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How to make sure you're getting a good deal on Black Friday

BBC News

How to make sure you're getting a good deal on Black Friday Whether you're excited for the seasonal sales or avoiding the shops altogether, it's hard to escape the countless emails and social media adverts on Black Friday deals. The US holiday - which falls this Friday - has been firmly adopted by UK retailers, and what was once a single day of sales now spans the weeks before and after. However eight in 10 deals promoted during this buying bonanza were cheaper or the same price outside of the four-week Black Friday period, according to research from consumer group Which? This suggests shoppers could get the same or a better deal at other times of the year. But if you're planning to buy now, here's how to make sure you bag a bargain.


LLM Unlearning with LLM Beliefs

Li, Kemou, Wang, Qizhou, Wang, Yue, Li, Fengpeng, Liu, Jun, Han, Bo, Zhou, Jiantao

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models trained on vast corpora inherently risk memorizing sensitive or harmful content, which may later resurface in their outputs. Prevailing unlearning methods generally rely on gradient ascent and its variants to lower the probability of specific target responses. However, we find that this strategy induces a critical side effect: probability mass is redistributed into high-likelihood regions, often corresponding to semantically related rephrasings of the targets. We refer to this as the squeezing effect, which explains why many methods yield merely spurious unlearning, a problem further obscured by automated metrics (e.g., ROUGE, truth ratio) that misreport actual success. To address this, we propose a bootstrapping (BS) framework that explicitly links the squeezing effect with the model's own high-confidence generations, namely its model beliefs. Since model beliefs inherently capture the very high-likelihood regions where probability mass is squeezed, incorporating them into the unlearning objective directly counters the squeezing effect. By jointly suppressing both target responses and model beliefs, BS-T (token) attenuates high-probability tokens, whereas BS-S (sequence) removes entire high-confidence generations, together achieving more thorough forgetting while preserving utility. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks with various model families confirm the effectiveness of our approach.


Tesla investigated over self-driving cars on wrong side of road

BBC News

Tesla is being investigated by the US government after reports the firm's self-driving cars had broken traffic laws, including driving on the wrong side of the road and not stopping for red lights. It said it was aware of 58 reports where the electric cars had committed such violations, according to a filing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). An estimated 2.9 million cars equipped with full self-driving tech will fall under the investigation. Tesla, whose boss Elon Musk recently became the world's first half-trillionaire, has been approached for comment. The NHTSA's preliminary evaluation will assess the scope, frequency, and potential safety consequences of the Full Self-Driving (Supervised) mode.


More holidaymakers using AI to plan trips

BBC News

More holidaymakers are turning to AI when planning or booking their trips, according to travel association ABTA. The body found that 8% of travellers were using AI - up from 4% last year - with younger holidaymakers more likely to use the technology when planning their trips. However, AI still lagged a long way behind more established methods - such as general internet searches and asking family and friends. Overall, the number of people taking a holiday continued a recent trend of climbing back towards pre-pandemic levels, ABTA said. The travel body described the increase in customers using AI as both a challenge and an opportunity.


How toxic is YOUR air? Terrifying charts reveal the towns and cities around the world with the worst air pollution

Daily Mail - Science & tech

The secret cult caves of polyamorous Mormon'prophet' with 85 wives are seen for first time Florida's housing market is tanking but the birthplace of Southern rock keeps its groove and defies the crash My war with Harry & Meghan, by PIERS MORGAN: What really happened, their absurd accusations, the brutal truth about post-royal life... and how I believe their royal racism lies helped kill off woke But experts warn the huge benefits come with risks... here's what it means for YOU I hung ICE agent effigies from the gallows in my yard. MAGA had a huge meltdown. They're going to lose their minds when they see what else I've done Vile Chicago woman filmed rubbing dog poop on Cybertruck emblazoned with Donald Trump's signature Taylor, your album should be'Life of a Callgirl'. KENNEDY's appalled take on Swift's new record... and its ultra-vivid sex shout outs for Travis the Sasquatch Fate of the four Scottish crime lords who terrorised Dubai: Gangsters thought they were'untouchable' after spree of executions and firebombings. Now we reveal hellhole jail, inhumane'toilet paper' punishment... and where they are now Olympic gold medalist forced to put Louisiana home up for sale as she'can't make a living' months after filing for divorce Tycoon who is cousin of former President George W. Bush expected to launch run for Maine governor Israel prepares to implement'first stage' of Trump's Gaza peace plan Cassie Ventura's attorney responds to Diddy sentencing as she's hailed by judge who jailed vile rapper The truth about Keith Urban's guitarist'other woman' Maggie Baugh revealed amid Nicole Kidman divorce How I look like this at 62. I've lost 5 stone fast, 20 years off my biological age and wear size 8... without weight-loss jabs.


From full bars to no service: The best and worst areas for mobile signal in the UK revealed - so, do you live in a connectivity black spot?

