Tootfinder

How will new Packers president, Ed Policy, manage coach Matt LaFleur, GM Brian Gutekunst? https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45524237/nfl-green-bay-packers-president-ed-policy-mark-murphy-lafleur

USDA Ends Policy That Helped Black Farmers Access Aid - Capital B News
https://capitalbnews.org/usda-ends-dei-policy-black-farmers/

US judge blocks Trump passport policy targeting transgender people (Nate Raymond/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-judge-blocks-trump-passport-policy-targeting-transgender-people-2025-06-17/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250617/p155#a250617p155

ATK: Automatic Task-driven Keypoint Selection for Robust Policy Learning
Yunchu Zhang, Shubham Mittal, Zhengyu Zhang, Liyiming Ke, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Abhishek Gupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13867

ATK: Automatic Task-driven Keypoint Selection for Robust Policy Learning
Visuomotor policies often suffer from perceptual challenges, where visual differences between training and evaluation environments degrade policy performance. Policies relying on state estimations, like 6D pose, require task-specific tracking and are difficult to scale, while raw sensor-based policies may lack robustness to small visual disturbances.In this work, we leverage 2D keypoints - spatially consistent features in the image frame - as a flexible state representation for robust policy le…

CDP: Towards Robust Autoregressive Visuomotor Policy Learning via Causal Diffusion
Jiahua Ma, Yiran Qin, Yixiong Li, Xuanqi Liao, Yulan Guo, Ruimao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14769

CDP: Towards Robust Autoregressive Visuomotor Policy Learning via Causal Diffusion
Diffusion Policy (DP) enables robots to learn complex behaviors by imitating expert demonstrations through action diffusion. However, in practical applications, hardware limitations often degrade data quality, while real-time constraints restrict model inference to instantaneous state and scene observations. These limitations seriously reduce the efficacy of learning from expert demonstrations, resulting in failures in object localization, grasp planning, and long-horizon task execution. To add…

Mixed-variable policy-based optimization
Jonathan Viquerat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13240 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13240

Mixed-variable policy-based optimization
The optimization of mixed-variable problems remains a significant challenge. We propose an extension of the policy-based optimization method that handles mixed-variables problems in a natural way, through a simple policy combination. This is achieved by independently sampling from a multivariate normal distribution for the continuous domain, and from multiple categorical distributions for the discrete choices. Results demonstrate that the agent successfully yields high-quality solutions on a cl…

The Trump administration claims to be fighting an existential battle against insurrectionary forces in Los Angeles.
In truth, it created this cynical spectacle itself,
deploying troops and inflaming tensions to distract from its policy failures.
https://jacobin.com/2025/06/la-immigr…

Donald Trump Manufactured the Crisis in Los Angeles
The Trump administration claims to be fighting an existential battle against insurrectionary forces in Los Angeles. In truth, it created this cynical spectacle itself, deploying troops and inflaming tensions to distract from its policy failures.

With Trump's media habits once again having serious foreign policy effects, Fox News takes a pro-war stance in the MAGA media feud over the Israel-Iran conflict (CNN)
http://www.cnn.com/2025/06/18/media/fox-news-mark-levin-tucker-c…

Fox News takes pro-war position as MAGA media feuds over Israel-Iran conflict
President Trump’s television habits once again have serious foreign policy implications as his administration weighs further US involvement in Iran.

Kriegstüchtige Kasernen https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10021

Implicit Constraint-Aware Off-Policy Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Ali Baheri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14058 https://

Implicit Constraint-Aware Off-Policy Correction for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Offline reinforcement learning promises policy improvement from logged interaction data alone, yet state-of-the-art algorithms remain vulnerable to value over-estimation and to violations of domain knowledge such as monotonicity or smoothness. We introduce implicit constraint-aware off-policy correction, a framework that embeds structural priors directly inside every Bellman update. The key idea is to compose the optimal Bellman operator with a proximal projection on a convex constraint set, wh…

Inference on Optimal Policy Values and Other Irregular Functionals via Smoothing
Justin Whitehouse, Morgane Austern, Vasilis Syrgkanis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11780

Inference on Optimal Policy Values and Other Irregular Functionals via Smoothing
Constructing confidence intervals for the value of an optimal treatment policy is an important problem in causal inference. Insight into the optimal policy value can guide the development of reward-maximizing, individualized treatment regimes. However, because the functional that defines the optimal value is non-differentiable, standard semi-parametric approaches for performing inference fail to be directly applicable. Existing approaches for handling this non-differentiability fall roughly int…

Wow "individualised pricing", such fun. I guess this boils down to: what's the most we can charge you, personally, based on what dirt we have on you:
https://

Alt National Park Servic "They’re cranking up the propaganda machine again: claiming Brad Lander “unlawfully interfered” and that ICE is just “enforcing Trump’s policy.” Reality: Lander stood up for civil rights. ICE’s conduct reflects a deeply troubling use of federal power." — Bluesky
https://

California AI Policy Report Warns of 'Irreversible Harms' - Slashdot
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/06/17/214215/california-ai-policy-report-warns-of-irreversible-harms

A look at California's 52-page California Report on Frontier Policy, which proposes an AI regulatory framework based on transparency, risk assessments, and more (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

California is trying to regulate its AI giants — again
California has released a safety report proposing new legislation after Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047.

