In Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, nearly a dozen cases of supposed spontaneous combustion were reported. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In December 2010, Michael Faherty died in his home in Galway, Ireland. His body was burned and the fireplace was lit, but there was no other source of flames or fuel.

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success across a wide range of domains, significantly expanding the frontiers of what is achievable in artificial intelligence. Yet, despite these advances, critical challenges remain -- most notably, ensuring robustness to small input perturbations and generalization to out-of-distribution data. These critical challenges underscore the need to understand the underlying fundamental principles that govern robustness and generalization. Among the theoretical tools available, Lipschitz continuity plays a pivotal role in governing the fundamental properties of neural networks related to robustness and generalization. It quantifies the worst-case sensitivity of network's outputs to small input perturbations. While its importance is widely acknowledged, prior research has predominantly focused on empirical regularization approaches based on Lipschitz constraints, leaving the underlying principles less explored. This thesis seeks to advance a principled understanding of the principles of Lipschitz continuity in neural networks within the paradigm of machine learning, examined from two complementary perspectives: an internal perspective -- focusing on the temporal evolution of Lipschitz continuity in neural networks during training (i.e., training dynamics); and an external perspective -- investigating how Lipschitz continuity modulates the behavior of neural networks with respect to features in the input data, particularly its role in governing frequency signal propagation (i.e., modulation of frequency signal propagation).

Sexual activity in young people is on the decline, but why? And what's more, should we be worried about what this means for society and the future of the human race? The comedy film was released in 1973 with a largely youthful cast and one too many double entendres. Half a century later, that title seems more apt than ever, at least among the younger members of society. Over the past few decades, sex appears to have been on the decline among teenagers and young adults - but it's not just happening in Britain . In the US in 2010, 12 per cent of 18 to 29-year-olds reported not having had sex in the past year, according to the General Social Survey, a long-running sociological survey.

Internet memes, now a staple of digital communication, play a pivotal role in how users engage within online communities and allow researchers to gain insight into contemporary digital culture. These engaging user-generated content are characterised by their reuse of visual elements also found in other memes. Matching instances of memes via these shared visual elements, called Meme Matching, is the basis of a wealth of meme analysis approaches. However, most existing methods assume that every meme consists of a shared visual background, called a Template, with some overlaid text, thereby limiting meme matching to comparing the background image alone. Current approaches exclude the many memes that are not template-based and limit the effectiveness of automated meme analysis and would not be effective at linking memes to contemporary web-based meme dictionaries. In this work, we introduce a broader formulation of meme matching that extends beyond template matching. We show that conventional similarity measures, including a novel segment-wise computation of the similarity measures, excel at matching template-based memes but fall short when applied to non-template-based meme formats. However, the segment-wise approach was found to consistently outperform the whole-image measures on matching non-template-based memes. Finally, we explore a prompting-based approach using a pretrained Multimodal Large Language Model for meme matching. Our results highlight that accurately matching memes via shared visual elements, not just background templates, remains an open challenge that requires more sophisticated matching techniques.

Recent advances in citation recommendation have improved accuracy by leveraging multi-view representation learning to integrate the various modalities present in scholarly documents. However, effectively combining multiple data views requires fusion techniques that can capture complementary information while preserving the unique characteristics of each modality. We propose a novel citation recommendation algorithm that improves upon linear Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) methods by applying Deep CCA (DCCA), a neural network extension capable of capturing complex, non-linear relationships between distributed textual and graph-based representations of scientific articles. Experiments on the large-scale DBLP (Digital Bibliography & Library Project) citation network dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art CCA-based methods, achieving relative improvements of over 11% in Mean Average Precision@10, 5% in Precision@10, and 7% in Recall@10. These gains reflect more relevant citation recommendations and enhanced ranking quality, suggesting that DCCA's non-linear transformations yield more expressive latent representations than CCA's linear projections.

Despite tremendous progress in neuroscience, we do not have a compelling narrative for the precise way whereby the spiking of neurons in our brain results in high-level cognitive phenomena such as planning and language. We introduce a simple mathematical formulation of six basic and broadly accepted principles of neuroscience: excitatory neurons, brain areas, random synapses, Hebbian plasticity, local inhibition, and inter-area inhibition. We implement a simulated neuromorphic system based on this formalism, which is capable of basic language acquisition: Starting from a tabula rasa, the system learns, in any language, the semantics of words, their syntactic role (verb versus noun), and the word order of the language, including the ability to generate novel sentences, through the exposure to a modest number of grounded sentences in the same language. We discuss several possible extensions and implications of this result.

