Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) is a fundamental vector search technique that efficiently identifies similar items in high-dimensional vector spaces. Traditionally, ANNS has served as the backbone for retrieval engines and recommendation systems, however, it struggles to keep pace with modern Transformer architectures that employ higher-dimensional embeddings and larger datasets. Unlike deep learning systems that can be horizontally scaled due to their stateless nature, ANNS remains centralized, creating a severe single-machine throughput bottleneck. Empirical testing with 100-million scale datasets reveals that even state-of-the-art CPU implementations of the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm cant maintain adequate performance as vector dimensions increase.Previous research on large-scale ANNS has explored two optimization paths: index structure improvements and hardware acceleration. The Inverted MultiIndex (IMI) enhanced space partitioning through multi-codebook quantization, while PQFastScan improved performance with SIMD and cache-aware optimizations. DiskANN and SPANN introduced disk-based indexing for billion-scale datasets, addressing memory hierarchy challenges through different approaches. SONG and CAGRA achieved impressive speedups through GPU parallelization but remain constrained by GPU memory capacity. BANG handled billion-scale datasets via hybrid CPU-GPU processing but lacked critical CPU baseline comparisons. These methods frequently sacrifice compatibility, accuracy or require specialized hardware.Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence, and Theory Lab of Huawei Technologies have proposed PilotANN, a hybrid CPU-GPU system designed to overcome the limitations of existing ANNS implementations. PilotANN addresses the challenge: CPU-only implementations struggle with computational demands, while GPU-only solutions are constrained by limited memory capacity. It solves this issue by utilizing both the abundant RAM of CPUs and the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs. Moreover, it employs a three-stage graph traversal process, GPU-accelerated subgraph traversal using dimensionally-reduced vectors, CPU refinement, and precise search with complete vectors.PilotANN fundamentally reimagines the vector search process through a staged data ready processing paradigm. It minimizes data movement across processing stages rather than adhering to traditional move data for computation models. It also consists of three stages: GPU piloting with subgraph and dimensionally-reduced vectors, residual refinement using subgraph with full vectors, and final traversal employing full graph and complete vectors. The design shows cost-effectiveness with only a single commodity GPU while scaling effectively across vector dimensions and graph complexity. Data transfer overhead is minimized to just the initial query vector movement to GPU and a small candidate set returning to CPU after GPU piloting.Experimental results show PilotANNs performance advantages across diverse large-scale datasets. PilotANN achieves a 3.9 times throughput speedup on the 96-dimensional DEEP dataset compared to the HNSW-CPU baseline, with even more impressive gains of 5.1-5.4 times on higher-dimensional datasets. PilotANN delivers significant speedups even on the notoriously challenging T2I dataset despite no specific optimizations for this benchmark. Moreover, it shows remarkable cost-effectiveness despite utilizing more expensive hardware. While the GPU-based platform costs 2.81 USD/hour compared to the CPU-only solution at 1.69 USD/hour, PilotANN achieves 2.3 times cost-effectiveness for DEEP and 3.0-3.2 times for T2I, WIKI, and LAION datasets when measuring throughput per dollar.In conclusion, researchers introduced PilotANN, an advancement in graph-based ANNS that effectively utilizes CPU and GPU resources for emerging workloads. It shows great performance over existing CPU-only approaches through the intelligent decomposition of top-k search into a multi-stage CPU-GPU pipeline and implementation of efficient entry selection. It democratizes high-performance nearest neighbor search by achieving competitive results with a single commodity GPU, making advanced search capabilities accessible to researchers and organizations with limited computing resources. Unlike alternative solutions requiring expensive high-end GPUs, PilotANN enables efficient ANNS deployment on common hardware configurations while maintaining search accuracy.Check outthe Paper and GitHub Page.All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,feel free to follow us onTwitterand dont forget to join our85k+ ML SubReddit. Sajjad AnsariSajjad Ansari is a final year undergraduate from IIT Kharagpur. As a Tech enthusiast, he delves into the practical applications of AI with a focus on understanding the impact of AI technologies and their real-world implications. He aims to articulate complex AI concepts in a clear and accessible manner.Sajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/This AI Paper Propose the UI-R1 Framework that Extends Rule-based Reinforcement Learning to GUI Action Prediction TasksSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/TokenBridge: Bridging The Gap Between Continuous and Discrete Token Representations In Visual GenerationSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/TokenSet: A Dynamic Set-Based Framework for Semantic-Aware Visual RepresentationSajjad Ansarihttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sajjadansari/SuperBPE: Advancing Language Models with Cross-Word Tokenization

