Social media aids disaster response but suffers from noise, hindering accurate impact assessment and decision making for resilient cities, which few studies considered. To address the problem, this study proposes the first domain-specific LLM model and an integrated method for rapid earthquake impact assessment. First, a few categories are introduced to classify and filter microblogs considering their relationship to the physical and social impacts of earthquakes, and a dataset comprising 7282 earthquake-related microblogs from twenty earthquakes in different locations is developed as well. Then, with a systematic analysis of various influential factors, QuakeBERT, a domain-specific large language model (LLM), is developed and fine-tuned for accurate classification and filtering of microblogs. Meanwhile, an integrated method integrating public opinion trend analysis, sentiment analysis, and keyword-based physical impact quantification is introduced to assess both the physical and social impacts of earthquakes based on social media texts. Experiments show that data diversity and data volume dominate the performance of QuakeBERT and increase the macro average F1 score by 27%, while the best classification model QuakeBERT outperforms the CNN- or RNN-based models by improving the macro average F1 score from 60.87% to 84.33%. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to assess two earthquakes with the same magnitude and focal depth. Results show that the proposed approach can effectively enhance the impact assessment process by accurate detection of noisy microblogs, which enables effective post-disaster emergency responses to create more resilient cities.

Deception, a prevalent aspect of human communication, has undergone a significant transformation in the digital age. With the globalization of online interactions, individuals are communicating in multiple languages and mixing languages on social media, with varied data becoming available in each language and dialect. At the same time, the techniques for detecting deception are similar across the board. Recent studies have shown the possibility of the existence of universal linguistic cues to deception across domains within the English language; however, the existence of such cues in other languages remains unknown. Furthermore, the practical task of deception detection in low-resource languages is not a well-studied problem due to the lack of labeled data. Another dimension of deception is multimodality. For example, a picture with an altered caption in fake news or disinformation may exist. This paper calls for a comprehensive investigation into the complexities of deceptive language across linguistic boundaries and modalities within the realm of computer security and natural language processing and the possibility of using multilingual transformer models and labeled data in various languages to universally address the task of deception detection.

Efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires batching multiple requests together to improve throughput. As the batch size, context length, or model size increases, the size of the key and value (KV) cache can quickly become the main contributor to GPU memory usage and the bottleneck of inference latency. Quantization has emerged as an effective technique for KV cache compression, but existing methods still fail at very low bit widths. We observe that distinct channels of a key/value activation embedding are highly inter-dependent, and the joint entropy of multiple channels grows at a slower rate than the sum of their marginal entropies. Based on this insight, we propose Coupled Quantization (CQ), which couples multiple key/value channels together to exploit their inter-dependency and encode the activations in a more information-efficient manner. Extensive experiments reveal that CQ outperforms or is competitive with existing baselines in preserving model quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that CQ can preserve model quality with KV cache quantized down to 1-bit.

Effectively handling instructions with extremely long context remains a challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), typically necessitating high-quality long data and substantial computational resources. This paper introduces Step-Skipping Alignment (SkipAlign), a new technique designed to enhance the long-context capabilities of LLMs in the phase of alignment without the need for additional efforts beyond training with original data length. SkipAlign is developed on the premise that long-range dependencies are fundamental to enhancing an LLM's capacity of long context. Departing from merely expanding the length of input samples, SkipAlign synthesizes long-range dependencies from the aspect of positions indices. This is achieved by the strategic insertion of skipped positions within instruction-following samples, which utilizes the semantic structure of the data to effectively expand the context. Through extensive experiments on base models with a variety of context window sizes, SkipAlign demonstrates its effectiveness across a spectrum of long-context tasks. Particularly noteworthy is that with a careful selection of the base model and alignment datasets, SkipAlign with only 6B parameters achieves it's best performance and comparable with strong baselines like GPT-3.5-Turbo-16K on LongBench.

