Media
Artist uses AI to imagine Taylor Swift in eras throughout history - from a prehistoric cavewoman to a futuristic cyborg
Whether it's Lover, The Tortured Poets Department, or 1989, every Taylor Swift fan has their favourite era. But one skilled artist has brought a whole new meaning to the Eras Tour. Sirio Berati, a digital creator from Canada, has used artificial intelligence (AI) to imagine what Swift would have looked like in eras throughout history. His stunning video sees Swift morphing from a prehistoric cavewoman all the way through to a futuristic cyborg. Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Berati said: 'People are loving it.
Garmin Fenix 8 review: best adventure watch becomes smarter
The Fenix 8 is a landmark moment for Garmin. By adding voice control, an OLED screen and other niceties, it has merged its top Fenix and Epix adventure watch lines to better compete with increasingly advanced smartwatches from Apple, Samsung and other major players. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. The Fenix has always been where Garmin debuts its technology and features first before trickling them down into other products, such as the popular Forerunner series.
Why do concert tickets now cost as much as a games console?
Not everyone thinks that way. He was compelled to take action after noticing unsold seats on his US arena tour last year. "Five hundred seats would be completely empty because they were 200 a ticket," he told Music Week. "I'd have 1,000 kids outside the venue who couldn't afford to come in and I was like, 'Something's got to change here.'" But the festival didn't go completely to plan.
Language-based Audio Moment Retrieval
Munakata, Hokuto, Nishimura, Taichi, Nakada, Shota, Komatsu, Tatsuya
In this paper, we propose and design a new task called audio moment retrieval (AMR). Unlike conventional language-based audio retrieval tasks that search for short audio clips from an audio database, AMR aims to predict relevant moments in untrimmed long audio based on a text query. Given the lack of prior work in AMR, we first build a dedicated dataset, Clotho-Moment, consisting of large-scale simulated audio recordings with moment annotations. We then propose a DETR-based model, named Audio Moment DETR (AM-DETR), as a fundamental framework for AMR tasks. This model captures temporal dependencies within audio features, inspired by similar video moment retrieval tasks, thus surpassing conventional clip-level audio retrieval methods. Additionally, we provide manually annotated datasets to properly measure the effectiveness and robustness of our methods on real data. Experimental results show that AM-DETR, trained with Clotho-Moment, outperforms a baseline model that applies a clip-level audio retrieval method with a sliding window on all metrics, particularly improving Recall1@0.7 by 9.00 points. Our datasets and code are publicly available in https://h-munakata.github.io/Language-based-Audio-Moment-Retrieval.
Optimizing News Text Classification with Bi-LSTM and Attention Mechanism for Efficient Data Processing
Liu, Bingyao, Chen, Jiajing, Wang, Rui, Huang, Junming, Luo, Yuanshuai, Wei, Jianjun
The development of Internet technology has led to a rapid increase in news information. Filtering out valuable content from complex information has become an urgentproblem that needs to be solved. In view of the shortcomings of traditional manual classification methods that are time-consuming and inefficient, this paper proposes an automaticclassification scheme for news texts based on deep learning. This solution achieves efficient classification and management of news texts by introducing advanced machine learning algorithms, especially an optimization model that combines Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Network (Bi-LSTM) and Attention Mechanism. Experimental results show that this solution can not only significantly improve the accuracy and timeliness of classification, but also significantly reduce the need for manual intervention. It has important practical significance for improving the information processing capabilities of the news industry and accelerating the speed of information flow. Through comparative analysis of multiple common models, the effectiveness and advancement of the proposed method are proved, laying a solid foundation for future news text classification research.
Learning When to Retrieve, What to Rewrite, and How to Respond in Conversational QA
Roy, Nirmal, Ribeiro, Leonardo F. R., Blloshmi, Rexhina, Small, Kevin
Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with information retrieval capabilities (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)) has proven beneficial for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, understanding users' contextual search intent when generating responses is an understudied topic for conversational question answering (QA). This conversational extension leads to additional concerns when compared to single-turn QA as it is more challenging for systems to comprehend conversational context and manage retrieved passages over multiple turns. In this work, we propose a method for enabling LLMs to decide when to retrieve in RAG settings given a conversational context. When retrieval is deemed necessary, the LLM then rewrites the conversation for passage retrieval and judges the relevance of returned passages before response generation. Operationally, we build on the single-turn SELF-RAG framework (Asai et al., 2023) and propose SELF-multi-RAG for conversational settings. SELF-multi-RAG demonstrates improved capabilities over single-turn variants with respect to retrieving relevant passages (by using summarized conversational context) and assessing the quality of generated responses. Experiments on three conversational QA datasets validate the enhanced response generation capabilities of SELF-multi-RAG, with improvements of ~13% measured by human annotation.
