Get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Marvel Studios Thunderbolts*, hitting theaters on May 2. This special featurette dives into the making of Marvels bold new chapter, blending anti-heroes, high-stakes missions, and explosive action.From stunt choreography to visual effects, the team reveals how they brought together fan-favorite characters in one gritty, high-energy film. With powerful performances, dynamic team-ups, and Marvels signature storytelling, Thunderbolts promises a darker, edgier tone.The post Marvel Studios Thunderbolts Making Of Featurette appeared first on Vfxexpress.

The team meticulously crafted a realistic hurricane, integrating torrential rain, wind-ripped environments, and dynamic debris to enhance immersion. Every raindrop and gust of wind reacted realistically to surfaces and motion, ensuring the world felt alive and weighty.More than just a visual element, the storm became an atmospheric force, heightening tension and urgency. This before-and-after breakdown reveals how FX can seamlessly blend into storytelling, making animation feel cinematic and real.PlatigeThe post Secret Level: Crossfire FX Simulations Breakdown appeared first on Vfxexpress.

TikTok is shutting down TikTok Noteswait, you didnt even know it existed? Well, that explains a lot.TikTok Notes, the platforms short-lived attempt to take on Instagram (just as Instagram Reels was built to mimic TikTok), is officially being retired. Launched in limited markets like Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year, the photo-sharing app let users post images with captionssimple enough, but apparently not compelling enough.Users are now being notified that TikTok Notes will shut down on May 8, with TikTok instead shifting focus to another ByteDance-owned platform: Lemon8.Were excited to bring the feedback from TikTok Notes to Lemon8 as we continue building a dedicated space for our community to share and experience photo content, designed to complement and enhance the TikTok experience, a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.Lemon8think Instagram meets Pinteresthas quietly been gaining traction, tripling its U.S. user base since last summer and hitting 12 million downloads. It reportedly had around 12.5 million global monthly active users by December 2024. TikTok didnt spell out why Notes is getting the axe, but given how few people knew about it . . . the writing was on the wall.In a notice to users, TikTok is urging anyone who used Notes to download and save their content before the app disappears for good. Theyre also encouraging creators to continue their creative journey on Lemon8 instead.Unlike TikToks vertical video scroll, Lemon8 leans photo-first, allowing users to post curated carousels and slideshows. Still, it borrows TikToks dual-feed format, with both a Following and For You feed for discovery.Dj vu? Thats because TikTok already started plugging Lemon8 as a backup late last year when a potential U.S. ban first loomed. Now, with a fresh April 5 deadline hanging over TikToks head, the strategy looks familiarand unchanged.The short lesson of TikTok Notes: if it aint broke, dont fix it. And if the whole app banned, I guess everyone panic.

On Wednesday, President Trump unveiled a series of sweeping tariffs that not only targeted major U.S. trading partners but also included small, remote islands and territories.Among the most unexpected entries on the list were the Heard and McDonald Islands, isolated sub-Antarctic volcanic islands located in the southern Indian Ocean, roughly halfway between Australia and South Africa. Though these islands are Australian territories, they are virtually uninhabited, with the only significant human presence occurring during Australian Antarctic Science expeditions. These expeditions generally take place every three years, lasting only a couple of months during the summer. For the majority of the time, the islands are left to their resident penguins and seals, with only occasional visits from commercial tourist groups, private expeditions, or fisheries and defense surveillance patrols.Despite their isolation, the islands appeared on a White House list of territories subject to new trade tariffs. According to the list, the Heard and McDonald Islands currently impose a 10 percent Tariff to the U.S.A., with a small note specifying that this includes currency manipulation and trade barriers. In return, the U.S. has announced discounted reciprocal tariffs at the same 10% rate.A White House official explained that the inclusion of the Heard and McDonald Islands is due to their status as Australian territory, as reported by Axios. The islands reportedly had no trade with the U.S. last year, according to the most recent U.S. data.The export figures from the Heard and McDonald Islands are equally perplexing. Despite having no permanent human population and only a fishery, the islands were recorded as having exported $1.4 million worth of goods to the U.S. in 2022, mostly classified as machinery and electrical imports. The exact nature of these goods remains unclear. Over the previous five years, imports from the islands ranged between $15,000 and $325,000 annually, as reported by The Guardian.Another unusual entry on Trumps tariff list is Jan Mayen, a volcanic island in the Arctic Ocean. Like the Heard and McDonald Islands, Jan Mayen has no permanent human inhabitants and is grouped with Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago known for its polar bears and small human population. Trump has set a 10 percent tariff for both Svalbard and Jan Mayen, while Norway itself faces a 15 percent tax on imports from the U.S.

