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SentinelKilnDB: ALarge-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for OBBBrick Kiln Detection in South Asia Using Satellite Imagery Supplementary Information
The questions are presented in blue, with our corresponding responses shown in black. For what purpose was the dataset created? Was there a specific task in mind? This dataset was created for academic and research purposes to advance scientific understanding and support policy development on air quality and sustainability issues. The findings highlight important opportunities to improve regulatory compliance and encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies within the brick kiln sector, which is a significant contributor to regional air pollution. Beyond its environmental relevance, this dataset is especially valuable for the fields of object detection and computer vision. It provides a large-scale, hand-validated collection of brick kiln locations annotated with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) on freely available Sentinel-2 satellite imagery.
Preconditioned Langevin Dynamics with Score-Based Generative Models for Infinite-Dimensional Linear Bayesian Inverse Problems
Designing algorithms for solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems directly in infinite-dimensional function spaces--where such problems are naturally formulated--is crucial to ensure stability and convergence as the discretization of the underlying problem is refined. In this paper, we contribute to this line of work by analyzing a widely used sampler for linear inverse problems: Langevin dynamics driven by score-based generative models (SGMs) acting as priors, formulated directly in function space. Building on the theoretical framework for SGMs in Hilbert spaces, we give a rigorous definition of this sampler in the infinite-dimensional setting and derive, for the first time, error estimates that explicitly depend on the approximation error of the score. As a consequence, we obtain sufficient conditions for global convergence in Kullback-Leibler divergence on the underlying function space. Preventing numerical instabilities requires preconditioning of the Langevin algorithm and we prove the existence and the form of an optimal preconditioner. The preconditioner depends on both the score error and the forward operator and guarantees a uniform convergence rate across all posterior modes. Our analysis applies to both Gaussian and a general class of non-Gaussian priors. Finally, we present examples that illustrate and validate our theoretical findings.
PseuZO: Pseudo-Zeroth-Order Algorithm for Training Deep Neural Networks
Zeroth-order Optimization (ZO) has received wide attention in machine learning, especially when computing full gradient is expensive or even impossible. Recently, ZO has emerged as an important paradigm for memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), circumventing the memory overhead of backpropagation. However, existing ZO gradient estimators exhibit dimension-dependent variance scaling as!(d), leading to dimension-dependent convergence rates without further assumptions on the objective function, which is prohibitive for large-scale LLM parameters. To address this problem, we present a Pseudo-Zeroth-Order (PseuZO) framework for optimizing composite objective functions, especially large-scale models: minx XF(x)= Ezg h(x;z), where h represents complex, high-dimensional representations and g is a task-specific loss. While existing zeroth-order methods estimate gradients with final loss functions, our PseuZO algorithm estimate the Jacobian matrix of h(x) with the model output o = h(x), and the gradient of the loss function on model output e = og(o), and apply exponential moving average on Jacobian estimators to reduce the variance. Moreover, we use the sliding window technique to reduce memory costs. Our algorithm achieves an O! max "
MEDMAX: Mixed-Modal Instruction Tuning for Training Biomedical Assistants
Recent advancements in mixed-modal generative have opened new avenues for developing unified biomedical assistants capable of analyzing biomedical images, answering complex questions about them, and generating multimodal patient reports. However, existing datasets face challenges such as small sizes, limited coverage of biomedical tasks and domains, and a reliance on narrow sources. To address these gaps, we present MEDMAX, a large-scale multimodal biomedical instruction-tuning dataset for mixed-modal foundation models. With 1.47 million instances, MEDMAX encompasses a diverse range of tasks, including interleaved image-text generation, biomedical image captioning and generation, visual chat, and report understanding. These tasks span knowledge across diverse biomedical domains, including radiology and histopathology, grounded in medical papers and YouTube videos.
Dendritic Resonate-and-Fire Neuron for Effective and Efficient Long Sequence Modeling
The explosive growth in sequence length has intensified the demand for effective and efficient long sequence modeling. Benefiting from intrinsic oscillatory membrane dynamics, Resonate-and-Fire (RF) neurons can efficiently extract frequency components from input signals and encode them into spatiotemporal spike trains, making them well-suited for long sequence modeling.
Reinforcement Learning Teachers of Test Time Scaling
Training reasoning language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) for one-hot correctness inherently relies on the LM being able to explore and solve its task with some chance at initialization. Furthermore, a key use case of reasoning LMs is to act as teachers for distilling new students and cold-starting future RL iterations rather than being deployed themselves. From these considerations, we introduce a new framework that avoids RL's exploration challenge by training a new class of Reinforcement-Learned Teachers (RLTs) focused on yielding the most effective downstream distillation. RLTs are prompted with both the question and solution to each problem, and tasked to simply "connect-the-dots" with detailed explanations tailored for their students. We train RLTs with dense rewards obtained by feeding each explanation to the student and testing its understanding of the problem's solution. In practice, the raw outputs of a 7BRLT provide higher final performance on competition and graduate-level tasks than existing distillation and cold-starting pipelines that collect and postprocess the reasoning traces of orders of magnitude larger LMs. Furthermore, RLTs maintain their effectiveness when training larger students and when applied zero-shot to out-of-distribution tasks, unlocking new levels of efficiency and re-usability for the RL reasoning framework.
Lloyds Banking Group to hire 300 tech experts to work on AI
News of Lloyds's AI recruitment drive comes as the group's chief executive prepares to unveil a strategic plan. News of Lloyds's AI recruitment drive comes as the group's chief executive prepares to unveil a strategic plan. Lloyds Banking Group has launched an AI recruitment drive for 300 tech experts, weeks before its chief executive, Charlie Nunn, unveils a strategic plan for the 261-year old lender. The bank said it intended the recruits to work on its use and development of agentic AI by September, referring to autonomous artificial intelligence models that can plan and execute tasks with minimal human oversight. While the hiring drive is will increase Lloyds' headcount for now, the group did not rule out its broad adoption of AI leading to job cuts in the future. Trystan Davies, group head of data and AI science, said: "AI will reshape how organisations are structured.
Steam Next Fest demos, a Virtual Boy-inspired shooter and other new indie games worth checking out
Plus, a timely soccer-related management sim that doesn't hit the back of the net. Welcome to our latest roundup of what's going on in the indie game space. As ever, we've got some new releases and news of upcoming games to share with you. However, it's Steam Next Fest time, so there are literally thousands of fresh game demos to jump into. One of the main aims of Steam Next Fest is to help players discover interesting games.
Puzzles: Unbounded Video-Depth Augmentation for Scalable End-to-End 3DReconstruction
Multi-view 3D reconstruction remains a core challenge in computer vision. Recent methods, such as DUSt3R and its successors, directly regress pointmaps from image pairs without relying on known scene geometry or camera parameters. However, the performance of these models is constrained by the diversity and scale of available training data. In this work, we introduce Puzzles, a data augmentation strategy that synthesizes an unbounded volume of high-quality, posed video-depth data from just a single image or video clip. By simulating diverse camera trajectories and realistic scene geometry through targeted image transformations, Puzzles enhances data variety. Extensive experiments show that integrating Puzzles into existing video-based 3D reconstruction pipelines consistently boosts performance, all without modifying the underlying network architecture. Notably, models trained on only 10%of the original data, augmented with Puzzles, still achieve accuracy comparable to those trained on the full dataset.[Project