Interesting article on how #GenAI can be used effectively in a classroom setting, what methods the instructor uses to make sure students learn how and when (not) to use it, and how they ensure the students still learn what they need to learn.

ARPaCCino: An Agentic-RAG for Policy as Code Compliance
Francesco Romeo, Luigi Arena, Francesco Blefari, Francesco Aurelio Pironti, Matteo Lupinacci, Angelo Furfaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10584

ARPaCCino: An Agentic-RAG for Policy as Code Compliance
Policy as Code (PaC) is a paradigm that encodes security and compliance policies into machine-readable formats, enabling automated enforcement in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) environments. However, its adoption is hindered by the complexity of policy languages and the risk of misconfigurations. In this work, we present ARPaCCino, an agentic system that combines Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG), and tool-based validation to automate the generation and verificati…

"I Cannot Write This Because It Violates Our Content Policy": Understanding Content Moderation Policies and User Experiences in Generative AI Products
Lan Gao, Oscar Chen, Rachel Lee, Nick Feamster, Chenhao Tan, Marshini Chetty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14018

"I Cannot Write This Because It Violates Our Content Policy": Understanding Content Moderation Policies and User Experiences in Generative AI Products
While recent research has focused on developing safeguards for generative AI (GAI) model-level content safety, little is known about how content moderation to prevent malicious content performs for end-users in real-world GAI products. To bridge this gap, we investigated content moderation policies and their enforcement in GAI online tools -- consumer-facing web-based GAI applications. We first analyzed content moderation policies of 14 GAI online tools. While these policies are comprehensive i…

Damn.
Most of the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy team that handles U.S. engagement with partner countries to prevent China from prevailing in AI and 5G wireless technologies, and in global data policy, were fired from the State Department.
https://www.washing…

State Department cuts China policy staff amid major overhaul
The State Department fired personnel and consolidated offices that help craft the U.S. diplomatic response to China’s aggression in Asia and global tech competition.

Meta Users Feel Less Safe Since It Weakened ‘Hateful Conduct’ Policy, Survey Finds https://www.404media.co/meta-users-feel-less-safe-since-it-weakened-hateful-conduct-policy-survey-finds/

Oren Cass has a knack for reverse engineering a reasoned explanation for Trump’s latest policy, only to fall out of sync when it turns out Trump doesn’t work that way.
Here he is last week lamenting how “commentators stuck in the old world seem confused” in worrying about the US being dragged into a war with Iran. Instead, he explains confidently, Israel will “handle its own business”, while an “America First” US will “step back from conflicts in the Middle East”.

Is Israel the Ideal "America First" Ally?
And more from this week...

How Iran's nuclear capabilities have developed, look what the impact of Trump was. Because he abandoned Obama's policy.
#trump #nuclear #iran

I've made a summer quiz for EU energy policy nerds 🤓
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jaapburger_acers-country-sheets-summer-quiz-acti…

Now that the school year is coming to an end in many European countries, many children are receiving their school reports. | Jaap Burger
Now that the school year is coming to an end in many European countries, many children are receiving their school reports. What are they doing well and where can they improve? Have they learned from the curriculum and have they acted on previous recommendations? How are they doing compared to their peers? EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) does something similar for countries, their retail energy markets and the level of consumer participation. It's time for their annual …

Partial identification via conditional linear programs: estimation and policy learning
Eli Ben-Michael
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12215 https://

Partial identification via conditional linear programs: estimation and policy learning
Many important quantities of interest are only partially identified from observable data: the data can limit them to a set of plausible values, but not uniquely determine them. This paper develops a unified framework for covariate-assisted estimation, inference, and decision making in partial identification problems where the parameter of interest satisfies a series of linear constraints, conditional on covariates. In such settings, bounds on the parameter can be written as expectations of solu…

Militärrepublik Deutschland https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/9978

