DRAGGIN' DRAGON: Shelby is selling 5 new classic Cobras for an astonishing price. RACY RANGER: Ford is taking on the Dakar Rally with a Ranger pickup. The Toyota Land Cruiser will return to the U.S. soon. COMEBACK KID: The Toyota Land Cruiser is returning to the USA. AI BIKES: Lightning Motorcycles is using artificial intelligence to build'organic' motorcycles.

Mike Gallagher and Raja Krishnamoorthi explain the threat from China amid growing concerns about TikTok and the country's relationship with Russia. Tech firm Ultra has developed an artificial intelligence-powered tool it believes has helped analysts identify products coming from China through the platform Temu that were created using forced labor, possibly from the Uyghur population. "We're looking at Temu from the perspective of the Forced Labor Prevention Act," Ultra founder and CEO Ram Ben Tzion told Fox News Digital. "How many things that we don't want are coming into the country using this method, right? The good cases are counterfeit. The worst cases are poor quality. "I'm quite confident that illicit elements can find themselves going through this platform into the market, so it's time to demand accountability," he added. Ben Tzion's company created the program Publican, which pulls in huge amounts of shipping data to analyze and look for patterns and red flags for any products ...

Deep-learning-based surrogate models provide an efficient complement to numerical simulations for subsurface flow problems such as CO$_2$ geological storage. Accurately capturing the impact of faults on CO$_2$ plume migration remains a challenge for many existing deep learning surrogate models based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) or Neural Operators. We address this challenge with a graph-based neural model leveraging recent developments in the field of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Our model combines graph-based convolution Long-Short-Term-Memory (GConvLSTM) with a one-step GNN model, MeshGraphNet (MGN), to operate on complex unstructured meshes and limit temporal error accumulation. We demonstrate that our approach can accurately predict the temporal evolution of gas saturation and pore pressure in a synthetic reservoir with impermeable faults. Our results exhibit a better accuracy and a reduced temporal error accumulation compared to the standard MGN model. We also show the excellent generalizability of our algorithm to mesh configurations, boundary conditions, and heterogeneous permeability fields not included in the training set. This work highlights the potential of GNN-based methods to accurately and rapidly model subsurface flow with complex faults and fractures.

This disease, characterized by cognitive impairments such as memory loss, predominantly affects aging populations, exerting an escalating burden on global healthcare systems as societies continue to age [3]. The significance of AD is further magnified by the increasing life expectancy globally, with the disease now recognized as a leading cause of disability and dependency among older people [4]. Consequently, AD has substantial social, economic, and health system implications, making its understanding and awareness of paramount importance [5, 6]. Despite the ubiquity and severity of AD, a gap persists in comprehensive, data-driven public understanding of this complex health narrative. Traditionally, public health professionals have to rely on labor-intensive methods such as web scraping, API data collection, data postprocessing, and analysis/synthesis to gather insights from news media, health reports, and other textual sources [7, 8, 9].

Smart-parking solutions use sensors, cameras, and data analysis to improve parking efficiency and reduce traffic congestion. Computer vision-based methods have been used extensively in recent years to tackle the problem of parking lot management, but most of the works assume that the parking spots are manually labeled, impacting the cost and feasibility of deployment. To fill this gap, this work presents an automatic parking space detection method, which receives a sequence of images of a parking lot and returns a list of coordinates identifying the detected parking spaces. The proposed method employs instance segmentation to identify cars and, using vehicle occurrence, generate a heat map of parking spaces. The results using twelve different subsets from the PKLot and CNRPark-EXT parking lot datasets show that the method achieved an AP25 score up to 95.60\% and AP50 score up to 79.90\%.

