UAE
Tech firms are blaming AI for mega device and console price rises
For years, buyers of tech could rely on a familiar trend - that older devices would get cheaper over time. That now seems to have stopped, or in some cases, completely reversed. Apple and Microsoft's Xbox have joined the firms hiking prices for devices and games consoles which are years old. They and other tech companies have pointed to the rising cost of crucial components needed to build their machines, laying the blame on AI. Compute-hungry data centres, which power AI, need more and more chips to keep up with demand from AI companies - which means the demand for them is far outstripping supply.
U.S. strikes Iran in response to attack on cargo ship in Strait of Hormuz
U.S. strikes Iran in response to attack on cargo ship in Strait of Hormuz US President Donald Trump speaks during the Faith & Freedom Coalition event in Washington on Friday. Washington/Dubai - The U.S. military attacked Iran on Friday in response to an Iranian drone strike on a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, further straining the fragile peace deal agreed last week between the two countries. U.S. Central Command said aircraft struck missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites. CNN, citing an unnamed U.S. official, reported the U.S. operation had concluded. Iranian media said a projectile struck the area around a pier in Sirik in southern Iran. Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps on Saturday said it targeted U.S. military positions in the region, in response to the U.S. strike.
A Dual Edge Spatial Jacobian Image Graph for Interpretable Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
Ullah, Inam, Razzak, Imran, Jameel, Shoaib
Automated diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading from colour fundus photographs can achieve strong predictive performance, but clinical interpretation requires more than an image-level label. It requires understanding how lesion evidence is distributed around retinal vessels and how this evidence relates to quantitative vascular biomarkers. We present a dual-edge spatial-Jacobian image graph for interpretable DR grading. Each fundus image is represented as a graph node with four aligned evidence streams: AutoMorph vessel information ($X_1$), DR-XAI-style lesion evidence maps ($X_2$), a 128-dimensional lesion-based contrastive image embedding ($X_3$), and AutoMorph morphometric biomarkers ($X_4$). The spatial edge branch ($X_{12}$) encodes vessel-lesion geometry, while the Jacobian branch ($X_{34}$) models embedding-biomarker sensitivity. Lightweight two-token attention fuses both edge families into a final image graph. On 2,910 matched non-augmented APTOS images, the full graph achieves 0.8076 accuracy, 0.8312 quadratic weighted kappa, 0.5915 macro-F1, and 0.9330 adjacent-grade accuracy; referable DR reaches 0.9055 accuracy and 0.9711 AUROC. The framework is positioned as an explainable representation-learning tool for lesion-biomarker hypothesis generation, rather than as a deployment-ready clinical classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/Inamullah-Colab/dual-edge-dr-graph-xai.
IPAD Inverse Prompt for and Interpretable LLM Generated Text Detector
Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained human-level fluency in text generation, which complicates the distinguishing between human-written and LLMgenerated texts. This increases the risk of misuse and highlights the need for reliable detectors. Yet, existing detectors exhibit poor robustness on out-of-distribution (OOD) data and attacked data, which is critical for real-world scenarios. Also, they struggle to provide interpretable evidence to support their decisions, thus undermining the reliability. In light of these challenges, we propose IPAD (Inverse Prompt for AIDetection), a novel framework consisting of a Prompt Inverter that identifies predicted prompts that could have generated the input text, and two Distinguishers that examine the probability that the input texts align with the predicted prompts. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that IPAD outperforms the strongest baselines by 9.05% (Average Recall) on in-distribution data, 12.93% (AUROC) on out-of-distribution data, and 5.48% (AUROC) on attacked data. IPAD also performs robustly on structured datasets. Furthermore, an interpretability assessment is conducted to illustrate that IPAD enhances the AI detection trustworthiness by allowing users to directly examine the decision-making evidence, which provides interpretable support for its state-of-the-art detection results.
