Tootfinder

What a gigantic gaping asshole. https://gothamist.com/news/mayor-adams-vows-to-challenge-nyc-school-policy-on-trans-students-bathroom-rights

Mayor Adams vows to challenge NYC school policy on trans students’ bathroom rights
State officials say denying access would break the law as civil rights groups and political rivals condemn the mayor’s remarks.

ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge: Multimodal Detection of Errors and Failures in Human-Robot Conversations
Shiye Cao, Maia Stiber, Amama Mahmood, Maria Teresa Parreira, Wendy Ju, Micol Spitale, Hatice Gunes, Chien-Ming Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13468

ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge: Multimodal Detection of Errors and Failures in Human-Robot Conversations
The integration of large language models (LLMs) into conversational robots has made human-robot conversations more dynamic. Yet, LLM-powered conversational robots remain prone to errors, e.g., misunderstanding user intent, prematurely interrupting users, or failing to respond altogether. Detecting and addressing these failures is critical for preventing conversational breakdowns, avoiding task disruptions, and sustaining user trust. To tackle this problem, the ERR@HRI 2.0 Challenge provides a m…

Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks the top 30 Hong Kong-listed tech stocks, is up 41% YTD vs. Nasdaq's 17%, driven by AI and China's chip self-sufficiency push (William Sandlund/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/db286a0a-ca2d-4791-809e-c9a1ac73b8ad

The French government has launched a criminal investigation into Elon Musk’s X over “the alleged manipulation of its algorithm” and “fraudulent” data extraction, the social media platform said.
https://www.ft.com/content/21818d23-71d7-45a4-ae8c-e7940f5d9e00

“Solidarity activities at the global level should be strategic and impactful. They should focus on disrupting all components of the supply chain that benefit the Israeli occupation in general and settler colonialism in particular. This means citizens around the world in different sectors of society can contribute to the struggle for Palestine as both producers and consumers by heeding the call to boycott and divest from Israel.
Direct actions from the working class are crucial. Workers…

Israel is proceeding with annexation, and there is only one way to stop it
Global grassroots organising is the only way to challenge Israel and its plan to legalise the theft of Palestinian land.

Las Vegas Review-Journal NFL Challenge picks — Week 3 https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/betting/las-vegas-review-journal-nfl-challenge-picks-week-3-3463619/

EventSSEG: Event-driven Self-Supervised Segmentation with Probabilistic Attention
Lakshmi Annamalai, Chetan Singh Thakur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14856 https://

EventSSEG: Event-driven Self-Supervised Segmentation with Probabilistic Attention
Road segmentation is pivotal for autonomous vehicles, yet achieving low latency and low compute solutions using frame based cameras remains a challenge. Event cameras offer a promising alternative. To leverage their low power sensing, we introduce EventSSEG, a method for road segmentation that uses event only computing and a probabilistic attention mechanism. Event only computing poses a challenge in transferring pretrained weights from the conventional camera domain, requiring abundant labeled…

Arcade Media, the management company behind British YouTuber collective The Sidemen, sells a minority stake to Thomas Benski's film studio and VC group Lumina (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/9e7e3955-dd9e-4e0f-b22c-fca01a480485

Turns out there are lots of mineral resources above ground. And local.
US could meet critical minerals needs from mining waste, study finds https://on.ft.com/4fKftQe

Quantum teleportation over thermal microwave network
W. K. Yam, S. Gandorfer, F. Fesquet, M. Handschuh, K. E. Honasoge, A. Marx, R. Gross, K. G. Fedorov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14691

Quantum teleportation over thermal microwave network
Quantum communication in the microwave regime is set to play an important role in distributed quantum computing and hybrid quantum networks. However, typical superconducting quantum circuits require millikelvin temperatures for operation, which poses a significant challenge for largescale microwave quantum networks. Here, we present a solution to this challenge by demonstrating the successful quantum teleportation of microwave coherent states between two spatially-separated dilution refrigerato…

ConCap: Practical Network Traffic Generation for Flow-based Intrusion Detection Systems
Miel Verkerken, Laurens D'hooge, Bruno Volckaert, Filip De Turck, Giovanni Apruzzese
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16038

ConCap: Practical Network Traffic Generation for Flow-based Intrusion Detection Systems
Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have been studied in research for almost four decades. Yet, despite thousands of papers claiming scientific advances, a non-negligible number of recent works suggest that the findings of prior literature may be questionable. At the root of such a disagreement is the well-known challenge of obtaining data representative of a real-world network-and, hence, usable for security assessments. We tackle such a challenge in this paper. We propose ConCap, a pra…

Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D)
is telling political allies that she is
likely to run for the Senate,
with some expecting an official announcement in the coming weeks.
Party leaders have been pressing the term-limited Mills to challenge Sen. Susan Collins,
the only GOP senator representing a state carried by former Vice President Kamala Harris

Scoop: Mills "likely" to run for Senate to try to defeat Susan Collins
Party leaders have been pressing the term-limited Mills to challenge GOP Sen. Susan Collins.

