Netflix and the BBC have released an all-too-brief look at Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. A clip from the stop-motion animated movie features Wallace proudly revealing his latest invention, a "smart gnome" called Norbot. The robot aggressively shakes Gromit's paw while introducing itself to the pooch, hinting at trouble ahead. The concept of a smart gnome as a riff on the smart home is funny by itself and it perfectly matches the type of humor the Wallace and Gromit series is known for. Wallace encouraging Gromit to put the voice-activated Norbot through its paces is a great touch too, considering that the beagle is famously silent.

Less than three months after Apple quietly debuted a tool for publishers to opt out of its AI training, a number of prominent news outlets and social platforms have taken the company up on it. WIRED can confirm that Facebook, Instagram, Craigslist, Tumblr, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, Vox Media, the USA Today network, and WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast, are among the many organizations opting to exclude their data from Apple's AI training. The cold reception reflects a significant shift in both the perception and use of the robotic crawlers that have trawled the web for decades. Now that these bots play a key role in collecting AI training data, they've become a conflict zone over intellectual property and the future of the web. This new tool, Applebot-Extended, is an extension to Apple's web-crawling bot that specifically lets website owners tell Apple not to use their data for AI training.

As foundation models have accumulated hundreds of millions of users, developers have begun to take steps to prevent harmful types of uses. One salient intervention that foundation model developers adopt is acceptable use policies: legally binding policies that prohibit users from using a model for specific purposes. This paper identifies acceptable use policies from 30 foundation model developers, analyzes the use restrictions they contain, and argues that acceptable use policies are an important lens for understanding the regulation of foundation models. Taken together, developers' acceptable use policies include 127 distinct use restrictions; the wide variety in the number and type of use restrictions may create fragmentation across the AI supply chain. Developers also employ acceptable use policies to prevent competitors or specific industries from making use of their models. Developers alone decide what constitutes acceptable use, and rarely provide transparency about how they enforce their policies. In practice, acceptable use policies are difficult to enforce, and scrupulous enforcement can act as a barrier to researcher access and limit beneficial uses of foundation models. Nevertheless, acceptable use policies for foundation models are an early example of self-regulation that have a significant impact on the market for foundation models and the overall AI ecosystem.

Music streaming services often leverage sequential recommender systems to predict the best music to showcase to users based on past sequences of listening sessions. Nonetheless, most sequential recommendation methods ignore or insufficiently account for repetitive behaviors. This is a crucial limitation for music recommendation, as repeatedly listening to the same song over time is a common phenomenon that can even change the way users perceive this song. In this paper, we introduce PISA (Psychology-Informed Session embedding using ACT-R), a session-level sequential recommender system that overcomes this limitation. PISA employs a Transformer architecture learning embedding representations of listening sessions and users using attention mechanisms inspired by Anderson's ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational), a cognitive architecture modeling human information access and memory dynamics. This approach enables us to capture dynamic and repetitive patterns from user behaviors, allowing us to effectively predict the songs they will listen to in subsequent sessions, whether they are repeated or new ones. We demonstrate the empirical relevance of PISA using both publicly available listening data from Last.fm and proprietary data from Deezer, a global music streaming service, confirming the critical importance of repetition modeling for sequential listening session recommendation. Along with this paper, we publicly release our proprietary dataset to foster future research in this field, as well as the source code of PISA to facilitate its future use.

The United States has experienced a significant increase in violent extremism, prompting the need for automated tools to detect and limit the spread of extremist ideology online. This study evaluates the performance of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT) in detecting and classifying online domestic extremist posts. We collected social media posts containing "far-right" and "far-left" ideological keywords and manually labeled them as extremist or non-extremist. Extremist posts were further classified into one or more of five contributing elements of extremism based on a working definitional framework. The BERT model's performance was evaluated based on training data size and knowledge transfer between categories. We also compared the performance of GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 models using different prompts: na\"ive, layperson-definition, role-playing, and professional-definition. Results showed that the best performing GPT models outperformed the best performing BERT models, with more detailed prompts generally yielding better results. However, overly complex prompts may impair performance. Different versions of GPT have unique sensitives to what they consider extremist. GPT 3.5 performed better at classifying far-left extremist posts, while GPT 4 performed better at classifying far-right extremist posts. Large language models, represented by GPT models, hold significant potential for online extremism classification tasks, surpassing traditional BERT models in a zero-shot setting. Future research should explore human-computer interactions in optimizing GPT models for extremist detection and classification tasks to develop more efficient (e.g., quicker, less effort) and effective (e.g., fewer errors or mistakes) methods for identifying extremist content.

