How to get started with Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on Runpod Serverless
Deploy Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on Runpod with vLLM's dedicated image. Validated flags, 4x H200 hardware math, measured cold starts, and the NCCL fix you need on day one.
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Multi-Stage Phase-Aware Self-Supervised Reconstruction for Multi-Echo Gradient-Echo MRI
Purpose: To develop a phase-aware self-supervised framework for accelerated high-resolution multi-echo gradient-echo (mGRE) MRI that preserves anatomical detail and complex echo information for quantitative mapping. Methods: We developed multi-stage phase-aware self-supervised reconstruction (MSPR-GRE), integrating progressive k-space expansion with phase estimation and refinement. Sequential unrolled networks reconstruct complex multi-echo images and update echo-dependent phase priors. A relaxation-informed temporal subspace is used for acquisitions with at least four echoes, while shorter echo trains are reconstructed in the image domain. Training uses held-out acquired k-space samples without fully sampled targets. Evaluation included 9.4 T ex vivo mouse-brain data 30um eight-echo and 18um dual-echo) and retrospectively undersampled 7 T AHEAD human-brain data, with supervised ablations. Results:MSPR-GRE reduced artifacts in regions of rapid phase variation and preserved fine mouse-brain anatomy. Across five AHEAD test datasets at R = 4, 8, and 12, it generally improved magnitude-image, T2* map, and QSM metrics, particularly at higher acceleration. At R = 12, fourth-echo magnitude NRMSE was 12.090.60% versus 21.551.12% for SSDU. Ablations indicated benefits of phase refinement, while supervised experiments supported multi-stage phase-aware reconstruction. Conclusion: MSPR-GRE improves accelerated mGRE reconstruction and quantitative-map agreement without fully sampled training targets. Further validation of generalizability and phase-estimation accuracy is needed.
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The global pledge to use AI for climate good is a cruel joke
At this point, reading through the latest splashy pledge to use AI for the good of the environment feels like downing a nonalcoholic beer. Admittedly…
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NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, a 120B-parameter multimodal vision-language model, is now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Deploy the NVFP4 or BF16 variant in a few steps, then run text, image, and video inference for document intelligence, computer-use agents, and multimodal agentic workloads.
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Kolmogorov-Chapman Maps: Trajectory-Free Learning for Simulating Molecular Dynamics
Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) describe stochastic processes across a wide range of scientific domains, including physics, biology, and finance. Although individual numerical integration steps are inexpensive, observing meaningful events or transitions can require millions of sequential steps, resulting in substantial wall-clock simulation time and poor hardware utilization. Deep learning offers an alternative by amortizing many integration steps into a single neural network forward pass, potentially enabling much faster simulation. However, existing supervised approaches typically require long simulated trajectory data, which restricts their applicability. In this work, we introduce Kolmogorov-Chapman Maps (KC-Maps), a method for learning the transition kernel of an SDE that relies only on the trajectory-free marginal samples together with the known drift and diffusion coefficients. Given an initial time and state of a process, KC-Maps models its distribution integrated to any given time, corresponding to the weak solution of the SDE. To recover the correct dynamics, KC-Maps satisfies two key properties: (i) it satisfies the boundary conditions, which we incorporate directly into the neural network architecture, and (ii) it respects the Kolmogorov--Chapman equation, which provides an efficient training objective. We empirically demonstrate that KC-Maps learns to integrate the dynamics of peptide molecular systems and outperforms classical molecular dynamics in terms of GPU-hours.
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HiVe-Mem: Interleaving Horizontal Memory Expansion and Vertical Evidence Composition for Multimodal Agents
As multimodal agents accumulate increasingly long interaction histories, effectively retrieving and utilizing past information becomes critical for long-term interaction. Existing memory systems typically rely on semantic retrieval over compressed memories and expose predefined representations, which may miss relevant memories and overlook heterogeneous evidence needs across queries. We introduce , a multimodal memory framework that interleaves Horizontal Memory Expansion with Vertical Evidence Composition. For horizontal memory expansion, organizes memory episodes into a relational graph using textual and visual anchors, expanding semantically retrieved seeds with related neighbors to recover complementary information. For vertical evidence composition, each retrieved memory retains multiple evidence forms, including compact summaries, captions, grounded visual views, raw images, and interaction history. A lightweight trainable selector independently composes an evidence subset for each retrieved memory, enabling query-adaptive utilization of heterogeneous multimodal information. This two-dimensional design jointly broadens memory coverage and adapts the evidence contributed by individual memories. Experiments across three multimodal memory benchmarks show that consistently improves task performance across base models while reducing token consumption by about 90\% compared with the most efficient competing multimodal baselines.
