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Ubisoft cancels six games including Prince of Persia and closes studios

BBC News

Ubisoft has cancelled six video games - including its long-awaited Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake - as part of a major reset of its operations. The French developer and publisher, known for popular games such as Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Just Dance, has closed two studios and delayed seven titles as part of its changes. Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot said the move would create the conditions for a return to sustainable growth. The firm's shares plunged by 33% on Thursday morning following the announcement. The move comes at a time when studios are increasingly turning to video game remakes and remasters, with new versions of Super Mario Galaxy, Oblivion and Metal Gear Solid 3 proving popular in 2025.


800 ancient Roman blade sharpeners found in Britain

Popular Science

Archaeologists also located English Civil War cannonballs and a Tudor-era shoe near a Newcastle river. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. At the height of its power, the Roman Empire extended as far away as Britain . Based on a new trove of archaeological artifacts discovered in northeast England, Britain hosted critical sites that supplied the empire's vast military complex. Over six months in 2025, researchers from the United Kingdom's Durham University excavated the new evidence on the banks of the River Wear not far from Newcastle, England.


Art2Music: Generating Music for Art Images with Multi-modal Feeling Alignment

Hong, Jiaying, Zhu, Ting, Markchom, Thanet, Liang, Huizhi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the rise of AI-generated content (AIGC), generating perceptually natural and feeling-aligned music from multimodal inputs has become a central challenge. Existing approaches often rely on explicit emotion labels that require costly annotation, underscoring the need for more flexible feeling-aligned methods. To support multimodal music generation, we construct ArtiCaps, a pseudo feeling-aligned image-music-text dataset created by semantically matching descriptions from ArtEmis and MusicCaps. We further propose Art2Music, a lightweight cross-modal framework that synthesizes music from artistic images and user comments. In the first stage, images and text are encoded with OpenCLIP and fused using a gated residual module; the fused representation is decoded by a bidirectional LSTM into Mel-spectrograms with a frequency-weighted L1 loss to enhance high-frequency fidelity. In the second stage, a fine-tuned HiFi-GAN vocoder reconstructs high-quality audio waveforms. Experiments on ArtiCaps show clear improvements in Mel-Cepstral Distortion, Frechet Audio Distance, Log-Spectral Distance, and cosine similarity. A small LLM-based rating study further verifies consistent cross-modal feeling alignment and offers interpretable explanations of matches and mismatches across modalities. These results demonstrate improved perceptual naturalness, spectral fidelity, and semantic consistency. Art2Music also maintains robust performance with only 50k training samples, providing a scalable solution for feeling-aligned creative audio generation in interactive art, personalized soundscapes, and digital art exhibitions.


Wavefront-Constrained Passive Obscured Object Detection

Zheng, Zhiwen, Ouyang, Yiwei, Huang, Zhao, Zhang, Tao, Zhang, Xiaoshuai, Zhou, Huiyu, Tang, Wenwen, Jiang, Shaowei, Liu, Jin, Huang, Xingru

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurately localizing and segmenting obscured objects from faint light patterns beyond the field of view is highly challenging due to multiple scattering and medium-induced perturbations. Most existing methods, based on real-valued modeling or local convolutional operations, are inadequate for capturing the underlying physics of coherent light propagation. Moreover, under low signal-to-noise conditions, these methods often converge to non-physical solutions, severely compromising the stability and reliability of the observation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel physics-driven Wavefront Propagating Compensation Network (WavePCNet) to simulate wavefront propagation and enhance the perception of obscured objects. This WavePCNet integrates the Tri-Phase Wavefront Complex-Propagation Reprojection (TriWCP) to incorporate complex amplitude transfer operators to precisely constrain coherent propagation behavior, along with a momentum memory mechanism to effectively suppress the accumulation of perturbations. Additionally, a High-frequency Cross-layer Compensation Enhancement is introduced to construct frequency-selective pathways with multi-scale receptive fields and dynamically model structural consistency across layers, further boosting the model's robustness and interpretability under complex environmental conditions. Extensive experiments conducted on four physically collected datasets demonstrate that WavePCNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both accuracy and robustness.


Energy Costs and Neural Complexity Evolution in Changing Environments

Heesom-Green, Sian, Shock, Jonathan, Nitschke, Geoff

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Cognitive Buffer Hypothesis (CBH) posits that larger brains evolved to enhance survival in changing conditions. However, larger brains also carry higher energy demands, imposing additional metabolic burdens. Alongside brain size, brain organization plays a key role in cognitive ability and, with suitable architectures, may help mitigate energy challenges. This study evolves Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) used by Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to investigate how environmental variability and energy costs influence the evolution of neural complexity, defined in terms of ANN size and structure. Results indicate that under energy constraints, increasing seasonality led to smaller ANNs. This challenges CBH and supports the Expensive Brain Hypothesis (EBH), as highly seasonal environments reduced net energy intake and thereby constrained brain size. ANN structural complexity primarily emerged as a byproduct of size, where energy costs promoted the evolution of more efficient networks.