'Sopranos' star Dominic Chianese continues to age in reverse, starts podcast at 95 years old Australia's'Queen of Infomercials' wants'no-strings attached fun,' the O-dome is back & you're not weird? Pizza delivery man deserves a raise after walking past a black bear to deliver customer's order Nicolas Cage leads all-star cast in'Fortitude,' a WWII film about the D-Day deception campaign Florida police learn the hard way to not trust'Crooked Jess' with money to buy crack for undercover operation Dale'Grey Beard' Sanders reclaims title as oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail at 91 'I literally think this is going to be it for me': Hiker recounts grizzly bear encounter in Canada Creature dubbed'Syracuse Figure' spotted in New York: Is it Bigfoot or an elderly skinny-dipper? Taylor Sheridan's Landman faces lengthy wait as season 3 production timeline revealed Man in trouble for using robot vacuum to record wife's affair, friends with benefits lease up & hall pass wins Country music star Riley Green keeps cooking with new single'That's Just Me' from upcoming album Iranian-American: 'It's going to take boots on the ground, the Iranian people need to be armed' Sheridan Gorman's family demands accountability at hearing for accused killer Trump DOJ's trans athlete lawsuit tossed by federal judge Trump says US is prepared to strike Iran'anytime we want' Jeffries vows'serious response' to Dems who voted with GOP Jeffries vows'serious response' to Democratic defectors The new adaptation of J.K. Rowling's books stars Dominic McLaughlin, John Lithgow and Janet McTeer'Dutton Ranch' stars call Texas move'like taking matches to a gasoline party' Marc Menchaca and Juan Pablo Raba preview the high-stakes shift to Texas for Beth and Rip as the Paramount+ series premieres May 15 with two episodes, followed by weekly releases. A new full trailer is out for HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series, and reactions are rolling in. Source material: The Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling.

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Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on a mixture of diverse datasets poses challenges due to data imbalance and heterogeneity. Existing methods often address these issues across datasets (globally) but overlook the imbalance and heterogeneity within individual datasets (locally), which limits their effectiveness. We introduce Hierarchical Balancing Optimization (HBO), a novel method that enables LLMs to autonomously adjust data allocation during fine-tuning both across datasets (globally) and within each individual dataset (locally). HBO employs a bilevel optimization strategy with two types of actors: a Global Actor, which balances data sampling across different subsets of the training mixture, and several Local Actors, which optimizes data usage within each subset based on difficulty levels. These actors are guided by reward functions derived from the LLM's training state, which measure learning progress and relative performance improvement. We evaluate HBO on three LLM backbones across nine diverse tasks in multilingual and multitask setups. Results show that HBO consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving significant accuracy gains. Our in-depth analysis further demonstrates that both the global actor and local actors of HBO effectively adjust data usage during fine-tuning. HBO provides a comprehensive solution to the challenges of data imbalance and heterogeneity in LLM fine-tuning, enabling more effective training across diverse datasets.

By pretty much every objective measure, HBO's adaptation of the hit postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us has been a roaring success. Never before has a video game narrative been molded into Emmy nominations and such warm reception among respectable critics, industry darlings, and people who have no idea what the term "one-shotting" means. You'd think that the devotees who first fell in love with the game back when it was originally released in 2013 would be toasting the cultural ascendance of their favorite medium--and especially how the story's complicated morality has impacted those who've never picked up a controller. And yet, for as long as the show has been on television, its most dogmatic fans have been caught up in a controversy of much inferior consequence: Specifically, they're furious that Bella Ramsey doesn't look much like Ellie. On the most basic level, this observation is correct.

"Fudge," I remember saying, only I didn't say fudge, I said fuck, a word for adults. I was playing The Last of Us, a narrative video game for adults about a zombie apocalypse, and I had just died for what seemed like the thousandth time in the first room with a "clicker," the game lore's name for a medium-difficulty enemy. These "infected"--it's classier not to call them zombies, and this is a classy zombie-combat game, one with a story--had become misshapen thanks to a cordyceps brain infection, which devoured mankind almost overnight. The clicker was ghastlier than others, because it had lived long enough for the infection to fully engulf its formerly human face, fungal fibers enrobing it, teeth jutting out like barbs. An older infected is a more resilient one.

"The Last of Us Part II" attempted to get players to empathize with NPC deaths more so than in the first game through dogs that mourned their masters' deaths or friends of the fallen calling out for them by name. The show continues to intensify death, including early moments during the pandemic's initial outbreak in the pilot, through the addition of tendrils. These thin, stemlike threads slowly grow from an infected's mouth. Upon contact with a human, they too become infected, offering an entirely new method of transmission. Characters can still be bitten by zombies, but spores -- which allowed for the game's disease to be airborne -- were ditched for this first season.

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. When the British actor Bob Hoskins agreed to star in "Super Mario Bros.," he had little sense of what he was getting into. The year was 1992, and, although the title on which the film was based had sold tens of millions of copies, a feature-length live-action adaptation of a video game had never been attempted. The movie's eventual tagline, "This ain't no game," reflected a self-conscious distance from its source material: a convoluted parallel-universe plot recast the heroes as Italian American handymen from Brooklyn and the princess they set out to save as an N.Y.U. Hoskins himself hadn't even heard of the Nintendo franchise--but when his kids learned that he would be playing Mario they excitedly showed him the game.

I love my Apple TV, but I can't stand the old Siri remote that came with it. Its touchpad is too sensitive, and I never know if it's in the right orientation when I grab it. Apple did fix all that with its second-generation Siri remote, but why buy another one when the one I currently have still works--especially when I can use a few handy Siri commands to do more than what the touchpad can do. On the Apple TV and accompanying Siri remote there's a handy microphone button that lets you chat directly with Siri to get your TV to do things like search for movies in a specific genre or year, ping other devices, and even fast forward by a specific amount of time. Not every command is intuitive, though, so it's helpful to know a few of them off-hand before you binge another series.

The recent introduction of thermodynamic integration techniques has provided a new framework for understanding and improving variational inference (VI). In this work, we present a careful analysis of the thermodynamic variational objective (TVO), bridging the gap between existing variational objectives and shedding new insights to advance the field. In particular, we elucidate how the TVO naturally connects the three key variational schemes, namely the importance-weighted VI, Renyi-VI, and MCMC-VI, which subsumes most VI objectives employed in practice. To explain the performance gap between theory and practice, we reveal how the pathological geometry of thermodynamic curves negatively affects TVO. By generalizing the integration path from the geometric mean to the weighted Holder mean, we extend the theory of TVO and identify new opportunities for improving VI. This motivates our new VI objectives, named the Holder bounds, which flatten the thermodynamic curves and promise to achieve a one-step approximation of the exact marginal log-likelihood. A comprehensive discussion on the choices of numerical estimators is provided. We present strong empirical evidence on both synthetic and real-world datasets to support our claims.

The three comedians talk about what it was like to craft a bilingual TV show with dialogue in both English and Spanish and why the show isn't set in a particular country. They also discuss the show's supernatural elements, which intentionally lack specific rules and logic. After the interview, June and co-host Isaac Butler help a listener who's feeling unproductive in her new workplace. Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to working@slate.com.