Significant "social ruptures" between people who think artificial intelligence systems are conscious and those who insist the technology feels nothing are looming, a leading philosopher has said. The comments, from Jonathan Birch, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, come as governments prepare to gather this week in San Francisco to accelerate the creation of guardrails to tackle the most severe risks of AI. Last week, a transatlantic group of academics predicted that the dawn of consciousness in AI systems is likely by 2035 and one has now said this could result in "subcultures that view each other as making huge mistakes" about whether computer programmes are owed similar welfare rights as humans or animals. Birch said he was "worried about major societal splits", as people differ over whether AI systems are actually capable of feelings such as pain and joy. The debate about the consequence of sentience in AI has echoes of science fiction films, such as Steven Spielberg's AI (2001) and Spike Jonze's Her (2013), in which humans grapple with the feeling of AIs. AI safety bodies from the US, UK and other nations will meet tech companies this week to develop stronger safety frameworks as the technology rapidly advances.

Steven Johnson has a reputation as a research software nerd. The author of 13 nonfiction books, he's constantly looking for digital tools to streamline his creative process. So when large language models – which power text-generating AI tools such as ChatGPT – started getting attention, he was most interested in what they could mean for organising information. In 2022, an article Johnson wrote about LLMs for the New York Times caught the eye of researchers at Google Labs, the tech company's experimental AI arm, who came to him with a proposition: would he help them develop the kind of digital research assistant he'd been dreaming of? The result is NotebookLM, a note-taking tool that uses AI to help organise, summarise and answer questions about any information you give it.

Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) pose significant challenges in tasks requiring complex multi-step reasoning, such as mathematical problem-solving. Existing approaches primarily detect the presence of hallucinations but lack a nuanced understanding of their types and manifestations. In this paper, we first introduce a comprehensive taxonomy that categorizes the common hallucinations in mathematical reasoning tasks into six types: fabrication, factual inconsistency, context inconsistency, instruction inconsistency, logical inconsistency, and logical error. We then propose FG-PRM (Fine-Grained Process Reward Model), an augmented model designed to detect and mitigate hallucinations in a finegrained, step-level manner. To address the limitations of manually labeling training data, we propose an automated method for generating fine-grained hallucination data using LLMs. By injecting hallucinations into reasoning steps of correct solutions, we create a diverse and balanced synthetic dataset for training FG-PRM, which consists of six specialized Process Reward Models (PRMs), each tailored to detect a specific hallucination type. Our FG-PRM demonstrates superior performance across two key tasks: 1) Fine-grained hallucination detection: classifying hallucination types for each reasoning step; and 2) Verification: ranking multiple LLM-generated outputs to select the most accurate solution, mitigating reasoning hallucinations. Our experiments show that FG-PRM outperforms ChatGPT-3.5 and Claude-3 on fine-grained hallucination detection and substantially boosts the performance of LLMs on GSM8K and MATH benchmarks.

Record linkage integrates diverse data sources by identifying records that refer to the same entity. In the context of mineral site records, accurate record linkage is crucial for identifying and mapping mineral deposits. Properly linking records that refer to the same mineral deposit helps define the spatial coverage of mineral areas, benefiting resource identification and site data archiving. Mineral site record linkage falls under the spatial record linkage category since the records contain information about the physical locations and non-spatial attributes in a tabular format. The task is particularly challenging due to the heterogeneity and vast scale of the data. While prior research employs pre-trained discriminative language models (PLMs) on spatial entity linkage, they often require substantial amounts of curated ground-truth data for fine-tuning. Gathering and creating ground truth data is both time-consuming and costly. Therefore, such approaches are not always feasible in real-world scenarios where gold-standard data are unavailable. Although large generative language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in various natural language processing tasks, including record linkage, their high inference time and resource demand present challenges. We propose a method that leverages an LLM to generate training data and fine-tune a PLM to address the training data gap while preserving the efficiency of PLMs. Our approach achieves over 45\% improvement in F1 score for record linkage compared to traditional PLM-based methods using ground truth data while reducing the inference time by nearly 18 times compared to relying on LLMs. Additionally, we offer an automated pipeline that eliminates the need for human intervention, highlighting this approach's potential to overcome record linkage challenges.

How to leverage large language model's superior capability in e-commerce recommendation has been a hot topic. In this paper, we propose LLM-PKG, an efficient approach that distills the knowledge of LLMs into product knowledge graph (PKG) and then applies PKG to provide explainable recommendations. Specifically, we first build PKG by feeding curated prompts to LLM, and then map LLM response to real enterprise products. To mitigate the risks associated with LLM hallucination, we employ rigorous evaluation and pruning methods to ensure the reliability and availability of the KG. Through an A/B test conducted on an e-commerce website, we demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-PKG in driving user engagements and transactions significantly.

