Multi-turn conversations with an Enterprise AI Assistant can be challenging due to conversational dependencies in questions, leading to ambiguities and errors. To address this, we propose an NLU-NLG framework for ambiguity detection and resolution through reformulating query automatically and introduce a new task called "Ambiguity-guided Query Rewrite." To detect ambiguities, we develop a taxonomy based on real user conversational logs and draw insights from it to design rules and extract features for a classifier which yields superior performance in detecting ambiguous queries, outperforming LLM-based baselines. Furthermore, coupling the query rewrite module with our ambiguity detecting classifier shows that this end-to-end framework can effectively mitigate ambiguities without risking unnecessary insertions of unwanted phrases for clear queries, leading to an improvement in the overall performance of the AI Assistant. Due to its significance, this has been deployed in the real world application, namely Adobe Experience Platform AI Assistant.

As artificial intelligence demonstrates surpassing human performance across real-world tasks, disclosing superhuman capabilities poses challenges for fairness, accountability, and trust. To investigate how transparency impacts attitudes and perceptions, we introduce a grounded and validated set of synthetic personas reflecting diverse fairness concerns and technology acceptance levels. Then we evaluate responses in two contrasting domains: (1) a competitive player in StarCraft II, where strategy and high-skill gameplay often elicit toxic interactions, and (2) a cooperative personal-assistant in providing information. Across numerous interactions spanning persona profiles, we test non-disclosure versus explicit superhuman labelling under controlled game outcomes and usage contexts. Our findings reveal sharp domain-specific effects: in StarCraft II, explicitly labelling AI as superhuman, novice personas who learned of it reported lower toxicity and higher fairness-attributing defeat to advanced skill rather than hidden cheating-whereas expert personas found the disclosure statements irksome but still less deceptive than non-disclosure. Conversely, in the LLM as personal-assistant setting, disclosure of superhuman capabilities improved perceived trustworthiness, though it risked AI overreliance among certain persona segments. We release Dataset X-containing persona cards-including profile attributes, disclosure prompts, and detailed interaction logs, accompanied by reproducible protocols and disclaimers for adapting them to diverse tasks. Our results demonstrate that transparency is not a cure-all: while it reduces suspicion and enhances trust in cooperative contexts, it may inflame resistance or disappointment in competitive domains.

Whether it's Tinder or Hinge, anyone with an online dating account will know that choosing the perfect pictures and words for your profile is a tricky business. From candid photos to funny jokes, it can be difficult to know what will help you bag the likes in a sea of profiles. But help is at hand, as scientists have revealed the one word you definitely should not include on your profile. According to researchers from the University of Warsaw, the word'vegetarian' will immediately put off potential dates. In a new study, the team found that being a vegetarian makes both women and men less attractive as potential partners.

I am honoured to present the International AI Safety Report. It is the work of 96 international AI experts who collaborated in an unprecedented effort to establish an internationally shared scientific understanding of risks from advanced AI and methods for managing them. We embarked on this journey just over a year ago, shortly after the countries present at the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit agreed to support the creation of this report. Since then, we published an Interim Report in May 2024, which was presented at the AI Seoul Summit. We are now pleased to publish the present, full report ahead of the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025. Since the Bletchley Summit, the capabilities of general-purpose AI, the type of AI this report focuses on, have increased further. For example, new models have shown markedly better performance at tests of Professor Yoshua Bengio programming and scientific reasoning.

Modern recommendation systems can be broadly divided into two key stages: the ranking stage, where the system predicts various user engagements (e.g., click-through rate, like rate, follow rate, watch time), and the value model stage, which aggregates these predictive scores through a function (e.g., a linear combination defined by a weight vector) to measure the value of each content by a single numerical score. Both stages play roughly equally important roles in real industrial systems; however, how to optimize the model weights for the second stage still lacks systematic study. This paper focuses on optimizing the second stage through auto-tuning technology. Although general auto-tuning systems and solutions - both from established production practices and open-source solutions - can address this problem, they typically require weeks or even months to identify a feasible solution. Such prolonged tuning processes are unacceptable in production environments for recommendation systems, as suboptimal value models can severely degrade user experience. An effective auto-tuning solution is required to identify a viable model within 2-3 days, rather than the extended timelines typically associated with existing approaches. In this paper, we introduce a practical auto-tuning system named HyperZero that addresses these time constraints while effectively solving the unique challenges inherent in modern recommendation systems. Moreover, this framework has the potential to be expanded to broader tuning tasks within recommendation systems.

Given the exponential advancement in AI technologies and the potential escalation of harmful effects from recommendation systems, it is crucial to simulate and evaluate these effects early on. Doing so can help prevent possible damage to both societies and technology companies. This paper introduces the Recommender Systems LLMs Playground (RecSysLLMsP), a novel simulation framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore the impacts of different content recommendation setups on user engagement and polarization in social networks. By creating diverse AI agents (AgentPrompts) with descriptive, static, and dynamic attributes, we assess their autonomous behaviour across three scenarios: Plurality, Balanced, and Similarity. Our findings reveal that the Similarity Scenario, which aligns content with user preferences, maximizes engagement while potentially fostering echo chambers. Conversely, the Plurality Scenario promotes diverse interactions but produces mixed engagement results. Our study emphasizes the need for a careful balance in recommender system designs to enhance user satisfaction while mitigating societal polarization. It underscores the unique value and challenges of incorporating LLMs into simulation environments. The benefits of RecSysLLMsP lie in its potential to calculate polarization effects, which is crucial for assessing societal impacts and determining user engagement levels with diverse recommender system setups. This advantage is essential for developing and maintaining a successful business model for social media companies. However, the study's limitations revolve around accurately emulating reality. Future efforts should validate the similarity in behaviour between real humans and AgentPrompts and establish metrics for measuring polarization scores.

