Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Your favorite streaming app may soon no longer be just a "streaming app" per se but an overall entertainment app that functions as a cross-medium platform of its own--and a necessity on both your smartphone and smart TV. On Monday, Peacock, the NBCUniversal service that catapulted off a successful 2024 to become one of the most popular streamers in the world, rolled out a bunch of new goodies in its latest mobile update, part of the testing phase for a gradual expansion of platform features. Subscribers will now have access to a significant array of pilot programs: new engines for discovery and for personalized recommendations, bonus clips for beloved shows, and even NBC-themed "mini-games" that will be updated daily to adapt to the latest broadcasts in the sports and reality-TV schedules. "After presenting the Paris Olympics on Peacock and testing interactive features like'Choose Your Reality' for shows like Real Housewives, we've learned that fans want to have options in their viewing experience and dive deeper into their favorite content," John Jelley, senior vice president of product and user experience at Peacock, told me. He added that the platform is "piloting new features" to allow users to interact with sports and TV shows "so they can indulge their obsessions in a way that's fun, super simple, and all in one place."

[Notice: This version is outdated. Recent research contradicts some key claims; we are working on a major revision with more nuanced analysis. Please wait for the updated version.] While LLMs excel at multi-hop questions (e.g. "Who is the spouse of the performer of Imagine?") when using chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT), they struggle when forced to reason internally (without CoT). Previous work on the size and nature of this gap produced mixed evidence with inconclusive results. In this paper, we introduce a controlled setting for investigating two-hop reasoning in LLMs, where the above-chance performance constitutes undeniable evidence for latent reasoning. We fine-tune LLMs (including Llama 3 8B Instruct and GPT-4o) on fictional facts and confirm that they generalize to answering two-hop questions about them using CoT. We find that models can perform latent reasoning when facts appear together during training or in the prompt. However, to our surprise, models completely fail at two-hop reasoning without CoT when learned facts only appear in different documents, achieving chance-level accuracy and chance-level test loss. We call this complete failure to compose separately learned facts the Two-Hop Curse. Moreover, we evaluate 9 frontier LLMs on real-world facts, finding that models completely fail at two-hop no-CoT reasoning for over half of question categories while maintaining partial success with CoT across most categories. These results suggest that LLMs lack a general capability for latent multi-hop reasoning independent of the question type.

Visual prompt, a pair of before-and-after edited images, can convey indescribable imagery transformations and prosper in image editing. However, current visual prompt methods rely on a pretrained text-guided image-to-image generative model that requires a triplet of text, before, and after images for retraining over a text-to-image model. Such crafting triplets and retraining processes limit the scalability and generalization of editing. In this paper, we present a framework based on any single text-to-image model without reliance on the explicit image-to-image model thus enhancing the generalizability and scalability. Specifically, by leveraging the probability-flow ordinary equation, we construct a diffusion bridge to transfer the distribution between before-and-after images under the text guidance. By optimizing the text via the bridge, the framework adaptively textualizes the editing transformation conveyed by visual prompts into text embeddings without other models. Meanwhile, we introduce differential attention control during text optimization, which disentangles the text embedding from the invariance of the before-and-after images and makes it solely capture the delicate transformation and generalize to edit various images. Experiments on real images validate competitive results on the generalization, contextual coherence, and high fidelity for delicate editing with just one image pair as the visual prompt.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has recently become a very popular task for Large Language Models (LLMs). Evaluating them on multi-turn RAG conversations, where the system is asked to generate a response to a question in the context of a preceding conversation is an important and often overlooked task with several additional challenges. We present MTRAG: an end-to-end human-generated multi-turn RAG benchmark that reflects several real-world properties across diverse dimensions for evaluating the full RAG pipeline. MTRAG contains 110 conversations averaging 7.7 turns each across four domains for a total of 842 tasks. We also explore automation paths via synthetic data and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our human and automatic evaluations show that even state-of-the-art LLM RAG systems struggle on MTRAG. We demonstrate the need for strong retrieval and generation systems that can handle later turns, unanswerable questions, non-standalone questions, and multiple domains. MTRAG is available at https://github.com/ibm/mt-rag-benchmark.

