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Evaluating Ensemble Methods for News Recommender Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

News recommendation is crucial for facilitating individuals' access to articles, particularly amid the increasingly digital landscape of news consumption. Consequently, extensive research is dedicated to News Recommender Systems (NRS) with increasingly sophisticated algorithms. Despite this sustained scholarly inquiry, there exists a notable research gap regarding the potential synergy achievable by amalgamating these algorithms to yield superior outcomes. This paper endeavours to address this gap by demonstrating how ensemble methods can be used to combine many diverse state-of-the-art algorithms to achieve superior results on the Microsoft News dataset (MIND). Additionally, we identify scenarios where ensemble methods fail to improve results and offer explanations for this occurrence. Our findings demonstrate that a combination of NRS algorithms can outperform individual algorithms, provided that the base learners are sufficiently diverse, with improvements of up to 5\% observed for an ensemble consisting of a content-based BERT approach and the collaborative filtering LSTUR algorithm. Additionally, our results demonstrate the absence of any improvement when combining insufficiently distinct methods. These findings provide insight into successful approaches of ensemble methods in NRS and advocates for the development of better systems through appropriate ensemble solutions.


FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) excel in generating coherent text, but they often struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. We introduce FastMem, a novel method designed to enhance instruction fine-tuned LLMs' context awareness through fast memorization of the prompt. FastMem maximizes the likelihood of the prompt before inference by fine-tuning only the last Feed-Forward Network (FFN) module. This targeted approach ensures efficient optimization without overfitting, significantly improving the model's ability to comprehend and accurately follow the context. Our experiments demonstrate substantial gains in reading comprehension, text summarization and adherence to output structures. For instance, FastMem improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6%, and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. Extensive experimental results highlight FastMem's potential to offer a robust solution to enhance the reliability and accuracy of LLMs in various applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/FastMem


Social Media Use is Predictable from App Sequences: Using LSTM and Transformer Neural Networks to Model Habitual Behavior

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The present paper introduces a novel approach to studying social media habits through predictive modeling of sequential smartphone user behaviors. While much of the literature on media and technology habits has relied on self-report questionnaires and simple behavioral frequency measures, we examine an important yet understudied aspect of media and technology habits: their embeddedness in repetitive behavioral sequences. Leveraging Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and transformer neural networks, we show that (i) social media use is predictable at the within and between-person level and that (ii) there are robust individual differences in the predictability of social media use. We examine the performance of several modeling approaches, including (i) global models trained on the pooled data from all participants, (ii) idiographic person-specific models, and (iii) global models fine-tuned on person-specific data. Neither person-specific modeling nor fine-tuning on person-specific data substantially outperformed the global models, indicating that the global models were able to represent a variety of idiosyncratic behavioral patterns. Additionally, our analyses reveal that the person-level predictability of social media use is not substantially related to the frequency of smartphone use in general or the frequency of social media use, indicating that our approach captures an aspect of habits that is distinct from behavioral frequency. Implications for habit modeling and theoretical development are discussed.


Smurfs: Leveraging Multiple Proficiency Agents with Context-Efficiency for Tool Planning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened up unprecedented possibilities for automating complex tasks that are often comparable to human performance. Despite their capabilities, LLMs still encounter difficulties in completing tasks that require high levels of accuracy and complexity due to their inherent limitations in handling multifaceted problems single-handedly. This paper introduces `Smurfs', a cutting-edge multi-agent framework designed to revolutionize the application of LLMs. By seamlessly transforming a conventional LLM into a synergistic multi-agent ensemble, Smurfs can enhance the model's ability to solve complex tasks at no additional cost. This is achieved through innovative prompting strategies that allocate distinct roles within the model, thereby facilitating collaboration among specialized agents and forming an intelligent multi-agent system. Our empirical investigation on both open-ended task of StableToolBench and closed-ended task on HotpotQA showcases Smurfs' superior capability in intricate tool utilization scenarios. Notably, Smurfs outmatches all the baseline methods in both experiments, setting new state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, through comprehensive ablation studies, we dissect the contribution of the core components of the multi-agent framework to its overall efficacy. This not only verifies the effectiveness of the framework, but also sets a route for future exploration of multi-agent LLM systems.


EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.


Welcome to Glastonbury... of the future! From virtual reality tickets to cooling tents due to climate change, here's what the famous festival could look like in 2050

Daily Mail - Science & tech

With almost 20 times as many fans flocking to Worthy Farm, Glastonbury has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1971. And while many of those original festival-goers may hardly recognise the festival due to open next week, the festival of the future could be even stranger. From cooling tents to beat the summer heat to holographic performers and haptic dancefloors, experts reveal what it might be like to visit Glastonbury 2050. With climate change set to make summers hotter and wetter, festivals will need to find new ways to keep fans safe against the extremes of a changing climate. From virtual bands to cooling tents and lab-grown burgers, here's what the famous festival could be like in 2050 Cooling tents to beat climate change induced heatwaves.


Sheryl Crow: 'Resurrecting Tupac with AI is hateful'

BBC News

In the end, she fell in with a songwriting collective, the Tuesday Music Club, through her then-boyfriend Kevin Gilbert. Each week, they'd gather in Pasadena and try to write a complete song before dawn broke. The sessions were recorded by Michael Jackson's producer Bill Bottrell for "about two cents" and released as Crow's debut album in 1993. Blending roots, Americana, emotional confessions, melody and intelligence, the album was slow to catch fire. In the UK, Danny Baker was an early champion, playing the singles Run, Baby Run and Leaving Las Vegas on BBC Radio 1 - but it was the slice-of-life bar room anthem All I Wanna Do that turned the album's fortunes around, much to Crow's surprise.


Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This survey provides an in-depth analysis of knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs), highlighting the complex challenges they encounter when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. Our focus is on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-memory conflict. These conflicts can significantly impact the trustworthiness and performance of LLMs, especially in real-world applications where noise and misinformation are common. By categorizing these conflicts, exploring the causes, examining the behaviors of LLMs under such conflicts, and reviewing available solutions, this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs, thereby serving as a valuable resource for advancing research in this evolving area.


Enhancing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution by Discourse Structure and Semantic Information

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models, which either compute mention similarity directly or enhance mention representation by extracting event arguments (such as location, time, agent, and patient), lacking the ability to utilize document-level information. As a result, they struggle to capture long-distance dependencies. This shortcoming leads to their underwhelming performance in determining coreference for the events where their argument information relies on long-distance dependencies. In light of these limitations, we propose the construction of document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model the structural and semantic information of documents. Subsequently, cross-document heterogeneous graphs are constructed and GAT is utilized to learn the representations of events. Finally, a pair scorer calculates the similarity between each pair of events and co-referred events can be recognized using standard clustering algorithm. Additionally, as the existing cross-document event coreference datasets are limited to English, we have developed a large-scale Chinese cross-document event coreference dataset to fill this gap, which comprises 53,066 event mentions and 4,476 clusters. After applying our model on the English and Chinese datasets respectively, it outperforms all baselines by large margins.


DASSF: Dynamic-Attention Scale-Sequence Fusion for Aerial Object Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The detection of small objects in aerial images is a fundamental task in the field of computer vision. Moving objects in aerial photography have problems such as different shapes and sizes, dense overlap, occlusion by the background, and object blur, however, the original YOLO algorithm has low overall detection accuracy due to its weak ability to perceive targets of different scales. In order to improve the detection accuracy of densely overlapping small targets and fuzzy targets, this paper proposes a dynamic-attention scale-sequence fusion algorithm (DASSF) for small target detection in aerial images. First, we propose a dynamic scale sequence feature fusion (DSSFF) module that improves the up-sampling mechanism and reduces computational load. Secondly, a x-small object detection head is specially added to enhance the detection capability of small targets. Finally, in order to improve the expressive ability of targets of different types and sizes, we use the dynamic head (DyHead). The model we proposed solves the problem of small target detection in aerial images and can be applied to multiple different versions of the YOLO algorithm, which is universal. Experimental results show that when the DASSF method is applied to YOLOv8, compared to YOLOv8n, on the VisDrone-2019 and DIOR datasets, the model shows an increase of 9.2% and 2.4% in the mean average precision (mAP), respectively, and outperforms the current mainstream methods.