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Scaling up Remote Sensing Segmentation with Segment Anything Model

Neural Information Processing Systems

The success of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates the significance of data-centric machine learning. However, due to the difficulties and high costs associated with annotating Remote Sensing (RS) images, a large amount of valuable RS data remains unlabeled, particularly at the pixel level. In this study, we leverage SAM and existing RS object detection datasets to develop an efficient pipeline for generating a large-scale RS segmentation dataset, dubbed SAMRS. SAMRS totally possesses 105,090 images and 1,668,241 instances, surpassing existing high-resolution RS segmentation datasets in size by several orders of magnitude. It provides object category, location, and instance information that can be used for semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection, either individually or in combination. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of SAMRS from various aspects. Moreover, preliminary experiments highlight the importance of conducting segmentation pre-training with SAMRS to address task discrepancies and alleviate the limitations posed by limited training data during fine-tuning. The code and dataset will be available at SAMRS.


GemNet: Universal Directional Graph Neural Networks for Molecules

Neural Information Processing Systems

Effectively predicting molecular interactions has the potential to accelerate molecular dynamics by multiple orders of magnitude and thus revolutionize chemical simulations. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently shown great successes for this task, overtaking classical methods based on fixed molecular kernels. However, they still appear very limited from a theoretical perspective, since regular GNNs cannot distinguish certain types of graphs. In this work we close this gap between theory and practice. We show that GNNs with directed edge embeddings and two-hop message passing are indeed universal approximators for predictions that are invariant to translation, and equivariant to permutation and rotation. We then leverage these insights and multiple structural improvements to propose the geometric message passing neural network (GemNet). We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed changes in multiple ablation studies. GemNet outperforms previous models on the COLL, MD17, and OC20 datasets by 34 %, 41 %, and 20 %, respectively, and performs especially well on the most challenging molecules. Our implementation is available online. 1


Adversarial Robustness with Semi-Infinite Constrained Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Despite strong performance in numerous applications, the fragility of deep learning to input perturbations has raised serious questions about its use in safety-critical domains. While adversarial training can mitigate this issue in practice, state-ofthe-art methods are increasingly application-dependent, heuristic in nature, and suffer from fundamental trade-offs between nominal performance and robustness. Moreover, the problem of finding worst-case perturbations is non-convex and underparameterized, both of which engender a non-favorable optimization landscape. Thus, there is a gap between the theory and practice of adversarial training, particularly with respect to when and why adversarial training works. In this paper, we take a constrained learning approach to address these questions and to provide a theoretical foundation for robust learning. In particular, we leverage semi-infinite optimization and non-convex duality theory to show that adversarial training is equivalent to a statistical problem over perturbation distributions, which we characterize completely. Notably, we show that a myriad of previous robust training techniques can be recovered for particular, sub-optimal choices of these distributions. Using these insights, we then propose a hybrid Langevin Monte Carlo approach of which several common algorithms (e.g., PGD) are special cases. Finally, we show that our approach can mitigate the trade-off between nominal and robust performance, yielding state-of-the-art results on MNIST and CIFAR-10.


2f3c6a4cd8af177f6456e7e51a916ff3-Supplemental.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

"Name" is the name of the operation in our search space. "TFFunction" is the TensorFlow function that the name is mapped to when a DNA instruction is being converted to a line of TensorFlow code. "Argument Mapping" describes how the values in a DNA's argument set are mapped to the corresponding TensorFlow function arguments. This vocabulary is largely constructed from the lowest level TF operations needed to create Transformers (see Appendix A.5). We also add commonly used math primitives such as SIN and ABS. Here we provide additional implementation details. Relative Dimensions: We use relative dimensions [13] instead of absolute dimensions for each instruction's "dimension size" argument. This allows us to resize the models to fit within our parameter limits (32M to 38M parameters). The vocabulary for these relative dimensions is [1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, 32, 48, 64].


Data Sharing and Compression for Cooperative Networked Control

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sharing forecasts of network timeseries data, such as cellular or electricity load patterns, can improve independent control applications ranging from traffic scheduling to power generation. Typically, forecasts are designed without knowledge of a downstream controller's task objective, and thus simply optimize for mean prediction error. However, such task-agnostic representations are often too large to stream over a communication network and do not emphasize salient temporal features for cooperative control. This paper presents a solution to learn succinct, highly-compressed forecasts that are co-designed with a modular controller's task objective. Our simulations with real cellular, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and electricity load data show we can improve a model predictive controller's performance by at least 25% while transmitting 80% less data than the competing method.






Inside Chornobyl: 40 years after disaster, nuclear site still at risk in Russia's war

The Guardian > Energy

A worker checks the radiation level inside the control room of reactor No 4, where the Chornobyl disaster happened in 1986. A worker checks the radiation level inside the control room of reactor No 4, where the Chornobyl disaster happened in 1986. In February 2025, a cheap Russian drone tore through Chornobyl's confinement shelter. Workers warn the site of the world's worst nuclear accident is not safe yet The dosimeter clipped to your chest ticks faster the moment you step off the designated path inside the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Step back, and it slows again - an invisible line between clean ground and contamination.