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My Friend's Life's Work Is Being Slashed Into Oblivion. It Hurts to Watch.
Good Job is Slate's advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? One of my dearest friends was recently squeezed into an unwanted early retirement by DOGE. The work she was doing at the government agency where she's spent most of her career is on the verge of being eliminated or slashed into oblivion, and it kills me to know that her life's work is about to be reversed. I want to support her through this.
ICNet: Intra-saliency Correlation Network for Co-Saliency Detection
Model-based methods produce coarse Co-SOD results due to hand-crafted intra-and inter-saliency features. Current data-driven models exploit inter-saliency cues, but undervalue the potential power of intra-saliency cues. In this paper, we propose an Intra-saliency Correlation Network (ICNet) to extract intra-saliency cues from the single image saliency maps (SISMs) predicted by any off-the-shelf SOD method, and obtain inter-saliency cues by correlation techniques. Specifically, we adopt normalized masked average pooling (NMAP) to extract latent intra-saliency categories from the SISMs and semantic features as intra cues. Then we employ a correlation fusion module (CFM) to obtain inter cues by exploiting correlations between the intra cues and single-image features. To improve Co-SOD performance, we propose a category-independent rearranged self-correlation feature (RSCF) strategy. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our ICNet outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on Co-SOD.
'Shakespeare would be writing for games today': Cannes' first video game Lili is a retelling of Macbeth
The Cannes film festival isn't typically associated with video games, but this year it's playing host to an unusual collaboration. Lili is a co-production between the New York-based game studio iNK Stories (creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, about a photojournalist in Iran) and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it's been turning heads with its eye-catching translocation of Macbeth to modern-day Iran. "It's been such an incredible coup to have it as the first video game experience at Cannes," says iNK Stories co-founder Vassiliki Khonsari. "People have gone in saying, I'm not familiar playing games, so I may just try it out for five minutes. The Cannes festival's Immersive Competition began in 2024, although the lineup doesn't usually feature traditional video games. "VR films and projection mapping is the thrust of it," says iNK Stories' other co-founder, Vassiliki's husband Navid Khonsari. But Lili weaves live-action footage with video game mechanics in a similar way to a game such as Telling Lies or Immortality. Its lead, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, won best actress at Cannes three years ago. Lili focuses on the story of Lady Macbeth, here cast as the ambitious wife of an upwardly mobile officer in the Basij (a paramilitary volunteer militia within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in Iran). As in the play, she plots a murder to secure her husband's rise. "I think that the narrative of Lady Macbeth is that she's manipulative, and that's exactly what got us interested," says Navid. "The social limitations based on her gender forced her to try to attain whatever leadership role she can," he continues. "If she was a man, she would have been one of the greatest kings that country would have ever experienced, but because she was a woman she had to work within the structure that was there for her.
SimiGrad: Fine-Grained Adaptive Batching for Large Scale Training using Gradient Similarity Measurement
Large scale training requires massive parallelism to finish the training within a reasonable amount of time. To support massive parallelism, large batch training is the key enabler but often at the cost of generalization performance. Existing works explore adaptive batching or hand-tuned static large batching, in order to strike a balance between the computational efficiency and the performance. However, these methods can provide only coarse-grained adaption (e.g., at a epoch level) due to the intrinsic expensive calculation or hand tuning requirements. In this paper, we propose a fully automated and lightweight adaptive batching methodology to enable fine-grained batch size adaption (e.g., at a mini-batch level) that can achieve stateof-the-art performance with record breaking batch sizes. The core component of our method is a lightweight yet efficient representation of the critical gradient noise information. We open-source the proposed methodology by providing a plugin tool that supports mainstream machine learning frameworks. Extensive evaluations on popular benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR10, ImageNet, and BERT-Large) demonstrate that the proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art methodologies using adaptive batching approaches or hand-tuned static strategies in both performance and batch size. Particularly, we achieve a new state-of-the-art batch size of 78k in BERT-Large pretraining with SQuAD score 90.69 compared to 90.58 reported in previous state-of-the-art with 59k batch size.
LexEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Legal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models You Chen Department of Computer Science Department of Computer Science Tsinghua University
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice. To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval. This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks.
A Tight Lower Bound and Efficient Reduction for Swap Regret
Swap regret, a generic performance measure of online decision-making algorithms, plays an important role in the theory of repeated games, along with a close connection to correlated equilibria in strategic games. This paper shows an (p TN log N)-lower bound for swap regret, where T and N denote the numbers of time steps and available actions, respectively. Our lower bound is tight up to a constant, and resolves an open problem mentioned, e.g., in the book by Nisan et al. [28]. Besides, we present a computationally efficient reduction method that converts no-external-regret algorithms to no-swap-regret algorithms. This method can be applied not only to the full-information setting but also to the bandit setting and provides a better regret bound than previous results.