The recent rise of social media has led to the spread of large amounts of fake and biased news, content published with the intent to sway beliefs. While detecting and profiling the sources that spread this news is important to maintain a healthy society, it is challenging for automated systems. In this paper, we propose an interactive framework for news media profiling. It combines the strengths of graph based news media profiling models, Pre-trained Large Language Models, and human insight to characterize the social context on social media. Experimental results show that with as little as 5 human interactions, our framework can rapidly detect fake and biased news media, even in the most challenging settings of emerging news events, where test data is unseen.
Artistic style transfer, a captivating application of generative artificial intelligence, involves fusing the content of one image with the artistic style of another to create unique visual compositions. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of a novel technique for style transfer using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). By leveraging deep image representations learned by CNNs, we demonstrate how to separate and manipulate image content and style, enabling the synthesis of high-quality images that combine content and style in a harmonious manner. We describe the methodology, including content and style representations, loss computation, and optimization, and showcase experimental results highlighting the effectiveness and versatility of the approach across different styles and content
Gender bias in political discourse is a significant problem on today's social media. Previous studies found that the gender of politicians indeed influences the content directed towards them by the general public. However, these works are particularly focused on the global north, which represents individualistic culture. Furthermore, they did not address whether there is gender bias even within the interaction between popular journalists and politicians in the global south. These understudied journalist-politician interactions are important (more so in collectivistic cultures like the global south) as they can significantly affect public sentiment and help set gender-biased social norms. In this work, using large-scale data from Indian Twitter we address this research gap. We curated a gender-balanced set of 100 most-followed Indian journalists on Twitter and 100 most-followed politicians. Then we collected 21,188 unique tweets posted by these journalists that mentioned these politicians. Our analysis revealed that there is a significant gender bias -- the frequency with which journalists mention male politicians vs. how frequently they mention female politicians is statistically significantly different ($p<<0.05$). In fact, median tweets from female journalists mentioning female politicians received ten times fewer likes than median tweets from female journalists mentioning male politicians. However, when we analyzed tweet content, our emotion score analysis and topic modeling analysis did not reveal any significant gender-based difference within the journalists' tweets towards politicians. Finally, we found a potential reason for the significant gender bias: the number of popular male Indian politicians is almost twice as large as the number of popular female Indian politicians, which might have resulted in the observed bias. We conclude by discussing the implications of this work.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have proven to be powerful 3D representations, capable of high quality novel view synthesis of complex scenes. While NeRFs have been applied to graphics, vision, and robotics, problems with slow rendering speed and characteristic visual artifacts prevent adoption in many use cases. In this work, we investigate combining an autoencoder (AE) with a NeRF, in which latent features (instead of colours) are rendered and then convolutionally decoded. The resulting latent-space NeRF can produce novel views with higher quality than standard colour-space NeRFs, as the AE can correct certain visual artifacts, while rendering over three times faster. Our work is orthogonal to other techniques for improving NeRF efficiency. Further, we can control the tradeoff between efficiency and image quality by shrinking the AE architecture, achieving over 13 times faster rendering with only a small drop in performance. We hope that our approach can form the basis of an efficient, yet high-fidelity, 3D scene representation for downstream tasks, especially when retaining differentiability is useful, as in many robotics scenarios requiring continual learning.
Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors today are more plentiful and interconnected than ever before. But while there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in novel ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find-contradicting recombinant growth theory. In this paper, we shed new light on this apparent puzzle. Analyzing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally. We further show that across all fields, periods, and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their onsite counterparts. Creating a dataset that allows us to explore the division of labor in knowledge production within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members, collaboration centers on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks-such as conceiving new ideas and designing research-when knowledge is tacit. We conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members to produce new, disruptive ideas.
