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What Ukraine thinks about Russia-US deal

Al Jazeera

While the US and Russia praised a phone call between Trump and Putin on Tuesday over a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, Kyiv fears it may be forced into a deal it does not like. Assed Baig reports from Ukraine's capital which was the target of a Russian drone attack on Tuesday night.


Russia and Ukraine carry out attacks after Putin-Trump call

BBC News

Within hours of Putin agreeing to halt attacks on energy infrastructure, Zelensky said "there have been hits, specifically on civilian infrastructure", including a hospital in Sumy. Zelensky said that Russia launched more than 40 drones against Ukraine in the hours following the call between Trump and Putin. "It is these types of night-time attacks by Russia that destroy our energy sector, our infrastructure, and the normal life of Ukrainians," Zelensky said. "Today, Putin effectively rejected the proposal for a full ceasefire." Meanwhile, the Russian defence ministry said of the 57 Ukrainian drones it intercepted and destroyed overnight, 35 were over the Kursk border region.


Trump vows to immediately ramp up U.S. production of 'beautiful, clean coal'

Los Angeles Times

President Trump this week continued to make his environmental priorities clear by vowing to open up hundreds of coal power plants in the United States in an effort to advance competition against China. "After years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals, and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants, I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL," Trump wrote in a post on social media Monday. Though the post was not linked to any particular policy plans or documents, it arrives as the White House takes aim at various environmental agencies and clean-energy initiatives. In the last week alone, the administration has announced plans to significantly roll back regulations that govern coal production and to potentially lay off up to 65% of scientists and researchers at the Environmental Protection Agency, among other actions. Coal accounts for about 16% of the country's electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration -- down from about 50% in 2000 as natural gas and nuclear and renewable energy have grown.


TULIP: Towards Unified Language-Image Pretraining

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite the recent success of image-text contrastive models like CLIP and SigLIP, these models often struggle with vision-centric tasks that demand high-fidelity image understanding, such as counting, depth estimation, and fine-grained object recognition. These models, by performing language alignment, tend to prioritize high-level semantics over visual understanding, weakening their image understanding. On the other hand, vision-focused models are great at processing visual information but struggle to understand language, limiting their flexibility for language-driven tasks. In this work, we introduce TULIP, an open-source, drop-in replacement for existing CLIP-like models. Our method leverages generative data augmentation, enhanced image-image and text-text contrastive learning, and image/text reconstruction regularization to learn fine-grained visual features while preserving global semantic alignment. Our approach, scaling to over 1B parameters, outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across multiple benchmarks, establishing a new SOTA zero-shot performance on ImageNet-1K, delivering up to a $2\times$ enhancement over SigLIP on RxRx1 in linear probing for few-shot classification, and improving vision-language models, achieving over $3\times$ higher scores than SigLIP on MMVP. Our code/checkpoints are available at https://tulip-berkeley.github.io


MobiFuse: Learning Universal Human Mobility Patterns through Cross-domain Data Fusion

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Human mobility modeling is critical for urban planning and transportation management, yet existing datasets often lack the resolution and semantic richness required for comprehensive analysis. To address this, we proposed a cross-domain data fusion framework that integrates multi-modal data of distinct nature and spatio-temporal resolution, including geographical, mobility, socio-demographic, and traffic information, to construct a privacy-preserving and semantically enriched human travel trajectory dataset. This framework is demonstrated through two case studies in Los Angeles (LA) and Egypt, where a domain adaptation algorithm ensures its transferability across diverse urban contexts. Quantitative evaluation shows that the generated synthetic dataset accurately reproduces mobility patterns observed in empirical data. Moreover, large-scale traffic simulations for LA County based on the generated synthetic demand align well with observed traffic. On California's I-405 corridor, the simulation yields a Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 5.85% for traffic volume and 4.36% for speed compared to Caltrans PeMS observations.


