Links for 2023-01-20
“An Adaptive Agent capable of hypothesis-driven exploration which solves challenging unseen tasks with just a handful of experience, at a similar timescale to humans. We demonstrate that training an RL agent at scale leads to a general in-context learning algorithm that can adapt to open-ended novel embodied 3D problems as quickly as humans. In addition to adapting from hypothesis-driven exploration, AdA can also make effective use of a single demonstration, accelerating adaptation. This is purely emergent as it was never trained with expert demonstrations!” https://sites.google.com/view/adaptive-agent/
Accurate Pose Estimation Via WiFi Signals: "our model can estimate the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only input" https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250
SceneDiffuser is a super powerful model for modeling interactions with scene&object. It is intrinsically scene-aware, physics-based, and goal-oriented.
Using Whisper to transcribe any youtube video and then perform diarization to identify each speaker http://hf.co/spaces/vumichien/whisper-speaker-diarization
“Something We Had Never Seen Before” – Unusual Cosmic Explosion Blasts Hole in Established Science https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/rare-cosmic-explosion-blasts-hole-established-science/
Artificial Organic Neurons Created – Almost Like Biological Nerve Cells https://liu.se/en/news-item/de-bygger-artificiella-nervceller
“Does childhood maltreatment cause mental health problems? Our new meta-analysis of 34 quasi-experimental studies (N~54k individuals) suggests a small causal effect of child maltreatment on mental health problems.” https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.20220174
"‘The Unheard Symphony of the Planet’: Using a tiny device called a Raspberry Shake, people around the world are tuning in to the earth’s vibrations" [The New York Times] https://archive.is/ychdc
Importance of temporal context during natural modes of vision. Neurons' responses to continuous movies are different from responses to isolated snippets. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627322011163
How A British Submarine Spent Hours Under A Russian Aircraft Carrier https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/how-a-british-submarine-spent-hours-under-a-russian-aircraft-carrier
“If Russia would win, then it would send a message, that you can invade another country. You can attack another country. And you can gain from that. I think the only message that we need to send is that we will support Ukraine as long as needed. One year, two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years.”
— Prime Minister of Finland Sanna Marin
“If we were to accept for one moment that Putin could be successful in Ukraine, that he would get Kyiv, that he would the whole country, it won’t end there. History has taught us that.”
— Prime Minister of the Netherlands
I have been saying this for months, and politicians seem to be finally catching up. This war isn't about Ukraine or Russia. This war is about maintaining international norms. It is about punishment and deterrence. If we want to lower the probability of future wars of aggression, we need to make this war very costly for Russia. The more Russia suffers as a consequence of starting this war, the less likely others will follow in its footsteps. This war is about lowering the probability of war by raising the cost of war.
P.S. Letting your fear of escalation stop you from supporting Ukraine encourages escalatory rhetoric. It signals that someone who threatens to escalate a war to the level of a world war should be allowed to take over the world because the price of opposing them would be too high.
P.P.S. There currently is no alternative to Pax Americana. The anti-Western opposition consists of the worst human rights violators on this planet. And they hate each other's guts. E.g., Russia is supplying India with weapons against China's ally Pakistan. Not going to work.
P.P.P.S. It's quite ironic that this is the country that the Western far-right supports. Here is Putin's Jewish propagandist Vladimir Solovyov chanting Allahu Akbar in front of Russia's Islamist mercenaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx_PKIEwMlE
P.P.P.P.S. Interesting developments:
1. Iranian Foreign Minister: Tehran does not recognize the entry of Crimea and four new regions into Russia https://t.me/strelkovii/3760 (original source is RT)
2. Serbian President: For us, Crimea is Ukraine, Donbas is Ukraine — and it’ll remain so https://archive.is/6jhpS (Bloomberg)
Nobody is interested to return to a world in which countries can just make land grabs or even question the territorial integrity of others countries. And nobody wants to side with losers.
Israel and France?