Anti-spoofing detection has become a necessity for face recognition systems due to the security threat posed by spoofing attacks. Despite great success in traditional attacks, most deep-learning-based methods perform poorly in 3D masks, which can highly simulate real faces in appearance and structure, suffering generalizability insufficiency while focusing only on the spatial domain with single frame input. This has been mitigated by the recent introduction of a biomedical technology called rPPG (remote photoplethysmography). However, rPPG-based methods are sensitive to noisy interference and require at least one second (> 25 frames) of observation time, which induces high computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a novel 3D mask detection framework, called FASTEN (Flow-Attention-based Spatio-Temporal aggrEgation Network). We tailor the network for focusing more on fine-grained details in large movements, which can eliminate redundant spatio-temporal feature interference and quickly capture splicing traces of 3D masks in fewer frames. Our proposed network contains three key modules: 1) a facial optical flow network to obtain non-RGB inter-frame flow information; 2) flow attention to assign different significance to each frame; 3) spatio-temporal aggregation to aggregate high-level spatial features and temporal transition features. Through extensive experiments, FASTEN only requires five frames of input and outperforms eight competitors for both intra-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations in terms of multiple detection metrics. Moreover, FASTEN has been deployed in real-world mobile devices for practical 3D mask detection.

We present CrochetBench, a benchmark for evaluating the ability of multimodal large language models to perform fine-grained, low-level procedural reasoning in the domain of crochet. Unlike prior benchmarks that focus on high-level description or visual question answering, CrochetBench shifts the emphasis from describing to doing: models are required to recognize stitches, select structurally appropriate instructions, and generate compilable crochet procedures. We adopt the CrochetPARADE DSL as our intermediate representation, enabling structural validation and functional evaluation via execution. The benchmark covers tasks including stitch classification, instruction grounding, and both natural language and image-to-DSL translation. Across all tasks, performance sharply declines as the evaluation shifts from surface-level similarity to executable correctness, exposing limitations in long-range symbolic reasoning and 3D-aware procedural synthesis. CrochetBench offers a new lens for assessing procedural competence in multimodal models and highlights the gap between surface-level understanding and executable precision in real-world creative domains. Code is available at https://github.com/Peiyu-Georgia-Li/crochetBench.

Anti-spoofing detection has become a necessity for face recognition systems due to the security threat posed by spoofing attacks. Despite great success in traditional attacks, most deep-learning-based methods perform poorly in 3D masks, which can highly simulate real faces in appearance and structure, suffering generalizability insufficiency while focusing only on the spatial domain with single frame input. This has been mitigated by the recent introduction of a biomedical technology called rPPG (remote photoplethysmography). However, rPPG-based methods are sensitive to noisy interference and require at least one second ( 25 frames) of observation time, which induces high computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose a novel 3D mask detection framework, called FASTEN (Flow-Attention-based Spatio-Temporal aggrEgation Network).

Functional regression analysis is an established tool for many contemporary scientific applications. Regression problems involving large and complex data sets are ubiquitous, and feature selection is crucial for avoiding overfitting and achieving accurate predictions. We propose a new, flexible and ultra-efficient approach to perform feature selection in a sparse high dimensional function-on-function regression problem, and we show how to extend it to the scalar-on-function framework. Our method, called FAStEN, combines functional data, optimization, and machine learning techniques to perform feature selection and parameter estimation simultaneously. We exploit the properties of Functional Principal Components and the sparsity inherent to the Dual Augmented Lagrangian problem to significantly reduce computational cost, and we introduce an adaptive scheme to improve selection accuracy. In addition, we derive asymptotic oracle properties, which guarantee estimation and selection consistency for the proposed FAStEN estimator. Through an extensive simulation study, we benchmark our approach to the best existing competitors and demonstrate a massive gain in terms of CPU time and selection performance, without sacrificing the quality of the coefficients' estimation. The theoretical derivations and the simulation study provide a strong motivation for our approach. Finally, we present an application to brain fMRI data from the AOMIC PIOP1 study.

Recent studies on learning with noisy labels have shown remarkable performance by exploiting a small clean dataset. In particular, model agnostic meta-learning-based label correction methods further improve performance by correcting noisy labels on the fly. However, there is no safeguard on the label miscorrection, resulting in unavoidable performance degradation. Moreover, every training step requires at least three back-propagations, significantly slowing down the training speed. To mitigate these issues, we propose a robust and efficient method that learns a label transition matrix on the fly. Employing the transition matrix makes the classifier skeptical about all the corrected samples, which alleviates the miscorrection issue. We also introduce a two-head architecture to efficiently estimate the label transition matrix every iteration within a single back-propagation, so that the estimated matrix closely follows the shifting noise distribution induced by label correction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach shows the best performance in training efficiency while having comparable or better accuracy than existing methods.

From driverless trucks and the conquering of Go and other complex board games, to the ability to help diagnose cancer and source great talent for HR teams, the applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are seemingly endless. AI is even being used to generate paintings and compose classical symphonies. For NASA most recently, AI helped in the discovery of two new planets. So I'd not be at all surprised if you're wondering how AI will impact aviation? But first, let me give you a definition: AI is a field of computer science that makes machines smart; machines powered by algorithms to solve specific problems or complete tasks that used to be handled by humans.

It has been a year since Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, after residents of the Texas capital voted to maintain strict regulations the ridehailing companies refused to abide, including fingerprinting of drivers. Uber and Lyft had fought hard for more permissive rules, spending a combined $8 million on the campaign (nearly seven times the previous record for a municipal election in the city). Without their services, they warned, drunk driving deaths would spike, 10,000 drivers would lose their jobs, and innovation in the booming tech hub would falter. DWI arrests hit a five-year low in the six months following the vote. Former Uber and Lyft drivers signed up with the slew of services that filled the vacuum.

Two important milestones were achieved within recent 15 days. Milestone 1: The first driverless taxi fleet is already operational in Pittsburgh. On September 14, Uber announced that the world's first Self-Driving Ubers are now on the road in the Steel City of Pittsburgh. As the company explains "We're inviting our most loyal Pittsburgh customers to experience the future first. If a Self-Driving Uber is available, we'll send it along with a safety driver up front to make sure the ride goes smoothly. Otherwise it's uberX as usual…This pilot is a big step forward. Real-world testing is critical to the success of this technology. And creating a viable alternative to individual car ownership is important to the future of cities".