Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a large volume of biased and partisan news has been spread via social media platforms. As this may lead to wider societal issues, we argue that understanding how partisan news sharing impacts users' communication is crucial for better governance of online communities. In this paper, we perform a measurement study of partisan news sharing. We aim to characterize the role of such sharing in influencing users' communications. Our analysis covers an eight-month dataset across six Reddit communities related to the Russian invasion. We first perform an analysis of the temporal evolution of partisan news sharing. We confirm that the invasion stimulates discussion in the observed communities, accompanied by an increased volume of partisan news sharing. Next, we characterize users' response to such sharing. We observe that partisan bias plays a role in narrowing its propagation. More biased media is less likely to be spread across multiple subreddits. However, we find that partisan news sharing attracts more users to engage in the discussion, by generating more comments. We then built a predictive model to identify users likely to spread partisan news. The prediction is challenging though, with 61.57% accuracy on average. Our centrality analysis on the commenting network further indicates that the users who disseminate partisan news possess lower network influence in comparison to those who propagate neutral news.
Narratives can be powerful tools for inspiring action on pressing societal issues such as climate change. While social science theories offer frameworks for understanding the narratives that arise within collective movements, these are rarely applied to the vast data available from social media platforms, which play a significant role in shaping public opinion and mobilizing collective action. This gap in the empirical evaluation of online narratives limits our understanding of their relationship with public response. In this study, we focus on plant-based diets as a form of pro-environmental action and employ natural language processing to operationalize a theoretical framework of moral narratives specific to the vegan movement. We apply this framework to narratives found in YouTube videos promoting environmental initiatives such as Veganuary, Meatless March, and No Meat May. Our analysis reveals that several narrative types, as defined by the theory, are empirically present in the data. To identify narratives with the potential to elicit positive public engagement, we used text processing to estimate the proportion of comments supporting collective action across narrative types. Video narratives advocating social fight, whether through protest or through efforts to convert others to the cause, are associated with a stronger sense of collective action in the respective comments. These narrative types also demonstrate increased semantic coherence and alignment between the message and public response, markers typically associated with successful collective action. Our work offers new insights into the complex factors that influence the emergence of collective action, thereby informing the development of effective communication strategies within social movements.
Generative AI has exhibited considerable potential to transform various industries and public life. The role of news media coverage of generative AI is pivotal in shaping public perceptions and judgments about this significant technological innovation. This paper provides in-depth analysis and rich insights into the temporal and spatial distribution of topics, sentiment, and substantive themes within global news coverage focusing on the latest emerging technology --generative AI. We collected a comprehensive dataset of news articles (January 2018 to November 2023, N = 24,827). For topic modeling, we employed the BERTopic technique and combined it with qualitative coding to identify semantic themes. Subsequently, sentiment analysis was conducted using the RoBERTa-base model. Analysis of temporal patterns in the data reveals notable variability in coverage across key topics--business, corporate technological development, regulation and security, and education--with spikes in articles coinciding with major AI developments and policy discussions. Sentiment analysis shows a predominantly neutral to positive media stance, with the business-related articles exhibiting more positive sentiment, while regulation and security articles receive a reserved, neutral to negative sentiment. Our study offers a valuable framework to investigate global news discourse and evaluate news attitudes and themes related to emerging technologies.
Networks, threat models, and malicious actors are advancing quickly. With the increased deployment of the 5G networks, the security issues of the attached 5G physical devices have also increased. Therefore, artificial intelligence based autonomous end-to-end security design is needed that can deal with incoming threats by detecting network traffic anomalies. To address this requirement, in this research, we used a recently published 5G traffic dataset, 5G-NIDD, to detect network traffic anomalies using machine and deep learning approaches. First, we analyzed the dataset using three visualization techniques: t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Second, we reduced the data dimensionality using mutual information and PCA techniques. Third, we solve the class imbalance issue by inserting synthetic records of minority classes. Last, we performed classification using six different classifiers and presented the evaluation metrics. We received the best results when K-Nearest Neighbors classifier was used: accuracy (97.2%), detection rate (96.7%), and false positive rate (2.2%).
