Left: A human partner is confined to a wheelchair and struggles to move past an obstacle.

Persuasive dialogue plays a pivotal role in human communication, influencing various domains. Recent persuasive dialogue datasets often fail to align with real-world interpersonal interactions, leading to unfaithful representations. For instance, unrealistic scenarios may arise, such as when the persuadee explicitly instructs the persuader on which persuasion strategies to employ, with each of the persuadee's questions corresponding to a specific strategy for the persuader to follow. This issue can be attributed to a violation of the "Double Blind" condition, where critical information is fully shared between participants. In actual human interactions, however, key information such as the mental state of the persuadee and the persuasion strategies of the persuader is not directly accessible. The persuader must infer the persuadee's mental state using Theory of Mind capabilities and construct arguments that align with the persuadee's motivations. To address this gap, we introduce ToMMA, a novel multi-agent framework for dialogue generation that is guided by causal Theory of Mind. This framework ensures that information remains undisclosed between agents, preserving "double-blind" conditions, while causal ToM directs the persuader's reasoning, enhancing alignment with human-like persuasion dynamics. Consequently, we present CToMPersu, a multi-domain, multi-turn persuasive dialogue dataset that tackles both double-blind and logical coherence issues, demonstrating superior performance across multiple metrics and achieving better alignment with real human dialogues. Our dataset and prompts are available at https://github.com/DingyiZhang/ToMMA-CToMPersu .

An intricate network of Israel's missile defense tech faced a serious test of its mettle Saturday night, downing '99 percent' of an aerial assault launched from Iran. Approximately 170 Iranian drones, 120 ballistic missiles and over 30 cruise missiles had been launched from the Iranian territory in the attack, soaring over 1,100 miles. Iran's airborne phalanx was repelled by ground-based anti-air missiles with names like the'Iron Dome,' 'David's Sling' and'Arrow-3,' the latest hardware in Israel's frequently updated national defense arsenal. Below, an overview of the equipment Israel has developed, sometimes with the help of American military contractors, and how it keeps bombardments in check. First operational in 2011, Israel's Iron Dome faced its first test over a decade ago, when militants in Gaza fired an estimated 1,500 rockets at Israel over eight days in Nov. 2014 - at least 10 Iron Dome missile batteries are known to exist, total (like this one pictured above) First operational in 2011, Israel's Iron Dome faced its first test over a decade ago, when militants in Gaza fired an estimated 1,500 rockets at Israel over eight days in November of 2014.

This week, Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz discuss the imminent X Date when the United States hits the debt ceiling and could default; the presidential campaign announcements of Ron DeSantis and Tim Scott; and the possibilities of regulating artificial intelligence. Here are some notes and references from this week's show: Ezra Klein for The New York Times: "Liberals Are Persuading Themselves of a Debt Ceiling Plan That Won't Work" John Dickerson for CBS News Prime Time: "Former Google executive speaks out against AI" Emily Conover for Science News Explores: "A new supercomputer just set a world record for speed" Here are this week's chatters: John: Oliver Whang for The New York Times: "A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With Brain and Spine Implants"; Henri Lorach, et al., for Nature: "Walking naturally after spinal cord injury using a brain-spine interface" David: NatureSweet Twilights tomato; join David at a live taping of City Cast DC on Saturday June 3 at 1 p.m., Right Proper Brewing's Brookland production house and tasting room. For this week's Slate Plus bonus segment, David, Emily, and John discuss Harlan Crow's collections and Graeme Wood's article in The Atlantic: "Inside the Garden of Evil." Tickets are on sale now.

At the core of most tales about androids and artificial intelligence lies a variation of the same question: what, if anything, makes these sentient, inorganic beings different from us? Flesh and biology aside, do they possess all that makes us human--are they, in all their hardware and programming, fundamentally the same? Steven Spielberg's criminally underrated film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is less concerned with this question than it is with questioning what obligation humans have for their "living" creations. It centers around a mecha (mechanical humanoid robot) named David (Haley Joel Osment) who is uniquely programmed with the ability to love. Stanley Kubrick, who originally conceived of the film and purchased the rights to its source material by Brian Aldiss, saw it as a Pinocchio story. Like Pinocchio, David is a manufactured object that suddenly dreams of becoming human.

