Tootfinder

Twenty years since London Bomb attacks they reckon. Seems both a short time and a long time. I wasn't in town and the first I heard of it was being woken up by messages asking if I was okay. Thought they were concerned I'd been taken away on the saucers on X-Day. 😆
Some say it was the biggest act of terrorism seen on these shores since the war!
But then 20 terrorists were arrested for terrorism this week! They were flagrantly and terrifyingly holding up signs saying "I support Palestine action", the terrorizing monsters. An action that's just as much terrorism under the law these days as blowing up trains and busses.
#terrorism #ukpol

Republicans want you to die.
https://skepchick.org/2025/05/republicans-want-you-to-die/
At what point does self-defense become a valid excuse for otherwise unacceptable political action? Because at this point any action taken against Republican officia…

Republicans Want You to Die
Transcript: About 15 years ago, the dumbest politician to take the national stage up until that point was Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and, at that time, the Republican Vice President…

The Study on Modified Theories of General Relativity: A Differential Geometric Approach
N. S. Kavya
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04031 https://

The Study on Modified Theories of General Relativity: A Differential Geometric Approach
The introduction of General Relativity (GR) in 1915 revolutionized our understanding of gravity, but over time, its limitations in explaining phenomena like dark energy, dark matter, and quantum gravity have motivated alternative theories. Early modifications, such as Weyl's 1919 proposal, focused on adding higher-order terms to the Einstein-Hilbert action. GR's non-renormalizability further strengthened the case for extending it. A central theme of modern gravity research is modifying the geom…

🫨 Scientists capture slow-motion earthquake in action
#earth

Scientists capture slow-motion earthquake in action
Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean.

A rigorous Keldysh functional integral for fermions
Philipp Benjamin Aretz, Manfred Salmhofer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01787 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.0…

A rigorous Keldysh functional integral for fermions
We provide a mathematically rigorous Keldysh functional integral for fermionic quantum field theories. We show convergence of a discrete-time Grassmann Gaussian integral representation in the time-continuum limit under very general hypotheses. We also prove analyticity of the effective action and explicit bounds for the truncated (connected) expectation values of the non-equilibrium system. These bounds imply clustering with a summable decay in the thermodynamic limit, provided these properties…

Learning the action for long-time-step simulations of molecular dynamics
Filippo Bigi, Michele Ceriotti
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01068 https://arxiv.org/…

Learning the action for long-time-step simulations of molecular dynamics
The equations of classical mechanics can be used to model the time evolution of countless physical systems, from the astrophysical to the atomic scale. Accurate numerical integration requires small time steps, which limits the computational efficiency -- especially in cases such as molecular dynamics that span wildly different time scales. Using machine-learning (ML) algorithms to predict trajectories allows one to greatly extend the integration time step, at the cost of introducing artifacts s…

It\^{o}-Stratonovich Conversion in Infinite Dimensions for Unbounded, Time-Dependent, Nonlinear Operators
Daniel Goodair
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03424 https://

Itô-Stratonovich Conversion in Infinite Dimensions for Unbounded, Time-Dependent, Nonlinear Operators
We prove that a solution, in a variational framework, to the Stratonovich stochastic partial differential equation with noise $G\left(t, Ψ_t\right) \circ dW_t$ is given by a solution to the Itô equation with Itô-Stratonovich corrector $\frac{1}{2}\sum_{i=1}^\infty D_uG_i\left(t, Ψ_t\right)\left[G_i(t,Ψ_t)\right]dt$. Here $G_i$ denotes the action of $G$ on the $i^{th}$ component of the cylindrical noise, and $D_uG_i$ its Fréchet partial derivative in the Hilbert space for which the Itô fo…

The US has about two dozen of its 71 nuclear-powered submarines at sea at any one time
and they are routinely moved into areas close to Russia, especially at times of heightened tension.
What is unusual is for the US to broadcast it, betraying the real point of Trump’s post,
which is: to demonstrate he is a man of action and to send a message.
The action is important to Trump as the most performative president of the modern era,
his now-familiar style being to r…

Why has Trump deployed nuclear submarines?
The US president wants to demonstrate that he is a man of action and send a message to President Putin after the Russian leader rejected his calls for a truce