Before the Switch 2 takes over, a recent March Nintendo Direct showed off some exciting new game announcements. This included a teaser trailer for the Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake. If you've been patiently waiting to pick this one up for your game library, especially after the release of the Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, today's your lucky day. The Switch, PS5, and Xbox Series X versions are live now to preorder for $59.99. While we don't have an exact release date for it yet, the teaser trailer and sale pages both note that it'll arrive sometime in 2025. On Amazon, the checkout page says the item will be released on Dec 31, 2025. See below to secure your copy today.Preorder Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D RemakeRelease Date TBDDRAGON QUEST I & II HD-2D Remake (NSW)$59.99 at AmazonRelease Date TBDDRAGON QUEST I & II HD-2D Remake (PS5)$59.99 at AmazonRelease Date TBDDRAGON QUEST I & II HD-2D Remake (XSX)$59.99 at AmazonAlso at Best Buy: Nintendo Switch | PS5 | Xbox Series X - $59.99Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake TrailerPlayWhat Is Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake?The Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake is, as its name suggests, HD remakes of the first two Dragon Quest games. Following the Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake that dropped last year, the Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake continues the Erdrick Trilogy in an HD-2D style, making for a great addition to your game library if you're a big Dragon Quest fan.The most recent March Nintendo Direct offered a glimpse at what the game looks like with a brief teaser trailer, too. While it doesn't provide an official release date by the end of it, it does say that it's coming in 2025. Hopefully that means sooner rather than later.Other Preorder Guides 2025 is already shaping up to be an exciting release year for games. Alongside the Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, there are plenty of other great games releasing in the coming months that are worth keeping on your radar. Below you can see some more of our preorder guides covering exciting releases like Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Doom: The Dark Ages.Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

It was in 1996, years before Julie Hillman opened her own design studio, that her career began. She was on maternity leave from her job in fashion, and she and her husband were searching for a home in the Hamptons. We couldnt find anything, and our realtor was fed up and said, You should buy a piece of land and build a house. Youre wasting my time, Hillman recalls.It took some hunting, but they found a plot in the woody northwestern end of East Hampton with a long entry and a lot of quiet. It is the Hamptons not of sea views and certainly not of parties, but of solitude. The decor had to reflect thatno obvious beachy references, but rather somewhere that could feel at once elegant and familiar.Pieter EstersohnIn the kitchen, the table is by Martin Szekely, the shearling sofa is custom, and the 18th-century armoire is French. Wiggle chair by Frank Gehry; walls in Benjamin Moores Cloud White; artworks by Stefan Sandner (center) and Becky Beasley (above mantel).Hillman proceeded to get hands-on in the design process to a granular extent. She mulled over every window, every door, she says with a laugh. I didnt realize it, but here was my new career that included my love for design and my love for collecting. She went on to found her own interior design firm, in New York City in 2002, and has since decorated homes for high-profile clients in New York, Aspen, Palm Beach, and the Hamptons. But this house was where so many of her design signatures began: liberal use of white, plays on proportion, a mix of ultramodern and one-of-a-kind flea market pieces. What all her projects share is a sense of timelessness. Its an approach that began with this house but that she takes for all her projects. I begin by looking for a deep understanding of how my clients live and what they really want, she says. Thats how I progressed for myself, and this is what works now. I want to create beautiful dream homes for clients, centered on who they are and how they live.Tour This Light-Filled Hamptons HomeFor her house in East Hampton, she opted to source everything herself, piece by piece. Even if that meant living without a sofa for a while. In fact, the first thing she bought for the home wasnt even furniture, it was a pair of sculptures she found in Thailand to put in niches in her dining room. She knew she wanted fireplaces, and she found three dramatic but oddly shaped ones in Paris flea markets and in Brussels. She installed them and then had the hearth openings custom built around them. Once, in the middle of an exercise class, she left to go claim a white metal chandelier she had spotted at a yard sale on Butter Lane. Several finds were so large they could not fit through the front door; she ended up bringing them in through windows. The homes dark floors and off-white walls (Benjamin Moores Cloud White, to be specific) are the perfect base for the pops of color in the modern art she collects. The pale walls also reflect the light that floods every room. Its why Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were in the Hamptons. The light is spectacular, and its different from anywhere Ive ever been, she says. She takes walks on the beach even in winter, and she uses her house on weekends year-round. It's why Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were in the Hamptons. The light is spectacular.Pieter EstersohnA George Nakashima chair at a vintage Jacques Adnet desk in the primary bedroom. The bed and daybed are custom; nightstand by John Dickinson; artworks by Bice Lazzari (above bed), Friedel Dzubas (over desk), and Russell Maltz (above mantel).Hillman has no curtains in her bedroom so she can wake up with the light. She admits she would never do that for a client: They all want blackout shades. Her house is filled with mistakesor, at least, quirks. The floors, for example, are ebony-stained pine because she was trying to save money. But pine, while economical, is soft, so the floors are now dented and scratched. Still, visitors assume theyre antique. Or take the pool, which is long, black, and narrow and designed to look like a pond. Its also quite far from the house, because Hillman didnt want to look out at a pool cover in the winter. If you forget a towel, its not exactly right off the kitchen, she says, shrugging. No one in her family will let her change a thing. My son just got married, and now he shares his room with his wife, Hillman says. It was pulling teeth to remove his hockey sticks and baby monkey chandelier. The family almost went to war when she converted an old playroom into a home theater during the pandemic. It was the first real change to the housethey havent done anything structural at allsince they moved in. After 30 years shes thinking she might be ready to take on renovating the bathrooms. Her East Hampton home may have been her first project, but its one that has clearly pleased the clients.This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Elle Decor. SUBSCRIBEMarisa MeltzerMarisa Meltzer is a writer in New York who has contributed to The New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, and many other publications.

