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Telar and TelarKG: Data-Driven Insights into Chile's Constitutional Process

Communications of the ACM

Thanks to a partnership with CNN Chile, our analyses were aired every Monday as part of a weekly program devoted to Plataforma Telar, with more details posted on our website and social media accounts. Our results were regularly met with high engagement, shared by media companies and personalities, and even by convention members.a Plataforma Telar thus had a noticeable impact on how people understood the convention (for an analysis of how data-driven political communication impacts public opinion, see Daud2). Given the diversity, scale and dynamics of the data, our cloud infrastructure was increasingly becoming unwieldy, with relevant information about particular entities (for example, convention members) scattered around different tables. In order to better structure these data, we structured these data as a knowledge graph, called TelarKG, which could then be queried using MillenniumDB: an open-source graph database also developed within the IMFD.


Cluster and Separate: a GNN Approach to Voice and Staff Prediction for Score Engraving

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper approaches the problem of separating the notes from a quantized symbolic music piece (e.g., a MIDI file) into multiple voices and staves. This is a fundamental part of the larger task of music score engraving (or score typesetting), which aims to produce readable musical scores for human performers. We focus on piano music and support homophonic voices, i.e., voices that can contain chords, and cross-staff voices, which are notably difficult tasks that have often been overlooked in previous research. We propose an end-to-end system based on graph neural networks that clusters notes that belong to the same chord and connects them with edges if they are part of a voice. Our results show clear and consistent improvements over a previous approach on two datasets of different styles. To aid the qualitative analysis of our results, we support the export in symbolic music formats and provide a direct visualization of our outputs graph over the musical score. All code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/CPJKU/piano_svsep


Guitar Chord Diagram Suggestion for Western Popular Music

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Chord diagrams are used by guitar players to show where and how to play a chord on the fretboard. They are useful to beginners learning chords or for sharing the hand positions required to play a song.However, the diagrams presented on guitar learning toolsare usually selected from an existing databaseand rarely represent the actual positions used by performers.In this paper, we propose a tool which suggests a chord diagram for achord label,taking into account the diagram of the previous chord.Based on statistical analysis of the DadaGP and mySongBook datasets, we show that some chord diagrams are over-represented in western popular musicand that some chords can be played in more than 20 different ways.We argue that taking context into account can improve the variety and the quality of chord diagram suggestion, and compare this approach with a model taking only the current chord label into account.We show that adding previous context improves the F1-score on this task by up to 27% and reduces the propensity of the model to suggest standard open chords.We also define the notion of texture in the context of chord diagrams andshow through a variety of metrics that our model improves textureconsistencywith the previous diagram.


Employing Sentence Space Embedding for Classification of Data Stream from Fake News Domain

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Tabular data is considered the last unconquered castle of deep learning, yet the task of data stream classification is stated to be an equally important and demanding research area. Due to the temporal constraints, it is assumed that deep learning methods are not the optimal solution for application in this field. However, excluding the entire -- and prevalent -- group of methods seems rather rash given the progress that has been made in recent years in its development. For this reason, the following paper is the first to present an approach to natural language data stream classification using the sentence space method, which allows for encoding text into the form of a discrete digital signal. This allows the use of convolutional deep networks dedicated to image classification to solve the task of recognizing fake news based on text data. Based on the real-life Fakeddit dataset, the proposed approach was compared with state-of-the-art algorithms for data stream classification based on generalization ability and time complexity.


Thorns and Algorithms: Navigating Generative AI Challenges Inspired by Giraffes and Acacias

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The interplay between humans and Generative AI (Gen AI) draws an insightful parallel with the dynamic relationship between giraffes and acacias on the African Savannah. Just as giraffes navigate the acacia's thorny defenses to gain nourishment, humans engage with Gen AI, maneuvering through ethical and operational challenges to harness its benefits. This paper explores how, like young giraffes that are still mastering their environment, humans are in the early stages of adapting to and shaping Gen AI. It delves into the strategies humans are developing and refining to help mitigate risks such as bias, misinformation, and privacy breaches, that influence and shape Gen AI's evolution. While the giraffe-acacia analogy aptly frames human-AI relations, it contrasts nature's evolutionary perfection with the inherent flaws of human-made technology and the tendency of humans to misuse it, giving rise to many ethical dilemmas. Through the HHH framework we identify pathways to embed values of helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness in AI development, fostering safety-aligned agents that resonate with human values. This narrative presents a cautiously optimistic view of human resilience and adaptability, illustrating our capacity to harness technologies and implement safeguards effectively, without succumbing to their perils. It emphasises a symbiotic relationship where humans and AI continually shape each other for mutual benefit.


