Media
Exploring AI Writers: Technology, Impact, and Future Prospects
Artificial Intelligence (AI) writers have emerged as a signi ficant force in the realm of content creation. These advanced tools leverage natural language processing techniques to g enerate coherent and logical texts, applicable across vari ous domains such as journalism, advertising, and educational m aterials. This document delves into the capabilities, applications, and implications of AI writers, examining thei r technological underpinnings, market influence, strength s, limitations, future trajectories, and ethical considerat ions. In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligenc e technologies today, AI models are increasingly being appl ied across various domains, with literary creation being no exc eption.
News Sentiment as a Predictor for American Domestic Migration
This paper goes into depth on the effect that US News Sentiment from national newspapers has on US interstate migration trends. Through harnessing data from the New York Times between 2010 and 2020, an average sentiment score was calculated, allowing for data to be entered into a neural network. Then a logistic regression model was used to predict interstate migration. The results indicate the model was highly accurate as the mean margin of error was +/- 900 citizens. The predictions from the model were compared with the US Census data from 2010 to 2020 that was used to train the model. Since the input for the model was not exposed to any migration data, the model clearly demonstrated that its results were drawn from sentiment data alone. These findings are significant as they indicate that the role of the press could be used as a predictor for domestic migration which can help the government and businesses understand better what is influencing people to move to certain places.
BAN: Neuroanatomical Aligning in Auditory Recognition between Artificial Neural Network and Human Cortex
Wang, Haidong, Xiao, Pengfei, Liu, Ao, Zhang, Jianhua, Shan, Qia
--Drawing inspiration from neurosciences, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have evolved from shallow architectures to highly complex, deep structures, yielding exceptional performance in auditory recognition tasks. However, traditional ANNs often struggle to align with brain regions due to their excessive depth and lack of biologically realistic features, like recurrent connection. T o address this, a brain-like auditory network (BAN) is introduced, which incorporates four neuroanatomically mapped areas and recurrent connection, guided by a novel metric called the brain-like auditory score (BAS). BAS serves as a benchmark for evaluating the similarity between BAN and human auditory recognition pathway. We further propose that specific areas in the cerebral cortex, mainly the middle and medial superior temporal (T2/T3) areas, correspond to the designed network structure, drawing parallels with the brain's auditory perception pathway. Our findings suggest that the neuroanatomical similarity in the cortex and auditory classification abilities of the ANN are well-aligned. In addition to delivering excellent performance on a music genre classification task, the BAN demonstrates a high BAS score. In conclusion, this study presents BAN as a recurrent, brain-inspired ANN, representing the first model that mirrors the cortical pathway of auditory recognition. EARING plays a vital role in human sound recognition and is especially important for the comprehension and creation of music. One key task in this domain is genre classification, which involves predicting the genre of a piece of music based on its audio signal. Music genres, such as jazz, rock, and classical, serve as descriptive labels that provide high-level information about a musical piece. As noted by previous work [2], genres are classes introduced by humans to categorize musical works.
Adversarial Prompt Evaluation: Systematic Benchmarking of Guardrails Against Prompt Input Attacks on LLMs
Zizzo, Giulio, Cornacchia, Giandomenico, Fraser, Kieran, Hameed, Muhammad Zaid, Rawat, Ambrish, Buesser, Beat, Purcell, Mark, Chen, Pin-Yu, Sattigeri, Prasanna, Varshney, Kush
As large language models (LLMs) become integrated into everyday applications, ensuring their robustness and security is increasingly critical. In particular, LLMs can be manipulated into unsafe behaviour by prompts known as jailbreaks. The variety of jailbreak styles is growing, necessitating the use of external defences known as guardrails. While many jailbreak defences have been proposed, not all defences are able to handle new out-of-distribution attacks due to the narrow segment of jailbreaks used to align them. Moreover, the lack of systematisation around defences has created significant gaps in their practical application. In this work, we perform systematic benchmarking across 15 different defences, considering a broad swathe of malicious and benign datasets. We find that there is significant performance variation depending on the style of jailbreak a defence is subject to. Additionally, we show that based on current datasets available for evaluation, simple baselines can display competitive out-of-distribution performance compared to many state-of-the-art defences. Code is available at https://github.com/IBM/Adversarial-Prompt-Evaluation.
Beyond Translation: LLM-Based Data Generation for Multilingual Fact-Checking
Chung, Yi-Ling, Cobo, Aurora, Serna, Pablo
Robust automatic fact-checking systems have the potential to combat online misinformation at scale. However, most existing research primarily focuses on English. In this paper, we introduce MultiSynFact, the first large-scale multilingual fact-checking dataset containing 2.2M claim-source pairs designed to support Spanish, German, English, and other low-resource languages. Our dataset generation pipeline leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), integrating external knowledge from Wikipedia and incorporating rigorous claim validation steps to ensure data quality. We evaluate the effectiveness of MultiSynFact across multiple models and experimental settings. Additionally, we open-source a user-friendly framework to facilitate further research in multilingual fact-checking and dataset generation.
