What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' A Russian attack has damaged port infrastructure in Ukraine's Danube River port city of Izmail, a vital grain-export hub, while Russian authorities said they had downed four Ukrainian drones headed towards Moscow, as peace efforts remain stalled and both sides continue reciprocal attacks. Izmail, in the Odesa region, is a frequently targeted logistical centre and was hit in the early hours of Tuesday. It is Ukraine's largest port on the Danube. The attack lasted from about 1am to 3am (22:00 to 00:00 GMT), with firefighters battling a blaze in a building with blown-out windows. This followed another Russian attack on port infrastructure in Izmail on the night of May 2. In Kharkiv, two people were rescued, and one may remain trapped under the rubble after a Russian drone attack, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said on Telegram.

Banking giant Standard Chartered has become the latest major company to announce job cuts as it increases its adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The firm, which has its headquarters in the UK, said it will cut more than 15%, or around 7,800, back-office roles by 2030. The BBC understands that Standard Chartered aims to move some of the effected workers to other roles in the business. Companies around the world have announced major job cuts in recent months as they increasingly use AI tools for roles currently carried out by humans. The company did not give details of where the roles would be cut.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) excels at finding general-purpose latent representations from complex data, yet lacks a unifying theoretical framework that explains the diverse existing methods and guides the design of new ones. We cast SSL as latent distribution matching (LDM): learning representations that maximize their log-probability under an assumed latent model (alignment), while maximizing latent entropy to prevent collapse (uniformity). This view unifies independent component analysis with contrastive, non-contrastive, and predictive SSL methods, including stop gradient approaches. Leveraging LDM, we derive a nonlinear, sampling-free Bayesian filtering model with a Kalman-based predictor for high-dimensional timeseries. We further prove that predictive LDM yields identifiable latent representations under mild assumptions, even with nonlinear predictors. Overall, LDM clarifies the assumptions behind established SSL methods and provides principled guidance for developing new approaches.

Deep neural networks achieve high accuracy on image classification tasks. Yet, they often produce overconfident predictions as which fail to express epistemic uncertainty, and frequently violate logical or structural constraints present in the data. These limitations are particularly pronounced in hierarchical classification, where predictions across fine and coarse levels must remain coherent. We propose, for the first time, a unified neurosymbolic and epistemic modelling framework that augments Swin Transformers with focal set reasoning and differentiable fuzzy logic. Rather than treating labels as isolated categories, our method induces data-driven focal sets within the learnt embedding space, which helps capture epistemic uncertainty over multiple plausible fine-grained classes. These focal sets form the basis of a belief-theoretic layer that uses fuzzy membership functions and t-norm conjunctions to encourage consistency between fine- and coarse-grained predictions. A learnable loss further balances calibration, mass regularisation, and logical consistency, allowing the model to adaptively trade off symbolic structure with data-driven evidence. In experiments on hierarchical image classification, our framework maintains accuracy on par with transformer baselines while providing more calibrated and interpretable predictions, reducing overconfidence and enforcing high logical consistency across hierarchical outputs. Our experimental results show that combining focal set reasoning with fuzzy logic provides a practical step toward deep learning models that are both accurate and epistemically aware.

Diffusion and flow-based models are ubiquitously used for generative modelling and density estimation. They admit a deterministic probability flow ordinary differential equation (PF-ODE), analogous to continuous normalizing flows (CNFs), which describes the transport of the probability mass. Obtaining the likelihood from these models is of interest to many workflows, especially Bayesian analysis, and requires solving the trace of the Jacobian to compute the divergence of the learned PF-ODE, which is either $\mathcal{O}(D^2)$ to compute exactly or $\mathcal{O}(D)$ with a noisy estimate. We introduce StAD, a new distillation method to predict and learn the divergence of the PF-ODE using the Langevin-Stein operator without ever computing the Jacobian. We show that our method is competitive with the Hutchinson and Hutch++ on CIFAR-10, ImageNet and other density estimation tasks, consistently improving the variance and speed of the likelihood predictions compared to the Hutchinson. We additionally show our method will generalize to a varied class of generative models, and show that under some regularity conditions these learned vector fields can be made to satisfy the Stein class.

This raises a fundamental dilemma of statistical-computational tradeoffs: removing all samples from an unwanted domain may be computationally prohibitive, while randomly removing a subset may not provide distribution-level statistical guarantees. We propose a statistical framework for distributional unlearning, in which domains are modeled as probability distributions, and the goal is to remove a carefully chosen subset of samples that reduces the effect of an unwanted distribution while preserving performance on a desired one. We formalize this using a hypothesis test of the edited data with the desired and unwanted domains, leading to an interpretable and robust criterion for selecting samples to remove. Within this statistical framework, we characterize the fundamental region of the allowable edited data distributions and the removal-preservation Pareto frontier for a broad class of distribution families. This includes parametric families such as shifted Gaussians of arbitrary dimension, a one-dimensional location family with log-concave noise, and the one-dimensional Poisson family. It also includes nonparametric families such as the Gaussian white noise model, a canonical model for nonparametric regression. We prove composition rules that describe how distributional unlearning behaves across multimodal unwanted domains, and introduce a central-limit behavior for the removal-preservation baselines when composing a large number of such families. Finally, we provide finite sample guarantees by providing Pareto frontiers for some selection algorithms, and observe an information-computation gap.

