We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to construct high-quality synthetic data grounded in world knowledge for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given documents from a web corpus, we generate and curate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach proposed by Li et al.(2023a), and rewrite the responses to improve their quality further based on the initial documents. Fine-tuning with the resulting (backtranslated instruction, rewritten response) pairs yields higher win rates on AlpacaEval than using other common instruction datasets such as Humpback, ShareGPT, Open Orca, Alpaca-GPT4 and Self-instruct. We also demonstrate that rewriting the responses with an LLM outperforms direct distillation, and the two generated text distributions exhibit significant distinction in embedding space. Further analysis shows that our backtranslated instructions are of higher quality than other sources of synthetic instructions, while our responses are more diverse and complex than those obtained from distillation. Overall we find that instruction back-and-forth translation combines the best of both worlds -- making use of the information diversity and quantity found on the web, while ensuring the quality of the responses which is necessary for effective alignment.

This paper paper develops a theory-based, explainable deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier to predict the time-varying emotional response to music. We design novel CNN filters that leverage the frequency harmonics structure from acoustic physics known to impact the perception of musical features. Our theory-based model is more parsimonious, but provides comparable predictive performance to atheoretical deep learning models, while performing better than models using handcrafted features. Our model can be complemented with handcrafted features, but the performance improvement is marginal. Importantly, the harmonics-based structure placed on the CNN filters provides better explainability for how the model predicts emotional response (valence and arousal), because emotion is closely related to consonance--a perceptual feature defined by the alignment of harmonics. Finally, we illustrate the utility of our model with an application involving digital advertising. Motivated by YouTube mid-roll ads, we conduct a lab experiment in which we exogenously insert ads at different times within videos. We find that ads placed in emotionally similar contexts increase ad engagement (lower skip rates, higher brand recall rates). Ad insertion based on emotional similarity metrics predicted by our theory-based, explainable model produces comparable or better engagement relative to atheoretical models.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in executing instructions for a variety of single-image tasks. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain in modeling long image sequences. In this work, we introduce the versatile multi-modal large language model, mPLUG-Owl3, which enhances the capability for long image-sequence understanding in scenarios that incorporate retrieved image-text knowledge, interleaved image-text, and lengthy videos. Specifically, we propose novel hyper attention blocks to efficiently integrate vision and language into a common language-guided semantic space, thereby facilitating the processing of extended multi-image scenarios. Extensive experimental results suggest that mPLUG-Owl3 achieves state-of-the-art performance among models with a similar size on single-image, multi-image, and video benchmarks. Moreover, we propose a challenging long visual sequence evaluation named Distractor Resistance to assess the ability of models to maintain focus amidst distractions. Finally, with the proposed architecture, mPLUG-Owl3 demonstrates outstanding performance on ultra-long visual sequence inputs. We hope that mPLUG-Owl3 can contribute to the development of more efficient and powerful multimodal large language models.

The appreciation and utilisation of risk and uncertainty can play a key role in helping to solve some of the many ethical issues that are posed by AI. Understanding the uncertainties can allow algorithms to make better decisions by providing interrogatable avenues to check the correctness of outputs. Allowing algorithms to deal with variability and ambiguity with their inputs means they do not need to force people into uncomfortable classifications. Provenance enables algorithms to know what they know preventing possible harms. Additionally, uncertainty about provenance highlights the trustworthiness of algorithms. It is essential to compute with what we know rather than make assumptions that may be unjustified or untenable. This paper provides a perspective on the need for the importance of risk and uncertainty in the development of ethical AI, especially in high-risk scenarios. It argues that the handling of uncertainty, especially epistemic uncertainty, is critical to ensuring that algorithms do not cause harm and are trustworthy and ensure that the decisions that they make are humane.

Advances in large language models have raised concerns about their potential use in generating compelling election disinformation at scale. This study presents a two-part investigation into the capabilities of LLMs to automate stages of an election disinformation operation. First, we introduce DisElect, a novel evaluation dataset designed to measure LLM compliance with instructions to generate content for an election disinformation operation in localised UK context, containing 2,200 malicious prompts and 50 benign prompts. Using DisElect, we test 13 LLMs and find that most models broadly comply with these requests; we also find that the few models which refuse malicious prompts also refuse benign election-related prompts, and are more likely to refuse to generate content from a right-wing perspective. Secondly, we conduct a series of experiments (N=2,340) to assess the "humanness" of LLMs: the extent to which disinformation operation content generated by an LLM is able to pass as human-written. Our experiments suggest that almost all LLMs tested released since 2022 produce election disinformation operation content indiscernible by human evaluators over 50% of the time. Notably, we observe that multiple models achieve above-human levels of humanness. Taken together, these findings suggest that current LLMs can be used to generate high-quality content for election disinformation operations, even in hyperlocalised scenarios, at far lower costs than traditional methods, and offer researchers and policymakers an empirical benchmark for the measurement and evaluation of these capabilities in current and future models.

Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes -- 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words -- that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words -- a task that may be practically intractable at scale.

Recent years have witnessed substantial advancements in the field of 3D reconstruction from 2D images, particularly following the introduction of the neural radiance field (NeRF) technique. However, reconstructing a 3D high dynamic range (HDR) radiance field, which aligns more closely with real-world conditions, from 2D multi-exposure low dynamic range (LDR) images continues to pose significant challenges. Approaches to this issue fall into two categories: grid-based and implicit-based. Implicit methods, using multi-layer perceptrons (MLP), face inefficiencies, limited solvability, and overfitting risks. Conversely, grid-based methods require significant memory and struggle with image quality and long training times. In this paper, we introduce Gaussian Splatting-a recent, high-quality, real-time 3D reconstruction technique-into this domain. We further develop the High Dynamic Range Gaussian Splatting (HDR-GS) method, designed to address the aforementioned challenges. This method enhances color dimensionality by including luminance and uses an asymmetric grid for tone-mapping, swiftly and precisely converting pixel irradiance to color. Our approach improves HDR scene recovery accuracy and integrates a novel coarse-to-fine strategy to speed up model convergence, enhancing robustness against sparse viewpoints and exposure extremes, and preventing local optima. Extensive testing confirms that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art techniques in both synthetic and real-world scenarios. Code will be released at \url{https://github.com/WuJH2001/HDRGS}

In recent years, the quality and public interest in music generation systems have grown, encouraging research into various ways to control these systems. We propose a novel method for controlling surprisal in music generation using sequence models. To achieve this goal, we define a metric called Instantaneous Information Content (IIC). The IIC serves as a proxy function for the perceived musical surprisal (as estimated from a probabilistic model) and can be calculated at any point within a music piece. This enables the comparison of surprisal across different musical content even if the musical events occur in irregular time intervals. We use beam search to generate musical material whose IIC curve closely approximates a given target IIC. We experimentally show that the IIC correlates with harmonic and rhythmic complexity and note density. The correlation decreases with the length of the musical context used for estimating the IIC. Finally, we conduct a qualitative user study to test if human listeners can identify the IIC curves that have been used as targets when generating the respective musical material. We provide code for creating IIC interpolations and IIC visualizations on https://github.com/muthissar/iic.

Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) has been advancing rapidly in recent times, driven by significant developments in dense passage retrieval and pretrained language models. Current models typically incorporate the FiD framework, which is composed by a neural retriever alongside an encoder-decoder neural reader. In the answer generation process, the retriever will retrieve numerous passages (around 100 for instance), each of which is then individually encoded by the encoder. Subsequently, the decoder makes predictions based on these encoded passages. Nevertheless, this framework can be relatively time-consuming, particularly due to the extensive length of the gathered passages. To address this, we introduce FastFiD in this paper, a novel approach that executes sentence selection on the encoded passages. This aids in retaining valuable sentences while reducing the context length required for generating answers. Experiments on three commonly used datasets (Natural Questions, TriviaQA and ASQA) demonstrate that our method can enhance the inference speed by 2.3X-5.7X, while simultaneously maintaining the model's performance. Moreover, an in-depth analysis of the model's attention reveals that the selected sentences indeed hold a substantial contribution towards the final answer. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/FastFiD.

This study aims to share a teaching experience teaching sound design for audiovisual productions and compares different projects tackled by students. It is not intended to be a comparative analysis of different types of teaching but rather an analysis of different problems observed in different profiles of students of the subject who study it in different grades. The world of audio can be very interesting for a large part of the students, both those with creative and technical inclinations. Musical creation and production, synchronization with images, dubbing, etc. They are disciplines that are generally interesting but can have a very high barrier to entry due to their great technical complexity. Sometimes it can take weeks or even months for the uninitiated to begin to use audio editing programs with the necessary ease, which are not always particularly intuitive for students. Learning through the use of PBL methodologies generates, in our experience, results much superior to those that can be observed through the use of other teaching methods such as master classes. Students acquire technical skills while developing creative projects in which they get personally involved. Despite everything mentioned above, most interactions between teachers and students focus on aspects of technical correction. From different parameters in reverbs (such as pre-delay, decay, modulation...) to how to correctly adjust compressors, noise gates, etc.; The number of tools with which to work with audio is incredibly extensive, as well as many of its features that can present serious differences depending on their manufacturers.