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Functional Virtual Adversarial Training for Semi-Supervised Time Series Classification

Neural Information Processing Systems

Real-world time series analysis, such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and solar energy, faces unique challenges arising from the scarcity of labeled data, highlighting the need for effective semi-supervised learning methods. While the Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) method has shown promising performance in leveraging unlabeled data for smoother predictive distributions, straightforward extensions of VAT often fall short on time series tasks as they neglect the temporal structure of the data in the adversarial perturbation. In this paper, we propose the framework of functional Virtual Adversarial Training (f-VAT) that can incorporate the functional structure of the data into perturbations. By theoretically establishing a duality between the perturbation norm and the functional model sensitivity, we propose to use an appropriate Sobolev ($H^{-s}$) norm to generate structured functional adversarial perturbations for semi-supervised time series classification. Our proposed f-VAT method outperforms recent methods and achieves superior performance in extensive semi-supervised time series classification tasks (e.g., up to $ \approx 9$ % performance improvement). We also provide additional visualization studies to offer further insights into the superiority of f-VAT.


Constrained Posterior Sampling: Time Series Generation with Hard Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

Generating realistic time series samples is crucial for stress-testing models and protecting user privacy by using synthetic data. In engineering and safety-critical applications, these samples must meet certain hard constraints that are domain-specific or naturally imposed by physics or nature. Consider, for example, generating electricity demand patterns with constraints on peak demand times. This can be used to stress-test the functioning of power grids during adverse weather conditions. Existing approaches for generating constrained time series are either not scalable or degrade sample quality. To address these challenges, we introduce Constrained Posterior Sampling (CPS), a diffusion-based sampling algorithm that aims to project the posterior mean estimate into the constraint set after each denoising update.


SentinelKilnDB: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for OBB Brick Kiln Detection in South Asia Using Satellite Imagery

Neural Information Processing Systems

Air pollution was responsible for 2.6 million deaths across South Asia in 2021 alone, with brick manufacturing contributing significantly to this burden. In particular, the Indo-Gangetic Plain; a densely populated and highly polluted region spanning northern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan sees brick kilns contributing 8-14% of ambient air pollution. Traditional monitoring approaches, such as field surveys and manual annotation using tools like Google Earth Pro, are time and labor-intensive. Prior ML-based efforts for automated detection have relied on costly high-resolution commercial imagery and non-public datasets, limiting reproducibility and scalability. In this work, we introduce SENTINELKILNDB, a publicly available, hand-validated benchmark of 62,671 brick kilns spanning threekiln types Fixed Chimney Bull's Trench Kiln (FCBK), Circular FCBK (CFCBK), and Zigzag kilns - annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) across 2.8 million km2 using free and globally accessible Sentinel-2 imagery. We benchmark state-of-the-art oriented object detection models and evaluate generalization across in-region, out-of-region, and super-resolution settings. SENTINELKILNDB enables rigorous evaluation of geospatial generalization and robustness for low-resolution object detection, and provides a new testbed for ML models addressing real-world environmental and remote sensing challenges at a continental scale. Datasets and code are available in SentinelKilnDB Dataset and SentinelKilnDB Bench-mark, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.


Reinforcement Learning with Imperfect Transition Predictions: A Bellman-Jensen Approach

Neural Information Processing Systems

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes the agents make decisions based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with one-step transition models. In many real-world applications, such as energy management and stock investment, agents can access multi-step predictions of future states, which provide additional advantages for decision making. However, multi-step predictions are inherently high-dimensional: naively embedding these predictions into an MDP leads to an exponential blow-up in state space and the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, existing RL theory provides few tools to analyze prediction-augmented MDPs, as it typically works on one-step transition kernels and cannot accommodate multi-step predictions with errors or partial action-coverage. We address these challenges with three key innovations: First, we propose the \emph{Bayesian value function} to characterize the optimal prediction-aware policy tractably. Second, we develop a novel \emph{Bellman-Jensen Gap} analysis on the Bayesian value function, which enables characterizing the value of imperfect predictions. Third, we introduce BOLA (Bayesian Offline Learning with Online Adaptation), a two-stage model-based RL algorithm that separates offline Bayesian value learning from lightweight online adaptation to real-time predictions. We prove that BOLA remains sample-efficient even under imperfect predictions.


Bipolar Self-attention for Spiking Transformers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Harnessing the event-driven characteristic, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) present a promising avenue toward energy-efficient Transformer architectures. However, existing Spiking Transformers still suffer significant performance gaps compared to their Artificial Neural Network counterparts. Through comprehensive analysis, we attribute this gap to these two factors. First, the binary nature of spike trains limits Spiking Self-attention (SSA)'s capacity to capture negative-negative and positive-negative membrane potential interactions on Querys and Keys. Second, SSA typically omits Softmax functions to avoid energy-intensive multiply-accumulate operations, thereby failing to maintain row-stochasticity constraints on attention scores.


