Large language models (LLMs) show potential as computer agents, enhancing productivity and software accessibility in multi-modal tasks. However, measuring agent performance in sufficiently realistic and complex environments becomes increasingly challenging as: (i) most benchmarks are limited to specific modalities/domains (e.g., text-only, web navigation, Q&A) and (ii) full benchmark evaluations are slow (on order of magnitude of multiple hours/days) given the multi-step sequential nature of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce Windows Agent Arena: a general environment focusing exclusively on the Windows operating system (OS) where agents can operate freely within a real OS to use the same applications and tools available to human users when performing tasks. We create 150+ diverse tasks across representative domains that require agentic abilities in planning, screen understanding, and tool usage. Our benchmark is scalable and can be seamlessly parallelized for a full benchmark evaluation in as little as $20$ minutes. Our work not only speeds up the development and evaluation cycle of multi-modal agents, but also highlights and analyzes existing shortfalls in the agentic abilities of several multimodal LLMs as agents within the Windows computing environment---with the best achieving only a 19.5\% success rate compared to a human success rate of 74.5\%.

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various signal geometries. Despite this versatility, generalizing the attention mechanism to scenarios where data is presented at different scales from potentially different modalities is not straightforward. The attempts to incorporate hierarchy and multi-modality within transformers are largely based on ad hoc heuristics, which are not seamlessly generalizable to similar problems with potentially different structures. To address this problem, in this paper, we take a fundamentally different approach: we first propose a mathematical construct to represent multi-modal, multi-scale data. We then mathematically derive the neural attention mechanics for the proposed construct from the first principle of entropy minimization. We show that the derived formulation is optimal in the sense of being the closest to the standard Softmax attention while incorporating the inductive biases originating from the hierarchical/geometric information of the problem. We further propose an efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming to compute our derived attention mechanism. By incorporating it within transformers, we show that the proposed hierarchical attention mechanism not only can be employed to train transformer models in hierarchical/multi-modal settings from scratch, but it can also be used to inject hierarchical information into classical, pre-trained transformer models post training, resulting in more efficient models in zero-shot manner.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) by demonstrating an impressive ability to generate human-like text. However, their widespread usage introduces challenges that necessitate thoughtful examination, ethical scrutiny, and responsible practices. In this study, we delve into these challenges, explore existing strategies for mitigating them, with a particular emphasis on identifying AI-generated text as the ultimate solution. Additionally, we assess the feasibility of detection from a theoretical perspective and propose novel research directions to address the current limitations in this domain.

Fake news may be intentionally created to promote economic, political and social interests, and can lead to negative impacts on humans beliefs and decisions. Hence, detection of fake news is an emerging problem that has become extremely prevalent during the last few years. Most existing works on this topic focus on manual feature extraction and supervised classification models leveraging a large number of labeled (fake or real) articles. In contrast, we focus on content-based detection of fake news articles, while assuming that we have a small amount of labels, made available by manual fact-checkers or automated sources. We argue this is a more realistic setting in the presence of massive amounts of content, most of which cannot be easily fact-checked. So, we represent collections of news articles as multi-dimensional tensors, leverage tensor decomposition to derive concise article embeddings that capture spatial/contextual information about each news article, and use those embeddings to create an article-by-article graph on which we propagate limited labels. Results on real-world datasets show that our method performs on par or better than existing fully supervised models, in that we achieve better detection accuracy using fewer labels. In particular, our proposed method achieves 75.43% of accuracy using only 30% of labels of a public dataset while an SVM-based classifier achieved 67.43%. Furthermore, our method achieves 70.92% of accuracy in a large dataset using only 2% of labels.