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Munich airport halts flights after drone sightings; passengers stranded

Al Jazeera

Germany's Munich airport has resumed operations after drone sightings led to the cancellation of 17 flights, the diversion of 15 others and the stranding of some 3,000 passengers. Flights had restarted by early Friday, with flight tracking websites showing planes departing the airport at about 5:50am (03:50 GMT). At least 19 Lufthansa flights were affected, either cancelled or re-routed, because of the airport suspension, the spokesperson added. Earlier, the airport said that drone sightings were first reported by German air traffic control at 10:18pm local time [20:18 GMT] on Thursday, leading initially to a restriction on flights, which was then upgraded to a full suspension. Germany's DPA news agency said police reported that several people had seen a drone near the airport, with later sightings of a drone over the airport grounds.


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Neural Information Processing Systems

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This paper addresses the classical problem of unsupervised learning of latent topic model, with an extra variable called response, which can be a score. The main issue is that the topic model (and the embeddings deduced from it) may not help in learning this extra variable, as the response can be induced by phenomena that are orthogonal to the topics. The goal of the so-called supervised topic model learning is to drive the topic learning into a direction which makes it useful w.r.t. the prediction of this extra variable (by a regression). The basic model considered is the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model.


Munich airport closes after drones spotted nearby

BBC News

Germany's Munich airport has reopened after several drone sightings forced it to close and cancel more than a dozen flights on Thursday night. At least 17 flights were grounded in Munich, affecting nearly 3,000 passengers, while the airport said it diverted a further 15 flights to nearby cities. On Friday, a spokesperson for German flag carrier Lufthansa said flight operations have since resumed according to schedule. There was no immediate confirmation of where the drones had come from. Several airports across Europe have closed down in recent weeks because of unidentified drones.


Transformers Discover Molecular Structure Without Graph Priors

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the dominant architecture for molecular machine learning, particularly for molecular property prediction and machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs). GNNs perform message passing on predefined graphs often induced by a fixed radius cutoff or k-nearest neighbor scheme. While this design aligns with the locality present in many molecular tasks, a hard-coded graph can limit expressivity due to the fixed receptive field and slows down inference with sparse graph operations. In this work, we investigate whether pure, unmodified Transformers trained directly on Cartesian coordinates$\unicode{x2013}$without predefined graphs or physical priors$\unicode{x2013}$can approximate molecular energies and forces. As a starting point for our analysis, we demonstrate how to train a Transformer to competitive energy and force mean absolute errors under a matched training compute budget, relative to a state-of-the-art equivariant GNN on the OMol25 dataset. We discover that the Transformer learns physically consistent patterns$\unicode{x2013}$such as attention weights that decay inversely with interatomic distance$\unicode{x2013}$and flexibly adapts them across different molecular environments due to the absence of hard-coded biases. The use of a standard Transformer also unlocks predictable improvements with respect to scaling training resources, consistent with empirical scaling laws observed in other domains. Our results demonstrate that many favorable properties of GNNs can emerge adaptively in Transformers, challenging the necessity of hard-coded graph inductive biases and pointing toward standardized, scalable architectures for molecular modeling.


Legal Knowledge Graph Foundations, Part I: URI-Addressable Abstract Works (LRMoo F1 to schema.org)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Building upon a formal, event-centric model for the diachronic evolution of legal norms grounded in the IFLA Library Reference Model (LRMoo), this paper addresses the essential first step of publishing this model's foundational entity-the abstract legal Work (F1)-on the Semantic Web. We propose a detailed, property-by-property mapping of the LRMoo F1 Work to the widely adopted schema.org/Legislation vocabulary. Using Brazilian federal legislation from the Normas.leg.br portal as a practical case study, we demonstrate how to create interoperable, machine-readable descriptions via JSON-LD, focusing on stable URN identifiers, core metadata, and norm relationships. This structured mapping establishes a stable, URI-addressable anchor for each legal norm, creating a verifiable "ground truth". It provides the essential, interoperable foundation upon which subsequent layers of the model, such as temporal versions (Expressions) and internal components, can be built. By bridging formal ontology with web-native standards, this work paves the way for building deterministic and reliable Legal Knowledge Graphs (LKGs), overcoming the limitations of purely probabilistic models.


