Lifeboat Foundation

Buildings collapse in Hualien, as multiple aftershocks reported in Taipei.

Apple researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can understand ambiguous references to on-screen entities as well as conversational and background context, enabling more natural interactions with voice assistants, according to a paper published on Friday.

The system, called ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), leverages large language models to convert the complex task of reference resolution — including understanding references to visual elements on a screen — into a pure language modeling problem. This allows ReALM to achieve substantial performance gains compared to existing methods.

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Intel presents LLaVA-Gemma.

Accelerating Multimodal Foundation Models with a Compact Language Model https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

We train a suite of multimodal foundation models (MMFM) using the popular LLaVA framework with the recently released Gemma family of large language models…

Continue reading “Paper page — LLaVA-Gemma: Accelerating Multimodal Foundation Models with a Compact Language Model” »

Academics are proposing a new and improved way to help researchers discover when consciousness emerges in human infancy.

When over the course of development do humans become conscious? When the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes was asked about infant consciousness by his critics, he eventually suggested that infants might have thoughts, albeit ones that are simpler than those of adults. Hundreds of years later, the issue of when human beings become conscious is a question which remains a challenge for psychologists and philosophers alike.

But now, in response to a recent article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, two academics from the University of Birmingham have suggested an improved way to help scientists and researchers identify when babies become conscious.

The traveling salesman problem is considered a prime example of a combinatorial optimization problem. Now a Berlin team led by theoretical physicist Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert of Freie Universität Berlin and HZB has shown that a certain class of such problems can actually be solved better and much faster with quantum computers than with conventional methods.

Quantum computers use so-called qubits, which are not either zero or one as in conventional logic circuits, but can take on any value in between. These qubits are realized by highly cooled atoms, ions, or superconducting circuits, and it is still physically very complex to build a quantum computer with many qubits. However, mathematical methods can already be used to explore what fault-tolerant quantum computers could achieve in the future.

“There are a lot of myths about it, and sometimes a certain amount of hot air and hype. But we have approached the issue rigorously, using mathematical methods, and delivered solid results on the subject. Above all, we have clarified in what sense there can be any advantages at all,” says Prof. Dr. Jens Eisert, who heads a joint research group at Freie Universität Berlin and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.

Google announces Bigger is not Always Better.

We study the scaling properties of latent diffusion models (LDMs) with an emphasis on their sampling efficiency.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

South Korean researchers have maintained plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds inside a tokamak fusion reactor.

Researchers have created a gene-edited cow that produces human insulin in her milk in Brazil.