We consider the following two-player game: using observational data, the leader chooses a prediction function for a response variable $Y$ from given covariates. The follower then reacts with an intervention on some covariates in the underlying structural causal model to maximize their own objective. The leader knows the intervention targets, but may have limited knowledge of the follower's objective. We call this setup a prediction-intervention game, a special case of a Stackelberg game. Finding an optimal strategy for the leader is generally difficult. To avoid severe performance loss, the leader may base their prediction on the causal parents of $Y$, or more generally on an invariant subset of covariates. We prove, for two common classes of follower objectives, that predictors based on the stable blanket, a specific invariant subset, are always better or as good as those based on the causal parents. We further upper bound the leader's post-intervention risk by a worst-case risk over allowed interventions and strengthen existing distribution generalization results to analyze this bound: we give sufficient conditions under which stable-blanket predictors are worst-case optimal, and show by examples that these conditions cannot in general be dropped. Finally, we discuss practical strategies for settings with known and unknown graph, and test them on simulated and real-world data.

Neural networks trained with gradient-based methods exhibit a strong simplicity bias: they learn simpler statistical features of their data before moving to more complex features. Previous analyses of this phenomenon have largely focused on settings with (quasi-)isotropic inputs. In this work, we study the simplicity bias from a Fourier perspective, which allows us to include two key features of natural images in the analysis: approximate translation-invariance and power-law spectra. We first show experimentally that simple neural networks trained on image classification tasks first rely on amplitude information -- related to pair-wise correlations between pixels -- before exploiting phase information, which encodes edges and higher-order correlations. In view of this, we introduce a synthetic data model for translation-invariant inputs that allows precise control over amplitudes and phases while remaining tractable. We rigorously establish that for isotropic and high-dimensional inputs, classification based on phase information alone is a genuinely hard task: online stochastic gradient descent (SGD) cannot distinguish the structured inputs from noise within $n \ll N^3$ steps, but needs at least $n \gg N^3 \log^2{N}$ steps. In contrast, we show both experimentally and theoretically that power-law spectra can dramatically accelerate the speed of learning phase information, even if the spectra do not help with classification. Simulations with two-layer networks trained on textures and with deep convolutional networks on ImageNet and CIFAR100 confirm this non-trivial interaction between amplitudes and phases, providing mechanistic insights into how deep neural networks can learn natural image distributions efficiently.

Many practical data analysis tasks reduce to learning, from observed samples, how a collection of variables depend on each other. A widely used approach is to fit a Gaussian graphical model, which represents the dependence structure as a graph connecting the variables. In a number of important applications, such as financial returns, gene co-expression, and climate or network analysis, the dependencies tend to be positive: variables move together rather than offset each other. Encoding this positivity through the constraint of multivariate total positivity of order two (MTP2) yields an attractive estimator that produces accurate fits with no tuning required. The resulting graphs are, however, typically much denser than the underlying ground-truth model, which makes them hard to interpret and slow to use in any downstream task that operates on the graph. In this work, we propose a novel highly-scalable approach for learning Gaussian graphical models from data using spectral sparsification; we call it Spectral-MTP2. Spectral graph sparsification is a fundamental method which aims to preserve meaningful properties of a dense graph with a sparser subgraph. We theoretically and empirically investigate and validate our method, and show that learning Gaussian Graphical Models under MTP2 using spectral sparsification preserves MTP2 and approximates well the original model in terms of Kullback-Leibler divergence and Gaussian log-likelihood. In simulations and applications to equity returns and gene expression, we observe that Spectral-MTP2 retains most of the fit quality of the denser MTP2 baseline, while producing substantially sparser and more interpretable graphs.

Transformers have become the dominant architecture in modern machine learning, yet the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing gradient-based training of transformers in the mean-field regime, where both the depth (number of layers) and width (number of attention heads) tend to infinity. While ResNet training can be understood as controlling a neural ODE, transformer training corresponds to controlling a neural PDE, due to the coupling of multiple token distributions through the attention mechanism. Our mean-field model features two types of measure representations: token distributions evolving through layers and attention parameters at each layer. We establish well-posedness of the forward pass through infinitely deep transformers, characterizing token evolution via flow maps that satisfy ODEs in function spaces. Using adjoint sensitivity analysis, we derive an explicit formula for the conditional Wasserstein gradient of the training risk, involving adjoint variables governed by backward ODEs. We prove the existence and uniqueness of gradient flow curves in the conditional Wasserstein metric space, establishing a rigorous foundation for gradient-based transformer training. A key technical contribution is providing necessary and sufficient conditions for injectivity of the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) for attention mechanisms: we show that NTK injectivity is equivalent to linear independence of log-sum-exp functions modulo affine functions, a condition satisfied by diverse token distributions, including discrete distributions, uniform distributions, and Gaussian mixtures. Under this NTK injectivity assumption, we prove that gradient flow converges to global minima when the initial loss is sufficiently small, eliminating spurious local minima from the optimization landscape.