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House DOGE Caucus eyes federal employees, government regulations in new goal-setting memo

FOX News

Fox News' senior national correspondent William La Jeunesse joins'America's Newsroom' to discuss Congress' history of killing pushes for cost-cutting. FIRST ON FOX: The Congressional Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Caucus is holding its second-ever meeting on Wednesday, where its leaders are expected to unveil a set of "principles" to guide the group in its mission to cut government waste. They outlined eight goals, some practical while others more symbolic, in a bid to ensure the caucus is in sync with the DOGE advisory panel set up by President-elect Donald Trump. "The federal government must serve the interests of taxpayers, and taxpayers are best served by a lean, efficient, transparent, and accountable bureaucracy," the first principle read, according to a draft memo obtained by Fox News Digital. The document also suggested both lofty and smaller-scale goals.


How to use AI to make you look younger - as Tom Hanks defends using the technology in his latest film

Daily Mail - Science & tech

From a daily skincare routine to Botox and face lifts, some people will do almost anything to turn back the hands of time. Now, some actors are going one step further and using a controversial technology to digitally'de-age' their appearance. In his latest film, Tom Hanks, 68, and his Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, 58, use AI to play the same couple at different stages in their lives. Hanks says: 'It's a great tool, because the super computing means you do not have to wait for post-production to do the purely technical visual view of it.' There has been growing concern over the use of AI in cinema, with many actors worrying that the technology will force humans out of the film industry.


Google investigated by UK watchdog over search dominance

The Guardian

Google is being investigated by the UK competition watchdog over the impact of its search and advertising practices on consumers, news publishers, businesses and rival search engines. The CMA estimates that search advertising costs the equivalent of nearly 500 for each UK household a year, which could be kept down with effective competition. The watchdog announced on Tuesday it will investigate if Google is blocking competitors from entering the market, and whether it is engaging in "potential exploitative conduct" by the mass collection of consumers' data without informed consent. It will also investigate whether Google is using its position as the pre-eminent search engine to give an unfair advantage to its own shopping and travel services. The investigation will take up to nine months and could result in Google being forced to share the mountains of data it collects with other businesses, or to give publishers greater control over how their content โ€“ books, newspaper articles and music โ€“ is used, including by Google's fast-growing artificial intelligence systems.


EditGAN: High-Precision Semantic Image Editing

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have recently found applications in image editing. However, most GAN-based image editing methods often require large-scale datasets with semantic segmentation annotations for training, only provide high-level control, or merely interpolate between different images. Here, we propose EditGAN, a novel method for high-quality, high-precision semantic image editing, allowing users to edit images by modifying their highly detailed part segmentation masks, e.g., drawing a new mask for the headlight of a car. EditGAN builds on a GAN framework that jointly models images and their semantic segmentation, requiring only a handful of labeled examples โ€“ making it a scalable tool for editing. Specifically, we embed an image into the GAN's latent space and perform conditional latent code optimization according to the segmentation edit, which effectively also modifies the image.


HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite their impressive ability to generate high-quality and fluent text, generative large language models (LLMs) also produce hallucinations: statements that are misaligned with established world knowledge or provided input context. However, measuring hallucination can be challenging, as having humans verify model generations on-the-fly is both expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we release HALoGEN, a comprehensive hallucination benchmark consisting of: (1) 10,923 prompts for generative models spanning nine domains including programming, scientific attribution, and summarization, and (2) automatic high-precision verifiers for each use case that decompose LLM generations into atomic units, and verify each unit against a high-quality knowledge source. We use this framework to evaluate ~150,000 generations from 14 language models, finding that even the best-performing models are riddled with hallucinations (sometimes up to 86% of generated atomic facts depending on the domain). We further define a novel error classification for LLM hallucinations based on whether they likely stem from incorrect recollection of training data (Type A errors), or incorrect knowledge in training data (Type B errors), or are fabrication (Type C errors). We hope our framework provides a foundation to enable the principled study of why generative models hallucinate, and advances the development of trustworthy large language models.


Tarsier2: Advancing Large Vision-Language Models from Detailed Video Description to Comprehensive Video Understanding

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce Tarsier2, a state-of-the-art large vision-language model (LVLM) designed for generating detailed and accurate video descriptions, while also exhibiting superior general video understanding capabilities. Tarsier2 achieves significant advancements through three key upgrades: (1) Scaling pre-training data from 11M to 40M video-text pairs, enriching both volume and diversity; (2) Performing fine-grained temporal alignment during supervised fine-tuning; (3) Using model-based sampling to automatically construct preference data and applying DPO training for optimization. Extensive experiments show that Tarsier2-7B consistently outperforms leading proprietary models, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, in detailed video description tasks. On the DREAM-1K benchmark, Tarsier2-7B improves F1 by 2.8\% over GPT-4o and 5.8\% over Gemini-1.5-Pro. In human side-by-side evaluations, Tarsier2-7B shows a +8.6\% performance advantage over GPT-4o and +24.9\% over Gemini-1.5-Pro. Tarsier2-7B also sets new state-of-the-art results across 15 public benchmarks, spanning tasks such as video question-answering, video grounding, hallucination test, and embodied question-answering, demonstrating its versatility as a robust generalist vision-language model.