How has the public responded to the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies? We investigate public perceptions of AI by collecting over 12,000 responses over 12 months from a nationally representative U.S. sample. Participants provided open-ended metaphors reflecting their mental models of AI, a methodology that overcomes the limitations of traditional self-reported measures. Using a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative clustering and qualitative coding, we identify 20 dominant metaphors shaping public understanding of AI. To analyze these metaphors systematically, we present a scalable framework integrating language modeling (LM)-based techniques to measure key dimensions of public perception: anthropomorphism (attribution of human-like qualities), warmth, and competence. We find that Americans generally view AI as warm and competent, and that over the past year, perceptions of AI's human-likeness and warmth have significantly increased ($+34\%, r = 0.80, p < 0.01; +41\%, r = 0.62, p < 0.05$). Furthermore, these implicit perceptions, along with the identified dominant metaphors, strongly predict trust in and willingness to adopt AI ($r^2 = 0.21, 0.18, p < 0.001$). We further explore how differences in metaphors and implicit perceptions--such as the higher propensity of women, older individuals, and people of color to anthropomorphize AI--shed light on demographic disparities in trust and adoption. In addition to our dataset and framework for tracking evolving public attitudes, we provide actionable insights on using metaphors for inclusive and responsible AI development.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods are being proposed to help interpret and understand how AI systems reach specific predictions. Inspired by prior work on conversational user interfaces, we argue that augmenting existing XAI methods with conversational user interfaces can increase user engagement and boost user understanding of the AI system. In this paper, we explored the impact of a conversational XAI interface on users' understanding of the AI system, their trust, and reliance on the AI system. In comparison to an XAI dashboard, we found that the conversational XAI interface can bring about a better understanding of the AI system among users and higher user trust. However, users of both the XAI dashboard and conversational XAI interfaces showed clear overreliance on the AI system. Enhanced conversations powered by large language model (LLM) agents amplified over-reliance. Based on our findings, we reason that the potential cause of such overreliance is the illusion of explanatory depth that is concomitant with both XAI interfaces. Our findings have important implications for designing effective conversational XAI interfaces to facilitate appropriate reliance and improve human-AI collaboration. Code can be found at https://github.com/delftcrowd/IUI2025_ConvXAI

Multi-modal sequential recommendation (SR) leverages multi-modal data to learn more comprehensive item features and user preferences than traditional SR methods, which has become a critical topic in both academia and industry. Existing methods typically focus on enhancing multi-modal information utility through adaptive modality fusion to capture the evolving of user preference from user-item interaction sequences. However, most of them overlook the interference caused by redundant interest-irrelevant information contained in rich multi-modal data. Additionally, they primarily rely on implicit temporal information based solely on chronological ordering, neglecting explicit temporal signals that could more effectively represent dynamic user interest over time. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical time-aware Mixture of experts for multi-modal Sequential Recommendation (HM4SR) with a two-level Mixture of Experts (MoE) and a multi-task learning strategy. Specifically, the first MoE, named Interactive MoE, extracts essential user interest-related information from the multi-modal data of each item. Then, the second MoE, termed Temporal MoE, captures user dynamic interests by introducing explicit temporal embeddings from timestamps in modality encoding. To further address data sparsity, we propose three auxiliary supervision tasks: sequence-level category prediction (CP) for item feature understanding, contrastive learning on ID (IDCL) to align sequence context with user interests, and placeholder contrastive learning (PCL) to integrate temporal information with modalities for dynamic interest modeling. Extensive experiments on four public datasets verify the effectiveness of HM4SR compared to several state-of-the-art approaches.

Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC), also known as Vector Symbolic Architectures, is a computing paradigm that combines the strengths of symbolic reasoning with the efficiency and scalability of distributed connectionist models in artificial intelligence. HDC has recently emerged as a promising alternative for performing learning tasks in resource-constrained environments thanks to its energy and computational efficiency, inherent parallelism, and resilience to noise and hardware faults. This work introduces the Hyperdimensional Contextual Bandits (HD-CB): the first exploration of HDC to model and automate sequential decision-making Contextual Bandits (CB) problems. The proposed approach maps environmental states in a high-dimensional space and represents each action with dedicated hypervectors (HVs). At each iteration, these HVs are used to select the optimal action for the given context and are updated based on the received reward, replacing computationally expensive ridge regression procedures required by traditional linear CB algorithms with simple, highly parallel vector operations. We propose four HD-CB variants, demonstrating their flexibility in implementing different exploration strategies, as well as techniques to reduce memory overhead and the number of hyperparameters. Extensive simulations on synthetic datasets and a real-world benchmark reveal that HD-CB consistently achieves competitive or superior performance compared to traditional linear CB algorithms, while offering faster convergence time, lower computational complexity, improved scalability, and high parallelism.