The devil’s in the details.

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Originally posted on 8 January 2025, and updated for the new Procedural Bridge tool. SideFX has begun releasing custom Houdini tools developed for Project Grot, its in-house tech demo intended to showcase procedural world-building techniques for game development. The first two tools are for generating procedural ruins and for generating procedural strands of flesh, both also available as .hda files that can be used in Unreal Engine. Project Grot: showcasing art-directable techniques for building game worlds procedurally Like 2022’s Project Titan, Project Grot is an in-house tech demo designed to test procedural workflows for creating 3D environment content for use in games.The art-directed scene depicts an ancient, cave-like environment, partially filled with lava, and with walls and rocks covered with unnervingly organic-looking strands of ‘flesh’. It was created by a team of five artists working under a two-month deadline, with the custom procedural tools created in Houdini then used to lay out the level inside Unreal Engine 5. Procedural ruins, procedural flesh and procedural bridge tools now available to download So far, two of those custom procedural tools have been released publicly, the first being one for generating procedural ruins.Shown in the video above, it enables artists to turn rough blockout geometry into detailed high-poly meshes by painting areas of procedural damage on their surfaces using vertex colors. The other, shown in the video at the top of the story, generates procedural webs of flesh. It makes use of raycasting to shoot curves between surfaces in the scene that will later become flesh, then clusters curves based on proximity to give an organic structure to the results. Updated 24 April 2025: SideFX has released a new Project Grot tool, for generating procedural ‘bridges’ – the horizontal rock structures bridging the caverns. Unlike the first two tools, it is only available as a Houdini .hip file. The Project Grot homepage also hosts videos without downloadable supporting files on creating the volcanic landscape and lava, and creating a rock-generation tool. Price and system requirements The Project Grot tools are available free as Houdini .hip files. Some also include .hda files that can be imported and edited in DCC applications compatible with Houdini Engine, including Unreal Engine. To use the .hda files inside Unreal Engine 5, you will need the Houdini Engine for Unreal plugin. It is now included in the Houdini installer, and is free for use on commercial projects, but only works with commercial licenses of the software, not free Houdini Apprentice licenses. You can find pricing and system requirements for Houdini in this story on Houdini 20.5. Read more about Project Grot on the SideFX website Download the free Project Grot procedural ruins tool for Houdini and Unreal Engine Download the free Project Grot procedural flesh tool for Houdini and Unreal Engine Download the free Project Grot procedural bridges tool for Houdini Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.

The pretraining efficiency and generalization of large language models (LLMs) are significantly influenced by the quality and diversity of the underlying training corpus. Traditional data curation pipelines often treat quality and diversity as separate objectives, applying quality filtering followed by domain balancing. This sequential optimization overlooks the complex interdependencies between these factors. High-quality datasets frequently exhibit domain biases, while diversified datasets may compromise quality. In the context of fixed training budgets, there is a critical need to simultaneously optimize for both dimensions to maximize model performance. However, defining and jointly optimizing quality and diversity remain non-trivial challenges. ByteDance Introduces QuaDMix ByteDance presents QuaDMix, a unified data selection framework that systematically balances quality and diversity during LLM pretraining. QuaDMix evaluates each data sample based on multiple quality criteria and domain classifications and determines its sampling probability through a parameterized function. The framework employs proxy model experiments combined with LightGBM-based regression to predict downstream performance, enabling efficient parameter optimization without exhaustive large-scale training. Experiments demonstrate that QuaDMix achieves an average performance improvement of 7.2% across multiple benchmarks compared to methods optimizing quality and diversity separately, underscoring the effectiveness of a joint approach. QuaDMix operates in three principal stages: feature extraction, quality aggregation, and quality-diversity aware sampling. Initially, each document is annotated with domain labels and multiple quality scores. These scores are normalized and merged using domain-specific parameters to compute an aggregated quality score. Documents are subsequently sampled according to a sigmoid-based function that prioritizes higher-quality samples while maintaining domain balance through parameterized controls. Optimization is performed by training thousands of proxy models across different parameter settings. A regression model, trained on these proxy experiments, predicts performance outcomes, enabling identification of optimal sampling configurations. This method allows for a structured exploration of a high-dimensional parameter space, aligning data selection more closely with intended downstream tasks. QuaDMix provides several advantages: Unified optimization of data quality and domain diversity. Adaptability to task-specific requirements through proxy evaluation target selection. Computational efficiency by circumventing exhaustive full-model retraining. Consistent downstream performance improvements without increasing compute budgets. Experimental Results and Insights Validation experiments were conducted using the RefinedWeb dataset, training 530M parameter models from scratch. QuaDMix was compared against several baselines, including Random Selection, Fineweb-edu, AskLLM, DCLM, DSIR, and RegMix. QuaDMix consistently outperformed these methods, achieving an average score of 39.5% across nine diverse benchmarks. Key observations include: Joint optimization strategies consistently outperform isolated quality- or diversity-focused methods. Proxy model performance correlates strongly with large-scale model outcomes, validating the efficacy of the proxy-based approach. Data mixtures optimized for specific downstream tasks further enhance task performance. Merging multiple quality criteria reduces inherent biases and improves overall model robustness. Expanding token diversity beyond a certain threshold yields diminishing returns, emphasizing the importance of curated quality over sheer quantity. Conclusion QuaDMix offers a principled approach to data selection for LLM pretraining, addressing the longstanding challenge of simultaneously optimizing data quality and diversity. By integrating quality aggregation and domain-aware sampling within a unified framework and leveraging proxy-based optimization, QuaDMix establishes a scalable methodology for enhancing LLM pretraining efficiency. While there are opportunities for future improvements—such as refining the parameter space and enhancing proxy model fidelity—QuaDMix represents a significant step towards more systematic and effective data curation strategies for large-scale model development. Check out the Paper. Also, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram Channel and LinkedIn Group. Don’t Forget to join our 90k+ 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/Google AI Unveils 601 Real-World Generative AI Use Cases Across IndustriesAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/A Coding Implementation with Arcade: Integrating Gemini Developer API Tools into LangGraph Agents for Autonomous AI WorkflowsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Meta AI Introduces Token-Shuffle: A Simple AI Approach to Reducing Image Tokens in TransformersAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/A Comprehensive Tutorial on the Five Levels of Agentic AI Architectures: From Basic Prompt Responses to Fully Autonomous Code Generation and Execution