So much winning.
https://www.ft.com/content/c51fc02c-0859-4908-9c3d-c3c1d12550c4

Patrick Mahomes increases sense of urgency amid Chiefs' 0-2 start, embraces challenge: 'What an opportunity'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/p…

catherine writes error messages
existence of challenge implies possibility of defeat

Eternal inflation near inflection points: a challenge to primordial black hole models
Eemeli Tomberg, Konstantinos Dimopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15522

Eternal inflation near inflection points: a challenge to primordial black hole models
Inflation with an inflection point potential is a popular model for producing primordial black holes. The potential near the inflection point is approximately flat, with a local maximum next to a local minimum, prone to eternal inflation. We show that a sufficient condition for eternal inflation is $λ_1 \leq 3$, where $λ_1$ is the index of the `exponential tail,' the lowest eigenvalue of the Fokker--Planck equation over a bounded region. We write $λ_1$ in terms of the model parameters for li…

ChatGPT: "Here's a direct, technical, and respectful argument you might present to Elon Musk to explain why the Neuralink "Blindsight" brain implant is unlikely to restore meaningful vision in people born blind" https://chatgpt.com/share/681baf6f-157c-8004-b2…

ChatGPT - Neuralink Blindness Challenge
A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges

ASCMamba: Multimodal Time-Frequency Mamba for Acoustic Scene Classification
Bochao Sun, Dong Wang, Han Yin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15632 https://arxiv.o…

ASCMamba: Multimodal Time-Frequency Mamba for Acoustic Scene Classification
Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) is a fundamental problem in computational audition, which seeks to classify environments based on the distinctive acoustic features. In the ASC task of the APSIPA ASC 2025 Grand Challenge, the organizers introduce a multimodal ASC task. Unlike traditional ASC systems that rely solely on audio inputs, this challenge provides additional textual information as inputs, including the location where the audio is recorded and the time of recording. In this paper, we…

Explainxkcd's text[1] about yesterday's #xkcd[2] was way more interesting and funny that I had expected[3]: the authors apparently interpreted the title text as a challenge. 😂
[1] https://www.explainxkcd.com/…

"No environmental impact assessment was made for the 90MW datacentre", which was approved when #AngelaRaynor overruled the local council's planning refusal.

Fermion quantum criticality far from equilibrium
Rohan Mittal, Tom Zander, Johannes Lang, Sebastian Diehl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14318 https://

Fermion quantum criticality far from equilibrium
Driving a quantum system out of equilibrium while preserving its subtle quantum mechanical correlations on large scales presents a major challenge, both fundamentally and for technological applications. At its core, this challenge is pinpointed by the question of how quantum effects can persist at asymptotic scales, analogous to quantum critical points in equilibrium. In this work, we construct such a scenario using fermions as building blocks. These fermions undergo an absorbing-to-absorbing s…

Transsion Multilingual Speech Recognition System for MLC-SLM 2025 Challenge
Xiaoxiao Li, An Zhu, Youhai Jiang, Fengjie Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14916 https://

Transsion Multilingual Speech Recognition System for MLC-SLM 2025 Challenge
This paper presents the architecture and performance of a novel Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system developed by the Transsion Speech Team for Track 1 of the MLC-SLM 2025 Challenge. The proposed system comprises three key components: 1) a frozen Whisper-large-v3 based speech encoder, leveraging large-scale pretraining to ensure robust acoustic feature extraction; 2) a trainable adaptor module using Linear-ReLU-Linear transformation mechanisms to effectively align speech and t…

Diplomats say the EU is moving to exclude Meta, Apple, Google, and Amazon from the new Financial Data Access system to protect the bloc's "digital sovereignty" (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/6596876f-c831-482c-878c-78c1499ef543

In computer graphics, there's a challenge to run the old-school game "Doom" on anything. So of course it doesn't just run on fridges and car stereos. It "runs" in Houdini:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aaefiikmnnnr/113833764390940721…

Black mayors challenge Trump’s lawless narrative - Salon.com
https://www.salon.com/2025/08/17/black-mayors-challenge-trumps-lawless-narrative/

The UK gov't is backtracking on encryption backdoors.
UK government seeks way out of clash with US over Apple encryption
https://www.ft.com/content/3a3e6dbc-591d-4087-9ad3-11af04f0176f

Adversarial Graph Fusion for Incomplete Multi-view Semi-supervised Learning with Tensorial Imputation
Zhangqi Jiang, Tingjin Luo, Xu Yang, Xinyan Liang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15955

Adversarial Graph Fusion for Incomplete Multi-view Semi-supervised Learning with Tensorial Imputation
View missing remains a significant challenge in graph-based multi-view semi-supervised learning, hindering their real-world applications. To address this issue, traditional methods introduce a missing indicator matrix and focus on mining partial structure among existing samples in each view for label propagation (LP). However, we argue that these disregarded missing samples sometimes induce discontinuous local structures, i.e., sub-clusters, breaking the fundamental smoothness assumption in LP.…

Political Leaning and Politicalness Classification of Texts
Matous Volf (DELTA High school of computer science and economics, Pardubice, Czechia), Jakub Simko (Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies, Bratislava, Slovakia)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13913

Political Leaning and Politicalness Classification of Texts
This paper addresses the challenge of automatically classifying text according to political leaning and politicalness using transformer models. We compose a comprehensive overview of existing datasets and models for these tasks, finding that current approaches create siloed solutions that perform poorly on out-of-distribution texts. To address this limitation, we compile a diverse dataset by combining 12 datasets for political leaning classification and creating a new dataset for politicalness …

CCrepairBench: A High-Fidelity Benchmark and Reinforcement Learning Framework for C Compilation Repair
Weixuan Sun, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Xiaojun Wu, Qiaobo Hao, AIMgroup, Yang Fang, Jiuyang Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15690

