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Spotify Has a Fake-Band Problem. It's a Sign of Things to Come.

Slate

If you ask their shareholders, Spotify is in a great place right now. Ask anyone else, and it's a mess of scams, tone-deaf CEO messaging, and lawsuits. One of the weirdest scams that recently came to light involves (what else) A.I.-generated content. Here's the gist: Covers of popular songs were being inserted into large, publicly available playlists, hidden among dozens of other covers by real artists while racking up millions of listens and getting paid. The artists "performing" the covers--the Highway Outlaws, Waterfront Wranglers, Saltwater Saddles--all fit a certain pattern, with monthly listeners in the hundreds of thousands, zero social media footprint, and some very ChatGPT-sounding bios.


Putting a Fine-Art Touch on Fixer-Uppers

The New Yorker

You can view art (e.g., at a museum). "To go from photographing the getaway to making the getaway, it's like art becoming reality," the photographer Gray Malin said the other day. He was sitting behind the wheel of a blue Range Rover, dressed in a denim shirt, white jeans, and raffia loafers, cruising up the 101 to his latest work: a house he has renovated in Montecito, California, in order to rent to visitors. "How I vacation is how I want you to vacation," he said. As an artist, Malin specializes in glossy portraits of the good life: beaches, boats, a plane landing in St. Bart's.


I2EBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Instruction-based Image Editing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Significant progress has been made in the field of Instruction-based Image Editing (IIE). However, evaluating these models poses a significant challenge. A crucial requirement in this field is the establishment of a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for accurately assessing editing results and providing valuable insights for its further development. In response to this need, we propose I2EBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to automatically evaluate the quality of edited images produced by IIE models from multiple dimensions. I2EBench consists of 2,000+ images for editing, along with 4,000+ corresponding original and diverse instructions. It offers three distinctive characteristics: 1) Comprehensive Evaluation Dimensions: I2EBench comprises 16 evaluation dimensions that cover both high-level and low-level aspects, providing a comprehensive assessment of each IIE model. 2) Human Perception Alignment: To ensure the alignment of our benchmark with human perception, we conducted an extensive user study for each evaluation dimension. 3) Valuable Research Insights: By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of existing IIE models across the 16 dimensions, we offer valuable research insights to guide future development in the field. We will open-source I2EBench, including all instructions, input images, human annotations, edited images from all evaluated methods, and a simple script for evaluating the results from new IIE models. The code, dataset and generated images from all IIE models are provided in github: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.


RConE: Rough Cone Embedding for Multi-Hop Logical Query Answering on Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-hop query answering over a Knowledge Graph (KG) involves traversing one or more hops from the start node to answer a query. Path-based and logic-based methods are state-of-the-art for multi-hop question answering. The former is used in link prediction tasks. The latter is for answering complex logical queries. The logical multi-hop querying technique embeds the KG and queries in the same embedding space. The existing work incorporates First Order Logic (FOL) operators, such as conjunction ($\wedge$), disjunction ($\vee$), and negation ($\neg$), in queries. Though current models have most of the building blocks to execute the FOL queries, they cannot use the dense information of multi-modal entities in the case of Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs). We propose RConE, an embedding method to capture the multi-modal information needed to answer a query. The model first shortlists candidate (multi-modal) entities containing the answer. It then finds the solution (sub-entities) within those entities. Several existing works tackle path-based question-answering in MMKGs. However, to our knowledge, we are the first to introduce logical constructs in querying MMKGs and to answer queries that involve sub-entities of multi-modal entities as the answer. Extensive evaluation of four publicly available MMKGs indicates that RConE outperforms the current state-of-the-art.


Claim Verification in the Age of Large Language Models: A Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The large and ever-increasing amount of data available on the Internet coupled with the laborious task of manual claim and fact verification has sparked the interest in the development of automated claim verification systems. Several deep learning and transformer-based models have been proposed for this task over the years. With the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their superior performance in several NLP tasks, we have seen a surge of LLM-based approaches to claim verification along with the use of novel methods such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). In this survey, we present a comprehensive account of recent claim verification frameworks using LLMs. We describe the different components of the claim verification pipeline used in these frameworks in detail including common approaches to retrieval, prompting, and fine-tuning. Finally, we describe publicly available English datasets created for this task.


What Makes a Good Story and How Can We Measure It? A Comprehensive Survey of Story Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the development of artificial intelligence, particularly the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), the quantity and quality of automatically generated stories have significantly increased. This has led to the need for automatic story evaluation to assess the generative capabilities of computing systems and analyze the quality of both automatic-generated and human-written stories. Evaluating a story can be more challenging than other generation evaluation tasks. While tasks like machine translation primarily focus on assessing the aspects of fluency and accuracy, story evaluation demands complex additional measures such as overall coherence, character development, interestingness, etc. This requires a thorough review of relevant research. In this survey, we first summarize existing storytelling tasks, including text-to-text, visual-to-text, and text-to-visual. We highlight their evaluation challenges, identify various human criteria to measure stories, and present existing benchmark datasets. Then, we propose a taxonomy to organize evaluation metrics that have been developed or can be adopted for story evaluation. We also provide descriptions of these metrics, along with the discussion of their merits and limitations. Later, we discuss the human-AI collaboration for story evaluation and generation. Finally, we suggest potential future research directions, extending from story evaluation to general evaluations.


