Tootfinder

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
VILA: Oh, you've no idea what I've been through.
CALLY: How is it?
VILA: Well, it's all right if you don't count the agony.
CALLY: I tried very hard to contact you.
VILA: Things got a bit hectic. Are you all right?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/302/4…

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Hard Contacts with Soft Gradients: Refining Differentiable Simulators for Learning and Control
Anselm Paulus, A. Ren\'e Geist, Pierre Schumacher, V\'it Musil, Georg Martius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14186

Hard Contacts with Soft Gradients: Refining Differentiable Simulators for Learning and Control
Contact forces pose a major challenge for gradient-based optimization of robot dynamics as they introduce jumps in the system's velocities. Penalty-based simulators, such as MuJoCo, simplify gradient computation by softening the contact forces. However, realistically simulating hard contacts requires very stiff contact settings, which leads to incorrect gradients when using automatic differentiation. On the other hand, using non-stiff settings strongly increases the sim-to-real gap. We analyze …

[Thread] A new US paper shows the best frontier LLM models achieve 0% on hard real-life Programming Contest problems, domains where expert humans still excel (Rohan Paul/@rohanpaul_ai)
https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1934751145400111572

Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) on X
This is really BAD news of LLM's coding skill. ☹️ The best Frontier LLM models achieve 0% on hard real-life Programming Contest problems, domains where expert humans still excel. LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI (“International

Detecting Hard-Coded Credentials in Software Repositories via LLMs
Chidera Biringa, Gokhan Kul
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13090 https://

Detecting Hard-Coded Credentials in Software Repositories via LLMs
Software developers frequently hard-code credentials such as passwords, generic secrets, private keys, and generic tokens in software repositories, even though it is strictly advised against due to the severe threat to the security of the software. These credentials create attack surfaces exploitable by a potential adversary to conduct malicious exploits such as backdoor attacks. Recent detection efforts utilize embedding models to vectorize textual credentials before passing them to classifier…

CLIP the Landscape: Automated Tagging of Crowdsourced Landscape Images
Ilya Ilyankou, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak, Tao Cheng, James Haworth
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12214

CLIP the Landscape: Automated Tagging of Crowdsourced Landscape Images
We present a CLIP-based, multi-modal, multi-label classifier for predicting geographical context tags from landscape photos in the Geograph dataset--a crowdsourced image archive spanning the British Isles, including remote regions lacking POIs and street-level imagery. Our approach addresses a Kaggle competition\footnote{https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/predict-geographic-context-from-landscape-photos} task based on a subset of Geograph's 8M images, with strict evaluation: exact match accura…

On the diffusion of hard sphere fluids in disordered porous media: New extended Enskog theory description
M. F. Holovko, M. Ya. Korvatska
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13483

On the diffusion of hard sphere fluids in disordered porous media: New extended Enskog theory description
We proposed a new extended version of Enskog theory for the description of the self-diffusion coefficient of a colloidal hard-sphere fluid adsorbed in a matrix of disordered hard-sphere obstacles. In a considered approach instead of contact values of the fluid-fluid and fluid-matrix pair distribution functions, we introduced by input the new functions that include the dependence on the fraction of the volume free from matrix particles and from fluid particles trapped by matrix particles. It is …

The vast majority of the plastic flotsam and jetsam in the North Pacific subtropical gyre (the North Pacific Garbage Patch) consists of discarded fishing gear.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16529-0

Industrialised fishing nations largely contribute to floating plastic pollution in the North Pacific subtropical gyre - Scientific Reports
The subtropical oceanic gyre in the North Pacific Ocean is currently covered with tens of thousands of tonnes of floating plastic debris, dispersed over millions of square kilometres. A large fraction is composed of fishing nets and ropes while the rest is mostly composed of hard plastic objects and fragments, sometimes carrying evidence on their origin. In 2019, an oceanographic mission conducted in the area, retrieved over 6000 hard plastic debris items > 5 cm. The debris was later sorte…

Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking
Wuwei Zhang, Fangcong Yin, Howard Yen, Danqi Chen, Xi Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09944

Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking
Recent work has identified retrieval heads (Wu et al., 2025b), a subset of attention heads responsible for retrieving salient information in long-context language models (LMs), as measured by their copy-paste behavior in Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks. In this paper, we introduce QRHEAD (Query-Focused Retrieval Head), an improved set of attention heads that enhance retrieval from long context. We identify QRHEAD by aggregating attention scores with respect to the input query, using a handful of exa…

Simpler, Better, Faster, Stronger: Revisiting a Successful Reduction Rule for Dominating Set
Lukas Geis, Alexander Leonhardt, Johannes Meintrup, Ulrich Meyer, Manuel Penschuck
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14564

Simpler, Better, Faster, Stronger: Revisiting a Successful Reduction Rule for Dominating Set
DominatingSet is a classical NP-complete problem and also known to be W[2]-hard. Thus, there is little hope for small kernels on general graphs. However, in practice, reduction rules to heuristically shrink instances are used. In this context, Rule1 by Alber et. al. is quite successful, yet at times somewhat expensive to execute. We propose a linear time algorithm implementing and surpassing the original Rule1 formulation. Our discussions and proofs yield interesting structural insights into th…

Detecting Hard-Coded Credentials in Software Repositories via LLMs
Chidera Biringa, Gokhan Kul
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13090 https://

Detecting Hard-Coded Credentials in Software Repositories via LLMs
Software developers frequently hard-code credentials such as passwords, generic secrets, private keys, and generic tokens in software repositories, even though it is strictly advised against due to the severe threat to the security of the software. These credentials create attack surfaces exploitable by a potential adversary to conduct malicious exploits such as backdoor attacks. Recent detection efforts utilize embedding models to vectorize textual credentials before passing them to classifier…