Tag Archives: perform

Chatbots Perform Best When Communicating in Formal Language.

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Your approach to chatting with AI may matter more than you realize

Oscar Wong/Getty Images

The manner in which you converse with an AI chatbot, especially using informal language, can significantly impact the accuracy of its replies. This indicates that we might need to engage with chatbots more formally or train the AI to handle informal dialogue better.

Researchers Fulei Zhang and Zhou Yu from Amazon explored how users begin chats with human representatives versus chatbot assistants that utilize large language models (LLMs). They employed the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model to evaluate various aspects of these interactions, discovering that exchanges with chatbots were marked by less grammatical accuracy and politeness compared to human-to-human dialogues, as well as a somewhat limited vocabulary.

The findings showed that human-to-human interactions were 14.5% more polite and formal, 5.3% more fluent, and 1.4% more lexically diverse than their chatbot counterparts, according to Claude’s assessments.

The authors noted in their study, “Participants adjust their linguistic style in human-LLM interactions, favoring shorter, more direct, less formal, and grammatically simpler messages,” though they did not respond to interview requests. “This behavior may stem from users’ mental models of LLM chatbots, particularly if they lack social nuance or sensitivity.”

However, embracing this informal style comes with challenges. In another evaluation, the researchers trained an AI model named Mistral 7B using 13,000 actual human-to-human interactions, then assessed 1,357 real messages directed at the AI chatbot. They categorized each conversation with an “intent” derived from a restricted framework summarizing the user’s purpose. Unfortunately, Mistral struggled with accurately defining the intentions within the chatbot conversations.

Zhang and Yu explored various methods to enhance Mistral AI’s understanding. Initially, they used Claude AI to transform users’ succinct messages into more polished human-like text and used these rewrites to fine-tune Mistral, resulting in a 1.9% decline in intent label accuracy from the baseline.

Next, they attempted a “minimal” rewrite with Claude, creating shorter and more direct phrases (e.g., asking about travel and lodging options for an upcoming trip with “Paris next month. Where’s the flight hotel?”). This method caused a 2.6% drop in Mistral’s accuracy. On the other hand, utilizing a more formal and varied style in “enhanced” rewrites also led to a 1.8% decrease in accuracy. Ultimately, the performance showed an improvement of 2.9% only when training Mistral with both minimal and enhanced rewrites.

Noah Jansiracusa, a professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts, expressed that while it’s expected that users communicate differently with bots than with other humans, this disparity shouldn’t necessarily be seen as a negative.

“The observation that people interact with chatbots differently from humans is often depicted as a drawback, but I believe it’s beneficial for users to recognize they’re engaging with a bot and adjust their communication accordingly,” Giansiracusa stated. “This understanding is healthier than a continual effort to bridge the gap between humans and bots.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Chimpanzees Perform Better at Difficult Tasks with an Audience present.

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Chimpanzee taking a number test on a touch screen

Akiho Muramatsu

Audience pressure can affect human performance both positively and negatively, and it turns out the same is true for our closest relatives.

Kristen Lin He and his colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan tested groups of six chimpanzees kept at the university's Primate Research Institute on three numerical tasks of varying difficulty.

In the first task, numbers from 1 to 5 appeared in random positions on the screen, and the chimpanzees simply had to touch the numbers in the correct order to receive a reward.

In the second task, the numbers were not adjacent. For example, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 15 might appear on the screen. Again, the chimpanzees had to press a number from the minimum value to the maximum value to receive a reward.

Finally, in the most difficult test, when the first digit in the sequence was pressed, the remaining digits were hidden behind a checkered square on the screen. This meant that the chimps had to memorize the positions of the numbers in order to press them in the correct order.

The chimpanzees were tested on this task thousands of times over six years with a variety of audiences, including one to eight human observers, people familiar with chimpanzees, and people new to chimpanzees.

When the task was easy, the chimpanzees performed worse as more people watched. However, on the most difficult task, all six chimpanzees performed better as the audience size increased.

“It was very surprising that performance improved so much as the number of human experimenters increased, because having more humans present can be distracting,” Lin says. “However, the results suggest that this may actually motivate them to perform even better.

“For the easiest tasks, humans may distract them, but for the most difficult tasks, humans can become a stressor and actually motivate them to perform better.”

team members Shinya YamamotoResearchers from Kyoto University also said they were surprised to find this effect in chimpanzees.

“Such audience effects are thought to be unique to humans who live in reputation-based and normative societies, where it is possible to perform well in front of an audience, and others to perform well in front of an audience. Sometimes they perform worse than they do,” he says. “However, our study shows that this audience effect may have evolved in the ape lineage before this type of normative society developed.”

Yamamoto says it's difficult and sometimes dangerous to tease out direct human implications from non-human research. “However, by telling people that chimpanzees are the same way, it may be possible to subtly calm the nerves of people who are extremely nervous in front of others.”

Miguel Llorente A team of researchers from the University of Girona in Spain suggests that it may be possible to further study how audience effects relate to individual chimpanzee personalities.

“To generalize these results to natural chimpanzee behavior, we will investigate these effects with chimpanzee audiences to more fully understand how these dynamics play out in natural social contexts.” “It would also be interesting to understand that,” he says.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Springtails that perform backflips are the quickest spinning creatures ever discovered.

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Composite image of a jumping spherical collembolan

Adrian Smith

High-speed cameras have clearly captured the springtails spinning in the air faster than any other animal ever recorded.

Springtails are a type of arthropod, a group related to insects, that are a few millimeters long and can be found in most places on Earth.

As its name suggests, the animal leaps off the ground using a tail-like appendage called a “furka” that folds up under its body and can instantly unfold to launch the creature into the air and escape predators.

Adrian Smith A North Carolina State University student was sifting through leaves in his backyard when he came across a round, mottled orange-and-brown reptile. Dikiltmina Minuta.

“We brought them into the lab to film them, and we were amazed by what they did,” Smith says.

Working together Jacob Harrison Smith, of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, used a high-speed camera to capture dozens of Springtail shells, and to encourage the arthropods to turn over, the researchers placed the Springtails under bright lights and sometimes poked them with tiny paintbrushes.

With each jump, the tiny acrobatic creatures arc backwards up to 80 times their body length, and springtails can spin up to 368 times a second, faster than any animal yet studied.

Smith and Harrison found that springtails have two ways of landing: by bouncing and rolling uncontrollably, or by a fixed stop made possible by organs called colophores, sticky tubes that allow them to attach to the ground.

Scientists continue to study the jumping mechanics of springtails for engineering clues, and they are also studying the forward somersaults of the blue-green algae, another arthropod that has evolved a rapid escape jump.

Smith says people may think that everything in the natural world is explained and known, but that's not the case: “There's so much that exists within us and between us that is incredible.”

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Carpenter ants possess the ability to perform life-saving amputation surgery on injured nestmates

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Carpenter Ants (Camponotus) – Jumping spiders, a diverse genus of large ants that inhabit many forested areas around the world, are able to selectively treat the injured limbs of their nestmates by cleaning or amputating the wounds.

Injured (marked in yellow) Camponotus floridanus. His wounds are being treated by his nestmates. Image credit: Frank others., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.06.021.

For animals, open wounds pose a significant risk of infection and death. To reduce these risks, many animal species apply antibacterial compounds to wounds.

In 2023, researchers discovered another ant species, Megaponera analis, uses special glands to inject antibacterial compounds into wounds, reducing the chance of infection.

Florida carpenter ant (Camponotus floridanus) and other species of the same genus Camponotus. Notably, they lack such glands and therefore appear to use only mechanical means to treat their nestmates.

Dr. Eric Frank from the University of Würzburg and his colleagues discovered that this mechanical care involves one of two pathways.

The ants either clean the wound using only their mouthparts, or clean it and then amputate the leg completely.

