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Japan's Terra Drone expands investment in Ukraine drone sector

The Japan Times

Japan's Terra Drone expands investment in Ukraine drone sector A soldier from Ukraine's Taifun unmanned aerial vehicle unit holds a new model Marsianin attack drone on April 7 in Kharkiv region, Ukraine. Tokyo-based Terra Drone is expanding its investment in Ukrainian interceptor drones as it looks to bring battlefield-tested technology back to Japan to tap into a multibillion-dollar defense budget for unmanned systems. On Tuesday, Terra Drone CEO Toru Tokushige said the company was entering a new strategic partnership with Ukraine's WinnyLab to develop fixed-wing interceptor drones. It comes after the company announced in March that it would make an investment in Ukraine's Amazing Drones to develop vertical take-off interceptor drones. "Starting with interceptor drones we are looking for products that are good for increasing the defensive power of Ukraine and also the defensive power of Japan," Tokushige said in an interview.


Deep Graph Neural Networks via Posteriori-Sampling-based Node-Adaptative Residual Module

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a type of neural network that can learn from graph-structured data through neighborhood information aggregation, have shown superior performance in various downstream tasks. However, as the number of layers increases, node representations becomes indistinguishable, which is known as over-smoothing. To address this issue, many residual methods have emerged. In this paper, we focus on the over-smoothing issue and related residual methods. Firstly, we revisit over-smoothing from the perspective of overlapping neighborhood subgraphs, and based on this, we explain how residual methods can alleviate over-smoothing by integrating multiple orders neighborhood subgraphs to avoid the indistinguishability of the single high-order neighborhood subgraphs. Additionally, we reveal the drawbacks of previous residual methods, such as the lack of node adaptability and severe loss of high-order neighborhood subgraph information, and propose a \textbf{Posterior-Sampling-based, Node-Adaptive Residual module (PSNR)}. We theoretically demonstrate that PSNR can alleviate the drawbacks of previous residual methods. Furthermore, extensive experiments verify the superiority of the PSNR module in fully observed node classification and missing feature scenarios.


Weeks of silence over Iran school strike highly unusual, former US officials say

BBC News

Five former US officials, including a former top military lawyer, have criticised the Pentagon for not acknowledging potential American involvement in a deadly strike on an Iranian school earlier this year. Some of those officials said it was highly unusual not to release even basic details of the strike after such a length of time. A missile hit a primary school in Minab during the opening salvos of the US-Israeli war on February 28, killing 168 people including around 110 children according to Iranian officials. In the two months since then the Pentagon has said only that the incident is under investigation. US media reported in early March that US military investigators believed American forces were likely responsible for hitting the school unintentionally but had not reached a final conclusion.


China races to build record biobank to rival U.S. drugs research

The Japan Times

China races to build record biobank to rival U.S. drugs research Biobanks store masses of biomedical data such as clinical records, genome sequences and other long-term health metrics that research and drug development depend on. As a fledgling researcher in U.S., Zhang Li was struck by the efficiency of extracting human tissue in the morning and mining it for data the same afternoon. Such a streamlined process had been missing from his years of training as a bio data scientist in China. Inspired, he returned home to Beijing to join the Chinese Institute for Brain Research and launch a national database that will collect blood and DNA samples from 33,000 children to help identify patterns of brain disease and their risk factors. "Biomedical data is extremely valuable and is fundamental for us to find solutions to diseases and to delay aging," said Zhang, surrounded by robotic arms carefully organizing blood samples.



Kim Jong Un praises troops who 'self-blasted' to avoid capture by Ukraine

BBC News

Kim Jong Un praises troops who'self-blasted' to avoid capture by Ukraine Kim Jong Un has praised North Korean soldiers who killed themselves by detonating their grenades while fighting for Russia against Ukraine, confirming a long-suspected battlefield policy. In a speech this week, the North Korean leader said those who unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting, suicide attack, in order to defend the great honour were heroes. South Korea estimates at least 15,000 North Koreans have been sent to help Russia recapture parts of western Kursk, and more than 6,000 have been killed so far. Neither Pyongyang nor Moscow have confirmed the numbers. Intelligence agencies and defectors have said the soldiers were under Pyongyang's orders to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner by Ukraine.



Stanford-ORB: AReal-World 3DObject Inverse Rendering Benchmark

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce Stanford-ORB, a new real-world 3DObject inverse Rendering Benchmark. Recent advances in inverse rendering have enabled a wide range of real-world applications in 3D content generation, moving rapidly from research and commercial use cases to consumer devices. While the results continue to improve, there is no real-world benchmark that can quantitatively assess and compare the performance of various inverse rendering methods. Existing real-world datasets typically consist only of the shape and multi-view images of objects, which are not sufficient for evaluating the quality of material recovery and object relighting. Methods capable of recovering material and lighting often resort to synthetic data for quantitative evaluation, which on the other hand does not guarantee generalization to complex real-world environments. We introduce a new dataset of real-world objects captured under a variety of natural scenes with ground-truth 3D scans, multi-view images, and environment lighting. Using this dataset, we establish the first comprehensive real-world evaluation benchmark for object inverse rendering tasks from in-thewild scenes and compare the performance of various existing methods. All data, code, and models can be accessed at https://stanfordorb.github.io/.



Training Data Attribution via Approximate Unrolling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Many training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to estimate how a model's behavior would change if one or more data points were removed from the training set. Methods based on implicit differentiation, such as influence functions, can be made computationally efficient, but fail to account for underspecification, the implicit bias of the optimization algorithm, or multi-stage training pipelines. By contrast, methods based on unrolling address these issues but face scalability challenges.