The John ellipsoid problem has far-reaching applications in numerous fields of computer science.

In this paper, we introduce SAIL-VL (ScAlable Vision Language Model TraIning via High QuaLity Data Curation), an open-source vision language model (VLM) of state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with 2B parameters. We introduce three key improvements that contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a visual understanding data construction pipeline, which enables hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation. Equipped with this pipeline, we curate SAIL-Caption, a large-scale caption dataset with large quantity and the highest data quality compared with opensource caption datasets. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 131B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting expected data size scaling laws in visual understanding and instruction following performance. (3) Scalable SFT via quantity and quality scaling: We introduce general guidance for instruction data curation to scale up instruction data continuously, allowing us to construct a large SFT dataset with the highest quality. To further improve SAIL-VL's performance, we propose quality scaling, a multi-stage training recipe with curriculum learning, to improve model performance scaling curves w.r.t. data sizes from logarithmic to be near-linear. SAIL-VL obtains the highest average score in 19 commonly used benchmarks in our evaluation and achieves top1 performance among VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass (https://rank.opencompass.org.cn/leaderboard-multimodal). We release our SAIL-VL-2B model at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent/SAIL-VL-2B).

We give a faster algorithm for computing an approximate John ellipsoid around $n$ points in $d$ dimensions. The best known prior algorithms are based on repeatedly computing the leverage scores of the points and reweighting them by these scores [CCLY19]. We show that this algorithm can be substantially sped up by delaying the computation of high accuracy leverage scores by using sampling, and then later computing multiple batches of high accuracy leverage scores via fast rectangular matrix multiplication. We also give low-space streaming algorithms for John ellipsoids using similar ideas.

Background: Breast density, as derived from mammographic images and defined by the American College of Radiology's Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS), is one of the strongest risk factors for breast cancer. Breast ultrasound (BUS) is an alternative breast cancer screening modality, particularly useful for early detection in low-resource, rural contexts. The purpose of this study was to explore an artificial intelligence (AI) model to predict BI-RADS mammographic breast density category from clinical, handheld BUS imaging. Methods: All data are sourced from the Hawaii and Pacific Islands Mammography Registry. We compared deep learning methods from BUS imaging, as well as machine learning models from image statistics alone. The use of AI-derived BUS density as a risk factor for breast cancer was then compared to clinical BI-RADS breast density while adjusting for age. The BUS data were split by individual into 70/20/10% groups for training, validation, and testing. Results: 405,120 clinical BUS images from 14.066 women were selected for inclusion in this study, resulting in 9.846 women for training (302,574 images), 2,813 for validation (11,223 images), and 1,406 for testing (4,042 images). On the held-out testing set, the strongest AI model achieves AUROC 0.854 predicting BI-RADS mammographic breast density from BUS imaging and outperforms all shallow machine learning methods based on image statistics. In cancer risk prediction, age-adjusted AI BUS breast density predicted 5-year breast cancer risk with 0.633 AUROC, as compared to 0.637 AUROC from age-adjusted clinical breast density. Conclusions: BI-RADS mammographic breast density can be estimated from BUS imaging with high accuracy using a deep learning model. Furthermore, we demonstrate that AI-derived BUS breast density is predictive of 5-year breast cancer risk in our population.

This letter provides what is, to the best of our knowledge, a first study on the applicability of ultra-low-resolution thermal cameras for providing rotational odometry measurements to navigational devices such as rovers and drones. Our use of an ultra-low-resolution thermal camera instead of other modalities such as an RGB camera is motivated by its robustness to lighting conditions, while being one order of magnitude less cost-expensive compared to higher-resolution thermal cameras. After setting up a custom data acquisition system and acquiring thermal camera data together with its associated rotational speed label, we train a small 4-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for regressing the rotational speed from the thermal data. Experiments and ablation studies are conducted for determining the impact of thermal camera resolution and the number of successive frames on the CNN estimation precision. Finally, our novel dataset for the study of low-resolution thermal odometry is openly released with the hope of benefiting future research.

As Machine Learning (ML) gains adoption across industries and new use cases, practitioners increasingly realize the challenges around effectively developing and iterating on ML systems: reproducibility, debugging, scalability, and documentation are elusive goals for real-world pipelines outside tech-first companies. In this paper, we review the nature of ML-oriented workloads and argue that re-purposing existing tools won't solve the current productivity issues, as ML peculiarities warrant specialized development tooling. We then introduce Metaflow, an open-source framework for ML projects explicitly designed to boost the productivity of data practitioners by abstracting away the execution of ML code from the definition of the business logic. We show how our design addresses the main challenges in ML operations (MLOps), and document through examples, interviews and use cases its practical impact on the field.

Pushing the envelope of Neural Language Processing model GPT-3 by OpenAI I explore its capability to interpret art -- and to create. One might say, "GPT-3" is still far away from AGI. One might say, it's "competence without comprehension". But during my experiments, I was already convinced about the creative power of GPT-3 -- mixed with human perception. In my texts, I always mark AI-generated contents as such.

We have been studying the performance of a bottlenosed dolphin on a delayed matching-to-sample task to gain insight into the processes and mechanisms that the animal uses during echolocation. The dolphin recognizes targets by emitting natural sonar signals and listening to the echoes that return. This paper describes a novel neural network architecture, called an integrator gateway network, that we have developed to account for this performance. The integrator gateway network combines information from multiple echoes to classify targets with about 90% accuracy. In contrast, a standard backpropagation network performed with only about 63% accuracy.

We have been studying the performance of a bottlenosed dolphin on a delayed matching-to-sample task to gain insight into the processes and mechanisms that the animal uses during echolocation. The dolphin recognizes targets by emitting natural sonar signals and listening to the echoes that return. This paper describes a novel neural network architecture, called an integrator gateway network, that we have developed to account for this performance. The integrator gateway network combines information from multiple echoes to classify targets with about 90% accuracy. In contrast, a standard backpropagation network performed with only about 63% accuracy.