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Cloudflare will filter out web crawlers that serve AI companies
The hosting platform wants sites to have more control over how AI companies use their content. Cloudflare has announced plans to automatically block mixed-use web crawlers that index websites for search engines and act as AI agents and trainers at the same time. The company previously offered its customers the optional ability to prevent crawlers from scraping their sites for AI chatbots, but now Cloudflare's stance is becoming more defensive by default. Now that the majority of traffic on the Internet is non-human, we must go further and act faster so that a sustainable ecosystem can emerge, Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO and co-founder shared in a statement. Cloudflare's new tools and partnerships give website owners increased visibility and commercial opportunities and benefit AI companies that have bots with clear and transparent intent.
How to Opt Out of Google Search's New AI Data Training Feature
Google's Search history update stores media uploads from your interactions, like images used in reverse image searches, for training its AI models. A little piece of my soul shrivels up every time I get a message laying out how another company plans to use personal data in ever encroaching ways for AI training . I got one of those emails recently from Google, with the subject line: "New privacy settings for Search services." It's part of Google's global rollout happening over the next few months that will change how it handles users' Search history data. Every piece of media, from photos you upload for reverse image searches to audio of you speaking with Google Translate, may be retained in your account and used to improve Google's AI models.
Thinking vs. Doing: Improving Agent Reasoning by Scaling Test-Time Interaction
The current paradigm of test-time scaling relies on generating long reasoning traces ("thinking" more) before producing a response. In agent problems that require interaction, this can be done by generating thinking traces before acting in the world. However, this process does not allow agents to acquire new information from the environment or adapt their behavior over time. In this work, we propose to scale test-time interaction, an untapped dimension of test-time scaling that increases the agent's interaction horizon to enable running rich behaviors such as exploration, backtracking, and dynamic re-planning within a single rollout. To demonstrate the promise of this scaling dimension, we study the domain of web agents.
OPENCUA: Open Foundations for Computer-Use Agents
Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OPENCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AGENTNET, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales.
Reconciling Geospatial Prediction and Retrieval via Sparse Representations
Urban computing harnesses big data to decode complex urban dynamics and revolutionize location-based services. Traditional approaches have treated geospatial prediction tasks (e.g., estimating socio-economic indicators) and retrieval tasks (e.g., querying geographic objects) as isolated challenges, necessitating separate models with distinct training objectives. This fragmentation imposes significant computational burdens and limits cross-task synergy, despite advances in representation learning and multi-task foundation models.
TAMI: Taming Heterogeneity in Temporal Interactions for Temporal Graph Link Prediction
Temporal graph link prediction aims to predict future interactions between nodes in a graph based on their historical interactions, which are encoded in node embeddings. We observe that heterogeneity naturally appears in temporal interactions, e.g., a few node pairs can make most interaction events, and interaction events happen at varying intervals. This leads to the problems of ineffective temporal information encoding and forgetting of past interactions for a pair of nodes that interact intermittently for their link prediction. Existing methods, however, do not consider such heterogeneity in their learning process, and thus their learned temporal node embeddings are less effective, especially when predicting the links for infrequently interacting node pairs. To cope with the heterogeneity, we propose a novel framework called TAMI, which contains two effective components, namely log time encoding function (LTE) and link history aggregation (LHA). LTE better encodes the temporal information through transforming interaction intervals into more balanced ones, and LHA prevents the historical interactions for each target node pair from being forgotten. State-of-the-art temporal graph neural networks can be seamlessly and readily integrated into TAMI to improve their effectiveness. Experiment results on 13 classic datasets and three newest temporal graph benchmark (TGB) datasets show that TAMI consistently improves the link prediction performance of the underlying models in both transductive and inductive settings.
Accelerated Evolving Set Processes for Local PageRank Computation
This work proposes a novel framework based on nested evolving set processes to accelerate Personalized PageRank (PPR) computation. At each stage of the process, we employ a localized inexact proximal point iteration to solve a simplified linear system. We show that the time complexity of such localized methods is upper bounded by min{ O(R2/ϵ2), O(m)}to obtain an ϵ-approximation of the PPR vector, where m denotes the number of edges in the graph and R is a constant defined via nested evolving set processes. Furthermore, the algorithms induced by our framework require solving only O(1/ α) such linear systems, where α is the damping factor. When 1/ϵ2 m, this implies the existence of an algorithm that computes an ϵ-approximation of the PPR vector with an overall time complexity of O(R2/( αϵ2)), independent of the underlying graph size.
Results of the Big ANN: NeurIPS'23 competition
The 2023 Big ANNChallenge, held at NeurIPS'23, aimed at advancing the stateof-the-art in indexing data structures and search algorithms. It focused for practical variants of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search that reflect the growing complexity and diversity of workloads. Unlike prior challenges that emphasized scaling up classical ANN search [21], this competition addressed filtered search, out-of-distribution data, sparse and streaming variants of ANNS. Participants developed and submitted innovative solutions that were evaluated on new standard datasets with constrained computational resources.