Tootfinder

FlightDiffusion: Revolutionising Autonomous Drone Training with Diffusion Models Generating FPV Video
Valerii Serpiva, Artem Lykov, Faryal Batool, Vladislav Kozlovskiy, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14082

FlightDiffusion: Revolutionising Autonomous Drone Training with Diffusion Models Generating FPV Video
We present FlightDiffusion, a diffusion-model-based framework for training autonomous drones from first-person view (FPV) video. Our model generates realistic video sequences from a single frame, enriched with corresponding action spaces to enable reasoning-driven navigation in dynamic environments. Beyond direct policy learning, FlightDiffusion leverages its generative capabilities to synthesize diverse FPV trajectories and state-action pairs, facilitating the creation of large-scale training …

"there is nothing whatsoever in the JTAC* assessment which backs up any of the claims being put out in a panic by government ministers."
*JTAC = assessment of the government’s Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre which forms the basis of the proscription of Palestine Action.
Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray

Yvette Cooper is Lying - Craig Murray
Yvette Cooper has continually lied about Palestine Action in a panicked attempt to defend the proscription of a direct action protest group which is opposing a Genocide in which Cooper’s government is deeply complicit. Cooper and other government ministers have repeatedly claimed: Palestine Action attacks people, not just weapons-making equipment Palestine Action is funded by […]

Trump proclaims he will strike against Antifa. Yet he cannot strike what has no head, what rejects the very principle of leadership. Antifa is not an institution but the spirit of resistance itself. It is the refusal of free people to bend before nationalism, capitalist rule, and authoritarian command.
He believes domination can be imposed upon liberty, as if coercion could extinguish solidarity. But our strength lies in direct action, in the free cooperation of equals, in the collecti…

lmao

Enhancing Generalization in Vision-Language-Action Models by Preserving Pretrained Representations
Shresth Grover, Akshay Gopalkrishnan, Bo Ai, Henrik I. Christensen, Hao Su, Xuanlin Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11417

Enhancing Generalization in Vision-Language-Action Models by Preserving Pretrained Representations
Vision-language-action (VLA) models finetuned from vision-language models (VLMs) hold the promise of leveraging rich pretrained representations to build generalist robots across diverse tasks and environments. However, direct fine-tuning on robot data often disrupts these representations and limits generalization. We present a framework that better preserves pretrained features while adapting them for robot manipulation. Our approach introduces three components: (i) a dual-encoder design with o…

Euro banks block billions in rogue PayPal direct debits after fraud glitch
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/euro_banks_block_paypal_direct_debits/

Euro banks block billions in rogue PayPal direct debits after fraud glitch
: US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers

I'm not usually one for spiritual ideas, but Hofmann makes a compelling point. Capitalism has deeply disconnected us, from nature and from one another.
I still believe that protests, organizing, and direct action are what truly drive change. Yet, shifting our perspective is just as crucial.
#SpiritualCrisis

Linear representations of the mapping class group of dimension at most $3g-3$
Julian Kaufmann, Nick Salter, Zhong Zhang, Xiyan Zhong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11365

Linear representations of the mapping class group of dimension at most $3g-3$
We classify representations of the mapping class group of a surface of genus $g$ (with at most one puncture or boundary component) up to dimension $3g-3$. Any such representation is the direct sum of a representation in dimension $2g$ or $2g+1$ (given as the action on the (co)homology of the surface or its unit tangent bundle) with a trivial representation. As a corollary, any linear system on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces of genus $g$ in this range is of algebro-geometric origin.

AEGIS: An Agent for Extraction and Geographic Identification in Scholarly Proceedings
Om Vishesh, Harshad Khadilkar, Deepak Akkil
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09470 https://

AEGIS: An Agent for Extraction and Geographic Identification in Scholarly Proceedings
Keeping pace with the rapid growth of academia literature presents a significant challenge for researchers, funding bodies, and academic societies. To address the time-consuming manual effort required for scholarly discovery, we present a novel, fully automated system that transitions from data discovery to direct action. Our pipeline demonstrates how a specialized AI agent, 'Agent-E', can be tasked with identifying papers from specific geographic regions within conference proceedings and then …

Direct Action and Sabotage
By William E. Trautmann
#UK

Reinforcement learning in densely recurrent biological networks
Miles Walter Churchland, Jordi Garcia-Ojalvo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09618 https://arxiv…

