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 Construction & Engineering


Why you shouldn't buy a water-cooling system for your PC

PCWorld

PCWorld argues against water-cooling systems for most gaming PCs, explaining that air coolers provide adequate performance while being cheaper, simpler, and more reliable than AIO or custom water-cooling setups. For gaming performance, investing in a better graphics card delivers superior results compared to expensive CPU coolers, since lower temperatures don't increase FPS if the processor isn't throttling. Air coolers offer excellent value with easier installation, longer lifespan, and allow budget reallocation toward components that actually boost gaming performance like upgraded GPUs or SSDs. Water-cooling systems look spectacular inside a PC. But do you really need them?


ArchCAD-400k: ALarge-Scale CADdrawings Dataset and New Baseline for Panoptic Symbol Spotting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recognizing symbols in architectural CAD drawings is critical for various advanced engineering applications. In this paper, we propose a novel CAD data annotation engine that leverages intrinsic attributes from systematically archived CAD drawings to automatically generate high-quality annotations, thus significantly reducing manual labeling efforts. Utilizing this engine, we construct ArchCAD-400k, a large-scale CAD dataset consisting of 413,062 chunks from 5538 standardized drawings, making it over 26 times larger than the largest existing CAD dataset. ArchCAD-400k boasts an extended drawing diversity and broader categories, offering line-grained annotations. Furthermore, we present a new baseline model for panoptic symbol spotting, termed Dual-Pathway Symbol Spotter (DPSS). It incorporates an adaptive fusion module to enhance primitive features with complementary image features, achieving state-of-the-art performance and enhanced robustness. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of DPSS, demonstrating the value of ArchCAD-400k and its potential to drive innovation in architectural design and construction.


FANS: AFlatness-Aware Network Structure for Generalization in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn optimal policies from static datasets while enhancing generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. To mitigate overfitting to suboptimal behaviors in offline datasets, existing methods often relax constraints on policy and data or extract informative patterns through data-driven techniques. However, there has been limited exploration into structurally guiding the optimization process toward flatter regions of the solution space that offer better generalization. Motivated by this observation, we present FANS, a generalization-oriented structured network framework that promotes flatter and robust policy learning by guiding the optimization trajectory through modular architectural design. FANS comprises four key components: (1) Residual Blocks, which facilitate compact and expressive representations; (2) Gaussian Activation, which promotes smoother gradients; (3) Layer Normalization, which mitigates overfitting; and (4) Ensemble Modeling, which reduces estimation variance. By integrating FANS into a standard actor-critic framework, we highlight that this remarkably simple architecture achieves superior performance across various tasks compared to many existing advanced methods.


Auto-Compressing Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Deep neural networks with short residual connections have demonstrated remarkable success across domains, but increasing depth often introduces computational redundancy without corresponding improvements in representation quality. We introduce Auto-Compressing Networks (ACNs), an architectural variant where additive long feedforward connections from each layer to the output replace traditional short residual connections. By analyzing the distinct dynamics induced by this modification, we reveal a unique property we coin as auto-compression--the ability of a network to organically compress information during training with gradient descent, through architectural design alone. Through auto-compression, information is dynamically "pushed" into early layers during training, enhancing their representational quality and revealing potential redundancy in deeper ones. We theoretically show that this property emerges from layer-wise training patterns present in ACNs, where layers are dynamically utilized during training based on task requirements. We also find that ACNs exhibit enhanced noise robustness compared to residual networks, superior performance in low-data settings, improved transfer learning capabilities, and mitigate catastrophic forgetting suggesting that they learn representations that generalize better despite using fewer parameters. Our results demonstrate up to 18% reduction in catastrophic forgetting and 30-80% architectural compression while maintaining accuracy across vision transformers, MLP-mixers, and BERT architectures. These findings establish ACNs as a practical approach to developing efficient neural architectures that automatically adapt their computational footprint to task complexity, while learning robust representations suitable for noisy real-world tasks and continual learning scenarios.