MiniRAG: Towards Extremely Simple Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In on-device Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, the limitations of device computational capabilities and data privacy restrict the use of powerful models, such as large language models and advanced text embedding models, necessitating reliance on smaller alternatives. Consequently, currently used pipelines heavily rely on LLMs for a comprehensive understanding of text semantics when computing embedding similarity for retrieval, facing significant challenges. These smaller models often struggle to capture the precise semantic nuances within lengthy texts, complicating accurate matching. To tackle these challenges, it is essential to: i) Reduce the complexity of input content for generation, ensuring that semantic information is clear and concise; ii) Shorten the length of input content for smaller language models, facilitating improved comprehension and retrieval accuracy. Additionally, employing effective graph indexing structures can help mitigate performance deficiencies in semantic matching, thereby enhancing the overall retrieval process. In MiniRAG, we propose a Graph-based Knowledge Retrieval mechanism that effectively leverages the semantic-aware heterogeneous graph G constructed during the indexing phase, in conjunction with lightweight text embeddings, to achieve efficient knowledge retrieval. By employing a graph-based search design, we aim to ease the burden on precise semantic matching with large language models. This approach facilitates the acquisition of rich and accurate textual content at a low computational cost, thereby enhancing the ability of language models to generate precise responses.


Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge: A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Multi-UAV Planning and Lessons Learned

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose the Cooperative Aerial Robot Inspection Challenge (CARIC), a simulation-based benchmark for motion planning algorithms in heterogeneous multi-UAV systems. CARIC features UAV teams with complementary sensors, realistic constraints, and evaluation metrics prioritizing inspection quality and efficiency. It offers a ready-to-use perception-control software stack and diverse scenarios to support the development and evaluation of task allocation and motion planning algorithms. Competitions using CARIC were held at IEEE CDC 2023 and the IROS 2024 Workshop on Multi-Robot Perception and Navigation, attracting innovative solutions from research teams worldwide. This paper examines the top three teams from CDC 2023, analyzing their exploration, inspection, and task allocation strategies while drawing insights into their performance across scenarios. The results highlight the task's complexity and suggest promising directions for future research in cooperative multi-UAV systems.


CSL-L2M: Controllable Song-Level Lyric-to-Melody Generation Based on Conditional Transformer with Fine-Grained Lyric and Musical Controls

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Lyric-to-melody generation is a highly challenging task in the field of AI music generation. Due to the difficulty of learning strict yet weak correlations between lyrics and melodies, previous methods have suffered from weak controllability, low-quality and poorly structured generation. To address these challenges, we propose CSL-L2M, a controllable song-level lyric-to-melody generation method based on an in-attention Transformer decoder with fine-grained lyric and musical controls, which is able to generate full-song melodies matched with the given lyrics and user-specified musical attributes. Specifically, we first introduce REMI-Aligned, a novel music representation that incorporates strict syllable- and sentence-level alignments between lyrics and melodies, facilitating precise alignment modeling. Subsequently, sentence-level semantic lyric embeddings independently extracted from a sentence-wise Transformer encoder are combined with word-level part-of-speech embeddings and syllable-level tone embeddings as fine-grained controls to enhance the controllability of lyrics over melody generation. Then we introduce human-labeled musical tags, sentence-level statistical musical attributes, and learned musical features extracted from a pre-trained VQ-VAE as coarse-grained, fine-grained and high-fidelity controls, respectively, to the generation process, thereby enabling user control over melody generation. Finally, an in-attention Transformer decoder technique is leveraged to exert fine-grained control over the full-song melody generation with the aforementioned lyric and musical conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CSL-L2M outperforms the state-of-the-art models, generating melodies with higher quality, better controllability and enhanced structure. Demos and source code are available at https://lichaiustc.github.io/CSL-L2M/.


Mode-conditioned music learning and composition: a spiking neural network inspired by neuroscience and psychology

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Musical mode is one of the most critical element that establishes the framework of pitch organization and determines the harmonic relationships. Previous works often use the simplistic and rigid alignment method, and overlook the diversity of modes. However, in contrast to AI models, humans possess cognitive mechanisms for perceiving the various modes and keys. In this paper, we propose a spiking neural network inspired by brain mechanisms and psychological theories to represent musical modes and keys, ultimately generating musical pieces that incorporate tonality features. Specifically, the contributions are detailed as follows: 1) The model is designed with multiple collaborated subsystems inspired by the structures and functions of corresponding brain regions; 2)We incorporate mechanisms for neural circuit evolutionary learning that enable the network to learn and generate mode-related features in music, reflecting the cognitive processes involved in human music perception. 3)The results demonstrate that the proposed model shows a connection framework closely similar to the Krumhansl-Schmuckler model, which is one of the most significant key perception models in the music psychology domain. 4) Experiments show that the model can generate music pieces with characteristics of the given modes and keys. Additionally, the quantitative assessments of generated pieces reveals that the generating music pieces have both tonality characteristics and the melodic adaptability needed to generate diverse and musical content. By combining insights from neuroscience, psychology, and music theory with advanced neural network architectures, our research aims to create a system that not only learns and generates music but also bridges the gap between human cognition and artificial intelligence.