The UN's AI warnings grow louder Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. It was a busy week for our team: Tharin Pillay was on site during the UN General Assembly in New York, while Harry Booth and Nikita Ostrovsky were at the "All In AI" event in Montreal. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? The United Nations General Assembly met this week in New York. While the assembly members spent much of their time on the crises in Palestine and Sudan, they also devoted a good chunk to AI.

What does recognising a Palestinian state mean? Why have Spain, Italy sent ships to assist the Gaza flotilla? Who are the artists speaking out against the war? Why has Microsoft cut Israel off from some of its services? Microsoft has announced that it has withdrawn some of its services from the Israeli army, following an investigation that raised concerns that Israel may be violating the company's terms of service by using its artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services to spy on millions of Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Boris Akunin is one of Russia's most popular authors. Erast Fandorin, his series of historical detective novels, has been adapted into feature films and TV miniseries. But he is also an enemy of the state, having been branded a "foreign agent" by the Russian authorities last year. Akunin, whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili, has been outspoken against President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Why have Spain, Italy sent ships to assist the Gaza flotilla? Israel's mass surveillance: Microsoft blocks the army from using its software United States tech giant Microsoft has cancelled some services it provides to the Israeli military over concerns it is violating its terms of service by using the firm's cloud computing software to spy on millions of Palestinians, the company's vice chair and president Brad Smith confirmed. Smith wrote in a Thursday blog post that the company had "ceased and disabled a set of services" to a unit within the Israeli Ministry of Defence in response to an August 6 joint investigation by The Guardian newspaper, +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. Unit 8200 is the Israeli military's elite cyber warfare unit responsible for clandestine operations, including collecting signal intelligence and surveillance. The investigation by journalists revealed that following a 2021 meeting between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Unit 8200's leader Yossi Sariel, an agreement was reached to collaborate on moving large volumes of sensitive intelligence material into the company's Azure platform.

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After significantly weakening other Iranian-backed groups in the region, Israel's military has turned its attention to the Houthis, carrying out a series of punishing strikes on Yemeni ports and other infrastructure. Last month an Israeli attack in Sana killed senior members of the Houthi-led government -- including the prime minister, Ahmed al-Rahawi -- but appeared to leave the group's military leadership largely unscathed. Israeli strikes in Yemen have also killed and wounded dozens of civilians in recent months, according to human rights groups. The United States has also bombed Yemen, in response to Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthis say they have targeted ships linked to Israel, although some of the ships they struck have no clear connection to the country. Houthi attacks on Israel are typically blocked or intercepted by the Israeli military, as was the case late on Thursday when sirens sounded in parts of Israel and the military soon after said that a missile from Yemen had been thwarted.

Accurate plant counting provides valuable information for agriculture such as crop yield prediction, plant density assessment, and phenotype quantification. Vision-based approaches are currently the mainstream solution. Prior art typically uses a detection or a regression model to count a specific plant. However, plants have biodiversity, and new cultivars are increasingly bred each year. It is almost impossible to exhaust and build all species-dependent counting models. Inspired by class-agnostic counting (CAC) in computer vision, we argue that it is time to rethink the problem formulation of plant counting, from what plants to count to how to count plants. In contrast to most daily objects with spatial and temporal invariance, plants are dynamic, changing with time and space. Their non-rigid structure often leads to worse performance than counting rigid instances like heads and cars such that current CAC and open-world detection models are suboptimal to count plants. In this work, we inherit the vein of the TasselNet plant counting model and introduce a new extension, TasselNetV4, shifting from species-specific counting to cross-species counting. TasselNetV4 marries the local counting idea of TasselNet with the extract-and-match paradigm in CAC. It builds upon a plain vision transformer and incorporates novel multi-branch box-aware local counters used to enhance cross-scale robustness. Two challenging datasets, PAC-105 and PAC-Somalia, are harvested. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art CAC models show that TasselNetV4 achieves not only superior counting performance but also high efficiency.Our results indicate that TasselNetV4 emerges to be a vision foundation model for cross-scene, cross-scale, and cross-species plant counting.

We present our journey in training a speech language model for Wolof, an underrepresented language spoken in West Africa, and share key insights. We first emphasize the importance of collecting large-scale, spontaneous, high-quality unsupervised speech data, and show that continued pretraining HuBERT on this dataset outperforms both the base model and African-centric models on ASR. We then integrate this speech encoder into a Wolof LLM to train the first Speech LLM for this language, extending its capabilities to tasks such as speech translation. Furthermore, we explore training the Speech LLM to perform multi-step Chain-of-Thought before transcribing or translating. Our results show that the Speech LLM not only improves speech recognition but also performs well in speech translation. The models and the code will be openly shared.

ABSTRACT Video sequences often contain structured noise and background artifacts that obscure dynamic content, posing challenges for accurate analysis and restoration. Robust principal component methods address this by decomposing data into low-rank and sparse components. Still, the sparsity assumption often fails to capture the rich variability present in real video data. To overcome this limitation, a hybrid framework that integrates low-rank temporal modeling with diffusion posterior sampling is proposed. The proposed method, Nuclear Diffusion, is evaluated on a real-world medical imaging problem, namely cardiac ultrasound dehazing, and demonstrates improved dehazing performance compared to traditional RPCA concerning contrast enhancement (gCNR) and signal preservation (KS statistic).

Israeli strike on Yemen's Houthis reportedly kills eight The Israeli military says its air force has carried out its most powerful strike in Yemen in response to the Houthi movement's repeated drone and missile attacks on Israel. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said dozens of its aircraft bombed targets belonging to the Houthis' security and intelligence services, and military in the capital Sanaa. The Houthi-run government's health ministry denounced what it called Israel's brutal crime, saying civilian facilities and residential buildings were hit and that eight people were killed. It comes a day after 22 people were injured, two of them seriously, in a Houthi drone attack in the Israeli Red Sea resort of Eilat. The Houthis have controlled much of north-western Yemen since they ousted the country's internationally recognised government from there 10 years ago, sparking a civil war.