Im not convinced.

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Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced the integration of visual and textual modalities, enabling progress in tasks such as image captioning, visual question answering, and document interpretation. However, the replication and further development of these models are often hindered by a lack of transparency. Many state-of-the-art MLLMs do not release key components, including training code, data curation methodologies, and pretraining datasets. Furthermore, the substantial computational resources required for training these models pose a significant barrier, particularly for academic researchers with limited infrastructure. This lack of accessibility impedes reproducibility and slows the dissemination of new techniques within the research community.Researchers from UC Santa Barbara, Bytedance and NVIDIA introduce Open-Qwen2VL, a 2-billion parameter Multimodal Large Language Model that has been pre-trained on 29 million image-text pairs using approximately 220 A100-40G GPU hours. Developed collaboratively by researchers from UC Santa Barbara, ByteDance, and Nvidia Research, Open-Qwen2VL is designed to address reproducibility and resource constraints in MLLM research. The project provides a complete suite of open-source resources, including the training codebase, data filtering scripts, WebDataset-formatted pretraining data, and both base and instruction-tuned model checkpoints. This comprehensive release aims to support transparent experimentation and method development in the multimodal learning domain.Open-Qwen2VL is based on the Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct LLM backbone, coupled with a SigLIP-SO-400M vision encoder. An Adaptive Average-Pooling Visual Projector reduces the number of visual tokens from 729 to 144 during pretraining, which improves computational efficiency. The token count is increased back to 729 during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. This low-to-high resolution strategy maintains image understanding capabilities while optimizing for resource usage.To further enhance training efficiency, Open-Qwen2VL implements multimodal sequence packing, allowing the concatenation of multiple image-text pairs into sequences of approximately 4096 tokens, thereby minimizing padding and computational overhead. The vision encoder parameters remain frozen during pretraining to conserve resources and are optionally unfrozen during SFT to improve downstream performance.Open-Qwen2VL is trained on only 0.36% of the token count used in Qwen2-VL, yet demonstrates comparable or superior performance across several benchmarks. The model achieves a score of 80.9 on MMBench, and performs competitively on SEEDBench (72.5), MMStar (49.7), and MathVista (53.1). Ablation studies indicate that integrating a small subset (5M samples) of high-quality image-text pairs filtered using MLM-based techniques can result in measurable performance improvements, highlighting the importance of data quality over volume.In addition, Open-Qwen2VL exhibits robust few-shot multimodal in-context learning capabilities. When evaluated on datasets such as GQA and TextVQA, the model shows 3% to 12% accuracy gains from 0-shot to 8-shot scenarios. Fine-tuning performance scales predictably with the size of the instruction tuning dataset, with performance gains plateauing around 8M examples from the MAmmoTH-VL-10M dataset.Open-Qwen2VL introduces a reproducible and resource-efficient pipeline for training multimodal large language models. By systematically addressing the limitations of prior models in terms of openness and compute requirements, it enables broader participation in MLLM research. The models design choicesincluding efficient visual token handling, multimodal sequence packing, and judicious data selectionillustrate a viable path forward for academic institutions aiming to contribute to the field. Open-Qwen2VL establishes a reproducible baseline and provides a foundation for future work on scalable, high-performance MLLMs within constrained computational environments.Check outthe Paper, Model, Data and Code.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. Asif RazzaqWebsite| + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Researchers from Dataocean AI and Tsinghua University Introduces Dolphin: A Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition ASR Model Optimized for Eastern Languages and DialectsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Introduction to MCP: The Ultimate Guide to Model Context Protocol for AI AssistantsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Snowflake Proposes ExCoT: A Novel AI Framework that Iteratively Optimizes Open-Source LLMs by Combining CoT Reasoning with off-Policy and on-Policy DPO, Relying Solely on Execution Accuracy as FeedbackAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Salesforce AI Introduce BingoGuard: An LLM-based Moderation System Designed to Predict both Binary Safety Labels and Severity Levels