Reinforcement learning in densely recurrent biological networks
Training highly recurrent networks in continuous action spaces is a technical challenge: gradient-based methods suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients, while purely evolutionary searches converge slowly in high-dimensional weight spaces. We introduce a hybrid, derivative-free optimization framework that implements reinforcement learning by coupling global evolutionary exploration with local direct search exploitation. The method, termed ENOMAD (Evolutionary Nonlinear Optimization with Mes…

Nonequilibrium nonlinear response theory of amplitude-dependent dissipative conductivity in disordered superconductors
Takayuki Kubo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09766 https://

Nonequilibrium nonlinear response theory of amplitude-dependent dissipative conductivity in disordered superconductors
This work investigates amplitude-dependent nonlinear corrections to the dissipative conductivity in superconductors, using the Keldysh-Usadel theory of nonequilibrium superconductivity, which captures the nonequilibrium dynamics of both quasiparticles and the pair potential. Our rigorous formulation naturally incorporates both the direct nonlinear action of the photon field and indirect contributions mediated by nonequilibrium variations in the pair potential, namely the Eliashberg effect and t…

VT-LVLM-AR: A Video-Temporal Large Vision-Language Model Adapter for Fine-Grained Action Recognition in Long-Term Videos
Kaining Li, Shuwei He, Zihan Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15903

VT-LVLM-AR: A Video-Temporal Large Vision-Language Model Adapter for Fine-Grained Action Recognition in Long-Term Videos
Human action recognition in long-term videos, characterized by complex backgrounds and subtle action differences, poses significant challenges for traditional deep learning models due to computational overhead, difficulty in capturing long-range temporal dependencies, and limited semantic understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multi-modal understanding and reasoning, their direct application to continuous …

It's the last week of the California Legislative session, and there are a number of #climate & #environment bills awaiting action in the California Senate.
PLease help! #350BayArea has an eas…

Solutions that our communities need - Support these bills!
As Californians concerned about global warming and the climate crisis, it is up to us to make sure that our legislators listen to us and enact legislation that will do everything possible to fight climate change, and to mitigate its effects on all communities, especially those communities most directly affected. Please add your voice to this effort by signing this letter to your State Senator. Feel free to add your experiences and your thoughts about why your Senator needs to support this cl…

It's the last week of the California Legislative session, and there are a number of #climate & #environment bills awaiting action in the California Senate.
PLease help! #350BayArea has an eas…

Solutions that our communities need - Support these bills!
As Californians concerned about global warming and the climate crisis, it is up to us to make sure that our legislators listen to us and enact legislation that will do everything possible to fight climate change, and to mitigate its effects on all communities, especially those communities most directly affected. Please add your voice to this effort by signing this letter to your State Senator. Feel free to add your experiences and your thoughts about why your Senator needs to support this cl…

Resultant of an equivariant polynomial system with respect to direct product of symmetric groups
Sonagnon Julien Owolabi, Ibrahim Nonkane, Joel Tossa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21713

Resultant of an equivariant polynomial system with respect to direct product of symmetric groups
In this note, we consider the resultant of systems of homogeneous multivariate polynomials which are equivariant under the action of direct product of two symmetric groups. We establish a decomposition formula for the resultant of such systems. Thanks to that decomposition formula we prove that the discriminant of an invariant multivariate homogeneous polynomial under a direct product of symmetric groups splits into smaller resultants that are easier to compute.

