Tootfinder

Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Topology-Aware Communication Alignment on More Than 9600 GPUs
Guoliang He, Youhe Jiang, Wencong Xiao, Kaihua Jiang, Shuguang Wang, Jun Wang, Zixian Du, Zhuo Jiang, Xinlei Zhang, Binhang Yuan, Eiko Yoneki
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15940

Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Topology-Aware Communication Alignment on More Than 9600 GPUs
The scaling law for large language models (LLMs) depicts that the path towards machine intelligence necessitates training at large scale. Thus, companies continuously build large-scale GPU clusters, and launch training jobs that span over thousands of computing nodes. However, LLM pre-training presents unique challenges due to its complex communication patterns, where GPUs exchange data in sparse yet high-volume bursts within specific groups. Inefficient resource scheduling exacerbates bandwidt…

When and What: Diffusion-Grounded VideoLLM with Entity Aware Segmentation for Long Video Understanding
Pengcheng Fang, Yuxia Chen, Rui Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15641 https…

When and What: Diffusion-Grounded VideoLLM with Entity Aware Segmentation for Long Video Understanding
Understanding videos requires more than answering open ended questions, it demands the ability to pinpoint when events occur and how entities interact across time. While recent Video LLMs have achieved remarkable progress in holistic reasoning, they remain coarse in temporal perception: timestamps are encoded only implicitly, frame level features are weak in capturing continuity, and language vision alignment often drifts from the entities of interest. In this paper, we present Grounded VideoDi…

Topology-Aware Volume Fusion for Spectral Computed Tomography via Histograms and Extremum Graph
Mohit Sharma, Emma Nilsson, Martin Falk, Talha Bin Masood, Lee Jollans, Anders Persson, Tino Ebbers, Ingrid Hotz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14719

Topology-Aware Volume Fusion for Spectral Computed Tomography via Histograms and Extremum Graph
Photon-Counting Computed Tomography (PCCT) is a novel imaging modality that simultaneously acquires volumetric data at multiple X-ray energy levels, generating separate volumes that capture energy-dependent attenuation properties. Attenuation refers to the reduction in X-ray intensity as it passes through different tissues or materials. This spectral information enhances tissue and material differentiation, enabling more accurate diagnosis and analysis. However, the resulting multivolume datase…

A survey of 28K adults in 25 countries on AI: 81% have heard a lot or a little, 34% are more concerned than excited, and 42% are equally concerned and excited (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-around-the-world-v…

How People Around the World View AI
Most adults across 25 countries are aware of AI, and people are generally more concerned than excited about its effects on daily life.

SIGN: Safety-Aware Image-Goal Navigation for Autonomous Drones via Reinforcement Learning
Zichen Yan, Rui Huang, Lei He, Shao Guo, Lin Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12394 http…

SIGN: Safety-Aware Image-Goal Navigation for Autonomous Drones via Reinforcement Learning
Image-goal navigation (ImageNav) tasks a robot with autonomously exploring an unknown environment and reaching a location that visually matches a given target image. While prior works primarily study ImageNav for ground robots, enabling this capability for autonomous drones is substantially more challenging due to their need for high-frequency feedback control and global localization for stable flight. In this paper, we propose a novel sim-to-real framework that leverages visual reinforcement l…

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

I don't disagree with suggestions that the UK public sector should have less reliance on the big-three (American) cloud providers. But this has been a concern for more than a decade, and people should at least be aware of both the "GOV.UK PaaS" and UKCloud.

Migrating our data from GOV.UK Platform as a Service (PaaS) to Amazon Web Services (AWS) – MHCLG Digital
After learning that GOV.UK’s hosting platform PaaS is being decommissioned, the Energy Performance of Buildings Register team decided to migrate all their hosting to AWS. In this post, Barry, Developer, explains what they did.

Omni-CLST: Error-aware Curriculum Learning with guided Selective chain-of-Thought for audio questuin answering
Jinghua Zhao, Hang Su, Lichun Fan, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Hui Wang, Haoqin Sun, Yong Qin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12275

Omni-CLST: Error-aware Curriculum Learning with guided Selective chain-of-Thought for audio questuin answering
We propose Omni-CLST, an error-aware Curriculum Learning framework with guided Selective Chain-of-Thought for audio question answering. The framework efficiently leverages existing high-quality dataset through two key strategies: an error-aware curriculum that organizes samples by difficulty, and a guided thought dropout mechanism that focuses reasoning on challenging cases. Integrated with GRPO training, these strategies enable the model to learn more effectively from informative samples. Expe…