With the wide release of the five-minute Superman sneak peek that was first shown at CinemaCon earlier this week, one thing stands out even more than Kryptos lovable (if painful for Superman) hijinks: Its the fact that James Gunn understands the most important thing he can do for his reboot of not just the Man of Steel, but the entire DC universe, is to make us care about the characters. All of the characters, great and small, Kryptonian and human, canine and, yes, even robot. Giggling robots.The extended preview features footage from the film that weve seen before, including of course Kal-Els incredibly cute super dog arriving on the icy scene when his master is at a real low point. But it expands on that sequence from the films first trailer, showing us that Krypto is very much the troublemaker Gunn has described him to be. Yes, Superman is bloodied and beaten, pleading with Krypto to take him home, but all the pup wants to do is play. And he makes this point by jumping on the hurt Supes with all of his super-dog strength, and even dragging Kal-Els leg up into an extremely awkward yet entirely believable pose. Play with me, Dad! hes saying, in deeds if not words. Its all very funny and it makes you love Krypto even more than you already did. Oh yes, you will believe that a super-powered dog can fly and be lovable.PlayBut Superman is hurt, and Krypto finally gets it, bringing Kal to the Fortress of Solitude. And thats where we meet that giggling robot, who is one of the keys to understanding why James Gunn is so good at what he does. But before we get to that, consider that the first time we ever saw Gunns version of the Last Son of Krypton in action, he was in bad shape beaten up, bleeding, needing his dog to save him. And we dont yet know who dished out this punishment either, so this first image of Gunns version of Superman battered and broken is not for the benefit of getting a villain over. Theres no look how scary this antagonist is because they beat the hell out of the Man of Steel. The purpose of beginning the entire marketing push for this film is to show Superman in dire straits and in need of help. Its a far cry from the typical introduction of any superhero, let alone the superhero, and yet it makes perfect sense coming from Gunn.Its the Harrison Ford Syndrome. Which isnt so much a syndrome as it is a legitimate strength of Fords on screen persona. Either way, think about how badly Indiana Jones gets roughed up. We dont love him because hes so good at fighting; its because hes tired and in pain just like the rest of us. Think about the scared-as-shit look on Fords face when he was on the run in The Fugitive, the desperate man leaping off of a dam en route to prove his innocence. Think about the hurt on Han Solos face, the fully bruised ego when he thought Leia was into Luke and not him at the start of Empire. Its an everyman appeal that few actors have ever really been able to pull off. Honestly, it might just be Ford and Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley that do it completely right. The point is, seeing your heroes beat up a little bit kind of makes you love them even more, especially when they rise to the occasion later to be, you know, heroes, despite everything theyve been through.Giving us a Superman who right off the bat has broken ribs, a jacked-up bladder, and is in awful pain is a very Gunn choice.Gunn knows this, and he has a track record of putting his characters through the ringer. Think back to the first time we met the Guardians of the Galaxy. The first trailer for that film shows that nobody knows Star-Lords name and that it stings a little. And yes, Star-Lord was a little known character from the depths of Marvels roster, and Superman is well, its almost apples to oranges, but Gunns approach is exactly the same here. Lets put some dents in our main character as quickly as we can. Lets meet a protagonist at a moment when theyre not heroic, not saving the day, when they dont even have the upper hand thats part of what makes Gunns superhero work resonate as well as anybodys ever been able to.So giving us a Superman who right off the bat has broken ribs, a jacked-up bladder, and is in awful