Daily Mail - Science & tech

FBI under pressure over open airport five miles from Charlie Kirk assassination hit as private jet'vanishes' after shooting MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd fired over'disgusting' on-air comments about Charlie Kirk shortly after conservative star was assassinated Elite sniper breaks down Charlie Kirk assassin's sick plot... and reveals tiny detail everyone's missed: The gun. MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Charlie Kirk's body wasn't even cold... before the fighting started again. Do these ghouls not see where this is headed? Charlie Kirk's powerful tribute to murdered Ukrainian refugee hours before his own assassination: 'America will never be the same' Musk dethroned as richest person by forgotten Wall Street darling's founder as stock soars 42% Charlie Kirk dead at 31: What we know so far about MAGA star's death at Utah campus that sent shockwaves around the world as FBI botches arrest and Trump promises ultimate punishment TMZ forced to apologize after staff heard erupting in laughter as Charlie Kirk's death was announced Sweater weather starts here - the cozy, chic pieces from Soft Surroundings you'll actually wear all season Trump issues Oval Office address over Charlie Kirk's assassination: 'This is a dark moment for America' Fierce debate erupts over'non-human' technology in space after video captures UFO surviving Hellfire strike Is this Charlie Kirk's killer? This Oscar-nominated actress, 68, will soon reunite with her ex in Spain for their daughter's wedding, can you guess who?


Dargana: fine-tuning EarthPT for dynamic tree canopy mapping from space

Smith, Michael J., Fleming, Luke, Geach, James E., Roberts, Ryan J., Kalaitzis, Freddie, Banister, James

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Aspia Space A BSTRACT We present Dargana, a fine-tuned variant of the EarthPT time-series foundation model that achieves specialisation using < 3% of its pre-training data volume and 5% of its pre-training compute. Dargana is fine-tuned to generate regularly updated classification of tree canopy cover at 10 m resolution, distinguishing conifer and broadleaved tree types. Using Cornwall, UK, as a test case, the model achieves a pixel-level ROC-AUC of 0.98 and a PR-AUC of 0.83 on unseen satellite imagery. Dargana can identify fine structures like hedgerows and coppice below the training sample limit, and can track temporal changes to canopy cover such as new woodland establishment. Our results demonstrate how pre-trained Large Observation Models like EarthPT can be specialised for granular, dynamic land cover monitoring from space, providing a valuable, scalable tool for natural capital management and conservation.


Explainable AI for Autism Diagnosis: Identifying Critical Brain Regions Using fMRI Data

Vidya, Suryansh, Gupta, Kush, Aly, Amir, Wills, Andy, Ifeachor, Emmanuel, Shankar, Rohit

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Early diagnosis and intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been shown to significantly improve the quality of life of autistic individuals. However, diagnostics methods for ASD rely on assessments based on clinical presentation that are prone to bias and can be challenging to arrive at an early diagnosis. There is a need for objective biomarkers of ASD which can help improve diagnostic accuracy. Deep learning (DL) has achieved outstanding performance in diagnosing diseases and conditions from medical imaging data. Extensive research has been conducted on creating models that classify ASD using resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. However, existing models lack interpretability. This research aims to improve the accuracy and interpretability of ASD diagnosis by creating a DL model that can not only accurately classify ASD but also provide explainable insights into its working. The dataset used is a preprocessed version of the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) with 884 samples. Our findings show a model that can accurately classify ASD and highlight critical brain regions differing between ASD and typical controls, with potential implications for early diagnosis and understanding of the neural basis of ASD. These findings are validated by studies in the literature that use different datasets and modalities, confirming that the model actually learned characteristics of ASD and not just the dataset. This study advances the field of explainable AI in medical imaging by providing a robust and interpretable model, thereby contributing to a future with objective and reliable ASD diagnostics.


State of the art applications of deep learning within tracking and detecting marine debris: A survey

Moorton, Zoe, Kurt, Dr. Zeyneb, Woo, Dr. Wai Lok

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep learning techniques have been explored within the marine litter problem for approximately 20 years but the majority of the research has developed rapidly in the last five years. We provide an in-depth, up to date, summary and analysis of 28 of the most recent and significant contributions of deep learning in marine debris. From cross referencing the research paper results, the YOLO family significantly outperforms all other methods of object detection but there are many respected contributions to this field that have categorically agreed that a comprehensive database of underwater debris is not currently available for machine learning. Using a small dataset curated and labelled by us, we tested YOLOv5 on a binary classification task and found the accuracy was low and the rate of false positives was high; highlighting the importance of a comprehensive database. We conclude this survey with over 40 future research recommendations and open challenges.


EarthPT: a time series foundation model for Earth Observation

Smith, Michael J., Fleming, Luke, Geach, James E.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce EarthPT -- an Earth Observation (EO) pretrained transformer. EarthPT is a 700 million parameter decoding transformer foundation model trained in an autoregressive self-supervised manner and developed specifically with EO use-cases in mind. We demonstrate that EarthPT is an effective forecaster that can accurately predict future pixel-level surface reflectances across the 400-2300 nm range well into the future. For example, forecasts of the evolution of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) have a typical error of approximately 0.05 (over a natural range of -1 -> 1) at the pixel level over a five month test set horizon, out-performing simple phase-folded models based on historical averaging. We also demonstrate that embeddings learnt by EarthPT hold semantically meaningful information and could be exploited for downstream tasks such as highly granular, dynamic land use classification. Excitingly, we note that the abundance of EO data provides us with -- in theory -- quadrillions of training tokens. Therefore, if we assume that EarthPT follows neural scaling laws akin to those derived for Large Language Models (LLMs), there is currently no data-imposed limit to scaling EarthPT and other similar `Large Observation Models.'