Senate bill's Medicaid cuts draw some GOP angst (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5355932-senate-medicaid-cuts-concern/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250618/p20#a250618p20

good piece from Rafael Behr on Starmer & migration
"The prime minister’s immigration approach follows a now-familiar pattern: letting fear of a difficult argument get in the way of policy that might work"
Starmer once again demonstrating an absence of leadership skills i.m.o.
#LabourParty #KeirStarmer #UKPol

SFMTA board is hearing Mayor Lurie’s mass displacement plan to banish working-poor, mostly Latino families living in RVs from the city.
Here’s the “refuge permit” designed as window dressing to make liberals feel ok about this. Notice to get one, you have to “agree to accept offer of… interim… housing,” ie agree to be displaced a little later anyway. 💩
#sfpol

Damn; I quite liked the ammonia story;
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/production/air-products-shelves-2bn-plan-to-import-green-ammonia-to-uk-and-crack-it-back-to-hydrogen/2-1-1833888

Air Products shelves £2bn plan to import green ammonia to UK and crack it back to hydrogen
The industrial gases firm had received planning permission for the Immingham terminal earlier this year, but blames lack of policy support for its decision

#physics #manufacturing

The US factory that lays bare the contradiction in Trump's policy
An exclusive look inside the closely guarded factory the president wants to become a foundation stone for a US golden age.

Leaked all-hands: Mathias Döpfner said Axel Springer employees must use AI, opposed disclosing to readers whether AI was used in the reporting process, and more (Oliver Darcy/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/axel-springer-mathias-dopfner-ai-policy

Axel Springer’s A.I. Edict
At a global town hall, Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner delivered a blunt message—A.I. is here, and every employee must use it.

EquiContact: A Hierarchical SE(3) Vision-to-Force Equivariant Policy for Spatially Generalizable Contact-rich Tasks
Joohwan Seo, Arvind Kruthiventy, Soomi Lee, Megan Teng, Xiang Zhang, Seoyeon Choi, Jongeun Choi, Roberto Horowitz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10961

EquiContact: A Hierarchical SE(3) Vision-to-Force Equivariant Policy for Spatially Generalizable Contact-rich Tasks
This paper presents a framework for learning vision-based robotic policies for contact-rich manipulation tasks that generalize spatially across task configurations. We focus on achieving robust spatial generalization of the policy for the peg-in-hole (PiH) task trained from a small number of demonstrations. We propose EquiContact, a hierarchical policy composed of a high-level vision planner (Diffusion Equivariant Descriptor Field, Diff-EDF) and a novel low-level compliant visuomotor policy (Ge…

China, which pledged $8.5B for young AI startups in April, is taking an industrial policy approach to help its AI companies close the gap with those in the US (Meaghan Tobin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/technol

China Is Spending Billions to Become an A.I. Superpower
Beijing is taking an industrial policy approach to help its A.I. companies close the gap with those in the United States.

Enhancing Traffic Accident Classifications: Application of NLP Methods for City Safety
Enes \"Ozeren, Alexander Ulbrich, Sascha Filimon, David R\"ugamer, Andreas Bender
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12092

Enhancing Traffic Accident Classifications: Application of NLP Methods for City Safety
A comprehensive understanding of traffic accidents is essential for improving city safety and informing policy decisions. In this study, we analyze traffic incidents in Munich to identify patterns and characteristics that distinguish different types of accidents. The dataset consists of both structured tabular features, such as location, time, and weather conditions, as well as unstructured free-text descriptions detailing the circumstances of each accident. Each incident is categorized into on…

Into the Unknown: Applying Inductive Spatial-Semantic Location Embeddings for Predicting Individuals' Mobility Beyond Visited Places
Xinglei Wang, Tao Cheng, Stephen Law, Zichao Zeng, Ilya Ilyankou, Junyuan Liu, Lu Yin, Weiming Huang, Natchapon Jongwiriyanurak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14070…

Into the Unknown: Applying Inductive Spatial-Semantic Location Embeddings for Predicting Individuals' Mobility Beyond Visited Places
Predicting individuals' next locations is a core task in human mobility modelling, with wide-ranging implications for urban planning, transportation, public policy and personalised mobility services. Traditional approaches largely depend on location embeddings learned from historical mobility patterns, limiting their ability to encode explicit spatial information, integrate rich urban semantic context, and accommodate previously unseen locations. To address these challenges, we explore the appl…

I’ve long been a fan of the Check My Ads people. Now they’re launching a really ambitious-looking “Policy Platform” aimed at cleaning up the online-advertising business. My belief is that anyone who’s had much exposure to that business or to “AdTech” probably agrees that cleanup is called for. Check it out: https://checkmyads.org/policy/