Is there already an ActivityPub vocabulary for job openings, or cvs?
I'm trying to make my CV-webpage more visible, and also create a job-bot, that everyone can set up with their sources, and queries.
Obviously the idea is, to help people find jobs, and fill vacancies, without having to resort to a centralized network, like e.g. LinkedIn.
I'm aware of these efforts, though they're not ActivityPub related:

How Much Can a Behavior-Preserving Changeset Be Decomposed into Refactoring Operations?
Kota Someya, Lei Chen, Michael J. Decker, Shinpei Hayashi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11993

How Much Can a Behavior-Preserving Changeset Be Decomposed into Refactoring Operations?
Developers sometimes mix behavior-preserving modifications, such as refactorings, with behavior-altering modifications, such as feature additions. Several approaches have been proposed to support understanding such modifications by separating them into those two parts. Such refactoring-aware approaches are expected to be particularly effective when the behavior-preserving parts can be decomposed into a sequence of more primitive behavior-preserving operations, such as refactorings, but this has…

Heard a particular application of the definition of Planck's constant I wasn't aware of that made more real for me "we just can't see that small" and drove home that it was not about "quantiziation of spacetime".
I knew Planck energy was where a photon could become a black hole - but "our particle smashing makes black holes past a certain point" didn't say much to me about spacetime itself.
But today I was reading and saw where someone pointed out that beyond a certain scale, we use photons and light for studying reality - and that a photon with Planck wavelength by definition would have Planck energy.
So to make light of the right wavelength to study features of reality smaller than Planck length, you'd -also- trigger the black hole behavior.
For some reason this explanation sits _way_ better in my head. I get they're all related, I'd just never heard this angle of it in this particular way before.

As Putin is more aware than most, flattery and threats are his chief tactics against Trump, that and his trapping Trump in private into saying yes, to whatever he wants.
But they're also the tactics for Ukraine's and its Allies against the TACO President.
Trump wants out from under, an empty promise to share Ukraine's minerals won't cut it with Putin as he'll say they're his anyway.
A preemptive missile strike from Provideniyan Separatists on the t…

Less is More Tokens: Efficient Math Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Chain-of-Thought Distillation
Abdul Waheed, Chancharik Mitra, Laurie Z. Wang, Deva Ramanan, Bhiksha Raj
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05226

Less is More Tokens: Efficient Math Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Chain-of-Thought Distillation
Chain-of-thought reasoning, while powerful, can produce unnecessarily verbose output for simpler problems. We present a framework for difficulty-aware reasoning that teaches models to dynamically adjust reasoning depth based on problem complexity. Remarkably, we show that models can be endowed with such dynamic inference pathways without any architectural modifications; we simply post-train on data that is carefully curated to include chain-of-thought traces that are proportional in length to p…

The most effective way to destroy an organization is to make it more bureaucratic. In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was aware of this. What they didn't know was that their blueprint for sabotaging Nazi operations would become the operating manual for modern corporations.
https://www.alephic.com/sabotage

Simple Sabotage Field Manual
Simple Sabotage Field Manual - A book by the Alephic team.

As we head into a blizzard of infosec news, stay ahead of the curve by checking out today's Metacurity for the latest developments, including
--Ukraine claims major hack of Russian nuclear submarine,
--SonicWall is aware of flaw exploitation,
--Perplexity is stealthily evading robots.txt,
--FinCen warns of crypt ATM crimes,
--Vietnamese hackers are targeting thousands,
--Informants' data stolen in a Louisiana sheriff's office ransomware attack, …

Ukraine claims major hack of Russian nuclear submarine
SonicWall is aware of flaw exploitation, Perplexity is stealthily evading robots.txt, FinCen warns of crypt ATM crimes, Vietnamese hackers are targeting thousands of victims, Informants' data stolen in a Louisiana sheriff's office ransomware attack, Chanel hit in Salesforce breach, much more

More of this, please. (Spotted on Reddit.)
#HoesUnion

xRouter: Training Cost-Aware LLMs Orchestration System via Reinforcement Learning
Cheng Qian, Zuxin Liu, Shirley Kokane, Akshara Prabhakar, Jielin Qiu, Haolin Chen, Zhiwei Liu, Heng Ji, Weiran Yao, Shelby Heinecke, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong, Huan Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08439

xRouter: Training Cost-Aware LLMs Orchestration System via Reinforcement Learning
Modern LLM deployments confront a widening cost-performance spectrum: premium models deliver strong reasoning but are expensive, while lightweight models are economical yet brittle on complex tasks. Static escalation rules and keyword heuristics under-utilize this spectrum and fail to adapt across task types. We present xRouter, a tool-calling-based routing system in which a learned router can either answer directly or invoke one or more external models. The router is trained end-to-end with re…