Atomic Thinking of LLMs: Decoupling and Exploring Mathematical Reasoning Abilities
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in mathematical reasoning capabilities. However, we argue that current largescale reasoning models primarily rely on scaling up training datasets with diverse mathematical problems and long thinking chains, which raises questions about whether LLMs genuinely acquire mathematical concepts and reasoning principles or merely remember the training data. In contrast, humans tend to break down complex problems into multiple fundamental atomic capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a new paradigm for evaluating mathematical atomic capabilities.
Data Efficient Adaptation in Large Language Models via Continuous Low-Rank Fine-Tuning
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have emphasized the critical role of fine-tuning (FT) techniques in adapting LLMs to specific tasks, especially when retraining from scratch is computationally infeasible. Fine-tuning enables LLMs to leverage task-or domain-specific data, producing models that more effectively meet the requirements of targeted applications. However, conventional FT approaches often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal data efficiency, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes DEAL, a novel framework that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with a continuous fine-tuning strategy.
AMulti-Task Benchmark for Abusive Language Detection in Low-Resource Settings
Content moderation research has recently made significant advances, but remains limited in serving the majority of the world's languages due to the lack of resources, leaving millions of vulnerable users to online hostility. This work presents a large-scale human-annotated multi-task benchmark dataset for abusive language detection in Tigrinya social media with joint annotations for three tasks: abusiveness, sentiment, and topic classification. The dataset comprises 13,717 YouTube comments annotated by nine native speakers, collected from 7,373 videos with a total of over 1.2 billion views across 51 channels. We developed an iterative term clustering approach for effective data selection. Recognizing that around 64% of Tigrinya social media content uses Romanized transliterations rather than native Ge'ez script, our dataset accommodates both writing systems to reflect actual language use. We establish strong baselines across the tasks in the benchmark, while leaving significant challenges for future contributions. Our experiments demonstrate that small fine-tuned models outperform prompted frontier large language models (LLMs) in the low-resource setting, achieving 86.67% F1 in abusiveness detection (7+ points over best LLM), and maintain stronger performance in all other tasks. The benchmark is made public to promote research on online safety.1
Diffusion-Guided Graph Data Augmentation
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of applications. However, when trained on limited or low-diversity datasets, GNNs are prone to overfitting and memorization, which impacts their generalization. To address this, graph data augmentation (GDA) has become a crucial task to enhance the performance and generalization of GNNs. Traditional GDA methods employ simple transformations that result in limited performance gains. Although recent diffusion-based augmentation methods offer improved results, they are sparse, task-specific, and constrained by class labels.
Breaking the Likelihood Trap: Variance-Calibrated Modulation for Large Language Model Decoding
Ding, Yuanhao, Li, Meimingwei, Arias, Esteban Garces, Aรenmacher, Matthias, Heumann, Christian, Zhang, Chongsheng
In open-ended generation, LLMs frequently fall into the "likelihood trap", marked by repetitive degeneration and vocabulary dullness, creating a discrepancy between machine-generated and human-written text. While post-hoc tail truncation (e.g., Top-$p$, Min-$p$) avoids sampling from the unreliable tail, it can over-sample from the uncalibrated head and misalign generation with human lexical preferences; fixed scalar repetition penalties likewise ignore variation in logit scale across inference steps, potentially disrupting semantic coherence. To address both limitations, we propose Variance-Calibrated Modulation (VCM), a training-free pre-decoding intervention that reshapes the probability distribution before truncation through two dynamic mechanisms: (1) Contextual Searchlight via PMI, which suppresses global stopwords while elevating context-evoked tokens, and (2) Adaptive Self-Debiasing, which uses real-time logit standard deviation for scale-invariant penalization. Across open-ended generation, factual QA, and mathematical reasoning, VCM consistently mitigates the likelihood trap. With negligible computational overhead, VCM integrates with existing decoding strategies, improving diversity, coherence, and, particularly at higher decoding temperatures, reasoning accuracy.