Beacon2Science: Enhancing STEREO/HI beacon data1 with machine learning for efficient CME tracking

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Observing and forecasting coronal mass ejections (CME) in real-time is crucial due to the strong geomagnetic storms they can generate that can have a potentially damaging effect, for example, on satellites and electrical devices. With its near-real-time availability, STEREO/HI beacon data is the perfect candidate for early forecasting of CMEs. However, previous work concluded that CME arrival prediction based on beacon data could not achieve the same accuracy as with high-resolution science data due to data gaps and lower quality. We present our novel pipeline entitled ''Beacon2Science'', bridging the gap between beacon and science data to improve CME tracking. Through this pipeline, we first enhance the quality (signal-to-noise ratio and spatial resolution) of beacon data. We then increase the time resolution of enhanced beacon images through learned interpolation to match science data's 40-minute resolution. We maximize information coherence between consecutive frames with adapted model architecture and loss functions through the different steps. The improved beacon images are comparable to science data, showing better CME visibility than the original beacon data. Furthermore, we compare CMEs tracked in beacon, enhanced beacon, and science images. The tracks extracted from enhanced beacon data are closer to those from science images, with a mean average error of $\sim 0.5 ^\circ$ of elongation compared to $1^\circ$ with original beacon data. The work presented in this paper paves the way for its application to forthcoming missions such as Vigil and PUNCH.


EmoGRACE: Aspect-based emotion analysis for social media data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While sentiment analysis has advanced from sentence to aspect-level, i.e., the identification of concrete terms related to a sentiment, the equivalent field of Aspect-based Emotion Analysis (ABEA) is faced with dataset bottlenecks and the increased complexity of emotion classes in contrast to binary sentiments. This paper addresses these gaps, by generating a first ABEA training dataset, consisting of 2,621 English Tweets, and fine-tuning a BERT-based model for the ABEA sub-tasks of Aspect Term Extraction (ATE) and Aspect Emotion Classification (AEC). The dataset annotation process was based on the hierarchical emotion theory by Shaver et al. [1] and made use of group annotation and majority voting strategies to facilitate label consistency. The resulting dataset contained aspect-level emotion labels for Anger, Sadness, Happiness, Fear, and a None class. Using the new ABEA training dataset, the state-of-the-art ABSA model GRACE by Luo et al. [2] was fine-tuned for ABEA. The results reflected a performance plateau at an F1-score of 70.1% for ATE and 46.9% for joint ATE and AEC extraction. The limiting factors for model performance were broadly identified as the small training dataset size coupled with the increased task complexity, causing model overfitting and limited abilities to generalize well on new data.


Probing the topology of the space of tokens with structured prompts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The set of tokens T, when embedded within the latent space X of a large language model (LLM) can be thought of as a finite sample drawn from a distribution supported on a topological subspace of X. One can ask what the smallest (in the sense of inclusion) subspace and simplest (in terms of fewest free parameters) distribution can account for such a sample. Previous work[1] suggests that the smallest topological subspace from which tokens can be drawn is not manifold, but has structure consistent with a stratified manifold. That paper relied upon knowing the token input embedding function T X, which given each token t T, ascribes a representation in X. Because embeddings preserve topological structure, in this paper, we will study T by equating it with the image of the token input embedding function, thereby treating T both as the set of tokens and as a subspace of X. This subspace is called the token subspace of X. Usually X is taken to be Euclidean space R


Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modelling human variation in rating tasks is crucial for enabling AI systems for personalization, pluralistic model alignment, and computational social science. We propose representing individuals using value profiles -- natural language descriptions of underlying values compressed from in-context demonstrations -- along with a steerable decoder model to estimate ratings conditioned on a value profile or other rater information. To measure the predictive information in rater representations, we introduce an information-theoretic methodology. We find that demonstrations contain the most information, followed by value profiles and then demographics. However, value profiles offer advantages in terms of scrutability, interpretability, and steerability due to their compressed natural language format. Value profiles effectively compress the useful information from demonstrations (>70% information preservation). Furthermore, clustering value profiles to identify similarly behaving individuals better explains rater variation than the most predictive demographic groupings. Going beyond test set performance, we show that the decoder models interpretably change ratings according to semantic profile differences, are well-calibrated, and can help explain instance-level disagreement by simulating an annotator population. These results demonstrate that value profiles offer novel, predictive ways to describe individual variation beyond demographics or group information.


A Personalized Data-Driven Generative Model of Human Motion

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The deployment of autonomous virtual avatars (in extended reality) and robots in human group activities - such as rehabilitation therapy, sports, and manufacturing - is expected to increase as these technologies become more pervasive. Designing cognitive architectures and control strategies to drive these agents requires realistic models of human motion. However, existing models only provide simplified descriptions of human motor behavior. In this work, we propose a fully data-driven approach, based on Long Short-Term Memory neural networks, to generate original motion that captures the unique characteristics of specific individuals. We validate the architecture using real data of scalar oscillatory motion. Extensive analyses show that our model effectively replicates the velocity distribution and amplitude envelopes of the individual it was trained on, remaining different from other individuals, and outperforming state-of-the-art models in terms of similarity to human data.