"""
In the sixteenth century, lunacy was a constant theme that was never questioned. It was still frequent in the seventeenth century, but started to disappear, and by 1707, the year in which Le François asked the question ‘Estne aliquod lunae in corpora humana imperium?’ (Does the moon have any influence over the human body?), after lengthy discussions, the university decided that their reply was in the negative. In the course of the eighteenth century the moon was rarely cited among the causes of madness, even as a possible factor or an aggravation. But right at the end of the century the idea reappears, perhaps under the influence of English medicine, which had never entirely forgotten the moon, and Daquin, followed by Leuret and Guislain, all admitted the influence of the moon on the phases of maniacal excitement, or at the least on the agitation of their patients. But what is important here is not so much the return of the theme as the possibility and conditions necessary for its reappearance. It reappears entirely transformed, filled with a new significance that it did not formerly possess. In its traditional form, it designated an immediate influence, a direct coincidence in time and intersection in space, whose mode of action was entirely situated in the power of the stars. But in Daquin by contrast, the influence of the moon acts through a whole series of mediations, in a kind of hierarchy, surrounding man. The moon acts on the atmosphere with such intensity that it can set in motion a mass as heavy as the ocean. The nervous system, of all the parts that make up the human organism, is the part most sensitive to atmospheric variations, as the slightest variation in temperature, humidity or dryness can have serious effects upon it. The moon therefore, given the important power that its trajectory exerts on the atmosphere, is likely to act most on people whose nervous fibres are particularly delicate:
“Madness is an exclusively nervous condition, and the brain of a madman must therefore be infinitely more susceptible to the influence of the atmosphere, which itself undergoes considerable changes of intensity as a result of the different positions of the moon relative to the earth.” [Daquin, Philosophie de la folie, Paris, 1792]
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Divided difference operators for Hessenberg representations
Mathieu Guay-Paquet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05614 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Divided difference operators for Hessenberg representations
The equivariant cohomology ring of a regular semisimple Hessenberg variety in type A is a free module over the equivariant cohomology ring of a point. When equipped with Tymoczko's dot action, it becomes a twisted representation of the symmetric group, and the character of this representation is given by the chromatic quasisymmetric function of an indifference graph. In this note, we use divided difference operators to decompose this representation as a direct sum of sub-representations in a wa…

We are barely 6 months into #TheAmericanFascist Presidency and we already find ourselves with fundamental rights in the American Constitution under direct threat and the power of the judiciary to enforce and check the power of the President being pulled back.
And Democratic Party members seem to be all talk and very very little action or leadership to counter this.
Are they waiting for the midterms to take back Congress?
At this pace, surely they see the risk that there may not BE midterms. Or that the results are negated, disputed or invalidated.
I can’t fathom how they are not removing themselves from Congress now in protest and calling for a general protest/strike of all freedom loving Americans to restore the constitution, force the Trump appointed fascist enabling judges to resign, and force Trump and his Administration to go.
July 4th is coming. Independence Day? Or not? Democracy or not?
#usa

On the day the UK parliament voted to proscribe the citizen peaceful direct action group Palestine Action as supposedly terrorist, Channel 4 showed the searing Basement Films documentary "Gaza doctors under attack". It showed the actions of the Israeli terrorist State in destroying Gaza's healthcare system, murdering civilians of all kinds and targeting health workers some of whom have died following torture. Sprinkled throughout were the repetitive lies of the occupation.

This year is the 35th anniversary of Queers Read This. A key piece of LGBT activism, arguing for pride and direct action. It had a huge influence on my life.
An army of lovers cannot lose.

Quantum Transport Reservoir Computing
Yecheng Jing, Pengfei Wang, Shuai Zhang, Zhoujie Zeng, Shi-Jun Liang, Wei Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07778 https://

Quantum Transport Reservoir Computing
Reservoir computing (RC), a neural network designed for temporal data, enables efficient computation with low-cost training and direct physical implementation. Recently, quantum RC has opened new possibilities for conventional RC and introduced novel ideas to tackle open problems in quantum physics and advance quantum technologies. Despite its promise, it faces challenges, including physical realization, output readout, and measurement-induced back-action. Here, we propose to implement quantum …

"Wildfires devastate nearly 10,000 km2 in 2025 with Spain and Portugal hardest-hit"
#Portugal #Wildfires #Environment

Data shows Europe facing its worst wildfire season in decades
Spain's civil-protection chief warned that the fires continue to pose a direct threat to populated areas, while Defence Minister Margarita Robles described "airborne action" as difficult because of thick smoke.

"Listen, all you Fascists, you might be surprised, People in the world, are getting organized, you're bound to loose, Fascists bound to loose":
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/opinion/ice-immigration-protest-resistance.html

Opinion | They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan.
The movement against ICE in Los Angeles — one that is starting to take root across the country — demonstrates a shift from symbolic protest to direct action.