Hierarchical Generative Modeling of Melodic Vocal Contours in Hindustani Classical Music

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hindustani music is a performance-driven oral tradition that exhibits the rendition of rich melodic patterns. In this paper, we focus on generative modeling of singers' vocal melodies extracted from audio recordings, as the voice is musically prominent within the tradition. Prior generative work in Hindustani music models melodies as coarse discrete symbols which fails to capture the rich expressive melodic intricacies of singing. Thus, we propose to use a finely quantized pitch contour, as an intermediate representation for hierarchical audio modeling. We propose GaMaDHaNi, a modular two-level hierarchy, consisting of a generative model on pitch contours, and a pitch contour to audio synthesis model. We compare our approach to non-hierarchical audio models and hierarchical models that use a self-supervised intermediate representation, through a listening test and qualitative analysis. We also evaluate audio model's ability to faithfully represent the pitch contour input using Pearson correlation coefficient. By using pitch contours as an intermediate representation, we show that our model may be better equipped to listen and respond to musicians in a human-AI collaborative setting by highlighting two potential interaction use cases (1) primed generation, and (2) coarse pitch conditioning.


Netflix drops a gory new trailer for Terminator Zero, an anime from the studio behind Ghost in the Shell

Engadget

The new Terminator anime heading to Netflix looks absolutely brutal in a trailer that dropped this weekend. Terminator Zero is set in 2022 and 1997 (the year of Judgment Day, as described in Terminator 2) and focuses on new characters: Eiko and the scientist Malcom Lee, who are being hunted by a Terminator. The series was produced by Skydance and Production I.G., the Japanese animation studio behind Ghost in the Shell and Psycho-Pass. Fittingly, it drops on August 29, in a nod to the date of the fictional nuclear annihilation event. You can check out the new trailer below -- but just a heads up for anyone who isn't into anime gore, this clip is packed with it.


RoCP-GNN: Robust Conformal Prediction for Graph Neural Networks in Node-Classification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for predicting outcomes in graph-structured data. However, a notable limitation of GNNs is their inability to provide robust uncertainty estimates, which undermines their reliability in contexts where errors are costly. One way to address this issue is by providing prediction sets that contain the true label with a predefined probability margin. Our approach builds upon conformal prediction (CP), a framework that promises to construct statistically robust prediction sets or intervals. There are two primary challenges: first, given dependent data like graphs, it is unclear whether the critical assumption in CP - exchangeability - still holds when applied to node classification. Second, even if the exchangeability assumption is valid for conformalized link prediction, we need to ensure high efficiency, i.e., the resulting prediction set or the interval length is small enough to provide useful information. In this article, we propose a novel approach termed Robust Conformal Prediction for GNNs (RoCP-GNN), which integrates conformal prediction (CP) directly into the GNN training process. This method generates prediction sets, instead of just point predictions, that are valid at a user-defined confidence level, assuming only exchangeability. Our approach robustly predicts outcomes with any predictive GNN model while quantifying the uncertainty in predictions within the realm of graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL). Experimental results demonstrate that GNN models with size loss provide a statistically significant increase in performance. We validate our approach on standard graph benchmark datasets by coupling it with various state-of-the-art GNNs in node classification. The code will be made available after publication.


How did Donald Trump end up posting Taylor Swift deepfakes?

The Guardian

When Donald Trump shared a slew of AI-generated images this week that falsely depicted Taylor Swift and her fans endorsing his campaign for president, the former US president was amplifying the work of a murky non-profit with aspirations to bankroll rightwing media influencers and a history of spreading misinformation. Several of the images Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, which showed digitally rendered young women in "Swifties for Trump" T-shirts, were the products of the John Milton Freedom Foundation. The group's day-to-day operations appear to revolve around sharing engagement bait on X and seeking millions from donors for a "fellowship program" chaired by a high school sophomore that would award 100,000 to Twitter personalities such as Glenn Greenwald, Andy Ngo and Lara Logan, according to a review of the group's tax records, investor documents and social media output. The John Milton Freedom Foundation did not return request for comment to a set of questions about its operations and fellowship program. After months of retweeting conservative media influencers and echoing Elon Musk's claims that freedom of speech is under attack from leftwing forces, one of the organization's messages found its way to Trump and then his millions of supporters.