pain even when/because his robots are healing him its a very Gunn choice, and it goes a long way to getting us invested in his version of a character who, lets not forget, has had like 10 movies and 15 TV shows or something at this point and is older than your grandparents. Superman and all his pals have been around forever, so why should we care about yet another version of his story?And not for nothing, its important to remember that a significant criticism has been lobbed at Superman over the years saying his invulnerability and squeaky clean boy scout-ness are just plain boring. He was, after all, created to be the best of us, but crafting interesting narratives around an overpowered alien with only a single weakness can start to get hard after a century. So how do you make this familiar story engaging? Opening on a shot of a damaged Kal-El is a great start, but we still need to fall for the supporting cast.And that brings us back to the giggling robot. Once Krypto gets his dad into the Fortress (which is a cool re-thinking of the classic Richard Donner ice-crystal Fortress of Solitude, only in this case one that grows out of the snowy landscape on command), the robots take custody of Superman as they carry the injured hero in to treat his wounds. In the comics we know that the bot known as Kelex is usually the main caretaker of the Fortress, although here we see the main robot has the simple designation of 4 on the Superman-shield on his chest.As they tend to Superman, 4 (voiced by Alan Tudyk) introduces the newest robot of the group: Meet 12. Shes new. Superman nods to her weakly, and 12 practically blushes, despite being made of metal, as she giggles and says Oh, he looked at me!DC Universe: Every Upcoming Movie and TV Show12 has just that one line of dialogue (we're not sure whos voicing the character but its gotta be someone we know, right?), but we're already so invested in her and these other robots that we're a little embarrassed to admit it. 4 also tells Kal-El that theres no need to thank them for their service because they have no consciousness whatsoever. Merely automatons here to serve. But you know what? We're calling bullshit on that right now, because you can be guaranteed that half of us are going to be crying when we see the movie and one of these robots gets killed (something that in fact has already been teased in the first trailer). Theres also something about Tudyks delivery of those lines, like hes dripping with sarcasm. No consciousness my red-briefs-clad-butt.So even while comics fans can dig in and try to figure out if 4 is Kelex or how Supermans biology works (he has intestines!) or whatever other lore or Easter egg stuff comes to mind, Gunn isnt actually that concerned with that stuff. At minimum, we feel comfortable saying it doesnt seem like his first priority. Yes, he understands the geeky things, hes a fan himself and hes read the comics and loves them, no doubt but what hes doing here is building out little character moments and beats that will make us actually care about these people. And robots. And dogs!This isnt gonna be a Superman movie as much as it is a James Gunn movie, and we cant wait.

New footage from TRON: Ares was unveiled today at Disneys CinemaCon presentation by two of its stars, Oscar winners Jared Leto and Jeff Bridges. The footage revealed the havoc unleashed when the highly sophisticated Program, Ares, enters the real world from the digital world. Its humanitys first encounter with AI beings and judging from this footage, its not the most cordial of meetings.Leto plays Ares, who is on a dangerous mission to our world which brings him into contact with Bridges Kevin Flynn, the protagonist of the prior two TRON films.The footage showed Ares on his red-tinged light cycle zooming through a real-world city pursued by police cars who are no match to catch him. The overwhelmed citizens are terrified by the sight of a giant hovering Recognizer looming over them. There was a quick shot of Gillian Andersons character, who appears to be a business executive.TRON: Ares ImagesThe emphasis of the footage -- which boasted music by Nine Inch Nails -- was on wild video game elements invading the real-world and the sort of terror and destruction they can yield. At one point, we hear Flynn say, Are you ready? Because theres no going back. And then we see Ares suiting up for action.The cast also includes Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Hasan Minhaj, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, and Cameron Monaghan. Directed by Joachim Rnning, TRON: Ares zooms into theaters on October 10, 2025.

