Media
Improved Fine-Tuning of Large Multimodal Models for Hateful Meme Detection
Mei, Jingbiao, Chen, Jinghong, Yang, Guangyu, Lin, Weizhe, Byrne, Bill
Hateful memes have become a significant concern on the Internet, necessitating robust automated detection systems. While large multimodal models have shown strong generalization across various tasks, they exhibit poor generalization to hateful meme detection due to the dynamic nature of memes tied to emerging social trends and breaking news. Recent work further highlights the limitations of conventional supervised fine-tuning for large multimodal models in this context. To address these challenges, we propose Large Multimodal Model Retrieval-Guided Contrastive Learning (LMM-RGCL), a novel two-stage fine-tuning framework designed to improve both in-domain accuracy and cross-domain generalization. Experimental results on six widely used meme classification datasets demonstrate that LMM-RGCL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming agent-based systems such as VPD-PALI-X-55B. Furthermore, our method effectively generalizes to out-of-domain memes under low-resource settings, surpassing models like GPT-4o.
SongGen: A Single Stage Auto-regressive Transformer for Text-to-Song Generation
Liu, Zihan, Ding, Shuangrui, Zhang, Zhixiong, Dong, Xiaoyi, Zhang, Pan, Zang, Yuhang, Cao, Yuhang, Lin, Dahua, Wang, Jiaqi
Text-to-song generation, the task of creating vocals and accompaniment from textual inputs, poses significant challenges due to domain complexity and data scarcity. Existing approaches often employ multi-stage generation procedures, resulting in cumbersome training and inference pipelines. In this paper, we propose SongGen, a fully open-source, single-stage auto-regressive transformer designed for controllable song generation. The proposed model facilitates fine-grained control over diverse musical attributes, including lyrics and textual descriptions of instrumentation, genre, mood, and timbre, while also offering an optional three-second reference clip for voice cloning. Within a unified auto-regressive framework, SongGen supports two output modes: mixed mode, which generates a mixture of vocals and accompaniment directly, and dual-track mode, which synthesizes them separately for greater flexibility in downstream applications. We explore diverse token pattern strategies for each mode, leading to notable improvements and valuable insights. Furthermore, we design an automated data preprocessing pipeline with effective quality control. To foster community engagement and future research, we will release our model weights, training code, annotated data, and preprocessing pipeline. The generated samples are showcased on our project page at https://liuzh-19.github.io/SongGen/ , and the code will be available at https://github.com/LiuZH-19/SongGen .
This artist collaborates with AI and robots
"[Chung] comes from drawing, and then they start to work with AI, but not like we've seen in this generative AI movement where it's all about generating images on screen," says Sofian Audry, an artist and scholar at the University of Quebec in Montreal, who studies the relationships that artists establish with machines in their work. "[Chung is] really into this idea of performance. So they're turning their drawing approach into a performative approach where things happen live." Audiences watch as Chung works alongside or surrounded by robots, human and machine drawing simultaneously. The artwork, Chung says, emerges not just in the finished piece but in all the messy in-betweens.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review: still the superphone to beat
The Ultra is Samsung's largest and greatest phone and is packed to the gills with the very latest technology, which means more artificial intelligence than ever before. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. The Galaxy S25 Ultra is at the front of the line of a new wave of Android phones that promise to basically do everything for you. It combines Google's advanced AI assistance with numerous Samsung tools for writing, drawing, photography and chatting.
That is Unacceptable: the Moral Foundations of Canceling
Lo, Soda Marem, Araque, Oscar, Sharma, Rajesh, Stranisci, Marco Antonio
Canceling is a morally-driven phenomenon that hinders the development of safe social media platforms and contributes to ideological polarization. To address this issue we present the Canceling Attitudes Detection (CADE) dataset, an annotated corpus of canceling incidents aimed at exploring the factors of disagreements in evaluating people canceling attitudes on social media. Specifically, we study the impact of annotators' morality in their perception of canceling, showing that morality is an independent axis for the explanation of disagreement on this phenomenon. Annotator's judgments heavily depend on the type of controversial events and involved celebrities. This shows the need to develop more event-centric datasets to better understand how harms are perpetrated in social media and to develop more aware technologies for their detection.
VANPY: Voice Analysis Framework
Koushnir, Gregory, Fire, Michael, Alpert, Galit Fuhrmann, Kagan, Dima
Voice data is increasingly being used in modern digital communications, yet there is still a lack of comprehensive tools for automated voice analysis and characterization. To this end, we developed the VANPY (Voice Analysis in Python) framework for automated pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification of voice data. The VANPY is an open-source end-to-end comprehensive framework that was developed for the purpose of speaker characterization from voice data. The framework is designed with extensibility in mind, allowing for easy integration of new components and adaptation to various voice analysis applications. It currently incorporates over fifteen voice analysis components - including music/speech separation, voice activity detection, speaker embedding, vocal feature extraction, and various classification models. Four of the VANPY's components were developed in-house and integrated into the framework to extend its speaker characterization capabilities: gender classification, emotion classification, age regression, and height regression. The models demonstrate robust performance across various datasets, although not surpassing state-of-the-art performance. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the framework's ability to extract speaker characteristics on a use-case challenge of analyzing character voices from the movie "Pulp Fiction." The results illustrate the framework's capability to extract multiple speaker characteristics, including gender, age, height, emotion type, and emotion intensity measured across three dimensions: arousal, dominance, and valence.