CCrepairBench: A High-Fidelity Benchmark and Reinforcement Learning Framework for C++ Compilation Repair
The automated repair of C++ compilation errors presents a significant challenge, the resolution of which is critical for developer productivity. Progress in this domain is constrained by two primary factors: the scarcity of large-scale, high-fidelity datasets and the limitations of conventional supervised methods, which often fail to generate semantically correct patches.This paper addresses these gaps by introducing a comprehensive framework with three core contributions. First, we present CCr…

How to manage climate change effects is going to increasingly be a challenge for gardeners. It's refreshing to read about it in such a matter-of-fact way.
The secrets of Sissinghurst’s garden - https://on.ft.com/4ndljwA via @FT

I think this will be a good new challenge for #3dprinting. I think the tube diameter needs to be sufficient for stability, otherwise it will be too elastic and act like a spring instead of a ball. #openscad (thanks @damarberlari@x for his stunning visual article

Filing: OnlyFans took in $7.2B from subscribers in FY ending Nov. 2024, up from $6.6B YoY, and paid out $5.8B, up from $5.3B; creator accounts grew 13% to 4.6M (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7d936956-f1b9-4fe4-b3de-feaddac79953

BugScope: Learn to Find Bugs Like Human
Jinyao Guo, Chengpeng Wang, Dominic Deluca, Jinjie Liu, Zhuo Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15671 …

BugScope: Learn to Find Bugs Like Human
Detecting software bugs remains a fundamental challenge due to the extensive diversity of real-world defects. Traditional static analysis tools often rely on symbolic workflows, which restrict their coverage and hinder adaptability to customized bugs with diverse anti-patterns. While recent advances incorporate large language models (LLMs) to enhance bug detection, these methods continue to struggle with sophisticated bugs and typically operate within limited analysis contexts. To address these…

To Zip Through the Cost Analysis of Probabilistic Programs
Matthias Hetzenberger, Georg Moser, Florian Zuleger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14249 https://arx…

To Zip Through the Cost Analysis of Probabilistic Programs
Probabilistic programming and the formal analysis of probabilistic algorithms are active areas of research, driven by the widespread use of randomness to improve performance. While functional correctness has seen substantial progress, automated reasoning about expected runtime remains comparatively limited. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing a refinement-typed probability monad in Liquid Haskell. Our monad enables automated reasoning about expected values and costs by encodi…

Tree-like Pairwise Interaction Networks
Ronald Richman, Salvatore Scognamiglio, Mario V. W\"uthrich
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15678 https://arxiv.org…

Tree-like Pairwise Interaction Networks
Modeling feature interactions in tabular data remains a key challenge in predictive modeling, for example, as used for insurance pricing. This paper proposes the Tree-like Pairwise Interaction Network (PIN), a novel neural network architecture that explicitly captures pairwise feature interactions through a shared feed-forward neural network architecture that mimics the structure of decision trees. PIN enables intrinsic interpretability by design, allowing for direct inspection of interaction e…

The Constitutional Controller: Doubt-Calibrated Steering of Compliant Agents
Simon Kohaut, Felix Divo, Navid Hamid, Benedict Flade, Julian Eggert, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15478

The Constitutional Controller: Doubt-Calibrated Steering of Compliant Agents
Ensuring reliable and rule-compliant behavior of autonomous agents in uncertain environments remains a fundamental challenge in modern robotics. Our work shows how neuro-symbolic systems, which integrate probabilistic, symbolic white-box reasoning models with deep learning methods, offer a powerful solution to this challenge. This enables the simultaneous consideration of explicit rules and neural models trained on noisy data, combining the strength of structured reasoning with flexible represe…

The UK FCA has improved its crypto registration process, reducing approval times and increasing acceptance rate after criticism it was too slow and restrictive (Martin Arnold/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/c146250f-9821-44f3-ad21-4a3edf843e65

The far right is surging in the United States,
driven in part by white nationalists exploiting economic anxieties
and a populace increasingly frustrated with the political status quo.
Now, as the Trump administration rolls back diversity, equity and inclusion policies,
cracks down on immigration and offers pardons to white supremacists,
some see an opening.
In creating their community, the founders of "Return to the Land" are challenging anti-d…

Arkansas Housing Development Restricted to White Residents Sparks Legal Concerns
Housing rights experts say a community restricted to white residents is illegal, but the creators believe they could win a potential challenge in court in the current political climate.

Fox launches Fox One, its $20/month streamer to reach younger viewers; Fox News' median viewer age is 69, and Emplifi says it had 332M YouTube views in July (Anna Nicolaou/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8ce03199-948b-4752-9c1c-a24c9ed30937

A review of Tim Berners-Lee's new book This is for Everyone, while his startup Inrupt, which aims to commercialize the Solid web protocol, struggles to scale (John Thornhill/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/13e4fad3-9fa1-4534-b84e-aafed97ae073

Former Saints TE Jimmy Graham completes Arctic Challenge with crew, rowing 584 miles in record time https://www.nfl.com/news/jimmy-graham-arctic-challenge-record-time-rowing-584-miles

Multiscale Video Transformers for Class Agnostic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving
Leila Cheshmi, Mennatullah Siam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14729 https://

Multiscale Video Transformers for Class Agnostic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving
Ensuring safety in autonomous driving is a complex challenge requiring handling unknown objects and unforeseen driving scenarios. We develop multiscale video transformers capable of detecting unknown objects using only motion cues. Video semantic and panoptic segmentation often relies on known classes seen during training, overlooking novel categories. Recent visual grounding with large language models is computationally expensive, especially for pixel-level output. We propose an efficient vide…

