Sports analytics has become both more professional and sophisticated, driven by the growing availability of detailed performance data. This progress enables applications such as match outcome prediction, player scouting, and tactical analysis. In soccer, the effective utilization of event and tracking data is fundamental for capturing and analyzing the dynamics of the game. However, there are two primary challenges: the limited availability of event data, primarily restricted to top-tier teams and leagues, and the scarcity and high cost of tracking data, which complicates its integration with event data for comprehensive analysis. Here we propose OpenSTARLab, an open-source framework designed to democratize spatio-temporal agent data analysis in sports by addressing these key challenges. OpenSTARLab includes the Pre-processing Package that standardizes event and tracking data through Unified and Integrated Event Data and State-Action-Reward formats, the Event Modeling Package that implements deep learning-based event prediction, alongside the RLearn Package for reinforcement learning tasks. These technical components facilitate the handling of diverse data sources and support advanced analytical tasks, thereby enhancing the overall functionality and usability of the framework. To assess OpenSTARLab's effectiveness, we conducted several experimental evaluations. These demonstrate the superior performance of the specific event prediction model in terms of action and time prediction accuracies and maintained its robust event simulation performance. Furthermore, reinforcement learning experiments reveal a trade-off between action accuracy and temporal difference loss and show comprehensive visualization. Overall, OpenSTARLab serves as a robust platform for researchers and practitioners, enhancing innovation and collaboration in the field of soccer data analytics.

We introduce Hibiki, a decoder-only model for simultaneous speech translation. Hibiki leverages a multistream language model to synchronously process source and target speech, and jointly produces text and audio tokens to perform speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation. We furthermore address the fundamental challenge of simultaneous interpretation, which unlike its consecutive counterpart, where one waits for the end of the source utterance to start translating, adapts its flow to accumulate just enough context to produce a correct translation in real-time, chunk by chunk. To do so, we introduce a weakly-supervised method that leverages the perplexity of an off-the-shelf text translation system to identify optimal delays on a per-word basis and create aligned synthetic data. After supervised training, Hibiki performs adaptive, simultaneous speech translation with vanilla temperature sampling. On a French-English simultaneous speech translation task, Hibiki demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in translation quality, speaker fidelity and naturalness. Moreover, the simplicity of its inference process makes it compatible with batched translation and even real-time on-device deployment. We provide examples as well as models and inference code.

The potato is a widely grown crop in many regions of the world. In recent decades, potato farming has gained incredible traction in the world. Potatoes are susceptible to several illnesses that stunt their development. This plant seems to have significant leaf disease. Early Blight and Late Blight are two prevalent leaf diseases that affect potato plants. The early detection of these diseases would be beneficial for enhancing the yield of this crop. The ideal solution is to use image processing to identify and analyze these disorders. Here, we present an autonomous method based on image processing and machine learning to detect late blight disease affecting potato leaves. The proposed method comprises four different phases: (1) Histogram Equalization is used to improve the quality of the input image; (2) feature extraction is performed using a Deep CNN model, then these extracted features are concatenated; (3) feature selection is performed using wrapper-based feature selection; (4) classification is performed using an SVM classifier and its variants. This proposed method achieves the highest accuracy of 99% using SVM by selecting 550 features.

Text-embedding models often exhibit biases arising from the data on which they are trained. In this paper, we examine a hitherto unexplored bias in text-embeddings: bias arising from the presence of $\textit{names}$ such as persons, locations, organizations etc. in the text. Our study shows how the presence of $\textit{name-bias}$ in text-embedding models can potentially lead to erroneous conclusions in assessment of thematic similarity.Text-embeddings can mistakenly indicate similarity between texts based on names in the text, even when their actual semantic content has no similarity or indicate dissimilarity simply because of the names in the text even when the texts match semantically. We first demonstrate the presence of name bias in different text-embedding models and then propose $\textit{text-anonymization}$ during inference which involves removing references to names, while preserving the core theme of the text. The efficacy of the anonymization approach is demonstrated on two downstream NLP tasks, achieving significant performance gains. Our simple and training-optimization-free approach offers a practical and easily implementable solution to mitigate name bias.

Generating novel crystalline materials has potential to lead to advancements in fields such as electronics, energy storage, and catalysis. The defining characteristic of crystals is their symmetry, which plays a central role in determining their physical properties. However, existing crystal generation methods either fail to generate materials that display the symmetries of real-world crystals, or simply replicate the symmetry information from examples in a database. To address this limitation, we propose SymmCD, a novel diffusion-based generative model that explicitly incorporates crystallographic symmetry into the generative process. We decompose crystals into two components and learn their joint distribution through diffusion: 1) the asymmetric unit, the smallest subset of the crystal which can generate the whole crystal through symmetry transformations, and; 2) the symmetry transformations needed to be applied to each atom in the asymmetric unit. We also use a novel and interpretable representation for these transformations, enabling generalization across different crystallographic symmetry groups. We showcase the competitive performance of SymmCD on a subset of the Materials Project, obtaining diverse and valid crystals with realistic symmetries and predicted properties.

Future link prediction is a fundamental challenge in various real-world dynamic systems. To address this, numerous temporal graph neural networks (temporal GNNs) and benchmark datasets have been developed. However, these datasets often feature excessive repeated edges and lack complex sequential dynamics, a key characteristic inherent in many real-world applications such as recommender systems and ``Who-To-Follow'' on social networks. This oversight has led existing methods to inadvertently downplay the importance of learning sequential dynamics, focusing primarily on predicting repeated edges. In this study, we demonstrate that existing methods, such as GraphMixer and DyGFormer, are inherently incapable of learning simple sequential dynamics, such as ``a user who has followed OpenAI and Anthropic is more likely to follow AI at Meta next.'' Motivated by this issue, we introduce the Temporal Graph Benchmark with Sequential Dynamics (TGB-Seq), a new benchmark carefully curated to minimize repeated edges, challenging models to learn sequential dynamics and generalize to unseen edges. TGB-Seq comprises large real-world datasets spanning diverse domains, including e-commerce interactions, movie ratings, business reviews, social networks, citation networks and web link networks. Benchmarking experiments reveal that current methods usually suffer significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs on TGB-Seq, posing new challenges and opportunities for future research. TGB-Seq datasets, leaderboards, and example codes are available at https://tgb-seq.github.io/.

Biologically inspired neural networks offer alternative avenues to model data distributions. FlyVec is a recent example that draws inspiration from the fruit fly's olfactory circuit to tackle the task of learning word embeddings. Surprisingly, this model performs competitively even against deep learning approaches specifically designed to encode text, and it does so with the highest degree of computational efficiency. We pose the question of whether this performance can be improved further. For this, we introduce Comply. By incorporating positional information through complex weights, we enable a single-layer neural network to learn sequence representations. Our experiments show that Comply not only supersedes FlyVec but also performs on par with significantly larger state-of-the-art models. We achieve this without additional parameters. Comply yields sparse contextual representations of sentences that can be interpreted explicitly from the neuron weights.

Since declaring his support for Donald Trump in July of last year and subsequently spending more than 250m on his re-election effort, Elon Musk has rapidly accumulated political influence and positioned himself at the heart of the new administration. Now as prominent as the president himself, Musk has begun to make use of that power, making decisions that could affect the health of millions of people, gaining access to highly sensitive personal data, and attacking anyone who opposes him. Musk, the world's richest man and an unelected official, has achieved an astonishing level of power over the federal government. Over the weekend, workers with Musk's "department of government efficiency" (Doge) clashed with civil servants over demands for unfettered access to the computer systems of major US government agencies in a breakneck series of confrontations. When the dust settled, several top officials who opposed the takeover had been pushed out, and Musk's allies had gained control. Musk, with the backing of Trump, is now working to shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAid) – the world's largest single supplier of humanitarian aid.

Algorithmic discrimination is a critical concern as machine learning models are used in high-stakes decision-making in legally protected contexts. Although substantial research on algorithmic bias and discrimination has led to the development of fairness metrics, several critical legal issues remain unaddressed in practice. To address these gaps, we introduce a novel decision-theoretic framework grounded in anti-discrimination law of the United Kingdom, which has global influence and aligns more closely with European and Commonwealth legal systems. We propose the 'conditional estimation parity' metric, which accounts for estimation error and the underlying data-generating process, aligning with legal standards. Through a real-world example based on an algorithmic credit discrimination case, we demonstrate the practical application of our formalism and provide insights for aligning fairness metrics with legal principles. Our approach bridges the divide between machine learning fairness metrics and anti-discrimination law, offering a legally grounded framework for developing non-discriminatory automated decision systems.

Humans strive to design safe AI systems that align with our goals and remain under our control. However, as AI capabilities advance, we face a new challenge: the emergence of deeper, more persistent relationships between humans and AI systems. We explore how increasingly capable AI agents may generate the perception of deeper relationships with users, especially as AI becomes more personalised and agentic. This shift, from transactional interaction to ongoing sustained social engagement with AI, necessitates a new focus on socioaffective alignment--how an AI system behaves within the social and psychological ecosystem co-created with its user, where preferences and perceptions evolve through mutual influence. Addressing these dynamics involves resolving key intrapersonal dilemmas, including balancing immediate versus long-term well-being, protecting autonomy, and managing AI companionship alongside the desire to preserve human social bonds. By framing these challenges through a notion of basic psychological needs, we seek AI systems that support, rather than exploit, our fundamental nature as social and emotional beings.