Tootfinder

BDFirewall: Towards Effective and Expeditiously Black-Box Backdoor Defense in MLaaS
Ye Li, Chengcheng Zhu, Yanchao Zhao, Jiale Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03307 https://

BDFirewall: Towards Effective and Expeditiously Black-Box Backdoor Defense in MLaaS
In this paper, we endeavor to address the challenges of backdoor attacks countermeasures in black-box scenarios, thereby fortifying the security of inference under MLaaS. We first categorize backdoor triggers from a new perspective, i.e., their impact on the patched area, and divide them into: high-visibility triggers (HVT), semi-visibility triggers (SVT), and low-visibility triggers (LVT). Based on this classification, we propose a progressive defense framework, BDFirewall, that removes these …

Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
ZEN: Confirmed. [Oppressive noise. The crew all sink to their knees, hands over ears.]
ZEN: Information. Ship's velocity now in excess of design limitations. Force wall collapse imminent. [Distortion effect. Dayna, Vila, Cally unconcious. Avon struggles towards the seating. Tarrant rouses and crawls towards Avon. Avon removes spacesuit from storage compartment, starts to pull it on.]

Trump Fires Fed Governor Cook, Escalating Attack on Central Bank (Jonnelle Marte/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-26/trump-removes-fed-governor-lisa-cook-effective-immediately
http://www.memeorandum.com/250825/p142#a250825p142

Active Learning for Forecasting Severity among Patients with Post Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2
Jing Wang, Amar Sra, Jeremy C. Weiss
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22444

Active Learning for Forecasting Severity among Patients with Post Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2
The long-term effects of Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, known as PASC, pose a significant challenge to healthcare systems worldwide. Accurate identification of progression events, such as hospitalization and reinfection, is essential for effective patient management and resource allocation. However, traditional models trained on structured data struggle to capture the nuanced progression of PASC. In this study, we introduce the first publicly available cohort of 18 PASC patients, with text t…

High-Layer Attention Pruning with Rescaling
Songtao Liu, Peng Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01900 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.01900…

High-Layer Attention Pruning with Rescaling
Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency. However, conventional training-free structured pruning methods often employ a heuristic metric that indiscriminately removes some attention heads across all pruning layers, without considering their positions within the network architecture. In this work, we propose a novel pruning algorithm that strategically prunes attention heads in the model's higher layers. Since t…

Stacking the Deck: Gambling on a Light QCD Axion
Abhishek Banerjee, Manuel A. Buen-Abad, Anson Hook
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02049 https://

Stacking the Deck: Gambling on a Light QCD Axion
We consider axions lighter than what their QCD couplings might otherwise suggest. Starting with a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-axion, we introduce a small explicit $\mathbb{Z}_N$ symmetry-breaking coupling between the Standard Model Higgs boson and a reheaton. This small explicit breaking allows us to populate a large portion of the light axion $m_a$-$f_a$ plane, removes the $1/N$ tuning in the $\mathbb{Z}_N$-axion, and explains why only our sector was reheated. Due to finite temperature effects, axions of t…

Discogs statement on U.S. tariffs #VinylRecords @…

The White House removes WSJ from the pool of reporters covering Trump's trip to Scotland, says it is due to WSJ's "fake and defamatory conduct" (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/21/journal-removed-white-house-pool-ep…

Doubly robust pointwise confidence intervals for a monotonic continuous treatment effect curve
Charles R. Doss
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08415 https://arx…

Doubly robust pointwise confidence intervals for a monotonic continuous treatment effect curve
We study nonparametric inference for the causal dose-response (or treatment effect) curve when the treatment variable is continuous rather than binary or discrete. We do this by developing doubly robust confidence intervals for the continuous treatment effect curve (at a fixed point) under the assumption that it is monotonic, based on inverting a likelihood ratio-type test. Monotonicity of the treatment effect curve is often a very natural assumption, and this assumption removes the need to cho…

Prototyping of 6.2-mm-Pitch Fiber Positioner Modules for Stage-V Telescope Instrumentation
Malak Galal, Maxime Rombach, Jonathan Wei, Ricardo Ara\'ujo, Diane Chapuis, S\'ebastien Pernecker, Abby Bault, Joseph Harry Silber, Nicholas Wenner, William Van Shourt, Stefane Caseiro, Corentin Magnenat, David Schlegel, Jean-Paul Kneib
https://

Prototyping of 6.2-mm-Pitch Fiber Positioner Modules for Stage-V Telescope Instrumentation
Small-pitch populated focal planes are a critical enabling technology for the next generation of highly multiplexed astronomical instruments. This work reports on ongoing prototyping activities for 6.2 mm-pitch alpha-beta (theta-phi) fiber positioner modules. Following a concise review of the underlying concept, the performance of trillium-based and independently actuated robotic designs is compared. Key operational parameters including XY positioning repeatability, non-linearity, backlash, and…