Professor Konrad Banaszek from the University of Warsaw will present a seminar at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi on February 11, 2026. The seminar is part of the Quantum Research Center (QRC) seminar series. The TII is described as a global research center focused on discovery science and transformative technologies. Why it matters: This event facilitates knowledge sharing and collaboration in quantum technologies, a strategic area of research for the UAE.
Researchers at KAUST have developed a new method called Deep State Identifier for extracting information from videos for reinforcement learning. The method learns to predict returns from video-encoded episodes and identifies critical states using mask-based sensitivity analysis. Experiments demonstrate the method's potential for understanding and improving agent behavior in DRL.
The paper introduces TimeHUT, a new method for learning time-series representations using hierarchical uniformity-tolerance balancing of contrastive representations. TimeHUT employs a hierarchical setup to learn both instance-wise and temporal information, along with a temperature scheduler to balance uniformity and tolerance. The method was evaluated on UCR, UAE, Yahoo, and KPI datasets, demonstrating superior performance in classification tasks and competitive results in anomaly detection.
The paper introduces the Prism Hypothesis, which posits a correspondence between an encoder's feature spectrum and its functional role, with semantic encoders capturing low-frequency components and pixel encoders retaining high-frequency information. Based on this, the authors propose Unified Autoencoding (UAE), a model that harmonizes semantic structure and pixel details using a frequency-band modulator. Experiments on ImageNet and MS-COCO demonstrate that UAE effectively unifies semantic abstraction and pixel-level fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
MBZUAI researchers have developed 'Byzantine antidote' (Bant), a novel defense mechanism against Byzantine attacks in federated learning. Bant uses trust scores and a trial function to dynamically filter and neutralize corrupted updates, even when a majority of nodes are compromised. The research was presented at the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.