How Companies Track Climate Progress Is Changing

TIME - Tech

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The best last-minute Father's Day gifts for any dad

Popular Science

No matter what your dad is into, they'll appreciate the gifts on this list. We have everything from outdoor gear to tiny vinyl records. 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. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. 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 . Father's Day lands on June 21 this year, which also happens to be the longest day of the year. That gives you maximum daylight and minimum calendar left before it arrives. If our initial 2026 Father's Day gift guide came and went while you procrastinated, this list is the safety net. You can still get many of these items before Sunday, whether that means instant digital delivery (the $80 America the Beautiful parks pass), an in-store pickup (an $8.78 King of the Hill WD-40 can at The Home Depot), or fast shipping on gear like the Wolfbox G900 Pro dash cam.


UniFoil: A Universal Dataset of Airfoils in Transitional and Turbulent Regimes for Subsonic and Transonic Flows

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present UniFoil, the largest publicly available universal airfoil database based on Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations. It contains over 500,000 samples spanning a wide range of Reynolds and Mach numbers, capturing both transitional and fully turbulent flows across incompressible to compressible regimes. UniFoil is designed to support machine learning research in fluid dynamics, particularly for modeling complex aerodynamic phenomena.Most existing datasets are limited to incompressible, fully turbulent flows with smooth field characteristics, thus overlooking the critical physics of laminar-turbulent transition and shock-wave interactions--features that exhibit strong nonlinearity and sharp gradients. UniFoil fills this gap by offering a broad spectrum of realistic flow conditions.In the database, turbulent simulations utilize the Spalart-Allmaras (SA) model, while transitional flows are modeled using an $e^N$-based transition prediction method coupled with the SA model. The database includes a comprehensive geometry set comprising over 4,800 natural laminar flow (NLF) airfoils and 30,000 fully turbulent (FT) airfoils, effectively covering the diversity of airfoil designs relevant to aerospace, wind energy, and marine applications.This database is also highly valuable for scientific machine learning (SciML), enabling the development of data-driven models that more accurately capture the transport processes associated with laminar-turbulent transition. UniFoil is freely available under a permissive CC-BY-SA license.


Spiking Meets Attention: Efficient Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution with Attention Spiking Neural Networks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are emerging as a promising alternative to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), offering biological plausibility and energy efficiency. Despite these merits, SNNs are frequently hampered by limited capacity and insufficient representation power, yet remain underexplored in remote sensing image (RSI) super-resolution (SR) tasks. In this paper, we first observe that spiking signals exhibit drastic intensity variations across diverse textures, highlighting an active learning state of the neurons. This observation motivates us to apply SNNs for efficient SR of RSIs. Inspired by the success of attention mechanisms in representing salient information, we devise the spiking attention block (SAB), a concise yet effective component that optimizes membrane potentials through inferred attention weights, which, in turn, regulates spiking activity for superior feature representation. Our key contributions include: 1) we bridge the independent modulation between temporal and channel dimensions, facilitating joint feature correlation learning, and 2) we access the global self-similar patterns in large-scale remote sensing imagery to infer spatial attention weights, incorporating effective priors for realistic and faithful reconstruction. Building upon SAB, we proposed SpikeSR, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across various remote sensing benchmarks such as AID, DOTA, and DIOR, while maintaining high computational efficiency. Code of SpikeSR will be available at https://github.com/XY-boy/SpikeSR.


Unbalanced Optimal Total Variation Transport: A Theoretical Approach to Spatial Resource Allocation Problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose and analyze a new class of unbalanced weak optimal transport (OT) problems with total variation penalties, motivated by spatial resource allocation tasks. Unlike classical OT, our framework accommodates general unbalanced nonnegative measures and incorporates cost objectives that directly capture operational trade-offs between transport cost and supply-demand mismatch. In the general setting, we establish the existence of optimal solutions and a dual formulation. We then focus on the semi-discrete setting, where one measure is discrete and the other is absolutely continuous, a structure relevant to applications such as service area partitioning for facilities like schools or medical stations. Exploiting a tessellation-based structure, we derive the corresponding explicit optimality conditions. We further address a quantization problem that jointly optimizes the locations and weights of discrete support points, applicable to facility location tasks such as the cost-efficient deployment of battery swap stations or e-commerce warehouses, informed by demand-side data. The dual-tessellation structure also yields explicit gradient expressions, enabling efficient numerical optimization in finite dimensions.