Deep Learning
The Download: a promising retina implant, and how climate change affects flowers
Plus: AWS is working to get its customers' services back online following a major outage Science Corporation--a competitor to Neuralink founded by the former president of Elon Musk's brain-interface venture--has leapfrogged its rival after acquiring a vision implant in advanced testing for a fire-sale price. The implant produces a form of "artificial vision" that lets some patients read text and do crosswords, according to a report published in today. The implant is a microelectronic chip placed under the retina. Using signals from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses, the chip emits bursts of electricity in order to bypass photoreceptor cells damaged by macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in the elderly. How will flowers respond to climate change? Flowers play a key role in most landscapes, from urban to rural areas.
Normal-Abnormal Guided Generalist Anomaly Detection
Wang, Yuexin, Wang, Xiaolei, Gong, Yizheng, Xiao, Jimin
Generalist Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to train a unified model on an original domain that can detect anomalies in new target domains. Previous GAD methods primarily use only normal samples as references, overlooking the valuable information contained in anomalous samples that are often available in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a more practical approach: normal-abnormal-guided generalist anomaly detection, which leverages both normal and anomalous samples as references to guide anomaly detection across diverse domains. We introduce the Normal-Abnormal Generalist Learning (NAGL) framework, consisting of two key components: Residual Mining (RM) and Anomaly Feature Learning (AFL). RM extracts abnormal patterns from normal-abnormal reference residuals to establish transferable anomaly representations, while AFL adaptively learns anomaly features in query images through residual mapping to identify instance-aware anomalies. Our approach effectively utilizes both normal and anomalous references for more accurate and efficient cross-domain anomaly detection. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing GAD approaches. This work represents the first to adopt a mixture of normal and abnormal samples as references in generalist anomaly detection. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/JasonKyng/NAGL.
Hyperbolic Dataset Distillation
Li, Wenyuan, Li, Guang, Maeda, Keisuke, Ogawa, Takahiro, Haseyama, Miki
To address the computational and storage challenges posed by large-scale datasets in deep learning, dataset distillation has been proposed to synthesize a compact dataset that replaces the original while maintaining comparable model performance. Unlike optimization-based approaches that require costly bi-level optimization, distribution matching (DM) methods improve efficiency by aligning the distributions of synthetic and original data, thereby eliminating nested optimization. DM achieves high computational efficiency and has emerged as a promising solution. However, existing DM methods, constrained to Euclidean space, treat data as independent and identically distributed points, overlooking complex geometric and hierarchical relationships. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel hyperbolic dataset distillation method, termed HDD. Hyperbolic space, characterized by negative curvature and exponential volume growth with distance, naturally models hierarchical and tree-like structures. HDD embeds features extracted by a shallow network into the Lorentz hyperbolic space, where the discrepancy between synthetic and original data is measured by the hyperbolic (geodesic) distance between their centroids. By optimizing this distance, the hierarchical structure is explicitly integrated into the distillation process, guiding synthetic samples to gravitate towards the root-centric regions of the original data distribution while preserving their underlying geometric characteristics. Furthermore, we find that pruning in hyperbolic space requires only 20% of the distilled core set to retain model performance, while significantly improving training stability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to incorporate the hyperbolic space into the dataset distillation process. The code is available at https://github.com/Guang000/HDD.
Poultry Farm Intelligence: An Integrated Multi-Sensor AI Platform for Enhanced Welfare and Productivity
Panagi, Pieris, Karatsiolis, Savvas, Mosphilis, Kyriacos, Hadjisavvas, Nicholas, Kamilaris, Andreas, Nicolaou, Nicolas, Stavrakis, Efstathios, Vassiliades, Vassilis
Poultry farming faces increasing pressure to meet productivity targets while ensuring animal welfare and environmental compliance. Yet many small and medium-sized farms lack affordable, integrated tools for continuous monitoring and decision-making, relying instead on manual, reactive inspections. This paper presents Poultry Farm Intelligence (PoultryFI) - a modular, cost-effective platform that integrates six AI-powered modules: Camera Placement Optimizer, Audio-Visual Monitoring, Analytics & Alerting, Real-Time Egg Counting, Production & Profitability Forecasting, and a Recommendation Module. Camera layouts are first optimized offline using evolutionary algorithms for full poultry house coverage with minimal hardware. The Audio-Visual Monitoring module extracts welfare indicators from synchronized video, audio, and feeding data. Analytics & Alerting produces daily summaries and real-time notifications, while Real-Time Egg Counting uses an edge vision model to automate production tracking. Forecasting models predict egg yield and feed consumption up to 10 days in advance, and the Recommendation Module integrates forecasts with weather data to guide environmental and operational adjustments. This is among the first systems to combine low-cost sensing, edge analytics, and prescriptive AI to continuously monitor flocks, predict production, and optimize performance. Field trials demonstrate 100% egg-count accuracy on Raspberry Pi 5, robust anomaly detection, and reliable short-term forecasting. PoultryFI bridges the gap between isolated pilot tools and scalable, farm-wide intelligence, empowering producers to proactively safeguard welfare and profitability.
Paper2Web: Let's Make Your Paper Alive!
Chen, Yuhang, Lv, Tianpeng, Zhang, Siyi, Yin, Yixiang, Wan, Yao, Yu, Philip S., Chen, Dongping
Academic project websites can more effectively disseminate research when they clearly present core content and enable intuitive navigation and interaction. However, current approaches such as direct Large Language Model (LLM) generation, templates, or direct HTML conversion struggle to produce layout-aware, interactive sites, and a comprehensive evaluation suite for this task has been lacking. In this paper, we introduce Paper2Web, a benchmark dataset and multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation. It incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and human-verified LLM-as-a-Judge (covering interactivity, aesthetics, and informativeness), and PaperQuiz, which measures paper-level knowledge retention. We further present PWAgent, an autonomous pipeline that converts scientific papers into interactive and multimedia-rich academic homepages. The agent iteratively refines both content and layout through MCP tools that enhance emphasis, balance, and presentation quality. Our experiments show that PWAgent consistently outperforms end-to-end baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXiv versions by a large margin while maintaining low cost, achieving the Pareto-front in academic webpage generation.