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What kills v-prediction? A Patch-wise PCA Perspective on Pixel-Space Flow Matching
Latent Diffusion Models dominate generative modeling but face two-stage training complexity and the inherent reconstruction limits of pre-trained autoencoders. Pixel-space Flow Matching offers a simplified end-to-end alternative yet often encounters training difficulties when using the standard v-prediction objective. Recent research attributes this difficulty to the off-manifold nature of noised targets, motivating a shift toward x-prediction. In this paper, we investigate this explanation through patch-wise Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and identify a bandwidth bottleneck. The velocity in minor components is largely determined by the raw noisy input, requiring deep backbones to preserve information that competes with principal-component modeling. Through controlled experiments and representation analysis, we further examine why x-prediction remains effective: its parameterization provides a raw-input bypass, while its learned input representation can spontaneously concentrate on principal directions. Under low-rank observations, our analysis of the induced flow characterizes x-prediction as an implicit conditional-mean decoder, reconstructing discarded components from the retained information. These observations motivate the Raw-injected Transformer (RiT), which combines a lightweight raw-conditioned decoder with an output-side shortcut to separate semantic modeling from raw-state propagation. Our method restores effective v-prediction and achieves competitive performance on ImageNet 256256, providing a perspective on the interaction between prediction objectives and architectural bandwidth.
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Professional work deserves professional tools. Meet AWS Quick.
Introducing AWS Quick, formerly Amazon Quick, and the debut of our first brand campaign celebrating teams who keep business moving. AWS Quick is the AI workspace built only for work, where teams use AI agents to research, analyze, and act across the data and applications they already rely on.
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LUCQUE: A lung cancer screening dataset from Québec for reliable AI evaluation
BACKGROUND: AI-based tools are expected to play a key role in lung cancer screening (LCS). The evaluation of these tools often relied on private datasets or fragmented public datasets with inconsistent availability of clinical data and expert nodule annotations. This has hindered reproducibility, comparability, and independent assessment of AI tools. To address these gaps, we present LUCQUE, a novel, large, comprehensively annotated dataset derived from LDCT lung cancer screening in Québec, which is accessible for reliable AI evaluation. METHODS: LUCQUE was curated and is hosted on PARADIM, a digital infrastructure supporting DICOM data de-identification, annotation, long-term storage and analysis. LDCT scans and clinical information were combined to a curated collection and complemented by voxel-level, expert-derived pulmonary nodule and cyst segmentations, and Lung-RADS-based lesion characteristics. Key dataset characteristics and statistics were reported, including participant demographics, imaging parameters, radiological findings, and segmented lesion characteristics. Dataset analyses were conducted according to PARADIM's model-to-data approach, in which user code is executed on the platform such that data remains on premise. RESULTS: LUCQUE currently comprises 1,678 LDCT baseline studies from 1,678 participants. Most studies were classified as Lung-RADS 2. A total of 1,776 pulmonary nodules and 60 cysts were annotated, with a median (interquartile range) volume of 89\,(56,\,159)\,mm^3 and 1,384\,(589,\,3793)\,mm^3 respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to publicly available LCS datasets, LUCQUE currently represents the largest accessible annotated real-world LCS dataset. Access to LUCQUE is provided via a model-to-data approach, enabling privacy-preserving, reproducible, and independent real-world evaluation of AI tools in LCS.
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Inversion-Free High-Dimensional Counterfactual Inference
Counterfactual inference is the task of answering hypothetical "what-if" queries about a unit, given an observational dataset, modeling assumptions, and a causal graph. This enables a modeler to reason about hypothetical scenarios that cannot otherwise be answered without assumptions or a causal graph. The simpler case involves a causal graph with scalar 1-D variables that denote different attributes in the data-generation process. While the literature is clear in the 1-D case, extending this to settings with high-dimensional nodes (e.g., images) remains challenging. Conventionally, in the literature, methods recover the latent state from the factual image (inversion), generate counterfactual attributes from the graph, and render the counterfactual image from the latent state using the updated attributes. In our work, we investigate the necessity of the inversion step in computing high-dimensional counterfactuals. We first discuss moving from the scalar 1-D case to the higher-dimensional case. Secondly, we discuss the relevance of the inversion step and evaluate an inversion-free counterpart repurposed from the image-editing literature. Finally, on image datasets such as CelebA and ADNI, we benchmark our approach using two measures: namely, effectiveness and identity preservation. While effectiveness is a measure of how faithfully the counterfactual attribute is rendered, identity preservation measures whether the same unit (image) is being rendered, both of which are crucial for high-dimensional counterfactual inference. We present the tradeoffs of using inversion-based and inversion-free approaches in our work.
