Social networking sites, blogs, and online articles are instant sources of news for internet users globally. However, in the absence of strict regulations mandating the genuineness of every text on social media, it is probable that some of these texts are fake news or rumours. Their deceptive nature and ability to propagate instantly can have an adverse effect on society. This necessitates the need for more effective detection of fake news and rumours on the web. In this work, we annotate four fake news detection and rumour detection datasets with their emotion class labels using transfer learning. We show the correlation between the legitimacy of a text with its intrinsic emotion for fake news and rumour detection, and prove that even within the same emotion class, fake and real news are often represented differently, which can be used for improved feature extraction. Based on this, we propose a multi-task framework for fake news and rumour detection, predicting both the emotion and legitimacy of the text. We train a variety of deep learning models in single-task and multi-task settings for a more comprehensive comparison. We further analyze the performance of our multi-task approach for fake news detection in cross-domain settings to verify its efficacy for better generalization across datasets, and to verify that emotions act as a domain-independent feature. Experimental results verify that our multi-task models consistently outperform their single-task counterparts in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, both for in-domain and cross-domain settings. We also qualitatively analyze the difference in performance in single-task and multi-task learning models.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

在大量人员中，在线社交媒体（OSMS）消费的广泛上升构成了遏制这些平台上仇恨内容的传播的关键问题。随着多种语言的效果越来越多，检测和表征仇恨的任务变得更加复杂。代码混合文本的微妙变化以及切换脚本仅增加了复杂性。本文介绍了哈索克2021多语种推特仇恨语音检测挑战的解决方案，由Team Precog IIIT Hyderabad。我们采用基于多语言变压器的方法，并为所有6个子任务描述了我们的架构作为挑战的一部分。在参加所有子特设券的6支球队中，我们的提交总体排名第3。

Recent state-of-the-art performance on human-body pose estimation has been achieved with Deep Convolutional Networks (ConvNets). Traditional ConvNet architectures include pooling and sub-sampling layers which reduce computational requirements, introduce invariance and prevent over-training. These benefits of pooling come at the cost of reduced localization accuracy. We introduce a novel architecture which includes an efficient 'position refinement' model that is trained to estimate the joint offset location within a small region of the image. This refinement model is jointly trained in cascade with a state-of-the-art ConvNet model [21] to achieve improved accuracy in human joint location estimation. We show that the variance of our detector approaches the variance of human annotations on the FLIC [20] dataset and outperforms all existing approaches on the MPII-human-pose dataset [1].

Multiple studies have focused on predicting the prospective popularity of an online document as a whole, without paying attention to the contributions of its individual parts. We introduce the task of proactively forecasting popularities of sentences within online news documents solely utilizing their natural language content. We model sentence-specific popularity forecasting as a sequence regression task. For training our models, we curate InfoPop, the first dataset containing popularity labels for over 1.7 million sentences from over 50,000 online news documents. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset automatically created using streams of incoming search engine queries to generate sentence-level popularity annotations. We propose a novel transfer learning approach involving sentence salience prediction as an auxiliary task. Our proposed technique coupled with a BERT-based neural model exceeds nDCG values of 0.8 for proactive sentence-specific popularity forecasting. Notably, our study presents a non-trivial takeaway: though popularity and salience are different concepts, transfer learning from salience prediction enhances popularity forecasting. We release InfoPop and make our code publicly available: https://github.com/sayarghoshroy/InfoPopularity

Agile robotics presents a difficult challenge with robots moving at high speeds requiring precise and low-latency sensing and control. Creating agile motion that accomplishes the task at hand while being safe to execute is a key requirement for agile robots to gain human trust. This requires designing new approaches that are flexible and maintain knowledge over world constraints. In this paper, we consider the problem of building a flexible and adaptive controller for a challenging agile mobile manipulation task of hitting ground strokes on a wheelchair tennis robot. We propose and evaluate an extension to work done on learning striking behaviors using a probabilistic movement primitive (ProMP) framework by (1) demonstrating the safe execution of learned primitives on an agile mobile manipulator setup, and (2) proposing an online primitive refinement procedure that utilizes evaluative feedback from humans on the executed trajectories.

Abstractive dialogue summarization has long been viewed as an important standalone task in natural language processing, but no previous work has explored the possibility of whether abstractive dialogue summarization can also be used as a means to boost an NLP system's performance on other important dialogue comprehension tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel type of dialogue summarization task - STRUctured DiaLoguE Summarization - that can help pre-trained language models to better understand dialogues and improve their performance on important dialogue comprehension tasks. We further collect human annotations of STRUDEL summaries over 400 dialogues and introduce a new STRUDEL dialogue comprehension modeling framework that integrates STRUDEL into a graph-neural-network-based dialogue reasoning module over transformer encoder language models to improve their dialogue comprehension abilities. In our empirical experiments on two important downstream dialogue comprehension tasks - dialogue question answering and dialogue response prediction - we show that our STRUDEL dialogue comprehension model can significantly improve the dialogue comprehension performance of transformer encoder language models.

Recent work leverages the expressive power of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate labeled synthetic datasets. These dataset generation methods often require new annotations of synthetic images, which forces practitioners to seek out annotators, curate a set of synthetic images, and ensure the quality of generated labels. We introduce the HandsOff framework, a technique capable of producing an unlimited number of synthetic images and corresponding labels after being trained on less than 50 pre-existing labeled images. Our framework avoids the practical drawbacks of prior work by unifying the field of GAN inversion with dataset generation. We generate datasets with rich pixel-wise labels in multiple challenging domains such as faces, cars, full-body human poses, and urban driving scenes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation, keypoint detection, and depth estimation compared to prior dataset generation approaches and transfer learning baselines. We additionally showcase its ability to address broad challenges in model development which stem from fixed, hand-annotated datasets, such as the long-tail problem in semantic segmentation.

Creativity is an indispensable part of human cognition and also an inherent part of how we make sense of the world. Metaphorical abstraction is fundamental in communicating creative ideas through nuanced relationships between abstract concepts such as feelings. While computer vision benchmarks and approaches predominantly focus on understanding and generating literal interpretations of images, metaphorical comprehension of images remains relatively unexplored. Towards this goal, we introduce MetaCLUE, a set of vision tasks on visual metaphor. We also collect high-quality and rich metaphor annotations (abstract objects, concepts, relationships along with their corresponding object boxes) as there do not exist any datasets that facilitate the evaluation of these tasks. We perform a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art models in vision and language based on our annotations, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of current approaches in visual metaphor Classification, Localization, Understanding (retrieval, question answering, captioning) and gEneration (text-to-image synthesis) tasks. We hope this work provides a concrete step towards developing AI systems with human-like creative capabilities.

Speech systems are sensitive to accent variations. This is especially challenging in the Indian context, with an abundance of languages but a dearth of linguistic studies characterising pronunciation variations. The growing number of L2 English speakers in India reinforces the need to study accents and L1-L2 interactions. We investigate the accents of Indian English (IE) speakers and report in detail our observations, both specific and common to all regions. In particular, we observe the phonemic variations and phonotactics occurring in the speakers' native languages and apply this to their English pronunciations. We demonstrate the influence of 18 Indian languages on IE by comparing the native language pronunciations with IE pronunciations obtained jointly from existing literature studies and phonetically annotated speech of 80 speakers. Consequently, we are able to validate the intuitions of Indian language influences on IE pronunciations by justifying pronunciation rules from the perspective of Indian language phonology. We obtain a comprehensive description in terms of universal and region-specific characteristics of IE, which facilitates accent conversion and adaptation of existing ASR and TTS systems to different Indian accents.