DIVEBATCH: Accelerating Model Training Through Gradient-Diversity Aware Batch Size Adaptation
Yuen Chen, Yian Wang, Hari Sundaram
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16173 https://

DIVEBATCH: Accelerating Model Training Through Gradient-Diversity Aware Batch Size Adaptation
The goal of this paper is to accelerate the training of machine learning models, a critical challenge since the training of large-scale deep neural models can be computationally expensive. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are widely used to train deep neural networks. In contrast to traditional approaches that focus on tuning the learning rate, we propose a novel adaptive batch size SGD algorithm, DiveBatch, that dynamically adjusts the batch size. Adapting the batch size is c…

Structured Information for Improving Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generation
Sander Schildermans, Chang Tian, Ying Jiao, Marie-Francine Moens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15962

Structured Information for Improving Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generation
Text-to-image (T2I) generation has advanced rapidly, yet faithfully capturing spatial relationships described in natural language prompts remains a major challenge. Prior efforts have addressed this issue through prompt optimization, spatially grounded generation, and semantic refinement. This work introduces a lightweight approach that augments prompts with tuple-based structured information, using a fine-tuned language model for automatic conversion and seamless integration into T2I pipelines…

RadReason: Radiology Report Evaluation Metric with Reasons and Sub-Scores
Yingshu Li, Yunyi Liu, Lingqiao Liu, Lei Wang, Luping Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15464 https://

RadReason: Radiology Report Evaluation Metric with Reasons and Sub-Scores
Evaluating automatically generated radiology reports remains a fundamental challenge due to the lack of clinically grounded, interpretable, and fine-grained metrics. Existing methods either produce coarse overall scores or rely on opaque black-box models, limiting their usefulness in real-world clinical workflows. We introduce RadReason, a novel evaluation framework for radiology reports that not only outputs fine-grained sub-scores across six clinically defined error types, but also produces h…

Court filing: Elon Musk says he talked to Mark Zuckerberg in February about backing a $97.4B OpenAI bid, but neither he nor Meta signed a letter of intent (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/12494c21-e477-49c1-a2d7-683c12c281ea

UK government offers a new framework for artists who signed record deals before the streaming era and missed out on streaming income to renegotiate contracts (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/b7ec4cde-df96-4a06-9f2c-8e230bb0acd7

CCFC: Core & Core-Full-Core Dual-Track Defense for LLM Jailbreak Protection
Jiaming Hu, Haoyu Wang, Debarghya Mukherjee, Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14128

CCFC: Core & Core-Full-Core Dual-Track Defense for LLM Jailbreak Protection
Jailbreak attacks pose a serious challenge to the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs). We introduce CCFC (Core & Core-Full-Core), a dual-track, prompt-level defense framework designed to mitigate LLMs' vulnerabilities from prompt injection and structure-aware jailbreak attacks. CCFC operates by first isolating the semantic core of a user query via few-shot prompting, and then evaluating the query using two complementary tracks: a core-only track to ignore adversarial distractions (e…

Multi-Robot Navigation in Social Mini-Games: Definitions, Taxonomy, and Algorithms
Rohan Chandra, Shubham Singh, Abhishek Jha, Dannon Andrade, Hriday Sainathuni, Katia Sycara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13459

Multi-Robot Navigation in Social Mini-Games: Definitions, Taxonomy, and Algorithms
The ``Last Mile Challenge'' has long been considered an important, yet unsolved, challenge for autonomous vehicles, public service robots, and delivery robots. A central issue in this challenge is the ability of robots to navigate constrained and cluttered environments (e.g., doorways, hallways, corridor intersections), often while competing for space with other robots and humans. We refer to these environments as ``Social Mini-Games'' (SMGs). SMGs are tightly coupled, high-agency interactions …

Filing: OnlyFans took in $7.2B from subscribers in FY ending Nov. 2024, up from $6.6B YoY, and paid out $5.8B, up from $5.3B; creator accounts grew 13% to 4.6M (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7d936956-f1b9-4fe4-b3de-feaddac79953

Sources: Bari Weiss is seeking a valuation of between $200M and $250M for The Free Press amid talks with Skydance CEO David Ellison over a potential sale (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/0f1ce3d6-35bc-461f-9685-13e2dfddb08d

Reid's annual HBCU watch list: Ranking the top 10 prospects for the 2026 NFL draft https://www.espn.com/nfl/draft2026/story/_/id/46008738/2026-nfl-draft-ranking-top-10-hbcu-prospects

First RAG, Second SEG: A Training-Free Paradigm for Camouflaged Object Detection
Wutao Liu, YiDan Wang, Pan Gao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15313 https://ar…

First RAG, Second SEG: A Training-Free Paradigm for Camouflaged Object Detection
Camouflaged object detection (COD) poses a significant challenge in computer vision due to the high similarity between objects and their backgrounds. Existing approaches often rely on heavy training and large computational resources. While foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) offer strong generalization, they still struggle to handle COD tasks without fine-tuning and require high-quality prompts to yield good performance. However, generating such prompts manually is costly…

Tensorized Multi-Task Learning for Personalized Modeling of Heterogeneous Individuals with High-Dimensional Data
Elif Konyar, Mostafa Reisi Gahrooei, Kamran Paynabar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15676