Mirror descent for constrained stochastic control problems
Deven Sethi, David \v{S}i\v{s}ka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02564 https://…

Mirror descent for constrained stochastic control problems
Mirror descent is a well established tool for solving convex optimization problems with convex constraints. This article introduces continuous-time mirror descent dynamics for approximating optimal Markov controls for stochastic control problems with the action space being bounded and convex. We show that if the Hamiltonian is uniformly convex in its action variable then mirror descent converges linearly while if it is uniformly strongly convex relative to an appropriate Bregman divergence, the…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00339 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_…

Falcon: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Partial Denoising
Diffusion policies are widely adopted in complex visuomotor tasks for their ability to capture multimodal action distributions. However, the multiple sampling steps required for action generation significantly harm real-time inference efficiency, which limits their applicability in real-time decision-making scenarios. Existing acceleration techniques either require retraining or degrade performance under low sampling steps. Here we propose Falcon, which mitigates this speed-performance trade-of…

For those in San Jose: July 4th at Plaza de Cesar Chavez park:
#sanJose

50501 San Jose Independence Day Picnic and March
This 4th of July, pack a picnic lunch and join us in the park for a day of family fun and first amendment free speech! Time: Friday, July 4th, 12 noon to 2 p.m.  Place: Plaza De Cesar Chavez Park, San Jose Activities: Live Music Guest Speakers Face Painting Letter Writing Lawn Games  Banner Painting March to City Hall at the End! Our linktree:  www.linktr.ee/sanjose50501 Go to our Bluesky account for more info and shareable flyers: https://bsky.app/profile/50501sanjose.bsky.social

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12181 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_…

Value Gradients with Action Adaptive Search Trees in Continuous (PO)MDPs
Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) in continuous state, action and observation spaces is key for autonomous planning in many real-world mobility and robotics applications. Current approaches are mostly sample based, and cannot hope to reach near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. We propose two complementary theoretical contributions. First, we formulate a novel Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS) tree for value estimation, that allows to share value information b…

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.05663 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Physics-informed spectral approximation of Koopman operators
Koopman operators and transfer operators represent nonlinear dynamics in state space through its induced action on linear spaces of observables and measures, respectively. This framework enables the use of linear operator theory for supervised and unsupervised learning of nonlinear dynamical systems, and has received considerable interest in recent years. Here, we propose a data-driven technique for spectral approximation of Koopman operators of continuous-time, measure-preserving ergodic syste…

This renowned climate scientist says this is the most difficult time for climate science he’s ever seen
https://www.fastcompany.com/91347103/this-

This renowned climate scientist says this is the most difficult time for climate science he’s ever seen
Benjamin Santer has faced pushback on climate research in the past. But this environment feels different ‘because it's so targeted.’

Optimal Messaging Strategy for Incentivizing Agents in Dynamic Systems
Renyan Sun, Ashutosh Nayyar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00188 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Optimal Messaging Strategy for Incentivizing Agents in Dynamic Systems
We consider a finite-horizon discrete-time dynamic system jointly controlled by a designer and one or more agents, where the designer can influence the agents' actions through selective information disclosure. At each time step, the designer sends a message to the agent(s) from a prespecified message space. The designer may also take an action that directly influences system dynamics and rewards. Each agent uses its received message (and its own information) to choose its action. We are interes…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00631 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

Phase-space distortion as a key to unraveling galactic bar buckling
For the first time, we investigate the resonant structure of $N$-body galactic bar at the stage of buckling using action-angle variables. We studied the evolution of vertical actions ($J_z$) and angles associated with vertical resonance ($θ_\mathrm{res}=θ_z - θ_R$) for all orbits in the bar. For this purpose, we divide the orbits into types according to the behavior (libration or circulation) of their resonant angle with respect to fixed points $θ_\mathrm{res}=0$ and $π$ (vertical resonanc…

Impact of the Social Action, Responsibility and Heroism Act 2015
"If a standard of care in relation to risk assessment which is too high is imposed [...], people may be put off contributing for free or at all. Insurance premiums will rise. Volunteers are not looking to be sued, they are looking to help others"

