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Agentic generative AI for media content discovery at the national football league

Wang, Henry, Salekin, Md Sirajus, Lee, Jake, Claytor, Ross, Zhang, Shinan, Chi, Michael

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI has unlocked new possibilities in content discovery and management. Through collaboration with the National Football League (NFL), we demonstrate how a generative-AI based workflow allows media researchers and analysts to query relevant historical plays using natural language, rather than using traditional filter and click-based interfaces. The agentic workflow takes a user query in natural language as an input, dissects the query into different elements, and then translates these elements into the underlying database query language. The accuracy and latency of retrieval are further improved through carefully designed semantic caching. The solution performs with over 95-percent accuracy and reduces the average time of finding relevant videos from 10 minutes to 30 seconds, significantly increasing the NFL's operational efficiency and allowing users to focus more on producing creative content and engaging storylines.


No Forgetting Learning: Memory-free Continual Learning

Vahedifar, Mohammad Ali, Zhang, Qi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Continual Learning (CL) remains a central challenge in deep learning, where models must sequentially acquire new knowledge while mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting (CF) of prior tasks. Existing approaches often struggle with efficiency and scalability, requiring extensive memory or model buffers. This work introduces ``No Forgetting Learning" (NFL), a memory-free CL framework that leverages knowledge distillation to maintain stability while preserving plasticity. Memory-free means the NFL does not rely on any memory buffer. Through extensive evaluations of three benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that NFL achieves competitive performance while utilizing approximately 14.75 times less memory than state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric to better assess CL's plasticity-stability trade-off.


The Role of Social Support and Influencers in Social Media Communities

Su, Junwei, Marbach, Peter

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

How can individual agents coordinate their actions to achieve a shared objective in distributed systems? This challenge spans economic, technical, and sociological domains, each confronting scalability, heterogeneity, and conflicts between individual and collective goals. In economic markets, a common currency facilitates coordination, raising the question of whether such mechanisms can be applied in other contexts. This paper explores this idea within social media platforms, where social support (likes, shares, comments) acts as a currency that shapes content production and sharing. We investigate two key questions: (1) Can social support serve as an effective coordination tool, and (2) What role do influencers play in content creation and dissemination? Our formal analysis shows that social support can coordinate user actions similarly to money in economic markets. Influencers serve dual roles, aggregating content and acting as information proxies, guiding content producers in large markets. While imperfections in information lead to a "price of influence" and suboptimal outcomes, this price diminishes as markets grow, improving social welfare. These insights provide a framework for understanding coordination in distributed environments, with applications in both sociological systems and multi-agent AI systems.


Neural Symbolic Logical Rule Learner for Interpretable Learning

Wei, Bowen, Zhu, Ziwei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Rule-based neural networks stand out for enabling interpretable classification by learning logical rules for both prediction and interpretation. However, existing models often lack flexibility due to the fixed model structure. Addressing this, we introduce the Normal Form Rule Learner (NFRL) algorithm, leveraging a selective discrete neural network, that treat weight parameters as hard selectors, to learn rules in both Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) and Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) for enhanced accuracy and interpretability. Instead of adopting a deep, complex structure, the NFRL incorporates two specialized Normal Form Layers (NFLs) with adaptable AND/OR neurons, a Negation Layer for input negations, and a Normal Form Constraint (NFC) to streamline neuron connections. We also show the novel network architecture can be optimized using adaptive gradient update together with Straight-Through Estimator to overcome the gradient vanishing challenge. Through extensive experiments on 11 datasets, NFRL demonstrates superior classification performance, quality of learned rules, efficiency and interpretability compared to 12 state-of-the-art alternatives. Code and data are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NFRL-27B4/}.