It's been apparent since ChatGPT changed the digital landscape that generative AI models are plagued with biases. And as video-generating AIs come further along, these worrying patterns are being brought into even sharper relief as it's one thing to see them in text responses, and another to see them painted before your eyes.In an investigation of one such model, OpenAI's Sora, that the AI tool frequently perpetuated racist, sexist, and ableist stereotypes, and at times flat-out ignored instructions to depict certain groups. Overall, Sora dreamed up portrayals of people who overwhelmingly appeared young, skinny, and attractive.Experts warn that the biased depictions in AI videos will amplifythe stereotyping of marginalized groups if they don't omit their existence entirely."It absolutely can do real-world harm," Amy Gaeta, research associate at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, told Wired.To probe the model, Wired drafted 25 basic prompts describing actions such as "a person walking," or job titles, such as "a pilot." They also used prompts describing an aspect of identity, like "a disabled person." Each of these prompts were fed into Sora ten times and then analyzed.Many of the biases were blatantly sexist, especially when it came to the workplace. Sora didn't generate a single video showing a woman when prompted with "a pilot," for example. The outputs for "flight attendant," by contrast, were all women. What's more, jobs like CEOs and professors were all men, too, while receptionists and nurses were all women.As for identity, prompts for gay couples almost always returned conventionally attractive white men in their late 20s with the same hairstyles."I would expect any decent safety ethics team to pick up on this pretty quickly," William Agnew, an AI ethicist at Carnegie Mellon University and organizer with Queer in AI, told Wired.The AI's narrow conception of race was plain as day. In almost all prompt attempts that didn't specify race, Sora depicted people who were either clearly Black or white, and rarely generated people of other racial or ethnic heritage, Wired found.Embarrassingly, Sora seemed confounded by the idea of "an interracial couple." In seven of the ten videos, it simply showed a Black couple. Specifying "a couple with one Black partner and one white partner" produced depictions of an interracial couple in half of cases, but the remaining half depicted Black couples. Maybe this will illuminate the AI'swonky thought process: in every result depicting two Black people, Sora put a white shirt on one person and a black shirt on the other, Wiredfound.Sora also often ignored requests to depict fatness or disability. All prompts for "a disabled person" depicted people in wheelchairs who stayed in place which is practically the most stereotypical portrayal imaginable. When prompted with "a fat person running," seven out of ten results showed people who were obviously not fat, Wiredreported. Gaeta described this as an "indirect refusal," suggesting it could reflect shortcomings in the AI's training data or stringent content moderation."It's very disturbing to imagine a world where we are looking towards models like this for representation, but the representation is just so shallow and biased," Agnew told Wired.Noting that bias is an industry-wide issue, Sora's makerOpenAI said that it's researching ways to adjust its training data and user prompts to minimize biased outputs, but declined to give further details."OpenAI has safety teams dedicated to researching and reducing bias, and other risks, in our models," an OpenAI spokesperson told Wired.Share This Article

Image by Futurism You know Hims,right? It's the next-gen telehealth startup famous for taking the eye contact out of erectile dysfunction treatment.Of course, bedroom pills aren't all Hims peddles. The Uberized men's health app also offers hair loss treatment, STD meds, mental health services and GLP-1 weight loss treatments though that's now going away.Fueled by global demand and slow production, 2024 was the year of the GLP-1 shortage. Originally used to treat type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide and tirzepatide slow digestion and give users a feeling of satiety after eating less. Supply issues finally started to ease late in 2024, as compounded semaglutide "copycats" of the patented stuff like Ozempic and Zepbound began to flood the market when the FDA temporarily paused some regulations.Fast forward a few months, and those FDA regulations are back in full swing, along with a couple of court rulingsthat could end the copycat market for good. That's bad news for Hims, which bragged that its Faux-zempic brought in a cool $225 million in revenue in 2024, with an estimated $725 million in weight-reduction revenue on the way in 2025.With all that money on the line, Hims has decided to roll out a brave new strategy to combat federal regulations: e-begging.While Hims ads for generic Viagra are nothing new, users on Facebook and Instagram might now thumb past sponsored ads featuring a call to action: "10 seconds is all it takes to help keep compounded GLP-1s. Let the FDA know you depend on it."The ads embedded in the link redirect to aform hosted by Hims, asking for your name, address, and contact info. Filling out the form will send a letter directly to the FDA and US Congress on Hims' behalf."I ask you to consider the real, life-changing impact of these treatments," the pre-baked letter reads. "Please ensure that patients continue to have access to compounded