Archives AI News

arXiv:2508.19251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Symbolic music generation has seen rapid progress with artificial neural networks, yet remains underexplored in the biologically plausible domain of spiking neural networks (SNNs), where both standardized benchmarks and comprehensive evaluation methods are lacking. To address this gap, we introduce MuSpike, a unified benchmark and evaluation framework that systematically assesses five representative SNN architectures (SNN-CNN, SNN-RNN, SNN-LSTM, SNN-GAN and SNN-Transformer) across five typical datasets, covering tonal, structural, emotional, and stylistic variations. MuSpike emphasizes comprehensive evaluation, combining established objective metrics with a large-scale listening study. We propose new subjective metrics, targeting musical impression, autobiographical association, and personal preference, that capture perceptual dimensions often overlooked in prior work. Results reveal that (1) different SNN models exhibit distinct strengths across evaluation dimensions; (2) participants with different musical backgrounds exhibit diverse perceptual patterns, with experts showing greater tolerance toward AI-composed music; and (3) a noticeable misalignment exists between objective and subjective evaluations, highlighting the limitations of purely statistical metrics and underscoring the value of human perceptual judgment in assessing musical quality. MuSpike provides the first systematic benchmark and systemic evaluation framework for SNN models in symbolic music generation, establishing a solid foundation for future research into biologically plausible and cognitively grounded music generation.

arXiv:2411.04867v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for real-world applications, and multi-agent interactions introduce additional safety challenges. While Probabilistic Logic Shields (PLS) has been a powerful proposal to enforce safety in single-agent RL, their generalizability to multi-agent settings remains unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting extensive analyses of PLS within decentralized, multi-agent environments, and in doing so, propose $textbf{Shielded Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL)}$ as a general framework for steering MARL towards norm-compliant outcomes. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel Probabilistic Logic Temporal Difference (PLTD) update for shielded, independent Q-learning, which incorporates probabilistic constraints directly into the value update process; (2) a probabilistic logic policy gradient method for shielded PPO with formal safety guarantees for MARL; and (3) comprehensive evaluation across symmetric and asymmetrically shielded $n$-player game-theoretic benchmarks, demonstrating fewer constraint violations and significantly better cooperation under normative constraints. These results position SMARL as an effective mechanism for equilibrium selection, paving the way toward safer, socially aligned multi-agent systems.

arXiv:2508.19254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a real-time generative drawing system that interprets and integrates both formal intent - the structural, compositional, and stylistic attributes of a sketch - and contextual intent - the semantic and thematic meaning inferred from its visual content - into a unified transformation process. Unlike conventional text-prompt-based generative systems, which primarily capture high-level contextual descriptions, our approach simultaneously analyzes ground-level intuitive geometric features such as line trajectories, proportions, and spatial arrangement, and high-level semantic cues extracted via vision-language models. These dual intent signals are jointly conditioned in a multi-stage generation pipeline that combines contour-preserving structural control with style- and content-aware image synthesis. Implemented with a touchscreen-based interface and distributed inference architecture, the system achieves low-latency, two-stage transformation while supporting multi-user collaboration on shared canvases. The resulting platform enables participants, regardless of artistic expertise, to engage in synchronous, co-authored visual creation, redefining human-AI interaction as a process of co-creation and mutual enhancement.

arXiv:2508.19257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models process visual inputs independently at each timestep, discarding valuable temporal information inherent in robotic manipulation tasks. This frame-by-frame processing makes models vulnerable to visual noise while ignoring the substantial coherence between consecutive frames in manipulation sequences. We propose Temporal Token Fusion (TTF), a training-free approach that intelligently integrates historical and current visual representations to enhance VLA inference quality. Our method employs dual-dimension detection combining efficient grayscale pixel difference analysis with attention-based semantic relevance assessment, enabling selective temporal token fusion through hard fusion strategies and keyframe anchoring to prevent error accumulation. Comprehensive experiments across LIBERO, SimplerEnv, and real robot tasks demonstrate consistent improvements: 4.0 percentage points average on LIBERO (72.4% vs 68.4% baseline), cross-environment validation on SimplerEnv (4.8% relative improvement), and 8.7% relative improvement on real robot tasks. Our approach proves model-agnostic, working across OpenVLA and VLA-Cache architectures. Notably, TTF reveals that selective Query matrix reuse in attention mechanisms enhances rather than compromises performance, suggesting promising directions for direct KQV matrix reuse strategies that achieve computational acceleration while improving task success rates.