The US Senate voted to rescind two years' worth of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB),
-- delivering a blow to public radio and television stations around the country.
The CPB is a publicly funded nonprofit corporation that supports NPR and PBS stations.
The 51-48 vote today on President Trump's rescissions package would eliminate $1.1 billion that was allocated to public broadcasting
. The $1.1 billion includes $60 million for "cos…

Senate votes to kill entire public broadcasting budget in blow to NPR and PBS
Senate votes to rescind $1.1 billion from Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Befehlskette bis nach Damaskus https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10063

Forecasting Climate Policy Uncertainty: Evidence from the United States
Donia Besher, Anirban Sengupta, Tanujit Chakraborty
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12276

Forecasting Climate Policy Uncertainty: Evidence from the United States
Forecasting Climate Policy Uncertainty (CPU) is essential as policymakers strive to balance economic growth with environmental goals. High levels of CPU can slow down investments in green technologies, make regulatory planning more difficult, and increase public resistance to climate reforms, especially during times of economic stress. This study addresses the challenge of forecasting the US CPU index by building the Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) model with a large set of covariates, i…

Data-Driven Pricing: Key Technologies, Business Practices, and Policy Implications
https://fpf.org/blog/data-driven-pricing-key-technologies-business-practices-and-policy-implications/
@…

The New MAGA World Order
“Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether,” writes @jonathanchait, “Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad”:
(No paywall)

Trump’s Immoral World Order
This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

Logarithmic Smoothing for Adaptive PAC-Bayesian Off-Policy Learning
Maxime Haddouche, Otmane Sakhi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10664 https://

Logarithmic Smoothing for Adaptive PAC-Bayesian Off-Policy Learning
Off-policy learning serves as the primary framework for learning optimal policies from logged interactions collected under a static behavior policy. In this work, we investigate the more practical and flexible setting of adaptive off-policy learning, where policies are iteratively refined and re-deployed to collect higher-quality data. Building on the success of PAC-Bayesian learning with Logarithmic Smoothing (LS) in static settings, we extend this framework to the adaptive scenario using tool…

Rubio signs civil nuclear pact with Bahrain as Trump meets with crown prince (Timothy Nerozzi/Washington Examiner)
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/foreign-policy/3472823/marco-rubio-signs-civil-nuclear-pact-bahrain/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250716/p185#a250716p185

Policy-Based Trajectory Clustering in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Hao Hu, Xinqi Wang, Simon Shaolei Du
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09202 https://

Policy-Based Trajectory Clustering in Offline Reinforcement Learning
We introduce a novel task of clustering trajectories from offline reinforcement learning (RL) datasets, where each cluster center represents the policy that generated its trajectories. By leveraging the connection between the KL-divergence of offline trajectory distributions and a mixture of policy-induced distributions, we formulate a natural clustering objective. To solve this, we propose Policy-Guided K-means (PG-Kmeans) and Centroid-Attracted Autoencoder (CAAE). PG-Kmeans iteratively trains…

BenchRL-QAS: Benchmarking reinforcement learning algorithms for quantum architecture search
Azhar Ikhtiarudin, Aditi Das, Param Thakkar, Akash Kundu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12189

BenchRL-QAS: Benchmarking reinforcement learning algorithms for quantum architecture search
We introduce BenchRL-QAS, a unified benchmarking framework for systematically evaluating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in quantum architecture search (QAS) across diverse variational quantum algorithm tasks and system sizes ranging from 2- to 8-qubit. Our study benchmarks nine RL agents including both value-based and policy-gradient methods on representative quantum problems such as variational quantum eigensolver, variational quantum state diagonalization, quantum classification, and …

Big Tech quietly sponsors Trump’s military parade party
#resist

Big Tech quietly sponsors Trump’s military parade party
Though big tech companies have downplayed their involvement in funding this weekend’s military parade, the event’s organizer, America250, has released statements confirming involvement from Amazon, Palantir and Oracle.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/685690/big-tech-trump-military-parade-america250

Small Data Explainer -- The impact of small data methods in everyday life
Maren Hackenberg, Sophia G. Connor, Fabian Kabus, June Brawner, Ella Markham, Mahi Hardalupas, Areeq Chowdhury, Rolf Backofen, Anna K\"ottgen, Angelika Rohde, Nadine Binder, Harald Binder, the Collaborative Research Center 1597 Small Data
https://arxi…

Small Data Explainer -- The impact of small data methods in everyday life
The emergence of breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has led to a renewed focus on how small data settings, i.e., settings with limited information, can benefit from such developments. This includes societal issues such as how best to include under-represented groups in data-driven policy and decision making, or the health benefits of assistive technologies such as wearables. We provide a conceptual overview, in particular contrasting small data with big data, and identify comm…

