After months of anticipation, the wait is finally almost over for Apple fans, as the tech giant's annual tech event is about to commence. Apple says the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), which kicks off today at Apple Park in California, will be an'extraordinary week of technology'. The tech giant is expected to announce a load of AI features at the'momentous' event, including a chatbot built into its iPhones. It's also tipped to shed light on the next major mobile operating system, called iOS 18, which will likely also get an AI revamp. Ahead of the event, MailOnline gives a rundown of everything you need to know about WWDC, including how to tune in and when the big products will be revealed.

In the classification tasks, from raw data acquisition to the curation of a dataset suitable for use in evaluating machine learning models, a series of steps - often associated with high costs - are necessary. In the case of Natural Language Processing, initial cleaning and conversion can be performed automatically, but obtaining labels still requires the rationalized input of human experts. As a result, even though many articles often state that "the world is filled with data", data scientists suffer from its shortage. It is crucial in the case of natural language applications, which is constantly evolving and must adapt to new concepts or events. For example, the topic of the COVID-19 pandemic and the vocabulary related to it would have been mostly unrecognizable before 2019. For this reason, creating new datasets, also in languages other than English, is still essential. This work presents a collection of 3~187~105 posts in Polish about the pandemic and the war in Ukraine published on popular social media platforms in 2022. The collection includes not only preprocessed texts but also images so it can be used also for multimodal recognition tasks. The labels define posts' topics and were created using hashtags accompanying the posts. The work presents the process of curating a dataset from acquisition to sample pattern recognition experiments.

Virtual Assistants (VAs) are important Information Retrieval platforms that help users accomplish various tasks through spoken commands. The speech recognition system (speech-to-text) uses query priors, trained solely on text, to distinguish between phonetically confusing alternatives. Hence, the generation of synthetic queries that are similar to existing VA usage can greatly improve upon the VA's abilities -- especially for use-cases that do not (yet) occur in paired audio/text data. In this paper, we provide a preliminary exploration of the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic queries that are complementary to template-based methods. We investigate whether the methods (a) generate queries that are similar to randomly sampled, representative, and anonymized user queries from a popular VA, and (b) whether the generated queries are specific. We find that LLMs generate more verbose queries, compared to template-based methods, and reference aspects specific to the entity. The generated queries are similar to VA user queries, and are specific enough to retrieve the relevant entity. We conclude that queries generated by LLMs and templates are complementary.

Language agents perform complex tasks by using tools to execute each step precisely. However, most existing agents are based on proprietary models or designed to target specific tasks, such as mathematics or multi-hop question answering. We introduce Husky, a holistic, open-source language agent that learns to reason over a unified action space to address a diverse set of complex tasks involving numerical, tabular, and knowledge-based reasoning. Husky iterates between two stages: 1) generating the next action to take towards solving a given task and 2) executing the action using expert models and updating the current solution state. We identify a thorough ontology of actions for addressing complex tasks and curate high-quality data to train expert models for executing these actions. Our experiments show that Husky outperforms prior language agents across 14 evaluation datasets. Moreover, we introduce HuskyQA, a new evaluation set which stress tests language agents for mixed-tool reasoning, with a focus on retrieving missing knowledge and performing numerical reasoning. Despite using 7B models, Husky matches or even exceeds frontier LMs such as GPT-4 on these tasks, showcasing the efficacy of our holistic approach in addressing complex reasoning problems. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/agent-husky/Husky-v1.

Personalization has emerged as a critical research area in modern intelligent systems, focusing on mining users' behavioral history and adapting to their preferences for delivering tailored experiences. Despite the remarkable few-shot capabilities exhibited by black-box large language models (LLMs), the inherent opacity of their model parameters presents significant challenges in aligning the generated output with individual expectations. Existing solutions have primarily focused on prompt design to incorporate user-specific profiles and behaviors; however, such approaches often struggle to generalize effectively due to their inability to capture shared knowledge among all users. To address these challenges, we propose HYDRA, a model factorization framework that captures both user-specific behavior patterns from historical data and shared general knowledge among all users to deliver personalized generation. In order to capture user-specific behavior patterns, we first train a reranker to prioritize the most useful information from top-retrieved relevant historical records. By combining the prioritized history with the corresponding query, we train an adapter to align the output with individual user-specific preferences, eliminating the reliance on access to inherent model parameters of black-box LLMs. Both the reranker and the adapter can be decomposed into a base model with multiple user-specific heads, resembling a hydra. The base model maintains shared knowledge across users, while the multiple personal heads capture user-specific preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that HYDRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art prompt-based methods by an average relative improvement of 9.01% across five diverse personalization tasks in the LaMP benchmark. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/night-chen/HYDRA.