I'm writing this post from the guest room in my mom's house, which is peppered with old knick-knacks of mine--to summon the spirit of my childhood room, I suppose. While flipping through my photo albums, I was tickled to find a blurry picture of the poster for Phone Booth, clearly taken by me on a disposable camera outside of a movie theater. I was probably too young to be watching a gunman thriller--thanks, Mom--but I'm pretty sure my affection for it had a lot to do with Colin Farrell, who was a relative unknown when that movie came out in 2002. To this day, I'm a bit gaga over him, though I think part of the reason my puppy love has turned into something more enduring is that, as I've gotten older and my tastes have evolved, so has the actor's persona. Not to downplay his macho heartthrob phase in the aughts--I still go catatonic whenever I think about him salsa dancing in Miami Vice, and I sense noted MV-heads Bilge and David feel the same way--but it has been a delight to see him take on increasingly stranger, more cerebral roles for directors like Yorgos Lanthimos and Sofia Coppola while also pushing himself, unafraid to get ugly and unhinged, in blockbusters like The Batman.

Your New Year's treat is a short story that seems appropriate, given the growing popularity (and fear) about the new image and language generating AIs, such as ChatGPT and DALL-e. Even I can't get that earworm out of my head. It's drives me crazy, but you can't help but love it. Despite his words, Rory didn't look scared, in fact he gloated, a sneer across his lips, as he leaned back in his chair, took a drag on his cigar, and released the smoke in a slow stream to join the white mist hanging in a cloud above the desk separating him and his partner, David. "This is gonna change the music world, maybe even go beyond that." "I never would have said it would work, but damn if it didn't. Musicman put together a song that went right to the top of the charts. No one can stop humming it. Once it was on the internet, and our response bots started with the likes and the shares, it took off like a California wildfire."

This week, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson discuss Raphael Warnock beating Herschel Walker, and oral arguments at the Supreme Court in the anti-gay marriage website designer case and the "independent state legislature" election case. Here are some notes and references from this week's show: Fr. James Martin, S.J. for Outreach: "When Is Religious Liberty A Fig Leaf For Homophobia?" Here are this week's chatters: David: Tour Fort DeRussy with David; City Cast Portland has launched; Caitlin Doughty for The New York Times: "If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body" For this week's Slate Plus bonus segment Emily, David, and John discuss ChatGPT.

As memory and data blur, will we remember everything? And does remembering everything mean remembering nothing? "The root of men's problems is memory," states martial artist Huang Yaoshi, a character in Wong Kar-wai's arthouse classic Ashes of Time (1994). The film revolves around the dialectics of remembering and forgetting; in it an anonymous desert's shifting sandscape suggests a geological palimpsest of writing and unwriting memory at the same time. In the age of information saturation, people are entangled in the present technoscape of an attention economy that keeps altering.

In "Backprop as functor", the authors show that the fundamental elements of deep learning -- gradient descent and backpropagation -- can be conceptualized as a strong monoidal functor Para(Euc)$\to$Learn from the category of parameterized Euclidean spaces to that of learners, a category developed explicitly to capture parameter update and backpropagation. It was soon realized that there is an isomorphism Learn$\cong$Para(Slens), where Slens is the symmetric monoidal category of simple lenses as used in functional programming. In this note, we observe that Slens is a full subcategory of Poly, the category of polynomial functors in one variable, via the functor $A\mapsto Ay^A$. Using the fact that (Poly,$\otimes$) is monoidal closed, we show that a map $A\to B$ in Para(Slens) has a natural interpretation in terms of dynamical systems (more precisely, generalized Moore machines) whose interface is the internal-hom type $[Ay^A,By^B]$. Finally, we review the fact that the category p-Coalg of dynamical systems on any $p \in$ Poly forms a topos, and consider the logical propositions that can be stated in its internal language. We give gradient descent as an example, and we conclude by discussing some directions for future work.