In recent times, there has been a growing focus on end-to-end autonomous driving technologies. This technology involves the replacement of the entire driving pipeline with a single neural network, which has a simpler structure and faster inference time. However, while this approach reduces the number of components in the driving pipeline, it also presents challenges related to interpretability and safety. For instance, the trained policy may not always comply with traffic rules, and it is difficult to determine the reason for such misbehavior due to the lack of intermediate outputs. Additionally, the successful implementation of autonomous driving technology heavily depends on the reliable and expedient processing of sensory data to accurately perceive the surrounding environment. In this paper, we provide penalty-based imitation learning approach combined with cross semantics generation sensor fusion technologies (P-CSG) to efficiently integrate multiple modalities of information and enable the autonomous agent to effectively adhere to traffic regulations. Our model undergoes evaluation within the Town 05 Long benchmark, where we observe a remarkable increase in the driving score by more than 12% when compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model, InterFuser. Notably, our model achieves this performance enhancement while achieving a 7-fold increase in inference speed and reducing the model size by approximately 30%. For more detailed information, including code-based resources, they can be found at //hk-zh.github.io/p-csg/
It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks.
In recent years a vast amount of visual content has been generated and shared from various fields, such as social media platforms, medical images, and robotics. This abundance of content creation and sharing has introduced new challenges. In particular, searching databases for similar content, i.e. content based image retrieval (CBIR), is a long-established research area, and more efficient and accurate methods are needed for real time retrieval. Artificial intelligence has made progress in CBIR and has significantly facilitated the process of intelligent search. In this survey we organize and review recent CBIR works that are developed based on deep learning algorithms and techniques, including insights and techniques from recent papers. We identify and present the commonly-used databases, benchmarks, and evaluation methods used in the field. We collect common challenges and propose promising future directions. More specifically, we focus on image retrieval with deep learning and organize the state of the art methods according to the types of deep network structure, deep features, feature enhancement methods, and network fine-tuning strategies. Our survey considers a wide variety of recent methods, aiming to promote a global view of the field of category-based CBIR.
Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus on exploiting the emotions of news contents that conveyed by the publishers (i.e., publisher emotion). However, fake news is always fabricated to evoke high-arousal or activating emotions of people to spread like a virus, so the emotions of news comments that aroused by the crowd (i.e., social emotion) can not be ignored. Furthermore, it needs to be explored whether there exists a relationship between publisher emotion and social emotion (i.e., dual emotion), and how the dual emotion appears in fake news. In the paper, we propose Dual Emotion Features to mine dual emotion and the relationship between them for fake news detection. And we design a universal paradigm to plug it into any existing detectors as an enhancement. Experimental results on three real-world datasets indicate the effectiveness of the proposed features.
With the explosion of online news, personalized news recommendation becomes increasingly important for online news platforms to help their users find interesting information. Existing news recommendation methods achieve personalization by building accurate news representations from news content and user representations from their direct interactions with news (e.g., click), while ignoring the high-order relatedness between users and news. Here we propose a news recommendation method which can enhance the representation learning of users and news by modeling their relatedness in a graph setting. In our method, users and news are both viewed as nodes in a bipartite graph constructed from historical user click behaviors. For news representations, a transformer architecture is first exploited to build news semantic representations. Then we combine it with the information from neighbor news in the graph via a graph attention network. For user representations, we not only represent users from their historically clicked news, but also attentively incorporate the representations of their neighbor users in the graph. Improved performances on a large-scale real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Adversarial attacks to image classification systems present challenges to convolutional networks and opportunities for understanding them. This study suggests that adversarial perturbations on images lead to noise in the features constructed by these networks. Motivated by this observation, we develop new network architectures that increase adversarial robustness by performing feature denoising. Specifically, our networks contain blocks that denoise the features using non-local means or other filters; the entire networks are trained end-to-end. When combined with adversarial training, our feature denoising networks substantially improve the state-of-the-art in adversarial robustness in both white-box and black-box attack settings. On ImageNet, under 10-iteration PGD white-box attacks where prior art has 27.9% accuracy, our method achieves 55.7%; even under extreme 2000-iteration PGD white-box attacks, our method secures 42.6% accuracy. A network based on our method was ranked first in Competition on Adversarial Attacks and Defenses (CAAD) 2018 --- it achieved 50.6% classification accuracy on a secret, ImageNet-like test dataset against 48 unknown attackers, surpassing the runner-up approach by ~10%. Code and models will be made publicly available.