In the dynamic field of digital content creation using generative models, state-of-the-art video editing models still do not offer the level of quality and control that users desire. Previous works on video editing either extended from image-based generative models in a zero-shot manner or necessitated extensive fine-tuning, which can hinder the production of fluid video edits. Furthermore, these methods frequently rely on textual input as the editing guidance, leading to ambiguities and limiting the types of edits they can perform. Recognizing these challenges, we introduce AnyV2V, a novel tuning-free paradigm designed to simplify video editing into two primary steps: (1) employing an off-the-shelf image editing model to modify the first frame, (2) utilizing an existing image-to-video generation model to generate the edited video through temporal feature injection. AnyV2V can leverage any existing image editing tools to support an extensive array of video editing tasks, including prompt-based editing, reference-based style transfer, subject-driven editing, and identity manipulation, which were unattainable by previous methods. AnyV2V can also support any video length. Our evaluation indicates that AnyV2V significantly outperforms other baseline methods in automatic and human evaluations by significant margin, maintaining visual consistency with the source video while achieving high-quality edits across all the editing tasks.

Recent Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) usually only provide users with the inference APIs, namely the emerging Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) setting. To adapt MaaS PLMs to downstream tasks without accessing their parameters and gradients, some existing methods focus on the output-side adaptation of PLMs, viewing the PLM as an encoder and then optimizing a task-specific decoder for decoding the output hidden states and class scores of the PLM. Despite the effectiveness of these methods, they only use a single prompt to query PLMs for decoding, leading to a heavy reliance on the quality of the adopted prompt. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Multi-Prompting Decoder (MPD) framework for MaaS adaptation. The core idea is to query PLMs with multiple different prompts for each sample, thereby obtaining multiple output hidden states and class scores for subsequent decoding. Such multi-prompting decoding paradigm can simultaneously mitigate reliance on the quality of a single prompt, alleviate the issue of data scarcity under the few-shot setting, and provide richer knowledge extracted from PLMs. Specifically, we propose two decoding strategies: multi-prompting decoding with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting.

Given unstructured text, Large Language Models (LLMs) are adept at answering simple (single-hop) questions. However, as the complexity of the questions increase, the performance of LLMs degrade. We believe this is due to the overhead associated with understanding the complex question followed by filtering and aggregating unstructured information in the raw text. Recent methods try to reduce this burden by integrating structured knowledge triples into the raw text, aiming to provide a structured overview that simplifies information processing. However, this simplistic approach is query-agnostic and the extracted facts are ambiguous as they lack context. To address these drawbacks and to enable LLMs to answer complex (multi-hop) questions with ease, we propose to use a knowledge graph (KG) that is context-aware and is distilled to contain query-relevant information. The use of our compressed distilled KG as input to the LLM results in our method utilizing up to $67\%$ fewer tokens to represent the query relevant information present in the supporting documents, compared to the state-of-the-art (SoTA) method. Our experiments show consistent improvements over the SoTA across several metrics (EM, F1, BERTScore, and Human Eval) on two popular benchmark datasets (HotpotQA and MuSiQue).

Large multimodal language models have shown remarkable proficiency in understanding and editing images. However, a majority of these visually-tuned models struggle to comprehend the textual content embedded in images, primarily due to the limitation of training data. In this work, we introduce TRINS: a Text-Rich image INStruction dataset, with the objective of enhancing the reading ability of the multimodal large language model. TRINS is built upon LAION using hybrid data annotation strategies that include machine-assisted and human-assisted annotation processes. It contains 39,153 text-rich images, captions, and 102,437 questions. Specifically, we show that the number of words per annotation in TRINS is significantly longer than that of related datasets, providing new challenges. Furthermore, we introduce a simple and effective architecture, called a Language-vision Reading Assistant (LaRA), which is good at understanding textual content within images. LaRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art multimodal large language models on the TRINS dataset, as well as other classical benchmarks. Lastly, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation with TRINS on various text-rich image understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness.

Aligning large language models with human preferences has emerged as a critical focus in language modeling research. Yet, integrating preference learning into Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models is still relatively uncharted territory. The Diffusion-DPO technique made initial strides by employing pairwise preference learning in diffusion models tailored for specific text prompts. We introduce Diffusion-RPO, a new method designed to align diffusion-based T2I models with human preferences more effectively. This approach leverages both prompt-image pairs with identical prompts and those with semantically related content across various modalities. Furthermore, we have developed a new evaluation metric, style alignment, aimed at overcoming the challenges of high costs, low reproducibility, and limited interpretability prevalent in current evaluations of human preference alignment. Our findings demonstrate that Diffusion-RPO outperforms established methods such as Supervised Fine-Tuning and Diffusion-DPO in tuning Stable Diffusion versions 1.5 and XL-1.0, achieving superior results in both automated evaluations of human preferences and style alignment.