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ChessGPT: Bridging Policy Learning and Language Modeling Xidong Feng

Neural Information Processing Systems

Chess, one of the oldest and most universally played board games, presents an ideal testbed due to the wealth of both policy data and language data. In terms of policy data, it is reported that over ten million games are played daily on Chess.com, the most frequented online chess platform.


'Uncanny Valley': ICE's Secret Expansion Plans, Palantir Workers' Ethical Concerns, and AI Assistants

WIRED

In this episode of, our hosts dive into WIRED's scoop about a secret Trump administration campaign extending right into your backyard. This week, hosts Brian Barrett, Leah Feiger, and Zoë Schiffer discuss WIRED's big scoop on ICE's startling plans to expand to nearly every state in the US. Plus, a WIRED writer lets the viral AI assistant OpenClaw run his life for a week to give listeners a peek of what AI agents can and can't do. ICE Is Expanding Across the US at Breakneck Speed. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . I want to continue a conversation that we started yesterday in Slack after work hours for some of us. And this is about the men's short program-- But very specifically want to pick up on the conversation where Zoë had very strong feelings about the results of men's figure skating. I feel like we need to back up because you and Leah authentically care about the Olympics so much and I think just know more about sports than I do. I deeply have never engaged with sports ever, just as a whole rule, as a category. It doesn't exist in my life. Say the lines, say the lines, Zoë, or I'm going to read them verbatim from slack. Wait, I don't even know what you're talking about. I was merely surprised when I watched because the Americans went, I thought, wow, that guy basically fell over and was clumping around the ice, and then Japan went, and they were sailing around like little swans, and then when the gold medal came, it went to the Americans. I couldn't believe what had happened. No one else seemed outraged. For a little backup for our non-ice skating Olympic fans, I was always referring to Ilia Malinin, who a number of publications and sports experts say might actually be one of the greatest figure skaters of all time.


RFK Jr. Says Americans Need More Protein. His Grok-Powered Food Website Disagrees

WIRED

RFK Jr. Says Americans Need More Protein. A 30-second Super Bowl ad featuring boxing legend Mike Tyson and paid for by the nonprofit MAHA Center encourages viewers to avoid processed foods and visit Realfood.gov . The government website, which Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is promoting, provides resources on the administration's new dietary guidelines, released in January, and encourages people to use Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok to "get real answers about real food." I decided to see how Grok's advice aligns with the administration's recommendations, particularly around protein intake. The new guidelines say to get 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day--more than what was previously advised--while the new inverted food pyramid prominently features steak and other animal products.


Super Bowl Tailgate Photo Essay: Bad Bunny, Big Tech, and the Big Game

WIRED

We asked attendees of Super Bowl LX's pregame festivities for their takes on the competing halftime shows, the potential for ICE actions, and the influence of Silicon Valley on the event. To say this year's Super Bowl came at a charged time in American culture and politics is, perhaps, an understatement. While the pair of teams who took the field Sunday--the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots--comprised a pretty classic matchup (no underdogs here!), the rest of the event was set to be anything but. Santa Clara's Levi's Stadium is in the heart of Silicon Valley, just a few miles from the corporate headquarters of Nvidia and AMD, whose chips are powering the AI arms race that had competitors OpenAI and Anthropic sparring via rival Super Bowl ads . There was an explosion in sports "trading" activity on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket in the lead-up to the game, even in states like California where traditional sports betting is illegal. Sunday could prove to be an extraordinary success for prediction markets, as the industry becomes more mainstream . Fresh off a historic Grammy Album of the Year win (a first for a Spanish-language album), the unapologetically political Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny headlined --a choice that sparked a perhaps inevitable MAGA backlash. Meanwhile, Turning Point USA organized an alternative program called The All-American Halftime Show, featuring the likes of Kid Rock and Brantley Gilbert. Never mind that Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, and therefore an American citizen. Rumors were even buzzing about possible actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Super Bowl. Even though the NFL and California governor Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that there would be " no immigration enforcement tied to the game," anti-ICE protesters were on the streets. We caught up with football fans at a tailgate five minutes away from Levi's Stadium to hear their thoughts on all the drama. Here's what they had to say.


Kid Rock says TPUSA's alternate halftime show is for people who love Jesus and America

FOX News

This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset . Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions . Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by LSEG .


