Marrakesh
From 'sand theft auto' to space BABIES: The global innovations and trends set to shape 2026
Trump's ominous warning to Colombia as acting Venezuelan president issues message to world calling for'peace and dialogue, not war' Trump plans a military'quarantine' of Venezuela's oil to strong-arm Maduro's successor I got a GLP-1 drug with few questions asked... and never meeting a doctor face-to-face. But could that convenience have put my health at risk? Addicted, arrested and dead in a hotel corridor...Victoria Jones is the latest child of a famous parent to tragically spiral. So why ARE so many children of the rich and famous cursed? Marco Rubio'runs laps' around CBS reporter who asked why US commandos didn't nab Maduro associates in daring night time raid Prince Harry'desperately wants King Charles to come to Montecito and see Archie and Lilibet' Travis Kelce finally addresses possible retirement as Chiefs lose to NFL's worst team in what could be humiliating end to his iconic career State of Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Lopez's relationship revealed by insiders... as parents gossip about'less sociable' star at school play NASA's'queen of diamonds' EXPOSED: Genius is accused of treachery over top secret mission... as chilling details emerge Michael B. Jordan's unimpressed face sends fans wild as Timothee Chalamet cries on stage over Kylie Jenner North West, 12, sparks face piercing speculation after backlash over'risky' body modification'Out-of-touch' Gayle King slammed for complaining that her upper class seat doesn't have a window on her eight-hour flight'back to work' from Hawaii American family of seven stranded after Venezuela raids say they're trapped in a living hell... while oblivious influencers BOAST about getting stuck Ten people who spread false claims France's First Lady Brigitte Macron was born a man are found guilty of cyberbullying in Paris EXPOSED: The Air Force vet who let China steal America's nuclear secrets... and KEPT his $200K tax-funded salary From'sand theft auto' to space BABIES: The global innovations and trends set to shape 2026 From the rise of the humanoid robot to the weird world of AI girlfriends, 2025 had no shortage of strange and transformative inventions. Now, experts from the Nesta research foundation have revealed the global innovations and trends set to shape the world in 2026.
Deadly virus that prompted Covid-era restrictions in China now in the US, officials confirm
'Pathetic' JD Vance slammed for'cheap' reaction to racist texts as Young Republicans spark Trump world crisis Police say they have FOUND woman seen in viral'kidnapping' video and reveal what happened to her after harrowing footage emerged Jason Kelce speaks out after'brutal comments' about Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show go viral Trump's greatest fear for Gaza: Trusted White House policy expert MARK DUBOWITZ breaks down how peace deal will fail Kim Kardashian says she wasn't'emotionally or financially safe' during'toxic' marriage to Kanye West as she claims rapper hasn't contacted their children for MONTHS and has destroyed her dating life The world's most powerful passport revealed - as UK and USA both drop to record lows Unmasked after 80 years - the Nazi executioner in infamous WWII photo: Historian uses AI to uncover identity of killer in'The Last Jew of Vinnytsia' image Every woman I date has the same repulsive bedroom kink... it feels so wrong, but I always say yes: ...
Quantum Observers: A NISQ Hardware Demonstration of Chaotic State Prediction Using Quantum Echo-state Networks
Connerty, Erik L., Evans, Ethan N., Angelatos, Gerasimos, Narayanan, Vignesh
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have highlighted the remarkable capabilities of neural network (NN)-powered systems on classical computers. However, these systems face significant computational challenges that limit scalability and efficiency. Quantum computers hold the potential to overcome these limitations and increase processing power beyond classical systems. Despite this, integrating quantum computing with NNs remains largely unrealized due to challenges posed by noise, decoherence, and high error rates in current quantum hardware. Here, we propose a novel quantum echo-state network (QESN) design and implementation algorithm that can operate within the presence of noise on current IBM hardware. We apply classical control-theoretic response analysis to characterize the QESN, emphasizing its rich nonlinear dynamics and memory, as well as its ability to be fine-tuned with sparsity and re-uploading blocks. We validate our approach through a comprehensive demonstration of QESNs functioning as quantum observers, applied in both high-fidelity simulations and hardware experiments utilizing data from a prototypical chaotic Lorenz system. Our results show that the QESN can predict long time-series with persistent memory, running over 100 times longer than the median T1 and T2 of the IBM Marrakesh QPU, achieving state-of-the-art time-series performance on superconducting hardware.
