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Anthropic's new AI tool has implications for us all – whether we can use it or not Shakeel Hashim
'Lethal cyber-attacks are thankfully rare. But a new AI release could change that.' 'Lethal cyber-attacks are thankfully rare. But a new AI release could change that.' Anthropic's new AI tool has implications for us all - whether we can use it or not Claude Mythos's apparent superhuman hacking abilities are alarming experts as the Trump administration remains blinded by hostility I n June 2024, a cyber-attack on a pathology services company caused chaos across London's hospitals. More than 10,000 appointments were cancelled. Blood shortages followed and delays to blood tests led to a patient's death . Lethal cyber-attacks like this are thankfully rare.
The secret project to settle controversial maths proof with a computer
One of the most bitterly contested proofs in modern mathematics may be on the verge of being untangled. Two projects, both aiming to use a computer program to cast new light on the controversy, are now up and running - with one having operated in secret for more than two years already. The developments are a positive sign that the row might find a solution, say mathematicians. The saga began in 2012 when Shinichi Mochizuki at Kyoto University, Japan, claimed to have proved a famous idea called the ABC conjecture, posting a 500-page proof online. The conjecture is simple to state, concerning prime numbers involved in solutions to the equation a + b = c and how these numbers relate to each other.
Is Schoolwork Optional Now?
Education is on the verge of becoming fully automated. William Liu is grateful that he finished high school when he did. If the latest AI tools had been around then, he told me, he might have been tempted to use them to do his homework. Liu, now a sophomore at Stanford, finished high school all the way back in 2024. "I have a younger sibling who is just graduating high school," he said.
The man who ruined mathematics
Gödel's seminal work directly contradicted one of the great minds of mathematics and limited the field forever Kurt Gödel, the man who ruined mathematics, was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. He was born in 1906, smack-bang in the middle of the greatest crisis that maths has ever known. Just a few decades later, he would help resolve this turmoil, but in doing so doom mathematicians to a smaller world than the one that came before. Mathematics, as an intellectual framework, is incredibly powerful. The entire point is taking one set of logical ideas and using them to build another, making maths the closest thing we have to a cognitive perpetual-motion machine - there is always a new mathematical idea lurking across the horizon, and we just need to assemble the steps to get there.
tBayes-MICE: A Bayesian Approach to Multiple Imputation for Time Series Data
Ibenegbu, Amuche, de Micheaux, Pierre Lafaye, Chandra, Rohitash
Time-series analysis is often affected by missing data, a common problem across several fields, including healthcare and environmental monitoring. Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE) has been prominent for imputing missing values through "fully conditional specification". We extend MICE using the Bayesian framework (tBayes-MICE), utilising Bayesian inference to impute missing values via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to account for uncertainty in MICE model parameters and imputed values. We also include temporally informed initialisation and time-lagged features in the model to respect the sequential nature of time-series data. We evaluate the tBayes-MICE method using two real-world datasets (AirQuality and PhysioNet), and using both the Random Walk Metropolis (RWM) and the Metropolis-Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) samplers. Our results demonstrate that tBayes-MICE reduces imputation errors relative to the baseline methods over all variables and accounts for uncertainty in the imputation process, thereby providing a more accurate measure of imputation error. We also found that MALA mixed better than RWM across most variables, achieving comparable accuracy while providing more consistent posterior exploration. Overall, these findings suggest that the tBayes-MICE framework represents a practical and efficient approach to time-series imputation, balancing increased accuracy with meaningful quantification of uncertainty in various environmental and clinical settings.
A Generalized Sinkhorn Algorithm for Mean-Field Schrödinger Bridge
Eldesoukey, Asmaa, Chen, Yongxin, Halder, Abhishek
The mean-field Schrödinger bridge (MFSB) problem concerns designing a minimum-effort controller that guides a diffusion process with nonlocal interaction to reach a given distribution from another by a fixed deadline. Unlike the standard Schrödinger bridge, the dynamical constraint for MFSB is the mean-field limit of a population of interacting agents with controls. It serves as a natural model for large-scale multi-agent systems. The MFSB is computationally challenging because the nonlocal interaction makes the problem nonconvex. We propose a generalization of the Hopf-Cole transform for MFSB and, building on it, design a Sinkhorn-type recursive algorithm to solve the associated system of integro-PDEs. Under mild assumptions on the interaction potential, we discuss convergence guarantees for the proposed algorithm. We present numerical examples with repulsive and attractive interactions to illustrate the theoretical contributions.
