We derive a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler based on following ray paths in a medium where the refractive index $n(x)$ is a function of the desired likelihood $\mathcal{L}(x)$. The sampling method propagates rays at constant speed through parameter space, leading to orders of magnitude higher resilience to heating for stochastic gradients as compared to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), as well as the ability to cross any likelihood barrier, including holes in parameter space. Using the ray tracing method, we sample the posterior distributions of neural network outputs for a variety of different architectures, up to the 1.5 billion-parameter GPT-2 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2) architecture, all on a single consumer-level GPU. We also show that prior samplers including traditional HMC, microcanonical HMC, Metropolis, Gibbs, and even Monte Carlo integration are special cases within a generalized ray tracing framework, which can sample according to an arbitrary weighting function. Public code and documentation for C, JAX, and PyTorch are available at https://bitbucket.org/pbehroozi/ray-tracing-sampler/src

United States Customs and Border Protection is asking tech companies to send pitches for a real-time facial recognition tool that would take photos of every single person in a vehicle at a border crossing, including anyone in the back seats, and match them to travel documents, according to a document posted in a federal register last week. The request for information, or RIF, says that CBP already has a facial recognition tool that takes a picture of a person at a port of entry and compares it to travel or identity documents that someone gives to a border officer, as well as other photos from those documents already "in government holdings." "Biometrically confirmed entries into the United States are added to the traveler's crossing record," the document says. An agency under the Department of Homeland Security, CBP says that its facial recognition tool "is currently operating in the air, sea, and land pedestrian environments." The agency's goal is to bring it to "the land vehicle environment."

Despite the promising results of large multimodal models (LMMs) in complex vision-language tasks that require knowledge, reasoning, and perception abilities together, we surprisingly found that these models struggle with simple tasks on infographics that require perception only. As existing benchmarks primarily focus on end tasks that require various abilities, they provide limited, fine-grained insights into the limitations of the models' perception abilities. To address this gap, we leverage the theory of graphical perception, an approach used to study how humans decode visual information encoded on charts and graphs, to develop an evaluation framework for analyzing gaps in LMMs' perception abilities in charts. With automated task generation and response evaluation designs, our framework enables comprehensive and controlled testing of LMMs' graphical perception across diverse chart types, visual elements, and task types. We apply our framework to evaluate and diagnose the perception capabilities of state-of-the-art LMMs at three granularity levels (chart, visual element, and pixel). Our findings underscore several critical limitations of current state-of-the-art LMMs, including GPT-4o: their inability to (1) generalize across chart types, (2) understand fundamental visual elements, and (3) cross reference values within a chart. These insights provide guidance for future improvements in perception abilities of LMMs. The evaluation framework and labeled data are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/lmm-graphical-perception.

This is a rush transcript of'Fox News Sunday' on September 24, 2023. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. The chaos at the border grows by the day, as the pressure to take greater action builds yet again on the White House. We need people from the top. HEMMER (voice-over): A border city mayor and Democrat declaring a state of emergency as thousands upon thousands of migrants flow into the country. JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Republicans in Congress and my predecessor spent four years gutting the immigration system -- under my predecessor. They continue to undermine our border security today. HEMMER: We'll get reaction from border state Democrat, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar. President Biden says he'll join the picket line in Michigan on Tuesday, just a day before Donald Trump will be there, too. Meanwhile, another presidential hopeful pushes back. TIM SCOTT (R-SC), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We need a president who says we are not going to subsidize unions, period. HEMMER: We'll discuss with a man whose eyes are on the White House, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. We'll ask Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel what voters can expect to see on stage Wednesday night. JAMES LANKFORD (R-OK): It's a symbol of respect for the country when you dress respectfully when you're doing this responsibility. JOHN FETTERMAN (D-PA): I think there are more important things we should be talking about rather if -- if I dressed like a slob. The number of illegals crossing our border hit another new record. We want to show you our FOX News drone camera from Eagle Pass, Texas. We've been watching remarkable images today of a human flood that shows no sign of receding. And today, a new survey shows how displeased Americans are with the president's border policies. In a moment, we'll speak with border state Democrat, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, on that. But, first, to Griff Jenkins who has been in Eagle Pass for what seems like several years now. Well, there's a humanitarian crisis playing out along our southern border in places like here in Eagle Pass, Texas, where migrants have traveled thousands of miles in hopes of reaching the U.S. in numbers far greater than what border officials are able to handle. Actions include sending active duty troops to the border, increasing deportations and granting temporary protective status to nearly half a million Venezuelans, making it easier for them to find work in cities like New York, where officials are struggling to find room for them. Meanwhile, Texas Governor Greg Abbott trying to deter the migrants from entering his state, with miles of dense razor wire, Humvees manning the riverbank and guardsmen in rafts attempting to turn them back.