Tensorized Multi-Task Learning for Personalized Modeling of Heterogeneous Individuals with High-Dimensional Data
Effective modeling of heterogeneous subpopulations presents a significant challenge due to variations in individual characteristics and behaviors. This paper proposes a novel approach to address this issue through multi-task learning (MTL) and low-rank tensor decomposition techniques. Our MTL approach aims to enhance personalized modeling by leveraging shared structures among similar tasks while accounting for distinct subpopulation-specific variations. We introduce a framework where low-rank d…

Sources: EU officials are fast-tracking digital euro plans, and considering Ethereum or Solana over a private blockchain after the US passed the Genius Act (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8ad60169-d1e5-4d2c-b928-d53d668f0ec6

Multiple Memory Systems for Enhancing the Long-term Memory of Agent
Gaoke Zhang, Bo Wang, Yunlong Ma, Dongming Zhao, Zifei Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15294 https://

Multiple Memory Systems for Enhancing the Long-term Memory of Agent
An agent powered by large language models have achieved impressive results, but effectively handling the vast amounts of historical data generated during interactions remains a challenge. The current approach is to design a memory module for the agent to process these data. However, existing methods, such as MemoryBank and A-MEM, have poor quality of stored memory content, which affects recall performance and response quality. In order to better construct high-quality long-term memory content, …

Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responses
Fangyi Yu, Nabeel Seedat, Dasha Herrmannova, Frank Schilder, Jonathan Richard Schwarz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16093

Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responses
Evaluating long-form answers in high-stakes domains such as law or medicine remains a fundamental challenge. Standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture semantic correctness, and current LLM-based evaluators often reduce nuanced aspects of answer quality into a single undifferentiated score. We introduce DeCE, a decomposed LLM evaluation framework that separates precision (factual accuracy and relevance) and recall (coverage of required concepts), using instance-specific criteria autom…

X says France has launched a criminal investigation over "the alleged manipulation of its algorithm" and "fraudulent" data extraction; X denies the allegations (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/21818d23-71d7-45a4-ae8c-e7940f5d9e00

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Rainbow Table Attack on Human Passwords
MA. Khajeian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14600 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Hybrid Classical-Quantum Rainbow Table Attack on Human Passwords
Passwords that are long and human-generated pose a challenge for both classical and quantum attacks due to their irregular structure and large search space. In this work, we present an enhanced classical-quantum hybrid attack tailored to this scenario. We build rainbow tables using dictionary-based password generation with transformation rules to better model real user behavior. These tables are then organized into buckets, enabling faster lookup and reduced space complexity. To perform quantum…

Sources: Beijing's Nvidia H20 curbs were triggered by US Commerce Secretary Lutnick's not selling China the best stuff remark, which officials found "insulting" (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/b8e30c54-b71c-4113-8b3e-8f54bc36587d

Autonomous driving tech startup Nuro closed its $203M Series E at a $6B valuation, adding $97M from Uber, Nvidia, and others to April's $106M tranche (Rafe Uddin/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/264cecb7-aa7c-4cd3-9a54-601b3b7ba192

WISE-FUSE: Efficient Whole Slide Image Encoding via Coarse-to-Fine Patch Selection with VLM and LLM Knowledge Fusion
Yonghan Shin, SeungKyu Kim, Won-Ki Jeong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14537

WISE-FUSE: Efficient Whole Slide Image Encoding via Coarse-to-Fine Patch Selection with VLM and LLM Knowledge Fusion
Whole slide images (WSIs) in computational pathology (CPath) pose a major computational challenge due to their gigapixel scale, often requiring the processing of tens to hundreds of thousands of high-resolution patches per slide. This results in prohibitive encoding costs, with preprocessing and training times extending to days or even weeks-making WSI encoding the most significant bottleneck in real-world deployment. In this work, we propose WISE-FUSE, an adaptive WSI encoding framework that l…

Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attack on Large Language Models Using Exponentiated Gradient Descent
Sajib Biswas, Mao Nishino, Samuel Jacob Chacko, Xiuwen Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14853

Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attack on Large Language Models Using Exponentiated Gradient Descent
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in critical applications, ensuring their robustness and safety alignment remains a major challenge. Despite the overall success of alignment techniques such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) on typical prompts, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks enabled by crafted adversarial triggers appended to user prompts. Most existing jailbreak methods either rely on inefficient searches over discrete token spaces or dir…

Argumentation for Explainable Workforce Optimisation (with Appendix)
Jennifer Leigh, Dimitrios Letsios, Alessandro Mella, Lucio Machetti, Francesca Toni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15118

Argumentation for Explainable Workforce Optimisation (with Appendix)
Workforce management is a complex problem optimising the makespan and travel distance required for a team of operators to complete a set of jobs, using a set of instruments. A crucial challenge in workforce management is accommodating changes at execution time so that explanations are provided to all stakeholders involved. Here, we show that, by understanding workforce management as abstract argumentation in an industrial application, we can accommodate change and obtain faithful explanations. …

How do Language Models Generate Slang: A Systematic Comparison between Human and Machine-Generated Slang Usages
Siyang Wu, Zhewei Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15518 https://…

How do Language Models Generate Slang: A Systematic Comparison between Human and Machine-Generated Slang Usages
Slang is a commonly used type of informal language that poses a daunting challenge to NLP systems. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, have made the problem more approachable. While LLM agents are becoming more widely applied to intermediary tasks such as slang detection and slang interpretation, their generalizability and reliability are heavily dependent on whether these models have captured structural knowledge about slang that align well with human attested slang usage…