Memory-augmentation is a powerful approach for efficiently incorporating external information into language models, but leads to reduced performance relative to retrieving text. Recent work introduced LUMEN, a memory-retrieval hybrid that partially pre-computes memory and updates memory representations on the fly with a smaller live encoder. We propose GLIMMER, which improves on this approach through 1) exploiting free access to the powerful memory representations by applying a shallow reranker on top of memory to drastically improve retrieval quality at low cost, and 2) incorporating multi-task training to learn a general and higher quality memory and live encoder. GLIMMER achieves strong gains in performance at faster speeds compared to LUMEN and FiD on the KILT benchmark of knowledge-intensive tasks.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to conformal prediction for generative language models (LMs). Standard conformal prediction produces prediction sets--in place of single predictions--that have rigorous, statistical performance guarantees. LM responses are typically sampled from the model's predicted distribution over the large, combinatorial output space of natural language. Translating this process to conformal prediction, we calibrate a stopping rule for sampling different outputs from the LM that get added to a growing set of candidates until we are confident that the output set is sufficient. Since some samples may be lowquality, we also simultaneously calibrate and apply a rejection rule for removing candidates from the output set to reduce noise. Similar to conformal prediction, we prove that the sampled set returned by our procedure contains at least one acceptable answer with high probability, while still being empirically precise (i.e., small) on average. Furthermore, within this set of candidate responses, we show that we can also accurately identify subsets of individual components--such as phrases or sentences--that are each independently correct (e.g., that are not "hallucinations"), again with statistical guarantees. We demonstrate the promise of our approach on multiple tasks in open-domain question answering, text summarization, and radiology report generation using different LM variants.

Numerous solutions for yield estimation are either based on data-driven models, or on crop-simulation models (CSMs). Researchers tend to build data-driven models using nationwide crop information databases provided by agencies such as the USDA. On the opposite side of the spectrum, CSMs require fine data that may be hard to generalize from a handful of fields. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach for yield forecasting that combines data-driven solutions, crop simulation models, and model surrogates to support multiple user-profiles and needs when dealing with crop management decision-making. To achieve this goal, we have developed a solution to calibrate CSMs at scale, a surrogate model of a CSM assuring faster execution, and a neural network-based approach that performs efficient risk assessment in such settings. Our data-driven modeling approach outperforms previous works with yield correlation predictions close to 91\%. The crop simulation modeling architecture achieved 6% error; the proposed crop simulation model surrogate performs predictions almost 100 times faster than the adopted crop simulator with similar accuracy levels.

In this paper, we advocate in favor of smartphone apps as low-cost, easy-to-deploy solution for raising awareness among the population on the proliferation of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Nevertheless, devising such a smartphone app is challenging, for many reasons, including the required maturity level of techniques for identifying mosquitoes based on features that can be captured using smartphone resources. In this paper, we identify a set of (non-exhaustive) requirements that smartphone apps must meet to become an effective tooling in the fight against Ae. aegypti, and advance the state-of-the-art with (i) a residual convolutional neural network for classifying Ae. aegypti mosquitoes from their wingbeat sound, (ii) a methodology for reducing the influence of background noise in the classification process, and (iii) a dataset for benchmarking solutions for detecting Ae. aegypti mosquitoes from wingbeat sound recordings. From the analysis of accuracy and recall, we provide evidence that convolutional neural networks have potential as a cornerstone for tracking mosquito apps for smartphones.

Language model training in distributed settings is limited by the communication cost of gradient exchanges. In this short note, we extend recent work from Malladi et al. (2023), using shared randomness to perform distributed fine-tuning with low bandwidth. The method is a natural decentralized extension of memory-efficient Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (SPSA). Each iteration, each machine seeds a Random Number Generator (RNG) to perform local reproducible perturbations on model weights and calculate and exchange scalar projected gradients, which are then used to update each model. By using a (machine, sample) identifier as the random seed, each model can regenerate one another's perturbations. As machines only exchange single-byte projected gradients, this is highly communication efficient. There are also potential privacy benefits, as projected gradients may be calculated on different training data, and models never access the other's data. Our approach not only drastically reduces communication bandwidth requirements but also accommodates dynamic addition or removal of machines during the training process and retains the memory-efficient and inference-only advantages of recent work. We perform proof-of-concept experiments to demonstrate the potential usefulness of this method, building off of rich literature on distributed optimization and memory-efficient training.