Pope Leo XIV received a glass sculpture from a charity pushing to "protect human dignity" in the age of AI and help draft an independent set of guiding principles.

Existing information retrieval (IR) models often assume a homogeneous format, limiting their applicability to diverse user needs, such as searching for images with text descriptions, searching for a news article with a headline image, or finding a similar photo with a query image. To approach such different information-seeking demands, we introduce UniIR, a unified instruction-guided multimodal retriever capable of handling eight distinct retrieval tasks across modalities. UniIR, a single retrieval system jointly trained on ten diverse multimodal-IR datasets, interprets user instructions to execute various retrieval tasks, demonstrating robust performance across existing datasets and zero-shot generalization to new tasks. Our experiments highlight that multi-task training and instruction tuning are keys to UniIR's generalization ability. Additionally, we construct the M-BEIR, a multimodal retrieval benchmark with comprehensive results, to standardize the evaluation of universal multimodal information retrieval.

He may be one of the most famous figures in history, but it appears the Google Home smart speaker doesn't know who Jesus is. At least, that's according to several outraged users who have accused Google of deliberately filtering its results to fit its own agenda. They claim that despite not providing any details about Jesus, the smart speaker can still identify Buddha, Muhammad and Satan. When people asked their speaker'Who is Jesus?' the general response from Google Home seems to be'I'm not sure how to help you with that.' One television producer in Nashville compared the theological knowledge of Google Home and Amazon Alexa during a Facebook Live video.