Tootfinder

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MorningShow
The Heartbreakers:
🎵 Chinese Rocks
#TheHeartbreakers
https://johnnythunderstheheartbreakers.bandcamp.com/track/chinese-rocks-yonkers-demo
https://open.spotify.com/track/0oXw08kbTaXumYDNV9gQWL

NOCTA: Non-Greedy Objective Cost-Tradeoff Acquisition for Longitudinal Data
Dzung Dinh, Boqi Chen, Marc Niethammer, Junier Oliva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12412

NOCTA: Non-Greedy Objective Cost-Tradeoff Acquisition for Longitudinal Data
In many critical applications, resource constraints limit the amount of information that can be gathered to make predictions. For example, in healthcare, patient data often spans diverse features ranging from lab tests to imaging studies. Each feature may carry different information and must be acquired at a respective cost of time, money, or risk to the patient. Moreover, temporal prediction tasks, where both instance features and labels evolve over time, introduce additional complexity in dec…

Understanding and Benchmarking the Trustworthiness in Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding
Youze Wang, Zijun Chen, Ruoyu Chen, Shishen Gu, Yinpeng Dong, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Meng Wang, Richang Hong, Wenbo Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12336

Understanding and Benchmarking the Trustworthiness in Multimodal LLMs for Video Understanding
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models for video understanding (videoLLMs) have improved their ability to process dynamic multimodal data. However, trustworthiness challenges factual inaccuracies, harmful content, biases, hallucinations, and privacy risks, undermine reliability due to video data's spatiotemporal complexities. This study introduces Trust-videoLLMs, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating videoLLMs across five dimensions: truthfulness, safety, robustness, fairness, …

In a saner environment, we’d be having a reasonable conversation about that: in what ways, if any, can a machine that repeats contextual patterns with no sense of meaning augment humans thinking through tricky things? In ways can it mislead? When, if ever, is it worth the tradeoffs? the resource costs? etc etc.
Right now, the off-the-charts money and hype make that reasonable conversation impossible except perhaps in hushed corners. (Please do not have that argument in my replies. I am tired.)
7/

UCD: Unlearning in LLMs via Contrastive Decoding
Vinith M. Suriyakumar, Ayush Sekhari, Ashia Wilson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12097 https://

UCD: Unlearning in LLMs via Contrastive Decoding
Machine unlearning aims to remove specific information, e.g. sensitive or undesirable content, from large language models (LLMs) while preserving overall performance. We propose an inference-time unlearning algorithm that uses contrastive decoding, leveraging two auxiliary smaller models, one trained without the forget set and one trained with it, to guide the outputs of the original model using their difference during inference. Our strategy substantially improves the tradeoff between unlearni…

Quantum Resource Complementarity in Finite-Dimensional Systems
Justin K. Edmondson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11741 https://arxiv.org…

Quantum Resource Complementarity in Finite-Dimensional Systems
Quantum resources such as entanglement, information redundancy, and coherence enable revolutionary advantages but obey fundamental tradeoffs. We present a unified geometric constraint governing three core operational tasks: teleportation ($q_1$), cloning ($q_2$), and coherence-based metrology ($q_3$). For any tripartite quantum state $ρ_{ABC}$, we show the tight inequality $q_1^2 + q_2^2 + q_3^2 \leq 1$ confines all physically achievable resources to the positive octant of the unit ball. This …

Geometric Optimization and IPA-Induced Dispersion Tuning in Solid-Core Photonic Crystal Fibers
Zekeriya Mehmet Yuksel, Hasan Oguz, Ozgur Onder Karakilinc, Halil Berberoglu, Mirbek Turduev, Muzaffer Adak, Sevgi Ozdemir Kart
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10815

Geometric Optimization and IPA-Induced Dispersion Tuning in Solid-Core Photonic Crystal Fibers
This study presents a numerical investigation of solid-core photonic crystal fibers with circular and hexagonal cladding geometries. The goal is to optimize optical parameters for nonlinear photonics and environmental sensing. Full-vectorial simulations using FDTD, PWE, and FDE are used to analyze the effects of core diameter, pitch, and air filling fraction on the zero-dispersion wavelength, nonlinear coefficient, effective mode area, and confinement loss. Reducing the core diameter from 2.4 t…

A statistical mechanical view of complex economies under the green transition
Filippo Marcuccini, Giacomo Livan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11739 https://…

A statistical mechanical view of complex economies under the green transition
We propose a stylized model of a complex economy to explore the economic tradeoffs imposed by the so called "green transition" -- the shift towards more sustainable production paradigms -- using tools from the Statistical Mechanics of disordered systems. Namely, we promote the parameters of a standard input-output economic model to random variables, in order to characterize the typical statistical properties of its equilibria. A central feature of our work is the explicit inclusion of a waste v…

Milwaukee's "The Bindery" is closing, but the message from the guy who ran things is a good one.
“If our closure feels like a loss… now’s your time to make a new version of what we started here. Now more than ever, we need print media that is truthful, joyous, emotional, smart and led by those in the margins..."
1/2

Emergence of an Epsilon-Near-Zero Medium from Microscopic Atomic Principles
L. Ruks, J. Ruostekoski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13294 https://

Emergence of an Epsilon-Near-Zero Medium from Microscopic Atomic Principles
We demonstrate that an effective near-zero refractive index can emerge from collective light scattering in a discrete atomic lattice, using essentially exact microscopic simulations. In a 25-layer array, cooperative response leads to over a thirtyfold increase in the effective optical wavelength within the medium, almost eliminating optical phase accumulation, with potential applications in spectroscopy and optical manipulation of quantum emitters. Crucially, the near-zero refractive index aris…