Europe
Frank Gardner: Key points from government's defence spending plan
The government has published its long-delayed defence investment plan (DIP) that outlines how much money it will spend on the UK's armed forces. An additional £15bn will go on defence - a total of £270bn over the next four years - and will include spending on the nuclear deterrent and new combat aircraft. But the extra money is less than the £28bn reportedly sought by defence chiefs, and both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have criticised the plan as underfunded. Here are the key points included in the 81-page plan, and what they may mean. Ministers say that is the largest increase since the Cold War in the 1980s.
Warehouse robots move packages without human handoff
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Building tech in the world's secret R&D hub
Zurich has created a technology ecosystem nearing the density of Silicon Valley. Few places outside Silicon Valley can claim R&D hubs from all of these companies. Fewer still are concentrated in a city of just over 400,000 people--roughly half the size of San Francisco. Over the past two decades, however, many of the world's most influential technology companies have established R&D operations in and around Zurich, Switzerland. What began with Google's decision to build its largest R&D hub outside the United States has evolved into one of the world's most concentrated centers for AI research, talent, and commercialization, in certain areas at a higher density than Silicon Valley. The question is why so many technology leaders keep choosing the same place to build and scale.
Oura Ring 5 review: a stunning generational leap for smart rings
The Oura Ring 5 is the smallest, most discreet and best smart ring available. The Oura Ring 5 is the smallest, most discreet and best smart ring available. Tue 30 Jun 2026 02.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 30 Jun 2026 02.02 EDT The Guardianâ s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Ouraâ s new Ring 5 is a massive upgrade for smart rings, dramatically shrinking in size and weight to bring them right into line with standard wedding bands and other jewellery.
'There's this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?': the philosopher inside Google DeepMind
'There's this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?': the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI Since 2017, Iason Gabriel has worked at the tech giant, trying to anticipate - and think through - the impact of AI. But as commercial and geopolitical pressures escalate, can ethicists make any difference? In 2017, a 33-year-old political philosopher named Iason Gabriel was told by a friend that he ought to apply for a job at DeepMind, the London-based subsidiary of Google where much of its AI research was concentrated. The suggestion was not an obvious one. Gabriel was a cheerful but intense junior academic with a passion for Vipassana meditation and what his brother calls "enthusiastic" rock climbing. At the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow at St John's College, Gabriel taught courses on political theory and wrote papers on the moral contortions of "yuppie ethics" and the ethical blind spots of effective altruism. When he wasn't there, he did crisis work for the United Nations Development Programme in Sudan and Lebanon. DeepMind, meanwhile, was the world's leading AI research lab. In part, this was because it had the financial and computational backing of Google, which had bought the company in 2014 for $650m. In part, it was because DeepMind had recently shown it could put those resources to stunning use. In Seoul, in 2016, a DeepMind system called AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol, a South Korean Go champion, in a five-game match. The victory was significant not least because of Go's legendary complexity; the game has more possible configurations than there are atoms in the universe. Thanks to the fuss around AlphaGo, Gabriel was aware of DeepMind.
What Drives the Inlier-Memorization Effect? A Theory of Outlier Detection via Early Training Dynamics
Outlier detection (OD) aims to identify anomalous instances by learning the underlying structure of normal data (inliers), and is particularly challenging in fully unsupervised settings where no information about anomalies is available during training. Recent advances have leveraged the inlier-memorization (IM) effect, a phenomenon in which deep models memorize inlier patterns earlier than those of outliers, as a powerful signal for distinguishing outliers. However, despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of the IM effect remains limited. In this work, we present a theoretical study of the IM effect. Focusing on a simple autoencoder, we show that, under mild assumptions, the model can successfully memorize inliers while failing to memorize outliers during certain stages of early training. In particular, we characterize not only the emergence of the IM effect, but also its strength and persistence, and analyze how these properties depend on the data distribution and parameter initialization. In addition, building on these insights, we derive simple yet practical guidelines for enhancing the IM effect, including data preprocessing and parameter initialization schemes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the ADBench datasets. Our findings provide a theoretical foundation for the IM effect and offer actionable directions for improving IM-based outlier detection methods.
When Is a Draft Accepted? A Theory of Acceptance in Speculative Decoding
Speculative decoding accelerates language model inference by using a fast drafter to propose candidate tokens that are then verified by a larger target model. Existing theory largely studies the stochastic, distribution-preserving setting, where the goal is to exactly sample from the target distribution. In contrast, many practical systems use greedy decoding, relaxed acceptance rules, or tree-based candidate sets, where success is governed by local ranking and threshold events rather than exact distributional equality. We develop a theory for these regimes. We identify that many common acceptance criteria have rejection regions that can be characterized as lower level sets of the target distribution. For these, we characterize the exact KL divergence required for rejection yielding exact certificates and sharp margin-based bounds for strict greedy decoding, additive and multiplicative relaxed acceptance, top-(m) relaxed criteria, and entropy-thresholded acceptance. We then extend the framework to greedy tree decoding, deriving exact and margin-only certificates for when the target greedy token remains covered by the drafter's top-(m) candidates. Finally, we evaluate the resulting certificates on Qwen3 models, showing that relaxed and tree-based criteria substantially enlarge the region of certified acceptance, especially on decoding steps with low target model distribution margin. These results complement existing distribution-preserving analyses of speculative decoding by characterizing the deterministic local acceptance events common in practical inference systems.
AdaGrad does not adapt to Hölder-smoothness for composite objectives
Bojovic, Matia, Salzo, Saverio, Pontil, Massimiliano
Adaptive gradient methods are among the standard tools for training machine learning models. Their appeal is that they reduce the need to tune a fixed learning rate by adjusting the effective stepsize using information observed along the optimization trajectory. AdaGrad, introduced by Duchi et al. [2011], is a prototypical example: it rescales the update by the square root of the cumulative sum of past squared subgradients, coordinate by coordinate. The method was originally proposed for nonsmooth Lipschitz-continuous composite convex optimization, achieving the optimal rate O(1/ n) in the objective gap. Later works considered the smooth setting and asked whether AdaGrad can adapt to the unknown smoothness level of the objective, while attaining the corresponding standard rate.