BandControlNet: Parallel Transformers-based Steerable Popular Music Generation with Fine-Grained Spatiotemporal Features

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Controllable music generation promotes the interaction between humans and composition systems by projecting the users' intent on their desired music. The challenge of introducing controllability is an increasingly important issue in the symbolic music generation field. When building controllable generative popular multi-instrument music systems, two main challenges typically present themselves, namely weak controllability and poor music quality. To address these issues, we first propose spatiotemporal features as powerful and fine-grained controls to enhance the controllability of the generative model. In addition, an efficient music representation called REMI_Track is designed to convert multitrack music into multiple parallel music sequences and shorten the sequence length of each track with Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) techniques. Subsequently, we release BandControlNet, a conditional model based on parallel Transformers, to tackle the multiple music sequences and generate high-quality music samples that are conditioned to the given spatiotemporal control features. More concretely, the two specially designed modules of BandControlNet, namely structure-enhanced self-attention (SE-SA) and Cross-Track Transformer (CTT), are utilized to strengthen the resulting musical structure and inter-track harmony modeling respectively. Experimental results tested on two popular music datasets of different lengths demonstrate that the proposed BandControlNet outperforms other conditional music generation models on most objective metrics in terms of fidelity and inference speed and shows great robustness in generating long music samples. The subjective evaluations show BandControlNet trained on short datasets can generate music with comparable quality to state-of-the-art models, while outperforming them significantly using longer datasets.


Conquering images and the basis of transformative action

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Our rapid immersion into online life has made us all ill. Through the generation, personalization, and dissemination of enchanting imagery, artificial technologies commodify the minds and hearts of the masses with nauseating precision and scale. Online networks, artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and digital news feeds fine-tune our beliefs and pursuits by establishing narratives that subdivide and polarize our communities and identities. Meanwhile those commanding these technologies conquer the final frontiers of our interior lives, social relations, earth, and cosmos. In the Attention Economy, our agency is restricted and our vitality is depleted for their narcissistic pursuits and pleasures. Generative AI empowers the forces that homogenize and eradicate life, not through some stupid "singularity" event, but through devaluing human creativity, labor, and social life. Using a fractured lens, we will examine how narratives and networks influence us on mental, social, and algorithmic levels. We will discuss how atomizing imagery -- ideals and pursuits that alienate, rather than invigorate the individual -- hijack people's agency to sustain the forces that destroy them. We will discover how empires build digital networks that optimize society and embolden narcissists to enforce social binaries that perpetuate the ceaseless expansion of consumption, exploitation, and hierarchy. Structural hierarchy in the world is reified through hierarchy in our beliefs and thinking. Only by seeing images as images and appreciating the similarity shared by opposing narratives can we facilitate transformative action and break away from the militaristic systems plaguing our lives.


Addressing Image Hallucination in Text-to-Image Generation through Factual Image Retrieval

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Text-to-image generation has shown remarkable progress with the emergence of diffusion models. However, these models often generate factually inconsistent images, failing to accurately reflect the factual information and common sense conveyed by the input text prompts. We refer to this issue as Image hallucination. Drawing from studies on hallucinations in language models, we classify this problem into three types and propose a methodology that uses factual images retrieved from external sources to generate realistic images. Depending on the nature of the hallucination, we employ off-the-shelf image editing tools, either InstructPix2Pix or IP-Adapter, to leverage factual information from the retrieved image. This approach enables the generation of images that accurately reflect the facts and common sense.


BiasScanner: Automatic Detection and Classification of News Bias to Strengthen Democracy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing consumption of news online in the 21st century coincided with increased publication of disinformation, biased reporting, hate speech and other unwanted Web content. We describe BiasScanner, an application that aims to strengthen democracy by supporting news consumers with scrutinizing news articles they are reading online. BiasScanner contains a server-side pre-trained large language model to identify biased sentences of news articles and a front-end Web browser plug-in. At the time of writing, BiasScanner can identify and classify more than two dozen types of media bias at the sentence level, making it the most fine-grained model and only deployed application (automatic system in use) of its kind. It was implemented in a light-weight and privacy-respecting manner, and in addition to highlighting likely biased sentence it also provides explanations for each classification decision as well as a summary analysis for each news article. While prior research has addressed news bias detection, we are not aware of any work that resulted in a deployed browser plug-in (c.f. also biasscanner.org for a Web demo).


Learning to Generate Answers with Citations via Factual Consistency Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate, impeding their reliability in mission-critical situations. One approach to address this issue is to provide citations to relevant sources alongside generated content, enhancing the verifiability of generations. However, citing passages accurately in answers remains a substantial challenge. This paper proposes a weakly-supervised fine-tuning method leveraging factual consistency models (FCMs). Our approach alternates between generating texts with citations and supervised fine-tuning with FCM-filtered citation data. Focused learning is integrated into the objective, directing the fine-tuning process to emphasise the factual unit tokens, as measured by an FCM. Results on the ALCE few-shot citation benchmark with various instruction-tuned LLMs demonstrate superior performance compared to in-context learning, vanilla supervised fine-tuning, and state-of-the-art methods, with an average improvement of $34.1$, $15.5$, and $10.5$ citation F$_1$ points, respectively. Moreover, in a domain transfer setting we show that the obtained citation generation ability robustly transfers to unseen datasets. Notably, our citation improvements contribute to the lowest factual error rate across baselines.