While olfaction is central to how animals perceive the world, this rich chemical sensory modality remains largely inaccessible to machines. One key bottleneck is the lack of diverse, multimodal olfactory training data collected in natural settings. We present New York Smells, a large dataset of paired image and olfactory signals captured ``in the wild.'' Our dataset contains 7,000 smell-image pairs from 3,500 distinct objects across indoor and outdoor environments, with approximately 70$\times$ more objects than existing olfactory datasets. Our benchmark has three tasks: cross-modal smell-to-image retrieval, recognizing scenes, objects, and materials from smell alone, and fine-grained discrimination between grass species. Through experiments on our dataset, we find that visual data enables cross-modal olfactory representation learning, and that our learned olfactory representations outperform widely-used hand-crafted features.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

The two species use foul-smelling chemicals to spark their revolutions. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Scientists have confirmed a never-before-seen type of insect behavior . In a study published in the journal, behavioral ecologists at Japan's Kyushu University describe two species of ants that engage in matricide, killing a colony's queen . But the spark that ignites the uprising isn't generated from within.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This study investigates two algorithms for fast inference in generative models of olfaction. Their goal is to compute the most likely, linear mixture of odors comprising an olfactory stimulus. One of the algorithms employs variational inference, while the other is based on a sampling scheme. Simulations demonstrate that both algorithms perform suitably well, and the authors claim that inference is performed rapidly within the first 100 ms, while eliminating false positives (detection of odors not present in a particular stimulus) takes much longer and is difficult when more than two odors are present.

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. Summary: This paper attempts to link sparse optimization methodology to the anatomical structure of locust's early olfactory system. The work is motivated by the observation that odorant molecules are sparsely represented by the population of Kenyon cells. The authors first mathematically formulate the olfactory system as a MAP decoder, and give the standard solution to the problem without considering biological constraints. Next, to make the solution more biologically plausible, the authors reformulate the olfactory system model as a decoder of a compressive sensing problem, and provide two standard solutions to the dual problem. Then, the authors argue that each of the components in the solution can be mapped/interpreted to/as a unit of the biological structure in the olfactory system. However, these maps are described without a strong justification and there are conceptual problems in linking the math with the biology.

The olfactory system faces a difficult inference problem: it has to determine what odors are present based on the distributed activation of its receptor neurons. Here we derive neural implementations of two approximate inference algorithms that could be used by the brain. One is a variational algorithm (which builds on the work of Beck.

The annual award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and 24/7 lectures. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Does alcohol enhance one's foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

When applied to recordings from the mouse olfactory bulb, our approach reveals low-dimensional population dynamics that are odor specific and have consistent structure across animals.