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2D Gum-Net: Unsupervised Dense Elastic Image Registration via Symmetric Correlation and Spectral Pooling
Dense non-rigid registration, the recovery of a pixel-wise deformation field that warps one image into geometric agreement with another, is fundamental across medical imaging, structural biology, and correspondence estimation, yet learning-based approaches face a severe bottleneck: ground-truth deformation fields are notoriously difficult to obtain for real data. We present 2D Gum-Net, an end-to-end architecture that predicts dense elastic deformation fields fully unsupervised. We transfer the Geometric Unsupervised Matching Network (Gum-Net), originally developed for 3D subtomogram alignment in cryo-electron tomography, to 2D elastic registration: all three modules are redesigned in 2D, and the rigid transformation head is replaced by a Dense Spatial Transformer that regresses a sparse control-point grid, lifted to a full-resolution field Φ by bicubic interpolation. Downsampling uses DCT spectral pooling, implemented as frozen-basis matrix multiplications (50GPU speedup), preserving the fine, quasi-periodic structure that max and average pooling destroy. We evaluate on contact-based fingerprints, a challenging testbed for this task: locally self-similar ridge patterns make correspondence maximally ambiguous, skin pressed against a sensor generates authentic large-displacement elastic distortion, and minutiae act as precise landmarks through which an independent matcher externally verifies the topological correctness of predicted fields. Trained purely on synthetic impressions and evaluated zero-shot on real benchmarks, our method improves structural correlation by up to 15.7% on FVC2004 and raises genuine match scores under an independent matcher while leaving imposter scores essentially unchanged. This suggests that the predicted deformations restore true structure without fabricating correspondences.
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Instagram’s Effect Builder makes new filters from AI prompts
After expanding its Edits app to macOS last week, Instagram's next move is launching this Effect Builder that generates custom filters for your Stories posts…
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Smartphone-Enabled Depth-Aware Transillumination Imaging for Detection of Chicken Breast Fillet Myopathies in Chicken Fillets
Woody Breast (WB) myopathy is a major quality defect in broiler chickens characterized by fibrosis, increased tissue hardness, and altered structural properties that affect product quality. Conventional palpation is subjective and labor-intensive, while many non-destructive methods require specialized equipment or substantial computational resources. This study developed a smartphone-based transillumination and 3D point-cloud framework for non-destructive WB severity classification. A total of 267 chicken breast fillets, including normal breast (NB, n = 87), mild WB (MWB, n = 85), and severe WB (SWB, n = 95), were evaluated using RAW transillumination images and 3D point clouds acquired with an iPhone 16 Pro. A total of 91 features, comprising 14 image-derived, 76 geometric, and one physics-informed Beer-Lambert attenuation feature, were extracted. Partial correlation controlling for thickness revealed a significant association between image characteristics and WB severity (r = 0.413, p < 0.0001), indicating optical information independent of fillet geometry. SWB tissue exhibited approximately 26% greater light attenuation per unit thickness than NB. The 2D-only models achieved approximately 82% test accuracy, while the multimodal ensemble combining Fusion-DGCNN, XGBoost, and physics-guided logistic regression (PGLR) achieved approximately 90% accuracy. These findings demonstrate the complementary value of optical, geometric, and physics-informed features and establish the feasibility of smartphone-based, non-destructive WB severity assessment.
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Large Language Models as a Universal Searcher for Open-World Automated Machine Learning
Developing effective machine learning models requires complex manual tuning, while current Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) frameworks remain domain-specific and isolate model architecture, training hyperparameter, and data ratio optimization. Here, we bridge this gap by proposing a universal, large language model (LLM)-based AutoML framework that jointly optimizes these configurations for the first time without the need for task-specific fine-tuning. We propose NCode, a unified numerical encoding scheme that translates diverse AutoML design choices into universal discrete sequences and effectively reframes the optimization process as a unified ranking task. Trained solely on optimization trajectories derived from a limited, single-domain vision task, the proposed LLM-based searcher demonstrates impressive cross-task, cross-modality and joint search-space optimization generalizability, achieving state-of-the-art performance across image classification, image segmentation, speaker verification and text-to-image benchmarks. Crucially, it exhibits superior scalability in the large-scale training and joint optimization of a billion-parameter Diffusion Transformer, requiring 896 GPU-days and attaining a state-of-the-art GenEval score of 0.91. By leveraging reinforcement learning to instill Chain-of-Thought reasoning, we provide a systematic way to interpret the LLM-based searcher's internal decision-making mechanisms, revealing its optimization strategy shifted from the early-stage diversity-driven exploration to the late-stage anchor exploitation. Our proposed framework provides a scalable, generalizable, and interpretable pathway toward general-purpose open-world machine learning optimization.
