The first issue of the magazine Giant Robot I ever came across featured the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai on the cover--this was enough to stand out on a crowded newsstand in the mid-nineteen-nineties. But what caught my attention were the teasers for a random assortment of other stories, about gangs, surfing, shaved ice, orgies. But who was I? I was a teen-ager and desperate to know. I suspected Giant Robot could help me figure it out. For anyone under the age of forty, this level of impressionability might sound a bit silly.

The multimedia content and streaming are a major means of information exchange in the modern era and there is an increasing demand for such services. This coupled with the advancement of future wireless networks B5G/6G and the proliferation of intelligent handheld mobile devices, has facilitated the availability of multimedia content to heterogeneous mobile users. Apart from the conventional video, the 360$^o$ videos have gained popularity with the emerging virtual reality applications. All formats of videos (conventional and 360$^o$) undergo processing, compression, and transmission across dynamic wireless channels with restricted bandwidth to facilitate the streaming services. This causes video impairments, leading to quality degradation and poses challenges in delivering good Quality-of-Experience (QoE) to the viewers. The QoE is a prominent subjective quality measure to assess multimedia services. This requires end-to-end QoE evaluation. Efficient multimedia streaming techniques can improve the service quality while dealing with dynamic network and end-user challenges. A paradigm shift in user-centric multimedia services is envisioned with a focus on Machine Learning (ML) based QoE modeling and streaming strategies. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of the overall and continuous, time varying QoE modeling for the purpose of QoE management in multimedia services. It also examines the recent research on intelligent and adaptive multimedia streaming strategies, with a special emphasis on ML based techniques for video (conventional and 360$^o$) streaming. This paper discusses the overall and continuous QoE modeling to optimize the end-user viewing experience, efficient video streaming with a focus on user-centric strategies, associated datasets for modeling and streaming, along with existing shortcoming and open challenges.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have shown remarkable progress, but their potential to generate harmful content remains a critical concern in the ML community. While various safety mechanisms have been developed, the field lacks systematic tools for evaluating their effectiveness against real-world misuse scenarios. In this work, we propose ICER, a novel red-teaming framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and a bandit optimization-based algorithm to generate interpretable and semantic meaningful problematic prompts by learning from past successful red-teaming attempts. Our ICER efficiently probes safety mechanisms across different T2I models without requiring internal access or additional training, making it broadly applicable to deployed systems. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ICER significantly outperforms existing prompt attack methods in identifying model vulnerabilities while maintaining high semantic similarity with intended content. By uncovering that successful jailbreaking instances can systematically facilitate the discovery of new vulnerabilities, our work provides crucial insights for developing more robust safety mechanisms in T2I systems.

In this paper, we introduce RecallAffectiveMemory, a novel task designed to reconstruct autobiographical memories through audio-visual generation guided by affect extracted from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. To support this pioneering task, we present the EEG-AffectiveMemory dataset, which encompasses textual descriptions, visuals, music, and EEG recordings collected during memory recall from nine participants. Furthermore, we propose RYM (Recall Your Memory), a three-stage framework for generating synchronized audio-visual contents while maintaining dynamic personal memory affect trajectories. Experimental results indicate that our method can faithfully reconstruct affect-contextualized audio-visual memory across all subjects, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with participants reporting strong affective concordance between their recalled memories and the generated content. Our approaches advance affect decoding research and its practical applications in personalized media creation via neural-based affect comprehension.

Music style transfer, while offering exciting possibilities for personalized music generation, often requires extensive training or detailed textual descriptions. This paper introduces a novel training-free approach leveraging pre-trained Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). By manipulating the self-attention features of the LDM, we effectively transfer the style of reference music onto content music without additional training. Our method achieves superior style transfer and melody preservation compared to existing methods. This work opens new creative avenues for personalized music generation.