On the Robustness of Derivative-free Methods for Linear Quadratic Regulator
Weijian Li, Panagiotis Kounatidis, Zhong-Ping Jiang, Andreas A. Malikopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12596

On the Robustness of Derivative-free Methods for Linear Quadratic Regulator
Policy optimization has drawn increasing attention in reinforcement learning, particularly in the context of derivative-free methods for linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problems with unknown dynamics. This paper focuses on characterizing the robustness of derivative-free methods for solving an infinite-horizon LQR problem. To be specific, we estimate policy gradients by cost values, and study the effect of perturbations on the estimations, where the perturbations may arise from function approx…

I'm paranoid about the cloud, OneDrive etc
I have a policy that most stuff I put on the cloud is encrypted (esp backups). Not always practical tho.
I was happy to discover rclone https://rclone.org/ a while ago, & to find out it can set up encrypted containers on OneDrive etc. Readable on both ends, e…

FKA Swaziland. Small bit out of South Africa up against the south end of the Mozambique border. https://mstdn.social/@TomSullivan/114863583176451672

Latent Policy Steering with Embodiment-Agnostic Pretrained World Models
Yiqi Wang, Mrinal Verghese, Jeff Schneider
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13340 https:/…

Latent Policy Steering with Embodiment-Agnostic Pretrained World Models
Learning visuomotor policies via imitation has proven effective across a wide range of robotic domains. However, the performance of these policies is heavily dependent on the number of training demonstrations, which requires expensive data collection in the real world. In this work, we aim to reduce data collection efforts when learning visuomotor robot policies by leveraging existing or cost-effective data from a wide range of embodiments, such as public robot datasets and the datasets of huma…

Meta shareholders suing Mark Zuckerberg and Meta leaders over Facebook's Cambridge Analytica privacy violations reach a settlement deal, ending an $8B trial (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa…

Lawmakers are poised to extend Pell Grant eligibility to short-term credential programs.
With few guardrails in place, it could incentivize an explosion in unaccredited and for-profit providers.
https://www.insidehighered.com/ne…

Workforce Pell Would Extend Grants to Unaccredited Programs
Lawmakers are poised to extend Pell eligibility to short-term credential programs. With few guardrails in place, it could incentivize an explosion in unaccredited and for-profit providers.

„Den Triple Lock des neutralen Irland verteidigen“ https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10019

Trump approval steady at 42%, support weakens for his immigration policy, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds (Jason Lange/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-approval-steady-42-support-weakens-his-immigration-policy-reutersipsos-2025-06-16/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p129#a250616p129

Efficient Multi-Camera Tokenization with Triplanes for End-to-End Driving
Boris Ivanovic, Cristiano Saltori, Yurong You, Yan Wang, Wenjie Luo, Marco Pavone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12251

Efficient Multi-Camera Tokenization with Triplanes for End-to-End Driving
Autoregressive Transformers are increasingly being deployed as end-to-end robot and autonomous vehicle (AV) policy architectures, owing to their scalability and potential to leverage internet-scale pretraining for generalization. Accordingly, tokenizing sensor data efficiently is paramount to ensuring the real-time feasibility of such architectures on embedded hardware. To this end, we present an efficient triplane-based multi-camera tokenization strategy that leverages recent advances in 3D ne…

Blessed be the rule of law.
Breaking: Federal judge blocks Rubio's anti-trans, anti-nonbinary passport policy for all
https://www.lawdork.com/p/breaking-federal-judge-blocks-rubios

Sources: EU regulators plan a full-scale investigation into UMG's $775M acquisition of Downtown Music; UMG didn't provide remedies to address regulatory worries (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/su…

The EU issues guidelines to help AI models with systemic risks comply with the AI Act, after criticism from some companies about lack of clarity (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boa

The New MAGA World Order
“Rather than following a foreign policy that ignores values altogether,” writes @jonathanchait, “Trump has a clear preference for values that are, in the American context, historically anomalous or—to put it in less neutral terms—bad”:
(No paywall)

Trump’s Immoral World Order
This week’s Gulf tour revealed that Trump’s transactional foreign policy doesn’t lack values. It just has really bad ones.