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Anchor Behavior, Not Parameters: Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning with a Single Shared Prompt
Prompt-based continual learning adapts a frozen pre-trained vision transformer by tuning a small set of prompt tokens. Recently, one-prompt methods which share one single prompt across all tasks make this paradigm maximally parameter efficient. The open question is how a shared prompt can keep the knowledge of old classes while being updated for new ones. Existing methods protect old knowledge in parameter space, where they freeze task-specific prompts, expand new components, or sparsely gate which tokens receive gradients. However, this method sacrifices plasticity, yet the drift it still permits in shared tokens can corrupt the prompt's function on past classes. What must be preserved is the prompt's behavior. We propose TEA-Prompt, which couples (i) a token evaluation module that assigns each prompt token a continuous, input-conditional relevance score injected into the attention logits, softly specializing tokens across tasks without discarding any of them, and (ii) an attention-behavior anchoring loss that constrains each token's attention output around class-specific query regions using only compact Gaussian query statistics without stored old images, weighted by the token's past relevance. Anchoring the attention value allows the parameters to continue updating freely, as long as their interaction remains unchanged. TEA-Prompt achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with markedly lower forgetting on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200 with only 0.38M parameters. Code is publicy available at https://github.com/cuonga1cvp/TEA-Prompt.git
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The future of AI hinges on… Jensen Huang’s sex life?
I would prefer that these people's sex lives were none of my business but I guess we have to talk about Jensen Huang and the…
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Scaling Taxonomy-Free Image Labeling with Generative AI: A Multimodal
Providing real-time multimodal insights into images is challenging because it requires low latency, high description accuracy, and scalable solutions that are both cost-effective and efficient. For example, given a new image of an outfit, we would like to generate insights that the image depicts "earth tones" and "linen pants" and allow users to explore similar ideas along these themes. Traditional strategies to generate such insights would typically involve building taxonomies producing a golden set labeled by humans, training models on these datasets, and deploying these models for online inference services. Such workflows are constrained by fixed taxonomy, high labeling cost, limited labeling coverage in sample space, and human errors and expertise gaps in labelers. In addition, these methods are expensive and cumbersome to iterate over time. Recent trends have started exploring generative AI models for online insights, but this method suffers from long latency and prohibitive costs to support a high volume of requests or large amounts of offline labeling needs. We present Generative Labeling On Clusters (GLOC) as a solution to provide highly scalable, cost-effective, low latency, and high accuracy online image insight services. GLOC leverages highly optimized image embeddings to form image clusters that are semantically close to each other for the purpose of the type of insights, and summarizes the insights at the cluster level, which effectively generalizes to members in the cluster. At Pinterest, GLOC powers image descriptors and pivot query suggestions for Hybrid Search, which is a multimodal search service enabling users to search with both an image and a text query. Our offline and online A/B tests demonstrate that GLOC significantly outperforms previous methods, delivering improvements in quality and efficiency.
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GeoScope: Training-Free Program Execution beyond the Counting Horizon for Ultra-High-Resolution Remote Sensing Question Answering
In ultra-high-resolution (UHR) remote sensing images, the objects that questions count in a region or relate by direction often span only a few pixels. Existing methods mainly decide where a vision-language model (VLM) should look and trust its answer in the chosen view. We show that this assumption fails for counting, and measure VLMs as one calibrates a sensor. All eight open VLMs tested fall increasingly short once a view holds more than a certain number of objects, about five for most on DOTA aerial images. This counting horizon narrows as views grow and objects appear smaller. An empirical power-law response model predicts the undercount a split recovers and the spurious counts it adds, and supports the rule of splitting only views beyond the horizon. In GeoScope, a text-only language model parses the question into a typed spatial program that fixes the region and its resolution. The VLM only grounds and counts within its operating range, and directions are computed explicitly from the grounded boxes. To our knowledge, it is the first UHR method to split views by a measured limit of the VLM. Without training, it improves Qwen3-VL-8B by 16.3 points on regional counting and 10.5 on spatial relations in XLRS-Bench, and has the highest reported accuracy, trained methods included, on regional counting and on the whole benchmark by question. On UHR-Micro it improves global and regional counting by 16.8 and 36.2 points, 15.6 of the former from splitting. On MME-RealWorld counting it gains 11.4 points, and we show that an option that is almost never correct yet often chosen distorts comparisons there. Project page: https://avalon-s.github.io/GeoScope/
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