When choosing which route to take, Ali appears to be assessing the type of injury and tailoring the best treatment approach based on information.

The study analyzed two types of leg injuries: femur lacerations and ankle-like tibial lacerations.

All femur injuries involved a nestmate first cleaning the cut and then biting off the entire leg, in contrast to the tibia injuries, which involved only mouth cleaning.

In both cases, the intervention resulted in a significant increase in survival of ants with experimentally infected wounds.

“With femur injuries, we always end up amputating the leg, and we have about a 90 to 95 percent success rate. And with tibia injuries, where we don’t amputate, we achieve about a 75 percent survival rate,” Dr. Frank said.

“This is in contrast to the survival rates of untreated infected femoral and tibial abrasions, which are less than 40 percent and 15 percent, respectively.”

The scientists hypothesized that preferred methods of wound care may be related to the risk of infection from the wound site.

Micro-CT scans of the femur confirmed that it was mostly composed of muscle tissue, suggesting that it played a functional role in pumping blood, called hemolymph, from the leg to the trunk.

When the femur is damaged, the muscles are damaged and the ability to circulate blood that may be contaminated with bacteria is reduced.

The tibia, on the other hand, has very little musculature and little contribution to blood circulation.

“With a tibia injury, the hemolymph flow is less disrupted, allowing bacteria to enter the body more quickly, whereas a femur injury slows down the rate at which blood circulates in the leg,” Dr Frank said.

“If tibial injury would hasten infection, one might expect that amputation of the entire leg would be the most appropriate option, but in fact the opposite has been observed.”

“It turns out that the speed at which the ants can sever the legs makes a difference.”

“An amputation surgery using ants takes at least 40 minutes to complete.”

“Experiments have demonstrated that in the case of tibial injuries, the ants cannot survive unless the leg is removed soon after infection.”

“This means that the ants cannot cut their legs quickly enough to prevent the spread of harmful bacteria, so by taking their time cleaning the wound in their shins they try to reduce a potentially fatal infection,” says Dr Laurent Keller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne.

“The fact that ants can diagnose wounds, determine whether they are infected or sterile, and then treat them accordingly over time with other individuals — the only medical system that could match that would be the human medical system.”

Given the sophisticated nature of these behaviors, the next question to ask is how these ants are able to perform such precise care.

“This is all innate behaviour; ants’ behaviour changes as individuals age, but there is little evidence of learning,” Dr Keller said.

of Investigation result Published in the journal Current Biology.

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Eric T. Frank othersIn order to combat infections in the ant community, they amputate legs depending on the injury. Current BiologyPublished online July 2, 2024; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.06.021

This article is based on an original release by Cell Press.

Source: www.sci.news

Research reveals that these ants possess the remarkable ability to perform life-saving emergency surgery on one another

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Florida carpenter ants are unique in their behavior, as they have been observed selectively cutting off the injured limbs of their nestmates. This unusual behavior was discovered in a study published in Current Biology, where researchers found that the ants use this “surgery” as a form of treatment for their injured companions. The ants were observed to carefully evaluate each injury and decide whether to clean the wound or amputate the leg entirely, based on the extent of the injury.

Lead author David Levine, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Würzburg, described this behavior as unique in the animal kingdom, as it involves one ant surgically treating another without the use of any tools. Unlike other ants that have specialized glands for wound treatment, Florida Carpenter ants rely solely on mechanical means to care for their injured nestmates.

The study found that the ants have a high success rate in treating femoral injuries, where amputation is required, compared to tibial injuries that can be treated with a simple mouthwash. This indicates that the ants have a sophisticated system for evaluating and treating wounds effectively to improve the chances of survival for the injured ants.

Credit: Bert Zielstra

The researchers believe that the ants’ ability to diagnose and treat wounds in such a precise manner is comparable to the human medical system. Further research is being conducted to understand if similar behavior exists in other ant species and to explore the ants’ tolerance to pain during these prolonged surgical procedures.

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Source: www.sciencefocus.com