Ivanti has disclosed details of a now-patched critical security vulnerability impacting its Connect Secure that has come under active exploitation in the wild.The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-22457 (CVSS score: 9.0), concerns a case of a stack-based buffer overflow that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on affected systems."A stack-based buffer overflow in Ivanti Connect Secure before version 22.7R2.6, Ivanti Policy Secure before version 22.7R1.4, and Ivanti ZTA Gateways before version 22.8R2.2 allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution," Ivanti said in an alert released Thursday.The flaw impacts the following products and versions -Ivanti Connect Secure (versions 22.7R2.5 and prior) - Fixed in version 22.7R2.6 (Patch released on February 11, 2025)Pulse Connect Secure (versions 9.1R18.9 and prior) - Fixed in version 22.7R2.6 (Contact Ivanti to migrate as the device has reached end-of-support as of December 31, 2024)Ivanti Policy Secure (versions 22.7R1.3 and prior) - Fixed in version 22.7R1.4 (To be available on April 21)ZTA Gateways (versions 22.8R2 and prior) - Fixed in version 22.8R2.2 (To be available on April 19)The company said it's aware of a "limited number of customers" whose Connect Secure and end-of-support Pulse Connect Secure appliances have been exploited. There is no evidence that Policy Secure or ZTA gateways have come under in-the-wild abuse."Customers should monitor their external ICT and look for web server crashes," Ivanti noted. "If your ICT result shows signs of compromise, you should perform a factory reset on the appliance and then put the appliance back into production using version 22.7R2.6."It's worth mentioning here that Connect Secure version 22.7R2.6 also addressed multiple critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-38657, CVE-2025-22467, and CVE-2024-10644) that could permit a remote authenticated attacker to write arbitrary files and execute arbitrary code.Google-owned Mandiant, in a bulletin of its own, said it observed evidence of exploitation of CVE-2025-22457 in mid-March 2025, allowing the threat actors to deliver an in-memory dropper called TRAILBLAZE, a passive backdoor codenamed BRUSHFIRE, and the SPAWN malware suite.The attack chain essentially involves the use of a multi-stage shell script dropper to execute TRAILBLAZE, which then injects BRUSHFIRE directly into the memory of a running web process in an attempt to sidestep detection. The exploitation activity is designed to establish persistent backdoor access on compromised appliances, potentially enabling credential theft, further network intrusion, and data exfiltration.The use of SPAWN is attributed to a China-nexus adversary tracked as UNC5221, which has a history of leveraging zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) devices, alongside other clusters such as UNC5266, UNC5291, UNC5325, UNC5330, UNC5337, and UNC3886.UNC5221, per the U.S. government, has also been assessed to share overlaps with threat groups such as APT27, Silk Typhoon, and UTA0178. However, the threat intelligence firm told The Hacker News that it does not have enough evidence on its own to confirm this connection."Mandiant tracks UNC5221 as a cluster of activity that has repeatedly exploited edge devices with zero-day vulnerabilities," Dan Perez, China Mission Technical Lead, Google Threat Intelligence Group, told the publication."The link between this cluster and APT27 made by the government is plausible, but we do not have independent evidence to confirm. Silk Typhoon is Microsoft's name for this activity, and we can't speak to their attribution."UNC5221 has also been observed leveraging an obfuscation network of compromised Cyberoam appliances, QNAP devices, and ASUS routers to mask their true source during intrusion operations, an aspect also highlighted by Microsoft early last month, detailing Silk Typhoon's latest tradecraft.The company further theorized that the threat actor likely analyzed the February patch released by Ivanti and figured out a way to exploit prior versions in order to achieve remote code execution against unpatched systems. The development marks the first time UNC5221 has been attributed to the N-day exploitation of a security flaw in Ivanti devices."This latest activity from UNC5221 underscores the ongoing targeting of edge devices globally by China-nexus espionage groups," Charles Carmakal, Mandiant Consulting CTO, said."These actors will continue to research security vulnerabilities and develop custom malware for enterprise systems that don't support EDR solutions. The velocity of cyber intrusion activity by China-nexus espionage actors continues to increase and these actors are better than ever." Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post.