How the US left Ukraine exposed to Russia's winter war Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? The United States, which stopped providing military and financial assistance to Ukraine under President Donald Trump, has asked for Kyiv's assistance in protecting its bases from Iranian retaliatory strikes in the Gulf. Ukraine's head of the Center for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, made the request public on March 6. On March 9, Zelenskyy also dispatched chief negotiator Rustem Umerov to sell Ukrainian interceptor drones to Gulf states.

Amazon is replacing its $2.99 ad-free Prime Video add-on with'Prime Video Ultra' at $4.99 monthly, representing a 66% price increase for ad-free viewing. PCWorld reports that 4K streaming will become exclusive to Ultra subscribers starting April 10, 2025, while standard Prime members lose 4K but gain Dolby Vision support. The Ultra plan includes five concurrent 4K streams and 100 offline downloads, significantly raising costs for users wanting premium streaming features. It's been a little more than two years since Amazon started charging extra for ad-free Prime Video streaming, and now that we've gotten used to the extra fee, it's time for a price hike. Amazon just announced that its $2.99-a-month add-on for removing ads from Prime Video is morphing into a new plan called Prime Video Ultra, which will set you back $4.99 a month. That's a 66-percent price hike for monthly subscribers who formerly opted for the cheaper ad-free add-on. An annual subscription for Prime Video Ultra costs $45.99, a 23-percent discount compared to the new plan's monthly rate. Slated to arrive April 10, Prime Video Ultra will come with a few added benefits besides stripping away most ads (live sports and other programming will still have commercial breaks), including up to five concurrent 4K streams (up from the original limit of three) and up to 100 offline downloads (up from 25). At the same time, standard Prime members (who get Prime Video with ads included in their subscriptions, which cost $14.99 a month or $139 a year) will see some changes too, including added support for Dolby Vision HDR, an additional concurrent video stream (for a total of 4) and double the amount of offline downloads compared to the former 25-download limit.

PCWorld reports that Microsoft's Automatic Super Resolution (AutoSR) technology is coming to Xbox Ally X handheld consoles to enhance gaming performance. AutoSR uses AI-powered upscaling to render games at lower resolutions then upscales them, allowing less powerful GPUs to achieve higher frame rates. A public preview of AutoSR for the AMD-powered Ally X is expected in April, promising smoother gameplay experiences for users. In a month, owners of Xbox Ally X handheld consoles will see their frame rates jump upwards, as Microsoft begins supporting the Automatic Super Resolution (AutoSR) tech on the console. Microsoft snuck in a reference to the technology as part of a presentation at the Game Developer Conference, where the company pitched features from its upcoming Project Helix console as well as AI enhancements coming to Microsoft's DirectX API . Essentially, AutoSR is an upscaling technology, originally designed for use with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 or X2 Elite processor, according to Microsoft.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Finally, feature-level alignment is performed between the aggregated domain and target domain while training the segmentation network.

The design of neural network architectures is an important component for achieving state-of-the-art performance with machine learning systems across a broad array of tasks. Much work has endeavored to design and build architectures automatically through clever construction of a search space paired with simple learning algorithms. Recent progress has demonstrated that such meta-learning methods may exceed scalable human-invented architectures on image classification tasks. An open question is the degree to which such methods may generalize to new domains. In this work we explore the construction of meta-learning techniques for dense image prediction focused on the tasks of scene parsing, person-part segmentation, and semantic image segmentation. Constructing viable search spaces in this domain is challenging because of the multi-scale representation of visual information and the necessity to operate on high resolution imagery. Based on a survey of techniques in dense image prediction, we construct a recursive search space and demonstrate that even with efficient random search, we can identify architectures that outperform human-invented architectures and achieve state-of-the-art performance on three dense prediction tasks including 82.7% on Cityscapes (street scene parsing), 71.3% on PASCAL-Person-Part (person-part segmentation), and 87.9% on PASCAL VOC 2012 (semantic image segmentation). Additionally, the resulting architecture is more computationally efficient, requiring half the parameters and half the computational cost as previous state of the art systems.

We study the problem of fair classification within the versatile framework of Dwork et al. [ITCS '12], which assumes the existence of a metric that measures similarity between pairs of individuals. Unlike earlier work, we do not assume that the entire metric is known to the learning algorithm; instead, the learner can query this metric a bounded number of times. We propose a new notion of fairness called and show how to achieve this notion in our setting. Metric multifairness is parameterized by a similarity metric d on pairs of individuals to classify and a rich collection C of (possibly overlapping) comparison sets over pairs of individuals. At a high level, metric multifairness guarantees that, as long as these subpopulations are identified within the class C.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Technology Engineering World's largest steam locomotive heads out on tour Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014 will travel coast-to-coast in commemoration of the semiquincentennial. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The world's largest operating steam locomotive is hitting the road--or tracks . Union Pacific's Big Boy No. 4014 is heading out on its first coast-to-coast steam tour to celebrate the United States' 250th anniversary . The first leg begins on March 29, when Big Boy and other historical passenger cars from Union Pacific's Heritage Fleet will travel from the locomotive's home base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, west towards California.