Lifetime-Aware Design of Item-Level Intelligence
Shvetank Prakash, Andrew Cheng, Olof Kindgren, Ashiq Ahamed, Graham Knight, Jed Kufel, Francisco Rodriguez, Arya Tschand, David Kong, Mariam Elgamal, Jerry Huang, Emma Chen, Gage Hills, Richard Price, Emre Ozer, Vijay Janapa Reddi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08193

Lifetime-Aware Design of Item-Level Intelligence
We present FlexiFlow, a lifetime-aware design framework for item-level intelligence (ILI) where computation is integrated directly into disposable products like food packaging and medical patches. Our framework leverages natively flexible electronics which offer significantly lower costs than silicon but are limited to kHz speeds and several thousands of gates. Our insight is that unlike traditional computing with more uniform deployment patterns, ILI applications exhibit 1000X variation in ope…

Few countries are more aware of the fragility of democracy than Poland.
45 years ago, Lech Walesa started Poland's Solidarity Movement, stared down the Soviet Union, and became his country's first democratically elected president.
He joins the show from Phoenix, Arizona to discuss today's dangers and his own extraordinary personal and political story.
Christiane Amanpour is fixated on history, which is important, but 82 year old Lech Walesa is not having it…

"""
All of which was of the utmost importance for subsequent developments in the medicine of the mind. In its positivist incarnation, this was little more than the combination of the two experiences that classicism had juxtaposed without ever joining them together: a social, normative and dichotomous experience of madness that revolved entirely around the imperative of confinement, formulated in a style as simple as ‘yes or no’, ‘dangerous or harmless’, and ‘good or not good for confinement’, and a finely differentiated, qualitative, juridical experience, well aware of limits and degrees, which looked into all the aspects of the behaviour of the subject for the polymorphous incarnations that insanity might assume. The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

G-UBS: Towards Robust Understanding of Implicit Feedback via Group-Aware User Behavior Simulation
Boyu Chen, Siran Chen, Zhengrong Yue, Kainan Yan, Chenyun Yu, Beibei Kong, Cheng Lei, Chengxiang Zhuo, Zang Li, Yali Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05709

G-UBS: Towards Robust Understanding of Implicit Feedback via Group-Aware User Behavior Simulation
User feedback is critical for refining recommendation systems, yet explicit feedback (e.g., likes or dislikes) remains scarce in practice. As a more feasible alternative, inferring user preferences from massive implicit feedback has shown great potential (e.g., a user quickly skipping a recommended video usually indicates disinterest). Unfortunately, implicit feedback is often noisy: a user might skip a video due to accidental clicks or other reasons, rather than disliking it. Such noise can ea…

Toward Energy and Location-Aware Resource Allocation in Next Generation Networks
Mandar Datar (CEA-LETI), Mattia Merluzzi (CEA-LETI)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05109 https://

Toward Energy and Location-Aware Resource Allocation in Next Generation Networks
Wireless networks are evolving from radio resource providers to complex systems that also involve computing, with the latter being distributed across edge and cloud facilities. Also, their optimization is shifting more and more from a performance to a value-oriented paradigm. The two aspects shall be balanced continuously, to maximize the utilities of Services Providers (SPs), users quality of experience and fairness, while meeting global constraints in terms of energy consumption and carbon fo…

GFS: A Preemption-aware Scheduling Framework for GPU Clusters with Predictive Spot Instance Management
Jiaang Duan, Shenglin Xu, Shiyou Qian, Dingyu Yang, Kangjin Wang, Chenzhi Liao, Yinghao Yu, Qin Hua, Hanwen Hu, Qi Wang, Wenchao Wu, Dongqing Bao, Tianyu Lu, Jian Cao, Guangtao Xue, Guodong Yang, Liping Zhang, Gang Chen
https://arxiv.org/…

GFS: A Preemption-aware Scheduling Framework for GPU Clusters with Predictive Spot Instance Management
The surge in large language models (LLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of GPU usage patterns, creating an urgent need for more efficient management strategies. While cloud providers employ spot instances to reduce costs for low-priority (LP) tasks, existing schedulers still grapple with high eviction rates and lengthy queuing times. To address these limitations, we present GFS, a novel preemptive scheduling framework that enhances service-level objective (SLO) compliance for high-pr…

SAGE-HLS: Syntax-Aware AST-Guided LLM for High-Level Synthesis Code Generation
M Zafir Sadik Khan, Nowfel Mashnoor, Mohammad Akyash, Kimia Azar, Hadi Kamali
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03558

