As urbanization and climate change progress, urban heat becomes a priority for climate adaptation efforts. High temperatures concentrated in urban heat can drive increased risk of heat-related death and illness as well as increased energy demand for cooling. However, estimating the effects of urban heat is an ongoing field of research typically burdened by an imprecise description of the built environment, significant computational cost, and a lack of high-resolution estimates of the impacts of climate change. Here, we present open-source, computationally efficient machine learning methods that can improve the accuracy of urban temperature estimates when compared to historical reanalysis data. These models are applied to residential buildings in Los Angeles, and we compare the energy benefits of heat mitigation strategies to the impacts of climate change. We find that cooling demand is likely to increase substantially through midcentury, but engineered high-albedo surfaces could lessen this increase by more than 50%. The corresponding increase in heating demand complicates this narrative, but total annual energy use from combined heating and cooling with electric heat pumps in the Los Angeles urban climate is shown to benefit from the engineered cooling strategies under both current and future climates.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been adapted for Multi-Label Recognition (MLR) with partial annotations by leveraging prompt-learning, where positive and negative prompts are learned for each class to associate their embeddings with class presence or absence in the shared vision-text feature space. While this approach improves MLR performance by relying on VLM priors, we hypothesize that learning negative prompts may be suboptimal, as the datasets used to train VLMs lack image-caption pairs explicitly focusing on class absence. To analyze the impact of positive and negative prompt learning on MLR, we introduce PositiveCoOp and NegativeCoOp, where only one prompt is learned with VLM guidance while the other is replaced by an embedding vector learned directly in the shared feature space without relying on the text encoder. Through empirical analysis, we observe that negative prompts degrade MLR performance, and learning only positive prompts, combined with learned negative embeddings (PositiveCoOp), outperforms dual prompt learning approaches. Moreover, we quantify the performance benefits that prompt-learning offers over a simple vision-features-only baseline, observing that the baseline displays strong performance comparable to dual prompt learning approach (DualCoOp), when the proportion of missing labels is low, while requiring half the training compute and 16 times fewer parameters

Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. However, this dependence can significantly constrain the true potential of AI-assistant agents due to the high cost of obtaining human supervision and the related issues on quality, reliability, diversity, self-consistency, and undesirable biases. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called SELF-ALIGN, which combines principle-driven reasoning and the generative power of LLMs for the self-alignment of AI agents with minimal human supervision. Our approach encompasses four stages: first, we use an LLM to generate synthetic prompts, and a topic-guided method to augment the prompt diversity; second, we use a small set of human-written principles for AI models to follow, and guide the LLM through in-context learning from demonstrations (of principles application) to produce helpful, ethical, and reliable responses to user's queries; third, we fine-tune the original LLM with the high-quality self-aligned responses so that the resulting model can generate desirable responses for each query directly without the principle set and the demonstrations anymore; and finally, we offer a refinement step to address the issues of overly-brief or indirect responses. Applying SELF-ALIGN to the LLaMA-65b base language model, we develop an AI assistant named Dromedary. With fewer than 300 lines of human annotations (including < 200 seed prompts, 16 generic principles, and 5 exemplars for in-context learning). Dromedary significantly surpasses the performance of several state-of-the-art AI systems, including Text-Davinci-003 and Alpaca, on benchmark datasets with various settings.

Billie Eilish dropped behind-the-scenes footage from her special concert, "Happier than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles," detailing how she made an animated segment for the event. The concert premiered on Disney Plus on Sept. 3. The 19-year-old singer took to Instagram Story on Sunday to share an impressive video that she recorded on June 25. During the special concert, there were animated sequences shown for a brief period to convey images like bleeding and driving a car. In the video, the singer could be seen wearing a black and red motion capture suit and taking a selfie video to flaunt the entire setup.

On a bright Tuesday afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. He wore blue Nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-framed sunglasses with red accents that inevitably drew attention to his most distinctive feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising skyward from his head. Under a canopy of chestnut trees, Karp executed a series of elegant tai chi and qigong moves, shifting the pebbles and dirt gently under his feet as he twisted and turned. A group of teenagers watched in amusement. After 10 minutes or so, Karp walked to a nearby bench, where one of his bodyguards had placed a cooler and what looked like an instrument case. The cooler held several bottles of the nonalcoholic German beer that Karp drinks (he would crack one open on the way out of the park). The case contained a wooden sword, which he needed for the next part of his routine. "I brought a real sword the last time I was here, but the police stopped me," he said matter of factly as he began slashing the air with the sword. Those gendarmes evidently didn't know that Karp, far from being a public menace, was the chief executive of an American company whose software has been deployed on behalf of public safety in France. The company, Palantir Technologies, is named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Its two primary software programs, Gotham and Foundry, gather and process vast quantities of data in order to identify connections, patterns and trends that might elude human analysts. The stated goal of all this "data integration" is to help organizations make better decisions, and many of Palantir's customers consider its technology to be transformative. Karp claims a loftier ambition, however. "We built our company to support the West," he says. To that end, Palantir says it does not do business in countries that it considers adversarial to the U.S. and its allies, namely China and Russia. In the company's early days, Palantir employees, invoking Tolkien, described their mission as "saving the shire." The brainchild of Karp's friend and law-school classmate Peter Thiel, Palantir was founded in 2003. It was seeded in part by In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.'s venture-capital arm, and the C.I.A. remains a client. Palantir's technology is rumored to have been used to track down Osama bin Laden -- a claim that has never been verified but one that has conferred an enduring mystique on the company. These days, Palantir is used for counterterrorism by a number of Western governments.

Whether you're looking at property long-distance or purchasing a yet-to-be-built custom home or condo, virtual reality comes close to providing the see-it-in-person experience. The turnkey property on a double lot above the Sunset Strip is owned by designer Jean-Louis Deniot. For a New York City Development Executive, Luxury is About Time … Gorgeous Views Don't Hurt Miriam Harris, a lifelong New Yorker, on what is important to buyers now. Sydney, Australia, Auction Clearance Rate Hits Over 80% This Weekend The auction clearance rate in Sydney rose 75% week-over-week to reach 81.4%, according to CoreLogic. Over 1,000 properties went to auction in Sydney last week with a median house price of A$1.465 million (US$958,480).

Sean Rad, a founder of the dating app Tinder, has purchased a home in L.A.'s Hollywood Hills for $26.5 million, according to a person with knowledge of the deal. The seller was real-estate mogul Kurt Rappaport, the founder of Westside Estate Agency. Mr. Rappaport purchased the property for around $5 million in 2014 from Mitzi Shore, founder of the iconic Comedy Store in Los Angeles who died in April. He completely remodeled it, according to a person familiar with the property, finishing work in 2017. It has a 60-foot pool, a game room, a large outdoor dining area, a bar with a Comedy Store theme, a gym and a wine cellar.

A book club meets on the terrace of Aldous Huxley's to discuss "Brave New World." A book club meets on the terrace of Aldous Huxley's to discuss "Brave New World." Seated on a veranda high in the Hollywood Hills, a few book clubbers who had gathered to discuss Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" in the author's last Los Angeles home craned their necks. They weren't peering at the softening evening sky or at the Hollywood sign, which loomed so close it looked like white plastic lawn furniture, a prop to rest a drink on. The occasional helicopter had already torn past, momentarily drowning out voices ("a humming overhead had become a roar," as Huxley describes their sinister advance in the novel's climactic scene) but that hardly merited a pause in conversation.