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Mystery as flock of UFOs seen hovering above power station for more than a year

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Kimberly Guilfoyle's bitter reaction to Don Jr's engagement with Bettina Anderson as scorned ex insists she'wants what's best' for the first son Simone Biles is slammed by furious animal rights activists after allegedly chopping her dog's EARS off The full story of Nick Reiner and these murders is so much more unbearable than everyone thinks. Even Hollywood wouldn't dare write it: MAUREEN CALLAHAN I sneakily looked at my perfect son's phone... What a terrible mistake! Rob Reiner and his wife's cause of death revealed'It was a cover up': Kirsty MacColl's ex-husband speaks out 25 years on from Fairytale of New York singer's death... and says she was'killed by speedboat driven by the richest man in Mexico' Reiner family bombshell as insiders reveal who is paying for Nick's celebrity lawyer... their secret motive... and who will REALLY inherit $200m fortune Trump's border patrol boss gets in VERY public spat with city mayor as he gives him rude awakening Chilling new video of Nick Reiner making disturbing comments about murder... as friend reveals dad Rob's tragic failed attempt to save him: 'I'm going to kill that f***ing dog' Tara Reid speaks out for the first time since THAT video emerged... and tells KATIE HIND why she is convinced she was spiked after watching CCTV How Bettina Anderson's engagement ring measures up to Kimberly Guilfoyle's... and which Don Jr spent most money on Elon Musk is blasted on social media over'pathetic' comments about Sydney Sweeney's breasts Biohacker Bryan Johnson says he will be immortal in 15 years... as he finally'cracks' the secret to living forever Natalee Holloway's killer Joran van der Sloot attempts to take his own life inside maximum-security Peruvian prison Chilling new details of father's death a day before facing justice for leaving his daughter, 2, to die in a hot car Pouty dine-and-dash diva interrupts judge MULTIPLE times as she's hauled to court for bill-skipping spree Sign up for our US Editor's Picks newsletter to get all the biggest exclusive stories A small town sheriff has admitted he is perplexed by a series of mysterious flying objects which have been bewildering locals in his Wyoming community for more than a year. Unidentified flying objects [ UFOs ] have been regularly spotted for 13 months above the Jim Bridger Power Plant and Sweetwater County's Red Desert. John Grossnickle, the Sheriff of Sweetwater County, saw lit-up, drone-like objects as recently as December 13, his spokesman Jason Mower told Cowboy State Daily .



Rare event modeling with self-regularized normalizing flows: what can we learn from a single failure?

Dawson, Charles, Tran, Van, Li, Max Z., Fan, Chuchu

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Increased deployment of autonomous systems in fields like transportation and robotics have seen a corresponding increase in safety-critical failures. These failures can be difficult to model and debug due to the relative lack of data: compared to tens of thousands of examples from normal operations, we may have only seconds of data leading up to the failure. This scarcity makes it challenging to train generative models of rare failure events, as existing methods risk either overfitting to noise in the limited failure dataset or underfitting due to an overly strong prior. We address this challenge with CalNF, or calibrated normalizing flows, a self-regularized framework for posterior learning from limited data. CalNF achieves state-of-the-art performance on data-limited failure modeling and inverse problems and enables a first-of-a-kind case study into the root causes of the 2022 Southwest Airlines scheduling crisis.


Zero-Shot Automatic Annotation and Instance Segmentation using LLM-Generated Datasets: Eliminating Field Imaging and Manual Annotation for Deep Learning Model Development