SAGE-HLS: Syntax-Aware AST-Guided LLM for High-Level Synthesis Code Generation
In today's rapidly evolving field of electronic design automation (EDA), the complexity of hardware designs is increasing, necessitating more sophisticated automation solutions. High-level synthesis (HLS), as a pivotal solution, automates hardware designs from high-level abstractions (e.g., C/C++). However, it faces significant challenges, particularly in design space exploration and optimization. While large language models (LLMs) have shown notable capabilities in code generation, their appli…

Embedding-Aware Noise Modeling of Quantum Annealing
Seon-Geun Jeong, Mai Dinh Cong, Dae-Il Noh, Quoc-Viet Pham, Won-Joo Hwang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04594 https://

Embedding-Aware Noise Modeling of Quantum Annealing
Quantum annealing provides a practical realization of adiabatic quantum computation and has emerged as a promising approach for solving large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. However, current devices remain constrained by sparse hardware connectivity, which requires embedding logical variables into chains of physical qubits. This embedding overhead limits scalability and reduces reliability as longer chains are more prone to noise-induced errors. In this work, building on the known st…

Day 21: Aya Yoshinaga
I'm actually generally much less aware of the creators involved in the anime I watch, for a number of reasons, and the few anime directors I could name without looking them up were all men before I started this list. I've now got a short list of anime directors/writers who are women, and the first I'll include here is Yoshinaga, in part because she was pivotal to one of my favorite lesser-known anime, "Kurau Phantom Memory". It was actually one of the first anime I watched ever, but I didn't like it just because of that, since I've rewatched it at least twice and still regard it highly. It's got a pretty cool science fiction setting, an extremely cool barely-comprehensible alien race, a female protagonist who is not sexualized and not subjected to romance, and it centers a platonic relationship torn apart by technological hubris. Very "cool seinen stuff that wouldn't make it past the focus groups today" stuff.
Besides Kurau, Yoshinaga has worked on other great stuff like Golden Kamuy, Azumanga Daioh, Durarara, and Fullmetal Alchemist, and when you see a correlation like that between well-written shows and the same writer showing up again and again, it's clear there's talent there, even if most of these are manga-based.
Probably going to circle back to at least one more anime writer, but for tomorrow I'll move on to manga probably, since I want to space out all my YA enthusiasm a bit.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Improving Synthetic Data Training for Contextual Biasing Models with a Keyword-Aware Cost Function
Chin Yuen Kwok, Jia Qi Yip, Eng Siong Chng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09197 ht…

Improving Synthetic Data Training for Contextual Biasing Models with a Keyword-Aware Cost Function
Rare word recognition can be improved by adapting ASR models to synthetic data that includes these words. Further improvements can be achieved through contextual biasing, which trains and adds a biasing module into the model architecture to prioritize rare words. While training the module on synthetic rare word data is more effective than using non-rare-word data, it can lead to overfitting due to artifacts in the synthetic audio. To address this, we enhance the TCPGen-based contextual biasing …

Less Signals, More Understanding: Channel-Capacity Codebook Design for Digital Task-Oriented Semantic Communication
Anbang Zhang, Shuaishuai Guo, Chenyuan Feng, Hongyang Du, Haojin Li, Chen Sun, Haijun Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04291

Less Signals, More Understanding: Channel-Capacity Codebook Design for Digital Task-Oriented Semantic Communication
Discrete representation has emerged as a powerful tool in task-oriented semantic communication (ToSC), offering compact, interpretable, and efficient representations well-suited for low-power edge intelligence scenarios. Its inherent digital nature aligns seamlessly with hardware-friendly deployment and robust storage/transmission protocols. However, despite its strengths, current ToSC frameworks often decouple semantic-aware discrete mapping from the underlying channel characteristics and task…

Something to always be aware of: Many wheelchair users can stand and move around for brief periods of time. Not all wheelchair users are paralysed. Reasons for wheelchair use are numerous and varied.

Some wheelchair users choose not to stand in public because chances are they will be chastised and harassed if they do. With more awareness and understanding this risk can hopefully diminish over time.