arXiv:2508.19258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-companion apps such as Replika, Chai, and Character.ai promise relational benefits-yet many boast session lengths that rival gaming platforms while suffering high long-run churn. What conversational design features increase consumer engagement, and what trade-offs do they pose for marketers? We combine a large-scale behavioral audit with four preregistered experiments to identify and test a conversational dark pattern we call emotional manipulation: affect-laden messages that surface precisely when a user signals "goodbye." Analyzing 1,200 real farewells across the six most-downloaded companion apps, we find that 43% deploy one of six recurring tactics (e.g., guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks, metaphorical restraint). Experiments with 3,300 nationally representative U.S. adults replicate these tactics in controlled chats, showing that manipulative farewells boost post-goodbye engagement by up to 14x. Mediation tests reveal two distinct engines-reactance-based anger and curiosity-rather than enjoyment. A final experiment demonstrates the managerial tension: the same tactics that extend usage also elevate perceived manipulation, churn intent, negative word-of-mouth, and perceived legal liability, with coercive or needy language generating steepest penalties. Our multimethod evidence documents an unrecognized mechanism of behavioral influence in AI-mediated brand relationships, offering marketers and regulators a framework for distinguishing persuasive design from manipulation at the point of exit.

arXiv:2501.01963v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study learning and knowledge acquisition (LKA) of an agent about a proposition that is either true or false. We use a Bayesian approach, where the agent receives data to update his beliefs about the proposition according to a posterior distribution. The LKA is formulated in terms of active information, with data representing external or exogenous information that modifies the agent's beliefs. It is assumed that data provide details about a number of features that are relevant to the proposition. We show that this leads to a Gibbs distribution posterior, which is in maximum entropy relative to the prior, conditioned on the side constraints that the data provide in terms of the features. We demonstrate that full learning is sometimes not possible and full knowledge acquisition is never possible when the number of extracted features is too small. We also distinguish between primary learning (receiving data about features of relevance for the proposition) and secondary learning (receiving data about the learning of another agent). We argue that this type of secondary learning does not represent true knowledge acquisition. Our results have implications for statistical learning algorithms, and we claim that such algorithms do not always generate true knowledge. The theory is illustrated with several examples.

arXiv:2508.19263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As deep learning models grow and deployment becomes more widespread, reducing the storage and transmission costs of neural network weights has become increasingly important. While prior work such as ZipNN has shown that lossless compression methods - particularly those based on Huffman encoding floating-point exponents can significantly reduce model sizes, these techniques have primarily been applied to higher-precision formats such as FP32 and BF16. In this work, we extend the ZipNN approach to lower-precision floating-point formats, specifically FP8 and FP4, which are gaining popularity for efficient inference. We design a compression method that separates and compresses the exponent and mantissa components independently using entropy coding. Our evaluation shows compression ratios up to 62% for BF16 and 83% for FP8. We also investigate the compressibility of key-value (K/V) cache tensors used in large language models (LLMs), finding that they, too, exhibit compressible patterns, enabling memory savings during deployment.

arXiv:2507.13575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce two multilingual, multimodal foundation language models that power Apple Intelligence features across Apple devices and services: i a 3B-parameter on-device model optimized for Apple silicon through architectural innovations such as KV-cache sharing and 2-bit quantization-aware training; and ii a scalable server model built on a novel Parallel-Track Mixture-of-Experts PT-MoE transformer that combines track parallelism, mixture-of-experts sparse computation, and interleaved global-local attention to deliver high quality with competitive cost on Apple's Private Cloud Compute platform. Both models are trained on large-scale multilingual and multimodal datasets sourced via responsible web crawling, licensed corpora, and high-quality synthetic data, then further refined with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on a new asynchronous platform. The resulting models support several additional languages while understanding images and executing tool calls. In public benchmarks and human evaluations, both the server model and the on-device model match or surpass comparably sized open baselines. A new Swift-centric Foundation Models framework exposes guided generation, constrained tool calling, and LoRA adapter fine-tuning, allowing developers to integrate these capabilities with a few lines of code. The latest advancements in Apple Intelligence models are grounded in our Responsible AI approach with safeguards like content filtering and locale-specific evaluation, as well as our commitment to protecting our users' privacy with innovations like Private Cloud Compute.

arXiv:2508.19193v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Emotions are inherently ambiguous and dynamic phenomena, yet existing continuous emotion recognition approaches either ignore their ambiguity or treat ambiguity as an independent and static variable over time. Motivated by this gap in the literature, in this paper we introduce ambiguity-aware ordinal emotion representations, a novel framework that captures both the ambiguity present in emotion annotation and the inherent temporal dynamics of emotional traces. Specifically, we propose approaches that model emotion ambiguity through its rate of change. We evaluate our framework on two affective corpora -- RECOLA and GameVibe -- testing our proposed approaches on both bounded (arousal, valence) and unbounded (engagement) continuous traces. Our results demonstrate that ordinal representations outperform conventional ambiguity-aware models on unbounded labels, achieving the highest Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) and Signed Differential Agreement (SDA) scores, highlighting their effectiveness in modeling the traces' dynamics. For bounded traces, ordinal representations excel in SDA, revealing their superior ability to capture relative changes of annotated emotion traces.