Tootfinder

UniAPL: A Unified Adversarial Preference Learning Framework for Instruct-Following
FaQiang Qian, WeiKun Zhang, Ziliang Wang, Kang An, Xuhui Zheng, Liangjian Wen, Mengya Gao, Yong Dai, Yichao Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25148

UniAPL: A Unified Adversarial Preference Learning Framework for Instruct-Following
Shaping powerful LLMs to be beneficial and safe is central to AI alignment. We argue that post-training alignment is fundamentally a unified Preference Learning problem, involving two modalities: demonstrated preferences (e.g., Supervised Fine-Tuning, SFT) and comparative preferences (e.g., Reinforcement Learning, RL).The standard sequential pipeline-SFT followed by RL-is flawed due to a critical distributional mismatch: SFT uses static expert data, but as the policy evolves, its generation dis…

Early on my way to another week of work.
I need music for this...
Yes, a Doctor singing 500 Miles, that will do it!
https://youtu.be/yUr8QyTCph8?t=112s

Structural, optical, and electrical properties of Cu-doped NiO films synthesized by spray pyrolysis for potential gas sensing applications
Eka Nurfani, Grace Grace, Mahardika Yoga Darmawan, Resti Marlina, Jumaeda Jatmika, Asnan Rinovian, Aditya Rianjanu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24197

Structural, optical, and electrical properties of Cu-doped NiO films synthesized by spray pyrolysis for potential gas sensing applications
Cu-doped NiO thin films were deposited on ITO substrates via spray pyrolysis at 450 °C for 1.5 minutes. XRD confirmed a cubic NiO structure, with Cu incorporation reducing crystallite size, increasing interplanar spacing, and expanding the lattice parameter, indicating successful substitution of Cu ions. Optical analysis showed a slight bandgap reduction from 3.70 to 3.65 eV, while PL revealed lower emission intensity, suggesting enhanced defect states and suppressed carrier recombination. Ram…

Rewatching the 1984 film version of 1984, as I haven't seen it since high school. They showed it to us in class in the 90s. Been a lot of years. John Hurt ftw
#film

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
George Orwell's novel of a totalitarian future society in which a man whose daily work is rewriting history tries to rebel by falling in love.

Rain, a stablecoin-backed Visa card issuer, raised a $58M Series B led by Sapphire Ventures, after raising a $24.5M Series A led by Norwest in March (Yueqi Yang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/stablecoin-…

Stablecoin Card Startup Rain Raises $58 Million Led By Sapphire Ventures
Rain, a stablecoin-backed card issuer that works with Visa, said it raised $58 million in Series B round led by Sapphire Ventures, just months after its last fundraising round, demonstrating once again investor enthusiasm for crypto startups flowing from congressional passage of stablecoin legislation in July. With the deal, Rain’s valuation increased nearly six times from its $24.5 million

A Greedy PDE Router for Blending Neural Operators and Classical Methods
Sahana Rayan, Yash Patel, Ambuj Tewari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24814 https://arx…

A Greedy PDE Router for Blending Neural Operators and Classical Methods
When solving PDEs, classical numerical solvers are often computationally expensive, while machine learning methods can suffer from spectral bias, failing to capture high-frequency components. Designing an optimal hybrid iterative solver--where, at each iteration, a solver is selected from an ensemble of solvers to leverage their complementary strengths--poses a challenging combinatorial problem. While the greedy selection strategy is desirable for its constant-factor approximation guarantee to …

Flauscht schon mal vor, gleich geht’s los.
#live
Yes we can.

Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Novel diamagnetic garnet-type substrate single crystals for ultralow-damping yttrium iron garnet Y3Fe5O12 films at cryogenic temperatures
C. Guguschev, C. Dubs, R. Blukis, O. Surzhenko, M. Br\"utzam, R. Koc, C. Rhode, K. Berger, C. Richter, C. Berryman, R. O. Serha, A. V. Chumak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18101

Novel diamagnetic garnet-type substrate single crystals for ultralow-damping yttrium iron garnet Y3Fe5O12 films at cryogenic temperatures
Y3Sc2Ga3O12-Y3Sc2Al3O12 and Y3Sc2Ga3O12-Y3Al5O12 (YSGAG) solid solution single crystals with diameters up to 30 mm and total lengths up to about 100 mm were grown by the conventional Czochralski technique. Rocking curve measurements on polished sections revealed typical FWHM values of about 22 arcsec, which is indicative of relatively high structural quality for a solid-solution crystal. The grown substrate crystals are nearly lattice-matched with Y3Fe5O12 (YIG) to allow epitaxial growth of hig…

MATRIX: Multi-Agent simulaTion fRamework for safe Interactions and conteXtual clinical conversational evaluation
Ernest Lim, Yajie Vera He, Jared Joselowitz, Kate Preston, Mohita Chowdhury, Louis Williams, Aisling Higham, Katrina Mason, Mariane Melo, Tom Lawton, Yan Jia, Ibrahim Habli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19163

MATRIX: Multi-Agent simulaTion fRamework for safe Interactions and conteXtual clinical conversational evaluation
Despite the growing use of large language models (LLMs) in clinical dialogue systems, existing evaluations focus on task completion or fluency, offering little insight into the behavioral and risk management requirements essential for safety-critical systems. This paper presents MATRIX (Multi-Agent simulaTion fRamework for safe Interactions and conteXtual clinical conversational evaluation), a structured, extensible framework for safety-oriented evaluation of clinical dialogue agents. MATRIX …