For example, if a wheelchair user is able to retrieve their own wheelchair from…

Data assimilation for energy-aware hybrid models
Igor Shevchenko, Dan Crisan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01726 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01726

Data assimilation for energy-aware hybrid models
This work integrates ensemble-based data assimilation (DA) with the energy-aware hybrid modeling approach, applied to a three-layer quasi-geostrophic (QG) model of the Gulf Stream flow. Building on prior DA success in the QG channel regime, where stochastic corrections based on EOFs were effective, we show that this method fails to address persistent errors in the more complex, dynamically richer Gulf Stream setting.To overcome this, we employ a hybrid model that controls energy at selected sca…

Layer-Aware Representation Filtering: Purifying Finetuning Data to Preserve LLM Safety Alignment
Hao Li, Lijun Li, Zhenghao Lu, Xianyi Wei, Rui Li, Jing Shao, Lei Sha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18631

Layer-Aware Representation Filtering: Purifying Finetuning Data to Preserve LLM Safety Alignment
With rapid advancement and increasing accessibility of LLMs, fine-tuning aligned models has become a critical step for adapting them to real-world applications, which makes the safety of this fine-tuning process more important than ever. However, recent studies have highlighted a critical challenge: even when fine-tuning with seemingly benign downstream datasets, the safety of aligned LLMs can be compromised, making them more susceptible to malicious instructions. In this paper, we show that fi…

Situationally Aware Rolling Horizon Multi-Tier Load Restoration Considering Behind-The-Meter DER
Wenlong Shi, Junyuan Zheng, Zhaoyu Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02502 https:/…

Situationally Aware Rolling Horizon Multi-Tier Load Restoration Considering Behind-The-Meter DER
Restoration in power distribution systems (PDSs) is well studied, however, most existing research focuses on network partition and microgrid formation, where load transfer is limited to adjacent feeders. This focus is not practical, as when adjacent feeders lack sufficient capacity, utilities may request support from more distant feeders in practice. Such a hirarchical restoration is complex, especially when involving changing system conditions due to cold load pickup and delayed reconnection o…

Peransformer: Improving Low-informed Expressive Performance Rendering with Score-aware Discriminator
Xian He, Wei Zeng, Ye Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10175 https://

Peransformer: Improving Low-informed Expressive Performance Rendering with Score-aware Discriminator
Highly-informed Expressive Performance Rendering (EPR) systems transform music scores with rich musical annotations into human-like expressive performance MIDI files. While these systems have achieved promising results, the availability of detailed music scores is limited compared to MIDI files and are less flexible to work with using a digital audio workstation (DAW). Recent advancements in low-informed EPR systems offer a more accessible alternative by directly utilizing score-derived MIDI as…

A Survey on Task Scheduling in Carbon-Aware Container Orchestration
Jialin Yang, Zainab Saad, Jiajun Wu, Xiaoguang Niu, Henry Leung, Steve Drew
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05949 …

A Survey on Task Scheduling in Carbon-Aware Container Orchestration
The soaring energy demands of large-scale software ecosystems and cloud data centers, accelerated by the intensive training and deployment of large language models, have driven energy consumption and carbon footprint to unprecedented levels. In response, both industry and academia are increasing efforts to reduce the carbon emissions associated with cloud computing through more efficient task scheduling and infrastructure orchestration. In this work, we present a systematic review of various Ku…

Intensional FOL over Belnap's Billatice for Strong-AI Robotics
Zoran Majkic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02774 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.02774

Intensional FOL over Belnap's Billatice for Strong-AI Robotics
AGI (Strong AI) aims to create intelligent robots that are quasi indistinguishable from the human mind. Like a child, the AGI robot would have to learn through input and experiences, constantly progressing and advancing its abilities over time. The AGI robot would require an intelligence more close to human's intelligence: it would have a self-aware consciousness that has the ability to solve problems, learn, and plan. Based on this approach an Intensional many-sorted First-order Logic (IFOL), …

Cooperative Flexibility Exchange: Fair and Comfort-Aware Decentralized Resource Allocation
Rabiya Khalid, Evangelos Pournaras
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04192 https://

Cooperative Flexibility Exchange: Fair and Comfort-Aware Decentralized Resource Allocation
The growing electricity demand and increased use of smart appliances are placing new pressures on power grids, making efficient energy management more important than ever. The existing energy management systems often prioritize system efficiency (balanced energy demand and supply) at the expense of user comfort. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel decentralized multi-agent coordination-based demand-side management system. The proposed system enables individual agents to coordinat…

Distribution-Aware Feature Selection for SAEs
Narmeen Oozeer, Nirmalendu Prakash, Michael Lan, Alice Rigg, Amirali Abdullah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21324 https://

Distribution-Aware Feature Selection for SAEs
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose neural activations into interpretable features. A widely adopted variant, the TopK SAE, reconstructs each token from its K most active latents. However, this approach is inefficient, as some tokens carry more information than others. BatchTopK addresses this limitation by selecting top activations across a batch of tokens. This improves average reconstruction but risks an "activation lottery," where rare high-magnitude features crowd out more informative but…

