discrimination
Cornell Sex Assault Case Raises Questions About Title IX Accountability and New York's Intoxicated Consent Law
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Women in UK arts feel they do not have equal opportunities for roles, says report
Actor Maureen Beattie, who recently played Shakespeare's Lear in a production in Pitlochry, said she was not surprised by the findings. Actor Maureen Beattie, who recently played Shakespeare's Lear in a production in Pitlochry, said she was not surprised by the findings. Women working in the arts believe they do not have equal opportunities for roles, especially as they get older, according to a report saying that the industry is fixated with "young and emerging" talent. Nearly all (95%) women working in the arts thought gender inequality persisted, while three-quarters (75%) reported experiencing unconscious bias or sexism, according to a survey of 76 arts professionals. More than two-thirds (69%) felt that age negatively affected their career success - a figure that rose to 100% among those working in artistic rather than managerial roles.
Seemingly Redundant Modules Enhance Robust Odor Learning in Fruit Flies
Biological circuits have evolved to incorporate multiple modules that perform similar functions. In the fly olfactory circuit, both lateral inhibition (LI) and neuronal spike frequency adaptation (SFA) are thought to enhance pattern separation for odor learning. However, it remains unclear whether these mechanisms play redundant or distinct roles in this process. In this study, we present a computational model of the fly olfactory circuit to investigate odor discrimination under varying noise conditions that simulate complex environments. Our results show that LI primarily enhances odor discrimination in low and medium noise scenarios, but this benefit diminishes and may reverse under higher noise conditions. In contrast, SFA consistently improves discrimination across all noise levels. LI is preferentially engaged in low and medium noise environments, whereas SFA dominates in high noise settings. When combined, these two sparsification mechanisms enable optimal discrimination performance. This work demonstrates that seemingly redundant modules in biological circuits can, in fact, be essential for achieving optimal learning in complex contexts.
Rethinking Joint Maximum Mean Discrepancy for Domain Adaptation
In domain adaption (DA), joint maximum mean discrepancy (JMMD), as a famous distribution-distance metric, aims to measure joint probability distribution difference between the source domain and target domain, while it is still not fully explored and especially hard to be applied into a subspace-learning framework as its empirical estimation involves a tensor-product operator whose partial derivative is difficult to obtain. To solve this issue, we deduce a concise JMMD based on the Representer theorem that avoids the tensor-product operator and obtains two essential findings. First, we reveal the uniformity of JMMD by proving that previous marginal, class conditional, and weighted class conditional probability distribution distances are three special cases of JMMD with different label reproducing kernels. Second, inspired by graph embedding, we observe that the similarity weights, which strengthen the intra-class compactness in the graph of Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC), take opposite signs in the graph of JMMD, revealing why JMMD degrades the feature discrimination. This motivates us to propose a novel loss JMMD-HSIC by jointly considering JMMD and HSIC to promote discrimination of JMMD. Extensive experiments on several cross-domain datasets could demonstrate the validity of our revealed theoretical results and the effectiveness of our proposed JMMD-HSIC.
UniViT: Unifying Image and Video Understanding in One Vision Encoder
Despite the impressive progress of recent pretraining methods on multimodal tasks, existing methods are inherently biased towards either spatial modeling (e.g., CLIP) or temporal modeling (e.g., V-JEPA), limiting their joint capture of spatial details and temporal dynamics. To this end, we propose UniViT, a cluster-driven unified self-supervised learning framework that effectively captures the structured semantics of both image spatial content and video temporal dynamics through event-level and object-level clustering and discrimination. Specifically, we leverage offline clustering to generate semantic clusters across both modalities. For videos, multi-granularity event-level clustering progressively expands from single-event to structured multi-event segments, capturing coarse-to-fine temporal semantics; for images, object-level clustering captures fine-grained spatial semantics. However, while global clustering provides semantically consistent clusters, it lacks modeling of structured semantic relations (e.g., temporal event structures). To address this, we introduce a contrastive objective that leverages these semantic clusters as pseudo-label supervision to explicitly enforce structural constraints, including temporal event relations and spatial object co-occurrences, capturing structured semantics beyond categories. Meanwhile, UniViT jointly embeds structured objectlevel and event-level semantics into a unified representation space. Furthermore, UniViT introduces two key components: (i) Unified Rotary Position Embedding integrates relative positional embedding with frequency-aware dimension allocation to support position-invariant semantic learning and enhance the stability of structured semantics in the discrimination stage; and (ii) Variable Spatiotemporal Streams adapt to inputs of varying frame lengths, addressing the rigidity of conventional fixed-input approaches. Extensive experiments across varying model scales demonstrate that UniViT achieves state-of-the-art performance on linear probing, attentive probing, question answering, and spatial understanding tasks.
