Environment Animals Wildlife Birds A giant-footed bird showed up in a Massachusetts backyard. The purple gallinule found its way north through unusual winds. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A winter storm blew an unexpected visitor from the south into a backyard in New Bedford, Massachusetts--a purple gallinule (). These gorgeously colored birds with shockingly large feet, live in marshes from the southeastern United States through South America.

Local news stations are often considered to be reliable sources of non-politicized information, particularly local concerns that residents care about. Because these stations are trusted news sources, viewers are particularly susceptible to the information they report. The Sinclair Broadcast group is a broadcasting company that has acquired many local news stations in the last decade. We investigate the effects of local news stations being acquired by Sinclair: how does coverage change? We use computational methods to investigate changes in internet content put out by local news stations before and after being acquired by Sinclair and in comparison to national news outlets. We find that there is clear evidence that local news stations report more frequently on national news at the expense of local topics, and that their coverage of polarizing national topics increases.

The deployment of GCNs in the cloud raises privacy concerns due to potential adversarial attacks on client data. To address security concerns, Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) using Homo-morphic Encryption (HE) secures sensitive client data.

Tabular data are central to many applications, especially longitudinal data in healthcare, where missing values are common, undermining model fidelity and reliability. Prior imputation methods either impose restrictive assumptions or struggle with complex cross-feature structure, while recent generative approaches suffer from instability and costly inference. We propose Impute-MACFM, a mask-aware conditional flow matching framework for tabular imputation that addresses missingness mechanisms, missing completely at random, missing at random, and missing not at random. Its mask-aware objective builds trajectories only on missing entries while constraining predicted velocity to remain near zero on observed entries, using flexible nonlinear schedules. Impute-MACFM combines: (i) stability penalties on observed positions, (ii) consistency regularization enforcing local invariance, and (iii) time-decayed noise injection for numeric features. Inference uses constraint-preserving ordinary differential equation integration with per-step projection to fix observed values, optionally aggregating multiple trajectories for robustness. Across diverse benchmarks, Impute-MACFM achieves state-of-the-art results while delivering more robust, efficient, and higher-quality imputation than competing approaches, establishing flow matching as a promising direction for tabular missing-data problems, including longitudinal data.

Rapid progress in terrain-aware autonomous ground navigation has been driven by advances in supervised semantic segmentation. However, these methods rely on costly data collection and labor-intensive ground truth labeling to train deep models. Furthermore, autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in unrehearsed, unstructured environments where no labeled data exists and semantic categories may be ambiguous or domain-specific. Recent zero-shot approaches to unsupervised segmentation have shown promise in such settings but typically operate on individual frames, lacking temporal consistency-a critical property for robust perception in unstructured environments. To address this gap we introduce Frontier-Seg, a method for temporally consistent unsupervised segmentation of terrain from mobile robot video streams. Frontier-Seg clusters superpixel-level features extracted from foundation model backbones-specifically DINOv2-and enforces temporal consistency across frames to identify persistent terrain boundaries or frontiers without human supervision. We evaluate Frontier-Seg on a diverse set of benchmark datasets-including RUGD and RELLIS-3D-demonstrating its ability to perform unsupervised segmentation across unstructured off-road environments.

We propose S$^2$GPT-PINN, a sparse and small model for solving parametric partial differential equations (PDEs). Similar to Small Language Models (SLMs), S$^2$GPT-PINN is tailored to domain-specific (families of) PDEs and characterized by its compact architecture and minimal computational power. Leveraging a small amount of extremely high quality data via a mathematically rigorous greedy algorithm that is enabled by the large full-order models, S$^2$GPT-PINN relies on orders of magnitude less parameters than PINNs to achieve extremely high efficiency via two levels of customizations. The first is knowledge distillation via task-specific activation functions that are transferred from Pre-Trained PINNs. The second is a judicious down-sampling when calculating the physics-informed loss of the network compressing the number of data sites by orders of magnitude to the size of the small model.

Artificial neural network pruning is a method in which artificial neural network sizes can be reduced while attempting to preserve the predicting capabilities of the network. This is done to make the model smaller or faster during inference time. In this work we analyze the ability of a selection of artificial neural network pruning methods to generalize to a new cybersecurity dataset utilizing a simpler network type than was designed for. We analyze each method using a variety of pruning degrees to best understand how each algorithm responds to the new environment. This has allowed us to determine the most well fit pruning method of those we searched for the task. Unexpectedly, we have found that many of them do not generalize to the problem well, leaving only a few algorithms working to an acceptable degree.

Traditional fine-tuning methods, while effective, often require substantial computational resources and large, static datasets, making them impractical for real-time applications. Moreover, these models notoriously suffer from catastrophic forgetting, rapid performance degradation on previously learned tasks when presented with new data (Luo et al., 2023). Recent literature addresses catastrophic forgetting via techniques such as replay buffers, which periodically reintroduce previously learned data, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach designed to reduce computational overhead (Smith & Jones, 2024; Hu et al., 2021). Although these methods individually show promise, there remains a notable gap in understanding their efficacy and interaction within real-time, streaming learning environments. In this work, we bridge this gap by integrating LoRA with a lightweight replay mechanism under stringent streaming constraints, simulating real-world conditions where models must continually adapt using limited computational resources and data batches. We focus specifically on three distinct domains,medical, genetic, and legal,to evaluate the generalizability and robustness of our approach.

Beamforming techniques are considered as essential parts to compensate severe path losses in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications. In particular, these techniques adopt large antenna arrays and formulate narrow beams to obtain satisfactory received powers. However, performing accurate beam alignment over narrow beams for efficient link configuration by traditional standard defined beam selection approaches, which mainly rely on channel state information and beam sweeping through exhaustive searching, imposes computational and communications overheads. And, such resulting overheads limit their potential use in vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications involving highly dynamic scenarios. In comparison, utilizing out-of-band contextual information, such as sensing data obtained from sensor devices, provides a better alternative to reduce overheads. This paper presents a deep learning-based solution for utilizing the multi-modality sensing data for predicting the optimal beams having sufficient mmWave received powers so that the best V2I and V2V line-of-sight links can be ensured proactively. The proposed solution has been tested on real-world measured mmWave sensing and communication data, and the results show that it can achieve up to 98.19% accuracies while predicting top-13 beams. Correspondingly, when compared to existing been sweeping approach, the beam sweeping searching space and time overheads are greatly shortened roughly by 79.67% and 91.89%, respectively which confirm a promising solution for beamforming in mmWave enabled communications.