Current keyword decision-making in sponsored search advertising relies on large, static datasets, limiting the ability to automatically set up keywords and adapt to real-time KPI metrics and product updates that are essential for effective advertising. In this paper, we propose On-the-fly Keyword Generation (OKG), an LLM agent-based method that dynamically monitors KPI changes and adapts keyword generation in real time, aligning with strategies recommended by advertising platforms. Additionally, we introduce the first publicly accessible dataset containing real keyword data along with its KPIs across diverse domains, providing a valuable resource for future research. Experimental results show that OKG significantly improves keyword adaptability and responsiveness compared to traditional methods. The code for OKG and the dataset are available at https://github.com/sony/okg.

Mental health support in colleges is vital in educating students by offering counseling services and organizing supportive events. However, evaluating its effectiveness faces challenges like data collection difficulties and lack of standardized metrics, limiting research scope. Student feedback is crucial for evaluation but often relies on qualitative analysis without systematic investigation using advanced machine learning methods. This paper uses public Student Voice Survey data to analyze student sentiments on mental health support with large language models (LLMs). We created a sentiment analysis dataset, SMILE-College, with human-machine collaboration. The investigation of both traditional machine learning methods and state-of-the-art LLMs showed the best performance of GPT-3.5 and BERT on this new dataset. The analysis highlights challenges in accurately predicting response sentiments and offers practical insights on how LLMs can enhance mental health-related research and improve college mental health services. This data-driven approach will facilitate efficient and informed mental health support evaluation, management, and decision-making.

Segmentation of anatomical structures and pathological regions in medical images is essential for modern clinical diagnosis, disease research, and treatment planning. While significant advancements have been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, many of these methods still suffer from limitations in data efficiency, generalizability, and interactivity. As a result, developing precise segmentation methods that require fewer labeled datasets remains a critical challenge in medical image analysis. Recently, the introduction of foundation models like CLIP and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), with robust cross-domain representations, has paved the way for interactive and universal image segmentation. However, further exploration of these models for data-efficient segmentation in medical imaging is still needed and highly relevant. In this paper, we introduce MedCLIP-SAMv2, a novel framework that integrates the CLIP and SAM models to perform segmentation on clinical scans using text prompts, in both zero-shot and weakly supervised settings. Our approach includes fine-tuning the BiomedCLIP model with a new Decoupled Hard Negative Noise Contrastive Estimation (DHN-NCE) loss, and leveraging the Multi-modal Information Bottleneck (M2IB) to create visual prompts for generating segmentation masks from SAM in the zero-shot setting. We also investigate using zero-shot segmentation labels within a weakly supervised paradigm to enhance segmentation quality further. Extensive testing across four diverse segmentation tasks and medical imaging modalities (breast tumor ultrasound, brain tumor MRI, lung X-ray, and lung CT) demonstrates the high accuracy of our proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/MedCLIP-SAMv2.

The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) has led to their consideration as models of human language processing. Instead, we suggest that the success of LLMs arises from the flexibility of the transformer learning architecture. To evaluate this conjecture, we trained LLMs on scientific texts that were either in a forward or backward format. Despite backward text being inconsistent with the structure of human languages, we found that LLMs performed equally well in either format on a neuroscience benchmark, eclipsing human expert performance for both forward and backward orders. Our results are consistent with the success of transformers across diverse domains, such as weather prediction and protein design. This widespread success is attributable to LLM's ability to extract predictive patterns from any sufficiently structured input. Given their generality, we suggest caution in interpreting LLM's success in linguistic tasks as evidence for human-like mechanisms.

Excellent progress has been made recently in solving ARC Challenge problems. However, it seems that new techniques may be required to push beyond 60% accuracy. Even commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to 'understand' many of the problems (when given the input and output grids), which makes discovering solutions by LLM-lead program search somewhat futile. In this work, LLM 'understanding' is attempted from a stronger starting position : An LLM is given complete solutions to tasks in code, and then asked to explain how the task is being solved at various levels of abstraction. Specifically, the LLM was given code solutions implemented in arc-dsl-llm (an LLM-legible version of Hodel's arc-dsl to obtain: (a) commented code; (b) code refactored into reusable functional chunks; (c) problem solution steps; and (d) high-level problem-solving tactics. We demonstrate that 'Sparks of Abstraction' can be extracted from the LLM output - in a form that could be used in downstream tasks with Local LLMs eligible to enter the ARC Prize. Both the arc-dsl-llm DSL framework (with the re-engineered solutions) and the Gemini LLM-generated data (along with the generation code) are made Open Source.