Sapkota, Ranjan, Paudel, Achyut, Karkee, Manoj

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Currently, deep learning-based instance segmentation for various applications (e.g., Agriculture) is predominantly performed using a labor-intensive process involving extensive field data collection using sophisticated sensors, followed by careful manual annotation of images, presenting significant logistical and financial challenges to researchers and organizations. The process also slows down the model development and training process. In this study, we presented a novel method for deep learning-based instance segmentation of apples in commercial orchards that eliminates the need for labor-intensive field data collection and manual annotation. Utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM), we synthetically generated orchard images and automatically annotated them using the Segment Anything Model (SAM) integrated with a YOLO11 base model. This method significantly reduces reliance on physical sensors and manual data processing, presenting a major advancement in "Agricultural AI". The synthetic, auto-annotated dataset was used to train the YOLO11 model for Apple instance segmentation, which was then validated on real orchard images. The results showed that the automatically generated annotations achieved a Dice Coefficient of 0.9513 and an IoU of 0.9303, validating the accuracy and overlap of the mask annotations. All YOLO11 configurations, trained solely on these synthetic datasets with automated annotations, accurately recognized and delineated apples, highlighting the method's efficacy. Specifically, the YOLO11m-seg configuration achieved a mask precision of 0.902 and a mask mAP@50 of 0.833 on test images collected from a commercial orchard. Additionally, the YOLO11l-seg configuration outperformed other models in validation on 40 LLM-generated images, achieving the highest mask precision and mAP@50 metrics. Keywords: YOLO, SAM, SAMv2, YOLO11, YOLOv11, Segment Anything, YOLO-SAM


Separating the "Chirp" from the "Chat": Self-supervised Visual Grounding of Sound and Language

Hamilton, Mark, Zisserman, Andrew, Hershey, John R., Freeman, William T.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present DenseAV, a novel dual encoder grounding architecture that learns high-resolution, semantically meaningful, and audio-visually aligned features solely through watching videos. We show that DenseAV can discover the ``meaning'' of words and the ``location'' of sounds without explicit localization supervision. Furthermore, it automatically discovers and distinguishes between these two types of associations without supervision. We show that DenseAV's localization abilities arise from a new multi-head feature aggregation operator that directly compares dense image and audio representations for contrastive learning. In contrast, many other systems that learn ``global'' audio and video representations cannot localize words and sound. Finally, we contribute two new datasets to improve the evaluation of AV representations through speech and sound prompted semantic segmentation. On these and other datasets we show DenseAV dramatically outperforms the prior art on speech and sound prompted semantic segmentation. DenseAV outperforms the previous state-of-the-art, ImageBind, on cross-modal retrieval using fewer than half of the parameters. Project Page: \href{https://aka.ms/denseav}{https://aka.ms/denseav}


Precise Robotic Weed Spot-Spraying for Reduced Herbicide Usage and Improved Environmental Outcomes -- A Real-World Case Study

Azghadi, Mostafa Rahimi, Olsen, Alex, Wood, Jake, Saleh, Alzayat, Calvert, Brendan, Granshaw, Terry, Fillols, Emilie, Philippa, Bronson

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Precise robotic weed control plays an essential role in precision agriculture. It can help significantly reduce the environmental impact of herbicides while reducing weed management costs for farmers. In this paper, we demonstrate that a custom-designed robotic spot spraying tool based on computer vision and deep learning can significantly reduce herbicide usage on sugarcane farms. We present results from field trials that compare robotic spot spraying against industry-standard broadcast spraying, by measuring the weed control efficacy, the reduction in herbicide usage, and the water quality improvements in irrigation runoff. The average results across 25 hectares of field trials show that spot spraying on sugarcane farms is 97% as effective as broadcast spraying and reduces herbicide usage by 35%, proportionally to the weed density. For specific trial strips with lower weed pressure, spot spraying reduced herbicide usage by up to 65%. Water quality measurements of irrigation-induced runoff, three to six days after spraying, showed reductions in the mean concentration and mean load of herbicides of 39% and 54%, respectively, compared to broadcast spraying. These promising results reveal the capability of spot spraying technology to reduce herbicide usage on sugarcane farms without impacting weed control and potentially providing sustained water quality benefits.


Autonomous Advanced Aerial Mobility -- An End-to-end Autonomy Framework for UAVs and Beyond

Mishra, Sakshi, Palanisamy, Praveen

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Developing aerial robots that can both safely navigate and execute assigned mission without any human intervention - i.e., fully autonomous aerial mobility of passengers and goods - is the larger vision that guides the research, design, and development efforts in the aerial autonomy space. However, it is highly challenging to concurrently operationalize all types of aerial vehicles that are operating fully autonomously sharing the airspace. Full autonomy of the aerial transportation sector includes several aspects, such as design of the technology that powers the vehicles, operations of multi-agent fleets, and process of certification that meets stringent safety requirements of aviation sector. Thereby, Autonomous Advanced Aerial Mobility is still a vague term and its consequences for researchers and professionals are ambiguous. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive perspective on the emerging field of autonomous advanced aerial mobility, which involves the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for various applications, such as urban air mobility, package delivery, and surveillance. The article proposes a scalable and extensible autonomy framework consisting of four main blocks: sensing, perception, planning, and controls. Furthermore, the article discusses the challenges and opportunities in multi-agent fleet operations and management, as well as the testing, validation, and certification aspects of autonomous aerial systems. Finally, the article explores the potential of monolithic models for aerial autonomy and analyzes their advantages and limitations. The perspective aims to provide a holistic picture of the autonomous advanced aerial mobility field and its future directions.