Fast Non-Episodic Adaptive Tuning of Robot Controllers with Online Policy Optimization
James A. Preiss, Fengze Xie, Yiheng Lin, Adam Wierman, Yisong Yue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10914

Fast Non-Episodic Adaptive Tuning of Robot Controllers with Online Policy Optimization
We study online algorithms to tune the parameters of a robot controller in a setting where the dynamics, policy class, and optimality objective are all time-varying. The system follows a single trajectory without episodes or state resets, and the time-varying information is not known in advance. Focusing on nonlinear geometric quadrotor controllers as a test case, we propose a practical implementation of a single-trajectory model-based online policy optimization algorithm, M-GAPS,along with rep…

EXPO: Stable Reinforcement Learning with Expressive Policies
Perry Dong, Qiyang Li, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07986 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07986 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.07986
arXiv:2507.07986v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of training and fine-tuning expressive policies with online reinforcement learning (RL) given an offline dataset. Training expressive policy classes with online RL present a unique challenge of stable value maximization. Unlike simpler Gaussian policies commonly used in online RL, expressive policies like diffusion and flow-matching policies are parameterized by a long denoising chain, which hinders stable gradient propagation from actions to policy parameters when optimizing against some value function. Our key insight is that we can address stable value maximization by avoiding direct optimization over value with the expressive policy and instead construct an on-the-fly RL policy to maximize Q-value. We propose Expressive Policy Optimization (EXPO), a sample-efficient online RL algorithm that utilizes an on-the-fly policy to maximize value with two parameterized policies -- a larger expressive base policy trained with a stable imitation learning objective and a light-weight Gaussian edit policy that edits the actions sampled from the base policy toward a higher value distribution. The on-the-fly policy optimizes the actions from the base policy with the learned edit policy and chooses the value maximizing action from the base and edited actions for both sampling and temporal-difference (TD) backup. Our approach yields up to 2-3x improvement in sample efficiency on average over prior methods both in the setting of fine-tuning a pretrained policy given offline data and in leveraging offline data to train online.
toXiv_bot_toot

From Outcomes to Processes: Guiding PRM Learning from ORM for Inference-Time Alignment
Bin Xie, Bingbing Xu, Yige Yuan, Shengmao Zhu, Huawei Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12446 …

From Outcomes to Processes: Guiding PRM Learning from ORM for Inference-Time Alignment
Inference-time alignment methods have gained significant attention for their efficiency and effectiveness in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, existing dominant approaches using reward-guided search (RGS) primarily rely on outcome reward models (ORMs), which suffer from a critical granularity mismatch: ORMs are designed to provide outcome rewards for complete responses, while RGS methods rely on process rewards to guide the policy, leading to inconsistent sc…

QSpark: Towards Reliable Qiskit Code Generation
Kiana Kheiri, Aamna Aamir, Andriy Miranskyy, Chen Ding
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12642 https://

QSpark: Towards Reliable Qiskit Code Generation
Quantum circuits must be error-resilient, yet LLMs like Granite-20B-Code and StarCoder often output flawed Qiskit code. We fine-tuned a 32 B model with two RL methods, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and Odds-Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO), using a richly annotated synthetic dataset. On the Qiskit HumanEval benchmark, ORPO reaches 56.29\% Pass@1 ($\approx+10$ pp over Granite-8B-QK) and GRPO hits 49\%, both beating all general-purpose baselines; on the original HumanEval they sco…

Trump governs today in the wake of the near-complete dismantling of checks and balances on the executive branch -- at least in the foreign policy and national security realm.
Since the 9/11 attacks, Congress has granted the presidency more and more power over foreign affairs
and declined to take any of it back,
and the Supreme Court has been reluctant to provide any meaningful restraints.
Trump inherited an ever-expanding national security apparatus that operates wi…

Imperial President at Home, Emperor Abroad
American foreign policy in an age of unrestrained executive power.

Estimation of Treatment Effects in Extreme and Unobserved Data
Jiyuan Tan, Jose Blanchet, Vasilis Syrgkanis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14051 https://

Estimation of Treatment Effects in Extreme and Unobserved Data
Causal effect estimation seeks to determine the impact of an intervention from observational data. However, the existing causal inference literature primarily addresses treatment effects on frequently occurring events. But what if we are interested in estimating the effects of a policy intervention whose benefits, while potentially important, can only be observed and measured in rare yet impactful events, such as extreme climate events? The standard causal inference methodology is not designed …

Affective-CARA: A Knowledge Graph Driven Framework for Culturally Adaptive Emotional Intelligence in HCI
Nirodya Pussadeniya, Bahareh Nakisa, Mohmmad Naim Rastgoo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14166

Affective-CARA: A Knowledge Graph Driven Framework for Culturally Adaptive Emotional Intelligence in HCI
Culturally adaptive emotional responses remain a critical challenge in affective computing. This paper introduces Affective-CARA, an agentic framework designed to enhance user-agent interactions by integrating a Cultural Emotion Knowledge Graph (derived from StereoKG) with Valence, Arousal, and Dominance annotations, culture-specific data, and cross-cultural checks to minimize bias. A Gradient-Based Reward Policy Optimization mechanism further refines responses according to cultural alignment, …