Apr 27, 2025Ravie LakshmananKubernetes / Cloud Security Microsoft has revealed that a threat actor it tracks as Storm-1977 has conducted password spraying attacks against cloud tenants in the education sector over the past year. "The attack involves the use of AzureChecker.exe, a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that is being used by a wide range of threat actors," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in an analysis. The tech giant noted that it observed the binary to connect to an external server named "sac-auth.nodefunction[.]vip" to retrieve an AES-encrypted data that contains a list of password spray targets. The tool also accepts as input a text file called "accounts.txt" that includes the username and password combinations to be used to carry out the password spray attack. "The threat actor then used the information from both files and posted the credentials to the target tenants for validation," Microsoft said. In one successful instance of account compromise observed by Redmond, the threat actor is said to have taken advantage of a guest account to create a resource group within the compromised subscription. The attackers then created more than 200 containers within the resource group with the ultimate goal of conducting illicit cryptocurrency mining. Microsoft said containerized assets, such as Kubernetes clusters, container registries, and images, are liable to various kinds of attacks, including using - Compromised cloud credentials to facilitate cluster takeover Container images with vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to carry out malicious actions Misconfigured management interfaces to gain access to the Kubernetes API and deploy malicious containers or hijack the entire cluster Nodes that run on vulnerable code or software To mitigate such malicious activities, organizations are advised to secure container deployment and runtime, monitor unusual Kubernetes API requests, configure policies to prevent containers from being deployed from untrusted registries and ensure that the images being deployed in containers are free from vulnerabilities. Found this article interesting? Follow us on Twitter  and LinkedIn to read more exclusive content we post. SHARE    

The Department of Education will send defaulted loans to debt collection starting May 5. What to do if you're behind on payments.

Edgar Cervantes / Android AuthorityTL;DR YouTube has begun rolling out a redesigned video player interface for its web platform. The new video UI features clearer pill-shaped controls, but users say they can no longer scroll on the volume bar to adjust volume. YouTube‘s first uploaded video just turned 20 years old, and the video platform has spent almost a decade with the current UI for the web video player. We’re all so used to the look and layout of the buttons that any change will disturb ten years’ worth of muscle memory. Google is marking the special occasion of twenty years of video uploads with a new UI for the web video player, but as expected, users aren’t taking kindly to the change.Several users are reporting that a new UI is appearing in some videos on YouTube’s website. Reddit user NoSpHiel got the new UI on their second account, but not on their primary account, and this is what it looks like: As you can see, the new UI features buttons for each prominent action. The Play/Pause button is prominent, followed by the Next button, the video timestamp, and video chapters — all in their own pills/capsules. The volume button is being shifted onto the other side, sharing its capsule with the rest of the action icons.Reddit user D-Meme-DThe video window also swaps the black gradient fade layer on the bottom edge for opaque buttons, which are better for legibility and give a cleaner view of the entire video.This Reddit user likes the new UI, but several others hate it. Some users are especially displeased with the audio slider, but we haven’t seen images of what it looks like in its expanded avatar in the new UI. Seemingly, you can no longer hover on the volume slider and scroll or even use the up/down keys to adjust the audio, which would be a significant feature regression if it indeed is the case.Have you received the new YouTube UI? Do you like it, or do you hate it? Vote below and let us know more in the comments below! Do you like YouTube's new video player UI on the web?7036 votesGot a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at news@androidauthority.com. You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.Follow

