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The Chinese AI app sending Hollywood into a panic
A new artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by the Chinese company behind TikTok rocked Hollywood this week - not just because of what it can do, but what it could mean for creative industries. Created by tech giant ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 can generate cinema-quality video, complete with sound effects and dialogue, from just a few written prompts. Many of the clips said to have been made using Seedance, and featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Deadpool, went viral. What is Seedance - and why the stir? Seedance was launched to little fanfare in June 2025 but it is the second version that came eight months later that has caused a major stir.
Latent Gaussian Activity Propagation: Using Smoothness and Structure to Separate and Localize Sounds in Large Noisy Environments
Daniel Johnson, Daniel Gorelik, Ross E. Mawhorter, Kyle Suver, Weiqing Gu, Steven Xing, Cody Gabriel, Peter Sankhagowit
Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/
Dog walkers find 2,000-year-old footprints on beach in Scotland
The Iron Age human and animal footprints were preserved before high winds destroyed them. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Two friends out walking their dogs along the eastern coast of Scotland unexpectedly found an archaeological goldmine . After wind gusts as strong as 55 mph blew away sand on the dunes of a beach near Angus, Ivor Campbell and Jenny Snedden (along with their pooches Ziggy and Juno) spotted the unique indentations in a layer of long-dried clay. The pair contacted a local archaeologist, and researchers from the University of Aberdeen quickly descended on the picturesque seaside locale to preserve the discoveries.
Sinkhorn Barycenters with Free Support via Frank-Wolfe Algorithm
Giulia Luise, Saverio Salzo, Massimiliano Pontil, Carlo Ciliberto
We present a novel algorithm to estimate the barycenter of arbitrary probability distributions with respect to the Sinkhorn divergence. Based on a Frank-Wolfe optimization strategy, our approach proceeds by populating the support of the barycenter incrementally, without requiring any pre-allocation.
Learning with SGD and Random Features
Luigi Carratino, Alessandro Rudi, Lorenzo Rosasco
Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/
Continuous-time Models for Stochastic Optimization Algorithms
Antonio Orvieto, Aurelien Lucchi
Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/
Semantic Image Synthesis with Unconditional Generator
Then we introduce a semantic mapper that produces the proxy masks from various input conditions including semantic masks.
'Pew Pew': The Chinese Companies Marketing Anti-Drone Weapons on TikTok
On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising. "Pew, pew, pew!" a woman wearing sneakers and high-waisted pink trousers says cheerfully in a video uploaded to TikTok. She is standing on what appears to be an industrial rooftop while demonstrating how to use a black device resembling an oversized laser tag gun. "Jamming gun, good," she adds, flashing a thumbs up. These days, nearly any product imaginable is available for purchase on TikTok straight from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Double Averaging Primal-Dual Optimization
Hoi-To Wai, Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang, Mingyi Hong
Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/