Tootfinder

Apparently, many of the new volunteers are quite young, which seems to go against prevailing narrative of an atomised lonely genZ/Alpha that doesn't feel part of society. OTOH, Hjemmeværnet emphasises that many are joining because of the "fælleskab" (an extremely important concept in Denmark which translates as fellowship, but is used much more commonly than the English word, it's something like "being part of the gang")

Los pinares de Burgos y Soria: la gestión comunal de los bosques que previene grandes incendios

Los pinares de Burgos y Soria: la gestión comunal de los bosques que previene grandes incendios
La Suerte de Pinos sobrevive desde la Edad Media como un modelo de reparto vecinal gestionado por los pueblos ante el desafío del abandono y el riesgo del fuego

karate: Zachary Karate Club
Network of friendships among members of a university karate club. Includes metadata for faction membership after a social partition. Note: there are two versions of this network, one with 77 edges and one with 78, due to an ambiguous typo in the original study. (The most commonly used is the one with 78 edges.).
This network has 34 nodes and 78 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted

"A common Israeli taking point [is] 'How should America respond if rockets were launched from Tijuana at San Diego?' ... it highlights both Israeli ignorance and fears and Palestinian and Xicano/Migrant commonality. Just like how Tel Aviv and Gaza are part of Historic Palestine, San Diego and Tijuana were both Mexico but more importantly part of the homeland of the Kumeyaay People."

Today has been mainly about stripping down my favourite mountain bike for repainting and renovation.
#BikeTooter

😮‍💨 Delta-8 THC use highest where marijuana is illegal, study finds
#drugs

Delta-8 THC use highest where marijuana is illegal, study finds
Researchers from University of California San Diego have found that Delta-8 tetrahydrocannabinol (delta-8 THC), a psychoactive compound often sold as a legal alternative to marijuana, is most commonly used in states where marijuana use remains illegal and delta-8 THC sales are unregulated. The findings, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, highlight how gaps in cannabis policy may be inadvertently steering people toward less-regulated substances and have allowed manufacture…

It's Not You, It's Clipping: A Soft Trust-Region via Probability Smoothing for LLM RL
Madeleine Dwyer, Adam Sobey, Adriane Chapman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21282 https…

It's Not You, It's Clipping: A Soft Trust-Region via Probability Smoothing for LLM RL
Training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) methods such as PPO and GRPO commonly relies on ratio clipping to stabilise updates. While effective at preventing instability, clipping discards information and introduces gradient discontinuities. We propose Probability Smoothing Policy Optimisation (PSPO), which smooths the current policy's probabilities toward the old (behaviour) policy before computing the importance ratio, analogous to label smoothing. Unlike clipping,…

Analysis of approximate linear programming solution to Markov decision problem with log barrier function
Donghwan Lee, Hyukjun Yang, Bum Geun Park
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19800

Analysis of approximate linear programming solution to Markov decision problem with log barrier function
There are two primary approaches to solving Markov decision problems (MDPs): dynamic programming based on the Bellman equation and linear programming (LP). Dynamic programming methods are the most widely used and form the foundation of both classical and modern reinforcement learning (RL). By contrast, LP-based methods have been less commonly employed, although they have recently gained attention in contexts such as offline RL. The relative underuse of the LP-based methods stems from the fact t…

Speech-Based Depressive Mood Detection in the Presence of Multiple Sclerosis: A Cross-Corpus and Cross-Lingual Study
Monica Gonzalez-Machorro, Uwe Reichel, Pascal Hecker, Helly Hammer, Hesam Sagha, Florian Eyben, Robert Hoepner, Bj\"orn W. Schuller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18092

Speech-Based Depressive Mood Detection in the Presence of Multiple Sclerosis: A Cross-Corpus and Cross-Lingual Study
Depression commonly co-occurs with neurodegenerative disorders like Multiple Sclerosis (MS), yet the potential of speech-based Artificial Intelligence for detecting depression in such contexts remains unexplored. This study examines the transferability of speech-based depression detection methods to people with MS (pwMS) through cross-corpus and cross-lingual analysis using English data from the general population and German data from pwMS. Our approach implements supervised machine learning mo…

Composition and Alignment of Diffusion Models using Constrained Learning
Shervin Khalafi, Ignacio Hounie, Dongsheng Ding, Alejandro Ribeiro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19104 http…

Composition and Alignment of Diffusion Models using Constrained Learning
Diffusion models have become prevalent in generative modeling due to their ability to sample from complex distributions. To improve the quality of generated samples and their compliance with user requirements, two commonly used methods are: (i) Alignment, which involves fine-tuning a diffusion model to align it with a reward; and (ii) Composition, which combines several pre-trained diffusion models, each emphasizing a desirable attribute in the generated outputs. However, trade-offs often arise…