Fox News correspondent Claudia Cowan joins'Your World' with the details from San Francisco This is a rush transcript from "Your World with Neil Cavuto" June 8, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: How about some good news to kick off things, like herd immunity happening in a lot of parts of this country, including in San Francisco, where close to eight out of 10 residents older than 12 years old have already had at least one vaccination shot? It reads similarly in other cities, like Philadelphia, 67.4 percent have been vaccinated, in Denver, close to 70 percent, in San Diego, north of 65 percent, and, in New York City, more than 52 percent. And this is "Your World." And FOX on top of vaccinations that are surprisingly robust across a country that is rapidly leading the world in finally putting a spike in this horrific, horrific disease. Now, the implications of all of this are being weighed in the medical community, as well as the political community, as to how much longer term this means we get to, well, herd immunity, if we even need to get to that, technically, at the rate we're going. Let's go to Claudia Cowan following all of this in San Francisco -- Claudia. The City by the Bay is on the cusp of herd immunity, which means that the coronavirus is having trouble finding new hosts. The city is reporting that nearly 80 percent of teens and adults have been vaccinated with at least one dose against COVID-19, while 68 percent are fully vaccinated. The number of new cases is the lowest since the city shut down in March of 2020. And no one has died of COVID in over a month. San Francisco pushed people to get the shot while infections hospitalizations and death rates were low. Officials believe that made a world of difference. While there is some debate over what exactly constitutes herd immunity, one expert says the numbers here are among the best in the country. MONICA GANDHI, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO: And there are places, like in the Bay Area, that are up to 76, 77 percent. So, we are doing great in terms of high vaccination rates, high immunity, low cases, low hospitalizations, low deaths, low test positivity rate.

When most people think of the connection between technology and jobs, they think of robots and automation taking over relatively unskilled jobs like factory work. And thus, the biggest toll from these technological advances would be on already hard-hit manufacturing regions of the Rust Belt. But a new wave of developments in artificial intelligence may have a greater effect on high-skilled jobs and high-tech knowledge regions. The study by Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton, and Robert Maxim takes a close look at the potential of artificial intelligence--or AI--to automate tasks that until now have required human intelligence and decision-making. As they put it: "Unlike robotics (associated with the factory floor) and computers (associated with routine office activities), AI has a distinctly white-collar bent."

As you read this, countless cards, letters and packages are en route to delivery destinations across the globe. We rarely think about the logistics involved in international mail crossing land and sea, country borders and continents, because we don't have to. We simply take our item to the nearest postal service branch, pay an acceptable conveyance fee, and within a week or sooner, that item can end up on the other side of the world. But some two hundred years ago, eccentric minds were devising ways of cutting international delivery times to hours or even minutes. Aside from the romantic notion of rolling notes around arrows for airborne exchanges at distance, German author and poet Heinrich von Kleist is widely credited as being the first champion of using projectiles to carry mail. Telegraphy systems were in their infancy in the early 1800s, and the technology was best suited for short notes, not long reports or letters -- and certainly not packages. In his position as editor of the Berliner Abendblätter (the Berlin Evening News), von Kleist wrote an article in October 1810 that suggested artillery shells could be filled with letters and trained at areas of soft ground many miles away.

Lawmakers are ignoring simple economics in favor of lunatic policies. If it continues, a voter revolution is guaranteed. The government shutdown continues as the debate over a border wall enters its fourth contentious week. Neither side in this has shown any sign of willingness to compromise. This remains a stalemate as of now, the very definition of it, or at least that's what it seems like from the outside.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A Texas nonprofit that helps immigrants has rejected a $250,000 donation from Salesforce, saying it won't be part of what it calls an attempt by the company to buy its way out of an ethical quandary over its contracts with Customs and Border Protection. The decision is part of the unprecedented backlash tech companies are facing -- particularly from their own employees -- over work with government agencies that these employees say violate ethical standards. In recent months, employees at Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce have pressured their senior management to drop deals with government agencies. The immigration nonprofit's decision follows an open letter to CEO Marc Benioff in June signed by more than 650 of Salesforce's own staff that asked it to cancel its contract to supply software and tools to manage border activities to Customs and Border Protection. Salesforce said it doesn't work with CBP regarding separating families and kept the contract.

On June 17th, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff retweeted images from a CBS reporter of a detention facility in McAllen, Texas where children slept on the floor, covered in emergency blankets. Just a few days later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an all-staff email calling President Donald Trump's immigration policy "cruel and abusive." In March, Beinoff's company signed a contract with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to provide cloud services in order to boost the agency's hiring efforts, something that CBP has long struggled with. And at Microsoft, employees have organized to demand that Microsoft cancel its $19.4 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for data processing and, potentially, facial recognition software. An NBC investigation also identified active contracts between ICE and a host of prominent tech companies--Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, Motorola Solutions, and Palantir--each worth tens of millions.