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Basketball can make you better at math

Popular Science

Combining math concepts with sports can help boost your fractions game. 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. Students also saw improvement in other math areas after participating in the workshop. 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 .


Rare lunar meteorite was smacked three times before finally hitting Earth

Popular Science

Portions of the rock date back billions of years to when the moon was molten rock. 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. NWA 12593 was discovered in Mali in 2017. 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 .


Incremental Sequence Classification with Temporal Consistency

Neural Information Processing Systems

We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporal-difference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a temporal-consistency condition that successive predictions should satisfy. We leverage this condition to develop a novel loss function for training incremental sequence classifiers. Through a concrete example, we demonstrate that optimizing this loss can offer substantial gains in data efficiency. We apply our method to text classification tasks and show that it improves predictive accuracy over competing approaches on several benchmark datasets. We further evaluate our approach on the task of verifying large language model generations for correctness in grade-school math problems. Our results show that models trained with our method are better able to distinguish promising generations from unpromising ones after observing only a few tokens.


Beyond Benign Overfitting in Nadaraya-Watson Interpolators

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, there has been much interest in understanding the generalization behavior of interpolating predictors, which overfit on noisy training data. Whereas standard analyses are concerned with whether a method is consistent or not, recent observations have shown that even inconsistent predictors can generalize well. In this work, we revisit the classic interpolating Nadaraya-Watson (NW) estimator (also known as Shepard's method), and study its generalization capabilities through this modern viewpoint. In particular, by varying a single bandwidth-like hyperparameter, we prove the existence of multiple overfitting behaviors, ranging non-monotonically from catastrophic, through benign, to tempered. Our results highlight how even classical interpolating methods can exhibit intricate generalization behaviors. In addition, for the purpose of tuning the hyperparameter, the results suggest that over-estimating the intrinsic dimension of the data is less harmful than under-estimating it. Numerical experiments complement our theory, demonstrating the same phenomena.


Brain removal likely used in Iron Age Scottish burial

Popular Science

A woman's 2,000-year-old skeleton also shows signs of limb sharpening. 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. Biological remains typically don't survive the region's moist, deteriorating soil. 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 .


745-mile whale graveyard found at the bottom of Indian Ocean

Popular Science

A 5.3-million-year old fossil was lurking inside this extensive whale fall. 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. Fragmentary whale skeletal remains are abundant on the deep seafloor of the Diamantina Zone, reflecting long-term exposure and slow carcass degradation. These bones are typically colonised by hard-substrate animals, including stalked sea anemones, sponges, and sea stars. Photographs taken from the Chinese submersible'Fendouzhe.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.


Multi-Agent Imitation by Learning and Sampling from Factorized Soft Q-Function

Neural Information Processing Systems

Learning from multi-agent expert demonstrations, known as Multi-Agent Imitation Learning (MAIL), provides a promising approach to sequential decision-making. However, existing MAIL methods including Behavior Cloning (BC) and Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) face significant challenges: BC suffers from the compounding error issue, while the very nature of adversarial optimization makes AIL prone to instability. In this work, we propose \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{A}gent imitation by learning and sampling from \textbf{F}actor\textbf{I}zed \textbf{S}oft Q-function (MAFIS), a novel method that addresses these limitations for both online and offline MAIL settings. Built upon the single-agent IQ-Learn framework, MAFIS introduces the value decomposition network to factorize the imitation objective at agent level, thus enabling scalable training for multi-agent systems. Moreover, we observe that the soft Q-function implicitly defines the optimal policy as an energy-based model, from which we can sample actions via stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics. This allows us to estimate the gradient of the factorized optimization objective for continuous control tasks, avoiding the adversarial optimization between the soft Q-function and the policy required by prior work. By doing so, we obtain a tractable and \emph{non-adversarial} objective for both discrete and continuous multi-agent control. Experiments on common benchmarks including the discrete control tasks StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge v2 (SMACv2), Gold Miner, and Multi Particle Environments (MPE), as well as the continuous control task Multi-Agent MuJoCo (MaMuJoCo), demonstrate that MAFIS achieves superior performance compared with baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/MAFIS.


Could raccoons become the new dogs?

Popular Science

Could raccoons become the new dogs? They're undeniably cute, but they'd also be a pretty annoying pet. 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. 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 .


Model–Behavior Alignment under Flexible Evaluation: When the Best-Fitting Model Isn't the Right One

Neural Information Processing Systems

Linearly transforming stimulus representations of deep neural networks yields high-performing models of behavioral and neural responses to complex stimuli. But does the test accuracy of such predictions identify genuine representational alignment? We addressed this question through a large-scale model-recovery study. Twenty diverse vision models were linearly aligned to 4.5 million behavioral judgments from the THINGS odd-one-out dataset and calibrated to reproduce human response variability. For each model in turn, we sampled synthetic responses from its probabilistic predictions, fitted all candidate models to the synthetic data, and tested whether the data-generating model would re-emerge as the best predictor of the simulated data. Model recovery accuracy improved with training-set size but plateaued below 80%, even at millions of simulated trials. Regression analyses linked misidentification primarily to shifts in representational geometry induced by the linear transformation, as well as to the effective dimensionality of the transformed features. These findings demonstrate that, even with massive behavioral data, overly flexible alignment metrics may fail to guide us toward artificial representations that are genuinely more human-aligned. Model comparison experiments must be designed to balance the trade-off between predictive accuracy and identifiability--ensuring that the best-fitting model is also the right one.


Trained Mamba Emulates Online Gradient Descent in In-Context Linear Regression

Neural Information Processing Systems

State-space models (SSMs), particularly Mamba, emerge as an efficient Transformer alternative with linear complexity for long-sequence modeling. Recent empirical works demonstrate Mamba's in-context learning (ICL) capabilities competitive with Transformers, a critical capacity for large foundation models. However, theoretical understanding of Mamba's ICL remains limited, restricting deeper insights into its underlying mechanisms. Even fundamental tasks such as linear regression ICL, widely studied as a standard theoretical benchmark for Transformers, have not been thoroughly analyzed in the context of Mamba. To address this gap, we study the training dynamics of Mamba on the linear regression ICL task. By developing novel techniques tackling non-convex optimization with gradient descent related to Mamba's structure, we establish an exponential convergence rate to ICL solution, and derive a loss bound that is comparable to Transformer's. Importantly, our results reveal that Mamba can perform a variant of \textit{online gradient descent} to learn the latent function in context. This mechanism is different from that of Transformer, which is typically understood to achieve ICL through gradient descent emulation. The theoretical results are verified by experimental simulation.