Language models have been effectively applied to modeling natural signals, such as images, video, speech, and audio. A crucial component of these models is the codec tokenizer, which compresses high-dimensional natural signals into lower-dimensional discrete tokens. In this paper, we introduce WavTokenizer, which offers several advantages over previous SOTA acoustic codec models in the audio domain: 1)extreme compression. By compressing the layers of quantizers and the temporal dimension of the discrete codec, one-second audio of 24kHz sampling rate requires only a single quantizer with 40 or 75 tokens. 2)improved subjective quality. Despite the reduced number of tokens, WavTokenizer achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality with outstanding UTMOS scores and inherently contains richer semantic information. Specifically, we achieve these results by designing a broader VQ space, extended contextual windows, and improved attention networks, as well as introducing a powerful multi-scale discriminator and an inverse Fourier transform structure. We conducted extensive reconstruction experiments in the domains of speech, audio, and music. WavTokenizer exhibited strong performance across various objective and subjective metrics compared to state-of-the-art models. We also tested semantic information, VQ utilization, and adaptability to generative models. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the necessity of each module in WavTokenizer. The related code, demos, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavTokenizer.

Estimating global human motion from moving cameras is challenging due to the entanglement of human and camera motions. To mitigate the ambiguity, existing methods leverage learned human motion priors, which however often result in oversmoothed motions with misaligned 2D projections. To tackle this problem, we propose COIN, a control-inpainting motion diffusion prior that enables fine-grained control to disentangle human and camera motions. Although pre-trained motion diffusion models encode rich motion priors, we find it non-trivial to leverage such knowledge to guide global motion estimation from RGB videos. COIN introduces a novel control-inpainting score distillation sampling method to ensure well-aligned, consistent, and high-quality motion from the diffusion prior within a joint optimization framework. Furthermore, we introduce a new human-scene relation loss to alleviate the scale ambiguity by enforcing consistency among the humans, camera, and scene. Experiments on three challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of COIN, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of global human motion estimation and camera motion estimation. As an illustrative example, COIN outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 33% in world joint position error (W-MPJPE) on the RICH dataset.

This paper examines the influence of recommender systems on local music representation, discussing prior findings from an empirical study on the LFM-2b public dataset. This prior study argued that different recommender systems exhibit algorithmic biases shifting music consumption either towards or against local content. However, LFM-2b users do not reflect the diverse audience of music streaming services. To assess the robustness of this study's conclusions, we conduct a comparative analysis using proprietary listening data from a global music streaming service, which we publicly release alongside this paper. We observe significant differences in local music consumption patterns between our dataset and LFM-2b, suggesting that caution should be exercised when drawing conclusions on local music based solely on LFM-2b. Moreover, we show that the algorithmic biases exhibited in the original work vary in our dataset, and that several unexplored model parameters can significantly influence these biases and affect the study's conclusion on both datasets. Finally, we discuss the complexity of accurately labeling local music, emphasizing the risk of misleading conclusions due to unreliable, biased, or incomplete labels. To encourage further research and ensure reproducibility, we have publicly shared our dataset and code.

Point-source transient events (PSTEs) - optical events that are both extremely fast and extremely small - pose several challenges to an imaging system. Due to their speed, accurately characterizing such events often requires detectors with very high frame rates. Due to their size, accurately detecting such events requires maintaining coverage over an extended field-of-view, often through the use of imaging focal plane arrays (FPA) with a global shutter readout. Traditional imaging systems that meet these requirements are costly in terms of price, size, weight, power consumption, and data bandwidth, and there is a need for cheaper solutions with adequate temporal and spatial coverage. To address these issues, we develop a novel compressed sensing algorithm adapted to the rolling shutter readout of an imaging system. This approach enables reconstruction of a PSTE signature at the sampling rate of the rolling shutter, offering a 1-2 order of magnitude temporal speedup and a proportional reduction in data bandwidth. We present empirical results demonstrating accurate recovery of PSTEs using measurements that are spatially undersampled by a factor of 25, and our simulations show that, relative to other compressed sensing algorithms, our algorithm is both faster and yields higher quality reconstructions. We also present theoretical results characterizing our algorithm and corroborating simulations. The potential impact of our work includes the development of much faster, cheaper sensor solutions for PSTE detection and characterization.

Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier has the latest on the pros and cons of the bombshell developments on'Special Report.' Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X Holdings Corp., speaks at the Milken Institute's Global Conference at the Beverly Hilton Hotel,on May 6, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California. 'TOUGH CALL': Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said that California should pass a controversial bill that would regulate artificial intelligence through having tech companies and AI developers be responsible for safety testing and implementing safeguards against cyberattacks. 'NEVER TIRED': While many musicians and celebrities have spoken out against A.I., rapper wiil.i.am is getting in on the technology, announcing a new artificial intelligence app called Raidio.FYI. AI HANDY HELPER: Meta's artificial intelligence chatbot, powered by Llama 3, is designed to make your online experience smoother and more enjoyable across platforms like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.