Tokenization is Sensitive to Language Variation
Wegmann, Anna, Nguyen, Dong, Jurgens, David
Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect downstream LLM performance differently on two types of tasks: Tasks where the model should be robust to language variation (e.g., for semantic tasks like NLI, labels do not depend on whether a text uses British or American spelling) and tasks where the model should be sensitive to language variation (e.g., for form-based tasks like authorship verification, labels depend on whether a text uses British or American spelling). We pre-train BERT base models for the popular Byte-Pair Encoding algorithm to investigate how key algorithmic design choices impact downstream models' performances: fitting corpus, pre-tokenizer and vocabulary size. We find that the best tokenizer varies on the two task types -- with the pre-tokenizer having the biggest impact on performance. Further, we introduce a new approach to estimate tokenizer impact on downstream LLM performance, showing significant improvement over techniques like R\'enyi efficiency. We encourage more work on language variation and its relation to tokenizers and thus LLM performance.
ComposeOn Academy: Transforming Melodic Ideas into Complete Compositions Integrating Music Learning
Pu, Hongxi, Jiang, Futian, Chen, Zihao, Song, Xingyue
Music composition has long been recognized as a significant art form. However, existing digital audio workstations and music production software often present high entry barriers for users lacking formal musical training. To address this, we introduce ComposeOn, a music theory-based tool designed for users with limited musical knowledge. ComposeOn enables users to easily extend their melodic ideas into complete compositions and offers simple editing features. By integrating music theory, it explains music creation at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. Our user study (N=10) compared ComposeOn with the baseline method, Suno AI, demonstrating that ComposeOn provides a more accessible and enjoyable composing and learning experience for individuals with limited musical skills. ComposeOn bridges the gap between theory and practice, offering an innovative solution as both a composition aid and music education platform. The study also explores the differences between theory-based music creation and generative music, highlighting the former's advantages in personal expression and learning.
Explaining the Success of Nearest Neighbor Methods in Prediction
Chen, George H., Shah, Devavrat
Many modern methods for prediction leverage nearest neighbor search to find past training examples most similar to a test example, an idea that dates back in text to at least the 11th century and has stood the test of time. This monograph aims to explain the success of these methods, both in theory, for which we cover foundational nonasymptotic statistical guarantees on nearest-neighbor-based regression and classification, and in practice, for which we gather prominent methods for approximate nearest neighbor search that have been essential to scaling prediction systems reliant on nearest neighbor analysis to handle massive datasets. Furthermore, we discuss connections to learning distances for use with nearest neighbor methods, including how random decision trees and ensemble methods learn nearest neighbor structure, as well as recent developments in crowdsourcing and graphons. In terms of theory, our focus is on nonasymptotic statistical guarantees, which we state in the form of how many training data and what algorithm parameters ensure that a nearest neighbor prediction method achieves a user-specified error tolerance. We begin with the most general of such results for nearest neighbor and related kernel regression and classification in general metric spaces. In such settings in which we assume very little structure, what enables successful prediction is smoothness in the function being estimated for regression, and a low probability of landing near the decision boundary for classification. In practice, these conditions could be difficult to verify for a real dataset. We then cover recent guarantees on nearest neighbor prediction in the three case studies of time series forecasting, recommending products to people over time, and delineating human organs in medical images by looking at image patches. In these case studies, clustering structure enables successful prediction.
Apple has quietly DISCONTINUED three popular devices - as concerned shoppers find they're sold out around the world
After months of anticipation, Apple finally unveiled its latest smartphone to the world last night. The iPhone 16e is Apple's latest'budget' smartphone, with prices starting at just 599/ 599. The new device runs Apple Intelligence features, including a ChatGPT integration with smart assistant Siri. It also includes a 6.1-inch display, a two-in-one camera system, an'extraordinary' battery life, and the return of the'notch' at the top of the display. While the focus has been on the new device, several eagle-eyed Apple fans have noticed that three popular devices have been quietly discontinued.
Why the billionaire class is kissing Trump's proverbial ring
Despite all beliefs to the contrary, the billionaires who have been seen in President Donald Trump's orbit since he won the presidency for a second time last November are not mere sycophants to his regime. Former Washington Post political cartoonist Ann Telnaes should know. Last month, Telnaes quit her job after her editor refused to publish what turned out to be her last cartoon for the newspaper. In it, Telnaes drew Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI billionaire Sam Altman, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, and Mickey Mouse (representing media giant Disney/American Broadcasting Company) either kneeling or bowing face down in front of a statue of the president. In explaining her decision to resign from the Post, Telnaes wrote, "Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press – and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press."