Adversary-Free Counterfactual Prediction via Information-Regularized Representations
Tang, Shiqin, Feng, Rong, Zhuang, Shuxin, Li, Hongzong, Zhang, Youzhi
We study counterfactual prediction under assignment bias and propose a mathematically grounded, information-theoretic approach that removes treatment-covariate dependence without adversarial training. Starting from a bound that links the counterfactual-factual risk gap to mutual information, we learn a stochastic representation Z that is predictive of outcomes while minimizing I(Z; T). We derive a tractable variational objective that upper-bounds the information term and couples it with a supervised decoder, yielding a stable, provably motivated training criterion. The framework extends naturally to dynamic settings by applying the information penalty to sequential representations at each decision time. We evaluate the method on controlled numerical simulations and a real-world clinical dataset, comparing against recent state-of-the-art balancing, reweighting, and adversarial baselines. Across metrics of likelihood, counterfactual error, and policy evaluation, our approach performs favorably while avoiding the training instabilities and tuning burden of adversarial schemes.
Temporal Referential Consistency: Do LLMs Favor Sequences Over Absolute Time References?
Bajpai, Ashutosh, Chakraborty, Tanmoy
The increasing acceptance of large language models (LLMs) as an alternative to knowledge sources marks a significant paradigm shift across various domains, including time-sensitive fields such as law, healthcare, and finance. To fulfill this expanded role, LLMs must not only be factually accurate but also demonstrate consistency across temporal dimensions, necessitating robust temporal reasoning capabilities. Despite this critical requirement, efforts to ensure temporal consistency in LLMs remain scarce including noticeable absence of endeavors aimed at evaluating or augmenting LLMs across temporal references in time-sensitive inquiries. In this paper, we seek to address this gap by introducing a novel benchmark entitled temporal referential consistency, accompanied by a resource TEMP-ReCon designed to benchmark a wide range of both open-source and closed-source LLMs with various linguistic contexts characterized by differing resource richness (including English, French, and Romanian). The findings emphasis that LLMs do exhibit insufficient temporal referent consistency. To address this, we propose \newmodel, a reasoning path alignment-based model that aims to enhance the temporal referential consistency of LLMs. Our empirical experiments substantiate the efficacy of UnTRaP compared to several baseline models.
Exploring Conditions for Diffusion models in Robotic Control
Shin, Heeseong, Heo, Byeongho, Han, Dongyoon, Kim, Seungryong, Kim, Taekyung
While pre-trained visual representations have significantly advanced imitation learning, they are often task-agnostic as they remain frozen during policy learning. In this work, we explore leveraging pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to obtain task-adaptive visual representations for robotic control, without fine-tuning the model itself. However, we find that naively applying textual conditions - a successful strategy in other vision domains - yields minimal or even negative gains in control tasks. We attribute this to the domain gap between the diffusion model's training data and robotic control environments, leading us to argue for conditions that consider the specific, dynamic visual information required for control. To this end, we propose ORCA, which introduces learnable task prompts that adapt to the control environment and visual prompts that capture fine-grained, frame-specific details. Through facilitating task-adaptive representations with our newly devised conditions, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various robotic control benchmarks, significantly surpassing prior methods.
GraphMind: Interactive Novelty Assessment System for Accelerating Scientific Discovery
da Silva, Italo Luis, Yan, Hanqi, Gui, Lin, He, Yulan
Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong reasoning and text generation capabilities, prompting their use in scientific literature analysis, including novelty assessment. While evaluating novelty of scientific papers is crucial for peer review, it requires extensive knowledge of related work, something not all reviewers have. While recent work on LLM-assisted scientific literature analysis supports literature comparison, existing approaches offer limited transparency and lack mechanisms for result traceability via an information retrieval module. To address this gap, we introduce $\textbf{GraphMind}$, an easy-to-use interactive web tool designed to assist users in evaluating the novelty of scientific papers or drafted ideas. Specially, $\textbf{GraphMind}$ enables users to capture the main structure of a scientific paper, explore related ideas through various perspectives, and assess novelty via providing verifiable contextual insights. $\textbf{GraphMind}$ enables users to annotate key elements of a paper, explore related papers through various relationships, and assess novelty with contextual insight. This tool integrates external APIs such as arXiv and Semantic Scholar with LLMs to support annotation, extraction, retrieval and classification of papers. This combination provides users with a rich, structured view of a scientific idea's core contributions and its connections to existing work. $\textbf{GraphMind}$ is available at https://oyarsa.github.io/graphmind and a demonstration video at https://youtu.be/wKbjQpSvwJg. The source code is available at https://github.com/oyarsa/graphmind.
Dynamic Recalibration in LiDAR SLAM: Integrating AI and Geometric Methods with Real-Time Feedback Using INAF Fusion
This paper presents a novel fusion technique for LiDAR Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), aimed at improving localization and 3D mapping using LiDAR sensor. Our approach centers on the Inferred Attention Fusion (INAF) module, which integrates AI with geometric odometry. Utilizing the KITTI dataset's LiDAR data, INAF dynamically adjusts attention weights based on environmental feedback, enhancing the system's adaptability and measurement accuracy. This method advances the precision of both localization and 3D mapping, demonstrating the potential of our fusion technique to enhance autonomous navigation systems in complex scenarios.