Discrepancy-Aware Contrastive Adaptation in Medical Time Series Analysis
Yifan Wang, Hongfeng Ai, Ruiqi Li, Maowei Jiang, Ruiyuan Kang, Jiahua Dong, Cheng Jiang, Chenzhong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05572

Discrepancy-Aware Contrastive Adaptation in Medical Time Series Analysis
In medical time series disease diagnosis, two key challenges are identified. First, the high annotation cost of medical data leads to overfitting in models trained on label-limited, single-center datasets. To address this, we propose incorporating external data from related tasks and leveraging AE-GAN to extract prior knowledge, providing valuable references for downstream tasks. Second, many existing studies employ contrastive learning to derive more generalized medical sequence representation…

Characterization of syndrome-dependent logical noise in detector regions
Matthew Girling, Ben Criger, Cristina Cirstoiu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08188 https://

Characterization of syndrome-dependent logical noise in detector regions
Characterizing how quantum error correction circuits behave under realistic hardware noise is essential for testing the premises that enable scalable fault tolerance. Logical error rates conditioned on syndrome outcomes are needed to enable noise-aware decoding and validate threshold-relevant assumptions. We introduce a protocol to directly estimate the logical Pauli channels (and pure errors) associated with detector regions formed of two or more syndrome extraction gadgets, conditioned on obs…

@… it was like a real guideline something like : « if you don’t want it generating stuff that don’t belong , but a more advance content aware fill, leave the prompt blank »

Are Recommenders Self-Aware? Label-Free Recommendation Performance Estimation via Model Uncertainty
Jiayu Li, Ziyi Ye, Guohao Jian, Zhiqiang Guo, Weizhi Ma, Qingyao Ai, Min Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23208

Are Recommenders Self-Aware? Label-Free Recommendation Performance Estimation via Model Uncertainty
Can a recommendation model be self-aware? This paper investigates the recommender's self-awareness by quantifying its uncertainty, which provides a label-free estimation of its performance. Such self-assessment can enable more informed understanding and decision-making before the recommender engages with any users. To this end, we propose an intuitive and effective method, probability-based List Distribution uncertainty (LiDu). LiDu measures uncertainty by determining the probability that a rec…

Downside Risk-Aware Equilibria for Strategic Decision-Making
Oliver Slumbers, Benjamin Patrick Evans, Sumitra Ganesh, Leo Ardon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03446 https://

Downside Risk-Aware Equilibria for Strategic Decision-Making
Game theory has traditionally had a relatively limited view of risk based on how a player's expected reward is impacted by the uncertainty of the actions of other players. Recently, a new game-theoretic approach provides a more holistic view of risk also considering the reward-variance. However, these variance-based approaches measure variance of the reward on both the upside and downside. In many domains, such as finance, downside risk only is of key importance, as this represents the potentia…

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

G2S-ICP SLAM: Geometry-aware Gaussian Splatting ICP SLAM
Gyuhyeon Pak, Hae Min Cho, Euntai Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18344 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.…

G2S-ICP SLAM: Geometry-aware Gaussian Splatting ICP SLAM
In this paper, we present a novel geometry-aware RGB-D Gaussian Splatting SLAM system, named G2S-ICP SLAM. The proposed method performs high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and robust camera pose tracking in real-time by representing each scene element using a Gaussian distribution constrained to the local tangent plane. This effectively models the local surface as a 2D Gaussian disk aligned with the underlying geometry, leading to more consistent depth interpretation across multiple viewpoints comp…

RoofSeg: An edge-aware transformer-based network for end-to-end roof plane segmentation
Siyuan You, Guozheng Xu, Pengwei Zhou, Qiwen Jin, Jian Yao, Li Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19003

RoofSeg: An edge-aware transformer-based network for end-to-end roof plane segmentation
Roof plane segmentation is one of the key procedures for reconstructing three-dimensional (3D) building models at levels of detail (LoD) 2 and 3 from airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point clouds. The majority of current approaches for roof plane segmentation rely on the manually designed or learned features followed by some specifically designed geometric clustering strategies. Because the learned features are more powerful than the manually designed features, the deep learning-bas…

A Tight Context-aware Privacy Bound for Histogram Publication
Sara Saeidian (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Inria Saclay), Ata Yavuzy{\i}lmaz (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Leonhard Grosse (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Georg Schuppe (SEBx), Tobias J. Oechtering (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508…

