Tootfinder

VQArt-Bench: A semantically rich VQA Benchmark for Art and Cultural Heritage
A. Alfarano (University of Zurich, Max Planck Society), L. Venturoli (University of Zurich, Max Planck Society), D. Negueruela del Castillo (University of Zurich, Max Planck Society)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12750

VQArt-Bench: A semantically rich VQA Benchmark for Art and Cultural Heritage
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in joint visual and linguistic tasks. However, existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks often fail to evaluate deep semantic understanding, particularly in complex domains like visual art analysis. Confined to simple syntactic structures and surface-level attributes, these questions fail to capture the diversity and depth of human visual inquiry. This limitation incentivizes models to exploit statisti…

Just to underscore the point, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo leaving MIT for UZH is probably one of the biggest academic news stories of the year.
(Think: Bad-Bunny-level-for-normal-people big.)
Nobel-winning Economists To Leave US For Zurich: University
https://www.

Nobel-winning Economists To Leave US For Zurich: University

The University of Zurich said that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, known for their work in development economics, will move from the US to Switzerland, amid Donald Trump's attacks on universities.
https://www.

Nobel-winning economists Duflo and Banerjee will leave US for Switzerland
The University of Zurich said that Nobel laureates Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, known for their work in development economics, will move from the US to Switzerland, amid Donald Trump's attacks on universities.

Convergence and Divergence of Language Models under Different Random Seeds
Finlay Fehlauer (ETH Zurich), Kyle Mahowald (University of Texas at Austin), Tiago Pimentel (ETH Zurich)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26643

Convergence and Divergence of Language Models under Different Random Seeds
In this paper, we investigate the convergence of language models (LMs) trained under different random seeds, measuring convergence as the expected per-token Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence across seeds. By comparing LM convergence as a function of model size and training checkpoint, we identify a four-phase convergence pattern: (i) an initial uniform phase, (ii) a sharp-convergence phase, (iii) a sharp-divergence phase, and (iv) a slow-reconvergence phase. Further, we observe that larger mode…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #ThroughTheNight
Franz Liszt, Joachim Raff, Orchestra of the Zurich University of the Arts & Marc Kissóczy:
🎵 Overture to 'Herders Entfesseltem Prometheus'
#FranzLiszt #JoachimRaff #OrchestraoftheZurichUniversityoftheArts #MarcKissóczy