Adapting Segment Anything Model for Unseen Object Instance Segmentation
Cao, Rui, Song, Chuanxin, Yang, Biqi, Wang, Jiangliu, Heng, Pheng-Ann, Liu, Yun-Hui
Unseen Object Instance Segmentation (UOIS) is crucial for autonomous robots operating in unstructured environments. Previous approaches require full supervision on large-scale tabletop datasets for effective pretraining. In this paper, we propose UOIS-SAM, a data-efficient solution for the UOIS task that leverages SAM's high accuracy and strong generalization capabilities. UOIS-SAM integrates two key components: (i) a Heatmap-based Prompt Generator (HPG) to generate class-agnostic point prompts with precise foreground prediction, and (ii) a Hierarchical Discrimination Network (HDNet) that adapts SAM's mask decoder, mitigating issues introduced by the SAM baseline, such as background confusion and over-segmentation, especially in scenarios involving occlusion and texture-rich objects. Extensive experimental results on OCID, OSD, and additional photometrically challenging datasets including PhoCAL and HouseCat6D, demonstrate that, even using only 10% of the training samples compared to previous methods, UOIS-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in unseen object segmentation, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in various tabletop scenes.
MTP: A Dataset for Multi-Modal Turning Points in Casual Conversations
Ho, Gia-Bao Dinh, Tan, Chang Wei, Darban, Zahra Zamanzadeh, Salehi, Mahsa, Haffari, Gholamreza, Buntine, Wray
Detecting critical moments, such as emotional outbursts or changes in decisions during conversations, is crucial for understanding shifts in human behavior and their consequences. Our work introduces a novel problem setting focusing on these moments as turning points (TPs), accompanied by a meticulously curated, high-consensus, human-annotated multi-modal dataset. We provide precise timestamps, descriptions, and visual-textual evidence high-lighting changes in emotions, behaviors, perspectives, and decisions at these turning points. We also propose a framework, TPMaven, utilizing state-of-the-art vision-language models to construct a narrative from the videos and large language models to classify and detect turning points in our multi-modal dataset. Evaluation results show that TPMaven achieves an F1-score of 0.88 in classification and 0.61 in detection, with additional explanations aligning with human expectations.
Do Large Language Models have Problem-Solving Capability under Incomplete Information Scenarios?
Chen, Yuyan, Yu, Tianhao, Li, Yueze, Yan, Songzhou, Liu, Sijia, Liang, Jiaqing, Xiao, Yanghua
The evaluation of the problem-solving capability under incomplete information scenarios of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important, encompassing capabilities such as questioning, knowledge search, error detection, and path planning. Current research mainly focus on LLMs' problem-solving capability such as ``Twenty Questions''. However, these kinds of games do not require recognizing misleading cues which are necessary in the incomplete information scenario. Moreover, the existing game such as ``Who is undercover'' are highly subjective, making it challenging for evaluation. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel game named BrainKing based on the ``Who is undercover'' and ``Twenty Questions'' for evaluating LLM capabilities under incomplete information scenarios. It requires LLMs to identify target entities with limited yes-or-no questions and potential misleading answers. By setting up easy, medium, and hard difficulty modes, we comprehensively assess the performance of LLMs across various aspects. Our results reveal the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in BrainKing, providing significant insights of LLM problem-solving levels.
Designing an Interpretable Interface for Contextual Bandits
Maher, Andrew, Gobbo, Matia, Lachartre, Lancelot, Prabanantham, Subash, Swiers, Rowan, Liyanagama, Puli
Contextual bandits have become an increasingly popular solution for personalized recommender systems. Despite their growing use, the interpretability of these systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for the often non-expert operators tasked with ensuring their optimal performance. In this paper, we address this challenge by designing a new interface to explain to domain experts the underlying behaviour of a bandit. Central is a metric we term "value gain", a measure derived from off-policy evaluation to quantify the real-world impact of sub-components within a bandit. We conduct a qualitative user study to evaluate the effectiveness of our interface. Our findings suggest that by carefully balancing technical rigour with accessible presentation, it is possible to empower non-experts to manage complex machine learning systems. We conclude by outlining guiding principles that other researchers should consider when building similar such interfaces in future.