STEVE-1: A Generative Model for Text-to-Behavior in Minecraft

Constructing AI models that respond to text instructions is challenging, especially for sequential decision-making tasks. This work introduces an instruction-tuned Video Pretraining (VPT) model for Minecraft called STEVE-1, demonstrating that the unCLIP approach, utilized in DALL-E 2, is also effective for creating instruction-following sequential decision-making agents. STEVE-1 is trained in two steps: adapting the pretrained VPT model to follow commands in MineCLIP's latent space, then training a prior to predict latent codes from text. This allows us to finetune VPT through self-supervised behavioral cloning and hindsight relabeling, bypassing the need for costly human text annotations. By leveraging pretrained models like VPT and MineCLIP and employing best practices from text-conditioned image generation, STEVE-1 costs just $60 to train and can follow a wide range of short-horizon open-ended text and visual instructions in Minecraft. STEVE-1 sets a new bar for open-ended instruction following in Minecraft with low-level controls (mouse and keyboard) and raw pixel inputs, far outperforming previous baselines. We provide experimental evidence highlighting key factors for downstream performance, including pretraining, classifier-free guidance, and data scaling. All resources, including our model weights, training scripts, and evaluation tools are made available for further research

THE MACHINE ANXIETIES OF STEAMPUNK: CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY, NEO-VICTORIAN AESTHETICS, AND FUTURISM

This dissertation examines the steampunk movement as a significant contemporary expression of the human condition. Although its aesthetic inspiration comes from the Victorian past, as re-tooled, re-imagined, and re-energized for the twenty-first century, steampunk’s underlying interest is in a speculative view of the future and a concern for the contemporary individual’s struggle to retain autonomy in a de-centered, deterritorialized world. As such the steampunk movement participates in, and contributes to, an important ongoing philosophical and aesthetic dialog. The project examines the motivations for steampunk’s visual inspiration in the Victorian. Technological and scientific advancements in that period greatly impacted societal traditions and the role of the individual within it. Economic, social, and political changes revolutionized daily life and the individual faced a new self-consciousness as she confronted, and adapted to, these significant changes. Today, similar technological advancements force new tensions between the individual and the world around her. Astounding developments in computing and artificial intelligence, and the concept of the cyborg and other hybrid beings challenge the contemporary individual’s sense of self. By looking to the past, steampunk seeks to recuperate the Victorian individual’s successful navigation of technological change. She does so in order to facilitate our own navigation of current waters. vii The project traces the movement’s modest roots as a literary sub-genre of science fiction, explores its sources in the Victorian, and describes the movement’s rapid evolution to global phenomenon. Today steampunk is fully integrated into contemporary culture as an aesthetic observed in visual, decorative, and fashion arts, comic books, movies, and television. The project explores the current landscape of art and philosophy in order to position the steampunk movement within the larger scope of the contemporary scene. A triad of prevailing philosophical trends—postmodernism, transhumanism, and posthumanism, help to reveal steampunk’s involvement in the contemporary philosophical and aesthetic dialog.https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1015/thumbnail.jp

Beyond the Notation: Developing Tools to Guide Artistic Decisions of Performers in the Wind Ensemble

Music is a subjective art form that is enhanced by emotional connection and understanding of the relationship of line and phrasing to both the performer and the audience. Performers and conductors are charged with making artistic decisions about the expressive qualities of a phrase within moments of seeing the notation for the first time. In the development of wind ensembles, there is often a disconnect between the technique and accuracy of a musician’s performance and the emotional connection and understanding required to perform a lyrical melody or phrase within a piece of music. As musicians progress, often the attention is placed on the development of technical facilities required to play increasingly difficult music, causing the artistic qualities to fall second to those achieved through concrete evidence; correct notes and rhythms. It is the goal of this project to create a collection of common practices for conductors, teachers, and musicians to facilitate the development of artistry and lyrical playing in the performance of repertoire within the wind ensemble with a specific focus on contemporary music of diverse composers. This paper will also include a discussion of the implementation of the project with audio samples so the reader may see examples of how these techniques can inspire their own performance

The internet science fiction theatre database

The Internet Science Fiction Theatre Database (ISFTDB) of Cyborphic primarily consists of contemporary plays, i.e. published and/or produced in the 21st Century. Some key texts of sci-fi theatre from the 20th Century are included in a separate section. For a more complete list of 20th Century science fiction plays, see Ralph Willingham’s appendix in his 1993 book Science Fiction and the Theatre. The database is created by Christos Callow Jr, playwright and lecturer at the University of Derby.N/

Vol. 52 No. 3 - Whole No. 374

Mythprint is the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to the study, discussion, and enjoyment of myth and fantasy literature, especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. To promote these interests, the Society publishes three magazines, maintains a World Wide Web site, and sponsors the annual Mythopoeic Conference and awards for fiction and scholarship, as well as local and written discussion groups

Riemannian Reading: Using Manifolds to Calculate and Unfold Narrative

The purpose of this study is to investigate the space where readers and texts interact. By applying non-Euclidean geometry to the modern subgenre of science fiction known as steampunk, we can see that narratives have no intrinsic geometry. Instead, what we can understand is that readers unflatten inherently flat narratives by applying their own metric of understanding to a narrative. Steampunk acts a primer to considering this mathematical process by explicitly flattening its settings and characters, as well as the historical accounts founding the narrative. Mark Hodder\u27s novel, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, offers two characters that unsuccessfully attempt to act as non-Euclidean readers. Through manipulation of agency, Hodder\u27s novel demonstrates the unflattening process as we read novels. However, our unflattening process distorts a narrative through the application of our metric of understanding. The study first gives a short historical account of non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century. The analysis stems from the application of non-Euclidean geometric thinking to narrative structures