Sources: Prosus offered to cut its 27% Delivery Hero stake to below 10% and give up its board seat to address EU concerns over its €4.1B Just Eat Takeaway deal (Foo Yun Chee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sustaina…

How Kennedy's overhaul could make vaccines more expensive (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5350100-acip-replacement-vaccine-policy-impact/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p47#a250615p47

The Synthetic Mirror -- Synthetic Data at the Age of Agentic AI
Marcelle Momha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13818 https://arxiv.org/pdf…

The Synthetic Mirror -- Synthetic Data at the Age of Agentic AI
Synthetic data, which is artificially generated and intelligently mimicking or supplementing the real-world data, is increasingly used. The proliferation of AI agents and the adoption of synthetic data create a synthetic mirror that conceptualizes a representation and potential distortion of reality, thus generating trust and accountability deficits. This paper explores the implications for privacy and policymaking stemming from synthetic data generation, and the urgent need for new policy inst…

Maine Family Planning sues Trump over Medicaid funding cut
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5404673-maine-family-planning-lawsuit-medicaid-funding/

GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control
Zixuan Chen, Mazeyu Ji, Xuxin Cheng, Xuanbin Peng, Xue Bin Peng, Xiaolong Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14770

GMT: General Motion Tracking for Humanoid Whole-Body Control
The ability to track general whole-body motions in the real world is a useful way to build general-purpose humanoid robots. However, achieving this can be challenging due to the temporal and kinematic diversity of the motions, the policy's capability, and the difficulty of coordination of the upper and lower bodies. To address these issues, we propose GMT, a general and scalable motion-tracking framework that trains a single unified policy to enable humanoid robots to track diverse motions in t…

A federal judge on Monday declared some of the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health grants
“void and illegal,”
accusing the government of racial discrimination and prejudice against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.
Ruling from the bench, Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts
delivered a damning assessment of the Trump administrations’ motives in targeting hundreds of grants that focused on the health of Bl…

Trump Live Updates: Senate Republicans Propose Deeper Medicaid Cuts in Major Policy Bill

Angriff auf die Neutralität https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10020

A Tax-Efficient Model Predictive Control Policy for Retirement Funding
Kasper Johansson, Stephen Boyd
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10603 https://

A Tax-Efficient Model Predictive Control Policy for Retirement Funding
The retirement funding problem addresses the question of how to manage a retiree's savings to provide her with a constant post-tax inflation adjusted consumption throughout her lifetime. This consists of choosing withdrawals and transfers from and between several accounts with different tax treatments, taking into account basic rules such as required minimum distributions and limits on Roth conversions, additional income, liabilities, taxes, and the bequest when the retiree dies. We develop a r…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11862 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_…

Q-Policy: Quantum-Enhanced Policy Evaluation for Scalable Reinforcement Learning
We propose Q-Policy, a hybrid quantum-classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework that mathematically accelerates policy evaluation and optimization by exploiting quantum computing primitives. Q-Policy encodes value functions in quantum superposition, enabling simultaneous evaluation of multiple state-action pairs via amplitude encoding and quantum parallelism. We introduce a quantum-enhanced policy iteration algorithm with provable polynomial reductions in sample complexity for the evaluat…

House Policy Bill Would Add $3.4 Trillion to Debt, Swamping Economic Gains (Tony Romm/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/us/politics/house-bill-federal-debt.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250618/p15#a250618p15

Reddit says it has started verifying UK users' ages before letting them "view certain mature content", in order to comply with the country's Online Safety Act (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

Reddit’s UK users must now prove they’re 18 to view adult content
Reddit hires company to verify user age with selfie or photo of government ID.

Der Etat für die Ära neuer Konflikte https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10062

Breaking: Federal judge blocks Rubio's anti-trans, anti-nonbinary passport policy for all (Chris Geidner/Law Dork)
https://www.lawdork.com/p/breaking-federal-judge-blocks-rubios
http://www.memeorandum.com/250617/p161#a250617p161

The UK CMA launches a probe into the planned $13.25B merger of ad giants Omnicom and Interpublic to assess potential competition reduction in the UK ad market (DhanushVignesh Babu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/…

Judge orders many NIH grants restored, calling cancellation unlawful (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5353385-trump-administration-grants-ruling/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p134#a250616p134

White House denies reporting by Guardian on VA benefits: 'Totally FALSE story' (Joseph Choi/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5353202-va-hospitals-report-white-house-denial/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p133#a250616p133

