new data
Trump Says He'll Fast-Track Private Gas Plants to Power AI Data Centers
Trump Says He'll Fast-Track Private Gas Plants to Power AI Data Centers "They can't believe it, that they're approved in a period of a matter of weeks." President Trump speaks to reporters at the White House on July 6, 2026. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. In brief remarks to reporters Monday at the White House, President Donald Trump noted that he was shocked to learn how much energy developing artificial intelligence requires and said his administration is now approving plans for energy facilities to power data centers in "a matter of weeks." After first describing his investment accounts for children, Trump responded to a question on cryptocurrency and said Big Tech leaders racing to develop artificial intelligence have told him they need access to double the country's existing energy capacity in order to advance technologies and outpace foreign competitors.
On-line Bayesian System Identification
Romeres, Diego, Prando, Giulia, Pillonetto, Gianluigi, Chiuso, Alessandro
We consider an on-line system identification setting, in which new data become available at given time steps. In order to meet real-time estimation requirements, we propose a tailored Bayesian system identification procedure, in which the hyper-parameters are still updated through Marginal Likelihood maximization, but after only one iteration of a suitable iterative optimization algorithm. Both gradient methods and the EM algorithm are considered for the Marginal Likelihood optimization. We compare this "1-step" procedure with the standard one, in which the optimization method is run until convergence to a local minimum. The experiments we perform confirm the effectiveness of the approach we propose.
fantasization_with_svgps
With a principled representation of uncertainty and closed form posterior updates, Gaussian processes (GPs) are a natural choice for online decision making. However, Gaussian processes typically require at least O(n2) computations for n training points, limiting their general applicability. Stochastic variational Gaussian processes (SVGPs) can provide scalable inference for a dataset of fixed size, but are difficult to efficiently condition on new data. We propose online variational conditioning (OVC), a procedure for efficiently conditioning SVGPs in an online setting that does not require re-training through the evidence lower bound with the addition of new data. OVC enables the pairing of SVGPs with advanced lookahead acquisition functions for black-box optimization, even with non-Gaussian likelihoods. We show OVC provides compelling performance in a range of applications including active learning of malaria incidence, and reinforcement learning on MuJoCo simulated robotic control tasks.
Reinforcement Learning with Euclidean Data Augmentation for State-Based Continuous Control
Data augmentation creates new data points by transforming the original ones for an reinforcement learning (RL) agent to learn from, which has been shown to be effective for the objective of improving data efficiency of RL for continuous control. Prior work towards this objective has been largely restricted to perturbation-based data augmentation where new data points are created by perturbing the original ones,which has been impressively effective for tasks where the RL agent observe control states as images with perturbations including random cropping, shifting, etc. This work focuses on state-based control, where the RL agent can directly observe raw kinematic and task features, and considers an alternative data augmentation applied to these features based on Euclidean symmetries under transformations like rotations. We show that the default state features used in exiting benchmark tasks that are based on joint configurations are not amenable to Euclidean transformations. We therefore advocate using state features based on configurations of the limbs (i.e., rigid bodies connected by joints) that instead provides rich augmented data under Euclidean transformations. With minimal hyperparameter tuning, we show this new Euclidean data augmentation strategy significantly improve both data efficiency and asymptotic performance of RL on a wide range of continuous control tasks.
Diffeomorphic interpolation for efficient persistence-based topological optimization
Topological Data Analysis (TDA) provides a pipeline to extract quantitative and powerful topological descriptors from structured objects. This enables the definition of topological loss functions, which assert to which extent a given object exhibits some topological properties. One can then use these losses to perform topological optimization via gradient descent routines. While theoretically sounded, topological optimization faces an important challenge: gradients tend to be extremely sparse, in the sense that the loss function typically depends (locally) on only very few coordinates of the input object, yielding dramatically slow optimization schemes in practice. In this work, focusing on the central case of topological optimization for point clouds, we propose to overcome this limitation using diffeomorphic interpolation, turning sparse gradients into smooth vector fields defined on the whole space. In particular, this approach combines efficiently with subsampling techniques routinely used in TDA, as the diffeomorphism derived from the gradient computed on the subsample can be used to update the coordinates of the full and possibly large input object. We then illustrate the usefulness of our approach on black-box autoencoder (AE) regularization, where we aim at applying some topological priors on the latent spaces associated to fixed, black-box AE models without modifying their (unknown) architectures and parameters. We empirically show that, while vanilla topological optimization has to be re-run every time that new data comes out of the black-box models, learning a diffeomorphic flow can be done once and then re-applied to new data in linear time. Moreover, reverting the flow allows us to generate data by sampling the topologically-optimized latent space directly, allowing for better interpretability of the model.
On-Device Training Under 256KB Memory
On-device training enables the model to adapt to new data collected from the sensors by fine-tuning a pre-trained model. Users can benefit from customized AI models without having to transfer the data to the cloud, protecting the privacy. However, the training memory consumption is prohibitive for IoT devices that have tiny memory resources. We propose an algorithm-system co-design framework to make on-device training possible with only 256KB of memory. On-device training faces two unique challenges: (1) the quantized graphs of neural networks are hard to optimize due to low bit-precision and the lack of normalization; (2) the limited hardware resource (memory and computation) does not allow full backpropagation.