Learning Encodings by Maximizing State Distinguishability: Variational Quantum Error Correction
Meyer, Nico, Mutschler, Christopher, Maier, Andreas, Scherer, Daniel D.
Quantum error correction is crucial for protecting quantum information against decoherence. Traditional codes like the surface code require substantial overhead, making them impractical for near-term, early fault-tolerant devices. We propose a novel objective function for tailoring error correction codes to specific noise structures by maximizing the distinguishability between quantum states after a noise channel, ensuring efficient recovery operations. We formalize this concept with the distinguishability loss function, serving as a machine learning objective to discover resource-efficient encoding circuits optimized for given noise characteristics. We implement this methodology using variational techniques, termed variational quantum error correction (VarQEC). Our approach yields codes with desirable theoretical and practical properties and outperforms standard codes in various scenarios. We also provide proof-of-concept demonstrations on IBM and IQM hardware devices, highlighting the practical relevance of our procedure.
Biomed-DPT: Dual Modality Prompt Tuning for Biomedical Vision-Language Models
Peng, Wei, Liu, Kang, Hu, Jianchen, Zhang, Meng
Prompt learning is one of the most effective paradigms for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to the biomedical image classification tasks in few shot scenarios. However, most of the current prompt learning methods only used the text prompts and ignored the particular structures (such as the complex anatomical structures and subtle pathological features) in the biomedical images. In this work, we propose Biomed-DPT, a knowledge-enhanced dual modality prompt tuning technique. In designing the text prompt, Biomed-DPT constructs a dual prompt including the template-driven clinical prompts and the large language model (LLM)-driven domain-adapted prompts, then extracts the clinical knowledge from the domain-adapted prompts through the knowledge distillation technique. In designing the vision prompt, Biomed-DPT introduces the zero vector as a soft prompt to leverage attention re-weighting so that the focus on non-diagnostic regions and the recognition of non-critical pathological features are avoided. Biomed-DPT achieves an average classification accuracy of 66.14\% across 11 biomedical image datasets covering 9 modalities and 10 organs, with performance reaching 78.06\% in base classes and 75.97\% in novel classes, surpassing the Context Optimization (CoOp) method by 6.20\%, 3.78\%, and 8.04\%, respectively. Our code are available at \underline{https://github.com/Kanyooo/Biomed-DPT}.
CLIMB: Data Foundations for Large Scale Multimodal Clinical Foundation Models
Dai, Wei, Chen, Peilin, Lu, Malinda, Li, Daniel, Wei, Haowen, Cui, Hejie, Liang, Paul Pu
Recent advances in clinical AI have enabled remarkable progress across many clinical domains. However, existing benchmarks and models are primarily limited to a small set of modalities and tasks, which hinders the development of large-scale multimodal methods that can make holistic assessments of patient health and well-being. To bridge this gap, we introduce Clinical Large-Scale Integrative Multimodal Benchmark (CLIMB), a comprehensive clinical benchmark unifying diverse clinical data across imaging, language, temporal, and graph modalities. CLIMB comprises 4.51 million patient samples totaling 19.01 terabytes distributed across 2D imaging, 3D video, time series, graphs, and multimodal data. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that multitask pretraining significantly improves performance on understudied domains, achieving up to 29% improvement in ultrasound and 23% in ECG analysis over single-task learning. Pretraining on CLIMB also effectively improves models' generalization capability to new tasks, and strong unimodal encoder performance translates well to multimodal performance when paired with task-appropriate fusion strategies. Our findings provide a foundation for new architecture designs and pretraining strategies to advance clinical AI research. Code is released at https://github.com/DDVD233/climb.
Better Private Distribution Testing by Leveraging Unverified Auxiliary Data
Aliakbarpour, Maryam, Burudgunte, Arnav, Cannone, Clément, Rubinfeld, Ronitt
Accurately analyzing data while preserving individual privacy is a fundamental challenge in statistical inference. Since its formulation nearly two decades ago, Differential Privacy (DP) [DMNS06] has emerged as the leading framework for privacy-preserving data analysis, providing strong mathematical privacy guarantees and gaining adoption by major entities such as the U.S. Census Bureau, Amazon [Ama24], Google [EPK14], Microsoft [DKY17], and Apple [Dif17; TVVKFSD17]. Unfortunately, DP guarantees often come at the cost of increased data requirements or computational resources, which has limited the widespread adoption of differential privacy in spite of its theoretical appeal. To address this issue, a recent line of work has investigated whether access to even small amounts of additional public data could help mitigate this loss of performance. Promising results for various tasks have been shown, both experimentally [KST20; LLHR24; BZHZK24; DORKSF24] and theoretically [BKS22; BBCKS23]. The use of additional auxiliary information is very enticing, as such access is available in many real-world applications: for example, hospitals handling sensitive patient data might leverage public datasets, records from different periods or locations, or synthetic data generated by machine learning models to improve analysis. Similarly, medical or socio-econonomic studies focusing on a minority or protected group can leverage statistical data from the overall population. However, integrating public data introduces its own challenges, as it often lacks guarantees regarding its accuracy or relevance to private datasets.
