South Pacific Ocean
3D map of Easter Island takes you places visitors aren't allowed
Science Archaeology 3D map of Easter Island takes you places visitors aren't allowed One of the world's most isolated islands is open to virtual tourists. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Nestled in the South Pacific Ocean, some 6,000 people live on the most isolated, inhabited island in the world: Rapa Nui. Known to many as Easter Island, a name Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen coined after landing on the island on Easter Sunday 1722, Rapa Nui is roughly double the size of Disney World, or 63.2 square miles. And every year, some 100,000 people visit the remote island to see the famed 13-foot-tall moai statues or Easter Island heads .
Newly discovered deep-sea lanternshark glows in the waters near Australia
The tiny shark and a ghost-like crab are two of the latest species uncovered in a yearslong expedition. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Oceanographers scouring the waters off of Western Australia have discovered two new deep-sea oddities . On October 6, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) showcased these new species originally collected in 2022: a bioluminescent lanternshark and a tiny, semi-translucent porcelain crab . The team revealed two of its initial finds--the painted hornshark and the ridged-egg catshark --in 2023.
Is THIS Amelia Earhart's missing plane? Expedition this month will finally confirm if the 'Taraia Object' in a lagoon on Nikumaroro Island is her Lockheed Electra 10E
Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection I was so happy after trying a trendy new cosmetic procedure. But 10 years later I suffered a devastating side effect... the doctor had lied I'm no longer sleeping with my husband - and never will again, says MOLLY RYDDELL. I love him, but counted down the moments until he climaxed. Then I couldn't bear it any more and the truth spilled out... so many women feel the same The'middle-class kinks' saving marriages: Wives reveal the eight buzzy sex trends that revived their lagging libidos - including the fantasy husbands are secretly obsessed with I'm a woman with autism... here are the signs you might be masking, even from yourself Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split Body count from Houston's bayous rises as serial killer whispers grip city and residents are told: 'Be vigilant' Cake-faced 90s sitcom star looks unrecognizable as she ditches the heavy eyeshadow for an LA errand run can you guess who? Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by the most iconic political photo of the century I've loved Taylor Swift for years. Mystery deepens over Hulk Hogan's death as his widow faces fresh anguish Prison chief reveals exactly where Diddy could end up... and the one horrifying jail he MUST avoid Is THIS Amelia Earhart's missing plane?
MOSS: Multi-Objective Optimization for Stable Rule Sets
We present MOSS, a multi-objective optimization framework for constructing stable sets of decision rules. MOSS incorporates three important criteria for interpretability: sparsity, accuracy, and stability, into a single multi-objective optimization framework. Importantly, MOSS allows a practitioner to rapidly evaluate the trade-off between accuracy and stability in sparse rule sets in order to select an appropriate model. We develop a specialized cutting plane algorithm in our framework to rapidly compute the Pareto frontier between these two objectives, and our algorithm scales to problem instances beyond the capabilities of commercial optimization solvers. Our experiments show that MOSS outperforms state-of-the-art rule ensembles in terms of both predictive performance and stability.
Spatiotemporal deep learning models for detection of rapid intensification in cyclones
Sutar, Vamshika, Singh, Amandeep, Chandra, Rohitash
Cyclone rapid intensification is the rapid increase in cyclone wind intensity, exceeding a threshold of 30 knots, within 24 hours. Rapid intensification is considered an extreme event during a cyclone, and its occurrence is relatively rare, contributing to a class imbalance in the dataset. A diverse array of factors influences the likelihood of a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification, further complicating the task for conventional machine learning models. In this paper, we evaluate deep learning, ensemble learning and data augmentation frameworks to detect cyclone rapid intensification based on wind intensity and spatial coordinates. We note that conventional data augmentation methods cannot be utilised for generating spatiotemporal patterns replicating cyclones that undergo rapid intensification. Therefore, our framework employs deep learning models to generate spatial coordinates and wind intensity that replicate cyclones to address the class imbalance problem of rapid intensification. We also use a deep learning model for the classification module within the data augmentation framework to di fferentiate between rapid and non-rapid intensification events during a cyclone. Our results show that data augmentation improves the results for rapid intensification detection in cyclones, and spatial coordinates play a critical role as input features to the given models. This paves the way for research in synthetic data generation for spatiotemporal data with extreme events. Introduction Over the past decade, the impacts of climate change have manifested in an alarming increase in the strength of tropical cyclones, characterised by elevated levels of precipitation and wind intensity, resulting in devastating consequences on a global scale [1, 2, 3]. Rappaport et al. [4] defined rapid intensification as a sudden surge in wind intensity exceeding 30 knots (35 miles / hour or 55 kilometres / hour) within 24 hours [5]. Forecasting the rapid intensification of high-category cyclones (Category 4 and 5) poses greater challenges due to their infrequent occurrence, in contrast to lower-category cyclones[6].
Where do Large Vision-Language Models Look at when Answering Questions?