Riemannian Reading: Using Manifolds to Calculate and Unfold Narrative

The purpose of this study is to investigate the space where readers and texts interact. By applying non-Euclidean geometry to the modern subgenre of science fiction known as steampunk, we can see that narratives have no intrinsic geometry. Instead, what we can understand is that readers unflatten inherently flat narratives by applying their own metric of understanding to a narrative. Steampunk acts a primer to considering this mathematical process by explicitly flattening its settings and characters, as well as the historical accounts founding the narrative. Mark Hodder\u27s novel, The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, offers two characters that unsuccessfully attempt to act as non-Euclidean readers. Through manipulation of agency, Hodder\u27s novel demonstrates the unflattening process as we read novels. However, our unflattening process distorts a narrative through the application of our metric of understanding. The study first gives a short historical account of non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century. The analysis stems from the application of non-Euclidean geometric thinking to narrative structures

OpenShape: Scaling Up 3D Shape Representation Towards Open-World Understanding

We introduce OpenShape, a method for learning multi-modal joint representations of text, image, and point clouds. We adopt the commonly used multi-modal contrastive learning framework for representation alignment, but with a specific focus on scaling up 3D representations to enable open-world 3D shape understanding. To achieve this, we scale up training data by ensembling multiple 3D datasets and propose several strategies to automatically filter and enrich noisy text descriptions. We also explore and compare strategies for scaling 3D backbone networks and introduce a novel hard negative mining module for more efficient training. We evaluate OpenShape on zero-shot 3D classification benchmarks and demonstrate its superior capabilities for open-world recognition. Specifically, OpenShape achieves a zero-shot accuracy of 46.8% on the 1,156-category Objaverse-LVIS benchmark, compared to less than 10% for existing methods. OpenShape also achieves an accuracy of 85.3% on ModelNet40, outperforming previous zero-shot baseline methods by 20% and performing on par with some fully-supervised methods. Furthermore, we show that our learned embeddings encode a wide range of visual and semantic concepts (e.g., subcategories, color, shape, style) and facilitate fine-grained text-3D and image-3D interactions. Due to their alignment with CLIP embeddings, our learned shape representations can also be integrated with off-the-shelf CLIP-based models for various applications, such as point cloud captioning and point cloud-conditioned image generation.Comment: Project Website: https://colin97.github.io/OpenShape

Spectral encounters: the Latin American immigrant and other ghosts of England

This novel and its critical companion express the unacknowledged presence of the Latin American immigrant in England in terms of the ghost. Penumbra is the story of Samuel, a Costa Rican immigrant settling in contemporary England, and narrates his encounters with literal and figurative ghosts. My research draws from the Derridean concept of hauntology and the critical approach developed from it to specify the challenges the ghost can pose to the dichotomies of presence and absence, as well as past and present. I map these challenges within the encounters of the Latin American immigrant with different cultural subjects in England to point out instances of Othering and postcolonial melancholia. What the novel depicts is a complex modern globalised England that tends to romanticise its Victorian past, that clings to certain aspects of this particular era. In Penumbra, these ideas filter through the everyday experiences and fantastical visions of a foreign narrator who struggles to reconciliate his confounded expectations with the reality of the country. This project has a microsociological focus. Its subject is a migrant individual adjusting to ghostliness in England, rather than Latin America as an ethnic group. The fiction explores the mechanisms of the Latin American protagonist for coping with such ghosts and emphasises the relevance of his anecdotical narrative for breaking it. My treatment of the spectre as a metaphor for the Latin American exposes the practices and everyday-life occurrences that make this subject invisible, voiceless, and liminal. This series of ghostly encounters pace the development of the main character, but what moves the plot forward is the protagonist’s awareness of his own ghostliness. The critical companion to the novel has four parts. The first one delineates the challenges hauntology poses to the concepts of presence and time, on which I base the rest of my analysis. I introduce two modalities of the ghost, the sensuous presence to which I connect the term ‘spectre’, and the symbolic modality which I identify with the term ‘ghost’. Part Two localises the hauntological argument of presence within the context of the Latin American immigrant in contemporary England in order to justify the characterisation of my protagonist. I examine the reasons for the inconspicuousness of the Latin American, looking at the historical relations between Europe and Central America, and more specifically between England and Costa Rica. I introduce my term of ghosting to refer to the practices that render the Latin American Other invisible. The central idea of Part Three is the challenge of hauntology to our concept of time, specifically, the solidity of the present. I analyse the impact of the returning past, not only on the foreign protagonist of Penumbra but also on the country as a whole. I concentrate most of my literary analysis on Part Four of the critical section. This last section focuses on the ghost as an instrument and subject of my creative practice. I study the themes of presence and time other authors have explored through a ghostly filter and compare them to my rendition. I locate my fiction in relation to other ghost literature. I conclude with the idea that both the sensuous and symbolic modalities of the ghost are complementary to each other and together make for a strong conceit of the invisibility of the Latin American immigrant in England