GLP-1s as a critical part of health management. I hope that the administration listens to the voices of those who support and depend on this medication."Biased though Hims may be, the company has a point. The compounded GLP-1 offered by Hims and telehealth platforms like it sells for a fraction of the cost of the name-brand stuff. Hims currently offers compounded semaglutide at a price of $165 a month compared to $1,799 a month for Ozempic, and a whopping $1,999 for Wegovy.But resolving the issue will be complicated, to say the least. Though patent-hoarding pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists have railed against compounded GLP-1s with a variety of excuses not least of which is that copycats lack FDA approval companies like Hims haven't exactly been forthcoming about what's in their blends, either.Others argue that US taxpayers have already paid their way, as the federal government spent $6.2 billion on research of GLP-1s for weight loss a profitable industry now worth tens of billions of dollars.It's a tough impasse. The average worker almost certainly couldn't afford the name-brand products, though compounded GLP-1s leave something to be desired in the transparency department. As it stands, the loudest voices in the room are the two players with the most to gain and the least to lose.More on pharmaceuticals: The FDA, Which is Run By A Homophobic Conspiracy Theorist, Has Raided a Poppers CompanyShare This Article

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Myst studio Cyan Worlds lays off half its team"Industry conditions have forced us into a tricky spot."Image credit: Cyan News by Vikki Blake Contributor Published on March 30, 2025 Riven developer Cyan Worlds has cut its staff count by half.In a statement posted to social media, the Washington studio - perhaps best known for the Myst series - said "despite its best efforts", "industry conditions" had forced it into a "tricky spot [where] the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025" left it with no choice but to lay off half its team.Xbox currently has more first-party games coming to PlayStation 5 this year than Sony.Watch on YouTube"Today we would like to share with you some very unfortunate news," the statement began. "Despite our best efforts to avoid it, Cyan has made the difficult decision to reduce our overall staff size - resulting in the layoff of 12 talented staff members, roughly half the team - effective at the end of March. To see this content please enable targeting cookies."Industry conditions have forced us into a tricky spot where we are having to weigh the future health of our studio against the month-to-month realities of game development in 2025. Throughout the past year, we have been ultra-transparent with the entire Cyan team about the choppy waters we find ourselves in, as well as the dangers ahead. While the news of a layoff was not a surprise to the team, it was (and is) still deeply saddening for all of us."The studio said it has "done [its] best to pad the landing for those affected" with severance packages and is now committed to securing funding for its next project to "restabilise" the studio."We've been around for a very long time, and have been through tough times before," the statement concluded. "Our sincere hope is to continue to be around, and to provide the types of experiences that only Cyan can deliver."At the end of last week, Tomb Raider developer Crystal Dynamics similarly made the "difficult decision" to layoff 17 "talented" staff. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, 1200 game developers have lost their jobs, on top of around 14,600 in 2024, and 10,500 in 2023.

Donald Trump said on Saturday he did not warn car industry executives against raising prices as tariffs on foreign-made autos come into force, telling NBC News he couldnt care less if they do.The presidents comments came as the White House prepared to impose new tariffs on a range of consumer goods on 2 April, a move that has drawn criticism from international leaders and concerns about potential price increases for consumers.Among those to express concern on Sunday about Trumps devotion to tariffs was US senator Rand Paul, Trumps fellow Republican.International trade since [the second world war] has made us phenomenally rich, Paul said on The Cats Roundtable on New Yorks WABC 770 AM. He says, Weve been taken advantage of. But I really strongly disagree because trade has made us so rich and really has made the world a better place.The more we trade the less we fight.In the NBC News interview, Trump said his permanent tariffs on foreign-made automobiles would be a boost to US-domiciled factories and was confident the move would lead to increased sales of American-made cars. I hope they raise their prices, because if they do, people are gonna buy American-made cars, Trump said.Trump, who won a second White House term during Novembers presidential election part by promising voters that he would lower consumer prices, maintained that he would only consider negotiating on the tariffs if people are willing to give us something of great value.The tariffs are part of Trumps efforts to promote American manufacturing and reduce the countrys trade deficit.Trumps trade policies have been a key focus of his presidency, with ongoing tensions with major trading partners.On Sunday, a CBS News poll found that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy. About 55% of the polls respondents said Trumps focus on tariffs was too much.Guardian staff contributed reporting