The use of cryptocurrency in sales of human beings for prostitution and scam compounds nearly doubled in 2025, according to a conservative estimate. Many of the deals are happening in plain sight. Cryptocurrency's frictionless, transnational, low-regulation transactions have long promised the ability to pay anyone in the world for anything. More than ever before, that anything includes human beings: victims of human trafficking forced into scam compounds and the sex trade on an industrial scale, bought and sold in crypto deals carried out with impunity, often in full public view. In new research published today, crypto-tracing firm Chainalysis found that crypto-funded transactions for human trafficking--largely forced laborers trapped in compounds across Southeast Asia and coerced into working as online scammers, as well as sex-trafficking prostitution rings--grew explosively in 2025.

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V ariational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics.

The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context.

Motivated by this property, we propose a method to extend transformers to tree-structured data, enabling sequence-totree, tree-to-sequence, and tree-to-tree mappings. Our approach abstracts the transformer'ssinusoidal positional encodings, allowing ustoinstead useanovel positional encoding scheme to represent node positions within trees.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to enhance the generalization capability ofacertain model from asource domain toatargetdomain.