Using Mixture of Experts to Fine-Tune Robotic Video Transformers

Video generation models have recently showcased impressive results, generating high quality visual features with realistic physics and motion. Such video generators are intriguing for robotics because after fine-tuning to the robotic embodiment, have the potential to serve as generalizable world models and real-world simulators. Among video generation approaches, masked video transformers provide a computationally efficient alternative to diffusion-based methods. Building on recent successes of Mixture of Experts (MoE) in transformer architectures, we propose a novel approach to improve pre-trained robotic video transformers using sparsely gated MoE. Our method replaces the feedforward layers of the transformer block with sparely gated MoE layers. We also introduce an innovative weight initialization scheme that improves training convergence while fine-tuning masked video transformers. We evaluate our method on the 1xgpt humanoid robotic dataset, demonstrating improvements in both cross-entropy loss (0.07 reduction) and LPIPS scores (0.007 reduction). Our findings suggest that MoE-based fine-tuning with strategic weight initialization can enhance the performance of robotic video transformers while maintaining computational efficiency through sparse expert activation

The Coxswain’s Widow: Charity, Heroism, and the Working Class in the Life and Death of James Maynard

In the months following the drowning of James Maynard, the circumstances of his death were commemorated in prose. A poem, “The Lifeboat,” was written by an accountant from Exeter named Samuel Steer. Describing James’ heroism and the tragedy of his loss, both to his family and the community at large, Steer published his work as part of a general fundraising effort for Thirza Maynard, widow of the late coxswain, and her eleven children. It was this poem that first drew me to the story of James Maynard—though he was my third great–grandfather, I knew nothing of his life or death before encountering “The Lifeboat.”8 From its lines emerged a narrative of heroism, charity, working–class ideals, intertwined with the history of a changing seaside community at the heart of the Victorian era. To Steer and the people of Bude, Cornwall, and beyond, James was the personification of popular British values of the nineteenth century: his story marks the intersections of class, gender, personal image, and patriotism at the forefront of contemporary social discourse. In this essay, I will follow the life of James Maynard, the repercussions of his death, and the extent to which these relate to the experiences of his widow, Thirza, the Exeter accountant Samuel Steer, and a myriad of other players, local and otherwise. His voice is never heard directly—he left no record of his personal thoughts and feelings—but his story remains nonetheless, told through accounts of his actions and efforts to do him justice. Through the magnification of a single tragic tale amidst a sea of history, this essay and the story of the late coxswain present a view of life, death, and British values of the Victorian era.&nbsp

On the Role of Luck for the Concentration of Capital and Piketty\u27s \u27Fundamental Force of Divergence\u27

We consider an overlapping generations version of a model suggested by Fargione, Lehmann and Polasky that allows us to show, by means of simulations, that randomness of the rate of return on capital, combined with inheritance of capital and consumption being a concave function of wealth may lead to an increasing concentration of capital. We can also show that the average rate of return being higher than the growth rate of aggregate income, r>g, does not necessarily lead to increasing concentration and that there are cases where concentration of capital does increase while the opposite inequality, g>r, holds

Image Generation at Different Detail Level: Scaling Skip Connections in ViT-based Diffusion Models

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) excel in image generation, but users have limited control over the level of detail and semantic richness in generated images. Although prompt-based diffusion models can create more detailed images with descriptive prompts and utilize spatial masks to preserve unedited regions, diffusion models frequently overlook these constraints, leading to inconsistent image regions. Inspired by transformers, where each feature level encodes varying semantic information, we propose a feature scaling method at inference for a ViT-based diffusion model, U-ViT. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 indicate that this scaling approach effectively adjusts the level of detail in generated images

Generalized Disappointment Aversion, Rare Disasters, and the Term Structure of Real Interest Rates

This study models a representative agent with generalized disappointment aversion preferences in an endowment economy. This model addresses the average upward slope in U.S. real bond yields, equity premium puzzle, and equity volatility puzzle. We integrate a two-state Markov switching process for economic cycles coupled with an independent rare disaster risk. During economic expansions, disaster risk increases the probability of disappointment, thereby reinforcing precautionary saving and reducing the risk-free rate. During recessions, diminished concern about disappointment encourages borrowing and increases the risk-free rate. This pattern engenders countercyclical fluctuations in risk-free rates and accounts for the upward-sloping average yield curve

Les données sont en péril!

This GIS Trends column offers another angle on data preservation (see my "Here Today, Here Tomorrow…" piece from the Summer 2024 issue, linked in the references section below). While last time we discussed the loss of research outputs and the data hosted therein with the retirement of Esri\u27s "Classic Story Maps", today we discuss the loss of more "stable" data sources, namely government sources. As we\u27ve seen, even something as simple as the name of a place (see Treisman, 2025 on the Gulf of Mexico) can be changed, though even that can lead to a question of changed for who (see Thiessen, 2025 on Denali)

L’oculomique : possibilités et défis pour l’optométrie

n/

Strong Spirits: A 1941 Court Martial Case of Canadian Sappers in England Who Decided to Shoot Up the Town

This paper presents the story of two Canadian sappers Lorne Long and Maurice Francis Flynn, who were stationed in England in February of 1941. In the true spirit of a hard days’ night, these sappers went pub crawling, got drunk, and decided to grab a rifle and shoot up the nearby town. When their bunkmate overheard the conversation, he reported it to their Lance Corporal, also drunk at the time, who in turn tried to apprehend them in the dark English countryside. Sapper Long did not like that and shot at him five times, missing every shot. Armed with a flashlight, the intoxicated Lance Corporal returned to the garrison garage and attempted to commandeer a truck for the manhunt. A sober captain stepped in and stopped him. The next morning, the hungover Long woke up in the woods as a stray dog was licking his face. He walked back, passed the guards without a problem, missed the formation while cleaning his rifle, and was promptly arrested. Looking at this incident through courts martial files and related documents, we will reconstruct the events and characters involved and try to understand why these men could behave like this only twenty years after prohibition

Mac Mapping in the Map Library by Colleen Beard

writes through passage revisits Colleen Beard\u27s Mac Mapping in the Map Library, which was originally published in the ACMLA Bulletin Number 76, 1990