Species Distribution Models (SDMs) play a vital role in biodiversity research, conservation planning, and ecological niche modeling by predicting species distributions based on environmental conditions. The selection of predictors is crucial, strongly impacting both model accuracy and how well the predictions reflect ecological patterns. To ensure meaningful insights, input variables must be carefully chosen to match the study objectives and the ecological requirements of the target species. However, existing SDMs, including both traditional and deep learning-based approaches, often lack key capabilities for variable selection: (i) flexibility to choose relevant predictors at inference without retraining; (ii) robustness to handle missing predictor values without compromising accuracy; and (iii) explainability to interpret and accurately quantify each predictor's contribution. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MaskSDM, a novel deep learning-based SDM that enables flexible predictor selection by employing a masked training strategy. This approach allows the model to make predictions with arbitrary subsets of input variables while remaining robust to missing data. It also provides a clearer understanding of how adding or removing a given predictor affects model performance and predictions. Additionally, MaskSDM leverages Shapley values for precise predictor contribution assessments, improving upon traditional approximations. We evaluate MaskSDM on the global sPlotOpen dataset, modeling the distributions of 12,738 plant species. Our results show that MaskSDM outperforms imputation-based methods and approximates models trained on specific subsets of variables. These findings underscore MaskSDM's potential to increase the applicability and adoption of SDMs, laying the groundwork for developing foundation models in SDMs that can be readily applied to diverse ecological applications.

Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful tool for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) ship classification. This survey comprehensively analyzes the diverse DL techniques employed in this domain. We identify critical trends and challenges, highlighting the importance of integrating handcrafted features, utilizing public datasets, data augmentation, fine-tuning, explainability techniques, and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations to improve DL model performance. This survey establishes a first-of-its-kind taxonomy for categorizing relevant research based on DL models, handcrafted feature use, SAR attribute utilization, and the impact of fine-tuning. We discuss the methodologies used in SAR ship classification tasks and the impact of different techniques. Finally, the survey explores potential avenues for future research, including addressing data scarcity, exploring novel DL architectures, incorporating interpretability techniques, and establishing standardized performance metrics. By addressing these challenges and leveraging advancements in DL, researchers can contribute to developing more accurate and efficient ship classification systems, ultimately enhancing maritime surveillance and related applications.

Abstract--Underwater environments pose significant challenges for visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems due to limited visibility, inadequate illumination, and sporadic loss of structural features in images. Addressing these challenges, this paper introduces a novel, tightly-coupled Acoustic-Visual-Inertial SLAM approach, termed AQUA-SLAM, to fuse a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL), a stereo camera, and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) within a graph optimization framework. The proposed system will be made open-source for the community. These vehicles are indispensable occasionally outside the camera's field of view leading to for tasks such as seabed mapping, pipeline and intermittent loss of visual tracking. Therefore, although visual cable inspections, biological and environmental monitoring, SLAM techniques have recently made tremendous progress and the maintenance of underwater infrastructure. A key in terrestrial settings [1], [2], [3], their performance and application area is the detailed visual inspection of subsea robustness are inevitably compromised in underwater due to structures, including offshore wind turbine foundations, where the complex and dynamic nature of aquatic environments. Considering cameras are widely equipped on underwater (IMU), known as visual-inertial SLAM (VI-SLAM) [4], [5], robots, visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping can alleviate some of the challenges arising from transient, (SLAM) techniques emerge as natural solutions. The rapid attenuation of underwater SLAM systems, particularly against shortterm of light energy in water severely limits the visibility of visual disruptions, can be substantially enhanced [6]. However, most of the challenges for underwater vision, such Moreover, underwater vision often suffers from poor lighting as the limited visibility and the "marine snow", are longterm and blizzards of "marine snow" caused by small particles of effects that last at least from tens of seconds to a few organic matter in water, severely reducing image quality with minutes before being mitigated. VI-SLAM also encounters increased motion blur and dynamic image regions.

With the emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), hundreds of benchmarks have been developed to ensure the reliability of MLLMs in downstream tasks. However, the evaluation mechanism itself may not be reliable. For developers of MLLMs, questions remain about which benchmark to use and whether the test results meet their requirements. Therefore, we propose a critical principle of Information Density, which examines how much insight a benchmark can provide for the development of MLLMs. We characterize it from four key dimensions: (1) Fallacy, (2) Difficulty, (3) Redundancy, (4) Diversity. Through a comprehensive analysis of more than 10,000 samples, we measured the information density of 19 MLLM benchmarks. Experiments show that using the latest benchmarks in testing can provide more insight compared to previous ones, but there is still room for improvement in their information density. We hope this principle can promote the development and application of future MLLM benchmarks. Project page: https://github.com/lcysyzxdxc/bench4bench

It's easy to feel a bit beset by doom these days. The other week, I watched the heinous AI-generated "Trump Gaza" video and was so appalled that I impulse-bought a kayaking guide book. It felt like the only sane response was to take to the water and paddle away. Video games are a reliable antidote to existential doom, but layoffs, corporate homogenisation and AI slop are all encroaching on my safe haven, making it more difficult to get a brief reprieve from what's happening in the outside world. Thank God, then, for the Bafta games awards nominations, which reliably remind me that video games are pretty great, actually.