NOTA: Multimodal Music Notation Understanding for Visual Large Language Model
Tang, Mingni, Li, Jiajia, Yang, Lu, Zhang, Zhiqiang, Tian, Jinghao, Li, Zuchao, Zhang, Lefei, Wang, Ping
Symbolic music is represented in two distinct forms: two-dimensional, visually intuitive score images, and one-dimensional, standardized text annotation sequences. While large language models have shown extraordinary potential in music, current research has primarily focused on unimodal symbol sequence text. Existing general-domain visual language models still lack the ability of music notation understanding. Recognizing this gap, we propose NOTA, the first large-scale comprehensive multimodal music notation dataset. It consists of 1,019,237 records, from 3 regions of the world, and contains 3 tasks. Based on the dataset, we trained NotaGPT, a music notation visual large language model. Specifically, we involve a pre-alignment training phase for cross-modal alignment between the musical notes depicted in music score images and their textual representation in ABC notation. Subsequent training phases focus on foundational music information extraction, followed by training on music notation analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that our NotaGPT-7B achieves significant improvement on music understanding, showcasing the effectiveness of NOTA and the training pipeline. Our datasets are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MYTH-Lab/NOTA-dataset.
Computational Safety for Generative AI: A Signal Processing Perspective
AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts. Examples of such tools include large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. As the performance of various leading GenAI models approaches saturation due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture designs, the development of reliable safety guardrails has become a key differentiator for responsibility and sustainability. This paper presents a formalization of the concept of computational safety, which is a mathematical framework that enables the quantitative assessment, formulation, and study of safety challenges in GenAI through the lens of signal processing theory and methods. In particular, we explore two exemplary categories of computational safety challenges in GenAI that can be formulated as hypothesis testing problems. For the safety of model input, we show how sensitivity analysis and loss landscape analysis can be used to detect malicious prompts with jailbreak attempts. For the safety of model output, we elucidate how statistical signal processing and adversarial learning can be used to detect AI-generated content. Finally, we discuss key open research challenges, opportunities, and the essential role of signal processing in computational AI safety. Signal processing has played a pivotal role in ensuring the stability, security, and efficiency of numerous engineering systems and information technologies, including, but not limited to, telecommunications, information forensics and security, machine learning, data science, and control systems. With the recent advances, wide accessibility, and deep integration of generative AI (GenAI) tools into our society and technology, such as ChatGPT and the emerging agentic AI applications, understanding and mitigating the associated risks of the so-called "frontier AI technology" is essential to ensure a responsible and sustainable use of GenAI. In addition, as the performance of state-ofthe-art GanAI models surpasses that of an average human in certain tasks, but reaches a plateau in standardized capability evaluation benchmarks due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture design (e.g., the use of decoder-only transformers), improving and ensuring safety is becoming the new arms race among GenAI stakeholders. EU AI Act, AI safety institutes, etc.), there are growing concerns about the broader socio-technical impacts [1].
Network-informed Prompt Engineering against Organized Astroturf Campaigns under Extreme Class Imbalance
Kanakaris, Nikos, Ping, Heng, Xiao, Xiongye, Ahmed, Nesreen K., Luceri, Luca, Ferrara, Emilio, Bogdan, Paul
Detecting organized political campaigns is of paramount importance in fighting against disinformation on social media. Existing approaches for the identification of such organized actions employ techniques mostly from network science, graph machine learning and natural language processing. Their ultimate goal is to analyze the relationships and interactions (e.g. re-posting) among users and the textual similarities of their posts. Despite their effectiveness in recognizing astroturf campaigns, these methods face significant challenges, notably the class imbalance in available training datasets. To mitigate this issue, recent methods usually resort to data augmentation or increasing the number of positive samples, which may not always be feasible or sufficient in real-world settings. Following a different path, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for identifying astroturf campaigns based solely on large language models (LLMs), introducing a Balanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Balanced RAG) component. Our approach first gives both textual information concerning the posts (in our case tweets) and the user interactions of the social network as input to a language model. Then, through prompt engineering and the proposed Balanced RAG method, it effectively detects coordinated disinformation campaigns on X (Twitter). The proposed framework does not require any training or fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, by strategically harnessing the strengths of prompt engineering and Balanced RAG, it facilitates LLMs to overcome the effects of class imbalance and effectively identify coordinated political campaigns. The experimental results demonstrate that by incorporating the proposed prompt engineering and Balanced RAG methods, our framework outperforms the traditional graph-based baselines, achieving 2x-3x improvements in terms of precision, recall and F1 scores.
AI/ML-Based Automatic Modulation Recognition: Recent Trends and Future Possibilities
Jafarigol, Elaheh, Alaghband, Behnoud, Gilanpour, Azadeh, Hosseinipoor, Saeid, Mirmozafari, Mirhamed
We present a review of high-performance automatic modulation recognition (AMR) models proposed in the literature to classify various Radio Frequency (RF) modulation schemes. We replicated these models and compared their performance in terms of accuracy across a range of signal-to-noise ratios. To ensure a fair comparison, we used the same dataset (RadioML-2016A), the same hardware, and a consistent definition of test accuracy as the evaluation metric, thereby providing a benchmark for future AMR studies. The hyperparameters were selected based on the authors' suggestions in the associated references to achieve results as close as possible to the originals. The replicated models are publicly accessible for further analysis of AMR models. We also present the test accuracies of the selected models versus their number of parameters, indicating their complexities. Building on this comparative analysis, we identify strategies to enhance these models' performance. Finally, we present potential opportunities for improvement, whether through novel architectures, data processing techniques, or training strategies, to further advance the capabilities of AMR models.