Google, Amazon, Cohere, and Mistral are intensifying efforts to reduce AI hallucinations via technical fixes, data quality improvements, and fact-checking (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/7a4e7eae-f004-486a-987f-4a2e4dbd34fb

FBI: Learning Dexterous In-hand Manipulation with Dynamic Visuotactile Shortcut Policy
Yijin Chen, Wenqiang Xu, Zhenjun Yu, Tutian Tang, Yutong Li, Siqiong Yao, Cewu Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14441

FBI: Learning Dexterous In-hand Manipulation with Dynamic Visuotactile Shortcut Policy
Dexterous in-hand manipulation is a long-standing challenge in robotics due to complex contact dynamics and partial observability. While humans synergize vision and touch for such tasks, robotic approaches often prioritize one modality, therefore limiting adaptability. This paper introduces Flow Before Imitation (FBI), a visuotactile imitation learning framework that dynamically fuses tactile interactions with visual observations through motion dynamics. Unlike prior static fusion methods, FBI …

Multinational firms like McDonald's and UK insurer Bupa, struggling to hire AI talent at home, are turning to back offices in India to meet their core AI needs (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/a46ee948-07c0-4083-9610-1d85d7e15cc7

WorldWeaver: Generating Long-Horizon Video Worlds via Rich Perception
Zhiheng Liu, Xueqing Deng, Shoufa Chen, Angtian Wang, Qiushan Guo, Mingfei Han, Zeyue Xue, Mengzhao Chen, Ping Luo, Linjie Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15720

WorldWeaver: Generating Long-Horizon Video Worlds via Rich Perception
Generative video modeling has made significant strides, yet ensuring structural and temporal consistency over long sequences remains a challenge. Current methods predominantly rely on RGB signals, leading to accumulated errors in object structure and motion over extended durations. To address these issues, we introduce WorldWeaver, a robust framework for long video generation that jointly models RGB frames and perceptual conditions within a unified long-horizon modeling scheme. Our training fra…

Sources: Microsoft has poached 24 employees from Google DeepMind in the past six months; Gemini engineering head Amar Subramanya confirms the move to Microsoft (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/9e6b3d89-e47a-40e1-b737-2792370c4b00

AFABench: A Generic Framework for Benchmarking Active Feature Acquisition
Valter Sch\"utz, Han Wu, Reza Rezvan, Linus Aronsson, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14734

AFABench: A Generic Framework for Benchmarking Active Feature Acquisition
In many real-world scenarios, acquiring all features of a data instance can be expensive or impractical due to monetary cost, latency, or privacy concerns. Active Feature Acquisition (AFA) addresses this challenge by dynamically selecting a subset of informative features for each data instance, trading predictive performance against acquisition cost. While numerous methods have been proposed for AFA, ranging from greedy information-theoretic strategies to non-myopic reinforcement learning appro…

Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation vs. Long-Context Input for Clinical Reasoning over EHRs
Skatje Myers, Dmitriy Dligach, Timothy A. Miller, Samantha Barr, Yanjun Gao, Matthew Churpek, Anoop Mayampurath, Majid Afshar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14817

Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation vs. Long-Context Input for Clinical Reasoning over EHRs
Electronic health records (EHRs) are long, noisy, and often redundant, posing a major challenge for the clinicians who must navigate them. Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution for extracting and reasoning over this unstructured text, but the length of clinical notes often exceeds even state-of-the-art models' extended context windows. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers an alternative by retrieving task-relevant passages from across the entire EHR, potentially reducin…

Futurity as Infrastructure: A Techno-Philosophical Interpretation of the AI Lifecycle
Mark Cote, Susana Aires
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15680 https://arxi…

Futurity as Infrastructure: A Techno-Philosophical Interpretation of the AI Lifecycle
This paper argues that a techno-philosophical reading of the EU AI Act provides insight into the long-term dynamics of data in AI systems, specifically, how the lifecycle from ingestion to deployment generates recursive value chains that challenge existing frameworks for Responsible AI. We introduce a conceptual tool to frame the AI pipeline, spanning data, training regimes, architectures, feature stores, and transfer learning. Using cross-disciplinary methods, we develop a technically grounded…

Sources: the UK may backtrack on its January order for Apple to create a backdoor for iCloud encrypted data after pressure from US officials, including JD Vance (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/3a3e6dbc-591d-4087-9ad3-11af04f0176f

Dating apps are encouraging users to meet in person to address concerns about "dating fatigue" among Gen Z and reverse a post-pandemic slowdown in growth (Kieran Smith/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/6d383cc2-0256-423e-8bf9-e85c20607e25

D3FNet: A Differential Attention Fusion Network for Fine-Grained Road Structure Extraction in Remote Perception Systems
Chang Liu, Yang Xu, Tamas Sziranyi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15537

D3FNet: A Differential Attention Fusion Network for Fine-Grained Road Structure Extraction in Remote Perception Systems
Extracting narrow roads from high-resolution remote sensing imagery remains a significant challenge due to their limited width, fragmented topology, and frequent occlusions. To address these issues, we propose D3FNet, a Dilated Dual-Stream Differential Attention Fusion Network designed for fine-grained road structure segmentation in remote perception systems. Built upon the encoder-decoder backbone of D-LinkNet, D3FNet introduces three key innovations:(1) a Differential Attention Dilation Extra…

FedEve: On Bridging the Client Drift and Period Drift for Cross-device Federated Learning
Tao Shen, Zexi Li, Didi Zhu, Ziyu Zhao, Chao Wu, Fei Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14539

