Artificial intelligence has made astonishing leaps by learning patterns from vast oceans of data. Yet when you push it to reason—to derive new conclusions from a few rules, or to check a complex chain of thought—the cracks start to show. A team at Google DeepMind led by András György, Tor Lattimore, Nevena Lazić, and Csaba…
In the age of AI-generated imagery, our sense of what is real and what is manufactured is getting fuzzier by the day. Watermarks have long been the quiet guardians of authorship and authenticity, a digital tattoo that says, in essence, this image belongs to someone and not to a random generator. But as image-generation tools…
What online video grounding asks of a machine Every second, a streaming video unfurls a story. In a world of surveillance feeds, live sports, and endless social clips, there’s a practical itch: can a computer listen to a spoken query like a human would and point to the exact moment in the stream where it…
Mathematicians and computer scientists have long loved a clean, decisive rule: if you can strip away extra layers of variables from a logical statement, you should be left with something you can decide—one that tells you yes or no, right or wrong. The first-order theory of the integers with addition and order—Presburger arithmetic—delivers that kind…
Imagine a world where we could fine-tune artificial intelligence without the usual massive computational costs and risks. That’s the promise of a groundbreaking new technique developed by researchers at UNC Chapel Hill, detailed in their paper, GRAINS (Gradient-based Attribution for Inference-Time Steering of LLMs and VLMs). Forget painstaking retraining; this method allows us to tweak…
A Big Challenge for Soft Robots Soft robots promise a gentler touch, resilience to impact, and a kind of adaptability that rigid machines can only envy. But as these squishy machines scale from cute centimeter toys to meter-long tools for real work, control stops being a neat afterthought and becomes the whole game. Pneumatic actuation—blasting…
In the realm of formal mathematics, computers prove theorems by following carefully crafted steps called tactics. When proofs grow long and tangled, researchers imagine a smarter way to reuse patterns—the software-library mindset applied to reasoning itself. The idea sounds almost like teaching a machine not just to solve a single puzzle, but to learn how…
In the world of artificial intelligence, bigger has often meant better. Large language models keep swelling, soaking up more data, parameters, and compute until they feel almost like a force of nature. Yet there’s a growing ache behind the thrill: how do we keep quality from exploding alongside cost? A team of researchers led by…
Mathematicians spend a lot of time counting symmetries. In the world of field theory, symmetries are captured by automorphisms — structure-preserving jumblings of the elements inside a field that leave its base numbers alone. If you bundle a field extension K over a base field F, the automorphisms that fix F form a group Aut(K/F)….
What if the bizarre rules governing black holes could unlock secrets about exotic materials here on Earth? A team at Hanyang University in South Korea believes the answer lies in topology – not the real estate kind, but the mathematical concept describing shapes that remain unchanged even when stretched and twisted. Think of a coffee…
The 3x + 1 problem, as famous for its stubborn simplicity as for its stubbornness, keeps outsmarting us with every new numerical trick and heuristic. Yet Leonard Ben Aurel Brauer, presenting under the banner of an Independent Researcher, turns the lens inward. Instead of chasing a universal invariant or a probabilistic canopy over endless sequences,…
The paper you’re about to read asks a deceptively simple question: does tossing more predictors into a model always improve forecasts, especially when the world around us keeps changing? In finance, where regimes flip from calm to chaotic as fast as a quarterly report drops, the answer is almost certainly not. The authors show that…
In the endless maze of real‑world decision making, some puzzles are simple to state but brutally hard to solve. You want to assign 0s and 1s to a set of items — binary decisions — while also obeying a handful of rules that link those choices together. Think facility location, scheduling, or even how to…
Dubbing that adapts voice to every scene’s heartbeat. When you press play on a movie, your ears expect voices to feel like they were born in the moment: every line, every breath, finely tuned to the mood and the camera’s rhythm. Dubbing, in practice, is a high‑wire act: you must preserve the actor’s identity while…
Can Video Tools Give AI the Patience to Reason? Long videos demand more than snapshots; they require memory, attention, and cross‑modal storytelling. A new wave of research is teaching AI how to reason through hours of footage, not just lines of text. The paper Thinking With Videos: Multimodal Tool-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Long Video Reasoning,…
The droplet perched on a surface is more than a pretty drop of water in a science fair. Its edge, the contact line where liquid meets solid and air, encodes a negotiation between molecules: a quiet vote about how much a surface wants to be kissed or ignored by a liquid. In industry, that tiny…
The Memory Hog Large language models (LLMs) are the brains behind many of today’s most impressive AI feats. They power everything from helpful chatbots to insightful search engines. But these digital minds are notoriously resource-intensive. Think of them as voracious eaters: the more they learn, the bigger they get, gobbling up vast amounts of memory….
Finding Order in the Unlabeled Chaos In the vast ocean of data, one of the most fundamental tasks is to separate the signal from the noise—to distinguish between groups or clusters hidden within the data. Traditionally, this requires knowing which data points belong to which group, a luxury often unavailable in real-world scenarios. But what…
Why Does It Matter Where Things Are and How They’re Oriented? Picture a robot in a kitchen trying to grab a mug. It’s not enough for the robot to just spot the mug in a photo; it needs to understand exactly how the mug is positioned in three-dimensional space. Is it upright or tilted? How…
In a fusion reactor, magnetic fields are both the choreographers and the stagehands. They guide hot plasma into neat, almost musical configurations, keeping the fuel from touching the walls while dictating how energy leaks, twists, and can suddenly surge. The study we’re about to dive into is about one of the trickier acts in that…