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Raccoons might be spreading diarrhea-causing bacteria in Japan
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. Raccoons are increasingly encroaching on populated areas, posing health risks for humans. 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 . Raccoons are cute and curious creatures, but frequently carry infectious diseases .
IntrinsiX: High-Quality PBR Generation using Image Priors
We introduce IntrinsiX, a novel method that generates high-quality intrinsic images from text description. In contrast to existing text-to-image models whose outputs contain baked-in scene lighting, our approach predicts physically-based rendering (PBR) maps. This enables the generated outputs to be used for content creation scenarios in core graphics applications that facilitate re-lighting, editing, and texture generation tasks. In order to train our generator, we exploit strong image priors, and pre-train separate models for each PBR material component (albedo, roughness, metallic, normals). We then align these models with a new cross-intrinsic attention formulation that concatenates key and value features in a consistent fashion.
Toward Relative Positional Encoding in Spiking Transformers
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are bio-inspired networks that mimic how neurons in the brain communicate through discrete spikes, which have great potential in various tasks due to their energy efficiency and temporal processing capabilities. SNNs with self-attention mechanisms (spiking Transformers) have recently shown great advancements in various tasks, and inspired by traditional Transformers, several studies have demonstrated that spiking absolute positional encoding can help capture sequential relationships for input data, enhancing the capabilities of spiking Transformers for tasks such as sequential modeling and image classification. However, how to incorporate relative positional information into SNNs remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce several strategies to approximate relative positional encoding (RPE) in spiking Transformers while preserving the binary nature of spikes.
China Didn't Make People Hate Data Centers
GOP lawmakers, tech investors, and even OpenAI have tied the anti-data-center movement in the US to Chinese interference. Experts say it's much more complicated than that. Right-wing officials and data center investors are increasingly claiming that data center protests are being funded and influenced by the Chinese government. OpenAI added to the discourse on Wednesday when it released a report describing a cluster of accounts originating in China that, the company said, had been spreading anti-data-center messages on social media. Experts who spoke to WIRED, however, are skeptical of the funding claims.
From Sequence to Structure: Uncovering Substructure Reasoning in Transformers
Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) possess the capability to solve graph reasoning tasks. Notably, even when graph structures are embedded within textual descriptions, LLMs can still effectively answer related questions. This raises a fundamental question: How can a decoder-only Transformer architecture understand underlying graph structures? To address this, we start with the substructure extraction task, interpreting the inner mechanisms inside the transformers and analyzing the impact of the input queries.
Fundamental Limitations in Pointwise Defences of LLM Finetuning APIs
LLM developers deploy technical mitigations to prevent, attacks in which adversaries evade safeguards by fine-tuning the model using a public API. Previous work has established several successful attacks against specific fine-tuning API defences; however, prior attacks training and/or inference samples can be easily flagged as suspicious. In this work, we show that defences of fine-tuning APIs that seek to detect individual harmful training or inference samples ('pointwise' detection) are in their ability to prevent fine-tuning attacks. We demonstrate a class of'pointwise-undetectable' attacks that repurpose semantic or syntactic variations in benign model outputs to covertly transmit dangerous knowledge. Our attacks are composed solely of unsuspicious benign samples that can be collected from the model before fine-tuning, meaning training and inference samples are all individually benign and low-perplexity. We test our attacks against the OpenAI fine-tuning API, finding they succeed in eliciting answers to harmful multiple-choice questions, and that they evade an enhanced monitoring system we design that successfully detects other fine-tuning attacks. Our results showing fundamental limitations of defending against pointwise attacks suggest focusing research efforts on mitigations towards multi-point defences.
CTSketch: Compositional Tensor Sketching for Scalable Neurosymbolic Learning
Many computational tasks benefit from being formulated as the composition of neural networks followed by a discrete symbolic program. The goal of neurosymbolic learning is to train the neural networks using end-to-end input-output labels of the composite. We introduce CTSketch, a novel, scalable neurosymbolic learning algorithm. CTSketch uses two techniques to improve the scalability of neurosymbolic inference: decompose the symbolic program into sub-programs and summarize each sub-program with a sketched tensor. This strategy allows us to approximate the output distribution of the program with simple tensor operations over the input distributions and the sketches. We provide theoretical insight into the maximum approximation error. Furthermore, we evaluate CTSketch on benchmarks from the neurosymbolic learning literature, including some designed for evaluating scalability. Our results show that CTSketch pushes neurosymbolic learning to new scales that were previously unattainable, with neural predictors obtaining high accuracy on tasks with one thousand inputs, despite supervision only on the final output.
MedChain: Bridging the Gap Between LLM Agents and Clinical Practice with Interactive Sequence
Clinical decision making (CDM) is a complex, dynamic process crucial to healthcare delivery, yet it remains a significant challenge for artificial intelligence systems. While Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have been tested on general medical knowledge using licensing exams and knowledge question-answering tasks, their performance in the CDM in real-world scenarios is limited due to the lack of comprehensive benchmark that mirror actual medical practice. To address this gap, we present MedChain, a dataset of 12,163 clinical cases that covers five key stages of clinical workflow.
Practical and Effective Code Watermarking for Large Language Models
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in code generation has raised significant attribution and intellectual property concerns. Code watermarking offers a potential solution but faces unique challenges due to programming languages' strict syntactic constraints and semantic requirements. To address these challenges, we introduce ACW (AST-guided Code Watermarking), a novel adaptive framework that leverages Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) analysis during training to learn watermark embedding strategies. Our framework identifies substitutable code components and strategically biases token selections to embed watermarks. We also propose a novel sampling scheme that distributes tokens between green/red lists according to semantic context, ensuring statistical distinguishability while preserving code functionality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ACW achieves a significant improvement in watermark detection accuracy compared to existing methods, with negligible impact on code functionality. This adaptive framework offers a promising solution for effective and practical code watermarking in the age of LLMs.
Reviving DSP for Advanced Theorem Proving in the Era of Reasoning Models
Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7%, 32.8%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.