FedEve: On Bridging the Client Drift and Period Drift for Cross-device Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared model without exposing their private data. Data heterogeneity is a fundamental challenge in FL, which can result in poor convergence and performance degradation. Client drift has been recognized as one of the factors contributing to this issue resulting from the multiple local updates in FedAvg. However, in cross-device FL, a different form of drift arises due to the partial cli…

RPG: A Repository Planning Graph for Unified and Scalable Codebase Generation
Jane Luo, Xin Zhang, Steven Liu, Jie Wu, Yiming Huang, Yangyu Huang, Chengyu Yin, Ying Xin, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qi Chen, Scarlett Li, Mao Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16198

RPG: A Repository Planning Graph for Unified and Scalable Codebase Generation
Large language models excel at function- and file-level code generation, yet generating complete repositories from scratch remains a fundamental challenge. This process demands coherent and reliable planning across proposal- and implementation-level stages, while natural language, due to its ambiguity and verbosity, is ill-suited for faithfully representing complex software structures. To address this, we introduce the Repository Planning Graph (RPG), a persistent representation that unifies pr…

How Europe is seeking US tech alternatives, as lawmakers consider adding "Buy European" to future laws; Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have unveiled local clouds (Barbara Moens/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/5e25c397-61d1-4b48-b5c5-65561a4c9df2

Response and Prompt Evaluation to Prevent Parasocial Relationships with Chatbots
Emma Rath, Stuart Armstrong, Rebecca Gorman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15748 https://

Response and Prompt Evaluation to Prevent Parasocial Relationships with Chatbots
The development of parasocial relationships with AI agents has severe, and in some cases, tragic effects for human well-being. Yet preventing such dynamics is challenging: parasocial cues often emerge gradually in private conversations, and not all forms of emotional engagement are inherently harmful. We address this challenge by introducing a simple response evaluation framework, created by repurposing a state-of-the-art language model, that evaluates ongoing conversations for parasocial cues …

X says France has launched a criminal investigation over "the alleged manipulation of its algorithm" and "fraudulent" data extraction; X denies the allegations (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/21818d23-71d7-45a4-ae8c-e7940f5d9e00

High-Frequency First: A Two-Stage Approach for Improving Image INR
Sumit Kumar Dam, Mrityunjoy Gain, Eui-Nam Huh, Choong Seon Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15582 https://

High-Frequency First: A Two-Stage Approach for Improving Image INR
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful alternative to traditional pixel-based formats by modeling images as continuous functions over spatial coordinates. A key challenge, however, lies in the spectral bias of neural networks, which tend to favor low-frequency components while struggling to capture high-frequency (HF) details such as sharp edges and fine textures. While prior approaches have addressed this limitation through architectural modifications or specialized …

HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents
Thomas Carta, Cl\'ement Romac, Loris Gaven, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Olivier Sigaud, Sylvain Lamprier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14751

HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents
Open-ended AI agents need to be able to learn efficiently goals of increasing complexity, abstraction and heterogeneity over their lifetime. Beyond sampling efficiently their own goals, autotelic agents specifically need to be able to keep the growing complexity of goals under control, limiting the associated growth in sample and computational complexity. To adress this challenge, recent approaches have leveraged hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) and language, capitalizing on its compos…

Beyond Semantic Similarity: Reducing Unnecessary API Calls via Behavior-Aligned Retriever
Yixin Chen, Ying Xiong, Shangyu Wu, Yufei Cui, Xue Liu, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14323

Beyond Semantic Similarity: Reducing Unnecessary API Calls via Behavior-Aligned Retriever
Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage external functions to extend their capabilities, but inaccurate function calls can lead to inefficiencies and increased costs.Existing methods address this challenge by fine-tuning LLMs or using demonstration-based prompting, yet they often suffer from high training overhead and fail to account for inconsistent demonstration samples, which misguide the model's invocation behavior. In this paper, we trained a behavior-aligned retriever (BAR), …

DIO: Refining Mutual Information and Causal Chain to Enhance Machine Abstract Reasoning Ability
Ruizhuo Song, Beiming Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15387 https://

DIO: Refining Mutual Information and Causal Chain to Enhance Machine Abstract Reasoning Ability
Despite the outstanding performance of current deep learning models across various domains, their fundamental bottleneck in abstract reasoning remains unresolved. To address this challenge, the academic community has introduced Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) problems as an authoritative benchmark for evaluating the abstract reasoning capabilities of deep learning algorithms, with a focus on core intelligence dimensions such as abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and complex problem-sol…

Spatio-temporal, multi-field deep learning of shock propagation in meso-structured media
M. Giselle Fern\'andez-Godino, Meir H. Shachar, Kevin Korner, Jonathan L. Belof, Mukul Kumar, Jonathan Lind, William J. Schill
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16139

Spatio-temporal, multi-field deep learning of shock propagation in meso-structured media
The ability to predict how shock waves traverse porous and architected materials is a decisive factor in planetary defense, national security, and the race to achieve inertial fusion energy. Yet capturing pore collapse, anomalous Hugoniot responses, and localized heating -- phenomena that can determine the success of asteroid deflection or fusion ignition -- has remained a major challenge despite recent advances in single-field and reduced representations. We introduce a multi-field spatio-temp…

Sources: Cursor maker Anysphere acquired Koala, an AI-powered CRM startup that raised a $15M Series A five months ago; Koala plans to shut down in September (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/18/cursor-snaps-up-…

Cursor snaps up enterprise startup Koala in challenge to GitHub Copilot | TechCrunch
Cursor-maker Anysphere is snapping up top talent from AI enterprise startups in an effort to compete with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot.