A Survey on Federated Fine-tuning of Large Language Models
Wu, Yebo, Tian, Chunlin, Li, Jingguang, Sun, He, Tam, Kahou, Li, Li, Xu, Chengzhong
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, with fine-tuning playing a pivotal role in adapting them to specific downstream applications. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising approach that enables collaborative model adaptation while ensuring data privacy, i.e., FedLLM. In this survey, we provide a systematic and thorough review of the integration of LLMs with FL. Specifically, we first trace the historical evolution of both LLMs and FL, while summarizing relevant prior surveys. We then present an in-depth analysis of the fundamental challenges encountered in deploying FedLLM. Following this, we conduct an extensive study of existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods and explore their applicability in FL. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to rigorously assess FedLLM performance and discuss its diverse real-world applications across multiple domains. Finally, we identify critical open challenges and outline promising research directions to drive future advancements in FedLLM. We maintain an active \href{https://github.com/Clin0212/Awesome-Federated-LLM-Learning}{GitHub repository} tracking cutting-edge advancements. This survey serves as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners, offering insights into the evolving landscape of federated fine-tuning for LLMs while guiding future innovations in privacy-preserving AI.
Extreme Learning Machines for Attention-based Multiple Instance Learning in Whole-Slide Image Classification
Krishnakumar, Rajiv, Baglio, Julien, Flöther, Frederik F., Ruiz, Christian, Habringer, Stefan, Romano, Nicole H.
Whole-slide image classification represents a key challenge in computational pathology and medicine. Attention-based multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as an effective approach for this problem. However, the effect of attention mechanism architecture on model performance is not well-documented for biomedical imagery. In this work, we compare different methods and implementations of MIL, including deep learning variants. We introduce a new method using higher-dimensional feature spaces for deep MIL. We also develop a novel algorithm for whole-slide image classification where extreme machine learning is combined with attention-based MIL to improve sensitivity and reduce training complexity. We apply our algorithms to the problem of detecting circulating rare cells (CRCs), such as erythroblasts, in peripheral blood. Our results indicate that nonlinearities play a key role in the classification, as removing them leads to a sharp decrease in stability in addition to a decrease in average area under the curve (AUC) of over 4%. We also demonstrate a considerable increase in robustness of the model with improvements of over 10% in average AUC when higher-dimensional feature spaces are leveraged. In addition, we show that extreme learning machines can offer clear improvements in terms of training efficiency by reducing the number of trained parameters by a factor of 5 whilst still maintaining the average AUC to within 1.5% of the deep MIL model. Finally, we discuss options of enriching the classical computing framework with quantum algorithms in the future. This work can thus help pave the way towards more accurate and efficient single-cell diagnostics, one of the building blocks of precision medicine.
Hate Speech and Sentiment of YouTube Video Comments From Public and Private Sources Covering the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Hofmann, Simon, Sommermann, Christoph, Kraus, Mathias, Zschech, Patrick, Rosenberger, Julian
This study explores the prevalence of hate speech (HS) and sentiment in YouTube video comments concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict by analyzing content from both public and private news sources. The research involved annotating 4983 comments for HS and sentiments (neutral, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine). Subsequently, machine learning (ML) models were developed, demonstrating robust predictive capabilities with area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) scores ranging from 0.83 to 0.90. These models were applied to the extracted comment sections of YouTube videos from public and private sources, uncovering a higher incidence of HS in public sources (40.4%) compared to private sources (31.6%). Sentiment analysis revealed a predominantly neutral stance in both source types, with more pronounced sentiments towards Israel and Palestine observed in public sources. This investigation highlights the dynamic nature of online discourse surrounding the Israel-Palestine conflict and underscores the potential of moderating content in a politically charged environment.