Diffusion Models (DMs) benefit from large and diverse datasets for their training. Since this data is often scraped from the Internet without permission from the data owners, this raises concerns about copyright and intellectual property protections. While (illicit) use of data is easily detected for training samples perfectly re-created by a DM at inference time, it is much harder for data owners to verify if their data was used for training when the outputs from the suspect DM are not close replicas. Conceptually, membership inference attacks (MIAs), which detect if a given data point was used during training, present themselves as a suitable tool to address this challenge. However, we demonstrate that existing MIAs are not strong enough to reliably determine the membership of individual images in large, state-of-the-art DMs. To overcome this limitation, we propose CDI, a framework for data owners to identify whether their dataset was used to train a given DM. CDI relies on dataset inference techniques, i.e., instead of using the membership signal from a single data point, CDI leverages the fact that most data owners, such as providers of stock photography, visual media companies, or even individual artists, own datasets with multiple publicly exposed data points which might all be included in the training of a given DM. By selectively aggregating signals from existing MIAs and using new handcrafted methods to extract features for these datasets, feeding them to a scoring model, and applying rigorous statistical testing, CDI allows data owners with as little as 70 data points to identify with a confidence of more than 99% whether their data was used to train a given DM. Thereby, CDI represents a valuable tool for data owners to claim illegitimate use of their copyrighted data.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, they often lack factuality, producing a mixture of true and false information, especially in long-form generation. In this work, we investigates the factuality of long-form text generation across various large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4, Gemini-1.5-Pro, Our analysis reveals that factuality scores tend to decline in later sentences of the generated text, accompanied by a rise in the number of unsupported claims. Furthermore, we explore the effectiveness of different evaluation settings to assess whether LLMs can accurately judge the correctness of their own outputs: Self-Known (the percentage of supported atomic claims, decomposed from LLM outputs, that the corresponding LLMs judge as correct) and Self-Unknown (the percentage of unsupported atomic claims that the corresponding LLMs judge as incorrect). The results indicate that even advanced models like GPT-4 and Gemini-1.5-Pro Moreover, we find a correlation between higher Self-Known scores and improved factuality, while higher Self-Unknown scores are associated with lower factuality. These findings show the limitations of current LLMs in long-form generation, and provide valuable insights for improving factuality in long-form text generation. The long-context capabilities of large language models (LLMs) (OpenAI, 2023b; AI@Meta, 2024; Jiang et al., 2024; GeminiTeam, 2024; Anthropic, 2024) have seen significant advancements in recent years. Lots of work (Shaham et al., 2023; Bai et al., 2024; An et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024; Kuratov et al., 2024) have explored the ability of LLMs to handle long contexts, however, relatively few have examined their ability for long-form text generation.

With continual advancements in technology, efforts to develop robots simulating human behavior have intensified. Cognitive robotics, combined with artificial intelligence (AI), has proven effective in surveying and research analysis. However, despite progress, human intervention remains necessary, and incorporating AI into robotic systems continues to pose challenges. This paper explores methodologies to integrate AI into robotic designs, aiming to enhance human-robot interactions. Several approaches are proposed to improve robotic performance, including routines for efficient control in varied environments and the incorporation of digital image processing for enhanced line-of-sight capabilities. A key contribution of this work is testing robotic systems in real-time environments to assess efficiency relative to existing models. Additionally, the paper introduces a robotic system with universal control capabilities, suitable for industrial applications, developed and programmed on the Arduino platform. Features such as GPS control for safe operations and progressive memory algorithms for efficient memory management are presented, offering advancements in both industrial and research applications.

The International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS) is a workshop that tries to connect researchers who develop systems for reading music, such as in the field of Optical Music Recognition, with other researchers and practitioners that could benefit from such systems, like librarians or musicologists. The relevant topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to: Music reading systems; Optical music recognition; Datasets and performance evaluation; Image processing on music scores; Writer identification; Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for music scores; Multi-modal systems; Novel input-methods for music to produce written music; Web-based Music Information Retrieval services; Applications and projects; Use-cases related to written music. These are the proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems, held Online on November 22nd 2024.

Agent-Based Modelling (ABM) has emerged as an essential tool for simulating social networks, encompassing diverse phenomena such as information dissemination, influence dynamics, and community formation. However, manually configuring varied agent interactions and information flow dynamics poses challenges, often resulting in oversimplified models that lack real-world generalizability. Integrating modern Large Language Models (LLMs) with ABM presents a promising avenue to address these challenges and enhance simulation fidelity, leveraging LLMs' human-like capabilities in sensing, reasoning, and behavior. In this paper, we propose a novel framework utilizing LLM-empowered agents to simulate social network users based on their interests and personality traits. The framework allows for customizable agent interactions resembling various social network platforms, including mechanisms for content resharing and personalized recommendations. We validate our framework using a comprehensive Twitter dataset from the 2020 US election, demonstrating that LLM-agents accurately replicate real users' behaviors, including linguistic patterns and political inclinations. These agents form homogeneous ideological clusters and retain the main themes of their community. Notably, preference-based recommendations significantly influence agent behavior, promoting increased engagement, network homophily and the formation of echo chambers. Overall, our findings underscore the potential of LLM-agents in advancing social media simulations and unraveling intricate online dynamics.