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From chirps to 'hellos': Why some birds talk like people

Popular Science

From chirps to'hellos': Why some birds talk like people Brains, bonds, and a strange voice box help some birds mimic our speech. Budgies (which is short for budgerigar) are actually a specific kind of parakeet. These birds are excellent communicators. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In 1995, a California parakeet earned the Guinness World Record for having the largest human vocabulary among birds.


Initialization-Aware Score-Based Diffusion Sampling

Fassina, Tiziano, Cardoso, Gabriel, Corff, Sylvan Le, Romary, Thomas

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Score-based generative models (SGMs) aim at generating samples from a target distribution by approximating the reverse-time dynamics of a stochastic differential equation. Despite their strong empirical performance, classical samplers initialized from a Gaussian distribution require a long time horizon noising typically inducing a large number of discretization steps and high computational cost. In this work, we present a Kullback-Leibler convergence analysis of Variance Exploding diffusion samplers that highlights the critical role of the backward process initialization. Based on this result, we propose a theoretically grounded sampling strategy that learns the reverse-time initialization, directly minimizing the initialization error. The resulting procedure is independent of the specific score training procedure, network architecture, and discretization scheme. Experiments on toy distributions and benchmark datasets demonstrate competitive or improved generative quality while using significantly fewer sampling steps.


How uncrewed narco subs could transform the Colombian drug trade

MIT Technology Review

Fast, stealthy, and cheap--autonomous, semisubmersible drone boats carrying tons of cocaine could be international law enforcement's nightmare scenario. A big one just came ashore. Colombian military officials intercepted this 40-foot-long uncrewed fiberglass "narco sub" in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a "narco sub," a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The plane's crew radioed it in, and eventually nearby coast guard boats got the order, routine but urgent: Intercept. In Cartagena, about 150 miles from the action, Captain Jaime González Zamudio, commander of the regional coast guard group, sat down at his desk to watch what happened next.


Aid reaches Sudan's Kordofan as over 30 countries alarmed by drone attacks

Al Jazeera

Aid reaches Sudan's Kordofan as over 30 countries alarmed by drone attacks United Nations aid trucks have reached an area in Sudan that has been cut off from relief efforts amid warnings that deadly drone strikes are making the hunger crisis in that part of the country worse. The UN said on Wednesday that its aid trucks had reached Dilling and Kadugli, in central Sudan's Kordofan region, with "life-saving" humanitarian supplies. "Dilling and the nearby city of Kadugli have been largely cut off from aid for more than two years, leaving communities with severe shortages of humanitarian assistance," the UN said. The aid delivery came as more than 30 countries issued a statement on Wednesday expressing "grave concern" at a recent "severe escalation" in drone attacks amid "heavy fighting" in the Darfur and Kordofan regions. The 28 European Union countries, plus Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, warned that "intentional attacks" against aid workers and "wilfully impeding" relief supplies, "may amount to war crimes".







VastTrack: Vast Category Visual Object Tracking

Neural Information Processing Systems

V astTrack consists of a few attractive properties: (1) V ast Object Category . In particular, it covers targets from 2,115 categories, significantly surpassing object classes of existing popular benchmarks ( e.g ., GOT -10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). Through providing such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking.