Tootfinder

Here are my favourites from the National Portrait Gallery's Portrait Award 2025. It's a fantastic selection this year, and free to see as always.
#art #portraits #painting

Is there any way to get details of past power outage events in the UK?
Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks notified me of a power cut yesterday. I wasn't home but it did happen. The URL they gave to track it did not work. A few hours later they sent an update saying it was fixed. I'd be interested to know anything more about it, because it's fairly unusual here.
Their URL was

Suppression of scalar perturbations due to a heavy axion
Kai-Ge Zhang, Jian-Feng He, Chengjie Fu, Zong-Kuan Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02828 https://ar…

Suppression of scalar perturbations due to a heavy axion
A fast-rolling axion can transfer its kinetic energy to gauge fields via the Chern-Simons coupling, leading to copious production of gauge quanta during inflation. The amplified gauge fields act as a source for both scalar and tensor perturbations. In this work, we propose a mechanism for suppressing scalar perturbations while sourcing strong tensor perturbations. We present an implementation of such a mechanism, demonstrating that sourced tensor perturbations are expected to be detected by upc…

“1984” portrait of the Prime Minister in the sand
https://needtoknow.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Artist-creates-‘1984-Keir-Starmer-portrait-inspired-by-Orwells.mp4
#1984

Democracy Noir, the 90-minute documentary
– opening in the US this week and portraying Orbšn’s creeping authoritarian takeover of an erstwhile liberal democracy through the eyes of three women;
Timea Szabó, an opposition politician,
Babette Oroszi, a television journalist,
and Niko Antal, a nurse
– has universal resonance and urgent relevance for American audiences grappling with the consequences of Trump.
“I’d say this is the most ‘hitting the zeitgeist’…

ZeroShotOpt: Towards Zero-Shot Pretrained Models for Efficient Black-Box Optimization
Jamison Meindl, Yunsheng Tian, Tony Cui, Veronika Thost, Zhang-Wei Hong, Johannes D\"urholt, Jie Chen, Wojciech Matusik, Mina Konakovi\'c Lukovi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03051

ZeroShotOpt: Towards Zero-Shot Pretrained Models for Efficient Black-Box Optimization
Global optimization of expensive, derivative-free black-box functions requires extreme sample efficiency. While Bayesian optimization (BO) is the current state-of-the-art, its performance hinges on surrogate and acquisition function hyper-parameters that are often hand-tuned and fail to generalize across problem landscapes. We present ZeroShotOpt, a general-purpose, pretrained model for continuous black-box optimization tasks ranging from 2D to 20D. Our approach leverages offline reinforcement …

Geometry Meets Vision: Revisiting Pretrained Semantics in Distilled Fields
Zhiting Mei, Ola Shorinwa, Anirudha Majumdar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03104 https://

Geometry Meets Vision: Revisiting Pretrained Semantics in Distilled Fields
Semantic distillation in radiance fields has spurred significant advances in open-vocabulary robot policies, e.g., in manipulation and navigation, founded on pretrained semantics from large vision models. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of visual-only semantic features (e.g., DINO and CLIP) in Gaussian Splatting and neural radiance fields, the potential benefit of geometry-grounding in distilled fields remains an open question. In principle, visual-geometry features seem ver…

Polynomial Prethermal Lifetimes in Non Smoothly Driven Quantum Systems
Matteo Gallone, Beatrice Langella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04137 https://arxiv.org…

Polynomial Prethermal Lifetimes in Non Smoothly Driven Quantum Systems
We study the dynamics of a quantum many-body lattice system with a local Hamiltonian subjected to a quasi-periodic driving with finite regularity. For sufficiently large driving frequencies, we prove that the system remains in a prethermal state for times growing polynomially with the frequency, and we show the optimality of this bound by constructing an explicit example that nearly saturates it. Within this prethermal regime, the dynamics is captured by an effective time-independent local Hami…

Le trafic est fortement Perturbé entre Paris Saint-Lazare et Versailles Rive Droite et entre Paris Saint-Lazare et St-Nom-la-Bretèche dans les 2 sens.
Rendez-vous sur la rubrique "Recherche Itinéraire", pour retrouver un itinéraire prenant en compte cette perturbation.
Pour plus d'informations sur cette perturbation, consultez le fil X de la ligne L.
Motif : panne d'alimentation électrique Š St Cloud .
🤖 07/10 09:28

A Recipe for Efficient Sim-to-Real Transfer in Manipulation with Online Imitation-Pretrained World Models
Yilin Wang, Shangzhe Li, Haoyi Niu, Zhiao Huang, Weitong Zhang, Hao Su
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02538

A Recipe for Efficient Sim-to-Real Transfer in Manipulation with Online Imitation-Pretrained World Models
We are interested in solving the problem of imitation learning with a limited amount of real-world expert data. Existing offline imitation methods often struggle with poor data coverage and severe performance degradation. We propose a solution that leverages robot simulators to achieve online imitation learning. Our sim-to-real framework is based on world models and combines online imitation pretraining with offline finetuning. By leveraging online interactions, our approach alleviates the data…