Learned priors based on deep generative models offer data-driven regularization for seismic inversion, but training them requires a dataset of representative subsurface models -- a resource that is inherently scarce in geoscience applications. Since the training objective of most generative models can be cast as maximum likelihood on a finite dataset, any such model risks converging to the empirical distribution -- effectively memorizing the training examples rather than learning the underlying geological distribution. We show that the posterior under such a memorized prior reduces to a reweighted empirical distribution -- i.e., a likelihood-weighted lookup among the stored training examples. For diffusion models specifically, memorization yields a Gaussian mixture prior in closed form, and linearizing the forward operator around each training example gives a Gaussian mixture posterior whose components have widths and shifts governed by the local Jacobian. We validate these predictions on a stylized inverse problem and demonstrate the consequences of memorization through diffusion posterior sampling for full waveform inversion.

When using sampling-based motion planners, such as PRMs, in configuration spaces, it is difficult to determine how many samples are required for the PRM to find a solution consistently. This is relevant in Task and Motion Planning (TAMP), where many motion planning problems must be solved in sequence. We attempt to solve this problem by proving an upper bound on the number of samples that are sufficient, with high probability, to find a solution by drawing on prior work in deterministic sampling and sample complexity theory. We also introduce a numerical algorithm to compute a tighter number of samples based on the proof of the sample complexity theorem we apply to derive our bound. Our experiments show that our numerical bounding algorithm is tight within two orders of magnitude on planar planning problems and becomes looser as the problem's dimensionality increases. When deployed as a heuristic to schedule samples in a TAMP planner, we also observe planning time improvements in planar problems. While our experiments show much work remains to tighten our bounds, the ideas presented in this paper are a step towards a practical sample bound.

Kyle Richards told Fox News Digital about her new movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, "Halloween Kills," and her "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" drama. John Carpenter says he had no qualms about dropping out of the University of Southern California's School of Cinema to pursue his film career. "I knew what I was doing," the director of horror classics like 1978's "Halloween" and 1982's "The Thing" told The Associated Press earlier this month. "I just wanted to get out of there, get on with my career." He began working on his first full-length film "Dark Star," which was released in 1974, while he was still at film school before moving on to "Halloween," "The Fog" and "Escape from New York."

On weekdays, between homeschooling her two children, Michelle Curtis logs on to her computer to squeeze in a few hours of work. Her screen flashes with Google Search results, the writings of a Google chatbot, and the outputs of other algorithms, and she has a few minutes to respond to each--judging the usefulness of the blue links she's been provided, checking the accuracy of an AI's description of a praying mantis, or deciding which of two chatbot-written birthday poems is better. She never knows what she will have to assess in advance, and for the AI-related tasks, which have formed the bulk of her work since February, she says she has little guidance and not enough time to do a thorough job. Curtis is an AI rater. She works for the data company Appen, which is subcontracted by Google to evaluate the outputs of the tech giant's AI products and search algorithm.

After years in which artificial intelligence-generated content was known more for its comic absurdity--only occasionally drifting into disconcerting realism--2022 was the year that generative AI finally graduated into a full-fledged creative force. A host of realistic image generators led by research group OpenAI's Dall-E 2 made it easy for anyone to create lifelike visuals with a simple text prompt. Meanwhile, OpenAI's ChatGPT put a conversational interface on the organization's state-of-the-art text generation system, allowing users to simply instruct a machine what to write and receive a detailed and rhetorically sound--if not always factually correct--passage in seconds. These new systems, trained on datasets that span hundreds of millions of images and pages of text, respectively, have already led to widespread experimentation among brands, agencies, burgeoning startups and creative tool integrations. But experts say 2023 will be the year that brand marketers and agencies start to get serious about how synthetic content of this sort can actually be deployed to serve bottom lines and augment human creativity.

Pong: a game so simple a bundle of lab-grown brain cells could play it. This might sound like a low blow, but it's true – last month, Australia-based startup Cortical Labs challenged its creation DishBrain, a biological computer chip that uses a combination of living neurons and silicon, to play the early console classic. The game – a 2D version of table tennis where players control a rectangle "paddle", moving it up and down to rally a ball – ran in the background, wired up to the DishBrain. Electrical stimulations were fed into the cells to represent the placement of the paddle and feedback was pinged when the ball was hit or missed. The scientists then measured the DishBrain's response, observing that it expended more or less energy depending on the position of the ball.

AI-based testing has the potential to help solve software quality issues, but it faces significant roadblocks on the way to widespread adoption. Automated testing uses software tools to automate the manual testing process. Testers can use traditional rules- or code-based scripts or AI -- which builds, initiates and runs testing models without human intervention. AI-powered tools such as Selenium IDE-compatible Katalon Studio, mabl and Functionize can free developers from mundane task repetition and monitor complex systems for vulnerabilities. However, a distrust of the inchoate technology hinders adoption rates, according to industry experts.

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. The salvage yard at M. Maselli & Sons, in Petaluma, California, is made up of six acres of angle irons, block pulleys, doorplates, digging tools, motors, fencing, tubing, reels, spools, and rusted machinery. To the untrained eye, the place is a testament to the enduring power of American detritus, but to Foley artists--craftspeople who create custom sound effects for film, television, and video games--it's a trove of potential props. On a recent morning, Shelley Roden and John Roesch, Foley artists who work at Skywalker Sound, the postproduction audio division of Lucasfilm, stood in the parking lot, considering the sonic properties of an enormous industrial hopper. "I'm looking for a resonator, and I need more ka-chunkers," Roden, who is blond and in her late forties, said.

In the moment between reading a phone number and punching it into your phone, you may find that the digits have mysteriously gone astray--even if you've seared the first ones into your memory, the last ones may still blur unaccountably. Was the 6 before the 8 or after it? Maintaining such scraps of information long enough to act on them draws on an ability called visual working memory. For years, scientists have debated whether working memory has space for only a few items at a time or if it just has limited room for detail: Perhaps our mind's capacity is spread across either a few crystal-clear recollections or a multitude of more dubious fragments. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

It's been a tough year for elegant terns in Southern California. A drone crash in June forced an estimated 3,000 of the sleek seabirds with their pointed orange bills to abandon their eggs on Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Orange County. Experts say it's possible that many of the birds set up camp on two commercial barges in nearby Long Beach Harbor. Now droves of the baby birds are falling into the ocean and drowning. "They basically landed on the barge a day or so, and it may have been two or three days, after the incident involving the drones when they left Bolsa Chica," said Tim Daly, spokesman for California Department of Fish and Wildlife.