Law firm hails "important judgement" for local cycling events after judge throws out claim club was liable for driver seriously injuring time trial participant
High Court judge rules negligent driver solely at fault and club's risk assessment was carried out "properly and sufficiently", the ruling said to provide reassurance and "sensible guidance for those who give their free time to help organise events"

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you
– it's time politicians knew about it
Amie, a town councillor and mother-of-two, had no choice but to use a food bank.
She’ll be joining more than 700 campaigners in Westminster on 18 June calling for urgent action against the rising tide of poverty in the UK
They are calling for an essentials guarantee,
which would help ensure universal credit provides enough to cover the essentials of life -- without having to g…

Having to go to a food bank sticks with you – it’s time politicians knew about it
Anti-poverty charities are calling for the government to introduce an essentials guarantee and prevent people needing to go to a food bank.

Perfect way to end the middle of summer: at the same time, an interesting parcours for the final TdF stage (with the usual scenic Paris shots), and a *gripping* cricket match finale. Very little comes close to a 5th day rearguard action: the excitement of a game that has no result! (Maybe.)

Confession time: I’m totally addicted to Coca Cola. Zero surprise to my family, they’ve seen the rainbow-fueled caffeine calculations in action.
But for my fellow fediverse friends, I know this might come as a major plot twist. Welcome to my neurodivergent soda saga! 🏳️‍🌈🧠🥤
#ActuallyAutistic

A Real-Time System for Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection in Industrial Domains
Antonio Finocchiaro, Alessandro Sebastiano Catinello, Michele Mazzamuto, Rosario Leonardi, Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13326

A Real-Time System for Egocentric Hand-Object Interaction Detection in Industrial Domains
Hand-object interaction detection remains an open challenge in real-time applications, where intuitive user experiences depend on fast and accurate detection of interactions with surrounding objects. We propose an efficient approach for detecting hand-objects interactions from streaming egocentric vision that operates in real time. Our approach consists of an action recognition module and an object detection module for identifying active objects upon confirmed interaction. Our Mamba model with …

DoubleFine are giving Brutal Legend away for free on itch.io, for a limited time to honor Ozzy's passing. I got this when it launched back in the day on PS3, I quite enjoyed it (I still have it). So go get it. Even available for Linux.
#Gaming #VideoGames

Surface waves and axoplasmic pressure waves in action potential propagation: fundamentally different physics or two sides of the same coin?
Marat M. Rvachev, Benjamin Drukarch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24580

Surface waves and axoplasmic pressure waves in action potential propagation: fundamentally different physics or two sides of the same coin?
We argue that El Hady and Machta's "surface wave" model describes the same underlying process as the "axoplasmic pressure wave" model introduced earlier by Rvachev. Note. We, the authors, contacted A. El Hady and B. Machta for comment on the ideas presented herein. They suggested that we "submit a Matters Arising Letter to Nature Communications and we will be asked to respond in due time." Nature Communications ultimately rejected the manuscript, citing: "... Our main criterion for consider…

With the Southwest flight taking action to avoid an ATAC hawker Hunter a couple of days ago, I've notices ALL of the coverage focused on how SOUTHWEST is so scary blah blah blah. Virtually no mention of why the Hunter was there, or why ATC wasn't aware of the conflict (The Hunter was IFR at the time.)
And absolutely no mention at all that because of modern systems like TCAS and skilful pilots, there was NO ACCIDENT. It was a Good Day for everybody.
Why do people choose d…

Slow convergence almost everywhere of ergodic averages
Valery V. Ryzhikov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00463 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.00463

Slow convergence almost everywhere of ergodic averages
For an ergodic action of the group $Z^n$ on a probability space and a given arbitrarily slowly decreasing to zero sequence, there exists an integrable function such that the standard ergodic time averages for it converge almost everywhere to the spatial average of the function at a rate that is not asymptotically majorized by this sequence. This generalizes the Krengel effect about the absence of universal estimates for the rate of convergence in Birkhoff's ergodic theorem. The proof uses a wea…

Potential Trade Has Raiders Landing Big-Time Wide Receiver https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-san-francisco-49ers-jauan-jennings-pete-carroll-geno-smith

Reminder: public protest is about visibility, not hiding. The power comes from people being willing to be visible, put their time on the line, and if needed, their bodies.
If you're going to start shit, maybe just ... don't. Direct action of the illegal sort requires careful planning and a tactical and strategic plan for why it will win. It happens sometimes, but it's not the mode, it's not the mode of the No Kings protests. This is a popular, public demonstration of outrage. It's legal (for now, and I hope, ever).
Yes, the police may try to kettle protesters and then trap them into curfew violations in places that have curfews. Masks won't save us from that where it happens. Just running the system with competent representation (and enough bodies to make it A Problem for the system) will.
We don't all need to be masked vigilantes at protests, and in a lot of cases, we need to be worried about the people masking up and starting shit. Remember that this is our opponents current tactic: masked, violent attacks. Don't look like them.

Phase-space distortion as a key to unraveling galactic bar buckling
Viktor D. Zozulia, Natalia Ya. Sotnikova, Anton A. Smirnov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00631

Phase-space distortion as a key to unraveling galactic bar buckling
For the first time, we investigate the resonant structure of $N$-body galactic bar at the stage of buckling using action-angle variables. We studied the evolution of vertical actions ($J_z$) and angles associated with vertical resonance ($θ_\mathrm{res}=θ_z - θ_R$) for all orbits in the bar. For this purpose, we divide the orbits into types according to the behavior (libration or circulation) of their resonant angle with respect to fixed points $θ_\mathrm{res}=0$ and $π$ (vertical resonanc…

$R^2$ corrections to Complexity Growth with a Probe String
Wen-Bin Chang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20841 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20841

$R^2$ corrections to Complexity Growth with a Probe String
We investigate the effect of $R^2$ corrections on holographic complexity growth within the framework of the Complexity=Action(CA) conjecture. By introducing a probe string into Gauss-Bonnet(GB) $AdS$ black brane background, we analyze the time derivative of the Nambu-Goto(NG) action as the holographic dual to complexity growth. Our results indicate that the complexity growth is maximized for a stationary string and is suppressed by its motion. Significantly, we identify a crossover point at spe…

After some neighbors say they want to be able to drive cars in cycletrack, DC govt replaces it with painted lanes & says basis for action was aesthetics of flexposts.
If the problem is really that flexposts don't look nice, why not replace them with decorative bollards?
https://wapo.st/4dXmJY1

D.C. is removing bike lane barriers for the first time, calling them ugly
The move comes as political leaders across the country begin reversing and undoing bike lane plans.

On my way to The Hague, to draw the red line for Dutch government with respect to Israel's continuing genocide in Gaza.
After last time's 100,000 participants, NS put in a lot of extra trains. My very early one already has a lot of passengers in red.
#rodelijn

EUISS, #Publication #ChaillotPaper 186
Unpowering Russia: How the EU can counter and undermine the Kremlin Metadata
22 May 2025
site:

A continuity equation compatible basis for Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy
Federico Armato, Edoardo Martinelli, Marco Raveri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18526 https://

A continuity equation compatible basis for Effective Field Theory of Dark Energy
The Effective Field Theory (EFT) of Dark Energy (DE) is a model independent framework that allows for the description of a wide class of dark energy and modified gravity models. This is achieved by extending the Hilbert Einstein action through the introduction of time dependent functions. However, the choice of these functions and thus the operator basis is not unique. In this paper, we propose a physically motivated constraint based on the continuity equation, leading to a continuity equation …

Help or Hindrance: Understanding the Impact of Robot Communication in Action Teams
Tauhid Tanjim, Jonathan St. George, Kevin Ching, Hee Rin Lee, Angelique Taylor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08892

Help or Hindrance: Understanding the Impact of Robot Communication in Action Teams
The human-robot interaction (HRI) field has recognized the importance of enabling robots to interact with teams. Human teams rely on effective communication for successful collaboration in time-sensitive environments. Robots can play a role in enhancing team coordination through real-time assistance. Despite significant progress in human-robot teaming research, there remains an essential gap in how robots can effectively communicate with action teams using multimodal interaction cues in time-se…

I'm not saying any new shit:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK

CARMA: Context-Aware Situational Grounding of Human-Robot Group Interactions by Combining Vision-Language Models with Object and Action Recognition
Joerg Deigmoeller, Stephan Hasler, Nakul Agarwal, Daniel Tanneberg, Anna Belardinelli, Reza Ghoddoosian, Chao Wang, Felix Ocker, Fan Zhang, Behzad Dariush, Michael Gienger
https://ar…

CARMA: Context-Aware Situational Grounding of Human-Robot Group Interactions by Combining Vision-Language Models with Object and Action Recognition
We introduce CARMA, a system for situational grounding in human-robot group interactions. Effective collaboration in such group settings requires situational awareness based on a consistent representation of present persons and objects coupled with an episodic abstraction of events regarding actors and manipulated objects. This calls for a clear and consistent assignment of instances, ensuring that robots correctly recognize and track actors, objects, and their interactions over time. To achiev…

VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policy
Dechen Gao, Boqi Zhao, Andrew Lee, Ian Chuang, Hanchu Zhou, Hang Wang, Zhe Zhao, Junshan Zhang, Iman Soltani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13231

VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policy
We present VITA, a Vision-To-Action flow matching policy that evolves latent visual representations into latent actions for visuomotor control. Traditional flow matching and diffusion policies sample from standard source distributions (e.g., Gaussian noise) and require additional conditioning mechanisms like cross-attention to condition action generation on visual information, creating time and space overheads. VITA proposes a novel paradigm that treats latent images as the flow source, learnin…

The average undergrad tuition fee in the 1974/75 academic year in Canada, across all disciplines, was $547 ($3445 adjusted to 2025)
Fees 50 years later in 2024/25 were $7360 ($7496 adjusted)
That is more than double. 117%.
And I *know* from personal experience this is a low ball average. If I could find a breakdown by discipline or by length of study for today, some would be even more obscene.
What has changed? Any occupation outside a minimum wage paying job demands a 2-4yr undergraduate diploma or degree, if not more.
Think about the 1970s and how common it was for people to get good paying jobs, leading to careers, without even high school education. Our free education stops with high school.
My family is a good example.
Mom and Step Dad: teacher college/degree. One got a Masters mid career.
Dad: didn’t complete HS
Father in law: didn’t complete HS
Mother in law: completed HS mid-career
Leadership positions and full careers demand a Masters or PhD requiring 5-10 years of study after HS!
Add in the cost of food and housing and the massive cuts happening at all colleges and universities because of the loss of international student tuition and I am going to go out on a limb and say our students today are going to pay double the price for a far worse experience than possibly any time since the Second World War.
Public education should be free.
Food and Housing should be controlled.
If the only thing government cares about is the economy, then they are setting us up for failure, and have been for decades.
(Don’t get me started on the kinds of “values” Canadian governments demonstrate when International student tuitions are 5x more than domestic students, let alone the inherent revenue risk in that funding strategy that has now come home to roost)
#canpoli #cdnpoli #education #university #college #canada
(
74/75 Source Stats Can: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710015001&pickMembers[0]=1.1&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=1972 / 1973&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2006 / 2007&referencePeriods=19720101,20060101
24/25 source stats can: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710004501
cc: @… @…

Real-Time Cascade Mitigation in Power Systems Using Influence Graph Improved by Reinforcement Learning
Kai Zhou, Youbiao He, Chong Zhong, Yifu Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08893 …

Real-Time Cascade Mitigation in Power Systems Using Influence Graph Improved by Reinforcement Learning
Despite high reliability, modern power systems with growing renewable penetration face an increasing risk of cascading outages. Real-time cascade mitigation requires fast, complex operational decisions under uncertainty. In this work, we extend the influence graph into a Markov decision process model (MDP) for real-time mitigation of cascading outages in power transmission systems, accounting for uncertainties in generation, load, and initial contingencies. The MDP includes a do-nothing action …

Collapse Scenario and Final State of Evaporation for Schwarzschild Black Hole in Dimensionally-Reduced Model of Dilaton Gravity
Voja Radovanovi\'c, Stefan {\DJ}or{\dj}evi\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09946

Collapse Scenario and Final State of Evaporation for Schwarzschild Black Hole in Dimensionally-Reduced Model of Dilaton Gravity
We study a model of (1+1)-dimensional dilaton gravity derived from the four-dimensional Einstein-Hilbert action by dimensional reduction in a semiclassical approximation including back-reaction. The reduced action involves the cosmological constant and admits black hole solutions; among these, the solutions of interest are the evaporating black holes. We solve the equations of motion perturbatively by demanding that the initial state geometry is a Minkowski space-time. When the infalling matter…

The Integral Decimation Method for Quantum Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics
Ryan T. Grimm, Alexander J. Staat, Joel D. Eaves
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11341

The Integral Decimation Method for Quantum Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics
We present a method to numerically evaluate functional integrals called integral decimation (ID). It constructs a separable decomposition of the integrand as a spectral tensor train (STT), a continuous generalization of the matrix product state. ID builds the STT by mapping the integrand to an auxiliary many-body wavefunction that evolves in time from an initially unentangled state. Each body-ordered term of the action corresponds to a quantum gate, applied to the state during its evolution. Th…

Cosmology with Distinct Functions $f$ of the Non-metricity Scalar $Q$ : A Dynamical System Approach
Promila Biswas, Subhajit Pal, Ritabrata Biswas, Satyajit Pal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21646

Cosmology with Distinct Functions $f$ of the Non-metricity Scalar $Q$ : A Dynamical System Approach
Symmetric teleparallel gravity is one among the general relativistic trinity which deals with the non-metricity scalar $Q$. In the Einstein Hilbert action, a function of $Q$ is chosen to be the main contributory part of the Lagrangian and a modified theory of gravity is constructed. In literature, different structures of the function of $Q$ are found which sustain several astrophysical observations like Big Bang nucleosynthesis, late-time cosmic acceleration etc. Autonomous systems for each suc…

Time-Unified Diffusion Policy with Action Discrimination for Robotic Manipulation
Ye Niu, Sanping Zhou, Yizhe Li, Ye Den, Le Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09422

Time-Unified Diffusion Policy with Action Discrimination for Robotic Manipulation
In many complex scenarios, robotic manipulation relies on generative models to estimate the distribution of multiple successful actions. As the diffusion model has better training robustness than other generative models, it performs well in imitation learning through successful robot demonstrations. However, the diffusion-based policy methods typically require significant time to iteratively denoise robot actions, which hinders real-time responses in robotic manipulation. Moreover, existing dif…

Coming down from infinity for coordinated particle systems
Varun Sreedhar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15736 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506…

Coming down from infinity for coordinated particle systems
We study coming down from infinity for coordinated particle systems. In a coordinated particle system, particles live on a set of sites $V$ and are able to coalesce, migrate, reproduce, and die. The dynamics of these events are coordinated in that many particles may undergo the same action simultaneously. Coming down from infinity is the phenomenon where a process starting with infinitely many particles will almost surely have only finitely many particles after any positive time. This phenomeno…

Technical Report for Egocentric Mistake Detection for the HoloAssist Challenge
Constantin Patsch, Marsil Zakour, Yuankai Wu, Eckehard Steinbach
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06174

Technical Report for Egocentric Mistake Detection for the HoloAssist Challenge
In this report, we address the task of online mistake detection, which is vital in domains like industrial automation and education, where real-time video analysis allows human operators to correct errors as they occur. While previous work focuses on procedural errors involving action order, broader error types must be addressed for real-world use. We introduce an online mistake detection framework that handles both procedural and execution errors (e.g., motor slips or tool misuse). Upon detect…

Learning in Random Utility Models Via Online Decision Problems
Emerson Melo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16030 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Learning in Random Utility Models Via Online Decision Problems
This paper examines the Random Utility Model (RUM) in repeated stochastic choice settings where decision-makers lack full information about payoffs. We propose a gradient-based learning algorithm that embeds RUM into an online decision-making framework. Our analysis establishes Hannan consistency for a broad class of RUMs, meaning the average regret relative to the best fixed action in hindsight vanishes over time. We also show that our algorithm is equivalent to the Follow-The-Regularized-Lead…

The Komar charge in presence of the Holst term and the gravitational Witten effect
Jos\'e Luis V. Cerdeira, Tom\'as Ort\'in
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15904

The Komar charge in presence of the Holst term and the gravitational Witten effect
In the first-order formalism, the Einstein--Hilbert action can be modified by the addition of a Holst term multiplied by the Barbero parameter $α$. This modification breaks parity although it does not affect the equations of motion. We show that the standard Komar charge is also modified by the addition of a topological term multiplied by the Barbero parameter $α$. For the Killing vector that generates time translations, the value of the Komar integral at infinity is modified by the addition …

Dynamical Phase Transition of Dissipative Fermionic Superfluids
Xin-Yuan Gao, Yangqian Yan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05770 https://a…

Dynamical Phase Transition of Dissipative Fermionic Superfluids
Driven-dissipative open quantum many-body systems exhibit rich phases that are characterized by the steady states in the long-time dynamics. However, lossy open systems inevitably decay to the vacuum, making their transient evolution the primary focus. Assuming the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov ansatz, we derive a generalized time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov equation based on the least action principle for open quantum systems. By solving the quench dynamics after abruptly introducing inelastic…

Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles at a time when state and local officials said they had protests there under control.

The move reflects an increasingly evident pattern of his presidency:
Trump declares an emergency or crisis where many others do not see one,
enabling him to take sweeping actions,
rally supporters and fight on political terrain he finds favorable.

Trump’s declaration of an economic emergency in April enabled sweeping tariffs.
…

For Trump, seizing emergency powers has become central to governing
President Donald Trump has declared emergencies in various areas. He says strong action is needed; critics say the emergencies don’t exist.

Geometric Cosmology models: statistical analysis with observational data
Mat\'ias Leizerovich, Luisa G. Jaime, Susana J. Landau, Gustavo Arciniega
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11299

Geometric Cosmology models: statistical analysis with observational data
Although the standard cosmological model is capable of explaining most current observational data, it faces some theoretical and observational issues. This is the main motivation for exploring alternative cosmological models. In this paper, we focus on a novel proposal that consists in adding an infinite tower of higher-order curvature invariants to the usual Einstein-Hilbert action. We obtain the late-time background evolution for three families of models that can be obtained from this proposa…

EASE: Embodied Active Event Perception via Self-Supervised Energy Minimization
Zhou Chen, Sanjoy Kundu, Harsimran S. Baweja, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17516

EASE: Embodied Active Event Perception via Self-Supervised Energy Minimization
Active event perception, the ability to dynamically detect, track, and summarize events in real time, is essential for embodied intelligence in tasks such as human-AI collaboration, assistive robotics, and autonomous navigation. However, existing approaches often depend on predefined action spaces, annotated datasets, and extrinsic rewards, limiting their adaptability and scalability in dynamic, real-world scenarios. Inspired by cognitive theories of event perception and predictive coding, we p…

Gaussian concentration bounds for probabilistic cellular automata
Jean-Ren\'e Chazottes, Frank Redig, Edgardo Ugalde
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05431 h…

Gaussian concentration bounds for probabilistic cellular automata
We study lattice spin systems and analyze the evolution of Gaussian concentration bounds (GCB) under the action of probabilistic cellular automata (PCA), which serve as discrete-time analogues of Markovian spin-flip dynamics. We establish the conservation of GCB and, in the high-noise regime, demonstrate that GCB holds for the unique stationary measure. Additionally, we prove the equivalence of GCB for the space-time measure and its spatial marginals in the case of contractive probabilistic cel…

Scaling invariance for the diffusion coefficient in a billiard system
Anne K\'etri P. da Fonseca, Diego F. M. Oliveira, Edson D. Leonel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06395

Scaling invariance for the diffusion coefficient in a billiard system
We investigated the unbounded diffusion observed in a time-dependent oval-shaped billiard and its suppression owing to inelastic collisions with the boundary. The main focus is on the behavior of the diffusion coefficient, which plays a key role in describing the scaling invariance characteristic of this transition. For short times, the low-action regime is characterized by a constant diffusion coefficient, which begins to decay after a crossover iteration, thereby suppressing the unlimited gro…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20124 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_…

TUNA: Comprehensive Fine-grained Temporal Understanding Evaluation on Dense Dynamic Videos
Videos are unique in their integration of temporal elements, including camera, scene, action, and attribute, along with their dynamic relationships over time. However, existing benchmarks for video understanding often treat these properties separately or narrowly focus on specific aspects, overlooking the holistic nature of video content. To address this, we introduce TUNA, a temporal-oriented benchmark for fine-grained understanding on dense dynamic videos, with two complementary tasks: captio…

