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Japan zoo staffer allegedly dumps wife's body inside incinerator

BBC News

Japan zoo staffer allegedly dumps wife's body inside incinerator A popular Japanese zoo has delayed its opening for the summer season after an employee told police he had disposed of his wife's body in the zoo's incinerator, local media reported. Asahiyama Zoo in the northern city of Asahikawa was supposed to welcome visitors on Wednesday in time for Japan's Golden Week holiday period, after completing a three-week maintenance break. But the city government says the zoo will now remain closed until Friday as investigations continue. Last week, police searched the zoo grounds after the employee told them he had disposed of his wife's body in the zoo's incinerator, local media reported. The incinerator was used to dispose of animal carcasses when they died.


On the Powerfulness of Textual Outlier Exposure for Visual OoDDetection

Neural Information Processing Systems

Successful detection of Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data is becoming increasingly important to ensure safe deployment of neural networks. One of the main challenges in OoD detection is that neural networks output overconfident predictions on OoD data, make it difficult to determine OoD-ness of data solely based on their predictions. Outlier exposure addresses this issue by introducing an additional loss that encourages low-confidence predictions on OoD data during training. While outlier exposure has shown promising potential in improving OoD detection performance, all previous studies on outlier exposure have been limited to utilizing visual outliers.


In the coming AI future, Britain must not end up at the mercy of US tech giants Rafael Behr

The Guardian

Kendall says AI is the'currency of the future'. Kendall says AI is the'currency of the future'. Trump is volatile, capricious and unreasonable - but he belongs to the old world of analogue power. D onald Trump is not impressed by soft power. He respects hard men with military muscle.


9602d22a8c791f23f8e4d1398e3fb5be-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Communication compression is a common technique in distributed optimization that can alleviate communication overhead by transmitting compressed gradients and model parameters. However, compression can introduce information distortion, which slows down convergence and incurs more communication rounds to achieve desired solutions. Given the trade-off between lower per-round communication costs and additional rounds of communication, it is unclear whether communication compression reduces the total communication cost. This paper explores the conditions under which unbiased compression, a widely used form of compression, can reduce the total communication cost, as well as the extent to which it can do so. To this end, we present the first theoretical formulation for characterizing the total communication cost in distributed optimization with unbiased compressors. We demonstrate that unbiased compression alone does not necessarily save the total communication cost, but this outcome can be achieved if the compressors used by all workers are further assumed independent. We establish lower bounds on the communication rounds required by algorithms using independent unbiased compressors to minimize smooth convex functions and show that these lower bounds are tight by refining the analysis for ADIANA. Our results reveal that using independent unbiased compression can reduce the total communication cost by a factor of up to ฮ˜( p min{n,ฮบ}) when all local smoothness constants are constrained by a common upper bound, where nis the number of workers and ฮบis the condition number of the functions being minimized. These theoretical findings are supported by experimental results.


Japan's Terra Drone expands investment in Ukraine drone sector

The Japan Times

Japan's Terra Drone expands investment in Ukraine drone sector A soldier from Ukraine's Taifun unmanned aerial vehicle unit holds a new model Marsianin attack drone on April 7 in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. Tokyo-based Terra Drone is expanding its investment in Ukrainian interceptor drones as it looks to bring battlefield-tested technology back to Japan to tap into a multibillion-dollar defense budget for unmanned systems. On Tuesday, Terra Drone CEO Toru Tokushige said the company was entering a new strategic partnership with Ukraine's WinnyLab to develop fixed-wing interceptor drones. It comes after the company announced in March that it would make an investment in Ukraine's Amazing Drones to develop vertical take-off interceptor drones. "Starting with interceptor drones we are looking for products that are good for increasing the defensive power of Ukraine and also the defensive power of Japan," Tokushige said in an interview.


Weeks of silence over Iran school strike highly unusual, former US officials say

BBC News

Five former US officials, including a former top military lawyer, have criticised the Pentagon for not acknowledging potential American involvement in a deadly strike on an Iranian school earlier this year. Some of those officials said it was highly unusual not to release even basic details of the strike after such a length of time. A missile hit a primary school in Minab during the opening salvos of the US-Israeli war on February 28, killing 168 people including around 110 children according to Iranian officials. In the two months since then the Pentagon has said only that the incident is under investigation. US media reported in early March that US military investigators believed American forces were likely responsible for hitting the school unintentionally but had not reached a final conclusion.


China races to build record biobank to rival U.S. drugs research

The Japan Times

China races to build record biobank to rival U.S. drugs research Biobanks store masses of biomedical data such as clinical records, genome sequences and other long-term health metrics that research and drug development depend on. As a fledgling researcher in U.S., Zhang Li was struck by the efficiency of extracting human tissue in the morning and mining it for data the same afternoon. Such a streamlined process had been missing from his years of training as a bio data scientist in China. Inspired, he returned home to Beijing to join the Chinese Institute for Brain Research and launch a national database that will collect blood and DNA samples from 33,000 children to help identify patterns of brain disease and their risk factors. "Biomedical data is extremely valuable and is fundamental for us to find solutions to diseases and to delay aging," said Zhang, surrounded by robotic arms carefully organizing blood samples.


Kim Jong Un praises troops who 'self-blasted' to avoid capture by Ukraine

BBC News

Kim Jong Un praises troops who'self-blasted' to avoid capture by Ukraine Kim Jong Un has praised North Korean soldiers who killed themselves by detonating their grenades while fighting for Russia against Ukraine, confirming a long-suspected battlefield policy. In a speech this week, the North Korean leader said those who unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting, suicide attack, in order to defend the great honour were heroes. South Korea estimates at least 15,000 North Koreans have been sent to help Russia recapture parts of western Kursk, and more than 6,000 have been killed so far. Neither Pyongyang nor Moscow have confirmed the numbers. Intelligence agencies and defectors have said the soldiers were under Pyongyang's orders to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner by Ukraine.



Transformer Approximations from ReLUs

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present a systematic recipe for translating ReLU approximation results to softmax Transformers1. Given a constructive ReLU approximator for a target, we construct an explicit softmax transformer with the same accuracy. The recipe applies to many common approximation targets and yields quantitative resource bounds beyond universal approximation statements. This matters because broad Universal Approximation Properties (UAP) still dominate Transformer approximation theory. For softmax Transformer, many universality results provide explicit constructions and quantitative resource bounds (e.g., parameters, depth, width...etc) [Yun et al., 2020, Kajitsuka and Sato, 2023, Takakura and Suzuki, 2023, Jiang and Li, 2024, Hu et al., 2025,