Xing, Xiaoying, Kuo, Chia-Wen, Fuxin, Li, Niu, Yulei, Chen, Fan, Li, Ming, Wu, Ying, Wen, Longyin, Zhu, Sijie
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown promising performance in vision-language understanding and reasoning tasks. However, their visual understanding behaviors remain underexplored. A fundamental question arises: to what extent do LVLMs rely on visual input, and which image regions contribute to their responses? It is non-trivial to interpret the free-form generation of LVLMs due to their complicated visual architecture (e.g., multiple encoders and multi-resolution) and variable-length outputs. In this paper, we extend existing heatmap visualization methods (e.g., iGOS++) to support LVLMs for open-ended visual question answering. We propose a method to select visually relevant tokens that reflect the relevance between generated answers and input image. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of state-of-the-art LVLMs on benchmarks designed to require visual information to answer. Our findings offer several insights into LVLM behavior, including the relationship between focus region and answer correctness, differences in visual attention across architectures, and the impact of LLM scale on visual understanding. The code and data are available at https://github.com/bytedance/LVLM_Interpretation.
ECLeKTic: a Novel Challenge Set for Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer
Goldman, Omer, Shaham, Uri, Malkin, Dan, Eiger, Sivan, Hassidim, Avinatan, Matias, Yossi, Maynez, Joshua, Gilady, Adi Mayrav, Riesa, Jason, Rijhwani, Shruti, Rimell, Laura, Szpektor, Idan, Tsarfaty, Reut, Eyal, Matan
To achieve equitable performance across languages, multilingual large language models (LLMs) must be able to abstract knowledge beyond the language in which it was acquired. However, the current literature lacks reliable ways to measure LLMs' capability of cross-lingual knowledge transfer. To that end, we present ECLeKTic, a multilingual closed-book QA (CBQA) dataset that Evaluates Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in a simple, black-box manner. We detected information with uneven coverage across languages by controlling for presence and absence of Wikipedia articles in 12 languages. We generated knowledge-seeking questions in a source language, for which the answer appears in a relevant Wikipedia article and translated them to all other 11 languages, for which the respective Wikipedias lack equivalent articles. Assuming that Wikipedia reflects the prominent knowledge in the LLM's training data, to solve ECLeKTic's CBQA task the model is required to transfer knowledge between languages. Experimenting with 8 LLMs, we show that SOTA models struggle to effectively share knowledge across, languages even if they can predict the answer well for queries in the same language the knowledge was acquired in.
RankCoT: Refining Knowledge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Ranking Chain-of-Thoughts
Wu, Mingyan, Liu, Zhenghao, Yan, Yukun, Li, Xinze, Yu, Shi, Zeng, Zheni, Gu, Yu, Yu, Ge
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. However, LLMs still encounter challenges in effectively utilizing the knowledge from retrieved documents, often being misled by irrelevant or noisy information. To address this issue, we introduce RankCoT, a knowledge refinement method that incorporates reranking signals in generating CoT-based summarization for knowledge refinement based on given query and all retrieval documents. During training, RankCoT prompts the LLM to generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) candidates based on the query and individual documents. It then fine-tunes the LLM to directly reproduce the best CoT from these candidate outputs based on all retrieved documents, which requires LLM to filter out irrelevant documents during generating CoT-style summarization. Additionally, RankCoT incorporates a self-reflection mechanism that further refines the CoT outputs, resulting in higher-quality training data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RankCoT, showing its superior performance over other knowledge refinement models. Further analysis reveals that RankCoT can provide shorter but effective refinement results, enabling the generator to produce more accurate answers. All code and data are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/RankCoT.
Fine-Grained Appropriate Reliance: Human-AI Collaboration with a Multi-Step Transparent Decision Workflow for Complex Task Decomposition
He, Gaole, Hemmer, Patrick, Vössing, Michael, Schemmer, Max, Gadiraju, Ujwal
In recent years, the rapid development of AI systems has brought about the benefits of intelligent services but also concerns about security and reliability. By fostering appropriate user reliance on an AI system, both complementary team performance and reduced human workload can be achieved. Previous empirical studies have extensively analyzed the impact of factors ranging from task, system, and human behavior on user trust and appropriate reliance in the context of one-step decision making. However, user reliance on AI systems in tasks with complex semantics that require multi-step workflows remains under-explored. Inspired by recent work on task decomposition with large language models, we propose to investigate the impact of a novel Multi-Step Transparent (MST) decision workflow on user reliance behaviors. We conducted an empirical study (N = 233) of AI-assisted decision making in composite fact-checking tasks (i.e., fact-checking tasks that entail multiple sub-fact verification steps). Our findings demonstrate that human-AI collaboration with an MST decision workflow can outperform one-step collaboration in specific contexts (e.g., when advice from an AI system is misleading). Further analysis of the appropriate reliance at fine-grained levels indicates that an MST decision workflow can be effective when users demonstrate a relatively high consideration of the intermediate steps. Our work highlights that there is no one-size-fits-all decision workflow that can help obtain optimal human-AI collaboration. Our insights help deepen the understanding of the role of decision workflows in facilitating appropriate reliance. We synthesize important implications for designing effective means to facilitate appropriate reliance on AI systems in composite tasks, positioning opportunities for the human-centered AI and broader HCI communities.