In second-order optimization, a potential bottleneck can be computing the Hessian matrix of the optimized function at every iteration. Randomized sketching has emerged as a powerful technique for constructing estimates of the Hessian which can be used to perform approximate Newton steps. This involves multiplication by a random sketching matrix, which introduces a trade-off between the computational cost of sketching and the convergence rate of the optimization algorithm. A theoretically desirable but practically much too expensive choice is to use a dense Gaussian sketching matrix, which produces unbiased estimates of the exact Newton step and which offers strong problem-independent convergence guarantees. We show that the Gaussian sketching matrix can be drastically sparsified, significantly reducing the computational cost of sketching, without substantially affecting its convergence properties. This approach, called Newton-LESS, is based on a recently introduced sketching technique: LEverage Score Sparsified (LESS) embeddings. We prove that Newton-LESS enjoys nearly the same problem-independent local convergence rate as Gaussian embeddings, not just up to constant factors but even down to lower order terms, for a large class of optimization tasks. In particular, this leads to a new state-of-the-art convergence result for an iterative least squares solver. Finally, we extend LESS embeddings to include uniformly sparsified random sign matrices which can be implemented efficiently and which perform well in numerical experiments.

His Supporters Are Already Looking for the Next Target. "Grok has thoughts on who to look at next." Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel hold a press conference on their prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center on April 21, 2026. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. The Justice Department this week announced criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, alleging that the longtime civil rights watchdog had defrauded its own donors by secretly paying large sums of money to informants within various hate groups.

In this paper, we aim to create generalizable and controllable neural signed distance fields (SDFs) that represent clothed humans from monocular depth observations. Recent advances in deep learning, especially neural implicit representations, have enabled human shape reconstruction and controllable avatar generation from different sensor inputs. However, to generate realistic cloth deformations from novel input poses, watertight meshes or dense full-body scans are usually needed as inputs. Furthermore, due to the difficulty of effectively modeling pose-dependent cloth deformations for diverse body shapes and cloth types, existing approaches resort to per-subject/cloth-type optimization from scratch, which is computationally expensive. In contrast, we propose an approach that can quickly generate realistic clothed human avatars, represented as controllable neural SDFs, given only monocular depth images.

Privacy is a central challenge for systems that learn from sensitive data sets, especially when a system's outputs must be continuously updated to reflect changing data. We consider the achievable error for differentially private continual release of a basic statistic--the number of distinct items--in a stream where items may be both inserted and deleted (the turnstile model). With only insertions, existing algorithms have additive error just polylogarithmic in the length of the stream T. We uncover a much richer landscape in the turnstile model, even without considering memory restrictions. We show that every differentially private mechanism that handles insertions and deletions has worst-case additive error at least T1/4 even under a relatively weak, event-level privacy definition. Then, we identify a parameter of the input stream, its maximum flippancy, that is low for natural data streams and for which we give tight parameterized error guarantees. Specifically, the maximum flippancy is the largest number of times that the contribution of a single item to the distinct elements count changes over the course of the stream. We present an item-level differentially private mechanism that, for all turnstile streams with maximum flippancy w, continually outputs the number of distinct elements with an O( p w polylogT) additive error, without requiring prior knowledge of w. We prove that this is the best achievable error bound that depends only on w, for a large range of values of w. When w is small, the error of our mechanism is similar to the polylogarithmic in T error in the insertion-only setting, bypassing the hardness in the turnstile model.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a well-known training paradigm in deep neural networks where knowledge acquired by a large teacher model is transferred to a small student. KD has proven to be an effective technique to significantly improve the student's performance for various tasks including object detection. As such, KD techniques mostly rely on guidance at the intermediate feature level, which is typically implemented by minimizing an ℓp-norm distance between teacher and student activations during training. In this paper, we propose a replacement for the pixel-wise independent ℓp-norm based on the structural similarity (SSIM) [28]. By taking into account additional contrast and structural cues, feature importance, correlation and spatial dependence in the feature space are considered in the loss formulation. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO [16] demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across different training schemes and architectures. Our method adds only little computational overhead, is straightforward to implement and at the same time it significantly outperforms the standard ℓp-norms. Moreover, more complex state-of-the-art KD methods [13, 33] using attention-based sampling mechanisms are outperformed, including a +3.5 AP gain using a Faster R-CNN R-50 [21] compared to a vanilla model.

A.1 Access instructions OpenProteinSet is hosted by the Registry of Open Data on AWS (RODA) and can be accessed at the following link: registry.opendata.aws/openfold/. A.2 Documentation and intended uses We include a datasheet [1] in Section B. Detailed documentation on the precise structure and content of the dataset is provided on the dataset's landing page. A.3 Data format All OpenProteinSet files are in standard plaintext formats (A3M for MSAs, HHSearch format for template hits, and PDB for structure files) that can be read by a wide variety of bioinformatics software. A.5 License OpenProteinSet is made available under the CCBY 4.0 license. A copy of the license is provided with the dataset.