranking and downscaling framework: Application to European climate zones
Loganathan, Parthiban, Zea, Elias, Vinuesa, Ricardo, Otero, Evelyn
Accurate regional climate forecast calls for high-resolution downscaling of Global Climate Models (GCMs). This work presents a deep-learning-based multi-model evaluation and downscaling framework ranking 32 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) models using a Deep Learning-TOPSIS (DL-TOPSIS) mechanism and so refines outputs using advanced deep-learning models. Using nine performance criteria, five K\"oppen-Geiger climate zones -- Tropical, Arid, Temperate, Continental, and Polar -- are investigated over four seasons. While TaiESM1 and CMCC-CM2-SR5 show notable biases, ranking results show that NorESM2-LM, GISS-E2-1-G, and HadGEM3-GC31-LL outperform other models. Four models contribute to downscaling the top-ranked GCMs to 0.1$^{\circ}$ resolution: Vision Transformer (ViT), Geospatial Spatiotemporal Transformer with Attention and Imbalance-Aware Network (GeoSTANet), CNN-LSTM, and CNN-Long Short-Term Memory (ConvLSTM). Effectively capturing temperature extremes (TXx, TNn), GeoSTANet achieves the highest accuracy (Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) = 1.57$^{\circ}$C, Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) = 0.89, Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) = 0.85, Correlation ($r$) = 0.92), so reducing RMSE by 20% over ConvLSTM. CNN-LSTM and ConvLSTM do well in Continental and Temperate zones; ViT finds fine-scale temperature fluctuations difficult. These results confirm that multi-criteria ranking improves GCM selection for regional climate studies and transformer-based downscaling exceeds conventional deep-learning methods. This framework offers a scalable method to enhance high-resolution climate projections, benefiting impact assessments and adaptation plans.