Moodifier: MLLM-Enhanced Emotion-Driven Image Editing
Jiarong Ye, Sharon X. Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14024 https://arxiv.org/…

Moodifier: MLLM-Enhanced Emotion-Driven Image Editing
Bridging emotions and visual content for emotion-driven image editing holds great potential in creative industries, yet precise manipulation remains challenging due to the abstract nature of emotions and their varied manifestations across different contexts. We tackle this challenge with an integrated approach consisting of three complementary components. First, we introduce MoodArchive, an 8M+ image dataset with detailed hierarchical emotional annotations generated by LLaVA and partially valid…

A look at the data center cluster in the Chinese city of Wuhu, where 15 companies, including Huawei, have built data centers with a total investment of $37B (Financial Times)

Inductive Domain Transfer In Misspecified Simulation-Based Inference
Ortal Senouf, Antoine Wehenkel, C\'edric Vincent-Cuaz, Emmanuel Abb\'e, Pascal Frossard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15593

Inductive Domain Transfer In Misspecified Simulation-Based Inference
Simulation-based inference (SBI) is a statistical inference approach for estimating latent parameters of a physical system when the likelihood is intractable but simulations are available. In practice, SBI is often hindered by model misspecification--the mismatch between simulated and real-world observations caused by inherent modeling simplifications. RoPE, a recent SBI approach, addresses this challenge through a two-stage domain transfer process that combines semi-supervised calibration with…

Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model
Yunzhe Zhang, Yifei Wang, Khanh Vinh Nguyen, Pengyu Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14748 https://

Cross-Modality Controlled Molecule Generation with Diffusion Language Model
Current SMILES-based diffusion models for molecule generation typically support only unimodal constraint. They inject conditioning signals at the start of the training process and require retraining a new model from scratch whenever the constraint changes. However, real-world applications often involve multiple constraints across different modalities, and additional constraints may emerge over the course of a study. This raises a challenge: how to extend a pre-trained diffusion model not only t…

SMTrack: End-to-End Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Multi-Object Tracking in RGB Videos
Pengzhi Zhong, Xinzhe Wang, Dan Zeng, Qihua Zhou, Feixiang He, Shuiwang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14607

SMTrack: End-to-End Trained Spiking Neural Networks for Multi-Object Tracking in RGB Videos
Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit significant potential for low-power computation, yet their application in visual tasks remains largely confined to image classification, object detection, and event-based tracking. In contrast, real-world vision systems still widely use conventional RGB video streams, where the potential of directly-trained SNNs for complex temporal tasks such as multi-object tracking (MOT) remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we propose SMTrack…

Adaptively Robust LLM Inference Optimization under Prediction Uncertainty
Zixi Chen, Yinyu Ye, Zijie Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14544 https://arxiv.or…

Adaptively Robust LLM Inference Optimization under Prediction Uncertainty
We study the problem of optimizing Large Language Model (LLM) inference scheduling to minimize total latency. LLM inference is an online and multi-task service process and also heavily energy consuming by which a pre-trained LLM processes input requests and generates output tokens sequentially. Therefore, it is vital to improve its scheduling efficiency and reduce the power consumption while a great amount of prompt requests are arriving. A key challenge in LLM inference scheduling is that whil…

UniTac2Pose: A Unified Approach Learned in Simulation for Category-level Visuotactile In-hand Pose Estimation
Mingdong Wu, Long Yang, Jin Liu, Weiyao Huang, Lehong Wu, Zelin Chen, Daolin Ma, Hao Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15934

UniTac2Pose: A Unified Approach Learned in Simulation for Category-level Visuotactile In-hand Pose Estimation
Accurate estimation of the in-hand pose of an object based on its CAD model is crucial in both industrial applications and everyday tasks, ranging from positioning workpieces and assembling components to seamlessly inserting devices like USB connectors. While existing methods often rely on regression, feature matching, or registration techniques, achieving high precision and generalizability to unseen CAD models remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage fram…

China introduces new rules to curb monks' and clergy's use of livestreaming and AI for unlicensed online preaching and commercial activities, following scandals (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/3f0f240b-c002-4726-a757-01ded711a5a8

Sources: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expects stablecoins to drive demand for Treasuries, as talks with Tether and Circle help inform issuance decisions (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/1914c189-b4ed-46dd-adde-106b08a68183

Companies like Scale AI are replacing low-cost data labelers with highly paid experts in fields such as finance, driven by the rise of reasoning AI models (Melissa Heikkilä/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/e17647f0-4c3b-49b4-a031-b56158bbb3b8

Source: OpenAI is preparing ChatGPT agents to let users create files compatible with PowerPoint and Excel, generate reports, and handle tasks involving websites (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/op

OpenAI Preps ChatGPT Agents in Challenge to Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint
As OpenAI tries to turn ChatGPT into a core application for white-collar work, it’s developing agent features that could make its customers less dependent on productivity apps from Microsoft. In the latest example, OpenAI has developed features that let ChatGPT customers quickly create and edit ...

Happn, a dating app with 170M registered users that matches people based on where they cross paths, agrees to a takeover deal with Beijing-based Hello Group (Financial Times)

The Nasdaq fell 1.4%, with Nvidia down 3.5%, Palantir down 9.4% and Arm down 5%, with AI enthusiasm cooling after a critical MIT report and warning from Altman (Financial Times)