Science Archaeology Wisconsin'ghost ship' uncovered after 139 years It took citizen scientists only two hours to find the F.J. King's final resting place. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A group of Wisconsin maritime historians and citizen scientists uncovered a Lake Michigan shipwreck "hidden in plain sight" for nearly 140 years. The team uncovered the waterlogged wreckage of the three-masted wooden schooner in the waters off Bailey's Harbor, Wisconsin. On September 15, 1886, the 144-foot left Escanaba, Michigan, bound for Chicago with 600 tons of iron ore onboard.

Hallucinations and unfaithful synthesis due to inaccurate prompts with insufficient semantic details are widely observed in multimodal generative models. A prevalent strategy to align multiple modalities is to fine-tune the generator with a large number of annotated text-image pairs. However, such a procedure is labor-consuming and resource-draining. The key question we ask is: can we enhance the quality and faithfulness of text-driven generative models beyond extensive text-image pair annotations? To address this question, we propose Knowledge Pursuit Prompting (KPP), a zero-shot framework that iteratively incorporates external knowledge to help generators produce reliable visual content. Instead of training generators to handle generic prompts, KPP employs a recursive knowledge query process to gather informative external facts from the knowledge base, instructs a language model to compress the acquired knowledge for prompt refinement, and utilizes text-driven generators for visual synthesis. The entire process is zero-shot, without accessing the architectures and parameters of generative models. We evaluate the framework across multiple text-driven generative tasks (image, 3D rendering, and video) on datasets of different domains. We further demonstrate the extensibility and adaptability of KPP through varying foundation model bases and instructions. Our results show that KPP is capable of generating faithful and semantically rich content across diverse visual domains, offering a promising solution to improve multimodal generative models.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. By the time Tara returned from the protest, SafeT gauged her Wellness at 60% and Chase felt sick. For the last two hours he'd watched the number on his phone's app tick down, from safe green to warning yellow: 87%, 74%, 60%. On his newsfeed, masked chanters waved signs before the wire cage shielding the five megapipes that breached the marshy shore of Lake Michigan. Each pipe was owned by a consortium of Lakes United companies. Their great steel veins wormed the city, bearing water from LU to the drought-scarred West and South, whose nations paid more per acre-foot than Milwaukee's citizens ever could. On the feed Chase hadn't been able to see Tara or the sign she'd painted that morning: Our Lake, Our Water. What he had seen were the security corps of at least three consortia, clumped beneath their ever-circling camera-drones, bull-horning the chanters that they were risking corporate slander. If arrested, they'd be hauled off to one of the consortia's private prisons. There they could be coerced into confessing they were linebreakers, guerillas who spliced pipes to siphon off clean water to Milwaukee neighborhoods that couldn't afford consortia prices. Protestors sometimes returned from these prisons. Fingers numb, Chase had tapped SafeT to view the breakdown of Tara's Wellness aggregate into its individual components: risk of arrest (15%), risk of indictment (20%), risk of job loss (27%), risk of injury (31%). Even when she had texted home in 30 and he'd cleared her route in the SafeT map--low smoke risk, low contagion risk, 93% chance of safe arrival--his jaw only eased when she stepped through the door. Tara's thin face was ferocious, cheeks red against her yellow hair. Black grease spotted her strong hands. Over the decade they'd shared, he'd watched age sharpen her into herself. Now, impassioned, she was fiercely beautiful. He almost forgot her yellow number, until she saw him, and her smile sagged.