Travel nightmare: Man caught smuggling over 100 live snakes in his pants

Travel nightmare: Man caught smuggling over 100 live snakes in his pants

A man tried to smuggle more than 100 live snakes to mainland China in his pants with just adhesive tape and canvas bags.The country's customs authority posted details about the incident on Tuesday in a post to Weibo, China's version of X.Officials said a male passenger entered mainland China through the Huanggang Port at Futian before officers intercepted him and conducted an inspection. Futian is in Shenzhen's downtown core and sits on the China-Hong Kong border. Officers discovered the man had worn six snake-infested canvas bags sealed with adhesive tape in his pants pockets. The bags had several species, including…
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Preference-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Exploration

Preference-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Exploration

arXiv:2407.06503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) that allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not feasible. However, this approach is inefficient and impractical for promoting deep exploration in hard-exploration tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards. To tackle this issue, we introduce LOPE: Learning Online with trajectory Preference guidancE, an end-to-end preference-guided RL framework that enhances exploration efficiency in hard-exploration tasks. Our intuition is that LOPE directly adjusts the focus of online exploration by considering human feedback as…
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A Single Transformer for Scalable Vision-Language Modeling

A Single Transformer for Scalable Vision-Language Modeling

arXiv:2407.06438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present SOLO, a single transformer for Scalable visiOn-Language mOdeling. Current large vision-language models (LVLMs) such as LLaVA mostly employ heterogeneous architectures that connect pre-trained visual encoders with large language models (LLMs) to facilitate visual recognition and complex reasoning. Although achieving remarkable performance with relatively lightweight training, we identify four primary scalability limitations: (1) The visual capacity is constrained by pre-trained visual encoders, which are typically an order of magnitude smaller than LLMs. (2) The heterogeneous architecture complicates the use of established hardware and software infrastructure. (3) Study of scaling laws on such architecture must…
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Deciphering Assamese Vowel Harmony with Featural InfoWaveGAN

Deciphering Assamese Vowel Harmony with Featural InfoWaveGAN

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The makers of Palworld have formed a new company in partnership with Sony

The makers of Palworld have formed a new company in partnership with Sony

The maker of Xbox Game Pass stalwart Palworld said on Wednesday it’s forming a new company in partnership with… Sony. Palworld developer and publisher Pocketpair announced its new team-up with Sony Music Entertainment to create Palworld Entertainment, Inc. The joint venture’s stated purpose: “accelerating the multifaceted global development of Palworld and its further expansion,” which sounds like corporate-speak for “merch, baby.”The deal includes Sony Music Entertainment, Inc. and anime studio and game publisher Aniplex, Inc., both part of the broader Sony Corporation. Pocketpair says Palworld merchandise will soon be available for pre-order at Aniplex Online.The joint venture’s new website describes…
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A new twist on artificial ‘muscles’ for safer, softer robots

A new twist on artificial ‘muscles’ for safer, softer robots

Northwestern University engineers have developed a new soft, flexible device that makes robots move by expanding and contracting -- just like a human muscle. To demonstrate their new device, called an actuator, the researchers used it to create a cylindrical, worm-like soft robot and an artificial bicep. In experiments, the cylindrical soft robot navigated the tight, hairpin curves of a narrow pipe-like environment, and the bicep was able to lift a 500-gram weight 5,000 times in a row without failing. Because the researchers 3D-printed the body of the soft actuator using a common rubber, the resulting robots cost about $3…
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The Open/Closed Principle in C# with Filters and Specifications

The Open/Closed Principle in C# with Filters and Specifications

Software design principles are fundamental in ensuring our code remains maintainable, scalable, and robust. One of the key principles in the SOLID design principles is the Open/Closed Principle (OCP). This principle states that software entities should be open for extension but closed for modification. Let’s explore how we can adhere to this principle through a practical example involving product filtering. Initial Implementation: The Problem Imagine we have a simple product catalog where each product has a name, color, and size. We need a way to filter these products based on various criteria. A straightforward implementation might look like this: public…
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One of the world’s greatest Go players who was defeated by AI warns that the technology may not come with a ‘happy ending’

One of the world’s greatest Go players who was defeated by AI warns that the technology may not come with a ‘happy ending’

One of the world's greatest Go players who was defeated by an artificial intelligence program warns that the technology may come with a rude awakening for humans as it advances.Lee Se-Dol is a South Korean legend in the game of Go, which is widely considered to be a more complex game than chess. The game, which can be played in person and online, also once posed a computational challenge for AI researchers.In 2016, the Go world was rocked after Lee was defeated by AlphaGo, an AI program made by Google's DeepMind. Lee lost 4 out of 5 games.The defeat was…
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