Oceania
What a load of rubbish! The 6 most common branded items dumped as litter in the UK, revealed - with Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Walkers the worst offenders
Taylor, your album should be'Life of a Callgirl'. KENNEDY's appalled take on Swift's new record... and its ultra-vivid sex shout outs for Travis the Sasquatch The truth about Keith Urban's guitarist'other woman' Maggie Baugh revealed amid Nicole Kidman divorce How I look like this at 62. I've lost 5 stone fast, 20 years off my biological age and wear size 8... without weight-loss jabs. My war with Harry & Meghan, by PIERS MORGAN: What really happened, their absurd accusations, the brutal truth about post-royal life... and how I believe their royal racism lies helped kill off woke Shroud of Turin mystery deepens as surgeon spots hidden detail that points to Jesus' resurrection I'm no longer sleeping with my husband - and never will again, says MOLLY RYDDELL. I love him, but counted down the moments until he climaxed. Then I couldn't bear it any more and the truth spilled out... so many women feel the same Fans erupt at Taylor Swift's'dig' at Travis Kelce's ex Kayla Nicole in wild The Life of a Showgirl track Trump dollar coin design released by Treasury... and it's inspired by an iconic political photo The THREE singers Keith Urban's been cosying up to revealed - now Nicole Kidman's on the warpath and has done the thing every estranged husband fears most: ALISON BOSHOFF Lori Loughlin's husband Mossimo Giannulli seen with mystery brunette in tiny skirt day after shock split Trump appears alongside Melania at dinner hosted by JD Vance and Usha after'disappearance' rumors Top plastic surgeons reveal secrets behind Taylor Swift's'changing' face: 'It is looking very full' I'm a woman with autism... here are the signs you might be masking, even from yourself Cake-faced 90s sitcom star looks unrecognizable as she ditches the heavy eyeshadow for an LA errand run can you guess who?
Entire Ukrainian family killed in Russian drone strike, officials say
An entire family - a married couple and their two young sons - have been killed in an overnight Russian drone attack in Ukraine's north-eastern Sumy region, local officials have said. Regional head Oleh Hryhorov said a residential building was hit in the village of Chernechchyna. The bodies of the two children, aged four and six, and their parents were later recovered from the wreckage. Ukraine's air force said its units shot down 46 out of 65 Russian drones across the country - but there were 19 direct hits in six locations. Russia's military has not commented.
Tilly Norwood: how scared should we be of the viral AI 'actor'?
Tilly Norwood: how scared should we be of the viral AI'actor'? Emily Blunt and Sag-Aftra join film industry condemnation of'AI actor' Tilly Norwood It takes a lot to be the most controversial figure in Hollywood, especially when Mel Gibson still exists. And yet somehow, in a career yet to even begin, Tilly Norwood has been inundated with scorn. This is for the simple fact that Tilly Norwood does not exist. Despite looking like an uncanny fusion of Gal Gadot, Ana de Armas and High School Musical-era Vanessa Hudgens, Norwood is the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) talent studio called Xicoia. And if Xicoia is to be believed, then Norwood represents the dazzling future of the film industry.
California police stumped after trying to ticket driverless car for illegal U-turn
San Bruno police posted a photo of a Waymo and a dilemma, writing: 'Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn't be issued.' San Bruno police posted a photo of a Waymo and a dilemma, writing: 'Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn't be issued.' San Bruno officers pull over Waymo but say a ticket wasn't issued, as'citation books don't have a box for "robot"' If a driver makes an illegal U-turn, but no one is behind the wheel, does the car still get a ticket? A police department in California grappled with this existential question last week. During a DUI enforcement operation, officers in San Bruno pulled over a car without anyone behind the wheel after the autonomous vehicle made an illegal U-turn at a light.
