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WhAM: Towards ATranslative Model of Sperm Whale Vocalization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Sperm whales communicate in short sequences of clicks known as codas. We present WhAM (Whale Acoustics Model), the first transformer-based model capable of generating synthetic sperm whale codas from any audio prompt. WhAM is built by finetuning VampNet, a masked acoustic token model pretrained on musical audio, using 10k coda recordings collected over the past two decades. Through iterative masked token prediction, WhAM generates high-fidelity synthetic codas that preserve key acoustic features of the source recordings. We evaluate WhAM's synthetic codas using Frรฉchet Audio Distance and through perceptual studies with expert marine biologists. On downstream classification tasks including rhythm, social unit, and vowel classification, WhAM's learned representations achieve strong performance, despite being trained for generation rather than classification.


VideoLucy: Deep Memory Backtracking for Long Video Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent studies have shown that agent-based systems leveraging large language models (LLMs) for key information retrieval and integration have emerged as a promising approach for long video understanding. However, these systems face two major challenges. First, they typically perform modeling and reasoning on individual frames, struggling to capture the temporal context of consecutive frames. Second, to reduce the cost of dense frame-level captioning, they adopt sparse frame sampling, which risks discarding crucial information. To overcome these limitations, we propose VideoLucy, a deep memory backtracking framework for long video understanding.


Towards Self-Refinement of Vision-Language Models with Triangular Consistency

Neural Information Processing Systems

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) integrate visual knowledge with the analytical capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through supervised visual instruction tuning, using image-question-answer triplets. However, the potential of VLMs trained without supervised instruction remains largely unexplored. This study validates that VLMs possess inherent self-refinement capabilities, enabling them to generate high-quality supervised data without external inputs and thereby learn autonomously. Specifically, to stimulate the self-refinement ability of VLMs, we propose a self-refinement framework based on a Triangular Consistency principle: within the image-query-answer triangle, any masked elements should be consistently and accurately reconstructed. The framework involves three steps: (1) We enable the instruction generation ability of VLMs by adding multi-task instruction tuning like image question-answer or image-answer question.


Benchmarking Egocentric Multimodal Goal Inference for Assistive Wearable Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

There has been a surge of interest in assistive wearable agents: agents embodied in wearable form factors (e.g., smart glasses) who take assistive actions toward a user's goal/query (e.g. "Where did I leave my keys?"). In this work, we consider the important complementary problem of inferring that goal from multi-modal contextual observations. Solving this "goal inference" problem holds the promise of eliminating the effort needed to interact with such an agent. This work focuses on creating WAGIBench, a strong benchmark to measure progress in solving this problem using vision-language models (VLMs). Given the limited prior work in this area, we collected a novel dataset comprising 29 hours of multimodal data from 348 participants across 3,477 recordings, featuring ground-truth goals alongside accompanying visual, audio, digital, and longitudinal contextual observations. We validate that human performance exceeds model performance, achieving 93% multiple-choice accuracy compared with 84% for the best-performing VLM. Generative benchmark results that evaluate several families of modern vision-language models show that larger models perform significantly better on the task, yet remain far from practical usefulness, as they produce relevant goals only 55% of the time. Through a modality ablation, we show that models benefit from extra information in relevant modalities with minimal performance degradation from irrelevant modalities.


Sekai: AVideo Dataset towards World Exploration

Neural Information Processing Systems

Video generation techniques have made remarkable progress, promising to be the foundation of interactive world exploration. However, existing video generation datasets are not well-suited for world exploration training as they suffer from some limitations: limited locations, short duration, static scenes, and a lack of annotations about exploration and the world. In this paper, we introduce Sekai (meaning "world" in Japanese), a high-quality first-person view worldwide video dataset with rich annotations for world exploration. It consists of over 5,000 hours of walking or drone view (FPV and UVA) videos from over 100 countries and regions across 750 cities. We develop an efficient and effective toolbox to collect, pre-process and annotate videos with location, scene, weather, crowd density, captions, and camera trajectories. Comprehensive analyses and experiments demonstrate the dataset's scale, diversity, annotation quality, and effectiveness for training video generation models. We believe Sekai will benefit the area of video generation and world exploration, and motivate valuable applications.


Eerie WWII photo sparks wild time-travel claims after viewers spot impossible detail

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Giorgia Meloni rips'senseless' attacks from Trump as Italian Prime Minister refuses to back down amid G7 feud Former Olympian is arrested for allegedly vandalizing Reflecting Pool... but he claims he merely touched it Cocaine scandal ripping the Hamptons apart: New York elite's dirty secret leaves mothers too afraid to let their children out... as police issue urgent warning Stingy fast food giant named America's favorite restaurant AGAIN... and experts think they know why Inside America's new fattest town: Burgers are the size of your head, gyms lie empty and custom mobility scooters carry 800lb loads... as we investigate why Ozempic just DOESN'T work Call me cynical, but the real reason Gruesome Twosome Harry and Meghan are returning to the UK is just so obvious... and highly humiliating: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Candace Owens hits out at nasty rumors claiming she was DEAD... as fellow MAGA influencer claims her account was hacked I lost 50lb without jabs using this easy but overlooked method. But I still felt dowdy - until I discovered these expert anti-ageing fashion and beauty tips. Embattled Alexi Lalas makes controversial World Cup declaration amid tension with Fox colleagues: 'Makes you look like a weak poser' No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. Grace Kelly's lookalike granddaughter, 27, wows in bikini snaps...as she packs on the PDA during beach getaway Three more arrested over bungee jumper's death after she was hurled from bridge without a rope Ex-partner of dad who was berated for taking his daughters into women's bathroom claims he'exploited' girls and accuses him of failing to pay child support... before he hits back Blake Lively runs errands in frumpy outfit after reconciling with ex-BFF Taylor Swift... miles away from reported'bachelorette party' TV star mom, 46, who appeared on'quitting everything to change your life' show died in fire at luxury Caribbean beach resort that sent 1,700 tourists running for their lives The four mistakes that led to bungee tragedy on Skeleton Bridge: FRED KELLY saw the scene for himself, now he retraces the prelude to disaster. So was it really an accident?


Scaling Computer-Use Grounding via User Interface Decomposition and Synthesis

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding, the ability to map natural language instructions to specific actions on graphical user interfaces, remains a critical bottleneck in computer use agent development. Current benchmarks oversimplify grounding tasks as short referring expressions, failing to capture the complexity of real-world interactions that require software commonsense, layout understanding, and fine-grained manipulation capabilities. To address these limitations, we introduce OSWORLD-G, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 564 finely annotated samples across diverse task types including text matching, element recognition, layout understanding, and precise manipulation. Additionally, we synthesize and release the largest computer use grounding dataset JEDI, which contains 4 million examples through multi-perspective decoupling of tasks. Our multi-scale models trained on JEDI demonstrate its effectiveness by outperforming existing approaches on ScreenSpot-v2, ScreenSpot-Pro, and our OSWORLD-G. Furthermore, we demonstrate that improved grounding with JEDI directly enhances agentic capabilities of general foundation models on complex computer tasks with state-of-the-art performance, improving from 23% to 51% on OSWorld. Through detailed ablation studies, we identify key factors contributing to grounding performance and verify that combining specialized data for different interface elements enables compositional generalization to novel interfaces.


Florida students watch male seahorse give birth in the wild

Popular Science

Male seahorses carry their fertilized eggs in a special pouch on their tails. 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 . Anything can happen out in the ocean .