This paper presents a novel rule-based approach for generating music by varying existing tunes. We parse each tune to find the Pathway Assembly (PA) [ 1], that is a structure representing all repetitions in the tune. The Sequitur algorithm [2 ] is used for this. The result is a grammar. We then carry out mutation on the grammar, rather than on a tune directly. There are potentially 19 types of mutations such as adding, removing, swapping or reversing parts of the grammar that can be applied to the grammars. The system employs one of the mutations randomly in this step to automatically manipulate the grammar. Following the mutation, we need to expand the grammar which returns a new tune. The output after 1 or more mutations will be a new tune related to the original tune. Our study examines how tunes change gradually over the course of multiple mutations. Edit distances, structural complexity and length of the tunes are used to show how a tune is changed after multiple mutations. In addition, the size of effect of each mutation type is analyzed. As a final point, we review the musical aspect of the output tunes. It should be noted that the study only focused on generating new pitch sequences. The study is based on an Irish traditional tune dataset and a list of integers has been used to represent each tune's pitch values.

Automatic Target Detection (ATD) and Recognition (ATR) from Thermal Infrared (TI) imagery in the defense and surveillance domain is a challenging computer vision (CV) task in comparison to the commercial autonomous vehicle perception domain. Limited datasets, peculiar domain-specific and TI modality-specific challenges, i.e., limited hardware, scale invariance issues due to greater distances, deliberate occlusion by tactical vehicles, lower sensor resolution and resultant lack of structural information in targets, effects of weather, temperature, and time of day variations, and varying target to clutter ratios all result in increased intra-class variability and higher inter-class similarity, making accurate real-time ATR a challenging CV task. Resultantly, contemporary state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning architectures underperform in the ATR domain. We propose a modified anchor-based single-stage detector, called YOLOatr, based on a modified YOLOv5s, with optimal modifications to the detection heads, feature fusion in the neck, and a custom augmentation profile. We evaluate the performance of our proposed model on a comprehensive DSIAC MWIR dataset for real-time ATR over both correlated and decorrelated testing protocols. The results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ATR performance of up to 99.6%.

Recent advances in autonomous driving (AD) have highlighted the potential of Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) for enhanced environmental perception, particularly in challenging weather and lighting conditions. However, efficiently processing its high-dimensional spectral data remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a Multi-scale Spectral Attention Module (MSAM) that enhances spectral feature extraction through three parallel 1D convolutions with varying kernel sizes between 1 to 11, coupled with an adaptive feature aggregation mechanism. By integrating MSAM into UNet's skip connections (UNet-SC), our proposed UNet-MSAM achieves significant improvements in semantic segmentation performance across multiple HSI datasets: HyKo-VIS v2, HSI-Drive v2, and Hyperspectral City v2. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that with minimal computational overhead (on average 0.02% in parameters and 0.82% GFLOPS), UNet-MSAM consistently outperforms UNet-SC, achieving average improvements of 3.61% in mean IoU and 3.80% in mF1 across the three datasets. Through extensive ablation studies, we have established that multi-scale kernel combinations perform better than single-scale configurations. These findings demonstrate the potential of HSI processing for AD and provide valuable insights into designing robust, multi-scale spectral feature extractors for real-world applications.

We present a theoretical framework for deriving the general $n$-th order Fréchet derivatives of singular values in real rectangular matrices, by leveraging reduced resolvent operators from Kato's analytic perturbation theory for self-adjoint operators. Deriving closed-form expressions for higher-order derivatives of singular values is notoriously challenging through standard matrix-analysis techniques. To overcome this, we treat a real rectangular matrix as a compact operator on a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, and embed the rectangular matrix into a block self-adjoint operator so that non-symmetric perturbations are captured. Applying Kato's asymptotic eigenvalue expansion to this construction, we obtain a general, closed-form expression for the infinitesimal $n$-th order spectral variations. Specializing to $n=2$ and deploying on a Kronecker-product representation with matrix convention yield the Hessian of a singular value, not found in literature. By bridging abstract operator-theoretic perturbation theory with matrices, our framework equips researchers with a practical toolkit for higher-order spectral sensitivity studies in random matrix applications (e.g., adversarial perturbation in deep learning).