Learning a latent dynamics model provides a task-agnostic representation of an agent's understanding of its environment. Leveraging this knowledge for model-based reinforcement learning holds the potential to improve sample efficiency over model-free methods by learning inside imagined rollouts. Furthermore, because the latent space serves as input to behavior models, the informative representations learned by the world model facilitate efficient learning of desired skills. Most existing methods rely on holistic representations of the environment's state. In contrast, humans reason about objects and their interactions, forecasting how actions will affect specific parts of their surroundings. Inspired by this, we propose Slot-Attention for Object-centric Latent Dynamics (SOLD), a novel algorithm that learns object-centric dynamics models in an unsupervised manner from pixel inputs. We demonstrate that the structured latent space not only improves model interpretability but also provides a valuable input space for behavior models to reason over. Our results show that SOLD outperforms DreamerV3, a state-of-the-art model-based RL algorithm, across a range of benchmark robotic environments that evaluate for both relational reasoning and low-level manipulation capabilities. Videos are available at https://slot-latent-dynamics.github.io/.

The widespread of offensive content online, such as hate speech and cyber-bullying, is a global phenomenon. This has sparked interest in the artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) communities, motivating the development of various systems trained to detect potentially harmful content automatically. These systems require annotated datasets to train the machine learning (ML) models. However, with a few notable exceptions, most datasets on this topic have dealt with English and a few other high-resource languages. As a result, the research in offensive language identification has been limited to these languages. This paper addresses this gap by tackling offensive language identification in Sinhala, a low-resource Indo-Aryan language spoken by over 17 million people in Sri Lanka. We introduce the Sinhala Offensive Language Dataset (SOLD) and present multiple experiments on this dataset. SOLD is a manually annotated dataset containing 10,000 posts from Twitter annotated as offensive and not offensive at both sentence-level and token-level, improving the explainability of the ML models. SOLD is the first large publicly available offensive language dataset compiled for Sinhala. We also introduce SemiSOLD, a larger dataset containing more than 145,000 Sinhala tweets, annotated following a semi-supervised approach.

Sure, it's harder than ever to get your hands on the newest consoles, but there's still plenty of gear, accessories, and games out there for your current machines. We've rounded up some of the best Cyber Monday video game and accessory deals here. Updated November 29: We've added a deal on the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, and checked prices throughout. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.

Sure, it's harder than ever to get your hands on the newest consoles, but there's still plenty of gear, accessories, and games out there for your current machines. We've rounded up some of the best Cyber Monday video game and accessory deals here. If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Normally the original Nintendo Switch is $300 on its own, but this bundle comes with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe–one of the better Mario Kart games in years–plus three months of the Nintendo Switch Online service included for free.

From attaching value to paper to make currency notes to attaching value to digital art works that sometimes come in the form of jpegs, the world economy has come a long way. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the new currency for the digital users who invest in cryptocurrency. However, along with the NFT boom, it has also been reported that several artworks are being stolen and sold on NFT marketplaces. This has left digital creators in a fix as their one opportunity to earn money from their work has come under threat. Platforms like DeviantArt, an American online art community featuring artwork, videography and photography have now become a place for online burglars to steal the pieces created by artists which they then sell on NFT platforms.

You can't squeeze a video game to check if it's good like an apple at the supermarket. But if you could, it wouldn't matter; game publishers would dunk it in enough shiny wax to disguise any imperfections. All the consumer sees is their hand reaching for it. There is a chasm between what gamers thought Cyberpunk 2077 would be and the reality of it. Eight years of lavish marketing inflated an edgelord open-world game into a cutting-edge, infinite cityscape brimming with intrigue and desire and possibility.

Supply Lines is a daily newsletter that tracks Covid-19's impact on trade. Sign up here, and subscribe to our Covid-19 podcast for the latest news and analysis on the pandemic. ByteDance Ltd. will be required to seek Chinese government approval to sell the U.S. operations of its short-video TikTok app under new restrictions Beijing imposed on the export of artificial intelligence technologies, according to a person familiar with the matter. AI interface technologies such as speech and text recognition, and those that analyze data to make personalized content recommendations, were added to a revised list of export-control products published on the Ministry of Commerce's website late Friday. Government permits will be required for overseas transfers to "safeguard national economic security," it said.

Welcome to Unofficial JBL Month here at CNET. Through sheer coincidence, I've had deals crop up on the JBL Link 10, JBL Link 500 (still available, by the way) and JBL Boost TV, all within the last 10 days or so. So just to finish off October in style, here's one more: For a limited time, and while supplies last, Daily Steals has the JBL Link 20 portable wireless voice-activated speaker for $59.99. The Link 20 is the big brother to the smaller Link 10 I wrote about last week and offers a similarly dazzling array of features: It's portable, waterproof and wireless times two (Bluetooth and Wi-Fi). It has built-in Google Assistant.

Successfully predicting gentrification could have many social and commercial applications; however, real estate sales are difficult to predict because they belong to a chaotic system comprised of intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics, perceived value, and market speculation. Using New York City real estate as our subject, we combine modern techniques of data science and machine learning with traditional spatial analysis to create robust real estate prediction models for both classification and regression tasks. We compare several cutting edge machine learning algorithms across spatial, semi-spatial and non-spatial feature engineering techniques, and we empirically show that spatially-conscious machine learning models outperform non-spatial models when married with advanced prediction techniques such as feed-forward artificial neural networks and gradient boosting machine models.

Last year, British auction company Christie's grabbed headlines for selling a portrait said to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci --although may believe that the work may been painted by a follower, a studio assistant, or at best, a talented copyist -- for $450 million. This year, the company has sold what it describes as the "first portrait generated by an algorithm to come up for auction," for $432,000 despite predictions that the piece would be acquired for $7,000 to $ 10,000. The painting named Edmond de Belamy, from La Famille de Belamy was purchased via telephone by an anonymous French bidder. Prior to the auction, Christie's reportedly invested a considerable amount of time in making the item appealing to buyers. The work became the matter of press releases, was granted interviews and advertized as being "on canvass" and "in a gilded frame."