Large Language Models for Software Testing: A Research Roadmap
Augusto, Cristian, Bertolino, Antonia, De Angelis, Guglielmo, Lonetti, Francesca, Morรกn, Jesรบs
Large Language Models (LLMs) are starting to be profiled as one of the most significant disruptions in the Software Testing field. Specifically, they have been successfully applied in software testing tasks such as generating test code, or summarizing documentation. This potential has attracted hundreds of researchers, resulting in dozens of new contributions every month, hardening researchers to stay at the forefront of the wave. Still, to the best of our knowledge, no prior work has provided a structured vision of the progress and most relevant research trends in LLM-based testing. In this article, we aim to provide a roadmap that illustrates its current state, grouping the contributions into different categories, and also sketching the most promising and active research directions for the field. To achieve this objective, we have conducted a semi-systematic literature review, collecting articles and mapping them into the most prominent categories, reviewing the current and ongoing status, and analyzing the open challenges of LLM-based software testing. Lastly, we have outlined several expected long-term impacts of LLMs over the whole software testing field.
Finding an Initial Probe Pose in Teleoperated Robotic Echocardiography via 2D LiDAR-Based 3D Reconstruction
Roshan, Mariadas Capsran, Hidalgo, Edgar M, Isaksson, Mats, Dunn, Michelle, Pyaraka, Jagannatha Charjee
Echocardiography is a key imaging modality for cardiac assessment but remains highly operator-dependent, and access to trained sonographers is limited in underserved settings. Teleoperated robotic echocardiography has been proposed as a solution; however, clinical studies report longer examination times than manual procedures, increasing diagnostic delays and operator workload. Automating non-expert tasks, such as automatically moving the probe to an ideal starting pose, offers a pathway to reduce this burden. Prior vision- and depth-based approaches to estimate an initial probe pose are sensitive to lighting, texture, and anatomical variability. We propose a robot-mounted 2D LiDAR-based approach that reconstructs the chest surface in 3D and estimates the initial probe pose automatically. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of robot-mounted 2D LiDAR used for 3D reconstruction of a human body surface. Through plane-based extrinsic calibration, the transformation between the LiDAR and robot base frames was estimated with an overall root mean square (RMS) residual of 1.8 mm and rotational uncertainty below 0.2ยฐ. The chest front surface, reconstructed from two linear LiDAR sweeps, was aligned with non-rigid templates to identify an initial probe pose. A mannequin-based study assessing reconstruction accuracy showed mean surface errors of 2.78 +/- 0.21 mm. Human trials (N=5) evaluating the proposed approach found probe initial points typically 20-30 mm from the clinically defined initial point, while the variation across repeated trials on the same subject was less than 4 mm.
Streaming Sequence-to-Sequence Learning with Delayed Streams Modeling
Zeghidour, Neil, Kharitonov, Eugene, Orsini, Manu, Volhejn, Vรกclav, de Marmiesse, Gabriel, Grave, Edouard, Pรฉrez, Patrick, Mazarรฉ, Laurent, Dรฉfossez, Alexandre
We introduce Delayed Streams Modeling (DSM), a flexible formulation for streaming, multimodal sequence-to-sequence learning. Sequence-to-sequence generation is often cast in an offline manner, where the model consumes the complete input sequence before generating the first output timestep. Alternatively, streaming sequence-to-sequence rely on learning a policy for choosing when to advance on the input stream, or write to the output stream. DSM instead models already time-aligned streams with a decoder-only language model. By moving the alignment to a pre-processing step,and introducing appropriate delays between streams, DSM provides streaming inference of arbitrary output sequences, from any input combination, making it applicable to many sequence-to-sequence problems. In particular, given text and audio streams, automatic speech recognition (ASR) corresponds to the text stream being delayed, while the opposite gives a text-to-speech (TTS) model. We perform extensive experiments for these two major sequence-to-sequence tasks, showing that DSM provides state-of-the-art performance and latency while supporting arbitrary long sequences, being even competitive with offline baselines. Code, samples and demos are available at https://github.com/kyutai-labs/delayed-streams-modeling
Sparsity Forcing: Reinforcing Token Sparsity of MLLMs
Chen, Feng, He, Yefei, Lin, Lequan, Gou, Chenhui, Liu, Jing, Zhuang, Bohan, Wu, Qi