Sora promises to redefine the way visual content is created. Despite its numerous forecasted benefits, the drivers of user willingness to use the text-to-video (T2V) model are unknown. This study extends the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) with perceived realism and novelty value. Using a purposive sampling method, we collected data from 940 respondents in the US and analyzed the sample using covariance-based structural equation modeling and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The findings reveal that all hypothesized relationships are supported, with perceived realism emerging as the most influential driver, followed by novelty value. Moreover, fsQCA identifies five configurations leading to high and low willingness to use, and the model demonstrates high predictive validity, contributing to theory advancement. Our study provides valuable insights for developers and marketers, offering guidance for strategic decisions to promote the widespread adoption of T2V models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their worth across a diverse spectrum of disciplines. LLMs have shown great potential in Procedural Content Generation (PCG) as well, but directly generating a level through a pre-trained LLM is still challenging. This work introduces Word2World, a system that enables LLMs to procedurally design playable games through stories, without any task-specific fine-tuning. Word2World leverages the abilities of LLMs to create diverse content and extract information. Combining these abilities, LLMs can create a story for the game, design narrative, and place tiles in appropriate places to create coherent worlds and playable games. We test Word2World with different LLMs and perform a thorough ablation study to validate each step. We open-source the code at https://github.com/umair-nasir14/Word2World.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for language models significantly improves language understanding systems. The basic retrieval-then-read pipeline of response generation has evolved into a more extended process due to the integration of various components, sometimes even forming loop structures. Despite its advancements in improving response accuracy, challenges like poor retrieval quality for complex questions that require the search of multifaceted semantic information, inefficiencies in knowledge re-retrieval during long-term serving, and lack of personalized responses persist. Motivated by transcending these limitations, we introduce ERAGent, a cutting-edge framework that embodies an advancement in the RAG area. Our contribution is the introduction of the synergistically operated module: Enhanced Question Rewriter and Knowledge Filter, for better retrieval quality. Retrieval Trigger is incorporated to curtail extraneous external knowledge retrieval without sacrificing response quality. ERAGent also personalizes responses by incorporating a learned user profile. The efficiency and personalization characteristics of ERAGent are supported by the Experiential Learner module which makes the AI assistant being capable of expanding its knowledge and modeling user profile incrementally. Rigorous evaluations across six datasets and three question-answering tasks prove ERAGent's superior accuracy, efficiency, and personalization, emphasizing its potential to advance the RAG field and its applicability in practical systems.

The progression to "Pervasive Augmented Reality" envisions easy access to multimodal information continuously. However, in many everyday scenarios, users are occupied physically, cognitively or socially. This may increase the friction to act upon the multimodal information that users encounter in the world. To reduce such friction, future interactive interfaces should intelligently provide quick access to digital actions based on users' context. To explore the range of possible digital actions, we conducted a diary study that required participants to capture and share the media that they intended to perform actions on (e.g., images or audio), along with their desired actions and other contextual information. Using this data, we generated a holistic design space of digital follow-up actions that could be performed in response to different types of multimodal sensory inputs. We then designed OmniActions, a pipeline powered by large language models (LLMs) that processes multimodal sensory inputs and predicts follow-up actions on the target information grounded in the derived design space. Using the empirical data collected in the diary study, we performed quantitative evaluations on three variations of LLM techniques (intent classification, in-context learning and finetuning) and identified the most effective technique for our task. Additionally, as an instantiation of the pipeline, we developed an interactive prototype and reported preliminary user feedback about how people perceive and react to the action predictions and its errors.

With the impressive performance in various downstream tasks, large language models (LLMs) have been widely integrated into production pipelines, like recruitment and recommendation systems. A known issue of models trained on natural language data is the presence of human biases, which can impact the fairness of the system. This paper investigates LLMs' behavior with respect to gender stereotypes, in the context of occupation decision making. Our framework is designed to investigate and quantify the presence of gender stereotypes in LLMs' behavior via multi-round question answering. Inspired by prior works, we construct a dataset by leveraging a standard occupation classification knowledge base released by authoritative agencies. We tested three LLMs (RoBERTa-large, GPT-3.5-turbo, and Llama2-70b-chat) and found that all models exhibit gender stereotypes analogous to human biases, but with different preferences. The distinct preferences of GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-70b-chat may imply the current alignment methods are insufficient for debiasing and could introduce new biases contradicting the traditional gender stereotypes.

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose Trip to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Trip in catering to diverse users.