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become one of the most popular paradigms for enabling LLMs to access external data, and also as a mechanism for grounding to mitigate against hallucinations. When implementing RAG you can face several challenges like effective integration of retrieval models, efficient representation learning, data diversity, computational efficiency optimization, evaluation, and quality of text generation. Given all these challenges, every day a new technique to improve RAG appears, making it unfeasible to experiment with all combinations for your problem. In this context, this paper presents good practices to implement, optimize, and evaluate RAG for the Brazilian Portuguese language, focusing on the establishment of a simple pipeline for inference and experiments. We explored a diverse set of methods to answer questions about the first Harry Potter book. To generate the answers we used the OpenAI's gpt-4, gpt-4-1106-preview, gpt-3.5-turbo-1106, and Google's Gemini Pro. Focusing on the quality of the retriever, our approach achieved an improvement of MRR@10 by 35.4% compared to the baseline. When optimizing the input size in the application, we observed that it is possible to further enhance it by 2.4%. Finally, we present the complete architecture of the RAG with our recommendations. As result, we moved from a baseline of 57.88% to a maximum relative score of 98.61%.
It is shown that a Hopfield recurrent neural network, informed by experimentally derived brain topology, recovers the scaling picture recently introduced by Deco et al., according to which the process of information transfer within the human brain shows spatially correlated patterns qualitatively similar to those displayed by turbulent flows. Although both models employ a coupling strength which decays exponentially with the euclidean distance between the nodes, their mathematical nature is widely different, Hopf oscillators versus Hopfield neural network. Hence, their convergence suggests a remarkable robustness of the aforementioned scaling picture. Furthermore, the present analysis shows that the Hopfield model brain remains functional by removing links above about five decay lengths, corresponding to about one sixth of the size of the global brain. This suggests that, in terms of connectivity decay length, the Hopfield brain functions in a sort of intermediate "turbulent liquid"-like state, whose essential connections are the intermediate ones between the connectivity decay length and the global brain size. This "turbulent-like liquid" appears to be more spiky than actual turbulent fluids, with a scaling exponent around $2/5$ instead of $2/3$.
Large Language Models (LLMs), with their abilities in knowledge acquisition and reasoning, can potentially enhance the various aspects of Self-adaptive Systems (SAS). Yet, the potential of LLMs in SAS remains largely unexplored and ambiguous, due to the lack of literature from flagship conferences or journals in the field, such as SEAMS and TAAS. The interdisciplinary nature of SAS suggests that drawing and integrating ideas from related fields, such as software engineering and autonomous agents, could unveil innovative research directions for LLMs within SAS. To this end, this paper reports the results of a literature review of studies in relevant fields, summarizes and classifies the studies relevant to SAS, and outlines their potential to specific aspects of SAS.
We evaluate the informational content of news-based sentiment indicators for forecasting Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and other macroeconomic variables of the five major European economies. Our data set includes over 27 million articles for 26 major newspapers in 5 different languages. The evidence indicates that these sentiment indicators are significant predictors to forecast macroeconomic variables and their predictive content is robust to controlling for other indicators available to forecasters in real-time.
In this article, we propose a new paradigm for training spiking neural networks (SNNs), spike accumulation forwarding (SAF). It is known that SNNs are energy-efficient but difficult to train. Consequently, many researchers have proposed various methods to solve this problem, among which online training through time (OTTT) is a method that allows inferring at each time step while suppressing the memory cost. However, to compute efficiently on GPUs, OTTT requires operations with spike trains and weighted summation of spike trains during forwarding. In addition, OTTT has shown a relationship with the Spike Representation, an alternative training method, though theoretical agreement with Spike Representation has yet to be proven. Our proposed method can solve these problems; namely, SAF can halve the number of operations during the forward process, and it can be theoretically proven that SAF is consistent with the Spike Representation and OTTT, respectively. Furthermore, we confirmed the above contents through experiments and showed that it is possible to reduce memory and training time while maintaining accuracy.
Recent studies have highlighted the issue of stereotypical depictions for people of different identity groups in Text-to-Image (T2I) model generations. However, these existing approaches have several key limitations, including a noticeable lack of coverage of global identity groups in their evaluation, and the range of their associated stereotypes. Additionally, they often lack a critical distinction between inherently visual stereotypes, such as `underweight' or `sombrero', and culturally dependent stereotypes like `attractive' or `terrorist'. In this work, we address these limitations with a multifaceted approach that leverages existing textual resources to ground our evaluation of geo-cultural stereotypes in the generated images from T2I models. We employ existing stereotype benchmarks to identify and evaluate visual stereotypes at a global scale, spanning 135 nationality-based identity groups. We demonstrate that stereotypical attributes are thrice as likely to be present in images of these identities as compared to other attributes. We further investigate how disparately offensive the depictions of generated images are for different nationalities. Finally, through a detailed case study, we reveal how the 'default' representations of all identity groups have a stereotypical appearance. Moreover, for the Global South, images across different attributes are visually similar, even when explicitly prompted otherwise. CONTENT WARNING: Some examples may contain offensive stereotypes.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.