A Tight Context-aware Privacy Bound for Histogram Publication
We analyze the privacy guarantees of the Laplace mechanism releasing the histogram of a dataset through the lens of pointwise maximal leakage (PML). While differential privacy is commonly used to quantify the privacy loss, it is a context-free definition that does not depend on the data distribution. In contrast, PML enables a more refined analysis by incorporating assumptions about the data distribution. We show that when the probability of each histogram bin is bounded away from zero, stronge…

Reinforcement Learning from Probabilistic Forecasts for Safe Decision-Making via Conditional Value-at-Risk Planning
Michal Koren, Or Peretz, Tai Dinh, Philip S. Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08226

Reinforcement Learning from Probabilistic Forecasts for Safe Decision-Making via Conditional Value-at-Risk Planning
Sequential decisions in volatile, high-stakes settings require more than maximizing expected return; they require principled uncertainty management. This paper presents the Uncertainty-Aware Markov Decision Process (UAMDP), a unified framework that couples Bayesian forecasting, posterior-sampling reinforcement learning, and planning under a conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) constraint. In a closed loop, the agent updates its beliefs over latent dynamics, samples plausible futures via Thompson sa…

LeWiDi-2025 at NLPerspectives: The Third Edition of the Learning with Disagreements Shared Task
Elisa Leonardelli, Silvia Casola, Siyao Peng, Giulia Rizzi, Valerio Basile, Elisabetta Fersini, Diego Frassinelli, Hyewon Jang, Maja Pavlovic, Barbara Plank, Massimo Poesio
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08460…

LeWiDi-2025 at NLPerspectives: The Third Edition of the Learning with Disagreements Shared Task
Many researchers have reached the conclusion that AI models should be trained to be aware of the possibility of variation and disagreement in human judgments, and evaluated as per their ability to recognize such variation. The LEWIDI series of shared tasks on Learning With Disagreements was established to promote this approach to training and evaluating AI models, by making suitable datasets more accessible and by developing evaluation methods. The third edition of the task builds on this goal …

X-ray thermal diffuse scattering as a texture-robust temperature diagnostic for dynamically compressed solids
P. G. Heighway, D. J. Peake, T. Stevens, J. S. Wark, B. Albertazzi, S. J. Ali, L. Antonelli, M. R. Armstrong, C. Baehtz, O. B. Ball, S. Banerjee, A. B. Belonoshko, C. A. Bolme, V. Bouffetier, R. Briggs, K. Buakor, T. Butcher, S. Di Dio Cafiso, V. Cerantola, J. Chantel, A. Di Cicco, A. L. Coleman, J. Collier, G. Collins, A. J. Comley, F. Coppari, T. E. Cowan, G. Cristoforetti, H…

X-ray thermal diffuse scattering as a texture-robust temperature diagnostic for dynamically compressed solids
We present a model of x-ray thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) from a cubic polycrystal with an arbitrary crystallographic texture, based on the classic approach of Warren. We compare the predictions of our model with femtosecond x-ray diffraction patterns obtained from ambient and dynamically compressed rolled copper foils obtained at the High Energy Density (HED) instrument of the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser (EuXFEL), and find that the texture-aware TDS model yields more accurate results…

IGUANA: Immersive Guidance, Navigation, and Control for Consumer UAV
Victor Victor, Tania Krisanty, Matthew McGinity, Stefan Gumhold, Uwe A{\ss}mann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07609

IGUANA: Immersive Guidance, Navigation, and Control for Consumer UAV
As the markets for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and mixed reality (MR) headsets continue to grow, recent research has increasingly explored their integration, which enables more intuitive, immersive, and situationally aware control systems. We present IGUANA, an MR-based immersive guidance, navigation, and control system for consumer UAVs. IGUANA introduces three key elements beyond conventional control interfaces: (1) a 3D terrain map interface with draggable waypoint markers and live camer…

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

CamPVG: Camera-Controlled Panoramic Video Generation with Epipolar-Aware Diffusion
Chenhao Ji, Chaohui Yu, Junyao Gao, Fan Wang, Cairong Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19979 ht…

CamPVG: Camera-Controlled Panoramic Video Generation with Epipolar-Aware Diffusion
Recently, camera-controlled video generation has seen rapid development, offering more precise control over video generation. However, existing methods predominantly focus on camera control in perspective projection video generation, while geometrically consistent panoramic video generation remains challenging. This limitation is primarily due to the inherent complexities in panoramic pose representation and spherical projection. To address this issue, we propose CamPVG, the first diffusion-bas…

