Media
10 voice scams to watch out for – and your quick action plan
Fox News' Danamarie McNicholl reports alongside the Secret Service as they detect and prevent the use of credit card skimmers, traced to a crime ring led in Eastern Europe. You've heard the stories … A CEO was conned out of 233,000 when someone copied the voice of his parent company's boss. A 75-year-old woman nearly lost 27,500, thinking her grandson was in trouble. With as little as 4, anyone can copy a voice with super-cheap, super-powerful AI software. I've got the inside scoop on tricks these scammers use so you don't fall for it.
Morgan Freeman calls AI deepfake a 'scam' after his voice is replicated on TikTok
The Fox News contributor argued law enforcement is good for all communities to ensure public safety. With one of the most discernible voices in Hollywood, Morgan Freeman certainly has his money where his mouth is. So, it's no surprise that the revered actor took issue with a video circulating on the social platform TikTok, with a voice that was packaged as his own. "Welcome to my niece's day-in-life, narrated by me, Morgan Freeman," the video begins. The creator captioned her post in part, "Uncle Mo has been booked and busy, but i finally got him to narrate my trip!" ACTOR MORGAN FREEMAN DERIDES BLACK HISTORY MONTH: 'MY HISTORY IS AMERICAN HISTORY' Morgan Freeman rebuked a TikTok that claimed to be narrated by him.
ANNA: Abstractive Text-to-Image Synthesis with Filtered News Captions
Ramakrishnan, Aashish Anantha, Huang, Sharon X., Lee, Dongwon
Advancements in Text-to-Image synthesis over recent years have focused more on improving the quality of generated samples using datasets with descriptive prompts. However, real-world image-caption pairs present in domains such as news data do not use simple and directly descriptive captions. With captions containing information on both the image content and underlying contextual cues, they become abstractive in nature. In this paper, we launch ANNA, an Abstractive News captioNs dAtaset extracted from online news articles in a variety of different contexts. We explore the capabilities of current Text-to-Image synthesis models to generate news domain-specific images using abstractive captions by benchmarking them on ANNA, in both standard training and transfer learning settings. The generated images are judged on the basis of contextual relevance, visual quality, and perceptual similarity to ground-truth image-caption pairs. Through our experiments, we show that techniques such as transfer learning achieve limited success in understanding abstractive captions but still fail to consistently learn the relationships between content and context features. The Dataset is available at https://github.com/aashish2000/ANNA .
A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms
Abercrombie, Gavin, Benbouzid, Djalel, Giudici, Paolo, Golpayegani, Delaram, Hernandez, Julio, Noro, Pierre, Pandit, Harshvardhan, Paraschou, Eva, Pownall, Charlie, Prajapati, Jyoti, Sayre, Mark A., Sengupta, Ushnish, Suriyawongkul, Arthit, Thelot, Ruby, Vei, Sofia, Waltersdorfer, Laura
This paper introduces a collaborative, human-centered taxonomy of AI, algorithmic and automation harms. We argue that existing taxonomies, while valuable, can be narrow, unclear, typically cater to practitioners and government, and often overlook the needs of the wider public. Drawing on existing taxonomies and a large repository of documented incidents, we propose a taxonomy that is clear and understandable to a broad set of audiences, as well as being flexible, extensible, and interoperable. Through iterative refinement with topic experts and crowdsourced annotation testing, we propose a taxonomy that can serve as a powerful tool for civil society organisations, educators, policymakers, product teams and the general public. By fostering a greater understanding of the real-world harms of AI and related technologies, we aim to increase understanding, empower NGOs and individuals to identify and report violations, inform policy discussions, and encourage responsible technology development and deployment.
Nullpointer at ArAIEval Shared Task: Arabic Propagandist Technique Detection with Token-to-Word Mapping in Sequence Tagging
This paper investigates the optimization of propaganda technique detection in Arabic text, including tweets \& news paragraphs, from ArAIEval shared task 1. Our approach involves fine-tuning the AraBERT v2 model with a neural network classifier for sequence tagging. Experimental results show relying on the first token of the word for technique prediction produces the best performance. In addition, incorporating genre information as a feature further enhances the model's performance. Our system achieved a score of 25.41, placing us 4$^{th}$ on the leaderboard. Subsequent post-submission improvements further raised our score to 26.68.
Enhancing the Capability and Robustness of Large Language Models through Reinforcement Learning-Driven Query Refinement
Huang, Zisu, Wang, Xiaohua, Zhang, Feiran, Xu, Zhibo, Zhang, Cenyuan, Zheng, Xiaoqing, Huang, Xuanjing
The capacity of large language models (LLMs) to generate honest, harmless, and helpful responses heavily relies on the quality of user prompts. However, these prompts often tend to be brief and vague, thereby significantly limiting the full potential of LLMs. Moreover, harmful prompts can be meticulously crafted and manipulated by adversaries to jailbreak LLMs, inducing them to produce potentially toxic content. To enhance the capabilities of LLMs while maintaining strong robustness against harmful jailbreak inputs, this study proposes a transferable and pluggable framework that refines user prompts before they are input into LLMs. This strategy improves the quality of the queries, empowering LLMs to generate more truthful, benign and useful responses. Specifically, a lightweight query refinement model is introduced and trained using a specially designed reinforcement learning approach that incorporates multiple objectives to enhance particular capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the refinement model not only improves the quality of responses but also strengthens their robustness against jailbreak attacks. Code is available at: https://github.com/Huangzisu/query-refinement .
Active Human Pose Estimation via an Autonomous UAV Agent
Chen, Jingxi, He, Botao, Singh, Chahat Deep, Fermuller, Cornelia, Aloimonos, Yiannis
One of the core activities of an active observer involves moving to secure a "better" view of the scene, where the definition of "better" is task-dependent. This paper focuses on the task of human pose estimation from videos capturing a person's activity. Self-occlusions within the scene can complicate or even prevent accurate human pose estimation. To address this, relocating the camera to a new vantage point is necessary to clarify the view, thereby improving 2D human pose estimation. This paper formalizes the process of achieving an improved viewpoint. Our proposed solution to this challenge comprises three main components: a NeRF-based Drone-View Data Generation Framework, an On-Drone Network for Camera View Error Estimation, and a Combined Planner for devising a feasible motion plan to reposition the camera based on the predicted errors for camera views. The Data Generation Framework utilizes NeRF-based methods to generate a comprehensive dataset of human poses and activities, enhancing the drone's adaptability in various scenarios. The Camera View Error Estimation Network is designed to evaluate the current human pose and identify the most promising next viewing angles for the drone, ensuring a reliable and precise pose estimation from those angles. Finally, the combined planner incorporates these angles while considering the drone's physical and environmental limitations, employing efficient algorithms to navigate safe and effective flight paths. This system represents a significant advancement in active 2D human pose estimation for an autonomous UAV agent, offering substantial potential for applications in aerial cinematography by improving the performance of autonomous human pose estimation and maintaining the operational safety and efficiency of UAVs.
Analyzing Persuasive Strategies in Meme Texts: A Fusion of Language Models with Paraphrase Enrichment
Nayak, Kota Shamanth Ramanath, Kosseim, Leila
This paper describes our approach to hierarchical multi-label detection of persuasion techniques in meme texts. Our model, developed as a part of the recent SemEval task, is based on fine-tuning individual language models (BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and mBERT) and leveraging a mean-based ensemble model in addition to dataset augmentation through paraphrase generation from ChatGPT. The scope of the study encompasses enhancing model performance through innovative training techniques and data augmentation strategies. The problem addressed is the effective identification and classification of multiple persuasive techniques in meme texts, a task complicated by the diversity and complexity of such content. The objective of the paper is to improve detection accuracy by refining model training methods and examining the impact of balanced versus unbalanced training datasets. Novelty in the results and discussion lies in the finding that training with paraphrases enhances model performance, yet a balanced training set proves more advantageous than a larger unbalanced one. Additionally, the analysis reveals the potential pitfalls of indiscriminate incorporation of paraphrases from diverse distributions, which can introduce substantial noise. Results with the SemEval 2024 data confirm these insights, demonstrating improved model efficacy with the proposed methods.
POLygraph: Polish Fake News Dataset
Dzienisiewicz, Daniel, Graliński, Filip, Jabłoński, Piotr, Kubis, Marek, Skórzewski, Paweł, Wierzchoń, Piotr
This paper presents the POLygraph dataset, a unique resource for fake news detection in Polish. The dataset, created by an interdisciplinary team, is composed of two parts: the "fake-or-not" dataset with 11,360 pairs of news articles (identified by their URLs) and corresponding labels, and the "fake-they-say" dataset with 5,082 news articles (identified by their URLs) and tweets commenting on them. Unlike existing datasets, POLygraph encompasses a variety of approaches from source literature, providing a comprehensive resource for fake news detection. The data was collected through manual annotation by expert and non-expert annotators. The project also developed a software tool that uses advanced machine learning techniques to analyze the data and determine content authenticity. The tool and dataset are expected to benefit various entities, from public sector institutions to publishers and fact-checking organizations. Further dataset exploration will foster fake news detection and potentially stimulate the implementation of similar models in other languages. The paper focuses on the creation and composition of the dataset, so it does not include a detailed evaluation of the software tool for content authenticity analysis, which is planned at a later stage of the project.
StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing
Cong, Gaoxiang, Qi, Yuankai, Li, Liang, Beheshti, Amin, Zhang, Zhedong, Hengel, Anton van den, Yang, Ming-Hsuan, Yan, Chenggang, Huang, Qingming
Given a script, the challenge in Movie Dubbing (Visual Voice Cloning, V2C) is to generate speech that aligns well with the video in both time and emotion, based on the tone of a reference audio track. Existing state-of-the-art V2C models break the phonemes in the script according to the divisions between video frames, which solves the temporal alignment problem but leads to incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability. To address this problem, we propose StyleDubber, which switches dubbing learning from the frame level to phoneme level. It contains three main components: (1) A multimodal style adaptor operating at the phoneme level to learn pronunciation style from the reference audio, and generate intermediate representations informed by the facial emotion presented in the video; (2) An utterance-level style learning module, which guides both the mel-spectrogram decoding and the refining processes from the intermediate embeddings to improve the overall style expression; And (3) a phoneme-guided lip aligner to maintain lip sync. Extensive experiments on two of the primary benchmarks, V2C and Grid, demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method as compared to the current stateof-the-art. The code will be made available at https://github.com/GalaxyCong/StyleDubber.