Steven Spielberg claims aliens have already visited Earth - now scientists say he might be right

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Former Olympian seen in handcuffs as Trump threatens'years in jail' and more arrests after vandals SABOTAGE Reflecting Pool with'corrosive and destructive chemicals' Angelina Jolie's son Pax, 22, surfaces in LA after bombshell revelation about his relationship to Brad Pitt Keir Starmer'will announce as early as Monday that he is quitting as Prime Minister' after spending weekend locked in tense talks about his future with his wife Victoria at Chequers Mortifying truth about Clavicular's'botched' nose job: Infertile influencer's'trans' admission to friends... as insider reveals what's said behind closed doors - and twisted secrets that'll leave fans floored Giorgia Meloni rips'senseless' attacks from Trump as Italian Prime Minister refuses to back down amid G7 feud Inside America's new fattest town: Burgers are the size of your head, gyms lie empty and custom mobility scooters carry 800lb loads... as we investigate why Ozempic just DOESN'T work Call me cynical, but the real reason Gruesome Twosome Harry and Meghan are returning to the UK is just so obvious... and highly humiliating: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Stingy fast food giant named America's favorite restaurant AGAIN... and experts think they know why I lost 50lb without jabs using this easy but overlooked method. But I still felt dowdy - until I discovered these expert anti-ageing fashion and beauty tips. No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. Blake Lively runs errands in frumpy outfit after reconciling with ex-BFF Taylor Swift... miles away from reported'bachelorette party' Embattled Alexi Lalas makes controversial World Cup declaration amid tension with Fox colleagues: 'Makes you look like a weak poser' Scientists propose radical new theory of consciousness - and claim it doesn't depend on flesh and blood Candace Owens hits out at nasty rumors claiming she was DEAD... as fellow MAGA influencer claims her account was hacked Grace Kelly's lookalike granddaughter, 27, wows in bikini snaps...as she packs on the PDA during beach getaway TV star mom, 46, who appeared on'quitting everything to change your life' show died in fire at luxury Caribbean beach resort that sent 1,700 tourists running for their lives The four mistakes that led to bungee tragedy on Skeleton Bridge: FRED KELLY saw the scene for himself, now he retraces the prelude to disaster. So was it really an accident?


Glowing 'mother orb' spotted launching swarms of mystery objects near secret US site, new Pentagon files reveal

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Former Olympian seen in handcuffs as Trump threatens'years in jail' and more arrests after vandals SABOTAGE Reflecting Pool with'corrosive and destructive chemicals' Keir Starmer'will announce as early as Monday that he is quitting as Prime Minister' after spending weekend locked in tense talks about his future with his wife Victoria at Chequers Mortifying truth about Clavicular's'botched' nose job: Infertile influencer's'trans' admission to friends... as insider reveals what's said behind closed doors - and twisted secrets that'll leave fans floored Giorgia Meloni rips'senseless' attacks from Trump as Italian Prime Minister refuses to back down amid G7 feud Inside America's new fattest town: Burgers are the size of your head, gyms lie empty and custom mobility scooters carry 800lb loads... as we investigate why Ozempic just DOESN'T work Call me cynical, but the real reason Gruesome Twosome Harry and Meghan are returning to the UK is just so obvious... and highly humiliating: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Stingy fast food giant named America's favorite restaurant AGAIN... and experts think they know why I lost 50lb without jabs using this easy but overlooked method. But I still felt dowdy - until I discovered these expert anti-ageing fashion and beauty tips. Embattled Alexi Lalas makes controversial World Cup declaration amid tension with Fox colleagues: 'Makes you look like a weak poser' No one can see the real reason Jelly Roll divorced Bunnie XO. Angelina Jolie's son Pax, 22, surfaces in LA after bombshell revelation about his relationship to Brad Pitt Scientists propose radical new theory of consciousness - and claim it doesn't depend on flesh and blood Candace Owens hits out at nasty rumors claiming she was DEAD... as fellow MAGA influencer claims her account was hacked Blake Lively runs errands in frumpy outfit after reconciling with ex-BFF Taylor Swift... miles away from reported'bachelorette party' Grace Kelly's lookalike granddaughter, 27, wows in bikini snaps...as she packs on the PDA during beach getaway TV star mom, 46, who appeared on'quitting everything to change your life' show died in fire at luxury Caribbean beach resort that sent 1,700 tourists running for their lives The four mistakes that led to bungee tragedy on Skeleton Bridge: FRED KELLY saw the scene for himself, now he retraces the prelude to disaster. So was it really an accident?