Good Morning #Canada
Today is World Population Day, established by United Nations as a result of the massive interest people had in Five Billion Day in 1987. It's a good day to get an update on Canada’s population growth, which was aggressive in 2023 when we hit 40M, and then hit 41M just a few months into 2024. The #StatsCan Real Time Tracker is not working for some reason, but we still have their Quarterly Estimates data. At the end of June, there were 41,548,787 of us strolling around Canada, with every province and territory showing growth.
#CanadaIsAwesome #INeedMySpace
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901

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 …

The liberal obsession with optics serves the right and persuades no one. There is literally an active ethnic cleansing happening in the US right now, and the only thing that matters is making that as hard as possible to carry out.
Anarchists destroying intelligence assets saves lives. Every escooter thrown at a cop car is one less escort for a goon too afraid to kidnap random brown people without being flanked by a branch full of bad apples. Spray paint is not violence. Vandalism is not violence. Community self defense in all forms is legitimate.
Make no mistake, these raids are about changing demographics. Demographic trends have been shifting blue for a long time, and the right has, for a long time, been blaming "white replacement." Conspiracy theory aside, Democrats have also been relying on the growth of black and brown voters as a block. The nuances of whiteness as an identity are lost on the current administration and their supporters. They see that "white people will be a minority by 2050" and equate that with the "end of Western Civilization."
The only way to "save Western Civilization" is to change those demographics. Forced birth and forced removal are two sides of the same white nationalist objective. Of course they can't have due process, because they need to be able to kidnap anyone who they see as a threat to their demographic future.
They don't care about optics. The plan is to murder away any threat and flood everyone else with propaganda. There is no mythical middle. There's no one unconvinced. They know this, but they win when democrats buy that myth and save the police the work of policing the protests.
If your protest is 90% "peaceful," they'll take pictures of the 10% that isn't. If it's 99% peaceful, they'll shoot rubber bullets and teargas until someone throws a brick and take 100 pictures from a dozen angles. If its 100% "peaceful" and no one can be provoked, they'll generate pictures with AI or photoshop like they did during the George Floyd uprising and the pictures from the CHOP/CHAZ. Do you have literally no memory?
#USPol #FiftyFiftyOne #50501movenent #resistance #NoKingsDay #NoKingsDayOfAction

Hearing Hands: Generating Sounds from Physical Interactions in 3D Scenes
Yiming Dou, Wonseok Oh, Yuqing Luo, Antonio Loquercio, Andrew Owens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09989

Hearing Hands: Generating Sounds from Physical Interactions in 3D Scenes
We study the problem of making 3D scene reconstructions interactive by asking the following question: can we predict the sounds of human hands physically interacting with a scene? First, we record a video of a human manipulating objects within a 3D scene using their hands. We then use these action-sound pairs to train a rectified flow model to map 3D hand trajectories to their corresponding audio. At test time, a user can query the model for other actions, parameterized as sequences of hand pos…

Hybrid Diffusion Policies with Projective Geometric Algebra for Efficient Robot Manipulation Learning
Xiatao Sun, Yuxuan Wang, Shuo Yang, Yinxing Chen, Daniel Rakita
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05695

Hybrid Diffusion Policies with Projective Geometric Algebra for Efficient Robot Manipulation Learning
Diffusion policies have become increasingly popular in robot learning due to their reliable convergence in motion generation tasks. At a high level, these policies learn to transform noisy action trajectories into effective ones, conditioned on observations. However, each time such a model is trained in a robotics context, the network must relearn fundamental spatial representations and operations, such as translations and rotations, from scratch in order to ground itself and operate effectivel…

FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency
Yifei Su, Ning Liu, Dong Chen, Zhen Zhao, Kun Wu, Meng Li, Zhiyuan Xu, Zhengping Che, Jian Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08822

FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency
Generative modeling-based visuomotor policies have been widely adopted in robotic manipulation attributed to their ability to model multimodal action distributions. However, the high inference cost of multi-step sampling limits their applicability in real-time robotic systems. To address this issue, existing approaches accelerate the sampling process in generative modeling-based visuomotor policies by adapting acceleration techniques originally developed for image generation. Despite this progr…