Seemingly Redundant Modules Enhance Robust Odor Learning in Fruit Flies
Biological circuits have evolved to incorporate multiple modules that perform similar functions. In the fly olfactory circuit, both lateral inhibition (LI) and neuronal spike frequency adaptation (SFA) are thought to enhance pattern separation for odor learning. However, it remains unclear whether these mechanisms play redundant or distinct roles in this process. In this study, we present a computational model of the fly olfactory circuit to investigate odor discrimination under varying noise conditions that simulate complex environments. Our results show that LI primarily enhances odor discrimination in low-and medium-noise scenarios, but this benefit diminishes and may reverse under higher-noise conditions. In contrast, SFA consistently improves discrimination across all noise levels. LI is preferentially engaged in low-and medium-noise environments, whereas SFA dominates in high-noise settings. When combined, these two sparsification mechanisms enable optimal discrimination performance. This work demonstrates that seemingly redundant modules in biological circuits can, in fact, be essential for achieving optimal learning in complex contexts.
GUIDED: Granular Understanding via Identification, Detection, and Discrimination for Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Fine-grained open-vocabulary object detection (FG-OVD) aims to detect novel object categories described by attribute-rich texts. While existing open-vocabulary detectors show promise at the base-category level, they underperform in fine-grained settings due to the semantic entanglement of subjects and attributes in pretrained vision-language model (VLM) embeddings - leading to over-representation of attributes, mislocalization, and semantic drift in embedding space. We propose GUIDED, a decomposition framework specifically designed to address the semantic entanglement between subjects and attributes in fine-grained prompts. By separating object localization and fine-grained recognition into distinct pathways, GUIDED aligns each subtask with the module best suited for its respective roles. Specifically, given a fine-grained class name, we first use a language model to extract a coarse-grained subject and its descriptive attributes. Then the detector is guided solely by the subject embedding, ensuring stable localization unaffected by irrelevant or overrepresented attributes. To selectively retain helpful attributes, we introduce an attribute embedding fusion module that incorporates attribute information into detection queries in an attention-based manner.
KSP: Kolmogorov-Smirnov metric-based Post-Hoc Calibration for Survival Analysis
We propose a new calibration method for survival models based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) metric. Existing approaches--including conformal prediction, D-calibration, and Kaplan-Meier (KM)-based methods--often rely on heuristic binning or additional nonparametric estimators, which undermine their adaptability to continuous-time settings and complex model outputs. To address these limitations, we introduce a streamlined KS metric-based post-processing framework (KSP) that calibrates survival predictions without relying on discretization or KM estimation. This design enhances flexibility and broad applicability. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse real-world datasets using a variety of survival models. Empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently improves calibration performance over existing methods while maintaining high predictive accuracy. We also provide a theoretical analysis of the KS metric and discuss extensions to in-processing settings.
Rethinking Joint Maximum Mean Discrepancy for Visual Domain Adaptation
In domain adaption (DA), joint maximum mean discrepancy (JMMD), as a famous distribution-distance metric, aims to measure joint probability distribution difference between the source domain and target domain, while it is still not fully explored and especially hard to be applied into a subspace-learning framework as its empirical estimation involves a tensor-product operator whose partial derivative is difficult to obtain. To solve this issue, we deduce a concise JMMD based on the Representer theorem that avoids the tensor-product operator and obtains two essential findings. First, we reveal the uniformity of JMMD by proving that previous marginal, class conditional, and weighted class conditional probability distribution distances are three special cases of JMMD with different label reproducing kernels. Second, inspired by graph embedding, we observe that the similarity weights, which strengthen the intra-class compactness in the graph of Hilbert Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC), take opposite signs in the graph of JMMD, revealing why JMMD degrades the feature discrimination. This motivates us to propose a novel loss JMMD-HSIC by jointly considering JMMD and HSIC to promote discrimination of JMMD. Extensive experiments on several cross-domain datasets could demonstrate the validity of our revealed theoretical results and the effectiveness of our proposed JMMD-HSIC.