Computationally lightweight classifiers with frequentist bounds on predictions
Murali, Shreeram, Rojas, Cristian R., Baumann, Dominik
While both classical and neural network classifiers can achieve high accuracy, they fall short on offering uncertainty bounds on their predictions, making them unfit for safety-critical applications. Existing kernel-based classifiers that provide such bounds scale with $\mathcal O (n^{\sim3})$ in time, making them computationally intractable for large datasets. To address this, we propose a novel, computationally efficient classification algorithm based on the Nadaraya-Watson estimator, for whose estimates we derive frequentist uncertainty intervals. We evaluate our classifier on synthetically generated data and on electrocardiographic heartbeat signals from the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. We show that the method achieves competitive accuracy $>$\SI{96}{\percent} at $\mathcal O(n)$ and $\mathcal O(\log n)$ operations, while providing actionable uncertainty bounds. These bounds can, e.g., aid in flagging low-confidence predictions, making them suitable for real-time settings with resource constraints, such as diagnostic monitoring or implantable devices.
A Bayesian Information-Theoretic Approach to Data Attribution
Tailor, Dharmesh, Felicioni, Nicolò, Ciosek, Kamil
Training Data Attribution (TDA) seeks to trace model predictions back to influential training examples, enhancing interpretability and safety. We formulate TDA as a Bayesian information-theoretic problem: subsets are scored by the information loss they induce - the entropy increase at a query when removed. This criterion credits examples for resolving predictive uncertainty rather than label noise. To scale to modern networks, we approximate information loss using a Gaussian Process surrogate built from tangent features. We show this aligns with classical influence scores for single-example attribution while promoting diversity for subsets. For even larger-scale retrieval, we relax to an information-gain objective and add a variance correction for scalable attribution in vector databases. Experiments show competitive performance on counterfactual sensitivity, ground-truth retrieval and coreset selection, showing that our method scales to modern architectures while bridging principled measures with practice.
Massively Parallel Exact Inference for Hawkes Processes
Multivariate Hawkes processes are a widely used class of self-exciting point processes, but maximum likelihood estimation naively scales as $O(N^2)$ in the number of events. The canonical linear exponential Hawkes process admits a faster $O(N)$ recurrence, but prior work evaluates this recurrence sequentially, without exploiting parallelization on modern GPUs. We show that the Hawkes process intensity can be expressed as a product of sparse transition matrices admitting a linear-time associative multiply, enabling computation via a parallel prefix scan. This yields a simple yet massively parallelizable algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation of linear exponential Hawkes processes. Our method reduces the computational complexity to approximately $O(N/P)$ with $P$ parallel processors, and naturally yields a batching scheme to maintain constant memory usage, avoiding GPU memory constraints. Importantly, it computes the exact likelihood without any additional assumptions or approximations, preserving the simplicity and interpretability of the model. We demonstrate orders-of-magnitude speedups on simulated and real datasets, scaling to thousands of nodes and tens of millions of events, substantially beyond scales reported in prior work. We provide an open-source PyTorch library implementing our optimizations.
Unified Precision-Guaranteed Stopping Rules for Contextual Learning
Ding, Mingrui, Zhao, Qiuhong, Gao, Siyang, Dong, Jing
Contextual learning seeks to learn a decision policy that maps an individual's characteristics to an action through data collection. In operations management, such data may come from various sources, and a central question is when data collection can stop while still guaranteeing that the learned policy is sufficiently accurate. We study this question under two precision criteria: a context-wise criterion and an aggregate policy-value criterion. We develop unified stopping rules for contextual learning with unknown sampling variances in both unstructured and structured linear settings. Our approach is based on generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) statistics for pairwise action comparisons. To calibrate the corresponding sequential boundaries, we derive new time-uniform deviation inequalities that directly control the self-normalized GLR evidence and thus avoid the conservativeness caused by decoupling mean and variance uncertainty. Under the Gaussian sampling model, we establish finite-sample precision guarantees for both criteria. Numerical experiments on synthetic instances and two case studies demonstrate that the proposed stopping rules achieve the target precision with substantially fewer samples than benchmark methods. The proposed framework provides a practical way to determine when enough information has been collected in personalized decision problems. It applies across multiple data-collection environments, including historical datasets, simulation models, and real systems, enabling practitioners to reduce unnecessary sampling while maintaining a desired level of decision quality.