Transfer learning for scalar-on-function regression via control variates

Yang, Yuping, Zhou, Zhiyang

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Transfer learning (TL) has emerged as a powerful tool for improving estimation and prediction performance by leveraging information from related datasets. In this paper, we repurpose the control-variates (CVS) method for TL in the context of scalar-on-function regression. Our proposed framework relies exclusively on dataset-specific summary statistics, avoiding the need to pool subject-level data and thus remaining applicable in privacy-restricted or decentralized settings. We establish theoretical connections among several existing TL strategies and derive convergence rates for our CVS-based proposals. These rates explicitly account for the typically overlooked smoothing error and reveal how the similarity among covariance functions across datasets influences convergence behavior. Numerical studies support the theoretical findings and demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve competitive estimation and prediction performance compared with existing alternatives.


Dyslexia and the Reading Wars

The New Yorker

Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them? "There's a window of opportunity to intervene," Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, said. "You don't want to let that go." In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment. Caroline's academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. "I can't remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless," she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to "the end of a row" she couldn't remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia. Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it's more complicated than that.


Referenceless Proton Resonance Frequency Thermometry Using Deep Learning with Self-Attention

Zhao, Yueran, Mei, Chang-Sheng, McDannold, Nathan J., Zong, Shenyan, Shen, Guofeng

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Background: Accurate proton resonance frequency (PRF) MR thermometry is essential for monitoring temperature rise during thermal ablation with high intensity focused ultrasound (FUS). Conventional referenceless methods such as complex field estimation (CFE) and phase finite difference (PFD) tend to exhibit errors when susceptibility-induced phase discontinuities occur at tissue interfaces.


Deep Reinforcement Learning for Phishing Detection with Transformer-Based Semantic Features

Faisal, Aseer Al

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Phishing is a cybercrime in which individuals are deceived into revealing personal information, often resulting in financial loss. These attacks commonly occur through fraudulent messages, misleading advertisements, and compromised legitimate websites. This study proposes a Quantile Regression Deep Q-Network (QR-DQN) approach that integrates RoBERTa semantic embeddings with handcrafted lexical features to enhance phishing detection while accounting for uncertainties. Unlike traditional DQN methods that estimate single scalar Q-values, QR-DQN leverages quantile regression to model the distribution of returns, improving stability and generalization on unseen phishing data. A diverse dataset of 105,000 URLs was curated from PhishTank, OpenPhish, Cloudflare, and other sources, and the model was evaluated using an 80/20 train-test split. The QR-DQN framework achieved a test accuracy of 99.86%, precision of 99.75%, recall of 99.96%, and F1-score of 99.85%, demonstrating high effectiveness. Compared to standard DQN with lexical features, the hybrid QR-DQN with lexical and semantic features reduced the generalization gap from 1.66% to 0.04%, indicating significant improvement in robustness. Five-fold cross-validation confirmed model reliability, yielding a mean accuracy of 99.90% with a standard deviation of 0.04%. These results suggest that the proposed hybrid approach effectively identifies phishing threats, adapts to evolving attack strategies, and generalizes well to unseen data.


Global stability of vehicle-with-driver dynamics via Sum-of-Squares programming

Gulisano, Martino, Gabiccini, Marco

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This work estimates safe invariant subsets of the Region of Attraction (ROA) for a seven-state vehicle-with-driver system, capturing both asymptotic stability and the influence of state-safety bounds along the system trajectory. Safe sets are computed by optimizing Lyapunov functions through an original iterative Sum-of-Squares (SOS) procedure. The method is first demonstrated on a two-state benchmark, where it accurately recovers a prescribed safe region as the 1-level set of a polynomial Lyapunov function. We then describe the distinguishing characteristics of the studied vehicle-with-driver system: the control dynamics mimic human driver behavior through a delayed preview-tracking model that, with suitable parameter choices, can also emulate digital controllers. To enable SOS optimization, a polynomial approximation of the nonlinear vehicle model is derived, together with its operating-envelope constraints. The framework is then applied to understeering and oversteering scenarios, and the estimated safe sets are compared with reference boundaries obtained from exhaustive simulations. The results show that SOS techniques can efficiently deliver Lyapunov-defined safe regions, supporting their potential use for real-time safety assessment, for example as a supervisory layer for active vehicle control.