Atlantic Council senior fellow Ariel Cohen and Heritage Foundation senior fellow Charles'Cully' Stimson discuss the state of the war amid White House tensions with President Zelenskyy. Ukraine launched its largest-ever drone attack on Moscow on Tuesday as a senior delegation met with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz in Saudi Arabia for talks about ending the war with Russia. A total of 337 drones were shot down Tuesday over Russia, including 91 in the Moscow area and 126 in the Kursk region bordering Ukraine, Reuters reported, citing Russia's defense ministry. Moscow-based meat producer Miratorg said two of its employees were killed by falling debris, while 18 other people – including three children – were injured after residential buildings were struck, officials told Reuters. Images taken in Russia showed damage to cars and apartment buildings in the wake of the attack, which temporarily shut down Moscow's four airports.

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents leverage the advanced reasoning capabilities of LLMs in real-world applications. To interface with an environment, these agents often rely on tools, such as web search or database APIs. As the agent provides the LLM with tool documentation along the user query, the completeness and correctness of this documentation is critical. However, tool documentation is often over-, under-, or ill-specified, impeding the agent's accuracy. Standard software testing approaches struggle to identify these errors as they are expressed in natural language. Thus, despite its importance, there currently exists no automated method to test the tool documentation for agents. To address this issue, we present ToolFuzz, the first method for automated testing of tool documentations. ToolFuzz is designed to discover two types of errors: (1) user queries leading to tool runtime errors and (2) user queries that lead to incorrect agent responses. ToolFuzz can generate a large and diverse set of natural inputs, effectively finding tool description errors at a low false positive rate. Further, we present two straightforward prompt-engineering approaches. We evaluate all three tool testing approaches on 32 common LangChain tools and 35 newly created custom tools and 2 novel benchmarks to further strengthen the assessment. We find that many publicly available tools suffer from underspecification. Specifically, we show that ToolFuzz identifies 20x more erroneous inputs compared to the prompt-engineering approaches, making it a key component for building reliable AI agents.

Accurate wind speed prediction is crucial for designing and selecting sites for offshore wind farms. This paper investigates the effectiveness of various machine learning models in predicting offshore wind power for a site near the Gulf of Mexico by analyzing meteorological data. After collecting and preprocessing meteorological data, nine different input feature combinations were designed to assess their impact on wind power predictions at multiple heights. The results show that using wind speed as the output feature improves prediction accuracy by approximately 10% compared to using wind power as the output. In addition, the improvement of multi-feature input compared with single-feature input is not obvious mainly due to the poor correlation among key features and limited generalization ability of models. These findings underscore the importance of selecting appropriate output features and highlight considerations for using machine learning in wind power forecasting, offering insights that could guide future wind power prediction models and conversion techniques.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases. However, this integration introduces a new security threat: adversaries can exploit the retrieval mechanism to inject malicious content into the knowledge base, thereby influencing the generated responses. Based on this attack vector, we propose CtrlRAG, a novel attack method designed for RAG system in the black-box setting, which aligns with real-world scenarios. Unlike existing attack methods, CtrlRAG introduces a perturbation mechanism using Masked Language Model (MLM) to dynamically optimize malicious content in response to changes in the retrieved context. Experimental results demonstrate that CtrlRAG outperforms three baseline methods in both Emotional Manipulation and Hallucination Amplification objectives. Furthermore, we evaluate three existing defense mechanisms, revealing their limited effectiveness against CtrlRAG and underscoring the urgent need for more robust defenses.

Large Language Model~(LLM) based agents have been increasingly popular in solving complex and dynamic tasks, which requires proper evaluation systems to assess their capabilities. Nevertheless, existing benchmarks usually either focus on single-objective tasks or use overly broad assessing metrics, failing to provide a comprehensive inspection of the actual capabilities of LLM-based agents in complicated decision-making tasks. To address these issues, we introduce DSGBench, a more rigorous evaluation platform for strategic decision-making. Firstly, it incorporates six complex strategic games which serve as ideal testbeds due to their long-term and multi-dimensional decision-making demands and flexibility in customizing tasks of various difficulty levels or multiple targets. Secondly, DSGBench employs a fine-grained evaluation scoring system which examines the decision-making capabilities by looking into the performance in five specific dimensions and offering a comprehensive assessment in a well-designed way. Furthermore, DSGBench also incorporates an automated decision-tracking mechanism which enables in-depth analysis of agent behaviour patterns and the changes in their strategies. We demonstrate the advances of DSGBench by applying it to multiple popular LLM-based agents and our results suggest that DSGBench provides valuable insights in choosing LLM-based agents as well as improving their future development. DSGBench is available at https://github.com/DeciBrain-Group/DSGBench.