Steering Robots with Inference-Time Interactions
Yanwei Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14287 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.14287…

Steering Robots with Inference-Time Interactions
Imitation learning has driven the development of generalist policies capable of autonomously solving multiple tasks. However, when a pretrained policy makes errors during deployment, there are limited mechanisms for users to correct its behavior. While collecting additional data for finetuning can address such issues, doing so for each downstream use case is inefficient at deployment. My research proposes an alternative: keeping pretrained policies frozen as a fixed skill repertoire while allow…

Abortion providers devastated by political killings, hit list (Alejandra O'Connell-Domenech/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5353386-abortion-providers-targeted-missouri-shooting/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p135#a250616p135

'Unconstitutional animus': Judge slaps down Trump admin effort to reinstate passport marker policy targeting transgender and nonbinary people
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/unconstitutional-animus-judge-slaps-down-trump-admin-effort-to-reinstate-passport-marker-policy-targeting-transgender-and-nonbinary-people/

Vom Recht auf Angriffskrieg https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10016

The UK CMA launches a probe into the planned $13.25B merger of ad giants Omnicom and Interpublic to assess potential competition reduction in the UK ad market (DhanushVignesh Babu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/…

Donald Trump’s attempt to take credit for the additional weapons headed to Ukraine at Europe’s expense has created some friction in EU-US relations.
“If we pay for these weapons, it’s our support,”
said Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, on Wednesday.
“So it’s European support,
and we are doing as much as we can to help Ukraine …
If you promise to give the weapons but say that somebody else is going to pay for it,
it’s not really given by …

DynaGuide: Steering Diffusion Polices with Active Dynamic Guidance
Maximilian Du, Shuran Song
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13922 https://

DynaGuide: Steering Diffusion Polices with Active Dynamic Guidance
Deploying large, complex policies in the real world requires the ability to steer them to fit the needs of a situation. Most common steering approaches, like goal-conditioning, require training the robot policy with a distribution of test-time objectives in mind. To overcome this limitation, we present DynaGuide, a steering method for diffusion policies using guidance from an external dynamics model during the diffusion denoising process. DynaGuide separates the dynamics model from the base pol…

Hawley Aims to Roll Back Medicaid Cuts He Voted for Just Two Weeks Ago (Megan Mineiro/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/us/politics/medicaid-hawley-trump-policy-bill.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250716/p18#a250716p18

Der westliche Exzeptionalismus https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10058

Can Pretrained Vision-Language Embeddings Alone Guide Robot Navigation?
Nitesh Subedi, Adam Haroon, Shreyan Ganguly, Samuel T. K. Tetteh, Prajwal Koirala, Cody Fleming, Soumik Sarkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14507

Can Pretrained Vision-Language Embeddings Alone Guide Robot Navigation?
Foundation models have revolutionized robotics by providing rich semantic representations without task-specific training. While many approaches integrate pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) with specialized navigation architectures, the fundamental question remains: can these pretrained embeddings alone successfully guide navigation without additional fine-tuning or specialized modules? We present a minimalist framework that decouples this question by training a behavior cloning policy dir…

Cassidy in a bind as RFK Jr. blows up vaccine policy (Nathaniel Weixel/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5345378-kennedy-cassidy-vaccine-policy/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250612/p14#a250612p14

GRaD-Nav : Vision-Language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics
Qianzhong Chen, Naixiang Gao, Suning Huang, JunEn Low, Timothy Chen, Jiankai Sun, Mac Schwager
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14009

GRaD-Nav++: Vision-Language Model Enabled Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics
Autonomous drones capable of interpreting and executing high-level language instructions in unstructured environments remain a long-standing goal. Yet existing approaches are constrained by their dependence on hand-crafted skills, extensive parameter tuning, or computationally intensive models unsuitable for onboard use. We introduce GRaD-Nav++, a lightweight Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that runs fully onboard and follows natural-language commands in real time. Our policy is trained …

Piraterie in der Ostsee (III) https://www.german-foreign-policy.com/news/detail/10056

Minnesota Shootings Shake Capitol Hill, Spark Security Fears (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/minnesota-lawmakers-shooting-response-political-violence-958959d4
http://www.memeorandum.com/250615/p11#a250615p11

Flash Floods and Climate Policy (Elizabeth Kolbert/New Yorker)
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/21/flash-floods-and-climate-policy?currentPage=all
http://www.memeorandum.com/250712/p12#a250712p12

Trump Disclosure Shows $57 Million in Earnings From Early Crypto Push (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-disclosure-shows-57-million-in-earnings-from-early-crypto-push-2c7dd19a?st=K5aK4n
http://www.memeorandum.com/250614/p88#a250614p88