FL-GUARD: A Holistic Framework for Run-Time Detection and Recovery of Negative Federated Learning

Lin, Hong, Shou, Lidan, Chen, Ke, Chen, Gang, Wu, Sai

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach for learning a model from data distributed on massive clients without exposing data privacy. It works effectively in the ideal federation where clients share homogeneous data distribution and learning behavior. However, FL may fail to function appropriately when the federation is not ideal, amid an unhealthy state called Negative Federated Learning (NFL), in which most clients gain no benefit from participating in FL. Many studies have tried to address NFL. However, their solutions either (1) predetermine to prevent NFL in the entire learning life-cycle or (2) tackle NFL in the aftermath of numerous learning rounds. Thus, they either (1) indiscriminately incur extra costs even if FL can perform well without such costs or (2) waste numerous learning rounds. Additionally, none of the previous work takes into account the clients who may be unwilling/unable to follow the proposed NFL solutions when using those solutions to upgrade an FL system in use. This paper introduces FL-GUARD, a holistic framework that can be employed on any FL system for tackling NFL in a run-time paradigm. That is, to dynamically detect NFL at the early stage (tens of rounds) of learning and then to activate recovery measures when necessary. Specifically, we devise a cost-effective NFL detection mechanism, which relies on an estimation of performance gain on clients. Only when NFL is detected, we activate the NFL recovery process, in which each client learns in parallel an adapted model when training the global model. Extensive experiment results confirm the effectiveness of FL-GUARD in detecting NFL and recovering from NFL to a healthy learning state. We also show that FL-GUARD is compatible with previous NFL solutions and robust against clients unwilling/unable to take any recovery measures.


Chiefs' Justyn Ross placed on NFL's restricted list after felony charge

FOX News

Fox News Flash top sports headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Kansas City Chiefs wide receiver Justyn Ross has been placed on the NFL's restricted list after being charged in a domestic incident this week. Ross is not permitted to attend any Chiefs practices or games while on the list. The 23-year-old was arrested on a felony charge Monday, per Johnson County Sheriff's Office arrest records.


The 7 Best Conspiracies About Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

WIRED

First thing's first: Misinformation and disinformation are bad. False tweets that go viral, government conspiracy theories, lies about vaccines--these are all huge problems online, and they're poised to get worse thanks to generative AI. There are a few exceptions, though. The best of these came to light over the weekend when Taylor Swift showed up at a Kansas City Chiefs game. Sports internet and Swiftie internet promptly collided--and collapsed into chaos.


NFL Career Success as Predicted by NFL Scouting Combine

Szekely, Brian, Sinnott, Christian, Halow, Savannah, Ryan, Gregory

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The National Football League (NFL) Scouting Combine serves as a tool to evaluate the skills of prospective players and assess their readiness to play in the NFL. The development of machine learning brings new opportunities in assessing the utility of the Scouting Combine. Using machine and statistical learning, it may be possible to predict future success of prospective athletes, as well as predict which Scouting Combine tests are the most important. Results from statistical learning research have been contradicting whether the Scouting combine is a useful metric for player success. In this study, we investigate if machine learning can be used to determine matriculation and future success in the NFL. Using Scouting Combine data, we evaluate six different algorithms' ability to predict whether a potential draft pick will play a single NFL snap (matriculation). If a player is drafted, we predict how many snaps they go on to play (success). We are able to predict matriculation with 83% accuracy; however, we are unable to predict later success. Our best performing algorithm returns large error and low explained variance (RMSE=1,210 snaps; ${R}^2$=0.17). These findings indicate that while the Scouting Combine can predict NFL matriculation, it may not be a reliable predictor of long-term player success.


The NFL hopes video games can get young people into sports again

Washington Post - Technology News

Past NFL partnerships with "Fortnite" have proved successful. In 2018, the game introduced licensed NFL in-game cosmetic skins; according to data revealed during the trial between "Fortnite" creator Epic Games and Apple, Epic sold 3.3 million NFL skins in the month they were released, making this collaboration the third most lucrative in intellectual property partnerships for Epic.


The Morning After: Dyson's secret robot projects

Engadget

The NFL's rumored streaming service could debut in JulyDyson, the company that's recently branched out into hair curlers, air-purifying headphones and not cars, has revealed it has an entire division secretly developing robot prototypes for household chores. The company didn't detail any of the models specifically, but many look like robot arms adapted to do specialized home chores, like cleaning and tidying. Dyson also showed off its Perception Lab dedicated to robotic vision systems, environment detection and even mapping humans with sensors, cameras and thermal imaging systems. So why reveal its secret lab now? Well, Dyson's on a recruiting drive, looking for around 700 engineers to help finally make at least some of these ideas a reality in our homes.