A promising tool for addressing fake news detection is Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, most existing GNN-based methods rely on binary classification, categorizing news as either real or fake. Additionally, traditional GNN models use a static neighborhood for each node, making them susceptible to issues like over-squashing. In this paper, we introduce a novel model named Decision-based Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (DHGAT) for fake news detection in a semi-supervised setting. DHGAT effectively addresses the limitations of traditional GNNs by dynamically optimizing and selecting the neighborhood type for each node in every layer. It represents news data as a heterogeneous graph where nodes (news items) are connected by various types of edges. The architecture of DHGAT consists of a decision network that determines the optimal neighborhood type and a representation network that updates node embeddings based on this selection. As a result, each node learns an optimal and task-specific computational graph, enhancing both the accuracy and efficiency of the fake news detection process. We evaluate DHGAT on the LIAR dataset, a large and challenging dataset for multi-class fake news detection, which includes news items categorized into six classes. Our results demonstrate that DHGAT outperforms existing methods, improving accuracy by approximately 4% and showing robustness with limited labeled data.

This study seeks to enhance academic integrity by providing tools to detect AI-generated content in student work using advanced technologies. The findings promote transparency and accountability, helping educators maintain ethical standards and supporting the responsible integration of AI in education. A key contribution of this work is the generation of the CyberHumanAI dataset, which has 1000 observations, 500 of which are written by humans and the other 500 produced by ChatGPT. We evaluate various machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms on the CyberHumanAI dataset comparing human-written and AI-generated content from Large Language Models (LLMs) (i.e., ChatGPT). Results demonstrate that traditional ML algorithms, specifically XGBoost and Random Forest, achieve high performance (83% and 81% accuracies respectively). Results also show that classifying shorter content seems to be more challenging than classifying longer content. Further, using Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) we identify discriminative features influencing the ML model's predictions, where human-written content tends to use a practical language (e.g., use and allow). Meanwhile AI-generated text is characterized by more abstract and formal terms (e.g., realm and employ). Finally, a comparative analysis with GPTZero show that our narrowly focused, simple, and fine-tuned model can outperform generalized systems like GPTZero. The proposed model achieved approximately 77.5% accuracy compared to GPTZero's 48.5% accuracy when tasked to classify Pure AI, Pure Human, and mixed class. GPTZero showed a tendency to classify challenging and small-content cases as either mixed or unrecognized while our proposed model showed a more balanced performance across the three classes. Keywords: LLMs, Digital Technology, Education, Plagiarism, Human AI 1. Introduction Our communication practices are quickly changing due to the emergence of generative AI models.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as GPT4o, have shown strong capabilities in visual reasoning and explanation generation. However, despite these strengths, they face significant challenges in the increasingly critical task of Image Forgery Detection and Localization (IFDL). Moreover, existing IFDL methods are typically limited to the learning of low-level semantic-agnostic clues and merely provide a single outcome judgment. To tackle these issues, we propose ForgeryGPT, a novel framework that advances the IFDL task by capturing high-order forensics knowledge correlations of forged images from diverse linguistic feature spaces, while enabling explainable generation and interactive dialogue through a newly customized Large Language Model (LLM) architecture. Specifically, ForgeryGPT enhances traditional LLMs by integrating the Mask-Aware Forgery Extractor, which enables the excavating of precise forgery mask information from input images and facilitating pixel-level understanding of tampering artifacts. The Mask-Aware Forgery Extractor consists of a Forgery Localization Expert (FL-Expert) and a Mask Encoder, where the FL-Expert is augmented with an Object-agnostic Forgery Prompt and a Vocabulary-enhanced Vision Encoder, allowing for effectively capturing of multi-scale fine-grained forgery details. To enhance its performance, we implement a three-stage training strategy, supported by our designed Mask-Text Alignment and IFDL Task-Specific Instruction Tuning datasets, which align vision-language modalities and improve forgery detection and instruction-following capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

LG has unveiled its OLED evo TV lineup for 2025 and is showing them off at CES this year, along with its other home entertainment products. The new models are powered by the company's latest α (Alpha) 11 AI processor Gen2, with deep learning algorithms that give the TVs the ability to sharpen the visuals of low-resolution and low-quality images. LG says the new TVs are also the industry's first with 4K resolution and a refresh rate of 165Hz, as certified by NVIDIA G-SYNC and AMD FreeSync Premium. That enables the models to delivery stutter-free gameplay with minimal input lag. The company has upgraded its Brightness Booster Ultimate technology for the new OLED TVs, which means they can achieve brightness three times higher than conventional OLED models.

"The Ukrainian army launched a drone strike on a civilian car carrying Izvestia's freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov," the news outlet reported on its Telegram channel. "The car was located far from the line of contact." The vehicle was returning from covering shelling in the Russian-held city of Gorlivka when it was hit, Russia's state RIA news agency said. Two RIA journalists were wounded in the attack, the agency added. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the incident "deliberate murder".

The Russian media outlet Izvestia said a Ukrainian drone attack killed its freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov. Data previously provided by the Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 15 journalists killed since Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.