Text-to-Code Generation for Modular Building Layouts in Building Information Modeling

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present Text2MBL, a text-to-code generation framework that generates executable Building Information Modeling (BIM) code directly from textual descriptions of modular building layout (MBL) design. Unlike conventional layout generation approaches that operate in 2D space, Text2MBL produces fully parametric, semantically rich BIM layouts through on-the-fly code instantiation. To address MBLs' unique challenges due to their hierarchical three-tier structure: modules (physical building blocks), units (self-contained dwellings), and rooms (functional spaces), we developed an object-oriented code architecture and fine-tuned large language models to output structured action sequences in code format. To train and evaluate the framework, we curated a dataset of paired descriptions and ground truth layouts drawn from real-world modular housing projects. Performance was assessed using metrics for executable validity, semantic fidelity, and geometric consistency. By tightly unifying natural language understanding with BIM code generation, Text2MBL establishes a scalable pipeline from high-level conceptual design to automation-ready modular construction workflows.


Fans don't cool rooms and 3 other myths about home energy conservation

Popular Science

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. A fan can help you feel cooler, but won't lower the temperature of a room. 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 . Want to spend less on energy?


TabPFN-3: Technical Report

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tabular data underpins most high-value prediction problems in science and industry, and TabPFN has driven the foundation model revolution for this modality. Designed with feedback from our users, TabPFN-3 builds on this foundation to scale state-of-the-art performance to datasets with 1M training rows and substantially reduce training and inference time. Pretrained exclusively on synthetic data from our prior, TabPFN-3 dramatically pushes the frontier of tabular prediction and brings substantial gains on time series, relational, and tabular-text data. On the standard tabular benchmark TabArena, a forward pass of TabPFN-3 outperforms all other models, including tuned and ensembled baselines, by a significant margin, and pareto-dominates the speed/performance frontier. On more diverse datasets, TabPFN-3 ranks first on datasets with many classes, and beats 8-hour-tuned gradient-boosted-tree baselines on datasets up to 1M training rows and 200 features. TabPFN-3 introduces test-time compute scaling to tabular foundation models. Our API offering TabPFN-3-Plus (Thinking) exploits this to beat all non-TabPFN models by over 200 Elo on TabArena, rising to 420 Elo on the largest data subset, and outperforms AutoGluon 1.5 extreme while being 10x faster, without using LLMs, real data, internet search or any other model besides TabPFN. TabPFN-3 extends the capabilities of our models, enabling SOTA prediction on relational data (new SOTA foundation model on RelBenchV1) and tabular-text data (SOTA on TabSTAR via TabPFN-3-Plus); and improves existing integrations: a specialized checkpoint, TabPFN-TS-3, ranks 2nd on the time-series benchmark fev-bench, and SHAP-value computation is up to 120x faster. TabPFN-3 achieves this performance while being up to 20x faster than TabPFN-2.5. In addition, a reduced KV cache and row-chunking scale to 1M rows on one H100 with fast inference speed.


Della Optima TP Series Mini-Split AC Review: Cheap, Smart, and (Mostly) Reliable

WIRED

Ductless AC systems get smart tech features--and the growing pains that come with them. App works well, with voice assistant support. Ductless mini-split air-conditioners have risen in popularity dramatically in recent years. One study now pegs their domestic market share at more than 40 percent compared to larger-scale HVAC units--and the smaller systems are even more popular in Asia and Europe than in the US. Mini-splits make a compelling climate control solution for a number of reasons.


Fast Bayesian Coresets via Subsampling and Quasi-Newton Refinement

Neural Information Processing Systems

Any inference procedure that is too computationally expensive to be run on the full posterior can instead be run inexpensively on the coreset, with results that approximate those on the full data. However, current approaches are limited by either a significant run-time or the need for the user to specify a low-cost approximation to the full posterior. We propose a Bayesian coreset construction algorithm that first selects a uniformly random subset of data, and then optimizes the weights using a novel quasi-Newton method. Our algorithm is a simple to implement, black-box method, that does not require the user to specify a low-cost posterior approximation. It is the first to come with a general high-probability bound on the KL divergence of the output coreset posterior. Experiments demonstrate that our method provides significant improvements in coreset quality against alternatives with comparable construction times, with far less storage cost and user input required.