Detection of Chagas Disease from the ECG: The George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2025

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Objective: Chagas disease is a parasitic infection that is endemic to South America, Central America, and, more recently, the U.S., primarily transmitted by insects. Chronic Chagas disease can cause cardiovascular diseases and digestive problems. Serological testing capacities for Chagas disease are limited, but Chagas cardiomyopathy often manifests in ECGs, providing an opportunity to prioritize patients for testing and treatment. Approach: The George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2025 invites teams to develop algorithmic approaches for identifying Chagas disease from electrocardiograms (ECGs). Main results: This Challenge provides multiple innovations. First, we leveraged several datasets with labels from patient reports and serological testing, provided a large dataset with weak labels and smaller datasets with strong labels. Second, we augmented the data to support model robustness and generalizability to unseen data sources. Third, we applied an evaluation metric that captured the local serological testing capacity for Chagas disease to frame the machine learning problem as a triage task. Significance: Over 630 participants from 111 teams submitted over 1300 entries during the Challenge, representing diverse approaches from academia and industry worldwide.


Understanding the Geospatial Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs: A Trajectory Recovery Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We explore the geospatial reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically, whether LLMs can read road network maps and perform navigation. Using road network as context, our prompting framework enables LLMs to generate valid paths without accessing any external navigation tools. Experiments show that LLMs outperform off-the-shelf baselines and specialized trajectory recovery models, with strong zero-shot generalization. Fine-grained analysis shows that LLMs have strong comprehension of the road network and coordinate systems, but also pose systematic biases with respect to regions and transportation modes. Finally, we demonstrate how LLMs can enhance navigation experiences by reasoning over maps in flexible ways to incorporate user preferences. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly recognized as general-purpose systems, showing strong performance across domains ranging from mathematics and coding to vision and robotics. An emerging yet underex-plored question is whether these models possess geospa-tial understanding, the ability to reason about maps, paths, and spatial relationships. Such capabilities are fundamental to many real-world applications, e.g., autonomous vehicle navigation, logistics, and urban planning. While prior work has studied LLMs in contexts such as geographic knowledge retrieval (Manvi et al., 2024a;b) and map-based multiple-choice question answering (Dihan et al., 2025), the ability of LLMs to read road networks and plan paths has not been systematically evaluated. We investigate whether LLMs can perform navigation through the trajectory recovery task: reconstructing masked segments of GPS traces from the road network context, to bypass the restriction of relying on shortest path-type of ground truth which may not reflect human navigation pattern in practice (Golledge, 1995; Duckham & Kulik, 2003). Our dataset is framed in away that is harder than the traditional point-wise trajectory recovery task (Newson & Krumm, 2009; Song et al., 2017; Si et al., 2024), and closer to the higher-level navigation problem.


Location Matters: Leveraging Multi-Resolution Geo-Embeddings for Housing Search

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

QuintoAndar Group is Latin America's largest housing platform, revolutionizing property rentals and sales. Headquartered in Brazil, it simplifies the housing process by eliminating paperwork and enhancing accessibility for tenants, buyers, and landlords. With thousands of houses available for each city, users struggle to find the ideal home. In this context, location plays a pivotal role, as it significantly influences property value, access to amenities, and life quality. A great location can make even a modest home highly desirable. Therefore, incorporating location into recommendations is essential for their effectiveness. We propose a geo-aware embedding framework to address sparsity and spatial nuances in housing recommendations on digital rental platforms. Our approach integrates an hierarchical H3 grid at multiple levels into a two-tower neural architecture. We compare our method with a traditional matrix factorization baseline and a single-resolution variant using interaction data from our platform. Embedding specific evaluation reveals richer and more balanced embedding representations, while offline ranking simulations demonstrate a substantial uplift in recommendation quality.