Sparse attention mechanisms aim to reduce computational overhead with minimal accuracy loss by selectively processing salient tokens. Despite their effectiveness, most methods merely exploit a model's inherent sparsity and thus plateau at moderate budgets (about 50\% token reduction), with little headroom to push budget lower without hurting accuracy. Other approaches attempt to enforce sparsity through trainable sparse attention or sharpness-inducing regularizers, but these either fix rigid patterns that ignore input and layer dynamics, or optimize proxy objectives without direct control over token budgets. In this paper, we explicitly reinforce token sparsity in well-posed multimodal large language models (MLLMs) through a simple RL-based post-training framework named \textit{Sparsity Forcing}. Our method explores the efficiency-accuracy trade-off by running multiple rollouts with different token budgets, where both efficiency (token reduction ratio) and performance (answer correctness) are formulated as joint rewards. By contrasting rollouts within each group, the more efficient and correct answer is rewarded while less efficient or incorrect ones are penalized, thereby turning token saving into an end-to-end, inference-consistent optimization objective. Across thirteen image and video benchmarks, Sparsity Forcing raises token reduction ratio on Qwen2-VL/Qwen2.5-VL from 20\% to 75\% with minimal accuracy decline, significantly reducing long-context inference memory by up to 3$\times$ while speeding up decoding by up to 3.3$\times$.
Visual CoT Makes VLMs Smarter but More Fragile
Xu, Chunxue, Wang, Yiwei, Cai, Yujun, Hooi, Bryan, Li, Songze
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques have significantly enhanced reasoning in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Extending this paradigm, Visual CoT integrates explicit visual edits, such as cropping or annotating regions of interest, into the reasoning process, achieving superior multimodal performance. However, the robustness of Visual CoT-based VLMs against image-level noise remains unexplored. In this paper, we present the first systematic evaluation of Visual CoT robustness under visual perturbations. Our benchmark spans 12 image corruption types across 4 Visual Question Answering (VQA) datasets, enabling a comprehensive comparison between VLMs that use Visual CoT, and VLMs that do not. The results reveal that integrating Visual CoT consistently improves absolute accuracy regardless of whether the input images are clean or corrupted by noise; however, it also increases sensitivity to input perturbations, resulting in sharper performance degradation compared to standard VLMs. Through extensive analysis, we identify the intermediate reasoning components of Visual CoT, i.e., the edited image patches , as the primary source of fragility. Building on this analysis, we propose a plug-and-play robustness enhancement method that integrates Grounding DINO model into the Visual CoT pipeline, providing high-confidence local visual cues to stabilize reasoning. Our work reveals clear fragility patterns in Visual CoT and offers an effective, architecture-agnostic solution for enhancing visual robustness.
AI-Enhanced Distributed Channel Access for Collision Avoidance in Future Wi-Fi 8
Pan, Jinzhe, Wang, Jingqing, Ouyang, Yuehui, Cheng, Wenchi, Zhang, Wei
The exponential growth of wireless devices and stringent reliability requirements of emerging applications demand fundamental improvements in distributed channel access mechanisms for unlicensed bands. Current Wi-Fi systems, which rely on binary exponential backoff (BEB), suffer from suboptimal collision resolution in dense deployments and persistent fairness challenges due to inherent randomness. This paper introduces a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) optimization with legacy device coexistence. We first develop a dynamic backoff selection mechanism that adapts to real-time channel conditions through access deferral events while maintaining full compatibility with conventional CSMA/CA operations. Second, we introduce a fairness quantification metric aligned with enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) principles to ensure equitable medium access opportunities. Finally, we propose a centralized training decentralized execution (CTDE) architecture incorporating neighborhood activity patterns as observational inputs, optimized via constrained multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) to jointly minimize collisions and guarantee fairness. Experimental results demonstrate that our solution significantly reduces collision probability compared to conventional BEB while preserving backward compatibility with commercial Wi-Fi devices. The proposed fairness metric effectively eliminates starvation risks in heterogeneous scenarios.