Tootfinder

(Soundtrack of the Mighty Mouse theme, but somehow janky: “Here I come to save the day!”)
Thankfully, the United States has only ever had good experiences deploying troops to the Middle East.
🤦‍♂️
https://apnews.com/article/mideast-gaz

US sending about 200 troops to monitor Gaza ceasefire deal
The United States is sending about 200 troops to Israel to help support and monitor the ceasefire deal in Gaza as part of a team that includes partner nations, nongovernmental organizations and private-sector players. That's according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that weren't authorized for release. They said Thursday that U.S. Central Command is going to establish a “civil-military coordination center” in Israel that will help facilitate the flow…

🎸 BAND-MAID's MIKU Kobato Talks About the Future and How the Band Decides on Album Names
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interview/2025-07-23/band-maid-miku-kobato-talks-about-the-future-a…

BAND-MAID's MIKU Kobato Talks About the Future and How the Band Decides on Album Names
BAND-MAID is hot off a successful tour and following the recent release of their latest song "What is justice?," we spoke to MIKU about what's next.

FaceAnonyMixer: Cancelable Faces via Identity Consistent Latent Space Mixing
Mohammed Talha Alam, Fahad Shamshad, Fakhri Karray, Karthik Nandakumar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05636

FaceAnonyMixer: Cancelable Faces via Identity Consistent Latent Space Mixing
Advancements in face recognition (FR) technologies have amplified privacy concerns, necessitating methods that protect identity while maintaining recognition utility. Existing face anonymization methods typically focus on obscuring identity but fail to meet the requirements of biometric template protection, including revocability, unlinkability, and irreversibility. We propose FaceAnonyMixer, a cancelable face generation framework that leverages the latent space of a pre-trained generative mode…

Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that U.S. Space Command will be located in Alabama,
reversing a Biden-era decision to keep it at its temporary headquarters in Colorado.
The long-expected decision from Trump caps a four-year tug of war between two states and opposing administrations about where to locate U.S. Space Command,
an intense fight because the headquarters would be a significant boon to the local economy.
Alabama and Colorado have long battled to claim Space…

Trump will announce Space Command moves from Colorado to Alabama
President Donald Trump’s administration will announce U.S. Space Command will be located in Alabama, reversing a Biden-era decision to keep it at its temporary headquarters in Colorado. That's according to two people familiar with the announcement. The people say Trump is expected to speak Tuesday afternoon and will give the new location. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to confirm the plans ahead of the official announcement. A Pentagon website set up to livestream the remarks …

DarkStream: real-time speech anonymization with low latency
Waris Quamer, Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04667 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

DarkStream: real-time speech anonymization with low latency
We propose DarkStream, a streaming speech synthesis model for real-time speaker anonymization. To improve content encoding under strict latency constraints, DarkStream combines a causal waveform encoder, a short lookahead buffer, and transformer-based contextual layers. To further reduce inference time, the model generates waveforms directly via a neural vocoder, thus removing intermediate mel-spectrogram conversions. Finally, DarkStream anonymizes speaker identity by injecting a GAN-generated …

HateBuffer: Safeguarding Content Moderators' Mental Well-Being through Hate Speech Content Modification
Subin Park, Jeonghyun Kim, Jeanne Choi, Joseph Seering, Uichin Lee, Sung-Ju Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00439

HateBuffer: Safeguarding Content Moderators' Mental Well-Being through Hate Speech Content Modification
Hate speech remains a persistent and unresolved challenge in online platforms. Content moderators, working on the front lines to review user-generated content and shield viewers from hate speech, often find themselves unprotected from the mental burden as they continuously engage with offensive language. To safeguard moderators' mental well-being, we designed HateBuffer, which anonymizes targets of hate speech, paraphrases offensive expressions into less offensive forms, and shows the original …

Teaching Machines to Speak Using Articulatory Control
Akshay Anand, Chenxu Guo, Cheol Jun Cho, Jiachen Lian, Gopala Anumanchipalli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05619 https://

Teaching Machines to Speak Using Articulatory Control
Current speech production systems predominantly rely on large transformer models that operate as black boxes, providing little interpretability or grounding in the physical mechanisms of human speech. We address this limitation by proposing a new framework: speech generation through explicit articulatory control. This reframes speech as a motor control task similar to robotic manipulation. Our approach uses reinforcement learning to train a policy that directly controls the movements of vocal t…

Scaling Spoken Language Models with Syllabic Speech Tokenization
Nicholas Lee, Cheol Jun Cho, Alan W Black, Gopala K. Anumanchipalli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26634 https://

Scaling Spoken Language Models with Syllabic Speech Tokenization
Spoken language models (SLMs) typically discretize speech into high-frame-rate tokens extracted from SSL speech models. As the most successful LMs are based on the Transformer architecture, processing these long token streams with self-attention is expensive, as attention scales quadratically with sequence length. A recent SSL work introduces acoustic tokenization of speech at the syllable level, which is more interpretable and potentially more scalable with significant compression in token len…

Nicknames for Group Signatures
Guillaume Quispe, Pierre Jouvelot, Gerard Memmi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02543 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02543

Nicknames for Group Signatures
Nicknames for Group Signatures (NGS) is a new signature scheme that extends Group Signatures (GS) with Signatures with Flexible Public Keys (SFPK). Via GS, each member of a group can sign messages on behalf of the group without revealing his identity, except to a designated auditor. Via SFPK, anyone can create new identities for a particular user, enabling anonymous transfers with only the intended recipient able to trace these new identities. To prevent the potential abuses that this anonymi…

Investigation of perception inconsistency in speaker embedding for asynchronous voice anonymization
Rui Wang, Liping Chen, Kong Aik Lee, Zhengpeng Zha, Zhenhua Ling
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05718

Investigation of perception inconsistency in speaker embedding for asynchronous voice anonymization
Given the speech generation framework that represents the speaker attribute with an embedding vector, asynchronous voice anonymization can be achieved by modifying the speaker embedding derived from the original speech. However, the inconsistency between machine and human perceptions of the speaker attribute within the speaker embedding remains unexplored, limiting its performance in asynchronous voice anonymization. To this end, this study investigates this inconsistency via modifications to s…