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LocDiff: Identifying Locations on Earth by Diffusing in the Hilbert Space

Neural Information Processing Systems

Image geolocalization is a fundamental yet challenging task, aiming at inferring the geolocation on Earth where an image is taken. State-of-the-art methods employ either grid-based classification or gallery-based image-location retrieval, whose spatial generalizability significantly suffers if the spatial distribution of test images does not align with the choices of grids and galleries. Recently emerging generative approaches, while getting rid of grids and galleries, use raw geographical coordinates and suffer quality losses due to their lack of multi-scale information. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-scale latent diffusion model called LocDiff for image geolocalization. We developed a novel positional encoding-decoding framework called Spherical Harmonics Dirac Delta (SHDD) Representations, which encodes points on a spherical surface (e.g., geolocations on Earth) into a Hilbert space of Spherical Harmonics coefficients and decodes points (geolocations) by mode-seeking on spherical probability distributions. We also propose a novel SirenNet-based architecture (CS-UNet) to learn an image-based conditional backward process in the latent SHDD space by minimizing a latent KL-divergence loss. To the best of our knowledge, LocDiff is the first image geolocalization model that performs latent diffusion in a multi-scale location encoding space and generates geolocations under the guidance of images. Experimental results show that LocDiff can outperform all state-of-the-art grid-based, retrieval-based, and diffusion-based baselines across 5 challenging global-scale image geolocalization datasets, and demonstrates significantly stronger generalizability to unseen geolocations.


People Are Living Better at the End of Their Lives, New Study Finds

TIME - Tech

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How some people's brains make an extraordinary recovery from stroke

New Scientist

How some people's brains make an extraordinary recovery from stroke A well-known actor who had experienced a stroke was treated by stroke specialist Sandor Nardai. The actor had been left with aphasia, or an impaired ability to speak - brutal for anyone, but "probably the most devastating thing that could happen to an actor", says Nardai. After three months of recovery, though, the actor was able to say some words. After a year, he voiced a commercial. Remarkably, he eventually got well enough to return to live theatre, says Nardai, who is at Semmelweis University in Hungary.


Kylie Jenner collaborates with Meta on 359 AI glasses with built-in cameras - and they even sing 'Rise and Shine' to you in the morning

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Financial experts say the American Dream is dead and they reveal who's to blame I lost almost 100lb and my friends keep asking me if I'm using fat jabs. Here's EXACTLY what happened with each of them and the surprising truth about who was best - and worst! Kanye West feeds wife Bianca Censori a cherry as she almost bursts out of tiny'kitten' bikini on daring new shoot Kylie Jenner collaborates with Meta on ยฃ359 AI glasses with built-in cameras - and they even sing'Rise and Shine' to you in the morning Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. From clip-in extensions to vodka sodas, Kylie Jenner already has a range of weird and wonderful products under her belt. Now, the billionaire has expanded her business empire into wearables.


Pigeons are surprisingly good at detecting cancer

Popular Science

Scientists are using the birds' skills to train AI medical tools. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. They can even see ultraviolet light, which humans aren't able to. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy .


Reframing Gaussian Splatting Densification with Complexity-Density Consistency of Primitives

Neural Information Processing Systems

The essence of 3DGaussian Splatting (3DGS) training is to smartly allocate Gaussian primitives, expressing complex regions with more primitives and vice versa. Prior researches typically mark out under-reconstructed regions in a renderingloss-driven manner. However, such a loss-driven strategy is often dominated by low-frequency regions, which leads to insufficient modeling of high-frequency details in texture-rich regions. As a result, it yields a suboptimal spatial allocation of Gaussian primitives. This inspires us to excavate the loss-agnostic visual prior in training views to identify complex regions that need more primitives to model.


InstanceAssemble: Layout-Aware Image Generation via Instance Assembling Attention

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating highquality images. Recent advancements in Layout-to-Image (L2I) generation have leveraged positional conditions and textual descriptions to facilitate precise and controllable image synthesis.


Contextual Integrity in LLMs via Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

As the era of autonomous agents making decisions on behalf of users unfolds, ensuring contextual integrity (CI) - what is the appropriate information to share while carrying out a certain task - becomes a central question to the field. We posit that CI demands a form of reasoning where the agent needs to reason about the context in which it is operating. To test this, we first prompt LLMs to reason explicitly about CI when deciding what information to disclose. We then extend this approach by developing a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that further instills in models the reasoning necessary to achieve CI. Using a synthetic, automatically created, dataset of only 700 examples but with diverse contexts and information disclosure norms, we show that our method substantially reduces inappropriate information disclosure while maintaining task performance across multiple model sizes and families. Importantly, improvements transfer from this synthetic dataset to established CI benchmarks such as PrivacyLens that has human annotations and evaluates privacy leakage of AI assistants in actions and tool calls. Our code is available at: https://github.com/EricGLan/CI-RL



Demystifying Spectral Feature Learning for Instrumental Variable Regression

Neural Information Processing Systems

We address the problem of causal effect estimation in the presence of hidden confounders, using nonparametric instrumental variable (IV) regression. A leading strategy employs spectral features - that is, learned features spanning the top eigensubspaces of the operator linking treatments to instruments. We derive a generalization error bound for a two-stage least squares estimator based on spectral features, and gain insights into the method's performance and failure modes. We show that performance depends on two key factors, leading to a clear taxonomy of outcomes. In a good scenario, the approach is optimal. This occurs with strong spectral alignment, meaning the structural function is well-represented by the top eigenfunctions of the conditional operator, coupled with this operator's slow eigenvalue decay, indicating a strong instrument. Performance degrades in a bad scenario: spectral alignment remains strong, but rapid eigenvalue decay (indicating a weaker instrument) demands significantly more samples for effective feature learning. Finally, in the ugly scenario, weak spectral alignment causes the method to fail, regardless of the eigenvalues' characteristics.