It is often desirable to distill the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller student models due to compute and memory constraints. One way to do this for classification tasks is via dataset synthesis, which can be accomplished by generating examples of each label from the LLM. Prior approaches to synthesis use few-shot prompting, which relies on the LLM's parametric knowledge to generate usable examples. However, this leads to issues of repetition, bias towards popular entities, and stylistic differences from human text. In this work, we propose Synthesize by Retrieval and Refinement (SynthesizRR), which uses retrieval augmentation to introduce variety into the dataset synthesis process: as retrieved passages vary, the LLM is seeded with different content to generate its examples. We empirically study the synthesis of six datasets, covering topic classification, sentiment analysis, tone detection, and humor, requiring complex synthesis strategies. We find that SynthesizRR greatly improves lexical and semantic diversity, similarity to human-written text, and distillation performance, when compared to 32-shot prompting and four prior approaches. We release our extensive codebase at https://github.com/amazon-science/synthesizrr

Contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful technique in audio-visual representation learning, leveraging the natural co-occurrence of audio and visual modalities in extensive web-scale video datasets to achieve significant advancements. However, conventional contrastive audio-visual learning methodologies often rely on aggregated representations derived through temporal aggregation, which neglects the intrinsic sequential nature of the data. This oversight raises concerns regarding the ability of standard approaches to capture and utilize fine-grained information within sequences, information that is vital for distinguishing between semantically similar yet distinct examples. In response to this limitation, we propose sequential contrastive audio-visual learning (SCAV), which contrasts examples based on their non-aggregated representation space using sequential distances. Retrieval experiments with the VGGSound and Music datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SCAV, showing 2-3x relative improvements against traditional aggregation-based contrastive learning and other methods from the literature. We also show that models trained with SCAV exhibit a high degree of flexibility regarding the metric employed for retrieval, allowing them to operate on a spectrum of efficiency-accuracy trade-offs, potentially making them applicable in multiple scenarios, from small- to large-scale retrieval.

The Music Emotion Recognition (MER) field has seen steady developments in recent years, with contributions from feature engineering, machine learning, and deep learning. The landscape has also shifted from audio-centric systems to bimodal ensembles that combine audio and lyrics. However, a severe lack of public and sizeable bimodal databases has hampered the development and improvement of bimodal audio-lyrics systems. This article proposes three new audio, lyrics, and bimodal MER research datasets, collectively called MERGE, created using a semi-automatic approach. To comprehensively assess the proposed datasets and establish a baseline for benchmarking, we conducted several experiments for each modality, using feature engineering, machine learning, and deep learning methodologies. In addition, we propose and validate fixed train-validate-test splits. The obtained results confirm the viability of the proposed datasets, achieving the best overall result of 79.21% F1-score for bimodal classification using a deep neural network.

This study explores real-world human interactions with large language models (LLMs) in diverse, unconstrained settings in contrast to most prior research focusing on ethically trimmed models like ChatGPT for specific tasks. We aim to understand the originator of toxicity. Our findings show that although LLMs are rightfully accused of providing toxic content, it is mostly demanded or at least provoked by humans who actively seek such content. Our manual analysis of hundreds of conversations judged as toxic by APIs commercial vendors, also raises questions with respect to current practices of what user requests are refused to answer. Furthermore, we conjecture based on multiple empirical indicators that humans exhibit a change of their mental model, switching from the mindset of interacting with a machine more towards interacting with a human.

Recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to being misled by false premise questions (FPQs), leading to errors in factual knowledge, know as factuality hallucination. Existing benchmarks that assess this vulnerability primarily rely on manual construction, resulting in limited scale and lack of scalability. In this work, we introduce an automated, scalable pipeline to create FPQs based on knowledge graphs (KGs). The first step is modifying true triplets extracted from KGs to create false premises. Subsequently, utilizing the stateof-the-art capabilities of GPTs, we generate semantically rich FPQs. Based on the proposed method, we present a comprehensive benchmark, the Knowledge Graph-based False Premise Questions (KG-FPQ), which contains approximately 178k FPQs across three knowledge domains, at six levels of confusability, and in two task formats. Using KG-FPQ, we conduct extensive evaluations on several representative LLMs and provide valuable insights. The KG-FPQ dataset and code are available Figure 1: Top: LLM correctly answers when faced with at https://github.com/yanxuzhu/KG-FPQ. a TPQ. Middle: LLM experiences factuality hallucination when faced with a FPQ.

