The top two rows show easy cases, while the bottom three rows present hard cases, including crowdedness, complex backgrounds, and tiny objects.

The development of foundation vision models has pushed the general visual recognition to a high level, but cannot well address the fine-grained recognition in specialized domain such as invasive species classification. Identifying and managing invasive species has strong social and ecological value.

While the ImageNet dataset has been driving computer vision research over the past decade, significant label noise and ambiguity have made top-1 accuracy an insufficient measure of further progress.

Ant evolution favored large colonies over individual strength. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Here's a fun (and creepy) fact: The Earth is home to approximately 20 quadrillion ants . To put zeroes on it, that's around 20,000,000,000,000,000 of the six-legged insects living all around us. How did such diminutive creatures attain their prominent--and ecologically vital -role on the planet?

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) offer a way to study the growth of two-dimensional artificial organisms from a single seed cell. From the outset, NCA-grown organisms have had issues with stability, their natural boundary often breaking down and exhibiting tumour-like growth or failing to maintain the expected shape. In this paper, we present a method for improving the stability of NCA-grown organisms by introducing an 'identity' layer with simple constraints during training. Results show that NCAs grown in close proximity are more stable compared with the original NCA model. Moreover, only a single identity value is required to achieve this increase in stability. We observe emergent movement from the stable organisms, with increasing prevalence for models with multiple identity values. This work lays the foundation for further study of the interaction between NCA-grown organisms, paving the way for studying social interaction at a cellular level in artificial organisms. Code/Videos available at: https://github.com/jstovold/ALIFE2025

We analyze an algorithm for assigning weights prior to scalarization in discrete multi-objective problems arising from data analysis. The algorithm evolves the weights (the relevance of features) by a replicator-type dynamic on the standard simplex, with update indices computed from a normalized data matrix. We prove that the resulting sequence converges globally to a unique interior equilibrium, yielding non-degenerate limiting weights. The method, originally inspired by evolutionary game theory, differs from standard weighting schemes in that it is analytically tractable with provable convergence.

The same pulling force that causes "tears" in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It's another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development. Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the that these wine "tears" or "legs" result from the difference in surface tension between alcohol and water. "This fact affords an explanation of several very curious motions," Thomson wrote.

What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) It's something of a familiar cycle by now: Tragedy hits; rampant misinformation and conspiracy theories follow. It's often even more acute in the case of a natural disaster, when conspiracy theories about what "really" caused the calamity run right into culture-war-driven climate change denialism. Put together, these theories obscure real causes while elevating fake ones. I've studied these ideas extensively, having spent the last 10 years writing about conspiracy theories and disinformation as a journalist and researcher. I've covered everything from the rise of QAnon to whether Donald Trump faked his assassination attempt. I've written three books, testified to Congress, and even written a report for the January 6th Committee.

Mars may have a network of liquid water flowing through the frozen ground. All buried permafrost, on Earth and beyond, is expected to host narrow veins of liquid, and new calculations show on Mars, they could be big enough to support living organisms. "For Mars we always live on the edge of maybe habitable, maybe not, so I set out to do this research thinking maybe I can close this loop and say that it's very unlikely to have enough water and have it be arranged so that it's habitable for microbes," says Hanna Sizemore at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. She and her colleagues used measurements of the soil composition on Mars to calculate how much of the icy soil could actually be liquid water and the size of the channels that water would run through. It is tricky to keep water liquid on Mars, because temperatures can get as low as -150 C (-240 F) on the planet.