An Adaptive Environment-Aware Transformer Autoencoder for UAV-FSO with Dynamic Complexity Control
Han Zeng, Haibo Wang, Kan Wang, Xutao Yu, Zaichen Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16918

An Adaptive Environment-Aware Transformer Autoencoder for UAV-FSO with Dynamic Complexity Control
The rise of sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks sets high demands on UAV-assisted Free Space Optical (FSO) communications, where the channel environment becomes more complex and variable due to both atmospheric turbulence and UAV-induced vibrations. These factors increase the challenge of maintaining reliable communication and require adaptive processing methods. Autoencoders are promising as they learn optimal encodings from channel data. However, existing autoencoder designs are generic a…

MECap-R1: Emotion-aware Policy with Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Emotion Captioning
Haoqin Sun, Chenyang Lyu, Xiangyu Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Jiaming Zhou, Hui Wang, Aobo Kong, Jinghua Zhao, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yong Qin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18729

C-Flat : Towards a More Efficient and Powerful Framework for Continual Learning
Wei Li, Hangjie Yuan, Zixiang Zhao, Yifan Zhu, Aojun Lu, Tao Feng, Yanan Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18860

C-Flat++: Towards a More Efficient and Powerful Framework for Continual Learning
Balancing sensitivity to new tasks and stability for retaining past knowledge is crucial in continual learning (CL). Recently, sharpness-aware minimization has proven effective in transfer learning and has also been adopted in continual learning (CL) to improve memory retention and learning efficiency. However, relying on zeroth-order sharpness alone may favor sharper minima over flatter ones in certain settings, leading to less robust and potentially suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we pro…

How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).

Geometric Backstepping Control of Omnidirectional Tiltrotors Incorporating Servo-Rotor Dynamics for Robustness against Sudden Disturbances
Jaewoo Lee, Dongjae Lee, Jinwoo Lee, Hyungyu Lee, Yeonjoon Kim, H. Jin Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01675

Geometric Backstepping Control of Omnidirectional Tiltrotors Incorporating Servo-Rotor Dynamics for Robustness against Sudden Disturbances
This work presents a geometric backstepping controller for a variable-tilt omnidirectional multirotor that explicitly accounts for both servo and rotor dynamics. Considering actuator dynamics is essential for more effective and reliable operation, particularly during aggressive flight maneuvers or recovery from sudden disturbances. While prior studies have investigated actuator-aware control for conventional and fixed-tilt multirotors, these approaches rely on linear relationships between actua…

Cat: Post-training quantization error reduction via cluster-based affine transformation
Ali Zoljodi, Radu Timofte, Masoud Daneshtalab
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26277 https://…

Cat: Post-training quantization error reduction via cluster-based affine transformation
Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) reduces the memory footprint and computational overhead of deep neural networks by converting full-precision (FP) values into quantized and compressed data types. While PTQ is more cost-efficient than Quantization-Aware Training (QAT), it is highly susceptible to accuracy degradation under a low-bit quantization (LQ) regime (e.g., 2-bit). Affine transformation is a classical technique used to reduce the discrepancy between the information processed by a quantize…

Diverse And Private Synthetic Datasets Generation for RAG evaluation: A multi-agent framework
Ilias Driouich, Hongliu Cao, Eoin Thomas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18929 https://

Diverse And Private Synthetic Datasets Generation for RAG evaluation: A multi-agent framework
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems improve large language model outputs by incorporating external knowledge, enabling more informed and context-aware responses. However, the effectiveness and trustworthiness of these systems critically depends on how they are evaluated, particularly on whether the evaluation process captures real-world constraints like protecting sensitive information. While current evaluation efforts for RAG systems have primarily focused on the development of perfor…

Accessibility Scout: Personalized Accessibility Scans of Built Environments
William Huang, Xia Su, Jon E. Froehlich, Yang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23190 https://

Accessibility Scout: Personalized Accessibility Scans of Built Environments
Assessing the accessibility of unfamiliar built environments is critical for people with disabilities. However, manual assessments, performed by users or their personal health professionals, are laborious and unscalable, while automatic machine learning methods often neglect an individual user's unique needs. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable novel approaches to this problem, balancing personalization with scalability to enable more adaptive and context-aware assessments of…

Would you be interested on a European #coop alternative to #Github for your private/for-profit projects (paid service)?
I welcome comments elaborating on why you said "yes", "maybe" or "no" .
Note: I'm aware of other alternatives like Gitlab, Bitbucket, Gitea, Codeberg... None of those match what I'm asking about for one or more reasons.
#EU #SovereignTech #SovereignCloud #privacy #GDPR #cooperatives
No
Maybe
Yes