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as hallucinations and sequence repetitions. We propose to view these behaviors as fallbacks that models exhibit under uncertainty, and investigate the connection between them. We categorize fallback behaviors -- sequence repetitions, degenerate text, and hallucinations -- and extensively analyze them in models from the same family that differ by the amount of pretraining tokens, parameter count, or the inclusion of instruction-following training. Our experiments reveal a clear and consistent ordering of fallback behaviors, across all these axes: the more advanced an LLM is (i.e., trained on more tokens, has more parameters, or instruction-tuned), its fallback behavior shifts from sequence repetitions, to degenerate text, and then to hallucinations. Moreover, the same ordering is observed throughout a single generation, even for the best-performing models; as uncertainty increases, models shift from generating hallucinations to producing degenerate text and then sequence repetitions. Lastly, we demonstrate that while common decoding techniques, such as random sampling, might alleviate some unwanted behaviors like sequence repetitions, they increase harder-to-detect hallucinations.

Injustice occurs when someone experiences unfair treatment or their rights are violated and is often due to the presence of implicit biases and prejudice such as stereotypes. The automated identification of injustice in text has received little attention, due in part to the fact that underlying implicit biases or stereotypes are rarely explicitly stated and that instances often occur unconsciously due to the pervasive nature of prejudice in society. Here, we describe a novel framework that combines the use of a fine-tuned BERT-based bias detection model, two stereotype detection models, and a lexicon-based approach to show that epistemological biases (i.e., words, which presupposes, entails, asserts, hedges, or boosts text to erode or assert a person's capacity as a knower) can assist with the automatic detection of injustice in text. The news media has many instances of injustice (i.e. discriminatory narratives), thus it is our use case here. We conduct and discuss an empirical qualitative research study which shows how the framework can be applied to detect injustices, even at higher volumes of data.

Misinformation about climate change causes numerous negative impacts, necessitating corrective responses. Psychological research has offered various strategies for reducing the influence of climate misinformation, such as the fact-myth-fallacy-fact-structure. However, practically implementing corrective interventions at scale represents a challenge. Automatic detection and correction of misinformation offers a solution to the misinformation problem. This study documents the development of large language models that accept as input a climate myth and produce a debunking that adheres to the fact-myth-fallacy-fact (``truth sandwich'') structure, by incorporating contrarian claim classification and fallacy detection into an LLM prompting framework. We combine open (Mixtral, Palm2) and proprietary (GPT-4) LLMs with prompting strategies of varying complexity. Experiments reveal promising performance of GPT-4 and Mixtral if combined with structured prompts. We identify specific challenges of debunking generation and human evaluation, and map out avenues for future work. We release a dataset of high-quality truth-sandwich debunkings, source code and a demo of the debunking system.

With the iOS 18 update coming this fall, it's like Apple had adulterers in mind. You can lock and even hide apps using your Face ID - a feature many have dubbed a'cheater's paradise.' I guarantee many coupled-up folks will'hide' dating apps or their preferred secret communication methods. Cheaters always find a way to sneak around, but not all are savvy enough to know about all the tech clues their wayward ways leave behind. Now, before we get to the clues… Snooping on someone's phone, computer or other tech never ends well.

While significant advancements have been made in music generation and differentiable sound synthesis within machine learning and computer audition, the simulation of instrument vibration guided by physical laws has been underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel model for simulating the spatio-temporal motion of nonlinear strings, integrating modal synthesis and spectral modeling within a neural network framework. Our model leverages physical properties and fundamental frequencies as inputs, outputting string states across time and space that solve the partial differential equation characterizing the nonlinear string. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves superior accuracy in string motion simulation compared to existing baseline architectures. The code and demo are available online.