Video-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Toolkit for Evaluating Video-based Large Language Models

Ning, Munan, Zhu, Bin, Xie, Yujia, Lin, Bin, Cui, Jiaxi, Yuan, Lu, Chen, Dongdong, Yuan, Li

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Video-based large language models (Video-LLMs) have been recently introduced, targeting both fundamental improvements in perception and comprehension, and a diverse range of user inquiries. In pursuit of the ultimate goal of achieving artificial general intelligence, a truly intelligent Video-LLM model should not only see and understand the surroundings, but also possess human-level commonsense, and make well-informed decisions for the users. To guide the development of such a model, the establishment of a robust and comprehensive evaluation system becomes crucial. To this end, this paper proposes \textit{Video-Bench}, a new comprehensive benchmark along with a toolkit specifically designed for evaluating Video-LLMs. The benchmark comprises 10 meticulously crafted tasks, evaluating the capabilities of Video-LLMs across three distinct levels: Video-exclusive Understanding, Prior Knowledge-based Question-Answering, and Comprehension and Decision-making. In addition, we introduce an automatic toolkit tailored to process model outputs for various tasks, facilitating the calculation of metrics and generating convenient final scores. We evaluate 8 representative Video-LLMs using \textit{Video-Bench}. The findings reveal that current Video-LLMs still fall considerably short of achieving human-like comprehension and analysis of real-world videos, offering valuable insights for future research directions. The benchmark and toolkit are available at: \url{https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Video-Bench}.


Distributionally Robust Classification on a Data Budget

Feuer, Benjamin, Joshi, Ameya, Pham, Minh, Hegde, Chinmay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Real world uses of deep learning require predictable model behavior under distribution shifts. Models such as CLIP show emergent natural distributional robustness comparable to humans, but may require hundreds of millions of training samples. Can we train robust learners in a domain where data is limited? To rigorously address this question, we introduce JANuS (Joint Annotations and Names Set), a collection of four new training datasets with images, labels, and corresponding captions, and perform a series of carefully controlled investigations of factors contributing to robustness in image classification, then compare those results to findings derived from a large-scale meta-analysis. Using this approach, we show that standard ResNet-50 trained with the cross-entropy loss on 2.4 million image samples can attain comparable robustness to a CLIP ResNet-50 trained on 400 million samples. To our knowledge, this is the first result showing (near) state-of-the-art distributional robustness on limited data budgets. Our dataset is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/penfever/JANuS_dataset}, and the code used to reproduce our experiments can be found at \url{https://github.com/penfever/vlhub/}.


Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air Transportation Services in City-Wide Autonomous Urban Air Mobility

Park, Chanyoung, Kim, Gyu Seon, Park, Soohyun, Jung, Soyi, Kim, Joongheon

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The development of urban-air-mobility (UAM) is rapidly progressing with spurs, and the demand for efficient transportation management systems is a rising need due to the multifaceted environmental uncertainties. Thus, this paper proposes a novel air transportation service management algorithm based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) to address the challenges of multi-UAM cooperation. Specifically, the proposed algorithm in this paper is based on communication network (CommNet) method utilizing centralized training and distributed execution (CTDE) in multiple UAMs for providing efficient air transportation services to passengers collaboratively. Furthermore, this paper adopts actual vertiport maps and UAM specifications for constructing realistic air transportation networks. By evaluating the performance of the proposed algorithm in data-intensive simulations, the results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches in terms of air transportation service quality. Furthermore, there are no inferior UAMs by utilizing parameter sharing in CommNet and a centralized critic network in CTDE. Therefore, it can be confirmed that the research results in this paper can provide a promising solution for autonomous air transportation management systems in city-wide urban areas.