Semiconvection unlocks dynamo action in stably-stratified regions of gaseous planets
Paul Pru\v{z}ina, David C\'ebron, Nathana\"el Schaeffer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18521

Semiconvection unlocks dynamo action in stably-stratified regions of gaseous planets
Stably-stratified fluid layers are ubiquitous in gaseous planets, stellar and liquid cores, and have previously been thought not to be capable of driving a dynamo. We demonstrate that semiconvection (convection driven by a destabilising thermal gradient in an overall stably stratified region) can actually lead to dynamo action in such regions. Motivated by recent works suggesting that significant regions of Jupiter and Saturn may be prone to semiconvection, we conduct direct numerical simulatio…

Holographic flavour and neural networks
Veselin G. Filev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20115 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20115

Holographic flavour and neural networks
In holography, flavour probe branes are used to introduce fundamental matter to the AdS/CFT correspondence. At a technical level, the probes are described by extremizing the DBI action and solving the Lagrange-Euler equations of motion. I report on applications of artificial neural networks that allow direct minimization of the regularized DBI action (interpreted as a free energy) without the need to derive and solve the equations of motion. I consider, as examples, magnetic catalysis of chiral…

$\displaystyle SL(2, {\Bbb Z})$, les tresses \`a trois brins, le tore modulaire et $Aut^{ }(F_{2})$
Alexis Marin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19371 https://

$\displaystyle SL(2, {\Bbb Z})$, les tresses à trois brins, le tore modulaire et $Aut^{+}(F_{2})$
The action of $SL(2, {\bf Z})$ on the integer torus and its quotient by central symmetry and Artin's presentation of three strings braid group $B_{3}$, produces a presentation with parabolic generators $\pmatrix{1& -1\cr 0& 1\cr}$ and $\pmatrix{1& 0\cr 1& 1\cr}$. This braided presentation describes the action of the derived group on Poincaré's half plane and its quotient the modular torus, just as Nielsen's theorem giving the group of direct automorphisms of the free group on two generators as…

The Norwegian Trade Union Association, Anarcho-syndicalism in Norway!
The NSF-IAA upholds the anarcho-syndicalist tradition in Norway, rooted in the organization’s founding in 1917 and its historic commitment to the principles of direct action, federalism, and worker self-management. The NSF has been a section of the International Workers’ Association (IWA-AIT) since 1922, maintaining its place within the international anarcho-syndicalist movement.
It makes me smile to see the NS…

Resurgent Lambert series with characters
David Broadhurst, Daniele Dorigoni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21352 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21352

Resurgent Lambert series with characters
We consider certain Lambert series as generating functions of divisor sums twisted by Dirichlet characters and compute their exact resurgent transseries expansion near $q=1^-$. For special values of the parameters, these Lambert series are expressible in terms of iterated integrals of holomorphic Eisenstein series twisted by the same characters and the transseries representation is a direct consequence of the action of Fricke involution on such twisted Eisenstein series. When the parameters of …

Direct Action! Always!
https://mastodon.online/@Geri/114777663457053836

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

Bob Vylan, Palestine Action etc - analysis from Archie Bland in Guardian
"It isn’t just that people are angry that the catastrophe in Gaza isn’t being given due attention: it is that their encounters with observable reality are being flatly denied. ...
"Those people have been told that Gaza protests are hate marches; they can see it’s not true. They have been told that US campus protesters are largely motivated by antisemitism; they can see it’s not true. They have been told that Palestine Action is a terrorist organisation because it spray painted military aircraft; they can see it’s not true. They have been repeatedly told, by Benjamin Netanyahu, that opposition to Israel’s war is antisemitic; they can see it’s not true. They have been told that the British government finds Israel’s actions “intolerable”; they can see it’s not true.
"Now they are being told that opposing the IDF is antisemitic, that the Glastonbury crowd is more virulent than the one at Nuremberg, and that direct action is a form of terrorism. They can see all that’s not true, either, and however far their view is from the front pages, they know that they are far from alone."
#BobVylan #PalestineAction #media #bias #Palestine #Gaza #Israel

I don’t care what people think or say. I stand in solidarity with the @… and share their vision for a free, self-organized workers’ movement in Norway. Even if syndicalists are few, we’re here, and I proudly support their struggle for worker control and direct action.
I identify as a syndicalist because I actually enjoy working, but only when labor is organized…

Identifying the sources of noise synergy and redundancy in the feed-forward loop motif
Mintu Nandi, Sudip Chattopadhyay, Suman K Banik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18620

Identifying the sources of noise synergy and redundancy in the feed-forward loop motif
The propagation of noise through parallel regulatory pathways is a prominent feature of feed-forward loops in genetic networks. Although the contributions of the direct and indirect regulatory pathways of feed-forward loops to output variability have been well characterized, the impact of their joint action arising from their shared input and output remains poorly understood. Here, we identify an additional component of noise that emerges specifically from this convergent nature of the pathways…

Why should I care about electing representatives when my immediate community faces urgent material and social needs that require direct, collective action and self-management?
#Anarchism #Syndicalism

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding