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A new US phone network for Christians aims to block porn and gender-related content

MIT Technology Review

Launching next week on T-Mobile's network, the cell plan takes a nuclear approach to online safety. A new US-wide cell phone network marketed to Christians is set to launch next week. It blocks porn, which experts in network security say marks the first time a US cell plan has used network-level blocking for such content that can't be turned off even by adult account owners. It's also rolling out a filter on sexual content aimed at blocking material related to gender and trans issues, which will be optional but turned on by default across all plans. The network, which is currently being tested ahead of its May 5 launch date, will be run by Radiant Mobile, a newly launched mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). These operators don't own cell towers but buy bandwidth from the big providers (in this case, T-Mobile) and sell to specific demographics (President Trump announced his own MVNO last year called Trump Mobile; CREDOMobile sends donations to progressive causes).


Russia hammers targets across Ukraine overnight

Al Jazeera

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' Russia has continued heavy attacks on Ukraine for the past 24 hours, with several coming overnight on Thursday and in the early hours of Friday. At least one person has been killed and several have been injured. A Russian drone attack overnight damaged port infrastructure in Ukraine's southern Odesa region and wounded two people in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, regional Governor Oleh Kiper said on Friday morning. Two high-rise residential buildings were damaged in the attack, which destroyed apartments and caused fires, Kiper wrote on the Telegram messaging app. "This night, Russia again massively attacked the civilian infrastructure of the Odesa region: two people were injured," he said.


Hardware Resilience Properties of Text-Guided Image Classifiers

Neural Information Processing Systems

This paper presents a novel method to enhance the reliability of image classification models during deployment in the face of transient hardware errors. By utilizing enriched text embeddings derived from GPT-3 with question prompts per class and CLIP pretrained text encoder, we investigate their impact as an initialization for the classification layer. Our approach achieves a remarkable 5.5 average increase in hardware reliability (and up to 14) across various architectures in the most critical layer, with minimal accuracy drop (0.3% on average) compared to baseline PyTorch models. Furthermore, our method seamlessly integrates with any image classification backbone, showcases results across various network architectures, decreases parameter and FLOPs overhead, and follows a consistent training recipe. This research offers a practical and efficient solution to bolster the robustness of image classification models against hardware failures, with potential implications for future studies in this domain.





What do Ukraine's robot soldiers mean for the future of warfare?

Al Jazeera

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' What do Ukraine's robot soldiers mean for the future of warfare? In a scene reminiscent of a computer war game, three battle-fatigued soldiers, dressed in white snow camouflage, emerge from a war-torn alley with their hands raised above their heads. They crouch down, following the orders being blasted at them, fear and shock etched across their faces as they stare down the barrel of a machinegun mounted on a so-called ground robot. In April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that, for the "first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms - ground systems and drones". "Ground robotic systems have already carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front in just three months," he wrote in a post on X, alongside images of green machines with tank tracks and weapons mounted on top.


Dynamics of Stochastic Momentum Methods on Large-scale, Quadratic Models Supplementary material

Neural Information Processing Systems

The appendix is organized into five sections as follows: 1. Appendix A derives the Volterra equation and proves the main result for the homogenized SGD (Theorem 1). 2. We show in Appendix B a heuristic derivation of the homogenized SGD approximation to the SDA class of algorithms on the least squares problem and we show that SGD and homogenized SGD are close under orthogonal invariance (Theorem 2). 3. We give in Appendix C a general overview of the analysis of a convolution Volterra equation of the type that arises in the SDA class. Unless otherwise stated, all the results hold under Assumptions 1 and 2. We include all statements from the previous sections for clarity. The results presented in this paper concern the analysis of existing methods and a new method that is a variant of an existing method. The results are theoretical and we do not anticipate any direct ethical and societal issues. We believe the results will be used by machine learning practitioners and we encourage them to use it to build a more just, prosperous world. A.1 Homogenized SGD We recall that the diffusion model is given by dXt = 2 dZt 1 To connect these diffusions to SGD on the least squares problem (2.1) f(x)= 1 2 kAx bk2, we will use the singular value decomposition of U VT of A. We order the singular values 1 2 3 in decreasing order. We then let t = VT(Xt ex), where we recall that b = Aex+ . We may do a similar computation with N and conclude that: J(1) = 2 2 2jJ 2 1 '(t) '(s)d s,j In summary, we may express J in terms of N by J(1) = 2 2 2jJ 1 '2(t) N(1) + 22 dh t,jiwith J(0) = EH When (k,n)= k+n and thus '(t)=(1+ t) with (t)= 1+t, the corresponding ODE is precisely bJ(3) The other case is when (k,n)= n, or '(t)=exp( t). We call this the general SDAHB; one recovers SDAHB when 1 =, 2 =0, and = .



Pruning Randomly Initialized Neural Networks with Iterative Randomization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Pruning the weights of randomly initialized neural networks plays an important role in the context of lottery ticket hypothesis. Ramanujan et al. [23] empirically showed that only pruning the weights can achieve remarkable performance instead of optimizing the weight values. However, to achieve the same level of performance as the weight optimization, the pruning approach requires more parameters in the networks before pruning and thus more memory space. To overcome this parameter inefficiency, we introduce a novel framework to prune randomly initialized neural networks with iteratively randomizing weight values (IteRand). Theoretically, we prove an approximation theorem in our framework, which indicates that the randomizing operations are provably effective to reduce the required number of the parameters. We also empirically demonstrate the parameter efficiency in multiple experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.