Image: Nintendo LifeNintendo has confirmed the Switch 2 will be arriving on 5th June 2025, but why exactly did it choose this specific month? Speaking to NPR recently, Nintendo of America president Doug Bowser revealed some of the reasons behind this decision - explaining how there is really no specific time frame as to when you "must" launch video games, or a console in this case, and both the hardware and games were "ready to launch". Locally, it's also the start of the summer season which makes a device like the Switch 2 a 'win' at home or when out and about travelling. Here's exactly what he had to say: Doug Bowser: "We like to think that the year is a year and that there are no specific time frames when you should or must launch video games. And so, as we looked at the games that we had prepared and ready to launch with the hardware, we thought June was a very good timing. It's the start of summer season, and obviously, with a Nintendo Switch 2, you have a device that you can both play at home and play at home docked like a gaming console, or you can take it out of the dock and take it on the go. So it's a perfect game [device] for summer travel." In the leadup to Nintendo's Switch 2 reveal, there were multiple rumours about how the new system might have followed a similar release schedule to the original Switch (with a possible launch in the earlier months of the year). Now that June has been locked in as the official launch date, it means Nintendo should still have plenty of time to replenish stock before 2025's holiday season - which will bring in even more sales in the first year of the system's life. So soon! One for the history books But new tariffs is "something we're going to have to address." What are your thoughts about the Switch 2 releasing this June? Let us know in the comments. [source npr.org, via nintendoeverything.com] See Also Share:0 4 Liam is a news writer and reviewer for Nintendo Life and Pure Xbox. He's been writing about games for more than 15 years and is a lifelong fan of Mario and Master Chief. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment... Related Articles Nintendo Confirms Upgrade Pack Price For More 'Switch 2 Edition' Titles Update: Some US prices also confirmed Where To Pre-Order Nintendo Switch 2 Where to buy Switch 2 consoles, accessories & games Feature: 27 GameCube Games We'd Love To See On Nintendo Switch 2 NSO Born to Play... on Switch 2 Paul Rudd Returns In An Awesome SNES-Style Switch 2 Commercial Super together!

Amazon is raising eyebrows with the timing of its big book sale for 2025, which runs from April 23 to 28 — which means it’s competing directly with Independent Bookstore Day. As writer Maris Kreisman explained in Lit Hub, Independent Bookstore Day is an annual event organized by the American Booksellers Association (ABA), with events, special guests, and exclusive merchandise at 1,600 participating bookstores. And this year, it’s taking place on April 26 (today). “I implore you: if you live near an indie bookstore (and I know that many of us still don’t and I hope one day we all do), you must go,” Kreizman said. Indie bookstores do appear to be on the upswing in the United States, at least according to last year’s numbers from the ABA. But of course, Amazon remains dominant — in 2020, a House committee estimated that the company controlled more than 50% of the total online and offline print book market, and it’s even more dominant in e-books. So it’s not exactly a good look for the company to time its big sale to compete with a nationwide, celebratory bookstore event. In fact, Bookshop.org — an Amazon competitor that partners with indie bookstores — emailed customers with a note from CEO Andy Hunter describing Amazon’s sale as “a calculated move by a company that has already put half the bookstores in the country out of business, controls over 60% of the market and sells far more books than all indie bookstores combined.” “The people at Amazon responsible for the timing of their ‘Book Sale’ should be ashamed, but they are shameless,” Hunter said. Amazon, however, released a statement describing the timing overlap as “unintentional”: “The dates for our sale were set this year to accommodate additional participating countries.” Given the company’s scale, it’s certainly possible that Independent Bookstore Day barely registered with the people scheduling the sale. Even so, ABA CEO Allison Hill told Vulture, “At best it’s insensitive and at worst it seems like a tactic to hurt small businesses.”

Anthony Smith retires from MMA after a brutal loss to Zhang Mingyang at UFC Kansas City, closing a resilient career with a heartfelt farewell from the promotion.